A Perfect Machine(17)

A voice from one of the crates: “Cleve, step back. Give him some fucking breathing room.”

Cleve grimaced, bared crooked, tombstone teeth. “Breathin’ room, yeah,” he said, and leaned back out of the candle’s light. Stood up straight.

His eyes adjusting a little more to the gloom, the man in the chair saw that the chorus of breathing he heard was made up of twenty-five, maybe thirty men sitting on large wooden crates of various heights – some stacked two, three high – in a rough circle.

He recognized a few faces in the crowd, men whose pictures he’d taken earlier that night – and other nights.

As the cobwebs in his head cleared, the man pieced together what had happened, how he’d got here: driving after Kendul’s jeep, trying to focus, concentrating as hard as he could on the task at hand. Flashes of chrome blinding him under each gas lamp. Two pops. Shot out my tires, flipped the car. Then, nothing.

“Shot out my tires,” the man said, enunciating as clearly as possible. He felt something sticky near the corner of one of his eyes, felt burning across his forehead, figured his face was cut up pretty badly.

Cleve just grunted.

The voice again from one of the crates. “Yes, we did. Cleve and Marcton did, anyway. You were… watching us.”

The man said nothing, just breathed.

“Why were you watching us?”

Again, nothing but a subtle shift of weight from the man in the chair, the click of tiny bones in his neck as he tilted his head to the side.

Edward Palermo jumped down from the crate on which he’d been sitting. Boots echoed, sharper than Cleve’s workboots. Cleve glanced behind him, handed the candle to Palermo, took a seat on a nearby crate.

Palermo leaned in very close, said, “What did you want with the man you were following in the jeep?”

“James Kendul.”

“Yes, James Kendul.”

Silence.

“Look, you’re going to talk. You know it as well as I do. Cleve loves to hurt people. And he would love to hurt you. So you’re either going to tell us–”

“Save the Hollywood bullshit, pal. This ain’t some fucking action movie. You won’t touch me. People know where I am. You kill me, they come looking, you’re fucked. End of story.”

Palermo leaned back out of the candlelight, breathed deeply. Then his free hand moved forward, reached inside the man’s fake leather, found something in the inside pocket, pulled it out.

“Yeah, my wallet, imagine that,” the man said, a big, cocky grin slapped across his bleeding face. “Inside you’ll find out that I’m some guy none of you know named Carl Duncan. Then you’ll get all pissy and have one of your dim-bulb bruisers threaten me, maybe even go so far as to break some of my fingers until I tell you everything. You’ll tell me I’ll never see my baby girl again unless I spill the beans.” Duncan snorted. “But I ain’t got no baby girl. And I’ve been alive long enough to know when someone means to kill me and when they don’t. You fuckers won’t do it. You’da done it by now if you’d meant to. ’Cause you know I ain’t bluffing when I tell you that people are watching the watcher, and if you kill me you’ll be exposed. This whole fucking freakshow will–”

Palermo’s hand suddenly shot forward, cramming Duncan’s wallet into his mouth. Then he drove his clenched fist five times into Duncan’s face, knocking out three teeth, and splitting his lip in two places on the last punch.

Unconscious, Duncan’s head lolled to one side, resting on his left shoulder. Blood dribbled onto his striped shirt. One of his dislodged teeth fell from his mouth into his lap.

“Cleve, Derek, Marcton: take some of the boys, go outside and make sure our friend was alone. If he wasn’t, bring in whomever you find.”

Boots slapped concrete. Motion. Gruff voices, plans of action.

The last thing Palermo wanted his Runners doing tonight – or, really, any other night – was hunting humans. But they’d only ever had one person snooping around before, a reporter. At least in as long as Palermo had been running things. And he’d been a bluffer. Trying to save his life, he went down the same fictional road as this new guy – lying about people watching him, people who’d break things wide open. Expose their society.

Palermo knew then as he knew now that even if this pompous sack of shit wasn’t lying, and there actually were others with him, exposing their society wasn’t as easy as he made it out to be. Because no one really wants to know the details of the disease they’re carrying, no one wants to understand it, admit it even exists within them.

They just want rid of it.



* * *



The snow had still not stopped, and it was now so high that Marcton’s boots were barely enough to protect him from it. Not that he appeared overly concerned.

“Why don’t you ever wear a fucking coat?” Cleve said, as they marched out into the warehouse yard. Figuring on a bluff, they weren’t being particularly stealthy. “Stand around shivering like an idiot when you could just throw on a fucking coat.”

Marcton shrugged. “Don’t want to wear one.”

“Yeah, but why not?”

Marcton shrugged again. “Don’t like how close they make me feel. Always feel too tight. Don’t like the rubbing on my arms.”