It’s finished.”
“Are you kidding me?”
He shrugged. “He’s vanished. Probably dead. So…”
“One of your colleagues got a sighting of him.” she said. “Yesterday. He’s still here in the city.”
“If you’ve got someone who knows where he is, why don’t they deal with him?”
“Because it’s your responsibility. And your job.”
“The situation is not my fault,” he said calmly. “I said that whacking Anderson was unnecessary from the start.”
“Strange. Word’s always had it you’re the go-to guy for black-and-white solutions. You were when we met.”
“I still am. But once in a while that means choosing white. Getting Anderson fired would have been enough. They shouldn’t have let one of the Nine try to handle it his own way.”
“The others had no warning of it. Once Joe Cranfield had done what he did, it was always going to have to be tidied up. I was given the task of coordinating it. Yours not to reason why, Shepherd.”
“Don’t patronize me,” he said. “I’ve been doing this since you were still shitting your pants.”
“Congratulations. And your point?”
“After a while you start to reason why.”
“But then you do what you were told in the first place, right? That’s the deal.”
The deal, yes. A cold wind came up across the bay. Shepherd’s gaze was on the cars that came and went along the Alaskan Viaduct, donkeys following the carrots of their own headlights. When he’d been young, the big science-fiction ideas had included cars that needed no human intervention, that followed predetermined tracks. He wondered how many people realized that it had already happened, and you didn’t even need a car.
“I’m worried about you,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Really. You don’t look so well.”
He glanced away from the view to see that her sharp, gray eyes were on him. “I’m fine, Rose.”
“I’m assuming you must be. Because of how dumb it would be for you not to say.”
“Give me what you have,” he said.
She handed him a piece of paper upon which something had been written. “No collateral damage this time. Don’t fuck it up, in other words.”
He looked up at her slowly and was glad to see her move back a little from the table. He was also aware, in the background, of the men and women at the other tables getting up, as if to protect her. He wondered just how far Rose’s star had now risen.
“I won’t,” he said.
The others melted away, leaving Shepherd and Rose alone. They walked up the slope of the park past the tall, thin shapes of totem poles placed there by civic-minded individuals of the past who either had not known or did not care that such things had never been made by the local tribes, nor by any Native Americans at all, before the white men had arrived with their metal tools, and who had felt it reasonable to steal the city’s poles, including the celebrated one in Pioneer Square, from Indian villages that lay hundreds of miles away.
Just before they got to Western Avenue, the boundary of the park, he stopped. Now was the time to get this under way.
“There’s another problem,” he said offhand. “Maybe. A girl’s gone missing in Oregon.”
“So?”
“I think she’s one of you.”
“What makes you believe that?”
“I tracked her down, had a conversation with her. She’s extremely confused. It could be dangerous if she talks to anyone. She got away from me.”
“That’s clumsy.”
“It was a public place.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Some random kid runs away from home and you leap straight to a major crisis?”
“I’ve been doing this a long time, Rose. It’s the way it works sometimes. They start to remember, things get ahead of themselves. A child, a good family, normal life, no history of problems—one morning they just disappear. Adults, too. Vanish off the face of the earth. Everyone assumes they got killed by accident or design or wound up two states away on crack. Not always so. They crop up elsewhere sometimes, yes. But alive. And feeling different about themselves.”
She considered this. “And?”
“I think she’s in Seattle. Or at least headed this way.”
Rose swore. Shepherd knew that the very last thing this woman wanted was trouble in the city. Especially right now.
“When you say ‘ahead of time’—how old is she?”
“Nine.”
“Nine?” She stared at him. “Shepherd, do you know something about this that you’re not telling me?”
“Me?” he said, holding her gaze. It was not easy. “I’m just here to serve.”
“Kill her,” she said, and walked away.
Shepherd watched her go and smiled.
chapter
TWENTY-SIX
“He’s not going to come.”
“So he doesn’t come,” I said.
Fisher shook his head, went back to staring out the window. It was a little after eight. We were in Byron’s, on the street level of Pike Place. You entered through the market, walked past bulky men bellowing about fish, and found yourself in a dusty, low-ceilinged and hazily sunlit diner that couldn’t decide whether greasy breakfasts or strong cocktails were its main business. Some of the patrons couldn’t either. In the center was a battered and grimy cook’s station, around which battered and grimy men perched on stools sucking down one type of fare or the other, occasionally both. Some wore the stained white coats of men who’d already been up for hours shifting raw seafood and ice, others were dressed white-collar, on the way to work, and trying to look like they’d wandered in by accident and found a beer in their hand the same way. One wall was mainly glass and looked out over Elliott Bay. The tables along the side were occupied by tourist families in defensive huddles, patriarchs staring into guidebooks with a look of worried betrayal.
I had a bucket of strong coffee. Fisher tried breakfast. He had admitted he didn’t drink much these days, and his leaden movements this morning confirmed he was out of practice. I didn’t feel so hot either. When the waitress stopped by to offer more coffee I said yes and left Fisher to toy biliously with his congealing food, while I went to have a cigarette outside.
My phone conversation with Anderson had been short. He wouldn’t say where he was. Wouldn’t come to Fisher’s hotel. Wouldn’t let us come to him. Chose Byron’s presumably on the grounds that it was a very public place. I said yes because I knew it, having nursed my head there the morning I woke in Occidental Park, before going to report Amy missing.
I stomped out the cigarette on the cobbled street and looked blearily at the people milling around. Tourists, market traders, adults, children. Selling, buying, browsing. Talking, shouting, silent. Everyone doing normal things, yet looking so strange. Bodies moving apparently with purpose, but controlled by intelligences whose existence I could determine only through their actions. Of course, it could have been the hangover.
To kill a few minutes, I walked across the way and got some money from an ATM. As I waited for the bills, I rubbed my eyes, hard. I needed to get my head together. I was feeling wide open, broken down, and far too
