Hell's Maw (7 page)

“Dumb mistake,” Cáscara lamented in Spanish.

It would have been,
Grant thought,
except that I picked this up from the people who actually did do this. I think.

“You,” Cáscara said to Grant in lightly accented English once she had been brought up to speed by her partner, “hands down, here, behind your back.” She showed him, crossing her wrists together at the small of her back. “I'm going to cuff you. You try anything and Pretor Corcel will shoot you, okay? He's a good shot.”

“Top of my graduating class,” Corcel added, his pistol never wavering.

“Yeah, I get it,” Grant said, lowering his hands as instructed. “You've got the wrong guy, you realize?”

“We'll figure that out back at the Sector Hall,” Cáscara told him emotionlessly as she placed a pair of plastic handcuffs on Grant's wrists. Then she stepped away and produced a pair of latex gloves from a pocket of her jacket, which she slipped over her hands. Along with the gloves, she produced an evidence bag, into which she placed the metallic projectile that Grant had narrowly avoided.

“Had that thrown at me,” Grant explained. “There's
another one of those out there somewhere. Couldn't see it, though.”

The two Pretors did not respond to his comment.

Once the first evidence pack was sealed, Cáscara returned to Grant, who remained standing close to the open ballroom doors. She reached for the bloodred feather that poked from one hip pocket of his jacket.

“More of these out there, too?” Cáscara challenged him. It was hard to tell with her not being a native English speaker, but Grant thought that she was employing a sarcastic tone.

“Look,” Grant said, “I had a partner here. A friend. We came here together—”

“We'll discuss that at the Sector Hall,” Corcel cut him off.

“Sure, I just—” Grant began.

“Quiet now,” Corcel said in a warning tone, gesturing vaguely with his blaster. “Don't make me shoot you.”

“Okay,” Grant said, “I just want to know what happened to her. If she's okay. Her name's Shizuka.”

Pretor Cáscara looked up at that from where she had been labeling the evidence bags with a marker pen.

“Shizuka…?” Grant repeated hopefully.

Cáscara nodded firmly just the once. “She's here. We'll be bringing her in,” she confirmed. Then she moved closer to Corcel and whispered something to him in Spanish. It was too quiet for Grant to hear, but he guessed he might have inadvertently just turned Shizuka into a suspect. At least she was still alive.

* * *

G
RANT WAS TAKEN
via secure wag past the bullfighting ring to the local Sector Hall of Justice, a grand building in the center of Zaragoza that housed the authorities. The building was four stories high and stretched the length of a block, with tinted glass in the windows and a basement
level housing the garage and firing range. The Pretors—the local equivalent of Magistrates—were based here, and they patrolled not only Zaragoza City but also the state beyond, covering an eighty-mile radius that took them well into the radiation-blighted lands to the south and east.

Once inside, Grant was swiftly processed by a uniformed Pretor—his uniform consisting of flexible armor in black and red, the tailored jacket flaring at the bottom so that it created something approaching a skirt across the hips. The Pretor was armed with a boot knife and had a holster—currently empty—at his hip. Grant could see notches around the high neck of his uniform where a helmet would be secured while on patrol.

After he had been processed—a simple procedure of taking holographs and prints—Grant was taken to a secure, white-walled interview room and left alone to wait. The room featured harsh lighting and contained a single table to which Grant's right wrist was cuffed on a short chain, along with four chairs, two to either side of the table. Grant waited almost forty minutes until Corcel, the officer whom he had first met in the hotel ballroom, joined him. Corcel's expression was unreadable as he greeted Grant, pulling a chair across to him before reversing it to sit on, his arms resting across its back.

“Your name?” Corcel asked without preamble.

“Grant.”

“Grant…?”

“Just Grant,” Grant confirmed. “Only name I ever needed.”

“And you are an American, we have already established.”

“That's right.”

“Whereabouts from?”

“Originally Cobaltville. More recently, all over, but still in that territory.”

“I see. And your purpose for being here, in Zaragoza?”

“Vacation, with a friend.”

Corcel checked something in the little A7 notebook he carried. “And that would be Shizuka, correct?”

Grant nodded.

“And what is your relationship to Shizuka?”

“Boyfriend/girlfriend,” Grant said, eyes locking with Corcel's, an unspoken challenge there. “Is this going anywhere, Pretor Corcel?”

“Just establishing the facts. Do you know why you are here, Grant?”

“I got an inkling,” Grant admitted, “but why don't you explain how you see it.”

“You were discovered at the scene of a crime,” Pretor Corcel stated, “the ballroom in the Gran Retiro. You match the description of one of our suspects, which is why you've been brought in for questioning. In addition to this, you had certain items about your person that we might expect to find on the perpetrator.

“Do you know what happened in the ballroom, Grant?”

Grant tilted his head to show he was uncertain. “When Shizuka and I arrived the place was full of hanging bodies—I didn't imagine that, right?”

Corcel nodded. “Go on.”

“I guess there were twenty-two, twenty-four people hanging from the ceiling in nooses,” Grant recalled. “Didn't know why.”

“So you confirm you were at the scene prior to our engagement?” Corcel checked.

“Yeah. I saw someone I thought was suspicious—three people, all together—and so I followed them while trusting Shizuka to look after the—I dunno what you call them—victims, maybe?”

Corcel looked intrigued. “When you say you saw someone you thought was suspicious, what happened then?”

“I followed them through the service door and out into the back streets,” Grant said, “but they threw something at me—the sharp disc-thing you saw—and escaped before I could catch up to them.”

“I see,” Corcel said, “and could you describe these people?”

Grant nodded. “Yeah, I got a good look at them and I have a good memory for faces, clothes.”

“But you yourself had nothing to do with the bodies you saw?”

“No, sir,” Grant confirmed.

Corcel watched Grant for a few seconds, searching for the truth among his words. Then Grant spoke up.

“You've had your chance,” Grant said, “so let me now start answering the questions you should have asked, and we'll see if we can get somewhere on this—”

Pretor Corcel's eyebrows rose with surprise.

“Number one,” Grant began, “I'm an ex-Magistrate—what you'd call a Pretor. So I'm one of you.”

“An
ex
-Magistrate…?” Corcel asked, placing emphasis on the first word.

“Cobaltville Mag Division, but I left,” Grant elaborated. “Little disagreement, but not to do with the law.”

Corcel gestured for him to explain.

“Turns out my boss was a snake—literally—so I found myself in an untenable position,” Grant explained. “Me and Shizuka came here for a vacation—she's an important muckety-muck in New Edo, and I've got my own thing I wanted to get away from. My guess is that we should have been at that ballroom when all the hangings happened, but we were running late—ate later than we planned, didn't leave the restaurant until almost ten.”

Pretor Corcel's eyes lit up at this. “Which restaurant was this?” he asked. “Do you think the staff there could confirm you were there when you said you were?”

“I'd hope so,” Grant said. “Guy like me kind of stands out in your city.” So did Shizuka, from what he could tell, Grant mentally added, recalling that he had seen no other people here of Asian descent.

Corcel nodded slowly, pondering the information that the hulking man had given him. It could be true, although it didn't confirm that the man calling himself Grant was not also the killer. He would need to take this one step at a time.

“So that's why I followed them,” Grant finished. “Old instincts getting me involved when I didn't have an invite.”

“I'll look into your story,” Corcel told Grant, rising from his seat. “You're going to have to sit tight until then.”

Grant nodded. Despite his frustration he could understand things from this local Magistrate's point of view. “Just tell me something,” he said as Corcel strode across the room to the door. “Is Shizuka all right?”

Corcel stared at Grant, the professional hardness in his eyes softening for a moment. “She's a little shook up, but otherwise she seems to be fine. We have her here right now.”

For questioning
, Grant guessed. “Just make sure she's okay for me, all right?” he asked.

Corcel nodded. “I'll do that.”

* * *

S
HIZUKA
,
MEANWHILE
,
WAS
in a room two flights above from where Grant was being held. She had been checked over by one of the Pretors' medical staff and now she sat with Pretor Cáscara on a comfortable couch, discussing what had happened in the hotel ballroom.

There was not much that Shizuka could say that she had not already told Cáscara, but she sketched out a rough timescale of the events and outlined the state of the room when they had entered and how she and Grant had discovered the bodies.

“You've had a traumatic few hours,” Cáscara said sympathetically. “The clinician here wants to keep an eye on you, to make sure you don't go into shock. Do you think that would be okay?”

“I should speak to Grant,” Shizuka said.

“I'll tell him you're here,” Cáscara assured her. “He's fine.”

Shizuka eyed the female Pretor warily. “Can I see him?” she asked.

“Soon, yes,” Cáscara promised.

“When?”

“Soon.”

Cáscara left Shizuka then, and the samurai woman was escorted to a safe room—a cell by another name. The room was comfortable and low-lit with white walls and a vase of flowers and a jug of water on a nightstand beside the single bed. It looked like a private hospital room. Shizuka was too tired to argue, but she remained alert for a long time, pacing the room and wondering about Grant.

In the corridor outside the room, Pretor Corcel met with his partner, Cáscara, to share information as they watched Shizuka pace back and forth through a one-way pane of glass.

“My guy says he's innocent,” Corcel said in Spanish.

“That's always the first defense, Juan,” Cáscara said dismissively.

“But there's more to it than that,” Corcel continued. “He says he's—get this—an ex-Magistrate, US. He's retired from service, he's not shy about explaining that, and he happened to be out here on vacation.”

Pretor Cáscara pushed one slender hand through the long bangs of her fringe. “So he's one of us. Do you believe him?”

Corcel looked thoughtful. “It's certainly an unusual
tactic if he is lying,” he concluded. “What about the woman, Liana? What does she say?”

Cáscara peered through the one-way glass before replying, watching as Shizuka tidied her hair in the mirror that lay on the obverse side of the glass. “She says she's the leader of the Tigers of Heaven from New Edo,” she said.

Corcel let out a grim sigh. “Their stories match. Did she give you anything else?”

“The name of a restaurant she and the boyfriend were attending when the crime was committed,” Cáscara stated.

“Yeah, I got that, too.”

“What do you think? Are they for real?”

Corcel shrugged. “The man—Grant—is certainly built. And if his story is true, then he's been trained to kill. He could be our killer—he's physically capable.”

“But why come back to the scene?” Cáscara wondered.

“To remove evidence maybe,” Corcel proposed. “Something he left behind. Or…”

Cáscara raised a querulous eyebrow as her partner left the sentence unfinished. “Or…?” she prompted.

“Or maybe they really did just bungle into this mess, in which case we're no closer than we were before to finding out who's committing these showpiece murders and how, Liana,” Corcel said grimly. “Except that my suspect claims he saw the killers—or, at least, some people he thinks were at the scene at the time of the ‘performance.'”

Emiliana Cáscara shook her head heavily. “We already have over two hundred dead in less than three weeks, Juan,” she said. “If this goes on—”

“It's unconscionable,” Corcel agreed. “Let's check their story first, see if it gels with what the restaurant owner remembers. After that—well, we'll see.”

Crouched among the sacks of corn in the rearmost road wag, Domi watched with a growing sense of disbelief as the weird machine came trundling across the field toward her, and a fanlike aperture irised open on its front surface. An instant later, the aperture began to glow, before unleashing a beam of red-gold energy across the distance between itself and the convoy.

Domi didn't hesitate. She leaped up, scrambling across the rear bed of the wag even as the energy beam screamed toward her. It struck an instant later, clipping the port flank of the truck with a shriek, accompanied by a wall of burning hotness that seemed to wash across the wag in a wave.

As the wave struck, Domi dropped down behind a pile of grain sacks, sheltering behind them as the wall of heat caromed past overhead, rolling over the roof of the wag and leaving the sacks untouched.