Back into the storm I went, snuffing out my cigarette along the way. Bianca Morés had a dingy little apartment tucked into the dingy little streets of downtown, one of the hinges snapped and held together with string. I eased it open, letting Bella lead the way. Nothing. It was by sheer luck that the place hadn’t flooded, with damp mold creeping around the corners and coating the kitchen in a sickly bloody yellow.
I flicked the lights on. They buzzed and hissed, and two of the five were burnt out. The couch had cigarette holes burned into the arm and a stack of books which had fallen over and spilled their pages anywhere. There was an oak-paneled coffee table with one of the doors missing and a mug of some icy brown liquid half-frozen on top. A clock was pushed up against the far wall like a rearranged mannequin. It was an hour and a half out of sync. A knife was stuck into the wall, buried up to the handle—but, thankfully, without blood spattered across it.
I paced over and stared at it. The handle was engraved with silver crisscrossing lines, and there was a scratched empty space which looked as though it had once bore a name plaque or title. And yet for all that wonderful, interesting, incongruous detail—it didn’t mean anything. Morés hadn’t bothered to take it with her, and though I could spend a lovely few hours tracking down its shop or trying to pull fingerprints, I’d end up back where I started.
What I needed here was, of course, everything that wasn’t here, everything that Morés had removed so as not to be found.
The couch developed a 30º bent as I sat down on it, a flurry of dust flying into the air. Where would a woman like this go to hide from her employers? Nowhere they knew of, obviously, nowhere Chesnes would have given me the location of. But they kept a close eye on her all the same, ensured she made all her deliveries on time, couldn’t loiter too long in one place, one house without Drakon or the police finding out. Somewhere innocuous, then, which wouldn’t stand out on Drakon’s radar, which Morés well knew enough to escape to.
Chesnes had given me a list of the addresses Morés delivered to. The high-profile customers wouldn’t creep around in back alleys; they expected her at their door, and until a week ago she’d dutifully shown. They made a neat little circle on the map. “All this time, you’re making your rounds,” I said aloud, “but all this time, you’re preparing, too. Planning. Where do you go?”
Hiding out with one of her customers, maybe? But Drakon knew them all—not to mention the fact that Morés felt secure enough to hand over her entire Dragon stock to Anjular, rather than using it to barter for a hideout. Huh. “Why do that? Anjular had no way of knowing you had six packs on you. You wouldn’t give him all unless you’re not worried about paying for anything else.” And Chesnes had said her loyalty was in question, but not why. “You have someone else. A benefactor. A friend—though those are rare enough in the Outscape.”
Chesnes didn’t know who it was, and there was nothing in Morés’ rooms to suggest another person, no convenient extra address in her book. I doubted her neighbors could tell me anything—the houses next door were heavily shuttered, the door dented around the handle. The only other people I knew she saw regularly were those Dragon customers, and they’d hardly talk to a detective.
I stood. The couch sprung back to position, knocking against the coatrack. The long grey coat hanging there unraveled from the hanger like a spool to pile on the ground, and I stared at it. No. They wouldn’t talk to a detective at all. Wouldn’t even open the door. But they might be a hair friendlier to a brown-haired, glasses-wearing woman dressed a whole lot like Bianca Morés, at least for that crucial moment. Then I could be my usual charming self and if all else failed, well, I’d let Bella do a little talking herself.
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***
The door opened. I squinted through the thick lenses at a reedy, grey-haired woman in a black jacket. The muscles in my leg began to twitch just from standing near her and I tamped them down. Morés was a nightmare and wouldn’t have been affected. “You’re late,” the woman snarled, and the hands that grabbed my collar didn’t feel quite as reedy as the rest of her. “Have you any idea how long-?”
“I’m—sorry, ma’am.” I managed to wrench free and retreated a step down the path. One of my hands clutched Bella inside my pocket. “I’ve been looking for someone-”
“That boy? He was clearly worthless the first time you carted him around. Weak and wrecked.”
“Boy?” This woman was the fourth of Morés’ customers I’d talked to and the first to give any indication of another person. Strange that he would accompany her while she dealt in Dragon, though. Not a plus-one activity. “Do you know where-?”
“You don’t sound like Bianca.”
Whatever nightmare she embodied really wanted me to be laid out flat looking up at her. I winced and began to back away. I didn’t make it very far before a mean, vicious, and surprised look appeared in her eyes. She spat and darted back inside the house. I heard the sound of several locks clicking before I saw the same pair of eyes peering through a crack in the window blinds.
Only when I ducked around the corner did I take the glasses off. Morés couldn’t have seen her own hand in front of her face with a prescription like that! I was burning bridges fast and not making it very far across them before I did, and I was starting to fear they’d soon come pre-burned. I eyed the phone booth, one door smashed open, across the street and sighed. Chesnes deserved to know what I was doing before he got some irate call about a false Morés, or before a false Morés managed to get herself shot. I’d been lucky so far, sure, but the funny thing about luck is that it only needs to run out once.
I made it one step towards the booth before I felt the gun pressing into my back. “D-don’t turn around,” said a small voice.
I held my hands up quickly. Then—very slowly—I turned around anyway. She was about my height, hair slick with rain and hanging down over her face, and she wore a mirror image of the glasses I’d just tucked into my pocket. (Her very presence also dug deep into the adrenaline center of my brain and insisted that I was being chased by an ever-persistent, nightmarish creature, but I ignored it. She’d caught up already, hadn’t she?) The gun she held had been cobbled together from four different models and looked very dangerous.
I said the only thing I could say. “Bianca Morés?”
Her eye twitched and her hands didn’t move. “I heard s-somebody talk about me. Out there. Where I w-wasn’t.”
“It’s the glasses, isn’t it?” I shrugged. “You’re a hard person to find. Can’t blame me for getting a little creative.”
“That’s the p-problem.” She had an odd cadence to her words—driven by the stutter, I guessed. “I don’t want to be f-found. I can’t be. And so if you’re here…”
I acknowledged that the part of my brain under the influence of her nightmare, still frantically telling me to run away, had a point. I didn’t like where this was going. “Hang on, hang on,” I said. “You know who I’m working for, right? I was just phoning them. If you kill me here that’ll bring Chesnes and Drakon down on you and they won’t be nearly as nice.”
“Nice?”
“They won’t understand why you did it. Why you had to.”
“Why I…?”
“It’s not just the money. It’s not selling out for the highest payout. You’re trying to help someone, aren’t you?”
The hand that held the gun wavered. It didn’t drop—Morés was too experienced for that—but I’d hit something. “W-what can you know about that?”
“I know how Drakon treats people who run away,” I said. “I don’t like working for him any more than you did, and I truly don’t care what happens to a little damn notebook. But the storms are getting rougher, and I need a reason not to earn my pay on this case.” I was gripping her arm now, turning us into a strange ouroboros of gunmetal, human, and nightmare. “Can you give me that reason, Bianca?”
We stood like that for a moment. Then she nodded glumly. “It’s—not f-far,” she said. “F-follow me.”