All Beasts Together (The Commander) (28 page)

“Sir,” he said formally, and left for the kitchen, his back angrily straight.

Bobby would go over the books.  He learned fast, and I had become paranoid after the near disaster with Pete.  Pete, it turned out, had indeed been trolling around my mobster identity in front of the cops, but I put a stop to that.  I checked all the records of the enterprises I directly controlled these days, no matter how innocuous or how well controlled my operative. The $2,518.88 from ‘other sources’ was mine.  The China Garden wasn’t the only way I cleaned my money, just one of the better ones.

Joey came by with more plates of food.  I had to smile at his enthusiasm.  He hated China, Chinese ways, and poverty, and the steady despair of his family’s failing restaurant.  I was everything his family wasn’t and
my criminal background didn’t matter at all.  I was strong and he wanted to be just like me.

Just like me, I thought.  I shook my head.  No one in
his right mind wanted to be like me.

“Tell your daddy to throw out the shrimp with snow peas,” I said.
“The shrimp has gone bad.”  The last thing they needed was to irritate some of their few remaining customers with another round of bad food.

I craved legitimacy in the business community.  I didn’t have a business background
, but I had observed my traitorous former husband making deals for years.  I learned.  Taxes, accounting, banking, loans, getting a business to turn a profit.  Difficult, yes, but for an Arm with enough juice in her to keep from making idiot mistakes, not impossible to learn, either.  My ability to read and control people allowed me to make advantageous deals.  I had come up with a medium-term goal: ownership of a chain of car dealerships.  I hoped to make a lot of money dealing cars; I could make nearly as much money as a car salesman as with my low end robberies.  I had spent three weeks selling cars to learn the industry and sold dozens of cars in the process.  Once I established the Curchew identity I planned to purchase a small used car lot in his name.  Go from there.  Not long from now, I envisioned myself with a large financial empire started with stolen money, invested in businesses I ran from behind the scenes, all turning a nice profit without me having to do much work.  I would be on my way to true wealth.

To make money legitimately, though, you have to have money.  It isn’t realistic to think you can invest a few thousand dollars and expect to churn out millions in profit.  Nor w
ere the standard methods of raising money open to me: I couldn’t go to a bank and take out a business loan.  I couldn’t form a corporation and issue stock.  At least not yet, on either of those issues, though later, once I established my false business identities, I suspected I would be able to.  That was why I recruited Mr. Oldman.

One of the big problems I
had come to realize was that Arms had expenses, large expenses.  Guns, ammo, bribes and even body disposal ate money, large amounts of money, and that didn’t even cover normal living expenses.  The issue of security proved to be a nasty tightrope because openly spending money itself breached my security.  Another issue was time.  Being an Arm had given me a skewed sense of how fast things should work and needed to work.  I thought in terms of days and weeks, while the business world thought in terms of quarters and years.  The fact I amassed wealth at a prodigious rate from a normal’s perspective didn’t stop me from worrying about it as an Arm, because from my perspective my money raising took forever.

So
now I faced one of the oldest problems in the world for budding business empire builders: once I factored in my various expenses, I lived day to day on virtually no money at all, because my real money was tied up in my investments.

Ying was the key to one of my plans: Greg and the gym.  I
had paired her up with Greg so I could funnel money into my gym, which also involved teaching Ying how to cope with Greg.  I also taught Ying how to interact in moneyed society.

I wanted her tonight to take her shopping for some appropriate
ly fancy clothing.

I might be a death-obsessed Arm, but that didn’t mean I didn’t like to shop.

Chapter
7

The average Focus can’t resist a fad.  The top Focuses can’t resist starting fads.

“Inventing Our Future”

Henry Zielinski: December 25, 1967 – December 28, 1967

“Sorry,
Doc,” Tina said.  “Focus’s orders.  Rise and shine.”  She stripped the covers off him with a sadistic grin.

Monday morning before the sun rose wasn
’t Zielinski’s favorite time of day.  Especially on Christmas day in a place that didn’t consider Christmas celebrations private.  “Urrgh?”  Bob and Jim were already up and gone.

“
You’ve got an appointment with a Crow and some beasts.  Let’s get a move on.”

“You’re my bodyguard?” he said with a groan as he gave in and sat up.

“Yup.”  She bundled Zielinski up, stuck a cup of coffee and a sack of doughnuts in his hands, and dragged him outside and to her vehicle, an older oversized Ford pickup.  Once she started it up he could hardly hear himself think.

“Hey, doc, why don’t you join us next Friday night?
” Tina bellowed over the thunder of the truck.  “You look a bit peeked.  I’m sure I can find you someone to cheer you up.”

Tina
would probably volunteer, but she didn’t appeal to him at all.  Tina had the femininity of a rutting moose and more muscles than he did.  Zielinski covered his reactions.  “No, but thanks for the offer,” he said, blandly and carefully.

“Fine.  You probably even know what you’re missing.”  She turned on Boylston and drove them into an improbable traffic jam.  There
had been construction, and the workers were gone, but barriers still blocked most of the lanes.  “Hell, it’s going to take us a half hour to get out of Brookline this morning.  What’s everybody doing on the roads?  Don’t they have better things to do on Christmas morning?”

Lori had come by two weeks ago to quiz him on his still fruitless
training efforts and asked whether he might be interested in consulting with the Crow, Occum, about problems he had run into with his Chimeras.  She had been tense and distracted, enough to make him wonder if he was about to be sold down the river.  He agreed only after he had bargained and received a bodyguard.

The Focus’s voice had carried
a dangerous undertone when they talked: she didn’t think he was earning his keep.

The Crow, Occum, had his lair these days somewhere in the industrial morass of East Boston, near Logan International Airport.  They reached the address a half hour later.

“So, how are we going to make contact with the Crow?”  Zielinski asked.

“The usual: a dark basement.  He said the door would be unlocked.”

“I thought Occum dealt only with Sadie
.”

“He usually does, but he specifically asked for me this time.  No idea why.  I’ve never met him, but I got the opinion from Sadie that he’s met me.”

They found the address and went down into the basement of what appeared to be a light industrial plant with a faded hand-painted Allied Packaging logo on the side.  The place was dark, as advertised, and smelled of salt water.

“This place reeks,” Tina said.  Her voice echoed unnervingly in the darkness.

“What do you expect, with three Beasts and a couple of Monsters in residence,” a voice whispered.  “Shit, owwh.  Get off my foot, Hoskins!”  The latter comment was not a whisper.

“Yes, boss,” a second voice said.  This
voice boomed, a deep rumble, a voice to shout over crowds and rattle the windows.

Something in the darkness made a tinkling noise
and a dim red light turned on, the sort of light one might find in a darkroom, just enough to illuminate silhouettes. “Crap,” the first voice said.  “Remember me, Doc?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Zielinski said. 
He recognized the Greek accent.  “You’re the Crow who helped me with my little problem last year.”

“Occum.”  In the dimness, Zielinski
made out the outline of two people, one short, the other huge and wide, with extra arms.  He couldn’t see the far walls of the room.  Up close, the room furnishings consisted of an old couch that looked shabby even in the dim red light, and piles of filthy blankets.

“Glad to meecha, Occum,” Tina said.  “
My name’s Tina.  You know the Doc.  What’s the big deal, anyway?”

“She’s ugly, boss,” the second voice, Hoskins, said.

“Hey!  I didn’t ask your opinion, furball,” Tina said.

“Fuck you, bitch,” the beast said.  Zielinski
realized why Occum had asked for Tina, remembering what the beast named Rover had deposited on his leg last time.  Occum was trying to reduce the possibilities of ancillary trouble.

“Now, Hoskins.  You know the language rule.  Only I get to be impolite.”

“Rules work better if everyone follows them.”

“Crap.  Dog breath,” Occum said
, walking forward out of the darkness.  He was a short man, fantastically ugly, with a scarred face and a patch over one eye.  His torso and arms carried a bodybuilder’s muscles, but his legs were thin and emaciated.  He rolled when he walked, a seaman uncomfortable with footing that didn’t move.

“You’ve made progress on their minds,” Zielinski said, impressed.  “May I ask how?”

“Sure, Doc.  That’s why you’re here.  Turns out I can guide my charges when they change shape.  I’m still working on perfecting it, though.”  Occum sat down on the couch a few feet away from Zielinski and lowered his voice to a whisper.  “I’m doing something wrong with the Monsters, though.  They’re just not lasting.”

“Perhaps you need to start at the beginning,” Zielinski said.

Zielinski finished examining Occum’s Monsters, chained up and not at all happy, long before Tina returned with the juice analyzer.

“I’ve got to apologize again, Doc,” Occum said.  “I’m not in a good mood.  Too much stress.”  Stress was endemic right now.  His own stress didn’t help him a bit, and stress was no easier on the psyche of a Major Transform.

“Why is this stressful? 
Am I contributing?”  Zielinski said.  They had returned to the entry section of the reeking basement.  Hoskins had dragged an old easy chair over for Zielinski.  They sat in an isolated glow of red light surrounded by darkness.

“No.  It’s the situation.  Every time I think I’m getting somewhere I find another three problems I need to fix. 
I’ve got so many of them now I can’t even keep track of them anymore.  Dammit, I know I can save the Beasts.  It’s so obvious it’s almost instinctive.  I can help them think, I can guide them back closer to human shape.  I can’t keep them fed, though.”

“Fed?”

“Juice.  Élan, we call it.  Monster juice.  Beasts don’t get much out of anything save élan, although they can suck up nearly anything.  They can get pretty dangerous if they get low on élan.”

“
You’re doing this on your own?”  This sounded like too many discoveries too fast.  Zielinski found it all rather suspicious.

“Shit,” Occum said.  “You’re too sharp for your own good, sonny.  Of course I’m not doing this on my own.  Problem is, I
’m afraid the idiot I’m trading information with is on the other side.  A bad guy.  He’s real angry at society in general and the woman Transforms in particular, and I don’t trust him.  I think he wants to recruit me.  Course, with my furry bodyguards he’ll need to work a lot harder.”

Hmm.  “What’s with the one you call Suzie?”

“Named her for a Focus who’s trying to hunt my ass down and kill me,” Occum said.  Zielinski had been afraid of that.  “The guiding thing I do to the Beasts I can do to the ladies during an élan draw.  I’m trying to keep them human, or, in Suzie’s case, bring her back closer to her long lost humanity.  The other side seems to think we can keep them human all the way.  The idea frightens the Focus bitches, though I got no clue how they found out.  Rizzari ain’t the one talk’n, that’s for damned sure.”

Zielinski found the entire business astonishing.  “Suzie can talk
?”  She had once been a Monster, according to Rover, or Sir Robert Sellers, as he currently preferred.

“Yes.  Cuss words
mostly, but she can talk.”  Occum paused, cursed.  “Dammit, I forgot about food for you.  You can’t eat garbage like the rest of us.  Maybe we can send ugly out after some food for you.  You think you can teach me to measure juice more accurately?”

“I’m positive I can,” Zielinski said.  “You just need to calibrate your metasense, so you can measure your own juice and that of your friends.”

---

“Well, doc, I will admit I
got some hints,” Tina said.  After four days working full time in Occum’s lair, they were on the way back to Inferno in Tina’s truck.  She had to bellow so he could hear her over the racket of the truck.

“Why would they want me out until Friday?”  They were coming back early, anyway.

“I can’t say.”

Right.  “I guess I’ll find out soon enough.”