Alien Taste (9 page)

Until he talked to Max and made sure it was okay, he said instead, “There's blood here.”

Max came to eye the bedpost. “Oh damn, that's not good.”

Ukiah moved his hand slowly down the post. “The smear goes the whole way down. Someone has made an effort to wipe it up.” He ran his hands over the dark-painted hardwood floors. “There was blood on the floor, too, but not a lot. Some hair too. It seems like a head wound, blunt force to the head.” Crouched on the floor, he scanned the room. “If he was attacked in this room, and the attacker left the weapon behind, what was he hit with?”

“Why do you think it got left behind?” Agent Zheng asked.

“There's nothing missing,” Max answered for him. “How about the classical heavy acrylic award?”

Ukiah picked up the clear acrylic award but found it innocent of blood. “No.”

Agent Zheng stood staring at the floor. “If the body fell here, the attacker would have stood here and”—she reached down to nudge a pair of roller blades tucked under the desk—“these would be close at hand.”

Ukiah examined the heavy wheel base. The right blade was clean, but he found blood and hair caught under the rims of the left. “This was it. Someone hit Wil Trace in the head with this.”

“And took his body out the back,” Max added, “if no one saw him leave the front.”

“Or the body is still in the house,” Ukiah amended.

Agent Zheng shook her head. “We've checked the house.”

From the attic window, Schenley Park stretched out as a canopy of green. Max looked out over the treetops and shook his head. “I'm starting to hate that park.”

 

Ukiah crouched on the same path that Janet Haze had taken two days before. To him the passage of Wil Trace's body was clear. “You said that your people checked the park?”

“There wasn't any indication that he went into the park.”

Ukiah glanced up at Max. “Can't you see this?”

Max shook his head. “It's just a bunch of footprints to me. What is it?”

Ukiah forgave the FBI somewhat. It seemed to him as if they should be perfect and infallible. The path was there, why hadn't they seen it? “A man came
this way, carrying something extremely heavy. See how deep his footprints are on this piece of level ground, compared to the others? Here, here, and here—blood. It's going to be easy to follow, but it's a day old.”

“Might as well see where it goes.” Max took out his pistol and checked its clip.

Agent Zheng nodded too, so they started down the dirt footpath.

Unlike Janet Haze's earlier trek, the blood trail followed the path to one of the park's wide graded trails until it came to the edge of Panther Hollow. There Wil Trace's abductor cut through shallow woods to a set of train tracks. The railroad, they discovered, forged through the heart of Oakland, almost unseen, hidden by the folds of land, bridges, and tunnels. Ukiah had heard the train occasionally, the rails singing, but never traced the engine's almost invisible route before. They walked through the narrow gorge between the Carnegie Museum and Carnegie Mellon University and found a tunnel. On the other side of the tunnel, the gorge continued. The Oakland traffic hummed high overhead on bridges crossing the ravine. Ukiah recognized the buildings perched above them and thus the streets crossing the bridges: Center Avenue and Baum Boulevard. It meant they were only a few blocks from the office.

Just before the railroad dipped down to join the busway, the blood trail climbed up the steep embankment to street level. It was a hard scramble, leaving Ukiah impressed with the strength of anyone who could do it with a body slung across one shoulder. They were in a bleak area. The street was deserted despite the fact it was full daylight. The buildings stood empty, windows boarded up, signs torn away.

The blood trail led to a door hanging askew on its hinges. Max caught Ukiah's shoulder before he entered, pausing him. Max had his pistol out, pointed skyward. He indicated Ukiah's gun with his eyes and a frown. Agent Zheng held her pistols skyward too, apparently also unwilling to enter the building unarmed.

Ukiah slipped his Colt out of his kidney holster, made sure the safety was on, then nodded his readiness.

The door opened to a large room, the far wall a bank of windows through which hazy sunlight barely cut through filthy glass. Dust coated the floor like a gray carpet. A host of footprints marched through the dust; dozens of people had entered and left the supposedly abandoned building.

Max moved cautiously into the large room. Agent Zheng followed behind. Ukiah stalked behind, stiff-legged, the hair on the back of his neck rising. Something was wrong. He moved slowly forward, straining to identify the sense of danger, to give it a shape, a name.

Except a few broken chairs, the only furniture in the room was a battered desk set under the bank of windows. Marks on the floor indicated that there had been an elaborate cubicle system in the vast room. Offices lined the side walls, executive claims on privacy.

“The attacker carries Wil Trace to this center support.” Ukiah called the trail as he found it, his eyes only half on the marks in the dust. “He puts him down. Wil Trace lies here, awakes, and starts to crawl. The attacker drags him back and ties him to the support.”

“Trace is alive?” Surprise colored Zheng's voice.

“He was. There's no more blood.” What was the
danger? “The wound has stopped bleeding and the attacker doesn't hurt him again. Other people come in two groups. The first group walks around Agent Trace. There are three men and the attacker. The second group wears biker boots. They wander around the room; it seems at random. There are five men and a woman in the second group.”

“The second group sounds like the Pack.” Agent Zheng said. “Who are the first group, though?”

Ukiah shrugged helplessly.

“They put something on this desk.” Max pointed at the disturbed dust on the desktop.

Ukiah nodded, following the tracks to the desk. “The one that brought him here put something here and retrieved it. A pen or pencil. See, these are his fingers sweeping through the dust to pick it up.” Ukiah frowned at the feather-fine track across the desk. The pen or whatever had rolled across the slightly slanted top. He stooped and looked under the desk. A hypodermic syringe glittered under the desk. “This doesn't look good.”

“What is it?” Max asked.

“A syringe, and it's been used.” He fished it out. On the tip of the needle, he found human blood. “It was used on Wil Trace.”

Max drifted off, checking into the nearest empty executive office. He had his PDA out, digging through the Internet. “This wasn't a random spot. They knew this place was empty and considered it a safe meeting place.”

“Can you tell what he was given?” Agent Zheng asked tentatively, doubt clear in her voice.

Ukiah pulled out the plunger and touched the tip, then slipped his pinkie into the cylinder. It had been used twice. At one time it had been filled with a complex pharmaceutical that he took to be the
missing immune-suppression drug. The second substance was a bloodlike protein that triggered memories of Janet Haze's oddly broken DNA. He frowned. Agent Trace was injected with blood?

He sensed something then and grew still, unable to name it. The feeling of something horribly wrong struck him again. This time he got the impression there had been something he overlooked, a warning left unrecognized. He cast back over the last few hours, trying to spot it. A black car had been parked near the office that morning. It had been in the alley behind Janet Haze's house, parked and empty three houses down.

The second set of tracks leading into the building, those of the Pack's, led in but didn't go back out.

The Pack had followed them to Janet Haze's, then raced ahead to this building, and waited.

It was an ambush.

There was a slight noise from Agent Zheng, a sharp inhale of surprise, but it hit him like a shout. He spun and found Rennie Shaw barely ten feet away, dressed in fatigues, shotgun in hand.

How did he get so close without me sensing him?

The Pack leader had turned too as Agent Zheng gasped, leveling his shotgun at her.

“No!” Ukiah flung himself in front of her.

A boom like a cannon filled the enclosed room and the blast hit him square in the chest, throwing him backward through the air. He hit the ground tumbling from the force. It hurt less than he expected Then he remembered he was wearing the flak jacket. If he could have breathed, he would have laughed.

He started to get up, gasping for breath. He had been kicked by an elk with less force. Rennie was coming on, chambering another shell. There was something about the Pack leader's face, his eyes.
Ukiah suddenly realized that for Rennie, no one else existed. Rennie was here to kill him.

Ukiah scrambled backward on all fours, discovering he'd lost his .45, gasping hard for a breath that wouldn't come. Rennie lengthened his stride, brought down the shotgun, aimed at Ukiah's head.

Max suddenly appeared behind Rennie, pistol shoved against the back of the Pack leader's head. “Drop it! Drop it or I'll blow your brains out.”

Rennie froze. Just then, Ukiah sensed others in the building, hiding in the shadows. Even as he looked about for them, groping still for his pistol, they emerged from the ring of executive offices. Six in all, armed with shotguns. Like Rennie, they were intently looking at Ukiah.

“Put your guns down!” Max shouted, nudging the back of Rennie's head. “Do it or I'll kill him.”

Ukiah heard the clunks of shells being chambered.

“Drop your gun,” Rennie told Max, “or we'll kill you too.”

Too, because they had come only for Ukiah.

“Back down, Max.” Ukiah forced the words out of his bruised lungs and then gasped for another breath. “They just want me. Back down and let them have me.”

“Over my dead body, son.”

That was uttered from the heart and not from the mind.
Damn it, Max, don't start thinking like that. I don't want you dead too.

So he lied to Max. “They're not going to hurt me, Max. You know I've told you weird shit in the past, and I've always been right.” He struggled for breath. “Back down, and none of us will be hurt.”

He looked up at Rennie, met his eyes squarely and silently pleaded to him.
Don't tell him the truth. Let him believe me. Don't let him force you into killing him.

Max let out a long sigh and slowly lowered his gun. “I hope you're right, kid.”

Pack members moved in, stripped Max of his weapons, and put him on his knees, hands on his head. There was a sudden uneasiness in the Pack members.

A large Native American man stepped beside Rennie. “He's the one, isn't he?”

Rennie shrugged and motioned Ukiah up onto his knees. The Pack leader stepped forward to catch the neck closure of Ukiah's flak jacket and, in one hard pull, tore it open. The edge of the shotgun blast had punched through the fabric above the Kevlar plate. Blood trickled from a pellet embedded in his collarbone. Below it, a fist-sized bruise was already shading to black.

Rennie pressed his fingers into the wound and then licked the blood from his fingertips. “He's the one.”

The Native American shook his head. “Coyote must be wrong about this.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We can't afford to be wrong.” Rennie looked down at Ukiah. “What say you, boy?”

“Do what you want to me,” Ukiah whispered earnestly, “but not here, not in front of him. Leave them here and finish this wherever. I beg you, don't hurt them.”

Rennie stared down at him, a long unreadable look. Finally, he reached into the baggy pockets of his fatigues and pulled out an aerosol can. He flipped the can's lid off in a practiced flick of the thumb, then kicked Ukiah solidly in the chest. As Ukiah gasped for breath, Rennie aimed the can into Ukiah's face and pulled the trigger. Green gas blossomed out to kiss Ukiah's lips. The smell was sweet and suddenly distant. He tried not to inhale, but the gas was
down deep in his lungs already, making him cough and sputter, sucking down more as he did. Ukiah managed to think,
At least this won't hurt much,
then the world canted sideways and darkness closed in on him. Strangely his hearing remained, like a stereo left on after the lights were turned off. There was a low moan from Max, a deep utterance of despair.

“What do we do with them?”

“Can't make the boy a liar. Cuff them to a post, then follow.”

 

Ukiah marked their movement by sound. They moved remarkably fast for being burdened with his body. The run ended with the beep-beep of a car answering a remote and the thunk of a trunk lid popping open. A moment later he felt carpet against his cheek and hands roughly searching him.

“What the hell is this?”

“A camera,” Rennie answered. “It's probably got a remote recording system, probably in the Hummer.”

“Should I double back and get the recording out of the truck?”