Black Man / Thirteen

CHAPTER 19

Sevgi was still shaking when the cops showed up. She felt an odd shame when the detective in charge, a lean dark man with hard bones in his face, finished talking with patrol and made his way across to her. He was bound to notice. Wrapped in an insulene recovery shawl, seated in the open rear door of the murdered limo and watching CSI go about their business, she felt drenched in her civilian status.

“Ms. Ertekin?”

She looked up bleakly. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“Detective Williamson.” He flipped his left palm open. The NYPD holo twisted to blue-and-gold life, glistened at her like lost treasure. “I’d like to ask you some questions, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“I’m fine.” She’d taken the syn that morning, in the shower, but it wouldn’t have kicked in yet even on an empty stomach. She groped after conventional resources, pulled herself together with a shiver. “I used to be on the force, I’m fine.”

“That so?” Polite, speculative. Williamson didn’t want to be her buddy. She could guess why.

“Yeah, eleven years. Queens, then Midtown Homicide.” She managed a shaky smile. “You guys are from the Twenty-eighth, right? Larry Kasabian still attached there?”

“Yeah, Kasabian’s still around, I think.” No warmth in the words. He nodded at Marsalis, who sat starkly on the steps of the building in his South Florida State inmate jacket, watching the crime scene squad go about their business as if they were a stage play put on for his benefit. “Patrol says you told them this guy’s a thirteen.”

“Yes.” She was cursing herself for it now. “He is.”

“And.” Brief hesitation. “Is that filed with anyone here in the city?”

Sevgi sighed. “We got in late last night. He’s a technical consultant for COLIN Security, but we haven’t had time to notify anybody yet.”

“All right.” But it clearly wasn’t all right. Williamson’s expression stayed cool. “I’m not going to pursue that, but you need to get him registered. Today. Is he, uh, staying with you?”

The implication sneered beneath the words. It felt like a slap. It felt like her father’s tirade when he found out about Ethan. Sevgi felt her own expression tighten.

“No, he’s not uh, staying with me,” she parodied. “He’s uh, staying in COLIN-account accommodation, just as soon as we can find him some. So do you think we can maybe just shelve the fucking Jesusland paranoia. And maybe get on with the police work at hand? How’d that be?”

Williamson’s eyes flared.

“That’d be just fine, Ms. Ertekin,” he said evenly. “The police work at hand is that this twist just killed two armed men in broad daylight, empty-handed, and he doesn’t appear to have a scratch on him. Now, maybe this is just my paranoia ru

“He’s carrying a Mars environment systemic biohoist. And he was combat-trained from age seven up.”

Williamson grunted. “Yeah, I heard that about them. Bad to the bone, right? And you don’t think the men he killed here were combat-proficient.”

“You do?” Sevgi rapped her knuckles on the slug-riddled coachwork at her side. “Come on, Williamson, look at this shit. Combat-proficient? No, they just had guns.”

“Any reason you can think of that someone would send a low-grade spray-for-pay crew after a COLIN executive?”

She shook her head wordlessly. They weren’t after Ortiz, she knew inside. Ortiz just got in the way. They were here to kill Marsalis. Kill him before he gets any kind of handle on Merrin.

No reason to share that with Detective Williamson right now.

“And you told patrol you didn’t see the actual fight at all?”

She shook her head again, more definitely this time, getting traction. “No, I said I didn’t see much of it. Much of anything, I was on the ground—”

“Where he threw you, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.” The weight of his body on hers. “He probably saved my life.”

“So he saw them coming?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

Williamson nodded. “I’ll get around to it. Right now, I’m asking you.”

“And I told you I don’t know.”

There was a compressed pause. Williamson started again. “In the statement, you say you think there were three attackers. Or is that just what your twist friend over there told you?”

“No. I saw one take off toward the boulevard.” She indicated the shrink-wrapped corpses of the men Marsalis had killed. The black skater rig was clearly visible through the plastic. “And I can count.”

“Description?”

She looked up at him for a long moment. “Black-clad. Wearing a ski mask.”

Williamson sighed. “Yeah. Okay. You want to tell me about this other guy?”

He gestured at the third bundle on the pavement. The pale, blood-speckled face of Ortiz’s bodyguard gaped up wide-eyed through the plastic. They’d had to roll him onto his back to get Ortiz out from under and onto the wagon, and that was how CSI had wrapped him.

Sevgi shrugged.

“Security.”

“Did you know him?”

“No. Not my section.” It dawned abruptly on Sevgi why Williamson was so edgy. In theory, NYPD held the ground here, but under the Colony Initiative Act, she could take it from them pretty much at will. The sudden sense of the power she had gusted through her like insects in her belly. It wasn’t a clean feeling.

Williamson moved a couple of paces to stand over the dead bodyguard. He stared down at the man’s face. “So this guy covers Ortiz, right?”

“Yes, apparently.”

“Yeah, that’s his job. And our twist friend over there—”

“Do you want to stop using that fucking word?”

It got her a speculative look. The detective came back toward the limo. “All right. Security covers Ortiz. Your genetically modified friend over there covers you. You got any idea at all why he might have done that?”

Sevgi shook her head wearily. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Yeah, I will. But thirteens aren’t known for their honesty.” Williamson paused deliberately. “Or their self-sacrifice. Had to be something in it for him.”

She glared back at the detective, and maybe it was the syn coming on now, but she thought she could have blown Williamson’s head off if she had a weapon at hand. Instead she levered herself to her feet and faced him. “I’m done talking to you, Detective.”

“I don’t think—”

“I said I’m done talking to you.” No maybe about it, it was the syn. The anger drove her forward, but it was the drug that gave her the poise. Williamson was a head taller than she was, but she stood in his personal space as if she wore body armor. As if the last forty minutes hadn’t happened to her. The insulene shawl was puddled around her feet. “Someone a little less fucking Neanderthal, I’d be happy to liaise with. You, I’m done wasting time on.”

“This is a murder investi—”

“Yeah, right now that’s what it is. You want to see how fast I can turn it into a COLIN Security operation?”

His jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

“You back off, Detective, leave me the fuck alone, and you can keep your investigation. Otherwise I’m going to pull the COLIN act on you, and you can go back and tell them at the Twenty-eighth they’ll be losing their jurisdiction.”

Behind the syn, there was a tiny trickle of guilt as she watched Williamson crumble, an empathy from her own years on the other side of the fence.

She crushed it. Crossed the street to Marsalis.

COLIN arrived in modest force about ten minutes later. A secure transit Land Rover rolled quietly into the marketplace, parting the crowds with a low-intensity subsonic dispersal pulse that set Sevgi’s teeth on edge even at distance. She hadn’t called Norton, so someone must have authorized the roll-out when the news about Ortiz broke. The police had been holding back accredited film crews and solo shoulderscope artists in the crowd for a while, and it would be all over the feeds by now.