Hammered (19 page)

Valens’s voice, then, slow as a creaking door:
“Castaign, STOP!”
and Gabe halts at the snap of the command. I struggle for control, take a step back, between my sister and the doctor, away from Gabe. I gag on bile and go down on one knee in the steep sick aftershock of the adrenaline and the thing I almost did.

Again.

Valens puts a hand on my shoulder, holds the other one out to take the coffee cup away from Castaign. Blond, blue-eyed Gabe Castaign, a man who’ll crawl through a fire for a girl he’s never met, lets hands that could half-encircle a cantaloupe hang limply by his side, looking from me to Valens and back again with an expression like a befuddled bear: intelligent, thoughtful, determined to understand what it is that’s so suddenly changed. I see him taking in the way I’m dressed—plum-colored slacks, sweater without a pill on it, wine-red turtleneck I bought yesterday, downtown. Same old scarred boots, though. I wonder what he thinks of that.

Fury sparks slowly in his eyes, then, and they focus hard on Valens.

“What the hell did you do to her, fils de pute?”

I hold up my hand to stem the flow of that anger, trying to hide how gratified I am by it. Before I can say anything, Valens interposes himself smoothly. “She’s sick, Castaign. That’s why she’s here.”

An unfamiliar voice cuts in. It must be the woman, Gabe’s coworker. “And we talk about her like she’s not here because? …” And I can’t decide if what I feel is gratitude or irritation, but whatever it is, it’s enough to get me hauling myself up straight and not leaning on Valens’s goddamned arm any longer.

“Because I’m the patient,” I answer, and take a step forward to extend my hand to her, not letting any of them see how badly I want to sway on my feet. From the look Gabe gives me, he guesses. My face must be livid and shining with cold sweat between the scars. “Jen Casey.” I can’t remember the last time I introduced myself to somebody by my right name.

“Elspeth Dunsany,” she answers, switching the coffee to her left hand. Her right is warm and dry as her smile. Golden hazel eyes crinkle at the corners, eerily pale in a face darker than my own. She’s compact, vigorous, a little chunky. “Are you a programmer?”

“I’m a pilot,” I answer. “Or at least I was.” Valens clears his throat behind me—
shut up, Casey
—which makes me curious.

I’ve always been smarter than I look. And Valens wouldn’t have sent Barb half a thousand miles to collect me if he could get the results he wants from whatever teenage soldiers might volunteer for the project just to get the—wetware, Valens called it.

Charming.

So there’s got to be something about me that’s special. Enhanced reflexes? Just bloody not being dead? I know Valens isn’t telling me a third of the truth, but I can deduce that he needs me at least as much as I need him. What’s he going to do if I piss him off? Send me home to die?

What the hell. I have nothing to lose but my life.

I keep talking. “Are you working on the flight simulations for the VR program?”

“Some work in VR, but …” her voice trails off, and I can tell from the direction of her gaze that she’s looking at Valens.
Score. “…
nothing like that,” she finishes lamely.

Interesting. He has some kind of hold over her, too. Her, me, Gabe. Same old Valens.

Pity for him I ain’t the same old Jenny. The last time we tangled, he used Gabe to control me. I’m willing to bet that’s the whole reason he’s offered Gabe this much-needed job. Which no doubt comes with health insurance that will cover what the government won’t do for Genie. Enzyme therapy is fucking expensive.

I’m not twenty-five anymore, Frederick Valens. And you’d be wise not to forget it.

“Gabe,” I say, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “Dinner tonight? Bring the girls, my treat.”

“Sure,” he says, but then he glances over at Elspeth Dunsany almost as if checking to see if she minds. Not quite asking permission—Gabe would never do that. But seeing if maybe he needs to make it up to her later.

Elspeth’s emotion is unreadable behind the grin she gives me. “I hope once you two old friends have caught up, I’ll be invited to the next one.”

And I like her even more for that, dammit, in spite of myself. It’s gracious, and she’s not making a fuss about being gracious. A grown-up woman.

A woman who looks more familiar the more I look at her. “Elspeth Dunsany,” I say, thoughtfully.
“Doctor
Dunsany?”

She nods. “Yes.
That
Doctor Dunsany.” Her face falls, as she wouldn’t let it before.

I understand. Oh, Nellie, do I understand. “It’s okay,” I say, and clap her lightly on the shoulder. “I’m
that
Master Corporal Casey. Nothing like an uncomfortable fifteen minutes of fame, is there? We’ll get along just fine.”

Valens clears his throat again, and as I turn to look at
him I’m left with the unmistakable impression that he engineered this little meeting.

Of course he did. He’s Fred Valens, after all.

And as long as he thinks he’s got control of me, I’ve got half a chance of finding out what the hell is going on here, and why my sister put a bullet in the back of Mitch’s girlfriend’s head.

Razorface leaned against creaking, smoke-scented black leather and kicked his feet up on the chrome-edged coffee table. He liked his living room. He’d picked out the furniture himself, over Leesie’s protests. As if a woman knew anything about what looked good.

He still didn’t like the dingy unwashed cop perched on the loveseat across from him, but what the hell. You took what you could get.

“So this doc of Maker’s said he get in touch with her? She been calling me, like I asked, but you know she don’t listen to nothing.”

“Yeah. I know. He said he’d try. The prints came back. Hers, and the ones I lifted off the door of that Honda I told you about. Maker—or Casey—”

“Maker.” Irritation filled his mouth like the constant subliminal taste of steel. “What she want to be called.”

“Right. The other woman is her sister, this Barbara Anne Casey the car is registered to. Who works for—are you ready for this?”

“The drug company?” Razorface rolled his massive
shoulders back against the sofa, settling in. He could hear Leesie in the kitchen, banging cabinets. She wasn’t pleased about having a cop in the house.

“Close. Unitek corporate headquarters. Hired recently, too.” The cop punctured the air with jabs of his open hand. He leaned forward, picking up a glass of cola he’d been ignoring while the ice melted, and then fiddled with the tubular steel art object on the coffee table for a moment until it lined up neatly with the glass and chrome edge. “I’ve got a theory, Razorface, and I need you to do some checking for me.”

“What sort of checking?”

“Your dealers.”

Razorface leaned forward and rapped on the coffee table. At the sound, Emery peered around the corner from the next room, eyebrows raised questioningly, hand on his lapel.
On the job.
Razorface waved him down. “I ain’t got no dealers, man. I got boys, but they don’t sell.”

“Yeah, whatever. These guys who were supposedly out of New York. The ones nobody’s ever seen or heard of before?”

“Fuck, yeah. They weren’t from New York.”

The cop cracked his knuckles. “I think they were from Canada. And I bet you know people who could find out for me if they knew the right questions to ask. And maybe had a few holos to show around.” He reached slowly into his breast pocket and drew out a holder with a thick sliver of clear crystal imbedded in it.

“Damn. How you get those?” Despite himself, Razor felt a grin creeping across his face.

“Border patrol,” Mitch answered. “I’m a vice cop. This is the case I’m actually supposed to be working on.”

“Huh. You think we got some gangsters from Canada moving in?” He didn’t move to take it.

Mitch kept the hand extended. “Nah. I think we got a corporation. I think they ditched the Hammers here because it was convenient. Because they wanted a—fucked if I know. I think they did it on purpose, and I think they tainted them on purpose. And I think the company that makes the things is behind it all.”

Razor reached out and took the holo chip in his meaty hand. He laughed, and it turned into a wet cough, which he swallowed. “Why’d a corp be dumping stuff on my street? Not for money. Have to move volume for that.”

“Fuck,” Mitch answered. “Not controlled enough for a trial. Unless there was some reason they needed to—no, that makes no sense. Your guess is as good as mine, Razor, I guess I’m trying to say. Maybe it’s just that nobody gives a fuck what goes on in the North End. Maybe it has something to do with Maker being here.”

The silence stretched heavy. “Mitch.”

“Yeah?”

“You talk about the North End. Why you give a shit about this city, man? White boy from the suburbs …”

“Why do you? You’re a goddamned warlord. Nobody can touch you. You don’t have to do things the way you do. You do right. Most gangsters who get where you are, they go about shit a hell of a lot differently.”

Razorface thought about that for a while before he found the right words. They weren’t the right words, really, but they were the best he could do. “I grew up here, man. Some people, they think I go about things wrong, anyway.”

“You’ve got problems?”

“Damn, where ain’t I got problems? I got a twenty-year-old punk wants me out of a job so he can take my place, I got 20-Love trouble and they’re getting machine guns from somewhere. I got—hell, you don’t care what I’ve got.”

“So you grew up here. So what? So did the punks who
shoot the place up, put bullets through little girls on playgrounds.”

“Yeah, well. There’s men don’t provide for their children, too. Mean we all should do whatever the fuck we want?” Razor swung his feet off the coffee table and stood up, heaving his body out of the sofa. It seemed to get harder every year.
You’re not that fucking old.
But it was a struggle not to breathe hard, and he wasn’t going to let himself look weak in front of a cop.

The air was shit; that was all it was. He turned away from the cop and focused on the wall clock. It was chrome, too, and polished black enamel. Like Razorface. Like everything else in the room.

“No,” the cop said, climbing to his own feet. He finished the soda and set the glass down on a coaster. “No, we probably shouldn’t. You going to look into that shit for me?”

The big gangster studied the wall a little more closely, examining a crack running down it.
It’s for Merc. And the other kids.
“Fuck, yeah. But people see you coming to the house here they’ll talk, and I don’t need that shit. Next time, you leave me a message on my hip. I meet you downtown or in East Hartford. Not the neighborhood, all right?”

“All right.”

Razorface didn’t turn around until Mitch left. He didn’t want the cop to see the look on his face and think him—sweet.

Once he was sure Mitch was gone, Razor uncurled his fingers from the holo chip thoughtfully and held the little sliver of crystal up to the light.

Canada.

Wish to hell I knew what that meant.

Genie’s grown since Christmas, but maybe not as much as you’d expect of a girl her age. She’s a big-eyed elf, blonde and fine-boned, and her big sister always seems to have her arm around Genie’s shoulders. Leah’s a good kid. Looks just like her mother, with a promise of early beauty and later strength. Genie, on the other hand, has Gabe’s eyes.

I miss Geniveve. It’s a funny thing to say, but I do. She was good for Gabe, and I never had a shot at him anyway. She was a class act.

Gabe has always had a good eye for women. Only ever made one mistake that I know of, and we were both much younger then.

The girls want pizza and garlic bread and Greek salad, so we wind up in a little hole in the wall on the west side of town, gathered around a red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloth. The food’s good, all things considered. Genie eats like a pig. She has to, to maintain weight, although Gabe tells me she’s doing better now that she’s back on the gene therapy and the protein repair. Enzyme replacement therapy thins out the mucus in her lungs, but they haven’t nailed down the GI issues yet. She’s skinny and her cheeks are flushed and her skin is too pale, but she’s not coughing and she looks better than she did nine months ago, and that’s something.

I give Gabe’s knee a squeeze under the table when the
girls are fighting over the last olive in the bowl. He’s had a lousy decade. Odd how a couple of months in the same burn unit will give you a chance to really bond with somebody. He used to sit by my bed, when I was conscious, his hands and arms swathed in loose gauze to the shoulder, and make terrible bilingual puns to make me forget how he got burned so badly. We talk about small things, the way we used to, and when the girls wander off to play the VR games near the door he leans forward over the table, pouring the last of the beer out of the pitcher and into our glasses. “All right, Maker. Are you going to come clean with me now?”