Game of Cages

“No,” I answered. “With me, it’s …” What the hell could I say? I couldn’t tell him about the society. “… just bad luck.”

He didn’t look impressed with that answer. “And what does this have to do with what happened to you in Seattle?”

“Near as I can tell, nothing. It was similar to this, though—weird creature, people going nuts.”

“You did solve that problem, though?”

I kept my face carefully neutral. “I did.”

“How?”

I thought back to the last moments of that ordeal, when my best and oldest friend had pleaded for me to spare his life. The smells of spoiled blood and field turf came back to me, and so did his voice. The old injury on my left hand throbbed.

I opened my mouth to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. I’d only talked about it to one other person, a peer in the society I had never seen before or since. At the time, I was still in shock and I’d expected him to kill me. Since then, I hadn’t said a word about it.

And I wasn’t going to start with a cop, even a temp cop, no matter how politely he asked.

“Never mind,” Steve said with a wave of his hand. “I understand.”

We didn’t say anything for a while, and my eyelids began to droop. He noticed. “Let me set you up for some shut-eye. Any fool can see you need it, even this one.”

The pillows and blankets he brought were pink and flowery. I stretched out on the couch, feeling awkward and vulnerable, but when I closed my eyes, I dropped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

“Get up.”

I came awake suddenly, thinking that Yin’s men had found me again, but it was Catherine.

“I mean it,” she said again. Her tone was sharp. “Nap time is over.”

I sat up and rubbed the bleariness out of my eyes. The VCR clock said it was almost ten, but was that the evening of the same day, or had I slept all the way into the morning? “It’s nice to see you, too. Is it early or late?”

“It’s still the same day, if that’s what you mean. And I’m hungry again. Those bastards took my emergency food with the jump bag. Come on! Up!”

As a rule, I don’t like being snapped at, but I was too damn tired to care. Maybe I was just glad to see that she was okay. “Don’t talk to me that way,” I said out of habit. “How did you find me?”

“Goddammit, Ray.” She sat down on the edge of the couch and folded her arms across her breasts. “I saw you go into the motel to meet Yin. What kind of game are you playing?”

“I’m not playing any kind of game. Do you think he turned me? Do you think he bought me off?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said with more anger than I’d expected. “He sent me your cellphone and told me he’d kidnapped you. I went there to free you.”

She sighed and set her hands on her knees. “And I watched you go in, thinking you were collecting a payoff.”

“He nearly killed me, but the fire made him back off.”

“That was lucky.”

“Not really.”

She smiled and I smiled back. We had a moment. Then she looked away and her smile vanished. She held up her hands. They trembled slightly.

“I’m forty-five years old, you know. I’ll be forty-six in August, if I live that long. This job isn’t as exciting as it was when I was twenty-five. I’m better at it now, but …” She rubbed her hands together and leaned back. “They did get me, you know. They stopped my car and dragged me out onto the asphalt. It seemed like a dozen of them, all smiling shit-eating smiles and holding their guns against my body. All over my body.”

She was silent for a moment. I waited for her, and eventually she said: “They couldn’t keep me, though. They underestimated me, and when I saw my chance I took it.”

“I’m glad.” It was a stupid thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything better.

Catherine just nodded. “How did you get into this? How did you get sucked into this life?”

Maybe she didn’t know my history. Or maybe she was testing me to see if I shared information. I didn’t care. “My best friend … my best friend had a predator in him. Annalise was there to kill him, but I tried to save him. I took his side against her, but he was past saving.”

She nodded. “With me it was my nephew. He was a little wild and very funny, but one summer day he could suddenly do things. When the society came hunting for him, the whole family hid him away. They protected him. Except me. I knew he was killing people, and I decided to turn him in. I had to do the right damn thing, no matter what it cost. My family … isn’t my family anymore. I’m married now, with two girls, but they’ve never met my mother or sisters. I don’t want them to hear the things my family says to me—what they call me now. I got this damn job out of it, though.”

I couldn’t imagine how hard it was to do society work as a parent, and I said so.

She pulled away from me and let her body language become neutral. “I have ways of dealing. There are ways of doing this job that help keep a little distance. I don’t do any of the violence, and I’m never around when it happens. There’s no need for me to see that and carry it around with me, bring it home to my family. Not after what happened to my nephew. I take care of my own people and let these people take care of themselves.”