Windswept (30 page)

“And we have you shooting me, idiot,” I said. “Which raises the important question: where did you get a gun?”

“I’m not talking to you,” he said. “You’re not the police.”

“No, I’m good friends with them,” I said. “You don’t think Soni’d be happy to bust a weapons ring?”

“What weapons ring?” said Bloombeck. “Saarien doesn’t sell guns, he just hands them out...” He caught his next words, then went pale.

“Well, that’s interesting,” I said. “Tell me more.”

Bloombeck sank into the couch, then laughed, long and loud, blood dribbling down his jowls. “You mean,” he gasped, “you didn’t know?” He looked at us both then laughed again. “Jesus Christ, you should see your face, Padma! I actually made you shut up!”

I grabbed the gun from Banks and aimed it at Bloombeck’s chest. He just laughed harder. “What, you’re gonna shoot me, Padma? Mrs P not around with the pickle jars?”

I squeezed off one round into the couch, right between Bloombeck’s open legs. He looked at the half-expanded beanbag lodged in the cushion, then started laughing again.

“Padma, I think you shouldn’t do that,” said Banks into my ear, just loud enough to get around Bloombeck’s consumptive horselaugh.

“You’re right,” I said, thumbing back the hammer. “Never aim at something unless you intend to destroy it, and I really didn’t mean to hurt that couch.” I put the gun on Bloombeck’s forehead, which was easy, since there was so much of it.

“No, I mean, I don’t think waving a gun around is a good idea.”

“Do I look like I’m waving anything, Banks? I’m steady as a rock.”

Banks swallowed and held up his hands. “I think you should let me tie up Bloombeck, and I think we should call the police, and I think we should let this play out in the proper place.”

“This seems pretty proper to me,” I said. “Putting down a rat in the place I first met him, it’s got a nice symmetry.”

“You’re angry, and you’re hurt,” said Banks, moving between me and Bloombeck. “If you pull that trigger, you’re probably going to kill him, and that will cut off what’s probably a very, very important thread. You want that?”

“I want him to shut up, and you are in my way.”

“You didn’t know!” said Bloombeck, and he doubled over. I put the barrel in the back of his head.

“Put away the gun, Padma,” said Banks, “and we’ll follow all these threads, and you’ll be able to lock up Saarien or sue the shit out of him or whatever it takes to make you happy. You are not a killer.”

“Don’t tell me what I’m not, Banks. You don’t know what the fuck I’m not.”

He walked forward until the gun pushed his skinny chest. “I know you’re not a killer.”

I ground my jaw, then put down the gun. “I
could
have been.”

“Maybe, but not for him,” said Banks. “Besides, I’ve already worked for two nutjobs, remember? I’d really rather not work for a third?”

I looked past Banks at Bloombeck, who was still doubled over in laughter. “So, what now?”

“He’s going to help you tie off all these loose ends,” said Banks. “I’ll go back to the gate, ask that old lady to make a call for us. We’ll get the police here, you’ll probably go back to jail for a bit, but I will unravel all this stuff and have you out in no time.”

“Really?” I said. “And how’re you going to do that?”

He waved his hands. “Lawyer magic.”

I rolled my eyes, but helped him tie up Bloombeck. As Banks walked out the door, I said, “You sure I can’t shoot him just a little?”

He shook his head, then was gone.

I pocketed the gun, and went back inside, pulling the door shut behind me. “So, you gonna tell me what the deal is?” I said to Bloombeck. “I think you owe me that much.”

Bloombeck stopped dabbing the blood away from his eyes on his shoulder and snorted. “I don’t owe you a damn thing, Padma. You can go ahead and shoot me, ’cause you’ll be saving me from whatever Saarien will do to me.”

“So you
knew
he was still alive when you came to me last night?” I said, wrapping one of Bloombeck’s belts around his wrists.

“I’m done talking to you,” he said. “Just wait until your cop buddy shows up, and we’ll get this over with. I’m a dead man, anyway.”

“You don’t know the half of it. You could always try calling her yourself. Suspects who make her life easier usually get lighter treatment.”

“Just like you, right?” said Bloombeck. “I dangled that bit of paper in front of you, and you jumped like a squid going for bait.”

“Well, the trick with landing fish is giving them what they like,” I said, “and I’ll admit, I liked the idea of not going to prison.”

“Too bad you’re still going,” he said. “Skipping bail, assaulting me in my own home.”

“True, but the murder part – I hope to avoid that.”

“Then you’re going to need my help,” said Bloombeck. “And you won’t get it.”

“No, but I do have timestamped footage from fifty minutes ago, showing a very alive and very angry Evanrute Saarien,” I said. “Soni may slap me around for jumping bail, but I’m pretty sure she’ll forget all that once she sees my video. And if she finds some kind of conspiracy, well...” I crouched in front of him. “She lives for that stuff.”

Bloombeck fidgeted. “Can you keep me safe?”

“Can you tell me what’s going on?”

Bloombeck’s mouth twitched. “What do you know so far?”

“I know that Saarien’s got a bigger, newer refinery inside his old one. I know that he’s growing some kind of new cane. I know a lot of Freeborn have had their crops wiped out by black stripe, a new variety that–”

“Strain,” said Bloombeck, his eyes to the carpet. He caught his breath, like he was choking, then looked up at me, stricken.

And that was the first time I realized that the ink on his cheek wasn’t a pair of hedge clippers like I’d always thought. Now that his face were free of grime and perpetual five-o’clock shadow, I saw that his tattoo was a winding, spiral lattice. “Bloomie,” I said, “I don’t think you ever told me what you used to do when you were in Service.”

“You never asked,” he said.

I looked closer. “Son of a bitch,” I said. “You were a gengineer.”

“A genetic engineering lab tech, actually,” he said, nodding. “Level Four pay grade.”

“Did you make the black stripe?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“I didn’t think so.”

“I just
perfected
it.”

There was steel in Bloombeck’s eyes when he said it, and all the fear in his face had melted away. He took a breath and sat up straight in his chair.

“Do you know what black stripe is?” he said. “It’s a warning. It’s nature’s way of telling us what a bad idea it is to rely too much on one plant. You know how many hectares of cane there are in Occupied Space? I figured it out once: two
trillion
. There are three hectares of cane for each human. We don’t raise cane; cane is raising
us
.”

I opened my mouth to knock Bloombeck for sounding philosophical, but decided it was better not to say anything.

“But you people never listened,” he said. “When I first got here, I was excited, because it meant I wouldn’t be around a bunch of rat-racers who were always looking at the bottom line. Too bad my recruiter couldn’t be bothered with things like skill sets and matching people to jobs. He only cared about filling Slots. You know where my Slot was? Reaming out the sewer sidelines in Brushhead. Not the main ones, where you have a little elbow room, but the teeny, tiny ones where you’re hunched over and smacking your head on the inside of the pipe. And when I complained, I got shoved even farther down the plant.” He shook his head. “He’d bothered to ask, I could’ve shown him what I can do. I could have shown him the stuff in my lab that makes black stripe look like athlete’s foot.”

“Wait,” I said, “you have a lab?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “You think I can just turn it all off? I
loved
being a tech: all the toys the scientists got, and none of the responsibility to justify my research. I got experiments that would blow your mind.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s in Sag Pond.”

Bloombeck laughed. “Really? You think I’d let Brittona or any of her kids contaminate my work? No, that’s my field station.”

“Then where’s your lab?”

Bloombeck shook his head. “You don’t get away that easy, Padma. No, I’m going to wait here until the cops show up and watch as they crack your skull all over my floor. I won’t mind the mess; it’s a cheap throw rug that I boosted from Mrs Powazek.”

I looked down and recognized the rug. I’d seen it many times when Mrs P would invite me for sandwiches and beer. It was a knockoff Persian, with a maroon base surrounded by blue and cream paisley. The thing was still in good shape. “How did you get this down?” I said. “Her place was locked up after she died. I remember, because I did it.”

Bloombeck bit his lip as he stole a glance toward the ceiling. I looked up and saw a damp patch of acoustic tiling. “Auction, I guess,” he said, looking at his feet. “Still would like to know who got her old bottling stuff.”

“Yeah,” I said, pulling an end table underneath the damp patch. “What I wouldn’t give for some of her pickles right now.” I got on the table and tapped the tiling; it gave way easily.

“Padma, you don’t want to mess with that,” he said. “You know how much this place leaks.”

“Like a sieve,” I said, sliding the tile out of place. Water dribbled down from a hole that had been cut in the ceiling of Bloombeck’s can and the floor of my old one. There was a musty funk, like mushrooms and freshly cut cane.

“Really, Padma, I think it would be a good idea for you to come down,” said Bloombeck. He strained against the belt and rocked in place.

“Sure,” I said, hauling myself up. Overhead lamps flickered on as I flopped onto the floor. When I stood up, I was in the middle of a forest of ironpalm benches, laboratory glassware, and racks and racks of labeled, sealed test tubes. Some of the tubes held blobs of red and purple goo; others were streaked with black. My brain did backflips as I read people’s names on the vials filled with goo and realized they were filled with meat. The filthy test tubes were all labeled BLACK STRIPE VARIANT; each one had a different number, all of them in series. “Jesus,” I whispered.

There was also a lot of equipment I couldn’t place: something that looked like an autoclave made from dishwasher parts, and another machine that had an ancient analog readout that spun between A, C, G, and T. It took me a moment to realize that it was a DNA sequencer.

I ran back to the hole and stuck my head down below. “Bloomie... did you
make
all this?”

“I had to,” he said. “I can’t afford Big Three shipping rates, and no one else around here had it.”

“Where did you get it?”

He shrugged. “At the plant, at the dump, anywhere there were people.”

I looked back at the makeshift lab. “Then you came up with Saarien’s cane, right? The kind that’s resistant to your black stripe?”

“Not just that,” said Bloombeck, “but it’s more energy dense, produces less bagasse that’s more useable, and even fixes three times as much nitrogen–”

The front door crashed open, and heavy bootsteps filled the flat. I pulled up and away, then froze. I wasn’t sure if they’d seen me, but I wasn’t about to give myself away by running. I held my breath as more boots clomped through the door. “Untie me, dammit!” Bloombeck yelled.

There was a cough, like a tuk-tuk backfiring, then silence.

I scooted away from the hatch as quickly and quietly as I could, making sure my boot heels didn’t ring against the metal floor. I managed to curl under one of the lab benches, making myself as small as possible. Maybe they had just come for Bloombeck. I wished I could have turned the lights off, just to make sure I stayed hidden.

Whoever had entered the flat wasn’t talking, but I could hear the soft clack of body armor, drawers slamming open, chairs overturning. It would only be a matter of time before one of them looked up and climbed in. I looked around for another way out, and saw the hole that Bloombeck had up into Mrs Powazek’s flat, right above the DNA sequencer. The outside ladder may have been gone, but I could always get out a window to the roof and hop to the next building and–

Something small and round flew up through the hatch and bounced across the floor to my feet. My B-school training took over and screamed GRENADE to my entire body. I kicked the thing back in the hole, hoping it would go off downstairs instead of in my face. I didn’t wait to see; I leaped from my hideyhole and scrambled on top of Bloombeck’s gear, reaching for the hole above the sequencer. My boot slipped on a pile of papers, sending me to the floor. I flopped on my stomach, the air whooshing out of my lungs.

I tried to breathe, tried to keep calm, but then, through the clutter of bench legs and spilled papers, I saw a head pop through the open hatch in the floor. It wasn’t a goon in riot gear, or a cop; it wore a black lacquer mask in the shape of a grinning fox. It turned, then looked up at me, its polished eyes staring right into me.

Ghosts.

I got to my feet and clawed up the sequencer. I got through the hatch, only to find myself in the middle of even more racks of test tubes, all nestled against tiny incubator lamps. The tubes were filled with a rainbow of liquids, molds, and fungi. All of them were labeled with neat, cramped handwriting. How long had Bloombeck been working on this? And how did Saarien and the goons figure in?

Down below, someone shouted my name. I put my shoulder to the nearest rack and knocked it over, sending a mountain of glass and Christ-knows-what toward the hatch. There was another shout, and then the floor began to vanish, one tiny hole at a time. It had been a long time since someone had shot an actual gun at me, but I still had the sense to hop away as fast as I could. The test tubes exploded into a cloud of glass fragments and spores. The approaching bullet holes blocked my way to the window. Something bit into my calf, and I yelped. My pants leg turned bright red, and I pressed down on the wound, hoping the next one would either miss or be quick.

And then the courtyards were filled with the screams of sirens. The shooting stopped, and the whole stack of cans thudded as my assailants ran. I edged to the window and peeked out the side; cops in their yellow-and-black riot gear flooded the hutong. They poured out of the alleys, over the rails, onto the rooftops, like someone had upended a hive of angry, badged bees onto the hutong. Above the din came the chatter of automatic weapons. Dozens of cops stumbled, blood gushing from bullet holes in their armor. Whoever had the guns wasn’t going to give up easily.