Fletcher (3 page)

My smile was returned.

Gotcha.

***

Clarice—the doleful girl in the blue dress—left my side a few hours later. She looked so pretty on the stretcher, clamped down to restrict her convulsions, with a thin trail of blood leaking from one eye. I thought of following her to Valerie, but I’d started to have fun and I wasn’t about to stop.

I smiled thinly. Amateurs. What did she expect would happen, mixing
hypno
and
angel-rage
? A recipe for disaster. I guess I shouldn’t have encouraged it, but I can hardly be held accountable.

Hypno
never really interested me. It was the only social drug that explicitly ended all social contact, reducing its users to a set of paralytic bodies invariably taking up all the comfortable seats. It was based off the same compound used by the body to paralyse itself during REM sleep, resulting in hypnagogic hallucinations. Too much of it had the side effect of increasing blood-flow to the head more than was healthy, often rupturing capillaries in the eyes.

Angel-rage
, on the other hand, was slightly more my style. A severely complex compound, it worked by both dosing the body with norepinephrine—violent adrenaline, to you—while fully blocking dopamine and endorphin receptors. The result: induced aggression and an inability to feel pleasure or satisfaction, which drove its users into frustrated states of madness. Anything was possible with enough
angel-rage
; the calmest, quietest person could be driven to leap off buildings, set fire to others or feed hooks through their own body.

The rush was always incredible; being entirely unfettered and uninhibited has a way of leaving a very tangible, addictive mark on your mind. But the ingenuity of the drug didn’t stop there. After a certain amount of time, the primary compound would decompose into multiple activators, triggering excess dopamine and endorphin production. In an instant, almost every pleasure centre in the brain would light up like a flare, reducing its users to a near-delirious state. As fun as it was, I was always wary of the Crippling Climax. It was a moment of blissful vulnerability. I don’t do vulnerable.

I took out a notepad and started writing.

Hypno + angel-rage. Results in seizures, minor haemolacria and temporary dementia. Parts of the body that retain motility seem to convulse uncontrollably.

My own dose was beginning to kick in. My choice of the night was
straitjacket
; I was in the mood for chemically induced psychosis. Unlike
angel-rage
, which altered your experiences of pain and pleasure,
straitjacket
actually induced full sensory hallucinations by making neurons fire at intermittent rates. It was almost like a controlled, directed seizure, turning your perceptions into a cataclysmo of strange sounds, nonexistent colours and bizarre sensations. It had the occasional side effect of inducing a psychotic break from reality. I relocated upstairs to the Wasp Gallery, scanning the sprawl of dancing, thrashing writhers below with a noxious glare.

I felt the signature chills up my spine and closed my eyes, waiting for the drug to take ef–

#0966

“Ugh. This is why I never take hostages. They cry and moan and scream through their gag, and they make such a noise scrabbling in circles on my nice tiled floors. I was in no mood this morning. To stop him from crawling in circles, I nailed his other hand to the floor. Didn’t really fix the noise problem, but it was fun, at least.

“I also saw the boy today. He was outside the library while I was hiding razor blades in the books. He looked nervous.

“He’s going to die again.”

4: Special Kindness

There was a sharp, probing pain in the back of my head. My face was pressed onto a cold steel plate, and I knew from experience that I was on a gurney. My eyes opened as the needle punctured my scalp again.

“Are you poking around for fun, or do I actually need stitches there?”

“Take a look at your fingernails. To put it mildly, a lot of that blood is yours.”

I gingerly moved my hand in front of my face, taking care not to shift my head. My nails were encrusted with a thick layer of red. I tried to pick some of the blood out with my thumb, before I realised that my thumbnail was, in fact, missing.

Regardless of the dazed state I was in, it hurt.

“How was I when you got me?”

“Curled up, shivering, hugging yourself for warmth. The usual. You managed to send someone else to me after that blue girl: seems that you convinced him to open up his wrists on a broken bottle. You were also apparently running around dripping
angel-rage
into the throats of the
hypno
users, or so Dante tells me.”

A memory tumbled out of the blackout. Valerie was right: I’d spent a large portion of the night trying to trigger more seizures.

“So I kept you busy?”

“What? Not really. Just the two. Hardly out of character for you.”

I smiled, head still fuzzy. “I aim to please, Valerie.”

I received an abrupt stab to the back of my head.

“While I’m fixing you, it’s Doctor Gravewood. Jesus, K, how sharp are your nails? This is worth about eight stitches alone.”

Alone?

I mentally mapped out the rest of my body. There was a throbbing in my thumb, and the dull pain at the back of my head. What else?

“If you’re trying to work out what else I had to patch up, you’re fresh out of luck. Your right leg needed about twelve: I had to remove a hook from your thigh. It’s been anaesthetized for now: a special kindness.”

She finished her work, tightening the weave with a brief tug. I rolled over, finally meeting with her eye to eye.

Valerie Gravewood was weird. Few other words describe her so fully. She was abjectly odd in ways that could never be reconciled with normal society. Long before 2012, she had worked in a morgue, until she eventually had her medical license revoked for carving poetry into the rib cages of cadavers. She paid special tribute to the works of Edgar Allen Poe, as I recall.
Annabel Lee
was her favourite, by far.

Personally, I thought the entire thing was a riot. Unfortunately for Valerie, her superiors thought very differently of her desecration. Little did they know the full, wonderful extent of her crimes.

The lack of a license did very little to keep her away from the medical field. She began to flit between shadier organisations and mercenary groups, working as a field doctor during missions and operations. She eventually settled down—to use a phrase loosely—in a quiet part of town, working as a no-questions-asked surgeon. Need a bullet extracted, but your face is all over the news? Valerie can help you out. A friend is overdosing, but you don’t want to go to the hospital? Dr Gravewood is your girl.

I met her in a professional context. I’d been involved in a shoot-out with three bodyguards and one of the CEOs of an international munitions company. While I had both eliminated my mark and gunned down two of his personnel, the third guard managed to get me in the shoulder. With my situation getting desperate, and the law closely monitoring any hospitals in the area, I turned to the rumours of this enigmatic surgeon working out of sight and under the radar.

One quick operation and a hefty fee later, I was dosed up on enough morphine to put a small mammal down. Scalpels seem to be a conversational aphrodisiac for personalities such as ours, and we got to talking.

Three years later and here we were: best friends (relatively speaking), partners in crime (of more than I’d care to mention), occasional lovers (in the most masochistic sense of the word) and sporadic confidants (generally through tales of conquest and glory).

In short, we worked well together.

She grinned at me. At least, I assumed she was grinning: her medical mask kept that part of her face hidden. The eyes gave it away, though. I knew exactly what that calculating green glint meant.

“So. Now that I’ve stopped you from bleeding out: how can I help you?”

I rolled my eyes. Valerie always knew when I needed something. She also never held back in explaining how she knew. I let her continue.

“High levels of degraded
livewire
in your system, low levels of glucose. Means you’ve been awake for a long time. Not only awake, but working: no time to eat properly. So, you’ve been on the job. You’ve been busy.

“Your coat is clean, relatively speaking, but you’ve definitely been wearing it for a day at least. That means that whatever job you’ve been on hasn’t been hands on. So, the job is an investigation of sorts. Murder, theft, surveillance. Something that takes time but not strenuous work...”

I zoned out. Valerie was prone to these rants. It was her way of strutting, and I never thought to take that away from her; my own special kindness.

“Finally, your abuse is always proportional to whatever’s on your mind. During the bank security case, you force-fed an epileptic
hypno
and put a hook through his hand. I think he’s still in a coma. During the hit on the Minister of Defence, you bit off someone’s ear before collapsing from alcohol poisoning. Last night? You send a girl to me on a stretcher, practically overdose on
straitjacket
and get a suitor to open his wrists, all before the sun rose.

“Something’s up. Now spill.”

I smiled. Despite her rambling, she was good.

“Take a look.”

I handed her the photographs from the house. She paged through them with an air of indifference, but I could see she was interested.

“There’s only so much I can do without getting my hands on the bodies. What I can tell you from these is limited, but here goes:

“They had a good marriage, and have both been happy for at least a few months. The double-tap to her chest is very executioner style. Close to the heart, you see? Despite his rage, or whatever, he wanted her to go quickly.”

“But why not shoot her in the head?”

“Because you don’t shoot something you love in the face.”

“So he definitely loved her?”

“That’s how I read it. He was also scared, or shocked, or some level of emotionally compromised at the time. Weak wrists gave rise to the interesting shot to his own head—upwards trajectory, entering his temple and erupting out the top left side of his head. Anger stiffens up the body, which would level the shot. Not here.”

She handed back the photographs, a puzzled look distorting her features.

“Why did he turn away?”

“I was hoping you would tell me.”

The expression persisted.

“This certainly isn’t your standard murder-suicide. Nice catch. Any background information on the victims?”

I had done a small amount of searching at the start of this case. Born and raised in Germany, in the years before 2012 the husband had worked at a foreign distributing branch representing a small German munitions company. When Berlin burned and the entire country went belly up, it did very little to take the wind out of his sails. Three months after Germany was abandoned by the rest of the world, the distributing branch had been repurposed under a far larger munitions company—RailTech. This name had instantly set off alarm bells for me. RailTech was dubious in its dealings at best. Aside from their incredibly vicious marketing cycles and technology releases, which rendered previous RailTech technology obsolete at a rate of knots, they had ascended to the position as largest munitions supplier through multiple ruthless takeovers, sabotage, extortion and a surprisingly long string of well-concealed corporate assassinations.

Naturally, they were one of my more common clients. No fewer than three members of the Department of Defence have met their end because RailTech tapped me on the shoulder and pointed, and as many opposing factories have suffered tragic—and spectacular—equipment malfunctions by my hand.

The wife, on the other hand, took a far more simple life working as a consultant dietician for schools and sporting institutions. Very little in her history raised any alarm—born in France, 1982; met her husband at a marathon in 2005; married four years later. Stone dead in 2014, shot to death by the same man who beat her by one place in 2005.

Valerie took all this in with a half-smile, while she tended to a comatose female in the gurney beside me. When I was done, she was quiet for a few minutes, and only once she had finished extracting shards of glass from her patient’s eardrum did she speak again.

“Three theories so far; none particularly good. First, some German-French vendetta. The frogs were the first to drop the krauts in 2012; could be that John Rourke here was pressured into offing his wife by a group of pissed-off survivors.

“Secondly, RailTech could have had a hand in this. From what you tell me, if a tree falls in a forest, chances are RailTech was responsible and has already stolen its shares. Maybe John knew something. Maybe he was planning something. Either way, the big plotters get wind of it, deal with the wife and set the husband up. Husband chooses acute lead poisoning over jail.

“Finally, what if she cheated on him? Works as a dietician, spends her time around good-looking sportsmen. Sure, not so much anymore, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t. Husband finds out, flies into a rage, double-taps her and then realizes what he’s done. Great love works both ways, unfortunately.”

I sighed. “None of those address the silencer. Or the fact that he turned around.”

“The silencer is circumstantial, K. This is 2014. Gunshots are hardly uncommon. The likelihood of someone reporting gunfire these days is fairly slim. Bring the gun to me and I’ll be able to judge for certain. As for the turn... I have no idea. You always get something you can’t explain, especially with murders.”

“This isn’t it. A man doesn’t gun down the love of his life and then turn a hundred and eighty degrees before blowing his brains out, for no reason.”

Valerie bit her lip, and I turned away. I could see that neither of us particularly liked her theories. The chances of a vengeful German survivor cell operating anywhere were small at best, while I still held the third theory with an air of doubt. The only theory which held water was the one that implied that, somehow, RailTech was involved. This didn’t help at all. RailTech was almost always involved, with everything.

“Get me the gun; that will clear up the silencer issue. If you’re going to pursue this, we need to get out of the cul-de-sac. Look around for anything interesting in the month before their death. Oh, and K—”

I felt the prick of the needle in my neck before I could turn around.

“Get some sleep. Lord knows you need it.”

There were sweet narcotics, and sweeter darkness. Valerie loved her morphine.