Authors: Finder
Emma Bull (18 page)
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His vo
ice rose in volume and pitch. "… Backstabbin' sonofabitch! Well, fuck him!" The last was a
shriek. I could hear the mingled fury and terror even thr
ough the steel.
"Walt?"
No answer. In the room beyond the door, something clattered.
In one sickening instant, I knew what was happening. "Walt, no!" I screamed, and launched myself toward the back of the house. I couldn't have been fast enough if I'd teleported.
Felkin, you idiot. Did you think he wouldn't rig the back door, too?
The blast from it, when Walt tried to bolt, blew out the windows in a hailstorm of glass. I remember that: over my head, three sparkling gouts of glass, like water spat out by someone surprised by a joke.
Surprise, Walt.
The contents of the cardboard box at the front door went off immediately, when the first blast warped the door. I felt it more than I heard it. The third explosion, though—I heard that one. The one set off by what I'd mistaken for a security cable on the motorcycle. It sounded like the Devil himself was laughing.
The weather saved my life. If it hadn't poured rain two nights before, and if the dew hadn't been heavy that morning, the parched trees and tall grass next to Walt Felkin's house would have kindled from the flaming debris and burned like a grease fire, and me with them. As it was, they smoldered, and the smoke from the field, the house, and Walt's old tires kept anyone from spotting me for a while. It would have been longer yet, except for Sunny Rico. According to stories I heard later, she refused to listen to the suggestion that I might never have been there at all.
"Drunks would pass up free beer first," she said through clenched teeth, and began to comb the site for me or my remains.
The first I knew of this was Rico's voice, saying, "No, don't move. There's a stretcher coming."
Everything I'd found out flooded my mind and clamored to be reported. I couldn't sort it. I opened my eyes and shut them again immediately; the sun was painful, and the smoke. I'd caught a glimpse of Rico's face, daubed with soot and with a bleeding scratch across the bridge of her nose, her hair soaked with sweat and sticking to her forehead. Now that I paid attention, I could hear the rushing noise of flames, and the firecracker explosions of things caught in the fire. The heat was buffetting.
"It's a he," I said.
"What?"
"It's a he," I said, more carefully this time, and louder.
"I can't hear you. Don't worry about it now."
"Felkin said 'he.' The bike was here. I can describe
it
."
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Inside my head, the words had bee
n half shouted and clear. But Rico shook her hea
d, frowning. I finally
realized that I was only
half conscious, and even that wasn't guaranteed.
"I can't tell if you've broken anything," she said. "The blood's just from the cut on your head. I'm worried about things like your spine. So when we move you onto the stretcher, if anything hurts, scream like hell right away, okay?"
That seemed funny. She might even have meant it to be. "Helper of men," I murmured.
She raised one eyebrow.
I didn't recognize the two people with the stretcher, when I squinted up at them. They were probably with the neighborhood fire watch. They were both as grubby as Rico. At that point I lost the signal again, if not consciousness altogether. I tuned back in as the sky was being replaced by the roof of an ambulance. "Sunny!" I said with all the force I could manage.
"Yeah?" She was somewhere close by.
"Tell Tick-Tick." I hoped she'd understood; I hadn't the strength to stick around and find out.
The Consequences of Thataway
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And that's how I ended up in Bolt Street Clinic myself. It could have been the same room as the one I'd been in the day before, the one in which I'd watched a girl die. I don't know; I hadn't paid much attention to it then, and I wasn't going to ask.
At Bolt Street, the medical hierarchy wasn't any more elaborate than the law enforcement equivalent at Chrystoble Street Station. Anybody who knew how to handle a problem, handled it. I wasn't, the staff assured me, much of a problem. I was attended to by the man who'd brought me water in the hall, the last time I'd been there. He sewed up the gash between my right eyebrow and my hairline, shone light into my eyes and ears, prodded my battered limbs and asked "Does this hurt?" (the answer was usually
"Yes"), and told me I was going to be there for twenty-four hours, for observation, whether I liked it or not.
I told him I didn't. I also told him I'd climb out a window sooner than spend the night, no offense meant.
"Good of you to warn me," he said. He sounded tired. "How about if you stay away from the windows for eight hours, and we'll renegotiate then?"
"I'll try." I didn't really feel like standing up yet, but I wasn't making an empty threat. The hospital surroundings were already making my nerves flutter. It had been four years since I'd lived in the World, since I'd lived with this ambience at second hand and come to associate it inextricably with everything
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that happened at h
ome. Some things take more than years and distance to escape, I guess.
He cleaned me up and left, warning as he did that there was probably somebody waiting to see me; at least, there had been, on and off for a while. I propped my pillow and me against the headboard and tried to look competent and unfazed.
I don't know why I was surprised when Tick-Tick came in. I was expecting her, of course; I just wasn't expecting her first. Her back was very straight and her face was calm. She shut the door behind her and sat down in the chair beside the bed. She crossed her legs. She folded her long white hands, right over left, on her thigh.
"I'm sorry," I said. I didn't think I looked competent and unfazed.
"I know that." Her voice matched the rest of her. "So?"
That was when I understood just how hard this was going to be. "Do you want me to promise never to do it again?"
"Never to be foolish? Of course not. What good would that do? You might as well promise not to blink.
Or were you proposing to promise never to go to Walt Felkin's in search of…
clues
?" She coughed the word out as if it had stuck in her throat. "I believe you could keep that one, but it's precious little protection from anything now."
"I thought I was doing the right thing at the time."
"Did you? Think, I mean. Or did you simply put your nose to the ground and chase along behind it, like a dog after a skunk?"
The Ticker actually stopped, then, looked at me, and waited, as if the question weren't rhetorical. I said,
"Don't let me interrupt you. You're barely warmed up."
That was meant to make her overtly furious; which would have been easier for me to take. It failed. "It seems I was nearly called upon to identify your body."
"Oh, for God's sake. Three stitches, all right? Three. I had worse falling off a swing when I was five."
"I spoke at length with Linn, Rico's partner. From his reconstruction, you must have been about halfway down the length of the concrete wall of the house, which means only about four long strides from the center of either blast. A few strides, and the chance durability of concrete—does that not seem like a near brush to you?"
It would eventually seem worse than that, I knew; but I also knew that the real knowledge of it would have to catch up to me at its own time. "Walt's dead, I suppose?"
"If you can assure the police that Walt was present at the time of the blasts, I know they'd appreciate it.
There was certainly someone present, but dental records are few in Bordertown."
"Oh."
"Linn is an excellent source of information, if one has the wit to ask him for it." She sounded positively
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pleasa
nt now, but I knew her; there wasn't anything in that f
or me. "For instance, did you know that the
explosive us
ed in the ceiling of the apartment building was Astrolite?"
"I don't even know from Astrolite." She knew I didn't.