Read Soldier of Fortune: A Gideon Quinn Adventure (Fortune Chronicles Book 1) Online
Authors: Kathleen McClure
MIA HAD BEEN
correct in her estimation of Detective Sergeant Ishan Hama — he was decent.
He took no bribes, believed in justice for all classes, and did his best to keep the peace in a city that had been under the cloud of war for over half his life.
Though the war with the Coalition States had seldom directly struck Nike — the airborne blitz that decimated Lower Cadbury had been the worst of the assaults — it was the indirect effects of war which made policing in Avon’s capitol an ongoing challenge. Effects such as the majority of tax monies going to support the war effort (with no few detours to various war-time committee chairs), along with a significant number of citizens who might have made fine police officers gone to ranks of Infantry or Air Corps.
Citizens such as Ishan’s husband, Paolo, lost when an enemy mortar struck his troop ’ship, the CAS Tenochtitlan.
Even years later, Ishan still recalled the numbing cold he’d felt the day he returned to the precinct, fresh from tamping down a potential riot, to see the Infantry Colonel in his dress greys, accompanied by the regimental Keeper.
He was recalling it now, in fact. Probably because the young man seated at his desk, brought in as a potential witness in Ishan’s latest case, was the very image of a young Paolo.
“You okay, Dad?” Tiago asked.
“I am quite — okay,” he said gruffly, appalled that his son might see the old distress. He cleared his throat, tapped his pencil and shoved his untouched tea an inch to the left (he’d shoved it an inch to the right three minutes past). “So, you believe you have seen the man we are looking for?”
“Yes, like I told Officer Prudawe, ten minutes ago, and DS Couerliane when she knocked on my door at home.”
“Home,” the word came out more as a derisive snort.
“Don’t start,” Tiago said.
“Of course not,” Ishan waved his hands in parental frustration. “After all, what business is it of mine if my only son chooses to dwell in a derelict building, putting his life in danger every day for the sake of—“
“For the sake of our neighbors,” Tiago said. “The same people who used to join us for tea in the morning, and celebrate Landing Day and who came to Papa’s funeral—“
“Don’t start,” Ishan echoed his son’s earlier directive. He glanced around at the nearby desks, where other detectives and officers were suddenly very busy with the paperwork they usually avoided like a plague. “This is not the time,” he added.
“It never is,” Tiago sighed, slumping back in his chair as if he were fourteen and not twenty-four.
The two men sat so for another moment before Ishan moved his chair slightly, and the predictable squeak of wood on cheap rehabbed flooring brought him back to the purpose of this interview. “About the suspect… can you give me the description?”
“I already—“
“Told Prudawe, and Couerliane, I know this, but every time you tell the story, you may include another detail, and so we paint the picture, one telling at a time, yes?”
“I’m sorry. Yes,” Tiago said, then he took a long, slow breath, and began.
Dutifully, Ishan recorded that the man Tiago had seen was tall, thin (too thin for his height and build, the medical student had pointed out) and looked a right mess.
Riding in a compost lorry after being shot whilst jumping from a second story window could do that, Ishan thought, and looked up when his son paused. “Is there anything else?”
“Right, umm,” Tiago closed his eyes. “His hair was sort of undecided,” he said at last. “Not quite brown, not quite blonde, but with some silver at the temples. I think there was a tattoo, here,” he pointed to the back of his own right hand, “and his eyes were blue.”
At which point Ishan could not prevent himself asking, “Were they exceedingly blue? The sort of blue that puts one in mind of sheet lightning? Or crystal? Or perhaps a glacier?”
His son’s brown eyes became quizzical at the uncharacteristic interjection. “They were quite blue,” he said, “but I’m not certain I could attest to any specific analog in the natural world.”
“Sorry,” Ishan grimaced. “Many of the earlier descriptions I have taken were given to poetic extremes.” He waved his pencil as if to erase the rhetoric which was, he knew, a holdover from the other half-dozen interviews he’d taken regarding this Quinn person.
The first time had been while interviewing various individuals involved in the Marlboro Avenue brawl, which spilled into the hukka dens of Byron and Wollstonecraft.
Ishan would never have taken that particular call, had he not been meeting Dr. Bayer, one of his sources. She had been reporting the tale of an associate making a significant sale of Morph to some risto's butler.
Since he had been near the scene of the riot, it was Ishan who also caught the interviews, after. At first, he had assumed the descriptions of the man he would later identify as Gideon Quinn were the side-effect of too much of whichever substance each witness had indulged in, but then he had been sent to take a statement in Carroll Square.
Here both the alleged victim (twenty years on the force told Ishan that Erasmus Ellison was about as likely to be a victim of a mugging as Ishan were to be crowned Queen on All Gather’s Eve), and the Keepers who’d found him had offered descriptions of the suspect that strolled away from simple height, weight and coloring and into the fields of fancy.
* * *
“It’s not so much the color of his eyes that grab attention,” Keeper Bren had told Ishan. “It’s more what those eyes have seen, you know?”
“Moves like a wolf,” Keeper Thalia had offered, with a certain appreciation.
“He owes fifty starbucks for a broken window,” Keeper Donal offered before adding, “but I felt there was something about him when he checked in, something dangerous, like a coiled snake. Or maybe it was just his draco.”
* * *
And then there was the widow, Celia Rand who, to Ishan’s mind, gave a description that said more about herself than Quinn.
* * *
“A brute,” she’d said, “mannerless and rough and… but forgive me, you asked for his physical description, not his personality. Tall, taller than poor Jessup,” here she’d looked down for a measured beat before continuing. “Tall, and thin in a sort of ravaged way, with a prison code here,” she’d held up her right hand, “and his eyes were blue… a dangerous blue.”
“Dangerous?” Ishan had asked, looking up from his notebook.
“Like crystal,” she said, her own eyes gleaming, perhaps with tears but Ishan thought not. “His eyes are the same shade as living crystal, right before it explodes.”
* * *
Yes, he’d heard Quinn’s description quite often, by now. So often, in fact, he doubted there was any way Gideon Quinn would be able to live up to the hyperbole.
Of course, the only way to find out was to locate him, and that was where the trouble lay. As much of a stir as Quinn had made over the past night, he was still one man in a city that held over a hundred thousand.
“— despite the tattoo, he didn’t seem a bad sort.”
“I’m sorry?” Ishan said, realizing with a start he’d been doodling rather than listening to his son’s statement.
Tiago’s mouth quirked in a slight smile. “I was saying, the man I saw, he was a mess, but he didn’t seem like a criminal. He seemed decent.”
“Perhaps he is,” Ishan said, taking a sip of tea that hadn’t been hot for nearly an hour, “but decent sorts are seldom found on the windowsill of a murder scene.”
“He could have been framed,” a new voice cut in.
Both men turned to see a young girl dressed in a roughly made tunic. Ishan’s eyes narrowed as he recognized her as one of the dodgers the Nike police were forever chasing. Before he could ask what she wanted, his eyes fell upon the draco riding on her shoulder. The beast had done an admirable job of camouflaging itself in her coiled hair, but was now peering out of the dark curls and tasting the air with quick licks of its forked tongue. It took everything Ishan had to suppress the childish glee the creature’s presence elicited.
Tiago, meanwhile, was hopping out of his chair. “Mia,” he said, staring down at the ebony-curled moppet. “What are you doing here?”
“Did you get it?” she asked, ignoring his question as her eyes darted from Tiago to Ishan. “About him bein’ in the window, so’s maybe he was framed. Window? Frame?”
Neither man said anything.
“Pfft,” she waved a dismissive hand, “why do I bother?”
* * *
“You want me to go where?” Mia had asked.
“It’s not that crazy an idea,” Gideon replied.
“The only thing more crazy than that idea is the fact you think it’s not that crazy.”
“Maybe it’s a little crazy, but it’s an important part of the plan.”
“I think I changed my mind,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “You’re better off quitting. Take your draco and run for it.”
“Ha,” he said, and continued to study the rough map of the city scratched into the basement’s floor.
“I’m serious,” she said back.
He looked up and yes, she was serious. “Okay.” He straightened, mostly because he’d been hunched over so long, then pushed himself to his feet and started to pace the basement . The light seeping through the small window had thinned some, as the suns rose above the nearby rooftops. “What, in particular, worries you?”
“What doesn’t?”
“Listen, even if Hama’s not as decent as you supposed, he’s going to be more interested in getting to me than giving you grief. It’ll be honey in the comb.”
“Promise?” she asked.
He looked at her. “If I promised, I’d be lying, and I won’t lie to you.”
“Good,” she said. “Then I’ll do it.”
* * *
And while Mia wouldn’t say Hama’s reception was particularly honey-like, at least he wasn’t looking to clap irons on her, so far. And finding Tiago here had been a nice surprise.
“You know this girl?” Hama was asking Tiago.
“I, ahhh— it’s complicated,” Tiago offered weakly.
“Funny,” Mia picked up the noticeable slack, “that’s what Gideon always says.”
“Gideon?” Hama looked at her.
“Does Gideon know you’re here?” Tiago asked her.
“
Gideon?
” the detective echoed himself, rising to stare at Tiago. ”You
know
Gideon Quinn?”
“Not know so much as, we’ve met.”
“When Gideon saved Tiago here from a thug what was asking protection money,” Mia said brightly.
“Not helping,” Tiago murmured. “Dad,” he began, turning to Hama.
“OY!” Mia jumped on that. “DS Hama’s your
Dad
?”
“It’s—“
“Stop! Both of you! Be silent,” Hama snapped.
Mia and Tiago shared a glance, but they remained silent.
“You,” Hama pointed to Mia, “wait your turn.
You
,” he turned to his son, “why did you not say you’d met Quinn? You know he is dangerous.”
“You’re right about that. He is dangerous,” Tiago said, ignoring Mia’s warning hiss. “But I don’t believe he is a murderer.”
Hama closed his eyes for a moment and his lips moved — Mia realized he was counting.
“Very well,” he said upon reaching ten. “What makes you believe, despite having been found at the scene, covered in blood and the murder weapon bearing his fingerprints, that Quinn is not a murderer?”
“Because he’s —“ Tiago seemed to flounder a moment before landing. “Because he really is decent.”
Mia smiled.
Hama stared at his son for a moment, his face devoid of expression, then he turned to Mia. “Your turn,” he said, “why did Quinn send you to the police?”
“Not the police,” she shook her head. “To you.”
“Me?” Though why that should surprise him more than any of the other revelations, he didn’t know. “Why?”
“Because,” she said, looking from Hama to Tiago and back, “you’re decent.”
Hama stared. Possibly, she thought, he was counting, again.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you should tell me what your Mr. Quinn wants.”
At which point she realized Gideon had been right.
It wasn’t that crazy a plan.
BY THE TIME
Mia and Elvis were on their way to see DS Hama, Gideon was on a mission of his own.
* * *
“And while I’m makin’ nice with the filth, what’ll you be doing?” Mia had asked, watching Gideon pace back and forth across the basement.
“Same thing, different people,” he’d said, then explained, then waited for her to stop laughing.
* * *
He supposed it was a bit bonkers, but there really weren’t a lot of options. Fehr would likely have agreed to help, but he was aloft with the Errant, so Gideon had to go for the next best option.
Okay, so maybe not the next best, or even the next after that, but at least it was an option, right?
Are you talking to yourself again?
Maybe — but hey, I’m not counting.
Then why do you know you just took step number 4,012?
Shut up.
His self shut up, but Gideon kept counting. It was a distraction, he supposed, from both the second-guessing of his choice of allies and the fact he’d just committed petty theft (an untended tram driver’s uniform jacket from the back of a chair in a sidewalk cafe and a fedora off a street vendor’s rack) for the sake of camouflage. The jacket, he was pleased to discover, not only fit, but provided the unexpected perk of free rides on the city’s tram system.
The hat was just cool.
For a little extra anonymity, he added a subtle hunch to his posture that changed his gait and shortened him by a good two inches, a trick he’d learned from Horatio Alva, the grifter he’d befriended in Morton.
It proved very effective, as Gideon walked by no fewer than six cops en route to his destination.
It was also swarming painful. So painful, by the time he reached the address Mia had given him, Gideon was basically a walking cramp and had to spend a few minutes uncrimping himself before stepping up to the door of the Ohmdahl’s flat. Once there, he raised his hand and then hesitated, uncertain.
“It’s not that crazy a plan,” he reminded himself, and knocked.
* * *
“Here,” Sonja Ohmdahl, mother to the Ohmdahl triplets, pressed a cup of tea into Gideon’s hands.
He took the cup, still recovering from the greeting Rolf had given him (vigorous enough to loosen the dressings Tiago had only recently applied), before assuring his suspicious mother that the ragged man with the prison tat really was a good guy and inviting him in.
Now Gideon was seated in the parlor of the Ohmdahl flat, a medium-sized, high ceilinged space chock full of husky, durable furniture he imagined necessary in a room inhabited by Rolf, Freya and Ulf.
“Thanks,” Gideon said, still trying not to stare at the Ohmdahl matriarch, who was just — not what he was expecting.
To start with, she was short, all of five-two, tops. Add to that her slender build, dark hair (barely touched with silver) and wide, highly intelligent eyes, and Gideon was left staring in turns at herself and her three strapping offspring.
Apparently, Sonja was used to this sort of speculative ogle. “They don’t come out that big, you know,” she said with a knowing smile. “Especially triplets.”
“I’d hope not,” Gideon said, looking to where Rolf, Ulf and Freya all stood in various states of bedhead — a wall of sleepy blonde muscle at their mother’s back.
Nope, he just couldn’t picture it.
Good humor aside, Sonja was still standing in front of Gideon, obviously waiting for him to drink his tea. He took a sniff, smelled an abundance of lemon, typical of Stolichnayan tea, and took a tentative sip. Bitter, bright — tasted like tea.
Just like the soup had tasted like soup, and the liqueur had tasted like liqueur…
he reminded himself.
Yeah, but these are the Ohmdahls
, his self said back.
If any one of them wanted to knock me out, they’d just tap me on the head with their pinky finger.
He drank half the cup in one swallow. “It’s very good,” he told Sonja.
“Of course it is,” she said. “There is nothing like Stoli tea to cure what is ailing you. Even if what ails is too much vodka, yes?” This last she addressed over her shoulder, to her offspring.
“Yes, momma,” Freya replied, hefting her own cup and slurping enthusiastically. As far as Gideon could tell, there was nothing Freya Ohmdahl did unenthusiastically.
“But it is not too much vodka ailing you, I think,” Sonja turned back to Gideon. “I think what ails you has more teeth?”
“Actually,” he said, setting the tea aside and leaning forward in the comfortable chair, “that’s what I wanted to talk to your children about.” Sonja’s head tilted curiously and the triplets, as if tuned to their mother’s mood became very attentive. “I wondered,” he said to the three of them, “if you’d be interested in a job.”
“A job?” Ulf perked up.
“What kind of job?” Sonja asked, giving her son a quelling look.
“Possibly a dangerous job,” Gideon admitted. “One that’s unlikely to pay anything, but if it goes well, will put some very bad people away for a long, long time.”
“This sounds like a terrible job,” Sonja said. She looked at her children and sighed. “And you had them at ‘dangerous.'”
“When do we leave?” Freya asked, confirming her mother’s suspicions.
Gideon smiled. “Two things first,” he said. “One, do you have a city directory and two, would you happen to know where I could my get hands on a two-way radio set?”
In an unprecedented instance of good luck, they not only had the directory, but also the radio, a holdover from their days in the Stoli infantry which, on inspection, proved to still function.
“Solar pack is pretty old,” Freya said, putting the radios in a carryall for Gideon. “Might only work for a few minutes.”
“If this works out,” he assured her, “a few minutes is all I’ll need.”
“That,” Sonja said with what Gideon considered remarkable intuition, “is a very big ‘if.'”
* * *
Once in possession of the radio and the address he needed from the directory — one belonging to a high-ranking member of the city government — Gideon laid out the Ohmdahl’s portion of the plan. Once he had, and Sonja had promised to reinforce both the instructions and the timing, repeatedly, he took his leave.
Outside again, he tugged the stolen hat down and resumed the hunched posture as he made his way via tram to the southern intersection of Carroll Square. From there he hunched-slash-limped to the alley next to the Elysium Hotel where the night before Rey had threatened to kill Elvis.
He didn’t spend a lot of time reminiscing, but he did let out a low whistle at the gash in the hotel wall caused by the compost bin before ducking into the kitchen door.
Once inside, he doffed the hat and jacket and strode into the kitchen, where preparations for lunch were underway.
“Mr. Quinn?”
He looked left, to where the young Keeper who’d delivered his dinner was up to his elbows in potato peelings.
“Hello,” he said brightly. “Keeper—?“
“Bren,” Bren filled in automatically, shaking peel from his hands. “And that’s Keeper Thalia. Or it was,” he added, as Thalia, the middle aged Keeper who’d been sautéing onions at the grill, had left the room.
Hopefully not to teleph the coppers, Gideon thought. “Keeper Bren,” he smiled, “I don’t suppose my room is still available?”
“What? Oh! Yes. You’re paid up through tomorrow, but—“
“Great, that’s great. With any luck, I’ll be needing it tonight.”
“Only, did you—“
“I also wondered if there’s a Hive Master in the hotel I could speak to?”
“There is and he’s here,” a deep voice boomed across the kitchen.
Gideon turned to see the man who'd been working the welcome desk the night before (had it really only been the night before?) enter the kitchen, Keeper Thalia at his side. “Hive Master—?”
“I’m Master Donal,” the Hive Master gave his name. “And you’d be Gideon Quinn, would you not?”
“Yes, sir,” Gideon bowed respectfully.
Donal took note of the bow, and the tone. Definitely at odds with the impression Mr. Ellison gave of his alleged attacker. “Tell me,” he asked on a hunch, “what were you doing in my winter wheat last night?”
“I don’t think I was in your winter wheat last night,” Quinn said, his expression confused. “I did mess with your composter, so I guess I owe you some damages to the wall, and then there was an issue with my bathroom window for which, okay I don’t have any cash left but maybe we could work something out?”
“Never mind that, for now,” Donal waved it aside. He’d had doubts of Ellison’s story to begin with and, though he wasn’t a Sensitive and had no particular reason to believe Quinn, he wasn’t quite ready to pass judgment on the man. “Are you aware that the police would be looking for you, Mr. Quinn?”
“I am,” Gideon said, “and it’s my intention to let them find me. Eventually.”
“Eventually?” Donal’s brow arched in curiosity.
“Yes, sir,” Gideon said. “But before then, I wanted to ask a favor. I’ve been out of the world a while but I’m hoping Keepers still offer sanctuary?”
“We do,” Thalia said before Donal could respond.
“As my wife says,” the Hive Master echoed, giving Thalia a look. “Though if you’re requesting sanctuary from the police—“
“No — well, yes — but not for me,” Gideon said.
Donal was finding the man more interesting by the minute. “All right,” he said, arms crossing over his barrel of a chest. “Let’s hear what it is you’re wanting.”
* * *
“You have to be sure,” Gideon had said as he crouched in front of Mia. “Once we start things moving, there’s no going back — not for you, not for any of the other dodgers in Ellison’s hive. We bring Keepers into the picture, and that life is over.”
She looked down at her hands, soft hands, excellent for dipping, and then at her wrist, still bruised from one of Ellison’s tantrums the previous week. She thought of little Antonio, already too small for his age, and put on short rations by Ellison for not bringing in enough loot. She thought of pretty Cara, drawing the wrong kind of looks from Ellison, and Marcus with a limp from the leg their fagin had broken with a kick last year, and never healed properly.
She thought of the lot of them, all hungry, all frightened and all starting at their own shadows most nights because you never knew, did you, if you’d still be in the hive come morning.
“I’m sure,” she said. “Let’s get ‘em outta there.”
* * *
Less than half an hour after Gideon entered the hotel, Donal, bearing one half of the Ohmdahl’s radio set, departed the Elysium. With him came Bren and two other Keepers, all four boarding a tram for the North Riverside docks where, according to Gideon, they’d find a hive of dodgers in need of sanctuary.
Gideon followed a few minutes later with the other half of the radio set and the vaguest hope the plan, which really was exactly as crazy as Mia had suggested, might just work out. If, that is, Mia had been able to persuade DS Hama to follow her lead, and if the Ohmdahls played their roles effectively and if the targets responded as Gideon hoped.
A lot of ifs
, he told himself.
If you have any better ideas…
Not surprisingly, his self had nothing to offer.