Tripoint (10 page)

“Nerves. All right. “ Marie put the camera back in her pocket and they started away, but the men started across the dock, four of them.

“Damn,” Tom said. “Marie,—”

“Just keep walking.”

“We could go into a bar. It’s safer.”

“I don’t like to be
in
places.”

God. Marie was sane ninety-nine point nine percent of the time. And then you got the schitzy tenth percent.

“I don’t care, we should get off the dock… get where we’ve got protection…”

Marie threw a look over her shoulder. Started running. He did, casting a fast look back, and they had, and he caught up to Marie, grabbed her arm as they were running and tried to drag her into the nearest bar, but Marie started fighting him and he let go and put on double speed as the
Corinthian
crewmen came pounding up the deck behind them.

They knocked into a woman coming out of a bar, knocked her flat, and kept going. People were shouting.

Then he saw people start to run toward them from down the dock in the other direction, and realized it was Saja in the lead.

Marie started to change direction. “It’s Saja!” he yelled at her, and grabbed her and ran for oncoming reinforcements.

But
Corinthian
personnel weren’t giving up the chase. They reached Saja and three of the cousins, and Saja had pulled a length of light chain from his pocket, the cousins had come up with other contraband, and there wasn’t time to think about anything but getting Marie out of there.

Except Marie wouldn’t go, Marie had a piece of chain, too, and it whipped about and caught a
Corinthian
crewman across the neck. There was a pile-up of bodies as the man went down, Marie went down, and the nearest bar emptied out more Corinthians.

“Security!” somebody yelled, on their side or
Corinthian’s
or the bystanders, he wasn’t sure, only a number of people had mixed into it that weren’t
Corinthian
or
Sprite
, people yelling that the cops were coming, about the time a fist came out of nowhere and hit him in the temple.

He couldn’t see. He stumbled over somebody’s leg or arm and went down, trying to fend off the attack with his uplifted arm, hearing chains flying and people yelling—he heard somebody yell cops, and look out, and he couldn’t find Marie, couldn’t find anything but the deck-plates. He scrambled for what he thought was a clear zone, and met what might be the frontage wall, he wasn’t sure. Hands helped him up, held onto him as the dark gave way to hazy sight and an orbiting couple of red spots.

Flashing blue, then. The cops were coming in, breaking it up with stun-sticks and bare hands. He didn’t see Marie. He didn’t know what to do. They were hauling people out of the tangle on the deck and arresting them and he found space to retreat at his back, people just pushing past him to shout information, who’d swung, who’d done what, the cops were shouting to calm down, they wanted officers, and they wanted them now.

He heard Saja saying he was an officer, dammit, and Corinthians started it, and somebody else shouting it was
Sprite
and there was a crazy woman trying to kill their captain, but Marie wasn’t anywhere in sight, Marie was loose somewhere and she was liable to do anything… or some
Corinthian
could have dragged her off, he didn’t know and he didn’t take station police as going to listen to a spacer quarrel.

He had the chance. He just backed away, just turned and kept walking, dizzy, his head hurting. He wasn’t aware of where he was walking, only it turned out to be toward
Corinthian
, and where they’d come from, and then he knew where Marie would go if she was loose. If she wasn’t crazy, she’d want the evidence to prove to the universe
Corinthian
was guilty and they’d had the motive to attack her, she’d fry Austin Bowe if it was the last and only thing she could do, and the evidence, if she couldn’t get at
Corinthian’s
own data, was at an address.

His head hurt. He couldn’t think of it. It was in the twenties on the same dock, and that was a long hike down from
Corinthian’s
berth at 10, but nobody was offering to stop him, he was just any spacer walking on the dock, staggering a little, but spacers did, on the Strip, that was why safe, moral stationers didn’t come walking here, it was spacer territory, spacer logic, even with the cops… couldn’t say they’d actually arrest anybody if nobody landed in hospital, just fine hell out of both ships, you didn’t know, you couldn’t predict…

Support column came up in his face. He grabbed it, leaned against it, head hurting, vision doing tricks again.

Couldn’t blame Marie for running. She’d conned him. She’d used him. Made Mischa think everything was under control. She’d probably scammed Saja, too, with that trick of stepping back onto the transport, Saja’d had to wait for the next one.

But what did you expect of Marie? She was what she was. She didn’t deserve to be in any psych ward, please God.

She’d pulled the same thing on Mischa twenty years ago. He wasn’t any brighter.

She’d said she had trade information, she said she was working on
Corinthian
doing something illegal, at least something borderline—she said if she could get some information out of the trade office,—and she had an appointment… everything looked good… but that wasn’t where she’d gone. She’d come here…

Wandering the ever-night of the docks, the clash and crash of loaders, the echoing of distant voices. He was walking again. He didn’t remember since when.

Abundant places to hide. Abundant places to lose oneself in, if one were determined, and Marie was that. Spacers passed him. He saw patches on sleeves but he didn’t know the ships. Strange to him. And he’d never been a place in his life where that was true.

Past the frontage of a sleepover. He felt his hands sweating despite the cold, his heart pumping and not keeping up with the oxygen demand. Opposite berth 18, it was. Looking for the twenties, he said to himself, and saw a transport go past.

Saw a sign, not a big one. Hercules Shipping. Commercial district. And warehouses. The character of the zone changed that quickly. Suddenly it was all warehouses, some with open doors, cans standing inside in the light, most with doors shut.

Transshippers, Marie had said. Couldn’t remember the name or the number, until he saw the sign.

Miller.

Miller Transshipping.

The doors weren’t open. Looked closed, except shippers didn’t ever close. No neon about the sign, easy to miss, on the frontage like that, with no lights. But Miller was the name, he was sure of it.

He tried the personnel entry, heavy door with no window. It was supposed to work on hydraulics, but it didn’t, you had to shove it after the electric motor took it halfway, and it wasn’t illegal to walk into an office and ask directions to some place: he could pretend he didn’t know where Hercules Shipping was, he had his story all ready.

But nobody was in the office. The side door wasn’t locked, either, and that led into the lighted warehouse.

Going there was a little chancier, but he could still say he was lost and looking for somebody… please God the vacancy in the office wasn’t because Marie had done something, like killing somebody.

He was lost, he’d tell them, if he ran into workers inside. He’d gotten separated from his crewmates in the transport crush, he didn’t know where he was.

He walked among tall shipping canisters, cold-hauler stuff, up in racks, like a ship’s hold, only more brightly lit. The cans drank up heat from the air, made the whole warehouse bitter cold. They were covered in frost.

The rack-loader had stopped with a can aboard. It was frosted as the rest. He undipped his ID, used the edge to scrape the plate to find out what was listed in it… Marie wanted to know, and he wanted to be able to tell her. Prove he was on her side.

It said the origin was Pell. It said… he couldn’t make out the contents, the label was faint and the plate kept frosting over again while he scraped thick greyed peels of ice off it, but it said it was cold-hold stuff, it said it was biologic, that was a check-box. It said food-stuffs. He was freezing where he stood, hadn’t realized it was cold-hold goods filling the warehouse. He needed more than the insulated coveralls you used on the docks. Needed gloves, because his fingers were burning just peeling the frost off, and the can drank the heat out of his exposed skin, out of his eyes, so he didn’t dare go on looking at it. Deep cold was treacherous: if you felt it do that and you didn’t have a face-mask, you needed to get out.

A door opened behind him. His heart thumped. He heard voices, decided he’d better go ahead with his charade. So he clipped his ID back to his pocket and walked out to see who’d come in, to give his story about being lost.

Personnel came in wearing heavy coats, in gloves; then a handful of spacers in no more protection than he stood in—in the same green he’d seen on
Corinthian
crew.

He decided to bluff it through, giddy and shivering as he was. “There you are,” he declared. “I was wondering if there was someone in charge.”

“What in hell are you doing in here?”

“Door was open,” he said, walking toward them, scared as hell and trying not to show it. “Sorry. I thought there’d be somebody in the warehouse, if nothing else. “ He didn’t want
Corinthian
crew to see the patch on his sleeve, please God, he just wanted to deal with the warehouse owners. “Lost my mates, got off at the wrong stop… I was supposed to go down to Hercules Shipping, I forgot the damn number…”

“He was with her,” one of the spacers said.

Shit, he thought, desperate, and made a throwaway gesture, measuring the distance to the door. “I was with my crew, except I got off too soon. Sorry if I’ve inconvenienced anybody, I was just looking for a number…”

His legs were stiff from the cold. He wasn’t sure he could run with any speed. The spacers came closer, the warehouse workers saying things about the dangers of cold cans, about not wanting any trouble on their premises.

Fine, he thought, he’d go through
them
, not the spacers. And he bolted for the door.

But the warehousers grabbed him, all the same, and swung him around to face the spacers. Six of them.

“
Sprite
crew,” one of them said, and the young man who looked like an officer of some sort said, “Looking for an address, are you?” The young man walked up and undipped the ID from his pocket. Looked at it.

Clean-cut young officer. Stripes on his sleeve. Didn’t look like as much trouble as the crew might be. Looked at the ID. Looked at him.

“Thomas Bowe-Hawkins.”

Bowe, the pocket tab on the officer said. C. Bowe. Cousin of his, he thought, and didn’t welcome the acquaintance.

“Well, well, well,” the young man said. “Marie Hawkins’ darling offspring. Search the place.”

“She’s not here.”

The
Corinthian
clipped the tab back to his pocket, one-handed. Straightened his collar, a familiarity he didn’t like.

“Thomas. Or Tom?”

“Suit yourself,” he muttered. He was scared. He’d been in cousin-traps a hundred times. But there were a dozen ways to get killed in this one.

“Tommy Hawkins. I’m
Christian
Bowe. Papa’s
other son.”

Other
son.

More than possible. He hadn’t known, he hadn’t guessed, and he looked at this Christian Bowe, wondering whether kinship was going to get him out of this or see him dead.

“Where’s your mama?” Christian Bowe asked him. “Hmmn?”

“I don’t know. She’s not here.”

“So you just went walking in the warehouses, did you? Looking for something in particular?”

“I know Miller’s handling your stuff. I thought she might have come here. But she didn’t.”

“Come here for what?”

He didn’t answer. One of the men came back from a circuit of the area. “He was scraping at the labels, “ that man said. “Or somebody was.”

“Marie Hawkins?” Christian shouted at the empty air. The voice echoed around the vast, cold warehouse, up among the racks. “You want your kid back?”

Marie didn’t, Tom thought. Not that much.

Or maybe not at all. Echoes died into silence. He stood there, with two men holding on to his arms, and hands and face numb with the cold. Eyes were frosting around the edges, the stiffness of ice.

“He knows too much,” somebody said, at his back.

“Don’t know a thing,” he said.

“The hell,” Christian said, and turned his shoulder, hand rubbing the back of his neck, while he thought over what to do, Tom supposed, while all of them froze, but he was getting there faster.

“Put him out,” Christian said then. He thought he meant out of the warehouse, and hoped, when the man holding his right arm quit twisting it.

But that man’s hand came around and under his jaw, then. He knew the hold, tried to break it before it cut the blood to his brain, but he didn’t have the leverage, they did, and the white suns in the overhead dimmed and faded out, quite painlessly.

—v—

DIDN’T KNOW WHERE HE WAS, then, except face down on the icy deck with a knee in his back, pressing his forehead against the burning cold of the decking. They taped his hands and ankles together. He yelled for help, and somebody ripped off some more tape and taped his mouth with it—after which, they threw some kind of cold blanket over him and rolled him in it, until he was a cocoon. He tried to kick and tried to yell out, figuring their beating him unconscious was no worse than smothering to death or freezing to death in the warehouse, if there was anybody to know.

But they picked him up, then, head and feet, and earned him a distance, through a doorway, he thought, before they dumped him on the deck. It was the office, he gradually decided, because he could feel the warmth in the air that got through the blanket, which was a source of cold, now, instead of warmth.

He heard them walking around him, talking about the transport rolling, how it had been down; he heard them cursing somebody named Jeff and wishing he’d hurry, but he hoped for maybe one of the company owners or a customer to come in, who’d be willing to call the cops and canny enough to get out the door. Now and again he gathered his forces to try to make noise in case somebody was in earshot, and they’d kick him half-heartedly, not with any force through the blanket, and once they told him they’d beat hell out of him if he didn’t lie still.