Black Rust (9 page)

Lutz stewed most of the way back to Ricardo’s. 

I used the quiet miles to think through a question I probably should have asked much earlier in the night: Was everything what it appeared to be?

I had ten bundles of a hundred one hundred-dollar bills—a hundred thousand dollars in my bag to give to Ricardo, and the money was fanning my suspicions.

Could the dirty kill have been a setup?  Was Lutz smart enough to conspire with Ricardo to scam me out of my savings?  I didn’t think Lutz was that clever but I knew his sense of morality could be bent far enough that he wouldn’t be bothered by taking every penny I had.

Maybe Lutz had run a similar game on his last partner and that’s why he’d wound up dead.  That was three dead partners for him in as many years. 

Enough to worry anybody.

By the time Lutz pulled the black Mercedes through Ricardo’s loading dock door, I was feeling a little bit paranoid and was entertaining fantasies of jumping out of the car with pistols drawn, ready to lay down some red mayhem.

Lutz parked, and we got out of the car. 

My pistols stayed holstered. 

Drones raced through the cavernous space, buzzing around the obstacles hanging from the ceiling, but no one had come to the big empty floor to meet us.  I took a glance at the cars parked near ours.  All the ones from earlier were present, as were two more—one of those a four-wheel-drive pickup, the other a Jeep.  Both were rugged and dented, exactly the kind of trucks a Regulator might drive.

I nudged Lutz on the arm and nodded toward the two trucks.

He looked at them and looked back at me like there might be something wrong with me.  “What?”

“Those two weren’t here before.”

“So?” Lutz took a few steps toward the stairs that led up to Ricardo’s office.

“They don’t worry you?” I asked, striding to catch up as I scanned for dangers.

“I’m not afraid of ugly cars.”

Sometimes I wanted to punch Lutz.  I grabbed his arm, stopped him, and turned him around to face me.  “Those don’t look like Regulators’ cars to you?” Maybe I was indulging my paranoia a bit too much.

Lutz heaved a pained sigh as he looked the Jeep and the truck over again.  “Could belong to the governor for all I know.”

“Dammit, Lutz, don’t be stupid.  You know what I mean.”

Lutz yanked his arm out of my hand and started walking away from me.  “Could be.”

“Why are they here?” I asked.

“Don’t know.”

“It doesn’t worry you?”

“I don’t have a bounty on my head.”

Lutz was right about that.  But what went on in his brain that he couldn’t see his turn was coming? 

“We’re not the only Regulators Ricardo does business with,” said Lutz.  “Houston is a big town.”

“Before we go up there, let me ask you a question.”

Lutz stopped and turned to look at me.  “What?”

“Why were we sent out on that job tonight?”

“I’m too tired to play a game.  Ask me what you want to ask me.”

I took a hard look at Lutz’s face.  I wanted to catch the lie when it happened.  “Those weren’t kids being cooked on that fire.  Why were we sent out there to kill those d-gens?”

“Oh, goddammit!” Lutz spun around and stomped away.  “Shit like this happens.  How many times do we show up to find something other than we expected?  How often do we find nothing at all?” Lutz glanced over his shoulder at me.  “You coming?  Or you wanna stand down here and make up stories to tell yourself?”

Ricardo was in his desk chair, spinning away from viewing his monitors to look at us as we came into his control room.  He casually asked, “You have the money?”

I pointed vaguely.  “Whose cars are those?”

Ricardo’s mood turned suspicious.  “Why do you ask?”

“There are a couple of cars down there that weren’t there when we left,” I told him.  “Who do they belong to?”

Ricardo looked at Lutz and then back at me.  “Don’t come in here and pretend you’re a policeman with questions I have to answer.  Do you have my money?”

“If you want the money, you’ll answer my questions.” 

Ricardo deliberately stood and raised himself to his imposing height so he could look down on me. 

He stood a dozen paces across the room, so I wasn’t worried that he could do anything besides look intimidating. 

“We had a deal.”  Ricardo’s face was hard.  His words weren’t angry, but they weren’t nice.  “I’m holding up my end.  Nothing in our deal was contingent on me answering stupid questions that might come up.  If this is your way of backing out, then get the hell off my property and enjoy being on the run because that video is going to the police unaltered.  Now, are you going to pay me or not?”

I didn’t want to part with my money in what I suspected might be a scam, but I decided it didn’t matter whether I got my answers before or after I paid.  If it turned out I wasn’t satisfied with Ricardo’s responses, he wouldn’t be alive to stop me from putting the money back in my bag.

Holding Ricardo’s eye, I walked over to his desk, took ten bundles of bills out of my bag, and stacked them messily in front of the array of computer monitors.  “A hundred thousand.”

“My faith is restored.”  Ricardo smiled.  “Why are you worried about those cars?”

I stepped back from the desk.

Lutz said, “He’s paranoid about Regulators.”

“Wouldn’t you be?”  Ricardo shrugged.  “He has a bounty on his head.” 

Pointing again toward the parked cars, I said, “The Jeep and truck out there, they look like Regulators’ cars.”

Ricardo laughed and went back to his seat.  “Those belong to a couple of fellows who fetch downed drones for us.”

Lutz laughed in that mean way he does when he’s torn between feeling amused and feeling that perverse satisfaction he gets from seeing someone else embarrassed. 

I thought about shooting Lutz.  Just because.  Well, not just because.  The more time I spent with Lutz, the more I found myself fantasizing about putting a bullet between his eyes.  Talking to Ricardo, I said, “What happened tonight with the sanction?  Why’d you send us out there?”

Ricardo’s brows knit as he steepled his fingers and he propped his elbows on the arms of his chair.  “That sounds like an accusation.”

“Tell me about the sanction.”

“You know I don’t assign Sanction IDs, right?” Ricardo looked over to Lutz.  “Does he know what we do?  Does he know how this business works?  Or is he just a stupid trigger boy?” Ricardo turned back to me, put on a disappointed face, and then returned his attention to his computer screens.  He started typing.

It took thirty or forty seconds, but one of the screens flashed to a different view.  Ricardo pointed.  “This is my raw footage.”

All I saw were treetops in fog with glimpses of a pale dirt road down on the forest floor.  “What am I looking at?”

“I’m showing you what I saw.”

“This is from your spotter drone?” I asked.

Ricardo nodded. 

I noticed immediately how sharp the picture was.  The video was high resolution.  “This wasn’t what was sent back through the air, was it?”

“It came off the memory card you took out of my drone.  My drone arrived at the scene seven minutes ahead of you.”  Ricardo leaned over and pointed at the road down between the trees.  “You two will come up this road.  Keep an eye on it when the drone gets more altitude.”

The road disappeared, and the video showed only trees slide by below through thick bands of fog.  The fire in the clearing came into view as did the celebrating d-gens.  The fog grew thick again, and it was hard to make out the details of any of the individuals. 

I focused particularly on the animals on the spit over the fire, trying to match the count with the number I recalled from seeing them in person, but with the fog, it was impossible.

The drone ascended, and the fire grew dim.  Momentarily, the barely visible strand of the pale-colored road came into view at the edge of the screen.

I said, “I don’t understand.”

“In a moment,” said Ricardo, “You’ll see Lutz’s piece of shit come down the road.”

“It’s not a piece of shit,” Lutz protested.  “It’s a Mercedes.”

“Lutz’s piece of Mercedes,” Ricardo goaded. 

I put a finger on the screen as though touching the image of the fire might help to clarify it.  “The timing doesn’t make sense to me.  How did they even assign a pending sanction off that video?  I can’t see anything incriminating.”  And that seemed for the moment to answer a very important question.  I was being conned by Ricardo, maybe with Lutz’s help.

“Take a deep breath,” Lutz told me, his hand suddenly on my shoulder. 

I shrugged it off and stepped back, ready to raise my rifle and start shooting holes in people.  “What happened?”

“They didn’t assign the pending sanction based on the video.”  Ricardo pointed at me.  “Take out your phone and check the Sanction Certificate.  You’ll see the time.  Compare it to the time on the screen.”

I took my phone out of my pocket, asking myself if Ricardo’s guys had time to alter the video, asking myself which bits of evidence I was seeing were real and which had been altered.  I keyed my phone and opened up the app to look at the sanction.  The big red cancellation letters virtually stamped across the screen taunted me with the evening’s mistakes.

“After you check that time,” said Ricardo.  “You need to take your SIM card and battery out.  They can track you by your phone.”

Shit!  I forgot about that.  We all did.

I checked the time.  The sanction had been assigned nearly forty-five minutes before the time the spotter drone arrived on the scene.  It appeared that it wasn’t Ricardo running a scam on me.  I really was in trouble.

Apparently seeing the change in my expression, Ricardo said, “You see?”

I stared at the canceled sanction on my phone.  “It took us what, Lutz, thirty minutes to get out there after you got the call?”

Lutz shrugged.  “About that.”

“I contacted Lutz after I got the coordinates from the police,” said Ricardo.  “I had a drone relatively close, and I tasked it to go.  That’s the one you shot down.” 

“But that’s not how it usually works,” I protested.  “You find the d-gens when they’re up to no good, right?  That’s how the spotter drone system works.  Then you send video back to the police, they assign a pending sanction, and as soon as they’re satisfied with what they see, they assign the ID.”

“Mostly right,” said Ricardo, “but you know as well as I do that I usually contact Lutz or someone like him before I alert the police.  That way when the sanction goes out to the Regulator network, you guys are already on your way or pretty close.”

“Front-running,” muttered Lutz.

I didn’t need a primer on Front-running.  “What I don’t understand is how the sanction was assigned before your drone arrived on site.”

“Anonymous tip,” said Ricardo.  “Somebody from one of the corporate farms said the d-gens were out in the woods killing kids.”

“So, there could be dead kids out there,” I said, conflicted over the hope I could go back out to the site and find some toddler corpses to prove my innocence. 

Nobody said anything about that.  Maybe Ricardo and Lutz saw the dilemma the same way I did.  It was hard to wish for dead kids, even if they were d-gens.

I had to ask myself whether going back out to the site of the kill before any cops went out there later in the morning would be a good idea.  Maybe when the sun came up, a more thorough check for bodies of cannibalized children would turn something up. 

Ricardo, seeming to read my thoughts, was ready to crush those hopes.  “I asked my video guys to give every frame a thorough look before they altered anything.  They only had to find one body on the video before you and Lutz showed up.  It might have been enough to put you in the clear.”

That’s not what I wanted to hear.  I sidled up to Ricardo’s long desk and asked, “Do you mind if I sit?”

He shook his head.

I seated myself in front of a pair of monitors with video panning past an overgrown neighborhood somewhere in the suburbs.  Another of Ricardo’s spotter drones at work.  “So nothing on the video to clear us.  Your guys are working on it, at least.”

Ricardo said, “They’re working on it and they—”

“They’ll finish it,” Lutz cut in, “right?  You have the money.”

Ricardo looked over at Lutz and didn’t answer him but instead turned back to me.  “There was a woman there we think was normal.”

“Wait.  What?” I leaned toward Ricardo.  I hoped he wasn’t telling me we’d murdered a citizen.  If that was the case, we’d have to run.  No choice.

“Not all of them were d-gens around that fire.  One was a normal woman.”

Lutz made a noise that sounded like a prelude to tears.

Ricardo got out of his chair and walked to the back wall of his office where a bank of cabinets stood.  He opened a drawer, rummaged through the contents for a moment and retrieved a pill bottle.  He took a second to examine the label before saying, “Hey, Lutz.”

Lutz looked up from the mental movie of his world coming to an end.

Ricardo tossed him the plastic bottle as he came back toward his desk.

Lutz caught the bottle and looked at the label.  “What’s this?”

“It’ll help you stay calm,” answered Ricardo.  “Complimentary, on the house.”  He pointed to a worn couch, also against the back wall.  “Go lay down.  The adults have grownup stuff to talk about.”

Lutz’s face turned red.  He threw the bottle at one of the computer monitors.  The cap popped off, and pills scattered.  “Don’t treat me like a cheese-headed degenerate.”

Ricardo looked down his nose at Lutz for a moment before turning back to me. 

“Did we kill her?” I asked, trying to guess which of the d-gens by the bonfire had been the normal one. 

Ricardo shook his head.

What? 

Ricardo used his keyboard and mouse to find a place on the video.  When the image froze on the screen, he pointed to a blonde woman standing by the fire, staring into the forest.

From the angle of the video, I was able to see her face.  “I remember that woman.  She got away across the cornfield.”

Lutz stepped up and leaned over Ricardo’s shoulder.

Ricardo grimaced at the smell and leaned back.  “Man, get a toothbrush!”

Lutz put a fat finger on the screen, right over the blonde woman’s face.  “She’s naked and streaked with blood just like the others.  She’s not normal.  She’s a d-gen.”

Ricardo pushed Lutz back, and he resituated himself in front of his keyboard.  He started the video.  “Watch.”

The camera slowly changed angle as the spotter drone that filmed the video drifted over the trees.  There was no sound, but it was perfectly obvious when the first shot was fired because every d-gen around the fire jerked and turned.  In the seconds that followed, d-gens ran and charged Lutz’s muzzle flashes.

It was clear to me now, just as it was at the time, that he was in trouble, and likely would have been killed by the d-gens had I not been there.  I saw the image of myself from the back as I stepped into the clearing, rifle blazing as d-gens dropped in every direction.  It was also obvious that if one of the high-res videos hit the network, a warrant would go out for Lutz, too.

Of all the people in the wide view of the clearing, only one person did not move, the blonde.  She stood with arms half raised, a look of horror on her face, paralyzed.  The Christian Black on the screen, having shot every d-gen attacking Lutz and every d-gen who’d had the courage to come at him, started working on downing the rest, shooting systematically around the clearing, from left to right.

The girl’s head snapped to her right as she came alive to the realization a bullet would soon find her.  She stumbled to her left, bent over and picked up a droopy canvas bag, and crouched as she ran for the cornfield.

“Watch the bag,” Ricardo narrated.

“Lots of ‘em collect shit,” Lutz muttered.

The girl tripped and sprawled onto the scrubby grass.  Her bag spilled its contents.

I watched the girl for anything unusual.  All I saw was the initial paralysis and then the ducking.  It wasn’t typical d-gen behavior.  D-gens didn’t understand bullets.  They didn’t know to duck.

Crawling on her knees in a rush for the corn, the girl scooped her treasures back into her bag, got her feet beneath her and ran between the nearest stalks, creating a wake in the corn that indicated the path she followed off the screen.

Ricardo stopped the video and looked at us, nodding.  “See?”

Lutz snorted.  “That doesn’t prove she’s anything.”

Ricardo looked at me.

I shrugged.  “Could go either way.”

Ricardo turned back to his computer and backed the video up to the point where the girl fell and her bag spilled.  He stopped it there with one frame burning on the screen. 

The girl was down, mostly.  An elbow and forearm were planted in the dirt, as was the side of her face and her chest.  Her hips and legs hadn’t yet hit the ground.  One arm was stuck out in front, hand open, fingers splayed as the bag got away and some of its contents were caught mid-tumble:  a shoe, what looked like a pair of jeans, something light-colored halfway out—maybe a blouse—and a brilliantly glowing little rectangle.

I leaned in close for a better look.  “Oh shit.”

“Uh-huh,” confirmed Ricardo.

Lutz leaned in and shared the smell of his dinner again.  “What is it?”

Ricardo pushed him back.  “Cell phone.”

“No.”  Lutz stepped back and dodged left, then right, as though the fact was in the air and trying to catch him.  “A glare from the fire.”

“Wrong color of light,” said Ricardo.  “My video guys are looking at this at a level of detail you wouldn’t understand.”

To help Lutz accept the only conclusion, I said, “D-gens don’t carry charged cell phones.”

“And look at her arm.”  Ricardo pointed.  “Tattoo.”

How did I miss that?

D-gens never had tattoos.  Nearly all of them showed signs of mental degeneration before they were old enough to go to kindergarten.  By the time they were mature enough to want a tattoo they were too far gone to understand what one was or how to get it.

Lutz shook his head and muttered silently before he stepped up to me, blocking out Ricardo.  He glanced down at the pile of my money that was still on the desk.  “Canada.  That’s plenty of money to get us there and get us set up.”

“That’s Ricardo’s money,” I told him.

Lutz glanced over his shoulder at Ricardo.  He looked back at me and exaggerated a slow look at the money.

I’m pretty sure he was urging me to kill Ricardo and take the money back.  But maybe that was just me reading too much of Lutz’s unpleasant personality into his intentions.

Speaking slowly, he said, “We should go to Mexico.”

As much as going to Mexico or Canada was still an option, it wasn’t an option I was willing to exercise with Lutz as a traveling companion.  His only value to me came from the contacts he had in Houston’s graft market.  He’d be a burden anywhere else.  That, and I didn’t intend to take part in the robbery he was clearly hinting at.  I’d made a deal with Ricardo—that money on the table was now his.  I put a hand on Lutz’s shoulder to nudge him out of my way.  “You’re getting too worked up to think straight.  Take one of those pills and go rest on the couch.”  I didn’t say it kindly.

Lutz’s face showed a desperate sadness as he stepped out of my way. 

Ricardo was at his keyboard again, opening up an email.  “I just got this in from Blix—she’s a hacker who rents one the apartments on the other side of the building.”

I looked at the screen.  “What is it?”

“Blix ran a facial recognition program on the girl.”  Ricardo looked back at Lutz to emphasize just how wrong Lutz’s desperate guesses were. 

“And?” I asked.

Ricardo clicked an attachment, and a document filled the screen as it opened up.  He leaned back and pointed at the glowing monitor.

I stepped behind Ricardo for a full view, seeing some type of identification paper I wasn’t familiar with.  It held a picture of the blonde girl—I was pretty sure it was her—younger, clean hair, not as lean as she looked in the video.  I read aloud, “Sienna Galloway.  Five-Six.  Green eyes.  Behavioral Conditioning Specialist at Blue Bean Agriculture, LLC.”

“Blue Bean?” Lutz asked as he headed for the couch.  “That big farming outfit?  They own half of three goddamn counties out there.  She works for them?”

“Makes sense right?” Ricardo answered.  “All of those d-gens you killed were wearing Blue Bean dog collars.”

“What?” Lutz didn’t believe it.

“She’s the only one who wasn’t.”

I didn’t believe but I kept my mouth closed.

Ricardo rewound the video again to a point where a clear view of several of the d-gens wearing collars on their necks could be seen.  Ricardo stopped the video.  “See?”

How did I miss that?

Ricardo said, “All those d-gens were Blue Bean Farms’ workers.  Every one except the girl.”

Neither Lutz nor I had any response.  Somehow, with all that had been going on, that detail never stuck with either of us.

“There’s a phone number here.”  Ricardo pointed at Sienna Galloway’s information sheet.

Time to get back on task.

Having already disassembled my phone, I came back around to my place on Ricardo’s desk.  “Can I use your phone?”

Ricardo opened a drawer that contained a half-dozen phones among other random pieces of junk.  “Pick one.  A thousand each.”

I looked at the phones. 
A thousand dollars?

“Clean,” said Ricardo.  “Use it for a week or two then toss it.  Better yet, toss the SIM card and sell the device.”

New phones were impossible to get outside of government, but old phones like these were a dime a dozen.  “I’d be lucky to get fifty bucks for it.”

“Without a SIM card and an active account, that’d be exactly right,” Ricardo confirmed. 

I’d already put too much risk on myself by stupidly not pulling the SIM card out of my phone the moment I found out I had a warrant.  I wasn’t going to risk putting the SIM card back in.  I reached into my pocket and took out two thousand dollars and laid the money on the desk.  “If I buy two, can I get a third for free?”

Ricardo laughed.  “Why not?”

I took three phones, dropped one in my pocket, tossed one to Lutz, and flipped the third open.  “I’ll need the number off that phone, Lutz, so you and I can call each other.”

Lutz grumbled something as he fumbled with his overpriced, used phone.

I looked at the number on Ricardo’s screen for Sienna Galloway, and I dialed as he looked on approvingly.

The phone took a moment to connect, but once it did, it didn’t ring, it went straight to a generic voicemail account.

“Crap.”

Ricardo raised his eyebrows in question.

“Her phone’s dead,” I told him.

Ricardo looked back at the screen.  “It was working when she threw it back in the bag.”

I dialed a second time to confirm the result.  Still nothing but voicemail.  Damn.  An expeditiously placed bribe could do so much to remedy my problems.  Ten thousand dollars for a few little lies from Sienna Galloway and I’d have flimsy but sufficient proof to keep myself out of a work camp.