Black Man (17 page)

“Did you have to fucking hospitalize him?”

He shrugged. He’d dumped his prison jacket earlier—stripped off shoes and socks, too—and the beach sand under his feet was cool and firm. The night air brushed his neck and his bared arms like loose-drape silk.

“Couldn’t see a good reason not to.”

“No?” Ertekin had not taken off her shoes. “Well, it would have meant we got home tonight, instead of staying in this dump. Ever think of that?”

Her gesture took in the floodlit clutch of low-rise behind them, the coms tower, and behind it like some Godzilla parent the endless upward loom of the Perez nanorack. The rack’s structure stood mostly in darkness, but red navigation lights blinked in dizzying stacked synchrony, dragging vision upward until the lights disappeared into the cloud cover.

“It’s your dump,” he said.

“It’s leased.”

“That must be heartbreaking for you. COLIN dependent on local state power. I’m surprised you don’t just topple the government. You know, like you did in Bolivia back in the nineties.”

She shot him a look he was beginning to recognize. Halfway to anger, locked down by something else. In another thirteen, he’d have read it as social aptitude training. Here, he wasn’t sure what it might mean.

Only one thing was clear. Something was scratching at the edges of Sevgi Ertekin, and had been since he met her.

“Marsalis, it’s late,” she told him. “I’m not going to get in a fight with you about something COLIN may or may not have done ten years before I joined them. The reason we’re in
this dump
is because you let your much-vaunted thirteen tendencies get out of hand, and it cost us another six fucking hours of phone calls and negotiation. So don’t push your luck. I’m close enough to sending you back as it is.”

He grinned. “Now you’re lying.”

“Think so? The warden wanted to refer it all the way back up to Tallahassee and a convened Violent Crimes Committee assessment. He’d just love to have you locked down while that grinds through the legislature.”

“I’d have thought he’d be glad to see the back of me.”

“Well, you’d be wrong. Warden Parris is an ex-marine.” Sevgi shot him another glance. “Just like Willbrink.”

“Will who?”

“Yeah, right. Forget it.”

He didn’t know how much truth she was telling. Certainly, things had been fraught once they saw what he’d done to Dudeck. The intervention squad didn’t quite stunwrap him on the spot, but it was a close thing. He spent three hours in the faintly ammoniac-perfumed gloom of the riot holding cells, was hauled out, marched summarily across to admin, and then marched just as rapidly back as, he supposed, competing authorizations whiplashed back and forth. It took another two hours to get him out of the hole permanently, by which time it was dark and the admin block was down to a skeleton crew of caretakers and security.

Norton and Ertekin came and went, in and out of doors to offices he never got to see inside. They barely glanced his way. Shift change came and went. At one point, a CO came and took his picture, took it away without comment. Carl let it all wash over him. When they were all done, he signed the documents they gave him, changed back into his own clothes, and, guessing it would be cold in New York, blagged an inmate jacket from the yawning night clerk. It was a use-faded gray-black, not a bad color in itself, but one sleeve was flashed with a line of orange chevrons and across the back was the customary sigma logo and name in the same glaring color. As with a lot of old stock, some tagging freak wit had taken a dye squirt to the lettering, dumping in a long jagged lowercase
t
after the
S.
He shrugged and took it anyway. Miami PD had impounded his gear from the hotel when they busted him, and he didn’t suppose he’d ever see
it again. UNGLA were apparently still negotiating for the return of the Haag gun and its load. Point of principle, point of pride. No one really believed they’d win. He shouldered his way into the jacket, rolled up the short personal effects strip that went with the clothes he’d been arrested in, and walked out.

Fuck the accessories, Carl. You’re halfway home.

A grim-faced Norton stayed at his side all the way to the innocuous hired teardrop in the parking lot, opened the backseat for him, and closed it again as soon as he was in. Ertekin came out of the admin building a couple of minutes later, muttered something to her partner, and then got in behind the wheel.

When Norton was in beside her, she fired up the engine and steered the car out of the prison gates on manual. Neither of the COLIN officers spoke to Carl at all.

Warden Parris, if he was still on site, never showed.

A couple of hundred meters down the exit highway, Norton was already on the phone, checking the Miami suborb terminal for departures north. Not surprisingly, there was nothing flying this late.

“Hotel?” he’d asked Ertekin.

She shook her head “Parris is way too pissed. I don’t want to wake up to a VCC warrant tomorrow morning because he called some friend in Tallahassee during the night. We need to get back on our own turf.”

Norton went back to the phone. A couple of hours later, they were rolling through a security gate and into the nanorack facility environs. Powered fences glinted off across the Florida flatland, watchful men and women in coveralls prowling back and forth in the gloom. The low-light headgear they wore made them look like insect aliens from a low-budget stage show. Carl spotted the colin insignia on an upper arm, on the badge of a beret. Safe haven. He could see the tension drain almost visibly out of his two rescuers.

Now, out on the beach with sand between his toes and his own clothes on his back for the first time in four months, he could feel a similar easing in himself. A sudden self-knowledge slopped in him, the awareness of how clenched he’d become, and the faintly scary slide as he let it go increments at a time.

He’d been here before a few times: the bridge of the
Felipe Souza,
crackling suddenly with transmission from the incoming rescue boat; stepping off the elevator platform at the bottom of the Hawking nanorack and onto ground that sucked at him with a full g; getting out of the teardrop taxi in Hampstead and looking up at Zooly’s new pad, checking the street corner sign, wondering if this could really be it, if maybe he’d gotten her instructions wrong—and then seeing her come to the huge picture window and grin down at him, dimly seen through the tree-shadowed glass. The slip in your guts that tells you it’s okay, you can let go now.

“Tell me something, Ertekin.” The words came out of his mouth like exhaled smoke, pure unguarded conversation. He didn’t much care what she thought or said in reply—just talking and knowing it wasn’t going to get him shanked was the point. “You’ve worked for COLIN a couple of years, right?”

“Two and a half.”

“So who’s senior? You or Norton?”

He got the look again, but muted. Maybe she could hear the lack of cabling in his voice. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“No? So how does it work?” He gestured. “Come on, Ertekin. We’re just talking here. It’s a beach, for fuck’s sake.”

The twitched corner of a smile, but he got the feeling it wasn’t for him. He gestured again.

“Come on.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you.” She shook her head. “One in the morning, the man wants to talk office politics.

Works like this. Norton’s an accredited COLIN investigator, a troubleshooter. Got a dozen years in, he went straight to them after law enforcement training in some upstate college. It’s a good career move: COLIN pay way over average and most of the work isn’t what you’d call hazardous. You’re looking at anticorruption task forcing, chasing down local government scams on COLIN property, Marstech licensing breaches, that sort of thing.”

“Not much serial homicide then.”

“No. When things get heavy, they mostly hire muscle from private military contractors like ExOp or Lamberts. Where it’s legally messy, they pull local PD liaison. That was me. I came in on a couple of Marstech hijacks where COLIN staff got killed, seconded from NYPD Homicide. They liked the work I did for them, Norton was moving up to a senior post, he needed a permanent partner with bloodwork experience, so.” She shrugged. “Like that. They offered me the job. The money was a lot. I took it.”

“But Norton still ranks you?”

Ertekin sighed. Looked out to sea.

“What?’

“Thirteens. You’re all so fucking wired for hierarchy. Who’s in charge? Who’s at the top? Who do I have to dominate? Every detective I ever shared an office with, it—”

She stopped.

For a moment, he thought Norton was there, coming down the beach toward them from the bunkhouse.

The mesh cranked, rustily. He flicker-checked the beach, saw nothing. Went back to her face and found her still staring out at the ocean.

“It what?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said evenly. “Yeah, Norton ranks me. Norton knows COLIN inside and out. But he’s not a cop and I am.”

“So he defers to you?”

“We cooperate.” She left the sea and met his eyes. “Strange concept for someone like you, I know. But Norton’s got nothing to prove.”

“
And a thick head of hair,
right?”

The lyric left her looking blank. He guessed she was too young to really remember Angry Young and the Men. Carl owned their last album because, hey, who over the age of forty didn’t, the download went triple platinum as soon as it hit the open stacks. But Ertekin would have been barely out of diapers at the time. He’d only just been old enough himself to take it on board when Angry Young blew his brains out all over the fittings of a Kilburn recording studio.
Making a Mess
. Right. Black-comic sly and London-gutter cool to the last. He sometimes wondered if Angry Young had known what would happen to sales of
Making a Mess
when he put the barrel of the frag carbine in his mouth that afternoon, grinned—apparently—at the sound man, and flipped the trigger. Whether he had in fact begun to guess when he’d scrawled out the title track and lyrics a year earlier.

“What’s his hair got to do with it?”

“Well, it’s hardly male-pattern baldness, is it?”

“Hardly… .” She got it. “Oh you’re fucking kidding me. You can
not
be serious. Marsalis,
you
don’t have male-pattern baldness.”

“No. But I’m not human.”

It stopped her like a shot from the Haag gun. Even in the last gasp glow from the arc lamps back up on the asphalt, he saw the way her stare tautened as she looked up at him. Her voice, when it came, was exactly as tight.

“You quoting somebody there?”

“Well, yeah.” He chuckled, mostly because it was so good to be out there on the beach with his hands in his pockets and his feet in the sand. “Your guys, for a start.”

She raised an eyebrow. “My guys?”

“Yeah. You’re Turkish, right? Sevgi? Which pretty much makes you a Muslim, I’d guess. Don’t you listen to what your bearded betters tell you about my kind?”

“For your information,” she said thinly, “the last imam I listened to was a woman. She doesn’t have much of a beard.”

Carl shrugged. “Fair enough. I’m just drawing on global media here. Islam, the Vatican, those Jesusland Baptist guys. They’re all singing pretty much the same hymn.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh excuse fucking me.” He caught the flapping edge of his mood and dragged it back into place.
You got out of jail today, pal. Tomorrow, you get out of the Republic. Day after that you’re on a suborb home. Just grin and bear it
. He pushed out a laugh. “I pretty much do know what I’m talking about, Ertekin. See, I live inside this skin. I was there in ’93 when Jacobsen came into force. And in case you think this is demob self-pity, it isn’t. We’re not just talking about the thirteens here. In Dubai I saw indentured Thai bonobos disemboweled and strung up outside the brothels they worked in when the
shahuda
hit town. The ordinary whores they just raped and branded.”

“The
shahuda
are not—”

“Yeah, yeah. The
shahuda
are not representative. Heard it. Just like the
gladius dei
don’t speak for all those peace-loving Catholics out there, and all those Jesusland TV freaks got nothing to do with Christianity, either. It’s all just a big misunderstanding, right. All this slaughter and blind prejudice, these guys just didn’t read promotional literature.”

“You’re talking about fanatical mino—”

“Look, Ertekin.” He found this time the laugh was genuine. “I really don’t care. I’m a free man tonight, got my feet in the sand and everything. You want to do the group-solidarity thing, run salvage on your broken-down patriarchal belief system, you go right ahead. I’ve believed some fucking stupid things in my time. Why should you be any different?”

“I’m not going to discuss my faith with you.”

“Good. Let’s not, then.”

They stood in the sand and listened to the quiet. Surf boomed on a reef somewhere offshore. Closer in, the smaller waves broke creamily in the gloom, made a white-noise hiss as they sucked back.

“How come you knew I was Turkish?” she asked him finally.

He shrugged. “Been there a lot. One time, I had an interpreter called Sevgi.”

“What were you doing in Turkey?”

“What do you think.”

“The tracts?”

He nodded somberly. “Yeah, standard European response. If it’s nasty or inconvenient, park it in eastern Turkey. Too far away to upset anyone who matters, and a long walk west if anybody gets out unauthorized. Which happens enough to keep me going back there a couple of times a year. You from the eastern end?”

“No, I’m from New York.”

“Right.” He nodded. “Sorry. I meant—”

He stopped as her gaze shuttled past him and up the beach. Turned to follow, though long-honed proximity sense already told him this time Norton was there for real. There on the low crest of the dunes, scuffing down through the sand toward them, and, by every physical sign Carl knew how to read, hauling bad news in bulk.