Authors: Finder
Emma Bull (6 page)
A B B YY.c
Rico
cut me off with one
of her looks. "We're going now. You wanna come, or are you sleeping in here
I made a shoot-myself-in-the-head gesture and followed them.
We stopped in a tiny office. The walls were pale aqua at the bottom, shading slowly to turquoise at the top and across the high ceiling studded with wisps of painted cloud. The free-standing coatrack, I now noticed, was painted on the wall. So was the window with its blinds drawn, and a four-drawer file cabinet, and the pile of books on it. I wished I was close enough to see the titles. The way Rico stepped through the clutter to the desk chair told me the office was hers.
Linn moved a file box of papers, a huge leather-bound book that looked like a photo album, and a
wrinkled, flattened silver jacket from a chair. He motioned me into it. For himself, he pushed the mess on the desk toward the center and perched on the cleared edge. Rico caught a box that fell off the other side.
"Bad cop," she said, with a glare at Linn. "No donut. Is this your way of telling me we should go to your office?"
"Not at all. Comfort and convenience dull the sharpest mind."
They sounded like the Ticker and me. How long had they been partners? I felt a moment of jealousy.
She had her best friend to back her up. Why couldn't I have mine?
Rico dropped the drawer on top of the clutter. It was full of the things people wear or keep in their pockets: keys, some jewelry, an impression ball, a tooled leather coin purse. No buttons torn from a murderer's coat. No matchbook with an address pencilled inside. Wolfboy'd taken me to too many
movies. "No clothes?" I asked Rico.
She grinned. "You wouldn't have liked 'em."
"Oh." I picked up the impression ball first. The song it played, started by contact with my palm, was the Pit Bulls' "Jump Me Now." "That's Charlie all over," I muttered.
Rico and Linn began to laugh hysterically.
"Shit," I said, torn between laughter and anger.
"Sorry," Rico gasped. "Cop humor."
I swapped the ball for a ring, dull silver metal and a big piece of red glass. I pushed it around my palm, wondering what to do with it. A glance showed me Rico watching, sober-faced now and with that look in her eyes again. I sighed.
Finding things. I had the thing already. What was to find? What it had done? Where it had been? All over Bordertown, knowing Charlie.
No, not where it had been. Where it
belonged
. Could I do that? I'd never done it before, but that didn't mean I couldn't. I asked the question in whatever way I do, called for the answer in whatever language my talent understands.
A B B YY.c
And I felt the tuggi
ng. It was faint, but enough to give me a direction. I stood up and be
gan to walk as
muc
h toward it as I could, given the hallways. The pull was s
o weak that I concentrated only on it, not
on where I was. So finding myself at the door to the morgue was a nasty shock.
Behind me, Rico said, "It works."
The jewelry all belonged on the corpse, but faintly, as if the pieces forgot their owner even as I held them. The coins belonged anywhere—money's like that. Their formless, omnidirectional pull made my head ache. The impression ball gave back nothing but lousy music. Maybe my hand was where it
belonged; an i-ball is meant to be held, after all. Or perhaps the magic in it crossed wires with my talent.
If I understood how my talent worked, maybe I'd know. But the keys…
The keys were the jackpot, as I might have expected if I'd thought about it. There were three of them, and each one pulled me, strong and steady, in a different direction. I held them up and jingled them, feeling abstractly pleased.
"Keys," Rico said, "belong in locks."
"Uh huh. Doors, cabinets, ignitions. These could be to his front door, his wheels, and his mom's house."
Rico stood swiftly. "Let's go find out."
The first two stops were Charlie's bike, abandoned on High Street and impounded in the copshop
garage, and Charlie's squat on Hell's Gate. The third was a boarded-up rowhouse near Fare-You-Well Park.
"If his mom lives here," Rico said—eyeing the rusted fence fallen into the basement entry, the trash on the steps, the wound in the wall where someone had yanked out the intercom system—"then I know where that boy got his sense of style." Her Night Peepers were back on her nose, and I wondered for the first time just how much better she could see in the dark than I could. "Do the honors, will you?" she added, and offered me a flashlight.
I unlocked the front door and turned to find Rico close behind me, with a gun in her hand. "Those things make me nervous," I said.
"Shh, you'll wake Mom."
We went quietly into the front hall. It stank of damp plaster dust and decaying wood, and nothing else.
The building was uncompromisingly silent. I phrased a question Wolfboy-style: with eyebrows and tilt of head. She nodded toward a piece of wall next to one of the hallway doors. I stood against it.
Rico moved to the other side, back flat to the wall, and turned the knob slowly. Then she slammed the door open and snapped back out of the way. It was as good as a movie. Absolutely nothing happened.
She edged out to look around the doorframe. Nothing happened then, either. She prowled the room like a tiger trained in Tai Chi, gun ready; then she made another textbook entrance into the next room in the suite. The whole suite was empty, except for little piles of wallpaper that had fallen off the walls from damp. Swaths of the ceiling paper drooped loose over our heads, and half-loosened strips dangled from the walls like lolling paper tongues.
A B B YY.c
There were four door
s on the first floor, each with a suite of rooms behind it, and we treate
d all of them
equally. I
'd expected to relax as we continued to find nothing. Instead, I felt as if I were vibrating all over. If I'd had a gun, too, I'd have opened fire on the first cockroach that moved.
We found a door to the basement. It was locked, and the key didn't open it. Rico looked at me, shrugged, and headed for the stairs.
The second floor had the same floor plan. I took my place beside the first door, and pretended I had no desire to scream.
The first suite was empty. The second was empty. The third seemed empty at first.
The first room certainly was. But the windows were covered over with plywood and tar paper, and loose wallpaper had been pulled down and consolidated in a musty heap in one corner, as if it had been in the way of something, or someone. Rico angled her head toward it, and I nodded. She couldn't have been more careful at the door to the inside room than she'd been before, out she certainly wasn't any less.
Nobody waited for us in the inside room. The windows were sealed up here, too. The room contained nothing but another heap of fallen wallpaper near the door, a rickety card table in the middle of the floor, and on it, a sheet of paper.
Rico gestured for me to hold the light on it. It was thick paper, smooth-finished, expensive, and there was a line of writing on it. In dense black ink, in the perfectly formed, soulless hand of penmanship texts, we read:
Set down your burden of clay, and enter happily into paradise
.
The flashlight faded and died. I toggled the switch again and again, without result. By the door, there was a rustling of paper.
A pale shape rose in the corner by the door. It had started, I thought, as the heap of fallen wallpaper, but something was happening to it; something was sprouting from the paper in faint, bluish light. The shape was humanoid, tall, thin, wild-haired. I thought I heard a little tittering sound from it, like the laughter of demented mice.
I didn't move. There was no place to move to. I wasn't sure where Rico was in the dark room, and I was afraid to look for fear I'd find I was alone. Then I heard a small, sharp
clack
beside me, and Rico's shaky whispered curse. "If it comes toward us," she murmured, "go left. If we split up, we might make the door."
A flash of spitting light from the ceiling, and a resonating
whump
. Then a near-human groan above us: the voice of wood and plaster straining.
Rico screamed, "Down, down,
down
!" Something slammed into me from behind and sent me lunging toward the apparition in the corner.
Then the sky fell.
I had something heavy on my back, and my face was pressed uncomfortably against the floor. Or
something like the floor. I was coughing.
The thing on my back shifted and coughed, too.
A B B YY.c
"Rico?" I
asked between spasms.
"Yeah. I don't suppose you managed to hang onto the flashlight?"
"Here."
"Here
where
?"
At that, I had the sense to thumb the button, and a cone of dust-filled light appeared at the corner of my vision.
"Ah. My hero." Her hand closed over mine and took the light. "Do you hurt anywhere?"
"Besides everywhere?"
"Yeah. Here, roll over. Easy, now."
The flashlight illuminated a heap of architectural carnage. "What happened?" I said, and started coughing again.
"An embarrassing trap, that's what," Rico said sourly. "I want Linn to look the place over, but I'll bet the trigger for everything was the light from the damn flashlight."
"Trigger?"
She stood up, cautiously. "Careful—a lot of the third floor has already fallen on us, and I'd just as soon the rest didn't. Yeah, you've just seen a demonstration of the Rube Goldberg school of spellcasting. light on the paper triggers the illusion that pops up out of the trash pile. While that keeps us in the middle of the room, it also sets off whatever cracked the ceiling beams. And boom. If I hadn't decided on the lesser of two evils and gotten us up against the outside wall we'd be hamburger."
She was right. There were three lengths of foot-square wooden beam collapsed into the center of the room, along with antique gas piping, an upstairs radiator, old wiring, shattered studs, and an incalculable amount of plaster and lath.
"What I want to know about," Rico continued, "was the technology outage."
"Huh?" I said wisely.
Even in the half-illumination of the flashlight, I could make out her look of martyred patience. "Did you think the batteries had died?"
I remembered the flashlight going out. I said nothing.
"My pistol wouldn't fire, either. Not that it would have helped. If we're after someone who can turn the laws of physics off at will, we're in deep, deep shit."
"You'll have to learn to fence," I said. It was her turn not to respond.
I followed the light as it moved through the fog of plaster dust. The strange landscape of empty rooms