Skin Game

Chapter one Imager is everything

Like a relentless boxer, rain beat down on the city, first jabbing with sharp needles, then smacking Seattle with huge fat drops that hit like haymakers, the barrage punctuated by the ominous rumble of thunder and the eerie flash of lightning.

An unmarked black car drew to a stop in a rat-infested Sector Three alley, the rain rattling the metal roof like machine-gun fire. Two men in dark suits climbed out, to be instantly drenched, though neither seemed to notice. Each wore a radio earplug with a short microphone bent toward his mouth.

Sage Thompson — the man who’d emerged from the passenger’s side — was relieved that the headsets, at least, seemed to be waterproof. In their coat pockets, each man carried one of the new portable thermal imagers that, just this week, had become standard equipment. Thompson — barely six feet, almost skinny at 180 pounds — wondered if water-tightness was among the gizmo’s various high-tech bells and whistles.

Water sluiced down the alley in a torrent that seemed to express the sky’s anger, eventually bubbling over the edge of a rusty grate maybe ten yards in front of them. Thompson was forced to jump the stream and his feet nearly slid out from under him as he landed and bumped into a triangle of garbage cans, sending them crashing into each other, creating a din that rivaled the storm’s, his hands flying wide to help maintain his balance. Then his hands dropped back to his sides, the one holding his flashlight clanging off the imager in his coat pocket, the other moving to make sure his pistol was still secure in its holster on his belt.

The hefty man who’d been driving — Cal Hankins — shone his flashlight in Thompson’s face, huffed once, and eased around a dumpster that looked like it hadn’t been emptied since before the Pulse. Moving slowly ahead, their flashlights sweeping back and forth over the brick hulk in front of them, the two men finally halted in front of what had once been a mullioned window.

The interior of the six-story brick building — an abandoned warehouse, Thompson surmised — seemed a black hole waiting to devour them without so much as a belch. Next to Thompson, his partner Hankins swept a flashlight through one of the broken panes, painting the rainy night with slow, even strokes. Darkness surrendered only brief glimpses of the huge first-floor room as it swallowed up the light.

“You sure this is the right place?” Hankins asked gruffly.

There was no fear in the man’s voice — Thompson sensed only that his partner didn’t want his time wasted. At forty, bucket-headed Hankins — the senior partner of the duo — wore his blondish hair in a short brush cut that revealed only a wisp or two of gray. His head rested squarely on his shoulders, without apparent benefit of a neck, and he stood nearly six-three, weighing in (Thompson estimated) at over 230. But the man wasn’t merely fat — there was enough gristle and muscle and bone in there to make Hankins formidable.

Still, Thompson knew their boss — that nasty company man, Ames White, a conscienceless yuppie prick if there ever was one — had been all over Hankins about his weight and rode the older guy mercilessly about it. Though he knew better than to ever say it out loud, Thompson considered White the worst boss in his experience — which was saying something.

White was smart, no doubting that, but he had a sarcastic tongue and a whiplash temper that Thompson had witnessed enough times to know he should keep his mouth shut and his head low.

“This is the right place, all right,” Thompson said, raising his voice over the battering rain. “Dispatch said the thermal imager team picked up a transgenic in the market in Sector Four.”

“This is Sector Three.”

“Yeah — they followed him here before they lost him.”

Hankins shook his head in disgust. “Then why the fuck ain’t they lookin’ for him, then? What makes us the clean-up crew for their sorry asses?”

These questions were rhetorical, Thompson knew, though they did have answers, the same answer in fact: Ames White.

And Hankins spent much of his time bitching about White, behind the boss’s back, of course. But they both knew it was only a matter of time before White found a way to get rid of Hankins...

... and then Thompson would have to break in a new partner, possibly one even younger than himself. Then he would be the old-timer. The thought made him cringe.

Not exactly a kid at twenty-seven, Thompson was the antithesis of Hankins: the younger man seemed like a long-neck bottle standing next to the pop-top beer can that was his partner. Married to his college sweetheart, Melanie, and with a new baby daughter, Thompson was the antithesis of Hankins in terms of home life, as well: the gristled bulldog had been divorced twice and had three or four kids he never saw and didn’t really seem to give a damn about.

This was a partnership made not in Heaven but in Ames White’s twisted idea of the right thing to do; and Thompson still hadn’t figured out if being partnered with Hankins was a reward — setting him up to step into the older man’s shoes — or a punishment — White saddling him with a complainer.

Thompson — in keeping a low profile and, frankly, kissing White’s ass — sometimes wondered if their sick, slick boss didn’t see through his obsequiousness into the contempt he truly felt.

Hankins took a few steps to the right, Thompson on his heels. Withdrawing the imager from his pocket, Hankins squeezed the trigger and methodically scanned the area around them for the transgenic — nothing.

The new thermal imagers looked like smaller versions of the pre-Pulse radar guns that Thompson had read about in his online history studies. The biggest difference was that instead of having red LED numbers that showed speed, the ass-end readout area of the imagers contained a tiny monitor that showed infrared pictures of any heat source the front end was pointed at. The two men were looking for something with a core temperature of 101.6, the average temperature of transgenics — three degrees higher than humans.

“Fuck it,” Hankins sighed, rain streaking down his face like heat-wave perspiration. “Looks like we’re going to have to go inside.”

“Looks like,” Thompson said with a nod.

“We’ll split up,” Hankins announced.

“Makes us both more vulnerable.”

Hankins kissed the air obnoxiously. “You’re so sensitive, so vulnerable, even with papa bear around.”

“Cut it out, man.”

Hankins grunted another, deeper sigh. “Sooner we get done with this thankless-ass job, sooner we can get away from this fuckin’ monsoon.”

“You’re right,” Thompson admitted, his voice calm even though his guts now seemed to be swimming upstream toward his mouth.

It wasn’t that Thompson was a coward. He’d seen action before, plenty of it — even for the post-Pulse world, Seattle was a tough town, and for cops and anybody working security, it was a higher risk job than steeplejack — and he handled the fear and stress just fine. What bothered him was, he didn’t think either he or even the rugged Hankins could handle a pissed-off transgenic alone. They weren’t human, those transgenics — they were monsters, really.

And Sage Thompson had seen monster movies before — he knew what happened when people split up in such circumstances.

He could tell himself that this was reality, not fantasy; but Seattle in the last few years had turned into a place more ghastly than the imagination of any mere writer or filmmaker could conjure.

Hankins said, “When we find the stairs, I’ll head up and start down. You begin down here and work your way up. We’ll meet in the middle, agree we didn’t find anything, and haul our soggy asses out of here.”

“It’s a plan,” Thompson said with a shrug.

Thompson slipped the imager back into his coat pocket, wiped the rain from his face — a fruitless gesture — and took a couple more steps forward.

The city was the reluctant home to a ton of these shabby old buildings, and they were all around the Emerald City, the structural equivalent of the homeless. Back when the buildings had been constructed in the 1940s and 1950s, they mostly housed factories that built things from scratch, packed them up and shipped them off to the four corners of the world.

But as time went on and the economy eroded around the turn of the century — only to take the devastating hit of the Pulse — many of the buildings stood abandoned, with some then used as warehouse space for other businesses. Each crumbling structure was different, depending on how it had been cannibalized. Thompson knew he might find a floor that was still all offices or one where all the office walls had been demolished to allow for the stacking of larger objects — there was just no way of knowing what lay ahead.

With half a head-turn, Hankins asked, “Ready?”

“Ready,” Thompson said, trying to keep a note of confidence in his voice.

Hankins turned all the way now, shined the light in his face yet again. “You okay, kiddo?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Just get the damn light out of my face.”

Grinning, Hankins aimed the flash back into the building. “Yeah, you’re okay.”

They were stopped outside a broken door, a heavy number that would have made quite a barrier if it had been locked rather than half hanging off its hinges. Both men pulled out their Glock nines and Thompson chambered a round. Hankins, Thompson knew, already had one in the pipe... and most likely already had the safety off as well.

Hankins stepped through the door and Thompson watched the older man swing his weapon from side to side, the hand holding the flashlight following suit.

Thompson stepped through the door behind his partner, his arms locked together in the same fashion, his pistol and flashlight simultaneously sweeping the room. Struggling to keep his breathing under control, he was thankful to at least be out of the rain. He could hear it banging on the roof far above him and on the remaining windows on this floor. Carefully, he tuned that out and listened closely for other sounds.

Moving off to the right now, putting himself out in front, Thompson heard Hankins’ raspy breathing and suddenly knew that, for all his bluster, his partner fought the same nervousness that wanted to paralyze him. To their left something metallic rattled, and they both swung around, their lights stopping briefly on a rattling soda can, then moving on, both beams settling on a huge brown rat. The rodent froze, but its black eyes were not the least bit intimidated by the lights.

“S’pose that sucker’s transgenic?” asked Hankins archly.

Thompson might have laughed — out of nervousness — but his throat felt too dry to pull it off. Letting out a long breath, he went back to checking out the room.

He moved slowly forward, allowing the distance between himself and Hankins to grow, but stayed close enough to cover his partner should the need arise. Halfway across the room, they found a stairwell leading to the second floor. Hankins’ flashlight shone up the stairs, his gun still balanced atop his wrist.

Turning his head halfway toward Thompson, he said, “I’m going up.”

“Okay. I’ll keep at it down here.”

“You find anything, let me know immediately.”

“Same back at ya,” Thompson said. Again he thought about the soggy headset plugged into his ear and hoped the thing had signal enough to get up six flights of stairs.

Hankins headed up the dark stairwell, the steps groaning for a while, but the sound soon getting swallowed by the hammering of rain, which was slanting toward the building, moisture working its way through the loose slats of boarded-up windows.

Thompson watched as Hankins and the light disappeared up the stairs. Shining his flashlight in that direction, he saw scant evidence that Hankins had even been in the building — merely a few wet footprints on the wooden stairs.

Thompson suddenly felt very alone.

Something scrabbled across the floor, just behind him, and he spun around, the flashlight and gun following in a wobbly arc, rainwater spraying off him like he was a wet hound. The beam of light and Glock settled on what appeared to be the same rat again, only this time the rodent stood on its haunches, and seemed to smile — showing its sharp yellow teeth — and almost appeared to be flipping Thompson off with its raised front paws.

Thompson suppressed the urge to squeeze off a round and end the little bastard, and it took no small amount of will to keep him from pulling the trigger — not just because the creature was a handy surrogate for both Hankins and Ames White, but because it might be helpful to end the distraction of the noise the thing was making.

Only, if the flashlights hadn’t alerted the transgenic to their positions, a gunshot most assuredly would... and God only knew what Hankins would think if he heard Thompson shooting, moments after the older man headed up the stairs.

Commuting the rat’s death sentence to life, Thompson resumed his search of the first floor. He moved carefully, doing his best to stay silent, a couple of times holding the flashlight under an arm as he probed especially shadowy corners with the thermal imager.

“Hankins,” he half whispered into the microphone.

No response.

Thompson felt a bead of sweat roll down his cheek, to mingle with the streaks of rain, and he unconsciously found a corner to press himself into as he spoke again, this time louder. “Hankins.”

This time the response was immediate. “Thompson, would you please shut the hell up? Transgenics from here to Portland can hear you. If you’re not in trouble — and it doesn’t sound like you are — zip it.”

The younger man’s face burned as he felt himself blush in the darkness. Seemed that with every shift he spent with Hankins, he found a new reason to hate him. Thompson vowed that once they were out of this building, he would speak up for himself, and finally ask White for a new partner... and, failing that, he would simply transfer out of White’s unit altogether.

This whole transgenic affair troubled him. He’d been with the program long enough to know that although these human experiments were considered a threat to national security, the transgenics had been engineered to defend this country, after all. So on some level, Thompson felt like his job was to track down and dispose of what might be considered soldiers of his country. He tried not to see it that way, but sometimes it felt exactly like that — particularly when he let himself think a little too much, or on long sleepless nights during which the hypocrisy of his life crawled into his mind like a waking nightmare.

Angrily wiping the sweat from his eyes, Thompson moved deeper into the blackness, punctuating it with sweeps of the flash. At the back of the cavernous space, he found three offices stretching across the rear wall. Two of the doors were completely gone, and the third — its window long gone — hung from one hinge like a stubborn loose rotted tooth, refusing to fall out of a gaping mouth. Of the six panes of glass that had been the top half of the facing walls of the offices, only one remained, a nasty crack running across it diagonally.

Thompson pulled out the thermal imager and slow-scanned the offices without success. Telling himself he was just being careful, he spun in a steady circle, covering the whole first floor again to make sure nothing had skulked in behind him. Except for a few more rats — and what was either the biggest rat he’d ever seen or a small stray cat — the monitor showed nothing.

This left only one thing to do. Since the thermal imager could not see through wood, that meant he still had to check out the offices one at a time.

Letting out his breath slowly, he stepped toward the doorway in the farthest left corner, his pistol and flashlight leading the way. He swept the room quickly once, past the large metal desk, over the peeling wallboard, past the scattered, smashed glass on the floor to the low half wall to his right.

The room was empty.

And he saw no wet footprints on the floor; even the dusty patina of the desktop seemed undisturbed. Still, Thompson played it carefully as he eased around the desk and pointed his gun at the floor behind it.

Nothing.

He let out another breath and felt a little better, and pressed on. His stomach was fluttering, though, and he felt covered in an apprehension as real as his rain-drenched clothes. Middle office, now.

Not only was the door gone off this office, so were the furnishings within: no desk, file cabinets, tables, chairs, nothing but piles of broken glass and fractured wallboard littering the room like the aftermath of a biker party. No transgenics in there either.

Listening intently at the sagging door of the final office, Thompson heard nothing but his own pulse pounding in his ears. Though the whole building smelled of rot and decay — a bouquet emphasized by the night’s dampness — the last office seemed to be the nexus of the putrid aroma. The door groaned as he pushed it open.

The desk in this room had been tipped over, its legs sticking out at Thompson, its top facing the back wall. He shoved the door hard, smacking it off the wall, just in case someone... something... had snugged himself... itself... back there...

Nothing behind it, though. Swinging the other way, Thompson played his light over the floor and saw nothing but broken glass and other rubble. Slowly, he edged toward the side of the desk and shined the beam behind it, and the light caught something, something made not of wood or steel or glass, but flesh...

There, on the floor, lay the skinned carcass of some sort of animal. The body had obviously been there for some time — even the insects had lost interest in it by now — and Thompson couldn’t even make out what it was, between the darkness and decay.

From its size, it at first appeared to him to be a very large dog, or maybe a deer that had wandered into the city; but as the beam crept over the prone form, Thompson realized that what he’d just found was neither deer nor dog.

The body on the floor was that of a man.

Not an animal carcass, but a human corpse.

“Hankins,” Thompson said, struggling to keep his voice calm. “Got something.”

No response.

The smell of the office oppressive now, threatening to send his dinner scurrying back up his throat, he again hissed, “Hankins.”

Finally his partner growled in his ear: “What the fuck is it now, Thompson?”

“Got a body here.”

Hankins’ voice came back gruffly, unimpressed: “The transgenic?”

“I... I don’t think so.”

“Shit. I knew we couldn’t be that fuckin’ lucky. Tell me about your catch of the day.”

“Office downstairs. Last one on the right. Behind a desk.”

Harrumphing, Hankins said, “Jesus, how about a detail that matters? Like is it a man? A woman? Child? What?”

Thompson bit his tongue and kept the obscenity from popping out of his mouth. Discipline, Thompson knew, kept him from being like Hankins, and he wouldn’t allow the F word to slip into his reply, no matter how hard it fought to come out. Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, he said, “Frankly, I can’t tell whether it’s male or female... probably adult, and I... I think it’s been skinned.”

“What?”

“Skinned,” Thompson repeated. “It’s a dead body... with no skin.”

“Goddamn... How fresh is that baby?”

How the hell should I know? Thompson wondered, but he said, “Old — there’s not even any bugs. Even the smell’s died down... some.”

Hankins sighed in Thompson’s ear, then said, “Fuck it then. Move on.”

“You don’t think finding a dead body is a ‘detail’ that matters?”

“Sure it is — in the long run. In the short term, we’re lookin’ for a transgenic tonight.”

“Maybe this is the victim of a transgenic.”

“Maybe — but we’ll let the investigative team figure that out, Sage my boy. If you got a kill that ain’t fresh, it’s not going to do us any good now... and it’ll wait until we’ve cleared the building.”

When this becomes somebody’s else’s job, Thompson thought.

Yet, while he would hate to admit it, Thompson knew that what Hankins said actually made sense. Slowly pulling the flashlight beam off the corpse, Thompson forced himself to turn away and walk out of the office.

He climbed the stairs to the second floor. Even darker than the first, this level had been subdivided into smaller rooms which lined either side of a central corridor that ran the length of the building, starting at the freight elevator that squatted next to the stairwell.

Though a thick layer of dust still covered the floor, this level seemed cleaner than the last, somehow — no debris, no shattered glass. He was just about to go up the stairs to the third floor, when he decided to take the time to double check. He turned and played the beam over the corridor in front of him.

At first glance he hadn’t spotted them, but now — on this second, closer look — he saw the wet footprints, running down the hall but close to the wall at right. Were those Hankins’ footprints?

No — his partner was still up on sixth; and anyway, these were smaller than Hankins’ big feet would make, not as wide, and longer. And leading to the third door on the left...

Acid churned in Thompson’s stomach as he considered what it might be like to go one-on-one with a transgenic. They could vary in strength, in abilities, and defects, depending on what animal DNA had been mixed into their personal genetic soup. Some of them were human, even beautiful.

Others were grotesque combinations of man and beast.

“Hankins,” he whispered into the headset.

“Yeah?” The older man’s voice sounded resigned and maybe a little pissed off.

“I’ve got footprints on the second floor. They’re wet and they’re fresh.”

Any skepticism or irritation disappeared from Hankins’ voice: “What’s the imager say?”

Thompson returned his automatic to its holster and pulled out the imager. Watching the imager drawing blanks as its invisible beam moved up the hallway, he suddenly felt naked without the pistol in his hand, and when a red flare blipped up on the imager’s tiny monitor screen, he damn near threw the thing down the hall in his anxiety to reach for his weapon.

“You still with me, kid?” Hankins asked.

In spite of himself, Thompson jumped a little when Hankins’ voice made its appearance in his ear.

“Got a hot body,” Thompson said, “but its temp is below a hundred.”

“Probably not a transgenic.”

“Probably not.”

“Shit, though — I’m on my way. Hang loose till I get there.”

Thompson felt his nerve returning a little as he realized that whatever was in the room ahead probably wasn’t a transgenic.

“It’s all right, man,” he said into the headset. “I’m all over it.”

“You sure, kiddo?”

Slipping the imager back into his pocket, Thompson pulled out his Glock; his stomach was still fluttery, but — goddamnit — this was his job, and he would do it. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

Hankins’ voice came back clearly, all business now. “You let me know what you find. You need me, I’m there in a heartbeat.”

“Right,” he said, almost feeling affection for the older man — and wasn’t that a rarity...

Thompson remained cautious, shining his light into each room as he moved down the hall. He wasn’t checking them carefully — somebody or something was on this floor, and he was moving it right along, accordingly — but the imager had shown nothing, and the quick playing of the beam around the rooms assured him the new gizmo wasn’t on the fritz.

Outside the third door on the left, he stopped, calmed his breathing, and once he was steady, he swung through the open door, his arms extended in front of him, the flashlight moving from right to left.

His flashlight sweep was halfway around the room when he heard the whoosh in the blackness to his left. In the grim darkness, he saw a length of two-by-four arcing through the air!

Before he could react, though, the board crashed down across his arms and the flashlight and pistol went flying in opposite directions, clattering, clanking. The flashlight went out when it hit the floor, the room going completely black. His Glock flew to the floor somewhere as well — didn’t go off, thankfully — winding up vaguely to the left, where it skittered along until it smacked into a wall.

Thompson’s vision went white, then black, as pain exploded through his being. He heard the whoosh of the board making a second swing, and tried to move out of the way, but then he heard the snap of his left arm breaking, and grunted once before collapsing to the floor. He felt more than saw his attacker, raising the board for a third strike, this one sure to split his head like a melon and leave Melanie a widow and his child fatherless...

Instinctively rolling toward his attacker, Thompson managed to narrow the distance between them enough so that this time when his opponent swung the board, it whizzed over Thompson’s head as he crashed into the attacker’s legs and sent the man tumbling across the room. Scrabbling to his left, Thompson used his good hand to feel along the floor for his pistol.

Behind him he could hear his attacker cursing under his breath as he struggled to regain his feet in the near darkness. Thompson fumbled along, seeking his gun, dust rising, and he repressed a sneeze as he crawled forward.

Hankins’ voice erupted in his headset. “Find anything yet, kid?”

Fine, Thompson thought, just swell, but he said nothing, not wanting to give his position away to his unwelcoming host. He continued forward, his good hand searching for the Glock, his bad arm throbbing so badly he wanted to pass out.

“Son of a bitch barge in my house,” the attacker muttered thickly behind him in the darkness.

There!

Something cool, something metallic — the Glock. His fingers wrapped around it and in one motion, still on his knees, Thompson pivoted, brought up the pistol and fired blindly three times, left, center, right, covering his options.

Thompson heard the soft thwack of at least one round entering the man’s body, heard too the man’s involuntary grunt, and finally he heard one more sound: the board dropping from his attacker’s hand with a thunk, raising dust. The attacker sagged to the floor, gurgled a couple of times, then was silent.

“Jesus, kid, I’m comin’!” Hankins’ voice shouted in the headset.

The pistol still in front of him, in his good hand, Thompson got to his feet, shuffled over, found the body in the dark and kicked it a couple of times.

It didn’t move.

Into the headset, Thompson calmly said, “It’s okay. Got a guy down — need a medic. My arm’s broken, but the attacker’s down.”

Hankins’ voice sounded like he was underwater. “I’m comin’, kid! I’ll be right there, I’m on the fifth floor and headed down.” The poor overweight bastard was probably running, which meant he might be about to have a heart attack.

“It’s all right, I said,” Thompson insisted. “I’ve got it covered.”

Using his foot, giving the darkness gentle kicks, he finally found the flashlight. He picked the thing up, shook it a couple of times, and was surprised when the beam came back on.

Struggling to juggle both the light and pistol in one hand — not put any more pressure on his aching arm than he had to — he made his way over and pointed the light down at his attacker’s face.

An old white man with wispy white hair, an open, mostly toothless mouth, and unblinking milky blue eyes stared up at him — no transgenic... just some poor homeless wretch. The old man had been doing nothing more than protecting his squatter’s rights in the tiny office... and for this, Thompson had killed him.

The young man’s stomach turned acidic again, but this time it wasn’t from fear. This time it was something far worse — shame... guilt.

He didn’t know how he’d ever get past this. Since joining White’s unit, he’d done some things that he knew he’d eventually regret; but, goddamnit, he’d never killed an innocent man — not until tonight.

Shaking his head, hot tears running down his face, mingling with sweat and rain, Thompson knew that tonight would be his last in this stinking job. Fuck Ames White. He and Hankins would finish here, drive back to the office, where they would make out their report, then he’d be done.

He would go home to his wife, take her and the baby in his arms, and tomorrow they would decide how far away they would move to try to put this night behind them. Somewhere, in the post-Pulse world, there had to be a life better than this one.

Then, in Thompson’s ear, Hankins screamed.

“Hankins!” Thompson shouted into his headset.

Nothing.

“Hankins, talk to me!”

Still no response.

Changing frequencies, Thompson sent out an emergency call to headquarters for reinforcements, and a general 911 call that would bring both the local cops and an ambulance. Then he switched back and called Hankins’ name again.

More silence.

Stripping off his tie, he made a makeshift splint with the flashlight, so the beam seemed to shoot out the end of his fingers; he tied it off, popped a new clip into the Glock, then took off up the stairs, fast as hell.

But not fast enough.

He found Hankins’ body on the fourth floor, where it had been dragged from the stairwell — he knew it was Hankins, though there was no way to recognize the naked, bright gleaming redness of blood and exposed muscle and bone as any particular human.

Merely a skinned one.

Very fresh, this time.

And the scream he heard in his ears, now, was his own.

Leanly muscular, with spiky brown hair, icy blue eyes, and the empathy of a shark, Ames White pressed the palm of his left hand against his forehead.

He didn’t know whether to laugh or scream, so he did what he always did: he smirked, even in the face of death... he smirked.

White knew Hankins and Thompson were not the sharpest men on his unit; he had even suspected they were inept — but he’d had no idea that they were this lame.

Yet somehow this seemed typical. He was a man with a mission of almost cosmic importance, in a city, a country, that was a shambles, barely worth ruling... though one took one’s best option, right? And here he was, with this huge responsibility, surrounded by fools and incompetents. It seemed to White, these days, that he was constantly on the verge of a great victory or a humiliating defeat.

He wondered which column this one would end up in.

The upside of this, if there was one, was that at least he’d be rid of the bungling duo now. Hankins, of course, was dead. White glanced at the skinned body, then looked away again — what a disgusting mess. Thompson, huddled in a corner, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, cradling his broken arm, seemed unable to tear his eyes from his partner’s grotesque corpse.

White already knew the kid was washed up, he could see it in his face. And the fact that Thompson had nearly been taken out by a geriatric homeless person only compounded the failure.

The downside of this was the pair’s ineffectiveness would reflect on him, and White despised failure, even if his was only one by association. Shaking his head, he turned to his associate, Otto Gottlieb.

Hispanic-looking with his black hair, dark eyes, and olive skin, Gottlieb was not in the know about government agent White’s several secret agendas. In fact, Gottlieb’s best trait — as far as White was concerned — was that the man did what he was told.

So far, Gottlieb had resisted the urge to grow a brain and start thinking on his own; but White was afraid that couldn’t last forever. And when the moment came, he knew he’d miss Gottlieb. He didn’t really like the guy — White didn’t really like anyone, and prided himself on a superiority devoid of such weakness as compassion and sentimentality — but he had gotten used to having Gottlieb around, and his associate’s presence somehow brought him peace.

Even if the man was a moron.

Motioning toward the two partners — one dead, one alive — White said, “Get him out of here, Otto. He disgusts me. Get him out.”

“The body? Shouldn’t we wait for—”

“No. That’s evidence. Thompson, I mean. Lose him.”

Gottlieb, finally getting it, nodded and moved to the other agent. Helping Thompson to his feet, Gottlieb drew the blanket around the man’s shoulders and led him toward the door.

When they neared White, Thompson looked at his boss with golf-ball eyes and said, “That transgenic skinned him so fast — so fucking fast. He skinned him.”

“You screwed up. This was an unacceptable loss.”

Now Thompson’s eyes tightened and tears began to trickle. “I tried to get to him in time... I tried to help... I...”

White smirked again, and shook his head slowly. “You just don’t get it, do you?”

A wide-eyed blank look settled on Thompson’s face.

“I’m not talking about Hankins. This transgenic saved me the trouble of firing his fat ass.”

“You said... it was an unacceptable... loss...”

“And it is. The transgenic got the thermal imager.” White grabbed the front of Thompson’s wet raincoat. “And how long do you suppose it’ll be before they figure out what it is, and what it’s for?”

White released the young agent’s coat. Thompson said nothing, his head turning back to Hankins on the floor. His lower lip trembled as he said, “You... you’re a monster.”

“No. They’re the monsters — and you’re fired. Get him out of here, Otto.”

Gottlieb hauled him away.

Alone but for the body, White slammed his fist into a concrete wall, leaving a fist-sized dent.

To the glistening scarlet corpse, White said, “I can’t believe you let a goddamn transgenic get hold of a thermal imager.”

But Hankins said nothing — he just grinned stupidly back at his boss, his teeth huge in the raw red pop-eyed mask of his face.