'Whoa, whoa, no one said anything about killing.' He pressed the knife more firmly against the girl's lolling head, just to make it clear that this whole conversation was, in fact, about killing. 'What the hell do you care, anyway?'
'Well, at first I thought you meant to rape her, and I had it in my mind that I was going to be some kind of hero about it. But then you drugged me, and I take that kind of thing personally. Would have been okay if you'd just dropped the knife when I pulled iron. Instead you hide behind the girl, put your knife to her throat.' The darkness in my head was closing in on me fast. Good thing I could talk in my sleep. Or at least, I could threaten in my sleep. 'It offends me on a professional level.'
'What would have been better is if you had drunk more and fallen asleep with the kids.' He was edging around the barrel, putting it firmly between us. He straddled Ricky's unconscious form and hitched the girl further up, so her feet were off the ground. 'Then everyone involved could have woken up tomorrow with a bad hangover, and you could have kept out of my business.'
'You'd have slit my throat. Unless you're particularly bad at this job which, honestly, I'm beginning to think might be the case. Besides, you didn't put enough juice in that bottle to take down a man my size. You had to drink it, too, or the kids would have gotten suspicious.'
'Listen to you, all clear-headed and analytical.' He smiled grimly. 'You know this kind of work. So why don't you just turn around and walk…'
He stopped talking and I stopped breathing, because we both heard it at the same time. Feet, lots of them, and the idle chatter of bored officers. Badge patrol. They weren't on our street, maybe on one of the cross streets, but certainly not more than a block or two away. They could turn and come this way, or they could wander off somewhere else. Tricky situation.
'Don't do it,' he hissed. 'Don't make a sound, don't call out, and don't fire that iron. Because if you do, I promise you, I promise, I'm going to cut this girl open and I'm going to run like hell. You think you can explain all this to the cops?'
'You think you can run faster than I can shoot you?' I asked, but I kept my voice down. I knew I couldn't run, and even if I could explain all this, I would still end up in custody and right back in the system. He gave me a sharp look and squeezed the girl for emphasis. I held up my hand.
They went the other way. Voices faded, footsteps became muffled. We stood staring at each other for two minutes after the last hint of their presence went away, then relaxed.
'See, this can still all be okay,' he said, resting the girl against his knee and wiping his mouth with the back of the hand holding the knife. 'We can work this out, you and me.'
It was just enough of an opening, his tired arm resting, the girl folding limply forward, the knife away from her throat. Only opening I was going to get. I pushed the tension and fatigue from my mind and, loosely as I could, raised the revolver and squeezed two shots into his chest.
First one took him in the shoulder. He looked startled, dropped the knife, his eyes wide. He tried to hug the girl back to his body but I was already pulling the trigger on the second shot. Faster than him. Better than him. He dropped, and the girl dropped with him. I stumbled around the barrel, kicked her away from his bloody chest, kicked the knife down the alley, then took his shirt in my hand, knelt, and raised him off the ground.
'This was never a negotiation,' I said. Then I punched him once, my hand wrapped around the cylinder of the revolver. Twice, teeth and blood across my knuckles. Three times, but he was already dead. I dropped him and turned to the girl.
She was still out, would be out for a while. A shout went up a couple streets over, then another. Patrol had heard the shot and was looking for the source. I didn't have a lot of time. I turned her so that she was on her side, in case something in the drug made her puke. Then I pulled her coat over her legs, made sure Ricky was comfortable, then turned back to the guy.
A bit of metal caught my eye. It was stuffed in an inner pocket of his coat, torn open by my shot. A familiar shape, stitched to a stiff black wallet. I picked it up.
Seal of the Badge, iron and pewter. My bullet had nicked the leather, biting a circle out of it. Why had he been scared of being found by the patrol, then? I looked down at the girl, at Ricky, at the dead man they trusted. The patrol was getting closer. Running out of time.
I pocketed the emblem, pulled my coat around my shoulders and trotted drunkenly down the alley. Just like a hero.
Chapter Eleven
Morning came with a backache and a hangover and more blood on my shirt than I expected. I was wrapped in a canvas tarp, stolen from a stack of crates. I remembered breaking into a warehouse the night before, at the end of a long, stumbling retreat through some pretty dodgy parts of Veridon.
It was all I could do to pull myself upright without groaning in pain. And then, I groaned anyway. I sat on the floor, hidden from the main floor of the warehouse by a pallet of barrels, and tried to gather my senses.
Today was the day of the curfew. I saw the start of it last night, the round-ups and the empty streets. Still didn't know why there was a curfew. Just that it meant I wasn't getting out of the city until tomorrow, at the earliest. Probably best to just lie low until the zep dock opened up. I got up and stumbled my way through the warehouse, looking for food. There was a break room for the workers, and some lockers. Wilson would have done a better job of it, but with the warehouse closed and no one coming in today, I had plenty of time to tumble the locks and go through the contents. When I had a suitable hodgepodge of foods and two nearly-empty bottles of wine from the manager's stash, I went back into the warehouse and made a little nest for my meal.
What must this be costing? Hundreds of warehouses like this one closed, no material moving through the city, no manufacturing or commerce of any kind. How do you shut down an entire city without crippling it? Why do you do such a thing?
Too much like work, that sort of thinking. I had resolved to run, and I was sticking to it. I pushed those questions from my mind and settled in to the business of filling my stomach on pilfered goods. Unfortunately, that didn't take long, and soon I was sitting looking out over the warehouse with nothing to hold my attention but a half-bottle of wine that had to last me all day. I sipped slowly, and my mind eventually returned to those questions.
It was the cost I couldn't get over. If this was imposed by the Council, and it had to be if the Badge was enforcing it, then it had the approval of the industrialists. This warehouse was probably run by one of the families on the Council. What was so important that those families were willing to take this kind of loss? I knew that there had been other attacks in the city, other instances of those weird cog-dead monsters sprouting up, but it would have to be really widespread to justify this kind of response. And any attack that was that widespread would have the attention of the public, unless the Badge had done a remarkably good job of covering it up. I hadn't heard anything in my wanderings last night. So it couldn't be that.
Another possibility was that the Council had lost control of the Badge. Or that a very small portion of the Council had seized control of the Badge and this was some kind of power grab. I could see Angela doing that. Something similar happened two years ago. The Council had put some controls in place to prevent that from happening again, but since they were the ones who wrote the rules, I imagined they knew how to get around them. If it came to force of arms, though, each of the Families had personal guards that wouldn't give up without a fight. It might be a day of small, violent battles fought behind the walls of the great manors of Veridon. That would be interesting.
Interesting, but unlikely. The Council had plenty of tools at its disposal. The Families didn't need to shoot each other to gain or lose control in the city. That was probably the only thing that kept them from open war, honestly. Of course, the Founders had been on the wane for years now, and a lot of the tools of the Council translated into money and political influence.
And Crane. How did Crane fit into all this? That purge mask, that might have something to do with the curfew. If the Council decided they were going to wipe one of the Families from the history books, now was the
