Shadow Unit 15 (5 page)

The man ignores you. He takes a telephone call, or pretends to, since he's got a headset in one ear. He's talking about buying houses. Many houses, not just one. He calls them properties, says something about using the investment for a tax break.

You glare daggers into his back. The power rushes through you. You tell yourself you can't stop it, but honestly, you don't want to. Rich bastard. It builds until it bursts, and you feel coldness just behind you. Even silent, you feel Ash, but in the moments when the power releases she disappears.

The man glances left and right. Apologizes to the phone— "I thought I heard something, what did you say?" —but he can't stop looking around. You watch his shoulders twitch, a shudder. "I'm sorry, something came up, I'll call you later."

Justice is yours. You push the power again, and he twists at the waist trying to catch sight of something, hugs the jug of milk to him, wipes his hand on his pants.

He doesn't even last a minute. He near-whimpers, "I've got to get out of here," sets down the jugs, and half runs to the exit. The security guard tries to intercept him, but the man cries, "I've got to get out of here!" and shoves him aside in his haste to get out.

A screech of tires and a blaring horn follow his exit. People crane their necks as if they could see through the walls.

You fight the urges to grin and to faint at the same time.

Arlington, VA

Hafidha and Chaz's condo smells like fresh baked bread and it obeys Hafidha's every gesture. She snaps her fingers and the lights come on, the burglar alarm accepts her code when she points at it. A voice murmurs, "You have no messages," as Hafidha wiggles her nose at an enormous flat-screen TV. It scrolls quickly through menus and Tom Petty plays through the home theater.

Sol puts his elbows on the butcher-block table and sighs contently.

"We've got beer. Your iPad's connected... and there's the file server. Unless you want a laptop, on the shelf there."

"Beer's good. What do you need me to chop?"

"Apples," Hafidha says. "I meant it about the pies. Chaz pulled out frozen leftover stew for dinner today."

He waves at the table in front of himself. "Put the knife and fruit there. How much stew do the two of you have to make to have leftovers?"

"Twelve quarts."

"Wow. Talk about your hunch?"

"Sure." Hafidha opens drawers, puts out bowls, finds a bag of apples in a cupboard. "Like I said, the car accident caught my eye. It got me thinking—about Erik."

"But it made you wonder."

"Well it's not a usual thing, is it? Yelling in terror and driving into a tree? There had to be a reason. So I thought, I'll find out what it was, lay this to rest. Only I got—"

"More questions," Sol says, peeling an apple in one long loop.

"More questions," Hafidha agrees. "And the bugzapper only trips when I start worrying that it's the Bug making me fix on this." A heavy pot goes on the stove, and Hafs spoons two containers of thick beef stew into it. The dishes land in the left-hand sink on her way to the fridge.

"Does it work better, or worse, knowing that it's zapping your responses?"

"Mine works great. I've had a lot of time to monitor it. I probably have a scientific paper about my 1.52 revision."

"You gonna write it?"

"Kat—Doctor Allison can do it."

"How much better do you feel?"

"It hasn't un-monstered me. But I trust myself some of the time. I trust Chaz more, of course. And he thinks I can be on my own. So I do not fuck it up, because he trusts me. Neat trick, yeah?"

"Neat trick," Sol agrees. "You want to hear what I'm thinking about with your motor-vehicle accidents?"

"Yeah. First, my guess. We've got a gremlin."

"That's what I was thinking. Someone with the ability to make machines malfunction. That or a witch."

"Throwing hexes?" They both pause for a moment, remembering New Mexico. And Daphne.

"Land of Enchantment," Sol says. Apple wedges splash in acidulated water. Then: "Hexes is vague, and we don't yet have a pattern to put a gremlin on."

"Maybe there's two," Hafida says, rocking the pastry blade though lard and butter and flour. "Because I'm just a barrel of sunshine."

"If we find two patterns, then maybe we'll have two gammas. How do you want to organize this?"

"Do it any way you want to. I can literally pick the data out of the air. Can you make me a cup of ice water, and get me the vodka from the freezer?"

"I can," Sol says, and rises to get both things. "For the piecrust?"

"For the piecrust," Hafidha agrees. "I'm thinking about the panic attacks. Can we eliminate the repeat customers for panic attacks?"

"Probably, but let's just tag repeats and then see if there's nothing. A witch could hex someone they know personally many times. I've got another tag, for the accidents," Sol says, and cores another peeled apple after cutting it in half. "Can you check to see if any of the vehicles were under a recall, and match any of the mechanical failures not just by type of failure but the same car models and years?"

"So say, 2008 MINI Cooper S, circuit board fire?"

"You didn't make that up."

Hafidha grins her wide grin. "I certainly did not. Fresh off recall.gov."

"You're an oracle, Hafs. I would keep you in my pocket."

"You do. I'm on your phone."

*

Some time later, Hafiha serves them both wedges of apple pie and Sol nods in satisfaction at the balance of sweetness and spices. He put his fork down to linger over the first bite, and Hafidha nods. That's as it should be. And it's as good a time as any to admit that she needs help.

"Actually I wonder if I could ask you to do this unpaid labor," Hafidha asks, and then washes down the bit of pie with some of her pint glass of milk. "I can rob seven hundred banks, bounce the money around the world and buy you stock certificates, if you're low on cash. But that would be a bit like bringing you a dead vole, so maybe I should just shut up and ask."

"Pay me in pie, Hafidha. This is fantastic. Really, what would you like?"

"When I told you all that I was looking into, you came up with better ideas than me," Hafidha says.
Can't get right to it, gotta talk around it.
"I didn't think of the panic attack thing, and the lawsuit claims compared against recorded parts recalls, that's all really good. I think I'm too close to it. I had a hunch, but it's about Erik. I want to find who's responsible. I never stopped thinking that."

"And now you posit accidents involving weird malfunctions."

"Yes. Well, no. That's what I found, and I'm trying to connect them together."

"But the accident your parents witnessed didn't have a weird malfunction."

"In the car, there was no weird malfunction. But there was in the body."

"You can't connect the two, you know that."

"But I can't shake the idea that I'm looking at a single point on two different graphs. And I will obsess, and I will keep looking... Sol, I
can't
do this alone. But if you can carry it..."

Sol gently sets his fork down. "That's a lot of trust, Hafs."

"I know you won't just soothe me down and not look. Besides. If I'm right? You want to know, too." Hafidha watches Sol's slow, single nod. "I might be faster at finding a needle in a big pile of needles, but you're better at figuring out which needle used to be in Drama Club in middle school with the other needle I found, and how it makes a story. I'll be your pocket oracle, you be the maestro."

Hafidha can't help the smile she gets when Sol nods. "Can you put everything we have on a server I can access?"

"It's on your iPad. You want it at home, too?"

"The machine's powered off."

"Turn it on when you get home and text me," Hafs says. "You sure you don't want those stock certificates?"

"Scrounging around your place for food and pie is fine." He pauses, pensive. "Hafs, Stephen and I have been working on something that maybe it's time you knew about."

"The thing that eats T. rexes?" she asks.

"Yes. And." The crust is flaky and perfect, but Hafidha watches Sol pick at it nonetheless. "Stephen thinks there's a pattern. One that includes Hope Mitchell and Guy Nadon and Jeffrey Simmons."

"Quantico," she says, eyes closing. "Viv Paliotto?"

"Erik Holt is on his list as well."

She nods, a puppet movement. Deliberate. Artificial. "I'm not the only conspiracy theorist in the house."

"We had reasons not to mention it."

"They were good reasons," she says. "Chaz knows?"

"He's the pattern master," Sol admits. "You're not angry?"

"You give me everything I can handle, Duke. You trust me more than I do. What's to be angry about?" Deliberately, she cuts more pie. Takes a bite, swallows. "Someone's gunning for us. And has been for a long time."

"Evidence suggests," he says gently.

She stands. "Well. I want coffee. How about you?"

"I'll be up all night," he answers, but it's not a no.

Arlington, VA, May 7, 2014

The phone rings just after midnight. Hafida puts the phone on speaker and hooks a finger under her bead bracelet. "Platypus?"

"I'm coming home, Wabbit. We found our UNSUB." Chaz's tired voice sounds through measured breaths.

"You sound like that's not a win. Did the arrest go down messy?"

"We found Chad Wendell Holmes in his apartment. Strangled."

Hafidha shrugs into a cashmere cardigan, and stuffs her feet into slippers. "Strangled."

"We got there too late. I can't order the body up so Frost can examine it, but there was no reason to believe he was a gamma."

"What even the hell, Platypus. This is the worst Moriarty ever. And you didn't get to see any music, did you."

"I am so mad, Wabbit."

"I am, too."
Check out the empathy,
Hafs thinks. But it's always easy to care about Chaz. "He did it as a taunt. And that'll be the hubris that means we get him. All the reports done?"

"Some of them."

Hafidha opens the fridge and pours herself a glass of milk. "Yoink."

"Wabbit..."

He wasn't actually alarmed, Hafs knew. Just habit."Just don't tell anybody. I'm giving them to Sol."

"Why Sol?"

"Because we have to update you on our acts of private citizenship."

"Wabbit..."

"Sol's looking out for me. And I watered the plants. And I didn't want to hurt them very much."

"And we're on a phone," he sighs, defeated.

"Sol told me about the conspiracy," she says, a rush.

There's a pause. Then: "Good," Chaz answers. "Frankly, I think we can use all hands."

"Are you here or there? I've got half a pie that needs eating."

"I'm here," Chaz says. "I'll be home soon. Do we need milk?"

"We always need milk."

Ashton, VA, May 14, 2014

This time the boxes Dice balances on his left hand are donuts — brown butter, dulce de leche, orange chocolate, and cannoli from a place on Capitol Hill. Leon takes a cannoli right away and passes the box on to his partner—"Try that kind before I eat them all"—and Dice makes his way up to the unit. Eddie waits for him in the hallway, chessboard and bag tucked under his arm. He's wearing faded jeans with a plaid shirt.

"Regular clothes," Dice says. "Walks yet?"

"Not yet," Eddie says, and something's wrong. He isn't smiling, isn't really interested in the baked goods or his nicotine gum. "Lets play, come on."

Eddie chooses a table that's off to the side, the dim corner by the piano no one plays, not his sunny window in earshot of the TV.

"Something wrong?" Dice asks.

"Natalie got mad at me," he says.

"Oh shit, sorry to hear. Is she still mad at you?"

"She's in observation," Eddie says. "I didn't know, I was just trying to help."

He sets the board up, gives Dice white. He looks down at the pieces with stubborn focus.

"What were you trying to help with?"

"You said you wouldn't use her, so I figured I'd try and get the ball rolling. I told her you liked her."

"Christ in a bucket."

"She got upset. Threw a table at me and then I—" He stops talking.

Dice opens with King's pawn four and Eddie mirrors it. "You didn't fight back."

"No, hell no, I knew I fucked up the second my brain caught up with my mouth," Eddie says, and accepts the King's Gambit.

"You shouldn't have said that to her. Natalie really doesn't need anyone romantically interested in her, and now she's probably not sure she can trust me to really be her friend."

"How do you even do that? Be friends with a girl. What do you even talk about?"

"Natalie's a scientist," Dice says quietly. "She likes to talk about chemistry and biology. She's very interested in the brain."

"Really? But she's... well, she's pretty."

"She's pretty, and she's a scientist," Dice says, and waits for the dismissal.

Instead Eddie settles down to play an open game, and the next thing Dice knows, he can't castle.

"Shit."

"Play it through and then I'll show you what I did," Eddie says. He remembers the games they play, never becomes more animated than when he explains a tactical choice, and Dice listens, remembers maybe half of it.

"I will never be good at this game," Dice says.

"You're better already," Eddie says. "It's just that I am now
really
good at this game. I've had a lot of time to learn it. I got books and stuff. And you're learning."

"Slowly."

"Nah. You get to play me for like half an hour a week, is all. We've done this what, twice? Last time was—shit, I was still in school. You got your own things you're into. Always have."

Maybe this is it,
Dice thinks.

"I have to tell you," Eddie says, and he's staring hard at the chess game between them. "When Natalie threw that table at me, I—"

When Eddie falters, Dice just waits.

"I used to think you were too stupid to learn, you know? When we were kids. You wouldn't learn better. You never would. And I thought I was better off because I was the good brother. And you know what I figured out? That's what put me in here. I'm here and you're not. Because you wouldn't learn."