The Forever Watch (16 page)

After two days, Barrens introduces me to Officer Miyaki Miura.

The diner is small, open only late at night and on weekends. The décor is 1950s Americana. Prints of those old petrol-burning cars and trucks. Black and whites of the famous actresses from the movies not on the ISec proscribed list. The owners are workers at the vertical farm who run this restaurant as a hobby. Between the overhead for rent and the expenses for their supplies, their culinary skills allow them a price scale that probably just allows them to eat a slightly better class of food. Denser synthetic meat. A slightly richer blend of margarine. A milk substitute that is almost like real milk.

She is there before us, stands when we enter. Officer Miura is a broad-shouldered woman with a delicate face. Porcelain cheeks, and bright gems for eyes and lips. She is diminutive, petite even with the bulk of the blue Inspector's overcoat. It is one I have seen before. I know her of course, though we have never met before today. I know her from combat briefings and after-action reports I have dipped into, and when Barrens would toss and turn at my side in the midst of nightmares, it is her name he muttered. She is the other woman closest to Barrens. A sister in battle, who has bled for him and whom he has bled for too.

She is as intimidating as I imagined she would be.

“Um. Hello.”

“Hi.”

We shake hands. I am taller, but her hand is larger than mine. It is steel under the glove, tense, all carefully controlled power. I wonder if all field peace officers have this coiled-spring tension in all their movements. Perhaps it is a by-product of their training, just as the dreamy-eyed, distracted looks that afflict me are a by-product of mine, an indicator of the multithreaded thought trances analysts maintain through most of the working day. She openly eyes me up and down. What does she see in me? I've wanted to meet her for a while, curious about this other woman in Barrens's life, the only other who knows about his beast. But I am not happy to meet like this, with his saddling her with my safety.

“Sorry about this.”

“Don't be sorry. The big lug just cares about you is all. He's a worrier.”

Barrens's glower is particularly fierce. “When I'm not around, you gotta protect her, Miya.”

“Okay already.” She rolls her eyes. “Nothing's going to happen, Barrens.”

The booths are designed for parties of four. She has one bench all to herself and slouches to take up all that space. She is languid, at ease, but her eyes are still sharp, flickering around the diner, examining every person who enters and leaves.

Crammed together on the opposite bench, Barrens and I barely fit. It might be easier if I sat on his lap. Barrens has been with me long enough that I have grown accustomed to how much larger he is than the average; eating out is always a reminder.

We have a short, quick meal together, us three. Tofu burgers and fried yam chips. Ice cream that is more natural than artificial. We chat about everything except for why Barrens wants her to be my part-time bodyguard.

Then Officer Miura cocks her head to one side, as those who receive a direct message often do. She has to go. “Assignment and all. Good to meet you, Ms. Dempsey. I'll be by in the morning at seven.”

I am to never go anywhere alone. He practically moves into my apartment, except for nights when we are both at his. He changes the locks on our doors and has me reinforce the hinges with a special telekinetic processing that makes them more resistant to TK manipulation. I don't know what good that will do, considering how Mincemeat got to Callahan through a thick door triple-bolted from the inside.

Miyaki Miura is faintly amused when it's her turn to keep an eye on me. She knows about our looking into Callahan's death, but not the scope of it, or how many other similar deaths there have been. Mostly, she talks about the old days, about being Barrens's partner through police academy and their first years in the force. Sometimes, she complains about her low income, and how much money she has to spend on food. She complains about the Psyn rings that have been spreading throughout the Habitat, kids riding the highs of enhanced psychic ability at the cost of burned-out brain cells and psychosis.

Unlike Barrens, she does not much care about politics and history, which is a relief. I get more than enough of that with Leon.

When he was shunted to Long Term Investigations, she got a promotion. And rates a police car. It's an interesting change, the mornings and evenings when she drives me around. I rank a private-vehicle permit, but anything more substantial than a bicycle is ridiculously pricey, and I live close to a train station and multiple bus stops.

Like Hennessy, Miyaki has no problems with getting a little too personal. “So, Miss Dempsey. What's he like in bed, our great big beastly friend?” Her smile is wicked.

“Uh.” Stammering, I try to turn it around. “You don't know?”

“It never worked out between me and him. We're just not each other's type. Actually, before you, I didn't think there was anyone, man or woman, who was his type.”

That heats up my cheeks more than her too informative tales about her multitude of boyfriends.

Miyaki turns the wheel. The narrow wedge of the car whispers around a corner. She is careful and aware of all our surroundings. Like Barrens, she does not need
reading
talents to get a read on people.

“You are the only one he's ever fallen for,” she says, something sad and happy in her voice. “There have been others. But you know him. He's different inside from how he seems. They never lasted.

“I like you together. And he's a good friend to me. Which is the only reason I'm humoring this current bout of looniness.”

She drops me off at my apartment and stays long enough to watch me unlock the building's outer door and enter.

The days pass without incident. Maybe it is just a coincidence. Maybe we are getting too deep into this. Are we at the point where we're scaring ourselves, looking for shadows where there aren't any?

Barrens, of course, has no doubts. We spend every night talking about our stranger. About what we can do to catch him first.

He is out there. He is closing in on us every day.

10

The best idea we come up with is to keep visiting the locations our stalker has already tracked us to. It seems too passive to me, and what's worse is we can't just stake out all these locations on our own. We still have our jobs. At most we can make a map of locations where Barrens has scented our man and the dates he's done so, then try to rotate through those locations when we can go there, mostly after our workdays are over and weekends.

It is dependent on chance for so many reasons. Barrens can't just stand there with his amplifier continuously activated. The calorie burn would be enormous—he'd have to eat enough for a normal person's daily intake of calories for each half hour with the amp on even the lowest power draw. So he has to use an app that automatically turns it on for a few seconds out of every minute.

The strobing effect on his senses gives him a constant headache.

Barrens wants to do it on his own and keep me safe and far away. Nuts to that.

“You're not leaving me behind for anything,” I keep having to tell him every time before we leave to follow the strange, not-quite random pattern of the stranger's scent.

Weeks pass like this, and my nerves tighten up with the passing days, until the occasional evening when I can't take it anymore and force Barrens to take a break with me. To attend a jazz concert. To go dancing. To just watch an old movie.

But we always return to this. Standing with Barrens in an alley next to the chowder place, or at this train station or that one, or in the park where I met Gorovsky, we watch people come and go. Is it this guy, or that guy? Wondering if it's Mincemeat. And if it is, what would a monster look like?

In the meantime, my program still spreads and searches throughout the Web. I can't understand how there can be so many Mincemeat vanishings; I'm sure they must be false positives, just as Barrens is sure they are not.

If we happen across him, will Barrens smell him first? Or will he detect us first, through whatever means the stranger has managed to find us?

 

 

Friday evening and I couldn't get out of it. The terrible three insisted and dragged me out to the paintball course. They also invited half of our graduating class from school. At least only thirty came.

“Didn't you miss this?” Jazz laughs while glowing globs of paint fly overhead.

We're crouched behind my hastily erected barrier; just a mound of earth three feet high.

The course is a maze. The rules are that anyone can use one of the guns, or use
touch
, but not both, and no amplifiers.

She shrieks and ducks as a hail of blue spheres curves around my wall, necessitating some impressive and desperate tumbling to avoid the splatter.

Down the range, Lyn laughs at us. “Come on, D, do your thing!”

“Ooooh, that's it now.” Jazz glows. Without an amp, her touch of
bruiser
is still substantial enough to give her performance at the edge of human ability—enough for a nine-second hundred-meter dash. She ducks and dives, a demented ballerina laughing as she
touch-
flings paintballs from her waist belt right back at Lyn.

I am
not
in the mood to be running around playing at battle.

But they are my friends, and I'm being mopey and it's not fair to them. “Hey, wait for me!”

I don't have any
bruiser
's psychometabolism at all, so compared to Jazz, I move in slow motion. But I do have the strongest
touch
talents of anybody in today's game, and as I charge like a snail behind Jazz, I keep pulling up earthen barriers an inch thick to block incoming fire. They're paintballs—it doesn't take much of a wall to stop them.

Then I make like the artillery and send the other group squealing in retreat as, still jogging forward, I fling up my hands and fire up half my pack of paintballs all at once. The red blobs blur and chase the enemy as they run. I scatter half a dozen of Marcus's Water Department buddies and Lyn's team from Nth Web R&D in about five seconds. When I lose sight of my targets, I have enough control to stop the projectiles without crushing them, then retarget and shoot them again.

“That is totally unfair,” Jazz says admiringly, laughing. “I'm suddenly remembering why we stopped playing paintball halfway through school.”

Marcus yells from the bottom of a ditch, out of sight, but I saw him jumping in and guessed right at his position when I sent half a dozen blurs his way. He always sits still too long after taking cover. “Son of a bitch! I just got my hair done!” He stands, shaking his fists in Lyn's general direction, in a bunker that serves as their side's base. “You just
had
to get her going!”

Now I'm laughing too. “Hey, you wake up the dragon, you get the fire, baby!”

For a couple of hours, we're kids again.

 

 

It is Saturday, the night just after I played at chasing and being chased by my friends.

And now, Barrens and I are not playing, at all. We are stalking even as we are being stalked.

It is a cold night. There are no stars tonight, just thick clouds, a haze reflecting the glow from the city.

I see him before Barrens smells him.

A slender man in a long coat, with a hat. I notice him because, as he walks along the sidewalk, he keeps stopping, and … touching things. Lampposts. The handles to the doors into the buildings. He does not seem drunk. He is not swaying or stumbling. Sometimes, he just brushes those long, slender fingers against an object. Sometimes he stays with his hands on something for ten minutes at a time.

He passes without turning to look at the opposite side of the street, where we are. Under the bright circle of a streetlamp, his face is astonishingly young. He looks like a teenager. This … this can't possibly be our killer. Can it? If it is … the dates of so many of our hits are wildly off.

Don't follow close.

Barrens glides out of the alleyway. Glides. It seems impossible someone so large can walk so quietly. His badge is on the inside of his coat; only a little bit of its red glow leaks as he moves. He crosses over to where our quarry is.

I take a deep, deep breath of the frosty air. When Barrens is half a block away, I follow too.

Crap. He practically already found me.

Haltingly, the stranger is making his way toward the South Edo Precinct. Barrens's station.

At every street corner, the slender figure touches the post for the pedestrian lights, the transmission boxes that project ads into the neural Implants of everyone that passes.

When the stranger passes the next alley, Barrens pours it on. Each step covers several feet. In an instant, Barrens is there.

His arm comes around from behind, clamps tight against the smaller man's face. A second more, and both of them vanish into the gap between two shophouses that are closed for the evening.

Even if the street had not been empty, I wonder if anyone would have noticed.

I walk the rest of the distance, quick as I can.

When I get there, Barrens has the boy hoisted up against a wall. His huge paw is clamped tight against the other's neck. Both the kid's hands don't as much as budge the steel pillar that is Barrens's arm.

“You're going to tell us who you are,” Barrens growls. “And how you found us.”

Wide-eyed, red-faced, the boy croaks something out.

“What was that?”

Gasping, the boy repeats himself. “I … juh-just … w'nted … ta … know…” Panicked, he broadcasts to both of us; he has more
writing
talent than I do and pushes a flood of murky images and thoughts at us telepathically, rather than through Implant messaging. Most of it is too unfocused to understand, but there is a single, clear image.