Odd Girl Out

Bayta wasn't at all happy with the plan. Neither was Karim. But they weren't in charge here. I gave them their orders, borrowed the keys to Karim's car, and headed out.

The garage behind the building where the car was parked was double-locked. Inside, the car itself was literally chained to the concrete floor. Apparently, auto theft was a major problem in Zumurrud District. Even with all the keys it took me a good ten minutes to get the car ready to go.

Maneuvering my way through streets filled with drunks and loiterers was the next challenge, and it cost me another ten minutes. But there was nothing I could do except ease my way forward through the wandering pedestrians and keep an eye out for drunk drivers. Finally, I was out of Zumurrud and back into the relative calm of Makarr. I picked up speed and headed for Veldrick's upscale neighborhood.

All seemed quiet as I pulled into Veldrick's street. I parked a block from his house and went the rest of the way on foot. "Things here were even quieter than they had been in Makarr pistrict. Imani City's rich and powerful were apparently finding their evening's entertainment in the comfort of their own homes.

Veldrick's house was well lit, with lights showing through the curtains in both the great room and one of the back rooms. I eyed the shrubbery and nearby buildings as I approached, but McMicking was nowhere in sight. Strolling past the house like an innocent pedestrian, I keyed my comm.

"Yes?" McMicking answered.

"I'm here," I said. "Where are you?"

"Inside," he said. "Hang on—I'll unlock the front door for you."

He keyed off. Muttering a curse, I reversed direction and went back to the house.

The front door opened as I approached. "About time," McMicking commented in greeting. The middle-aged jogger Bayta and I had had dinner with had been replaced by an elderly Oriental man with a small goatee and hair gathered high on the back of his head. "What did you do, walk the whole way?"

"I had to run the Zumurrud obstacle course," I growled as I brushed past him. "I thought I told you to wait for me."

"I'm on Mr. Hardin's clock here, not yours," he pointed out reasonably as he locked the door behind me. "Come on in and give me a hand."

I walked into the meditation room to find a half-dozen small Quadrail-style cargo crates lined up near Veldrick's artificial stream. On top of one of them were a pair of thick, elbow-length leather gloves. "Where did you get the crates?" I asked.

"Veldrick's storage room," McMicking told me, crossing to the boxes and pulling on the gloves. "I figured that however he moved the stuff in he would probably have kept the transport boxes. Turns out I was right."

"It'll certainly make it easier to move it back out again," I agreed, frowning. Something was nagging urgently at the back of my mind. "You have a story ready in case Veldrick walks in on us?

"Veldrick won't be walking in on anyone for a while," McMicking said. "He's sleeping off a snoozer in the master bedroom."

"You have any trouble getting in past the alarms?"

"Not a bit," he said. "I shot him as he opened the door for me.

I stared at him. "You knocked on the door?"

"Actually, I rang the bell." He gave me an innocent look. "You worried he's going to describe his assailant to the police when he wakes up?"

"That would be amusing," I growled, eyeing his Seven Samurai look. "How long have you been here?"

"Here in the house? About twenty minutes."

I frowned. "You made it all the way from downtown that fast?"

"Who says I started from downtown?" he asked, reaching into the flowing stream and working at a piece of coral. "It's as easy to tap into a computer system from one neighborhood as another."

"So you came here directly from the restaurant?" I asked. The urgent nagging in the back of my mind was getting stronger.

"More or less," he said, lifting out the coral and holding it gingerly at arm's length. "I did have to stop once along the way to change faces. You want to open that first crate for me?"

I moved toward the crate, staring at the coral. He'd been here twenty minutes …

And suddenly, the nagging in my mind blew into full-fledged certainty. "You know, these crates are going to be a bear to get out of here," I remarked, keeping my voice casual. "I've got some smaller ones in my car that we won't need a forklift to move."

Behind his makeup, McMicking's forehead creased slightly. "You have a car?"

"A borrowed one, yes," I said. "Smaller boxes will be easier to get through Customs, too."

"You may be right." He set the coral back into the flowing water, his eyes never leaving my face. "Where are you parked?"

"Two blocks away," I said, nodding the opposite direction to where I'd actually left the car. "Come on—you might as well give me a hand with them."

A minute later we were outside the house. "This way," I said, heading off at a fast walk toward my car. "Hurry."

"What's going on?" McMicking murmured as he caught up with me.

"Bayta once told me the polyps in Modhran coral could detect and interpret vibrations when they were underwater," I said. "In other words, the coral can hear."

"Yes, I remember her saying that," McMicking said. "So?"

"So you've been in the house for twenty minutes, getting ready to carve up the coral," I gritted out. "Not just attacking a major Modhran outpost, but also ruining his detector array. So why haven't the Filly walkers shown up in force to stop you?"

"Oh, hell," McMicking said, his voice soft but deadly.

"You got it," I said bitterly. "He doesn't need the array anymore.

"He's found Rebekah."

Ninety seconds later, we were in the car, barreling down Imani City's peaceful streets toward Zumurrud District.

"She says they're all right," McMicking said, his comm still at his ear as I took a corner way faster than either the laws of man or physics would have preferred. By a miracle of engineering, the car stayed on the pavement. "She can hear a lot of commotion going on in the bar, but so far no one's come poking around Karim's office."

I didn't answer, my stomach knotted with fury at my stupidity, my mind fogged with images of Bayta standing alone against the full strength of the Modhri.

"How did he figure it out?" McMicking asked.

"He didn't figure it out," I snarled. "I told him."

"How?"

No gasps of surprise, no blank stares, no time wasted with recriminations. Sometimes I forgot what it was like having a fellow professional like McMicking at my side.

And that reminder loosened the knots in my stomach a little. Together, we might still have a chance. "Because I was stupid," I told him. "I even said he was putting the damn coral in cars."

"You mean he had some in the police car?"

"Can you think of a better way to keep the local kids from taking it out for a spin than to stash it with a couple of dead cops?" I bit out. "It's either in the trunk or just sitting on the ground underneath the car. I never thought to look either place."

"I thought he also needed a Filly nearby to make this trick work," McMicking said.

"This particular chunk wasn't part of the tracking array," I said, a fresh wave of self-disgust washing over me. "It was put there to eavesdrop when I went to investigate the bodies. And I fell for it. I stood there feeling all safe and secure and unobserved and blabbed my stupid mouth off."

McMicking was silent for a few more blocks. "If you're right about the Modhri eavesdropping on you, he knew I was heading over to Veldrick's," he said at last. "But he didn't know what I was going to do to the coral once I got there."

"You're taking it home to Daddy, aren't you?"

"You miss my point," he said. "You and I know that, but the Modhri didn't. Neither of us said anything about it in that conversation, or any other he might have listened in on. For all he knew, I was going to bring a sledgehammer and beat him to death."

He drew his gun and laid it ready on his lap. "But the Fillies still didn't show up," he continued. "That means he was willing to sacrifice an entire coral outpost if necessary in order to get at this girl."

Which was pretty much the same deal he'd offered me a couple of months ago, with those boxes of coral on the train from Ghonsilya to Bildim. He'd been willing to sacrifice all that in order to get his hands on the third Lynx sculpture.

I knew now why he'd considered that trade worth making. What the hell was Rebekah to him that he was offering to make the same trade for her?

I had no idea. I just hoped we would all live long enough to find out.

At first glance Karim's block looked pretty much the way I'd left it. There were still drunks and toughs all over the place, making navigation hazardous as they wandered onto and off of the street.

But on second glance I could see that something about the scene had changed. A lot of the drunks weren't wandering anymore, but were just lying or sitting along the sides of the buildings. Passed out, or else on their way there.

McMicking noticed it, too. "They crash and burn early around here, don't they?" he commented.

"Hardly seems worth the effort of going out," I agreed as I let the car roll quietly to a halt by the curb half a block from the bar. "Snoozers, you think?"

"That would be the simplest conclusion," he said. "But bystanders normally don't hang around when that much shooting starts."

A movement across the street to our left caught my eye, and I looked over to see Oved emerge from a doorway and hurry toward us. "Stay here," I told McMicking, and got out.

"Thank God you're back," Oved murmured tightly as we met in the middle of the street. "They're in there now—six of them—handing out drinks like—"

"Hold it, hold it," I interrupted. "Who is in where?"

"Six Filiaelians are in the bar," he said, stumbling a little over the name. "They came in right after you left and sat down at a couple of the tables. They're offering free drinks to anyone who can beat them at arm wrestling."

I looked toward the bar and the sleeping men piled along the walkway around it. "I gather they've been doing a lot of losing?"

"Yes," Oved said, sounding a little mystified that I'd come to that conclusion so fast. "I don't know what's in those bottles they brought, but one shot and you're done for."

"Dark brown bottle?" I asked. "Triangular base with a short, wide, corkscrew-shaped neck?"

"Yes," he confirmed. "They must have a dozen of them, packed away in wraparound belt bags. But it can't be poison—they're drinking it themselves."

"It's not poison," I said. "It's dilivin. A classic Filly drink never intended for Human stomachs. Where's Karim?"

"Behind the bar," the boy said. "Standing on the door to the storage cellar. The main storage cellar, I mean. Not the one—you know. He told me to come out here and wait for you."

I nodded with approval. If the Modhri had figured out Rebekah was underground, he would reasonably assume she was in the cellar. Karim standing defiantly on the access door would add weight to that conclusion, which in turn should have the Modhri working on a way to get him off it.

But even the Modhri wasn't crazy enough to take on an entire bar's worth of Humans with only six Fillies. Hence, the rigged drinking contest to thin out the crowd. "Okay, I'll handle it," I told Oved, and headed back to the car. I would go in alone, I decided, and have McMicking find a nice shadow to hide in as backup. Bending down, I looked into the car.

McMicking was gone.

I straightened up, looking around as I silently cursed the man. But he was nowhere to be seen.

"What is it?" Oved called softly.

"Nothing," I said, turning back toward the bar. The least McMicking could have done was wait for my instructions before deciding to ignore them. "Stay here."

The tavern had been reasonably full before I left for Veldrick's place. Now, it was even more crowded, with wall-to-wall people laughing and hooting and generally enjoying themselves at the tops of their lungs. Clearly, word had traveled about the strangers in town providing free entertainment and free firewater.

Both of which were still going strong. Peering through a narrow gap between the bystanders, I saw two Fillies and a burly middle-aged Human seated at a table in the center of the main room. The Human was arm-wrestling one of the Fillies while the other alien looked on, a dilivin bottle and set of shot glasses neatly lined up on the table in front of him. Both Fillies, I noted, had turned their chairs around and were seated on their knees and shins in normal Filly style.

Behind the Human, a third Filly and two more Humans stood watching the action. One of the Humans was holding a notebook and pen, the other was cupping a fist full of coins. Apparently, book was being made on the various contests. All three Fillies were wearing the distinctive layered tunics and flared hats that always reminded me of Genghis Khan's thirteenth-century Mongolian warriors.

Fastened around their waists at their backs were the belt bags Oved had mentioned, five bags per Filly, each long enough to hold a dilivin bottle. Clearly, they'd come prepared to make a night of it.

The rest of the tables had been pushed back, leaving a small open area around the main event. I pushed my way through the rows of spectators, ignoring the growls and complaints that followed me, until I reached the inner edge. Just as I eased between the last two men the Human slammed his opponent's hand to the table. Through the mixed roar of triumph from the winning bettors and groans of disgust from the losers, I gave the room a careful scan.

Three of the Fillies, as I'd already noted, were standing prominently in the center of the room. The other three Oved had mentioned were nowhere to be seen.

Were they even now with Bayta and Rebekah?

"There you are," a throaty voice said.

I looked back at the table. All three Fillies had turned in my direction and were gazing at me down their long faces in a way that reminded me of an old man in a dit rec drama peering at fine print through the reading section of his bifocals.

They were definitely Filiaelians. No one else in the galaxy looked even remotely like that. And yet, as I studied the somewhat shorter lengths of their faces, the shapes of their scalloped ears, and the colors of their bristly facial hairs, I was struck more by the differences between them and Filiaelian norm than by their similarities to that standard.

And if there were that many differences showing on the outside, there were probably even more drastic changes on the inside. Clearly, someone had done some serious genetic work on them.

But for this bunch, altered DNA was the least of their problems. As I looked more closely, I could see the slightly unfocused eyes and slackened jaws and the minor darkening of the distinctive blaze marks on their long faces. Changes that had taken place sometime since I'd first seen them thirty seconds ago.

The Modhri had taken over.

"Here I am," I agreed. "Question is, what are you doing here?"

The two Fillies seated at the table reached behind them into their belt bags, each producing two more dilivin bottles. "For all," the losing arm wrestler said, reaching behind him to hand his bottles to two of the men in the crowd. "Enjoy to the fullest."

There was a fresh roar of appreciation as the second Filly passed his bottles off to his side of the ring. With the free entertainment over, but an even better deal on the free firewater, the audience broke up, the onlookers redistributing themselves into new groups centered around the four bottles.

I waited until their attention was firmly elsewhere, then closed the last couple of meters to the Fillies' table. The winning Human arm wrestler had also joined the rest of the crowd, leaving the half-full dilivin bottle behind. "I repeat, what are you doing here?" I asked the Fillies, keeping my voice low.

"A strange question," the Filly still standing said, peering down his long face and comet-shaped blaze at me. "Surely you know we're here to destroy the Abomination."

"That wasn't the deal we made at Yandro," I insisted. "Or aren't you in the loop yet on that?"

"I'm aware of the agreement," Comet Nose said gravely. "I'm also aware of how badly you've kept other such agreements in the past."

Unfortunately, he had a point. "So what exactly are you planning to do?" I asked.

Comet Nose flipped his head. "I?" he asked, stepping right up to me and resting his hand on my shoulder in classic the-car-salesman-is-your-friend fashion. "I will do nothing." He slid his hand off my shoulder and down the front of my jacket.

As he did so, I felt him slip something into my outer jacket pocket. I reached up a hand to see what he'd put there—

"Everyone freeze!" a Human voice snapped from behind me.

Instantly, the bar went silent. Keeping my hands motionless, I carefully turned my head.

There were six cops spread out around the wall by the door. All six had their guns out.

All six guns were pointed at me.

I took a deep breath. "Is there a problem, Officer?" I called.

"Stay exactly where you are, Donaldson," one of the cops ordered. "You—everyone else—get up and move calmly out of the way. Calmly, I said."

I turned back to Comet Nose. "Neatly done," I murmured. "I presume that was the murder weapon you just put into my pocket?"

"Correct," he said. "You now have two choices, Mr. Compton. You may refuse to give up the Abomination, whereupon the officers will take you to prison. They will examine the contract pen in your pocket and discover traces of Human blood on it.

"That would probably be bad," I agreed. "What's option number two?"

"You give up the Abomination, and this Eye will take back the pen," he said. "When asked, he will state you had borrowed it only a moment ago to write a note and forgetfully put it in your own pocket."

"We made a deal," I reminded him firmly. "I handle the Abomination. You stay out of my way."

"Don't be foolish," Comet Nose said scornfully. "You were allowed here to bring the Abomination out of hiding. Now that you have fulfilled that role, you will step aside."

I could hear boots on wood now as the cops started toward me. "I don't quit in the middle of a job," I said. "You really should know that by now"

"This is not the middle of the job," the Modhri warned. "For you, it is the end."

"Don't count on it," I said, trying not to think of me being in jail and Bayta trying to hold off the Fillies by herself. The Fillies, and whatever else the Modhri might have available to throw at her. "You're not getting the girl, period."

Comet Nose flipped his head again. "The Human female?" he asked. "When did I say I wanted any Human females?"

I stared at him. "You don't want—?"

And then the cops were on me, two of them grabbing my arms and roughly turning me around. "Easy," I told them. "I'll need those arms later."

"Very funny," a third cop said, opening my jacket and pulling McMicking's Beretta from my holster. He was older than the others, with lieutenants' insignia on his collar. The plate above his right shirt pocket gave his name as Bhatami. "Well, well—what have we here?"

"I have a carry permit," I reminded him.

"I understand Mr. Veldrick has canceled that," Bhatami said as he tucked the gun into his own belt.

"Mr. Veldrick has no such authority," I said.

"Perhaps not," Bhatami said. He gestured to the cops holding my arms. Reluctantly, I thought, they released me. "We, on the other hand, have all the authority we need."

"Oh, please," I said with a snort. "This isn't about that bogus warrant Sergeant Aksam tried to spoil my dinner with, is it?"

"This is far more serious," Bhatami said grimly. "A short time ago we received a tip that you were involved with the murders of two of our officers."

I felt sweat gathering beneath my collar, freshly aware of the slight bulge of the contract pen nestled in my jacket pocket. "An anonymous tip, I presume?"

Bhatami shrugged slightly. "True, and we both know the general value of such tips," he conceded. "However, given that we've been unable to contact either of the two officers by comm, we're inclined to take this one a bit more seriously."

I looked past his shoulder at the three cops by the door, their guns now pointed at the ceiling but still ready for action. So that was where at least one of the three missing Fillies had gotten to. He'd been lurking outside somewhere where he could spot my return and sic the cops on me. "May I ask who it is who's missing?"

I looked back at Bhatami in time to catch his flicker of disappointment. Sometimes murderers gave themselves away by forgetting to ask the identity of their alleged victim. Obviously, he'd been hoping I would add that indicator to the case against me. "Sergeant Aksam and Officer Lasari," he said. "The fact that you had a run-in with them earlier this evening makes the tip somewhat more credible."

"I didn't have a run-in with them," I explained patiently. "They tried to serve me with a trumped-up warrant and my legal representative politely invited them to take a hike."

"So I gather," Bhatami said. "They called in for a new warrant, which was subsequently issued."

"Which I was never served."

"Because both officers subsequently vanished."

"Which I know nothing about," I said. "Allow me to point out I've been on New Tigris less than a day, hardly enough time to work up a good grudge against anyone, let alone a pair of cops just doing their duty. Furthermore, there must have been twenty people who observed Sergeant Aksam and Officer Lasari accost me in the restaurant. If any of them had a grudge, they would have seen me as a gift-wrapped patsy."

"Facts which also have not escaped my notice," Bhatami agreed. "But the serious nature of the information requires that we make inquiries."

"I suppose," I said, looking over his shoulder again as the door opened and a newcomer shambled into the bar. Caught up in his own thoughts, or else blurred by his blood alcohol level, he got a full three steps inside before he noticed the cops lining the walls around him.

He jerked in shock and skittered nervously in a wide circle around the two nearest ones, keeping a wary eye on them as he backed hurriedly toward the bar. He looked toward me, his eyes narrowing as he peered at the evident object of the cops' attention. As he did so, he lifted his closed fist, thumb extended upward, toward his face. He dabbed the tip of his thumb at the corner of his mouth, the hand wiggling slightly as he did so.

Only then, as I gazed into his eyes, was I able to pierce the layer of grime and sweat and recognize McMicking's face.

McMicking's face, and a wiggling fist with thumb extended upward. The sign-language symbol for ten.

Ten cops? Ten minutes?

Ten seconds?

McMicking turned away and continued his shambling walk toward the bar. "But there's no reason we can't be comfortable, is there?" I asked, looking back at Bhatami. "Let's sit down."

Before the two cops flanking me could react, I took a step backward to the Fillies' table and sat down in the chair the Human arm wrestler had recently vacated. "Lieutenant?" I invited, gesturing Bhatami to the other empty chair as the two cops hurriedly moved back to my sides.

Bhatami looked pointedly at the two Fillies still seated at the table. "I think we'd do better to have this convers—"

From somewhere outside came the muffled thundercrack of an explosion.

Automatically, every head in the room spun that direction, every eye probing the half-dozen frosted windows for signs of what had happened.

And with their attention momentarily elsewhere, I pulled the damning contract pen from my jacket and dropped it, point down, into the open dilivin bottle.

Quickly but casually I pulled my hand back again, glancing at the two Fillies at the table and the one still standing nearby. If any of them had spotted my gambit and yelled for the cops, there might still be time to retrieve the pen before the witch's brew in the dilivin destroyed all traces of the murdered cops' blood and my own fingerprints.

But the Fillies weren't yelling, or even looking accusingly at me. All three of them were staring straight ahead, their necks stiff, their eyes glazed over, their lower jaws trembling in the classic Filly indicator of extreme emotional agitation.

And I suddenly realized what McMicking had done. The explosion that had so neatly distracted the bar's attention had been the car with the two dead cops inside. Probably not coincidentally, the blast had also fried the hidden Modhran coral, creating a surge of pain and shock that had kicked back through the group mind connection into my three agitated Fillies.

I looked at the bar, where McMicking was staring in the direction of the explosion with everyone else. His eyes flicked sideways to meet mine, one eyelid dropping in a sort of half wink.

I inclined my head microscopically. Whether he'd deliberately intended it or not, his stunt had just pulled the other half of my bacon out of the fire. With the car probably now blazing away, any traces of DNA that the contract pen might have left in the cops' chests were rapidly disintegrating into their component atoms.

Bhatami recovered first. "Bomb squad and fire department," he snapped, jabbing a finger toward one of the cops beside me. "You—stay with him," he told the other, the jabbing finger shifting to me. Turning, he raced for the door.

It was the signal for instant mass chaos, with everyone in the bar either shouting, gasping, or clawing their way toward the door to see what was happening out there. A minute later, the only ones left in the bar were me, my police escort, the Fillies, the bartender, Karim, and about a dozen men already slumped in their chairs or collapsed across the bar in dilivin-induced slumber.

And, of course, McMicking.

I looked at the Fillies. All three were looking back at me now, their eyes blank in a way that sent a shiver up my back. "I hope that didn't hurt too much," I said.

It was probably the wrong thing to say. Slowly, deliberately, one of the Fillies reached into his tunic and pulled out his contract pen. Staring into my face, he turned it around in his hand, gripping it like a knife—

"Is there a problem?" the cop standing behind me asked.

The color of the Filly's blaze paled a bit, his eyes coming back to normal focus. "Problem?" he asked. He looked at the pen in his hand as if wondering how it had gotten there, and tucked it away again. "No. There is no problem."

"Glad to hear it," the cop said. "Maybe you and your friends should move to a different table."

The Filly looked at me. Then, without a word, he and his companion climbed off their chairs, and the three of them walked over to a table across the room. They settled themselves around it, one of them facing me, the second facing the door, the third watching Karim behind the bar.

"Thank you," I said quietly to the cop.

"Save it," he muttered back. "If I find out you killed Aksam and Lasari, I'll take you apart myself."

I sighed. Clearly, I still had the knack of making friends wherever I went.

Someday, I really should work on that.