Hellbender (2 page)

I had to agree, the odds of coincidence here were pretty thin.

So I took her check, and I got to work.

Brother Harry had a third-floor apartment in a tired part of town near the water, which address alone would’ve made me wonder about him. And when I walked in, using the key his sister had given me, I’d have known for sure: The air was so moist the paint was coming off the walls, and you could smell the mildew despite the scrubbers.
Which told me Harry had the kind of skin that needed to be damp. Humidity was one reason so many of his kind—okay,
my
kind—lived in San Francisco. (That, and the city’s hey-it’s-your-business attitude.) Which in turn was one reason I lived in Oakland where, being dryer and hotter, people didn’t automatically wonder if you were One of Them.

I stood in the neat little two-bedroom, listening to the low hum of the two opposing machines—one to make the air wet, the other to battle the effects of damp—and waited for the place to tell me about Harry. He was a tidy guy, I could see that. He liked bare floors and simple furniture, and color on the walls.
Not too many books, but then, books didn’t like humidity, so that was hardly unusual.

More interesting, the place had been searched. So carefully that, unless you’d done a
lot of cautious searches yourself, you wouldn’t have noticed it. And even I might not’ve caught on if the sun hadn’t been out, or if Harry liked sunlight a little less.

It gave me pause, for a minute. But in the end, I was here with the permission of the owner’s sister, and anyway, my presence was sure to be on a camera somewhere in the neighborhood. So I went ahead with my search, keeping an eye out for bugs, but either the guy who’d searched the place was sharper when it came to planting surveillance than he was at putting back the vases on dusty surfaces, or there weren’t any.

My client’s brother liked damp, but he also liked light, which was unusual, considering the sensitivity of most SalaMan eyes. His walls were painted a bright white, the bulbs in his lamps were full-strength, and the thin curtains over the windows were designed to keep out eyes rather than glare. Moving to the kitchen, I could see he was a cook, with a bunch of Asian-style pans and spices, more knives than I’d seen outside a French bistro, and an espresso machine the size of a small car. His refrigerator’s sell-by dates didn’t narrow down his departure a whole lot, although I didn’t spot anything that was actually expired.

And his willingness to embrace the amphibious side of his heritage stopped well short of his palate—you wouldn’t believe the things some of his—of
our
—kind tried putting on their plates.

Or maybe you would.

His closet had a suitcase in it. His bathroom had a toothbrush, electric razor, and zip-up traveling bag in a drawer. The little closet near the front door had an overcoat, a raincoat, and a leather jacket, and its only bare hangers were half-hidden by occupied ones. All of which suggested that when Harry went out, he didn’t expect to be gone long.

I pressed a couple of buttons on the espresso machine, took the cup of black sludge that resulted over to Harry’s desk, and settled down to the drawers.

The first thing I saw was a box of bullets. It was sitting next to a tin of oil and a cleaning rag. The box was half empty. I got up and went to look for all the likely places to hide a handgun: bedside table, behind the toilet, in the flour canister. No gun.

I had to wonder if he had a carry permit for it. Permits aren’t easy to get, here in California.

My tablespoon of espresso had gone cold, so I pressed the buttons again and let the powerful syrup dribble into the cup, then returned to the desk.

Four cups later, my nerves were singing and I knew a few more things about Harry Savoy. His sister had told me he was a kind of graphic artist specializing in architectural drawings, who worked from home. The room he used as an office was drier than the rest, probably because of the equipment—I’d gone there when I’d squeezed what I could from his desk, and found a desktop computer with a state-of-the-art drawing pad, a giant wall-mounted screen, and a printer fitted with paper three feet wide. Most of the stuff I didn’t touch, although I did turn on the desktop long enough to see that pretty much all the files were password protected. Which put it beyond my personal skill set, although I had a friend who could help me, if need be.

His paper files told me he made good money, and invested some. His machinery suggested that most of his friends existed online, through WeWeb, although he also had a Facebook page. I shut the computer down without logging on to either, and sat for a minute looking at the half-dozen framed pictures on the wall over the desk.

Harry was good looking. My client hadn’t mentioned that, not a thing a sister would
notice maybe, but the group photos had one person in common, a guy with a dark and intense look about him I figured would win him a lot of attention, even without the litheness he was sure to have when he moved. Gun, looks, money: maybe I didn’t have to look any further than old Harry’s personal life for a motivation.

But I would. If nothing else, I had to earn the check in my pocket. I made notes of his phone numbers from the bills on file, and made copies of the last few months’ statements on the credit cards he used. He had an address book, a tattered old thing that functioned as a backup to whatever phone he carried, but I wrote down a few of the addresses that looked more recent.

I didn’t find a laptop, or a pad, or the phone.

I did make one very interesting discovery, hidden in a place so clever I nearly missed it myself—inside the heater vent, under a false side that looked exactly like the other three. I pulled it out, and sat on the floor to look at it: a nine-by-twelve envelope of printouts and clippings, nineteen of them, that made my brain whir around for a while until a little voice told me it might be a good time to leave.
Taking the envelope with me.

Maybe I needed to take a look at the other names on that list, after all.

When I finally slipped back through my own front door, late that night, I stood in the dark for the longest time, straining to hear over the pounding in my heart. Stupid, to leave my gun in the safe. Stupid, stupid, to let the habits of paranoia go rusty.

After the longest time, my eyes showed no
motion. No intruder shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned me, and I heard nothing outside my own skin. When I forced my hand to flip on the light, the only thing that looked back at me was my wild-eyed reflection in the mirror—good thing I didn’t have a gun in my hand, I told myself, or I’d have blown a hole in the wall.

But just because there was no one waiting for me (and no one in the bathroom or in the closet) didn’t mean I was safe. In ninety seconds I had my gun, my hat, my go-bag of cash, and a clean shirt, and I was out the door.

I left my car where I’d parked it, and went away on foot.

Which took care of my own safety; now for that of my client.
It always looks bad when a PI loses a client. And anyway, she was probably going to owe me plenty by the time I’d finished.

She was asleep, of course, since it was just shy of two in the morning. Anyway, I hoped she was only asleep. Her small house up in Sausalito (another place with damp air and tolerant attitudes) was dark, like all of its neighbors, so I fiddled with the lock on her front door and let myself in—if I knocked loud enough to wake her, I’d wake the neighbors as well, to say nothing of giving warning to any
unfriendlies who might be listening. Her cat nearly gave me a heart attack, a flash of near-ultraviolet motion followed by a slapping noise from the next room, and I came maybe half a micron from squeezing the trigger into action before my brain translated the motion and screamed at me to lay off. I eased back the pressure, feeling a little shaky: lucky she didn’t have a Rottweiler.

I breathed in the air for a while, sniffing for any trace of death and blood and terror, but the house smelled good, like cooking and flowers. Like her, in fact. And only like her, which suggested that she lived alone.

So I cleared my throat and started talking in a low voice. “Ms. Savoy? Elizabeth? This is Mike Heller, the investigator you hired. Elizabeth, please, if you’re here I need you to wake up. This is Mike Heller, and I found out some things that make me think you’re not safe here. Sorry about breaking in like this, I sort of needed to. Um, Ms. Savoy? You there? This is Mike—”

The lights went on abruptly, dazzling my dark-adapted eyes. My right hand jerked again, and I blinked hard.

“Mr. Heller? What are you doing here?”

I blew out a breath. I was going to have to go someplace nice and quiet at the end of this damn case. Assuming I was still alive, of course. I let my gun drop to my side, although I didn’t put it away.

“Ms. Savoy, I’m afraid you may be in danger. I need you to throw a few things in a bag and come with me.”

“What, now? What time is it, anyway?”

“Time to go, if you want to live.”

Motion in the dark doorway resolved into a figure, dressed in slinky pajamas. Her hair was every which way, her face was bare of makeup, and she had a red pillow line across one cheek. She was absolutely gorgeous.

“It’s Harry, isn’t it? What did you find?”

“I’m leaving here in two minutes, with or without you. I can tell you about Harry later, once I’m sure we’re safe.
You coming or not?”

“I can’t
 . . . How do you . . . You broke into my house!”

“I couldn’t be sure you weren’t being watched. Still can’t be sure.”

“Get out!”

I took a step back toward the door. “If that’s what you want, I’ll leave. But I won’t be able to keep you safe if you’re not with me.”

“I can’t just leave. And anyway, I have to be at work in a few hours!”

“Call in sick. Ms. Savoy, I really wish you would trust me on this. I swear, you’re honestly not safe here.” I could feel the seconds ticking away on the clock, but what could I do? Knock her out and carry her away? All I could do was try to look honest, and wait for her to make up her mind.

The way she did it shook me more than anything that had yet happened in that already busy twenty-four hours. She glanced at the gun dangling at the end of my arm, then undulated across the room in those slinky pajamas to stand in front of me, studying my face with her human-looking eyes. Then she reached up both hands to pull my face to hers, and kissed me.

Interesting fact: What’s unpredictable about genetic splicing is the distribution of each side’s characteristics. Salamanders have a whole lot of DNA packed into their cells—probably the reason they combine readily with others—but very few of us came out of our foster wombs looking like lizards (very few who lived, anyway.) And only a handful of us have tails, or spots, or four fingers instead of five. And although I have heard of the occasional poor bastard whose tail insists on regenerating after that particular surgery, I’ve never believed that any of us actually shoot out our tongues or ooze poison from our skin.

But there’s no doubt, many of us do things differently from your average
Homo sapiens
.

Now, a major side effect of that Supreme Court victory was that we had as much
right as anyone else to keep out of the hands of scientists (which is the reason you sometimes see ads on WeWeb and Facebook, begging for SalaMan volunteers). Science eyes us with a longing that verges on lust. It offers us considerable sums to participate in studies, then gleefully writes learned papers about our every oddity from pheromones and internal sex organs (science being as fascinated by our pre-Surgery organs as the tabloids are) to the ability to stretch the visible realm into the ultraviolet. Any of us who can prove that we’ve lost a scar or regenerated a finger, and don’t mind spending the rest of our lives under a microscope, would never have to work another day.

But one thing I’ve never read about in the literature, probably because the scientists never thought to ask about it, is the odd uses of some
SalaMan mucous membranes.

Elizabeth Savoy was not kissing me, she
was tasting the truth on me. She took her time about it, and for sure both of us enjoyed it, but we both knew what she was doing. And we both knew what she tasted.

Without a word, she walked back into the bedroom. I heard a drawer open.

I turned off the overhead light that she’d switched on with some kind of remote, and went into the room where the cat had disappeared. A neighbor’s outdoor light gave shape to kitchen cabinets, and I opened them until I found a bag of kibble, which I set on the floor with the top open. I took a big bowl and filled it with water, setting it next to the bag. My client’s feline responsibilities taken care of, I pressed my face to the windows, studying the possibilities. Wondering if what I’d found at Eileen Jacobs’s house was just brother Harry’s coffee having its way with my nerves. But I didn’t think so.

It was more than the two minutes I’d given her, but less than three, when I heard the toilet flush and feet wearing shoes coming across the room. My client fished a jacket out
of the front-door closet, put it on, and picked up the small bag.

“Did you bring whatever cash you have?” I asked her.
“Necessary pills, glasses, your ID?”