CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was still early enough for Panza’s Café to be doing a brisk business, both in food and drinks. The noise level didn’t change as Selene and I walked in, but I could see some of the patrons pause in their conversations to give us wary or borderline hostile looks. I ignored all of them and led the way back to the bar.
My old acquaintance Lefty was on duty again tonight. He spotted me as we approached, his expression more toward the wary end of the scale. “Evening, Lefty,” I said as we took a pair of seats that had been conveniently left open right in the center of the bar. “How’s business tonight?”
“Not too good,” he said coolly. “Some of our regulars have fallen on hard times.”
“Or have fallen, period,” I said. “Sorry about Lukki and Willie.”
“And Braun.”
“And Braun,” I agreed, mildly surprised that news of his death had already reached the general public.
Or if not the general public, maybe just the group I was interested in talking to. That could save time. “Speaking of Lukki, I was hoping to have a chat with anyone who might have worked with her,” I continued. “I have a small business proposition to offer.”
“Sounds like an exciting opportunity,” Lefty said, his voice still cool and now edging into sarcasm. “If I see any of them, I’ll be sure to let them know.”
“Thanks,” I said, pulling a folded twenty-commark bill from my pocket. “Just to make sure you don’t forget,” I added. Reaching to his hand, I pulled it toward me and pressed the bill into his palm. “Don’t lose it, now.”
He glanced at the bill, a hint of a smirk touching his lips. “Sure,” he said. He turned away, fumbling a bit as something fell out of the bill. He stooped to pick it up . . .
I counted down the seconds, just for my own amusement. There were five of them before he stood upright again, staring at me with wide eyes, his right fist clenched tightly around the coiled-up strand of silver-silk I’d wrapped inside the bill. “To make sure you don’t forget,” I repeated. “We’ll be at that booth over there. The one Lukki used to sit at.”
Without waiting for a response I took Selene’s arm and led her back toward Lukki’s booth. “You think this is a good idea?” she asked quietly as we passed between the occupied tables. “Lukki’s booth, I mean?”
“Unfortunately, I think we have to,” I said. “It’s what a challenger to her business would do to claim right of succession.”
“But that area will still hold her scent,” Selene warned. “That will make it more difficult to identify her other associates.”
“I know,” I said. “But again, it’s what we have to do. And don’t forget that the bug Braun told us about is presumably still active. If Galfvi’s been tapping into it, and if he’s still monitoring it, this may help flush him out.”
“I thought you knew where he was.”
“Ninety-five percent sure,” I said. “Same ninety-five percent that I know who all the killers are. Clearing that last five percent is why we’re here.” I looked back at the bar as I ushered her into one side of our new booth. “Speaking of Lukki’s associates . . . ?”
Selene shook her head. “Lefty’s not one of them. No smell of her, Willie, or Braun on him.”
“Okay,” I said, taking the seat across from her and keying my info pad for the menu. “I don’t know about you, but I’m still hungry.”
* * *
We’d been there an hour, and I was topping off my rack of ribs with a disappointing slice of Key Lime pie when Selene’s pupils suddenly went alert. She gave me a sharp look—
“Mind if we join you?” a wiry man asked as he appeared beside her. Without waiting for an answer, he sat down, nudging Selene half a meter over toward the wall with his hip to clear enough room for himself. “Sometimes hard to find a good seat in here.”
“Not really the case tonight,” I pointed out. Another figure loomed in my peripheral vision, and I found myself being similarly hip-shoved as someone else moved into my side of the booth. I felt a brush of long hair across my cheek, caught the whiff of what was probably a local perfume— “Ma’am,” I greeted my new seat mate. “I’m Roarke; this is Selene. And you are . . . ?”
“Call me Fisher,” the man said. He nodded to the woman beside me. “Call her Honey. We understand you have some goods for sale.”
“Could be a sale,” I agreed. “Could be a trade. Could be part of a larger business transaction.”
“Good—glad we got that settled,” Fisher said with a sort of brisk sarcasm. “You want to start again, this time with clarity?”
“Actually, let’s start with some introductions,” I said, watching Selene’s pupils. Her reaction had been a good indication that at least one of these two had been in recent close proximity to Lukki or one of her late associates, but I needed to hear it from them. “Starting with how exactly you two fit into Lukki’s team.”
For a moment they eyed each other across the table. Then, I felt Honey give a small shrug. “We’re the owners of her boat,” Fisher said. “The official owners, the ones with all the legal documents. We ran her packages whenever she wanted to use the river or ocean.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. All right. I presume Lefty showed you our little conversation piece?”
“No, but he told us about it.” Fisher’s mouth twisted. “After he put it somewhere no one was likely to trip over it.”
“Smart boy,” I said, nodding. At six thousand or more commarks each, anyone else in the café would similarly have taken quick steps to protect it from sticky fingers. “The point is there are more where that came from. Twenty, maybe even thirty of them.”
Fisher leaned forward a little, his eyes glinting. “Where?”
“Somewhere up the river,” I said, mentally crossing my fingers. This was one hundred percent speculation, and if I was wrong it was going to damn us in double-quick time as not being even casual members of Lukki’s group. But it was the only handle I had. “I’m pretty sure it was hidden aboard your boat’s dinghy.”
“The dinghy’s gone?” Honey demanded.
I let out a quiet breath. So Lukki’s boat had had a dinghy. That had only been an assumption, albeit a logical one. But now I had proof.
And the fact that there hadn’t been any such auxiliary boat when Selene swam aboard—I’d checked that with her earlier—was fairly conclusive evidence that Galfvi had taken it.
More important, I was now almost a hundred percent sure I knew where our rogue Patth was hiding. “You didn’t know?” I asked.
“We haven’t been to the boat since Lukki was killed,” Fisher growled. “The hell. So who took it? Wasn’t Braun, was it?”
“I don’t think so,” I told him. “No, we think it was either Tirano or Galfvi. You know them?”
“I’ve heard of Tirano, I think,” Fisher said. “Lukki never let us meet him.”
“You sure about that?” I pressed. “It’s important.”
He shook his head. “Just heard the name.”
“Never even heard of anyone named Galfvi,” Honey added.
“I see,” I murmured thoughtfully, as if weighing their answers.
All for show, of course, since I fully believed them. If either of them had met Tirano, they surely would have mentioned that he was the same species as Selene. But neither of them had, and if Selene’s pupils and judgment were any indication neither of them had reacted to that possible connection in any other way, either.
Both had worked for Lukki. Neither knew Galfvi or Tirano.
And both were still alive.
“Well, we’ll just have to work around it,” I said. “Our only shot now is to find that dinghy. Lucky for us, I know where to start looking. You two up for a late-night cruise?”
Again, they eyed each other silently across the table. “Sure, why not?” Fisher said. “So what exactly are we talking about?”
“You’ve got the boat; I know where the threads are,” I said. “I’d say thirty percent to you.”
“Fifty to us.”
“Forty.”
“Fifty,” Fisher said firmly. “You might know where the threads are, but do you know how to get them to a buyer?”
I felt my heart rate pick up. I’d hoped for this opening, but I’d figured I’d have to make it myself. “I have a few contacts,” I said evasively. “Why, you have someone better?”
“Lukki’s marketer,” Fisher said. “Knows everything about everything. He’s the one who set up the buyers and the transport.”
I looked at Selene, made a show of thoughtful deliberation. “You’d be paying him out of your fifty percent,” I warned Fisher. “You think he’d be interested?”
Fisher snorted. “In a share of thirty threads? Damn straight he would.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I want verbal confirmation. Give him a call and ask.”
“I don’t know,” Fisher said, giving me an appraising look. “He likes to keep to the background.”
“Let me clarify,” I said. “Call him, or Selene and I find a way to get to the threads without you or your boat.”
“It’s all right,” Honey said as Fisher’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll do it.”
“Yes, you should do it,” Selene agreed as Honey pulled out a phone and started punching in a number. “That way your partner doesn’t have to adjust his grip on the Jinnger he’s pointing at Mr. Roarke under the table.”
Fisher’s face went rigid. Honey froze with her number only halfway keyed in. “Oh, please,” I said, putting a little scorn into my voice and trying hard not to smile at their reaction to what must have seemed to them like a magic trick. But then, as Selene had pointed out to me in the past, the proprietary self-lubricating composites the Jinnger Firearms Corporation used in their slug guns had a very distinctive smell. “You think this is the first time someone’s pointed a gun at us? Frankly, I’d be a little worried if Lukki hadn’t hammered some caution into you. You can finish that call any time, Honey.”
Fisher hesitated, then nodded. She nodded back and finished keying in the number. A moment of silence . . . “Smitty?” she said. “Honey. Got a guy here with a proposition.”
She laid out the general parameters, concentrating on the deal and high reward/risk factor but not mentioning the silver-silk or any of the other specifics. I also noted enough odd words sprinkled through her monologue to show she was adding in confirmation codes. “He wants to know if you’re in,” she concluded.
She leaned closer to me and turned the phone so that I could hear. “If you think it’s legit, go ahead,” a lazy-sounding voice came. “Just make damn sure he’s not a badgeman or a shill.”
“I’m neither,” I spoke up. “But thanks for asking. Welcome aboard; she’ll call you later with an update.”
Honey keyed off. “No one asked you to talk to him,” she said irritably.
“No one asked me not to,” I said, pulling out a couple of hundred-commark bills and setting them beside my plate. “So that’s settled. Good. If the rain’s on its usual schedule it should be clearing up just about the time we get to the docks. Shall we go?”
“Sure,” Fisher said as he slid out of the booth and stood up. “We’ll take our car. You sit up front; Honey and your friend can sit behind us.”
“With Honey’s Jinnger pointed at me?” I asked as Honey, Selene, and I also got out.
“Or at her,” Fisher said casually. “Dealer’s choice. Out the door and turn left.”
* * *
Selene’s analysis earlier had been that Galfvi had tried to start the boat and been unable to do so. As it turned out, that failure was due to the owners’ setup. As Fisher stood at the helm and put in the key, Honey opened a camouflaged section of the bow railing near where one of the lines tying us to the dock was connected and held down a hidden button. Fisher pressed the starter, and the engines hummed to life, the dual propellers churning into the water and making small waves aft.
“Lukki had us set it up this way,” he told us as he guided the boat away from the dock. “Didn’t want anyone being able to run off with it by themselves. So where are we going?”
“Upriver,” I told him as I put on my night-scope goggles. “Stay as close to the south bank as you can without running us aground.”
“How far upriver?”
“A few kilometers,” I said, adjusting the goggles’ brightness level. “I’ll tell you when we’re there.”
Distances in darkness and on the water were difficult to judge, but from what I’d seen from the jeep trail it had looked like the northern edge of the Patth fence would be close enough to the river bank to be visible. Sure enough, half an hour after we headed out I spotted the fence’s nearer corner.
“Move a little ways back toward the middle,” I told Fisher. “We don’t want to look any more conspicuous than we already are.”
“Sure,” he said, easing the boat away from the bank. “How much farther?”
I thought about it a moment. So far all the pieces were falling in with my current theory. If that theory was indeed correct . . . “I’m guessing another seven kilometers,” I said. “Maybe seven and a half.”
“Got it,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously. “What do you know that I don’t?”
“Mostly it’s just hunches,” I said. “The idea is to take what I know about how the other guy thinks—or maybe just what I think I know about how he thinks—and overlay it on the situation at hand.”
He grunted. “Sounds pretty soggy.”
“It can be,” I conceded. “Hopefully, this one will bake up a little firmer.”
We’d gone another seven and a half kilometers, and I could see the rocky patch where the jeep trail hit the river and the dock in the distance, when we found the gap.
It looked just about the way I’d imagined it. A narrow but deep cut had been dug out of the bank, either from general erosion or some unusually high river level in the past, with a stream flowing through it. The Patth fence bridged the gap, leaving an opening high and wide enough for someone to squeeze through without touching any part of the fence itself. With the sensor buds strung along the top to guard against climbing attempts, there was every chance someone taking the low road would be missed completely.
At the very back of the cut, partially concealed in a tangle of grassy bushes, I could make out the prow of a narrow metal dinghy.
“There,” I told Fisher, pointing. “See it?”
“Looks like our dinghy, all right,” he said sourly. “Whoever took it better not have holed it. You say the rest of the silver-silk is in there?”
“I’ve searched everywhere else,” I said, beckoning to Selene. “How close can you get us without triggering the sensors on the fence?”
“Bigger question is how close I can get us without hanging up on the bank,” he said. “Honey? Time to take over. Me and our new friends are heading ashore.”
* * *
The landing was just as wet as I’d expected, but not nearly as difficult. Honey, who appeared to be the more competent of the pair at close-in work, got us to within a couple of meters of the shoreline and held the boat there while Selene, Fisher, and I waded ashore. The sides of the cut were mostly wet stone instead of wet mud, which caused a few scrapes and bruises as we fought our way through the flowing water and under the fence. Fisher groused under his breath the whole way, but personally I was happier with a few damp bruises than I would have been dragging mud through the streets of Bilswift and into our rental car. We drew enough attention to ourselves as it was.
“Looks okay,” Fisher said. He’d gone straight to the dinghy while I helped Selene up the side of the cut and was crouching over it like it was a pet that had been hit by a car. “A little banged up, but nothing too serious. So where’s the stuff?”
“Let me look,” I said, kneeling beside him and feeling along the boat’s underside. “His usual technique . . . Damn. Not here.”
“What do you mean, not here?” Fisher demanded, shooting to his feet and glaring down at me. “What the hell?”
“It was here,” I said, picking a spot on the hull at random and pointing to it. “You can feel the adhesive residue where he stuck the package. He must have taken it with him.”
“Taken it where?” Fisher looked around, then pointed west. “There?”
I looked that direction, feeling my stomach tighten. There were lights over there, distant and diffuse, but definitely not just reflected starlight. Presumably Huginn and his team, putting in late hours in their portal hunt. “Actually, the people over there are the last ones we want to meet up with,” I told Fisher.
“Not if they’ve got the package,” Fisher countered.
“They don’t,” I assured him. “That’s the last place our thief would have gone.”
“If you say so,” Fisher said, clearly not entirely convinced. “So what do we do now?”
“We go home,” I said throwing some angry regret into my voice. The sole point of this trip had been to find out if Galfvi could have sneaked into the Patth area, and how he could have accomplished that feat. Now that both questions had been answered, it was time to disengage with our new companions. “There’s no way we’re going to find him in the dark. Maybe we can come back tomorrow—”
“Maybe?” Fisher interrupted. “Maybe?”
“What exactly do you want me to do?” I demanded. “Go bumbling around in the dark and hope I trip over him?”
Fisher grunted. “I’ll tell you what I want,” he said.
And suddenly his Jinnger was in his hand and pointed at me. “I want you to get the silver-silk you promised us. I want my half of your thirty threads.”
“I said maybe thirty.”
“You bring me thirty, you keep half,” he said, ignoring my correction. “You bring me less, Honey and I keep all of them. Selene stays aboard until you get back with the loot.” He glanced at the distant glow, then up at the sky, then back at me. “You’ve got one hour. Oh, and I’ll take that.” He pointed at my holstered plasmic. “And your phone.” He shot a look at Selene, standing silently watching the drama. “You can just put yours on the ground. I’ll get ’em in a second.”
In the darkness I couldn’t see Selene’s pupils. But with her out of position to take any action, and with me kneeling on the ground under Fisher’s gun, we really didn’t have many other options. Silently, I drew my plasmic and handed it to him, butt first, then handed over my phone.
“Good,” he said, stuffing both items in his pockets and taking a step back. “Well, don’t just sit there. Clock’s running. You’re not back in an hour, we head to your ship and see if there’s something else we can take to make up for tonight’s losses.” He considered. “Or maybe we start with Selene’s fingers. That’ll be up to Honey.”
“I’d strongly recommend against that,” I said, hearing the death in my voice as I rose to my feet. “Bear in mind that you haven’t lost anything yet. You can still walk away from this. But if you hurt Selene, that offer ends. And it will cost you. Very, very dearly.”
For a moment he seemed taken aback. He looked at Selene, back at me. “Yeah, got it,” he said. “Like I said: One hour.” He gestured inland with the muzzle of his gun. “Better get going.”
I gave Selene what I hoped was a reassuring nod, and hurried off into the darkness. With a desperate and probably armed Galfvi somewhere to the east and a determined and definitely armed Huginn somewhere to the west, the window for Fisher and Honey to get out of this alive could close at any minute.
I needed to make sure that if that window closed it didn’t close on Selene.