The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) (6 page)

“I shit you not.”

“What the hell were you planning to do with this source of yours?”

He shrugged. “Figured we’d feed our information to the police. I’m not going to let another gang stomp all over my part of town. They’ve ruined enough lives. I tried to get your friend Detective Reed to take a look at the information I’d got. She wasn’t having a bar of it, though. Not official enough for her. She’s a pain in the ass, that one. I don’t know how you managed to make friends with the only straight cop in Bluegate.”

I shook my head. “Jesus Christ, Des. Leave the police work to the goddamn police.”

He turned from the road for a moment and stared at me, one eyebrow raised.

“What?” I asked. “What’s that look for?”

“Are you a civilian, Miles?”

“Yeah, but—”

“And what were you just doing half an hour ago?”

I scowled. “That’s completely…. You’re twisting things to suit your argument.”

He gave me a small, crooked smile and shook his head. “Miles Franco, man of logic.”

I couldn’t think of a good comeback, so I looked out the window instead. It took me a moment to recognize the neighborhood. I settled down in the seat and closed my eyes. Then I thought of something. I sat up quickly, too quickly, and pressed my nose against the glass. "What's the time?"

Des gave me a look then checked the dash. "Nearly midday. Why?"

I pointed to the block of grim-looking shops with a black-windowed pub in the middle. "Pull over. I want to do something."

"Jesus, guy, tell me you don't want a drink."

"Humor me. Stop the damn car."

He sighed, but he did it. It took him a moment to wedge the car into a tiny parallel park. I wadded some more tissues against my ear while he shut off the engine and opened the door. I tried to pretend I didn't need his help unfolding myself and clambering out of the car.

He gave my ear a glance. "Does it hurt?"

"Only when I hear your nasally whine."

I shuffled past the tattoo parlor and the shop selling black market Ink paraphernalia while Des locked the car. He'd already caught up to me by the time I reached the bar.

"You don't really think they're going to let you in looking like that, do you?" he said.

"Quit looking so worried. I'm not going in there. I'm going in there." I pointed to the narrow doorway next to the bar entrance. Inside, a staircase stretched up into the darkness.

"Well," Des said, "that's ominous. Drug dealer?"

"Not quite."

I took hold of the handrail and shuffled up the stairs. The carpet muffled the creaks, but it couldn't hide the way the stairs sagged with every step. Posters lined the walls, half shrouded by the dark: advertisements for local bands printed out by someone's home computer. Faint piano music tinkled down the stairs toward us.

The door at the top of the stairs was open a crack, light spilling out. I took a moment to catch my breath, then I leaned on the door and stepped inside.

It was a good thing neither me or Des were big guys, because there wasn’t much room to stand with the grand piano on one side and the row of electric guitars on the other. As it was I had to duck to get under the cymbals hanging from the ceiling. Brass instruments and Vei-made flesh drums filled every available nook and cranny in the shop. Even the door made a musical hum as it swung closed behind Des.

“You bring me to some weird places, guy,” Des said.

I grinned and walked past a rack of sheet music to the tiny front counter. “Salin!” I called out. “You in here?”

A thunk came from somewhere in the maze, and then a creaking floorboard. Salin stuck his head out from the back room. His eyebrows went up a quarter of an inch on his dark, leathery forehead, but the rest of his face remained completely neutral. That was the most excited I’d ever seen him get.

“You’re hurt,” Salin said. It wasn’t an offer to help, just an observation.

I shrugged. “You remember my friend Des, right?” I turned to Desmond. “This is Salin, from my band.”

Desmond nodded. “Double bassist. The only one of you that had any talent. I remember.”

Salin took the compliment without expression. He came out of the doorway, put down the part of a dismantled trombone he was holding, and wiped his hands on a rag. His polo shirt stretched a little over his belly. A Chewbacca-like carpet of chest hair poked out the collar.

“You heard about Claudia?” I asked.

Salin nodded. “The police, they came to talk to me. I did not believe it.” He carefully folded the rag and placed it on the counter. “I did not want to believe it.”

I clutched the wad of tissues to my ear and stuck my free hand in my pocket. “You know anything?”

“Only what the police told me. They said it might be some kind of drug. Something she took.”

“It wasn’t,” I said.

He nodded again. “I know.”

“The cops are keeping me out in the cold. But she was my friend. I can’t just let it go. So me and Des here are trying to find out what happened to her.”

Desmond gave me a glare that should’ve given me a black eye. “Guy—”

“I hadn’t seen her lately,” I said, bowling over the top of Desmond before he could contradict me. “I’ve been otherwise engaged. But she was always close to you. Has she been acting weird? Scared?”

Salin scratched the corner of his eye while he thought. “Not scared, no. Sad. Do you know she lost her day job?”

“What?” Claudia had worked during the days at an upmarket chain clothing store in the central city. It’d be a stretch to say she enjoyed it, but it brought in a decent paycheck. “No. No one told me. How?”

“The company, it suffered damage during the Chroma Wars.” Was that a glimmer of accusation I saw in Salin’s eyes? “They could not pay everyone,” he continued. “An insurance problem, I think. I wanted to give her a job here, but…” He raised his palms in a gesture of defeat. “…business is not good here either.”

Was that what she’d called me about? She needed money? I wasn’t exactly rolling in it, but I could have helped her.

“She get desperate?” I asked. “Starving?”

“No, no,” Salin said. “It wasn’t that. Her singing, it gave her enough money to live on. The job was for saving.”

And then I understood. I pictured the first time I met Claudia. To this day I don’t know what the hell she saw in us. Salin was pretty good with the double bass, but Bubbles and I were little more than hacks. The bar audiences we played to were usually more interested in knocking back beers than paying attention to us, and it was a rare night we didn’t get at least one bottle hurled at us. But Claudia had showed up for three gigs in a row, following us from bar to bar, always sitting right up near the stage, watching us with a glass of orange juice in her hand and a faint smile on her face. And on that third night, after we’d finished our set, she came and talked to us.

I remember that sparkle in her eyes as she approached our table where we commiserated over how badly we sucked. “May I join you?” she’d asked, her accent thick. We said yes. How could we not?

The first time I heard her singing, I knew she was going to go far. She should’ve been hunting down record deals, not hanging around with low-lifes like us. I asked her once what she was doing in Bluegate, instead of being somewhere—anywhere—else. She told me she didn’t want record deals. She wanted to sing in Heaven. There were enough Vei in Heaven who loved human music that a good musician could travel from town to town, city to city, living entirely off singing. Some Vei even believed that human music helped stabilize parts of their dimension, calming the chaos and allowing their minds to experience peace. Claudia wanted to travel the alternate world, visit Skytown and the Inverse Plains, see the shifting skies, swim the underground rivers, and soar past the floating mountains on an airsnake.

I offered to smuggle her to Heaven, free of charge. Hundreds of people did it, hiring freelancers like me to travel between the worlds. But Claudia was a good kid. She wanted to do it legit, and that meant saving up for a visa from Immigration and going through the Bore. She was still saving when she died, working that damn job until they fired her. She never set foot in Heaven.

I sighed and put it out of my head. I couldn’t get her there now. But I could make some people hurt for what they did.

“You ever hear of a Vei girl called Penny Coleman?” I asked Salin. “A prostitute. Did Claudia ever mention her?”

“No,” Salin said.

“Had she been hanging out with anyone new? New guy, or some homeless people or anything?”

Salin shrugged.

Damn it. I leaned against the counter and plucked a couple of strings on an acoustic guitar hanging by its strap. “The guys who gave me this papercut on my ear, they mentioned two names. The Collective, and AISOR. Set off any bells?”

“Of course, I know the names,” Salin said. “They are on the news. One is the gang, the other is the company. A Tunneling company, yes?”

“Tunneling and lots of other stuff,” Desmond said to me. “They’ve been popping up in the business pages of the paper. They dabble in a bit of everything, manufacturing, mining, rare materials, import/export. The whole shebang.”

“So if there’s money to be made in Tunneling, they’re interested?” I said.

Desmond shrugged. “Sure. Lots of these companies are. The paper says they’re a good bet for any investor. They’ve got offices in half the Bore cities, but they’ve moved their main operations here since the Chroma Wars and your little Limbus experiment.”

I fingered the keys on a shiny silver trumpet, much newer and cleaner than mine. Then I looked at the price tag and quickly let go before I got blood on it and Salin made me pay for it.

“Any dirt on them?” I asked.

“Not that I know of,” Desmond said. “They’re still small enough that they haven’t gone full evil corporation.”

“Yet,” I said. “So Claudia didn’t mention them?”

Salin shook his head. “I am sorry. I wish I knew. I keep thinking what I could have done, if I had talked to her more...”

I nodded and turned away. Claudia was there with us, strolling among the instruments, laying her hands on the keys and the strings. But they never made a sound.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“Listen, guy,” Desmond said as we went back down the stairs and out onto the street, “I know you mean well. But you’ve only just escaped this whole Chroma Wars thing. You don’t need this right now. You’re not in any condition to go playing detective.”

“Gimme a break.” I tried not to grimace as I got into Desmond’s car.

“Vivian can handle it. She’s a good cop.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “You said so yourself. Sometimes good’s not good enough. Sometimes you gotta get dirty.”

“I’m not going to change your mind, am I?”

“To be honest, I don’t even know why you still try.”

He sighed and started the engine. We were both quiet for a little while as he drove. I pretended I couldn’t see Claudia out of the corner of my eye, buckled in nice and safe in the backseat.

“All right,” he said finally. “What do you need?”

I glanced at him. His jaw was set.

“No,” I said. “Nuh-uh.”

“What?”

“Not this time. I’m doing this by myself.”

“Like hell,” Des said. “Tania and I are your friends, guy—”

“Tania? You’re volunteering Tania for this shit too? I nearly got her killed last winter. They turned her into a…a…” I shook my head. “No. Not happening.”

“She’s not the same girl she was then. She’s grown up a lot in the last few months. Her Tunneling control is fantastic. You should see the things she can do now.”

The implications of what he just said smacked me in the face like a rotten fish. “You’re teaching her.”

“Someone has to.” He stared out the windshield with eyes like nails.

“Damn it, Des. She’s got you twisted around her finger, doesn’t she? Have you got her involved in your goddamn neighborhood watch as well? How much danger are you putting her in?”

“She’s a smart girl.”

“She’s a goddamn child!”

“You’re the only chi—” He cut himself off and twisted the steering wheel in his hands. He was grinding his teeth so hard he must have been wearing them down to the gums.

We pulled up outside my apartment. I shoved open the car door and clambered out, careful not to brush my ear against the door frame. My apartment building didn’t look any better in the daylight, but at least you knew there weren’t things hiding in the shadows waiting for you.

“Hey, guy,” Desmond said before I could close the door. He was calmer now. Apologetic, almost. “Seriously, I’d drop this thing if I were you. You got lucky last time with the Chroma thing. If you get in trouble with the law, they might not be so easy-going the second time round.”

I sighed and kicked at the curb. “You worry too much. I think I’m going to take me a nice long nap first, anyway. Just for a week or two.”

He smiled, but his eyes didn’t carry it. “Take it easy on the…uh…” He shrugged and glanced away. “Just take it easy, all right, guy?”

I tapped on the door of the car and waved, and he peeled away.

Claudia was waiting for me at the door to my apartment building. She watched as I fumbled with my keys.