Black Man / Thirteen

“How’d he kill him?”

“Cressi sharkpunch. You ever see anyone killed with one of those things?” Sevgi gestured graphically. “Designed to stop a great white shark through ten meters of water, it’s practically a handheld disintegrator. Blew Ward’s belly out all over the surrounding furniture. Him plus another employee name of Emil Nocera, all in the same shot.”

“Thanks for the ride.”

“Right. CSI say there were another couple of employees around at the time, but they ran.”

“Hard to blame them.”

“Yeah, plus they were illegals. Apparently a lot of the casual labor up that way is. They see something, they’re not going to hang around and make witness statements. RimSec are looking, but they don’t hold out much hope.”

“Do they know what this is about?”

“RimSec do, but that’s as far as it’s gone. There’s no public knowledge, we can’t afford it, and neither can they. Things are bad enough between Jesusland and the Rim without word getting out that this guy’s treating their precious border security like a knee-high picket fence.”

“But the Rim cops know he’s killing in the Republic as well?”

“They’ve been apprised, yes.”

“Nice of them to keep quiet about it for you.”

“Well, like I said, there’s no love lost across the fencelines. And it looks bad if the high-powered high-tech Rim States couldn’t stop some psychotic killer crossing over and going on the rampage in the Republic. You can see how that’d play diplomatically.”

“What price technology without God on your side?”

“Right. Plus, if word got out that said psychotic killer is a, uh…”

“A genetic monster?” he asked gently. “A twist?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No. I guess you didn’t.”

“The Republic are already handing their people a line of shit about how the Rim is just a craven appeasement system for the Chinese. And with the stories coming out of China, the black lab escapees—” She shrugged again. “Well, you can see how that one’d play as well, right?”

“Pretty much. Nothing like a good monster scare.”

They cleared the shadow of the freight loader. Sevgi turned her head to beat the sudden glare of the sun and thought she caught a smile slipping across the black man’s lips. His gaze had rolled out to somewhere well beyond the gathering of buildings around the nanorack.

“Something fu

His attention reeled back in, but he didn’t look at her. “Not really.”

She stopped.

After a couple of paces, so did he, and turned to face her. “Something the matter?”

“If you’ve got something to contribute,” she said evenly, “then I would like to hear it. This isn’t going to work unless you talk to me.”

He looked at her for a long couple of moments. “It’s really not very important,” he said easily. “I guess you’d call it a resonance.”

She stood where she was. “Resonance with what.”

He sighed. “A resonance with monsters. Do you know what a pistaco is?”

She dredged memory, pulled up something from a long-ago briefing on altiplano training camp crimes. “Yeah, it’s some sort of demon, right? Something the Indians believe in. Some sort of vampire?”

“Close. Pistaco’s a white man with a long knife who comes at night and chops up Indians to get at their body fat. Most likely, it’s a cultural memory from the conquistadores and the Inquisition, because they certainly weren’t averse to a bit of dismemberment in the name of Gold and Jesus Christ. But these days, up on the altiplano they’ve got a new angle on the story.”

“Which is what?”

Marsalis gri

“These days,” he said, “the Andeans don’t believe the pistaco is the white man as such anymore. That’s gone. Still the same monster, still looks the same, but now the story they tell is, the pistaco’s something evil that the white man’s brought back.”

He nodded toward the dark towering webbed architecture of the nanorack.

“Brought back from Mars.”

CHAPTER 15

The sweep and swoop of the codes took hold.

Sevgi felt herself dislodged from current reality, turned away from it like a small child guided away from a TV screen by warm parental hands. The couches at COLIN Florida were clunky, thirty-year-old military surplus stock, fully enclosed and soundproofed, and now, in the deadened stillness they created, there was a low chiming that seemed to resonate deep in her guts. From long habit, she let herself home in on it. Gentle steerage to the new focus. Look at this, look at this. The colors above her seemed to mesh into significance just out of reach. The chiming was the beat of her heart, the shiver of blood along veins and arteries, a cellular awareness. The swirling ebbed and inked back, glaring out like antique celluloid film melting through. The standard desert format inked in.

She looked around. Marsalis was not with her.

“Good afternoon, ma’am.”

The Freeport PD ’face was a handsome black patrolman in his early twenties, insignia winking in the jarringly heatless Arizona sun. The fabric of his short-sleeved uniform had a perfect, factory-fresh texture to it, and so did his flawless, airbrushed skin. Muscle roped his forearms and bulked out his shoulders. He might have stepped, Sevgi thought sourly, out of the early stages of a porn experia, the storyline section before the clothes came off. She guessed the intention was to inspire confidence and respect for the symbols of Angeline law enforcement, but all it did was put her on the edge of a giggle and make her slightly warm.

Oh well, at least it isn’t another fucking body-perfect überbitch.

More than slightly warm, in fact.

“Uh, I’m waiting—”

“For a colleague.” The ’face nodded. “He’s incoming, but it’s taking some time. May I see your authorization?”

Sevgi lifted an open palm and watched as the skeins of bluish machine code fell out of it. They splashed on the ground with a faint crackling and disappeared into the dirt as if soaked up. Despite the color, it felt uncomfortably like watching herself bleed through a slashed wrist. At least, what she’d imagined it would when—

Stop that.

“Thank you, ma’am. You are cleared to proceed.” Ahead of her, the familiar adobe datahomes swam rapidly into existence. The ’face stepped aside to indicate Sevgi’s new status. “Your colleague also.”

She hadn’t noticed. Beside her, Marsalis was shading in. Looking at him as he solidified, she suddenly lost all interest in the patrolman. The attraction was in the flaws, the lines in the face, the faint and flattened scar across his left hand that looked like a burn, the barely perceptible tangles of gray in the hair. The way his mouth crimped slightly to the right when he looked at the patrolman. The way he took up space as if blocking a doorway to somewhere. The way—

She still wasn’t sure why he’d suddenly opted to join her in the virtuality.

“You took your time,” she said, a little more harshly than she’d intended.

He shrugged. “Blame the genes. Thirteens run high resistance to hypnotic technique. I knew some guys back in Osprey who had to be sedated before they could use a v-format at all. Shall we go have a look at Toni?”

The ’face led them across the sand to the closest of the datahomes. Primary crime scene hung in the air beside it in holographic blue. Unusually, the adobe structure had a door. The patrolman worked the black iron latch and pushed the raw wood surface inward. It opened incongruously onto a prissily decorated suburban front hall.

“My name is Cranston,” said the ’face as it stood back to let them pass. “If you need departmental assistance, please call me. The victim is in the dining room. Second door on the left. Feel free to touch or move anything, but if you wish the changes to be saved, you’ll need to advise me.”