Powers (13 page)

She’d vanished into the front room, probably her bedroom, leaving him alone with the treasures. Maybe she knew the door wouldn’t let him out? He turned and checked it. Three deadbolt locks on this side, no turn-knobs for unlocking. They couldn’t be tighter shut if they’d been welded.

He crossed to the fireplace mantel. Simple white-painted wood about six feet long over a square shallow fireplace with recent ashes, it held four jade carvings each about six inches high and varying widths. The first, white jade, a plain bowl that made your fingers ache to touch it, caress it, thin enough to glow translucent in the down-light from the ceiling. The second, a Chinese dragon wrapped around a brass incense burner, pale green. The third, a Buddha in deep green jade, the ascetic Buddha with his ribs like a picket fence and eyes sunken in his skull, not a common image in the Western world. The fourth . . .

The fourth was a naturalistic portrait bust, he’d never seen that done in jade before. It was old. It was exquisite, both detail and proportion. Pink jade.

It was her.

“Gifts to my family, long ago.”

“Including your portrait?”

She’d reappeared next to him while he was sunk in the jades. Or maybe while the mandala had hypnotized him, and he hadn’t noticed her, under the spell. She’d stripped out of the coverall, leaving her in a deep green bodysuit hung with holsters and pockets—and a padded yellow vest that he assumed was bulletproof. Or whatever technical term they used, ballistic nylon maybe. She looked a lot thinner without the bulky shapeless clothing, wiry. Somewhat like the Kali, this one a tough stringy warrior-woman rather than the voluptuous earth-mother depiction often used.

“Actually, my grandmother times seven. Or maybe six or eight—oral history confuses generations, sometimes. All our women look a lot alike. Strong genes.”

“Including the broken nose?”

She fingered hers. “That’s genetic, too. Not broken, just bent to the left. We’ve never bothered with that ‘symmetry equals beauty’ thing. We’re Picasso-women, one eye higher than the other. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

He hadn’t. But there it was, both her and the sculpture, subtle. It seemed to fit her face. The eyes balanced the nose.

She held her left wrist between their faces, glaring at the rough cast, pale green almost like the jade but with the pattern of the reinforcing mesh, from her forearm down to the back of her hand and circling the thumb. “I want this thing off. Can’t seem to get the proper angle at it one-handed. Make yourself useful.”

A pair of heavy kitchen shears thumped from her right hand to his, the sort of cutlery you’d use to dissect a raw chicken or goose.

“I’m no doctor. Don’t they use saws for that? You might make the injury worse, taking a cast off too soon.”

“Thy mother never knew thy father . . . ”

She broke off whatever followed, sounded like a particularly vile spitting dialect of Pashto too fast for him to grab specifics. The sense, though, was clear.

“I can’t reload with this thing on my wrist. Can’t get the magazines out of my pockets. Trust me, the bone is healed. It was just a hairline fracture. Cut the damned thing off!”

He’d been right about quick healing.

“And
thy
father ran on three legs, and howled in Baluchi!”
he said, and the words that followed. He tried to give his bastard Pashto exactly the inflection he’d learned from Ali Akhbar Khan, one of the old man’s favorite curses.

Her eyes widened. “We can discuss each other’s families at another time. For now, just help me out of the damned cast. Please?”

He tried. The tip of the shears barely fit under the cast edge. Each time he tried to cut, the blades just wedged back out from the hard fiberglass surface. If he angled exactly
so,
he could nibble away, maybe a molecule at a time.

“This will take all week. The doctor wrapped heavy gauze around your wrist before putting on the cast, yes? Padding? I can cut down to that with my knife a lot faster.” He paused. “Of course, that would require you to trust me . . . ”

He could see what she thought of
that,
written clear on her face. Her jaw worked for about a minute as she chewed on his offer. Then she nodded and led him into the back room of her apartment, the kitchen, just as austere as the other room—plain off-white walls and plain white refrigerator and stove and cabinets. One table, white Formica top; two chairs, white wood. She sat down and laid her left arm on the table, palm down, as much of a fist as she could make with the cast hindering. Her knuckles paled against her dark skin.

“You cut me, I’ll kill you.”

He stared at her for a moment. “I’ll be sure to cut deep, then.”

“The man who taught you those curses, he served with the Old Khybers. Havildar or higher. Only
they
stretched ‘Baluchi’ into tomorrow in quite that way. They did not like Baluchis.”

Ali Akhbar Khan rose to Havildar-major. What she calls the “Old Khybers” were disbanded after the Great War. Colonial rebellion. But how does
she
know how their sergeants cursed?

He pulled out his knife and touched the point to the forearm end of her cast. Drew it along the surface, no weight at all, testing the hardness of the resin and mesh. The tip left a scratch. Back to the beginning of the scratch, a feather more weight, and the tip bit partway into the mesh, hissing against the resin. Again. Again. Through the first layer. The second. The third.

She brought her other fist up to the table, white knuckles, tendons standing out. He pulled the knife back and looked up. Sweat beaded on her lip and forehead. No, she
didn’t
trust him. She’d tested the edge of that knife. She knew what a slip could do.

Again. He felt some of the last layer part, different drag at some points of the cut as the blade slid into cotton instead of fiberglass, he hadn’t kept the pressure even or the doctor hadn’t wrapped it exactly the same or the faint shake of her arm affected the cut. He used even more care, as if he was finishing on the anvil with the barest tap of his hammer and thought.

The two sides of the cut sprang apart a hair’s-width, tension in the cast and compression on the cotton. He pulled the knife back, she pulled her wrist back. They both dared to breathe. She flexed the fingers of both hands. Red lines marked where her nails had bitten into her right palm.

She grabbed the shears from where he had laid them on the table and ran them up the hairline break, cutting the gauze underneath and spreading the cut. Pulled the two edges apart with a crackling rip, breaking the back of the cast. Slid the corpse off her wrist over her fingers and thumb. Threw the wreck across her kitchen into a corner.

“Fuck
that!
” Cursing in English rather than Pashto.

She ran her fingers, both hands, through her hair and panted for more oxygen. “Thank. You.”

She stood up, twisting her freed wrist, bending it, testing it, and smiling at what she found. Apparently all present and correct. Then she walked over, picked up the cast, and opened a cabinet under the sink to a trashcan with neat plastic bag liner. Dumped the cast. Closed the cabinet. Everything proper again.

He glanced around, itemizing—nothing on the counters except a microwave and toaster oven. Nothing on the refrigerator top, no refrigerator magnets holding notes, top and front of the stove far cleaner than his. He bet that if he got into her bedroom, small chance of that, he’d find the bed made to military precision and the top of her dresser bare. This woman was a neat freak. He didn’t want to know what she thought of
his
place.

Over by the door again, she spun and stared at him with a gun in her hand. Reflex pulled his knife up until he realized the gun was pointed off to one side. It looked like it was aimed at the center of the clock on the stove. She turned her head without moving her hand, checked the sight picture, holstered the pistol, turned away, and spun back again, repeating the whole sequence.

She stared back at the knife, still in his hand. Blinked, as if she just ran through how her moves must look to him. She was used to being alone here.

Shook her head.

“Damned things are supposed to be identical, consecutive serial numbers and all. They aren’t. This one always feels a hair muzzle-heavy compared to the one that fucking demon ate. Machinist tolerances. Doesn’t matter when I use the sights, but I need to reset the instinct shooting. Sorry.”

Again, cursing in English. Did she run multiple personalities under that black hair? He sheathed his knife after checking the point for any wear from cutting the cast. If she was going to go to the extreme of actually apologizing for something . . .

“Let me see that.”

Again, the considering stare. She dropped the magazine into her other hand, worked the slide to eject a live round, and caught the cartridge out of mid-air. Fast hands, very fast, as he had noticed before. She handed the pistol to him with its slide locked open.

He checked the chamber anyway. Empty. Then let the slide snap forward and hefted the pistol with one hand, then the other, then a two-handed stance menacing the same clock on the stove. She wanted a gram, maybe more, off the muzzle weight . . .

She’d been playing those games of hers with a round in the chamber. Well, loaded weight
would
make a difference. She
had
kept her finger out of the trigger guard, and the safety on.

Still . . .

“You know how to handle a pistol. I thought you didn’t like them?”

He ignored her, sinking his thoughts into the Colt in his hands. Old design, 1911 model, he’d held them before, stripped them down, repaired them. But couldn’t remember where and when.

Have to stay away from the barrel bushing, don’t screw up fit on the firing-pin and chamber end, but there’s free space between slide and barrel in between . . .

Fingers bracketing the slide, he thought about the slow flow of metal like a glacier under his fingertips, dragging molecules toward the grip, humming a few words over and over, talking to the metal.
Sliding down the slide. Sliding down the slide. Sliding. Sliding. Do not pinch, do not distort the metal. A few molecules . . .

He shook himself loose, worked the slide a couple of times to verify it was just as silky-smooth as before, and locked it open. Handed it to her.

“I’ve used guns. Even own a couple. But I don’t make them. As I said, no soul.”

She took the gun, staring at him. Reloaded it, including a round in the chamber. Dammit, sure the weight of all that brass and lead would change the balance but it would change again every time she fired. This model had an inertial firing pin and no safety block—if you dropped the weapon it could go off. Military protocol said to carry it with an empty chamber . . .

He couldn’t remember where he’d learned that.

The detective, or whatever she was, went through her instinct-shooting drills again, then nodded. “We get a free morning sometime, I have some other guns I want you to sing over. And you still owe me a knife.”

That appeared to be as close to another “thank you” as he was going to get.

Over her shoulder as she headed back toward the front of the apartment, “Get yourself a beer and a sandwich. I have to sort out the gear I need to pull a raid on a place that doesn’t exist.”

“Huh?” Brilliant comment, but . . .

“You wondered why the local boyos haven’t tried to break into that wooden door. They can’t see it. It isn’t really there. You can see it. I can see it. But we aren’t human.”

So she
had
noticed.

“Let me get this straight. You’ve been on the city police force for twenty years, and nobody notices that you don’t get any older?”

They walked through the streets and alleys, dirty streets and filthy or worse alleys, Albert with a backpack full of whatever Melissa el Hajj thought they needed for “a raid on a place that doesn’t exist”—damned heavy, whatever the whatever was; he suspected ammunition sufficient to start a small revolution. She was wearing uniform coveralls—badge, patches, name-tag, gun belt, and all—and carrying a pump shotgun slung over her shoulder. This time, she was willing to walk in front of him. Some kind of barometer for a change in their personal weather, he guessed. She seemed like the kind of woman who turned her back on damn few people.

The weather spoke of probable change, too. Gray clouds rolled in from the northwest, a suggestion that long walks weren’t a good idea, and gusts of cold wind stirred the winter residue of dirt and trash. He sniffed. Threat of rain on the air as well as other things—garbage lost and buried in a snow bank and recently surfaced and thawing. Not air you’d breathe in a better class of neighborhood.

People weren’t noticing them. As she’d said, “Mostly, people in places like this don’t
want
to notice cops. Subconscious theory is, if they can’t see me, I can’t see them. Plus, like you said back at that smoke shop, people like us can be very hard to see. That clerk didn’t see you and wouldn’t have noticed me if I hadn’t slapped the pad down on the counter in front of him. They don’t
want
to see us, whatever we are.”

“Us” meaning something other than cops, in this case. But that brought him back to thinking of cops and her blue uniform coveralls and the lieutenant bars on her collar. That rank implied her captain or chief or whatever did something more than “put up” with her. Which was how they got on the subject of her twenty years on the force, and nobody noticing that she hadn’t changed much from “thirty-ish” to age “fifty” and standing on the edge of retirement: “twenty and out.”

“I overhear comments about how silly it is for someone who looks like
her
dyeing her hair—like it would make
her
look young and sexy. Overheard a sergeant in the break room, couple of months past an ugly divorce, say he’d rather try to fuck an axe.”

Ouch.

But she looked more amused than hurt or offended.

He relaxed a bit, quitting the dance of evasion that had started when she mentioned that old photo of him from the 1800s.