Starfall (Starflight #2)(32)
Renny rapped on the office door, and it opened a crack. “I’m looking for my rep. Tall kid. Brown hair, short beard. Jumpier than a caffeinated squirrel.”
“That’s Gill,” came a man’s voice. “Haven’t seen him since yesterday.”
“Where does he live?”
A knobby finger extended from the crack, pointing behind them. “Check the bordello. The girls let him sleep there when he brings new clients around.”
Kane snickered and elbowed Doran. “Our ferret’s a genius.” When Solara and Cassia burned their glares into him, he clarified, “I mean, if you’re into hired ladies. Which I’m not.”
“Let’s go,” Renny told them.
The crew followed as he charged down the side corridor to a two-story building with a glowing red rooftop. No matter how far you traveled, that was the mark of a flesh house. At this early hour, they didn’t pass any travelers except for a drunkard or two curled up on the floor in a Crystalline coma. If there was ever a time to go nosing around a black market hub, it was now.
Renny pushed open the brothel’s front door and met a bouncer the size of a whale. The giant didn’t bother standing up from his stool. Renny told him, “We’re looking for Gill. Did he stay here last night?”
The bouncer grunted. “Up the stairs. Room thirteen.”
One by one, they skirted around the man and crossed the lobby to the staircase. Renny held a finger to his lips in warning, then led the way quietly up the steps and down the hall to room 13. When they reached the door, he pressed an ear to it, listening for movement from the other side. Instead of using the touch-sensor keypad on the wall, he hooked a finger around the door’s manual latch and gave a sideways tug.
It was locked.
He moved aside and pointed from Solara to the keypad. She nodded and pulled a small tool kit from her inside jacket pocket. In less than a minute, she’d overridden the lock, and the crew filed inside the room. Kane spotted Gill at once, sprawled faceup on a stained mattress in the corner with his jaw askew and his eyes half-open.
Dead as a stone.
Kane froze. From behind, someone shut the door, probably Renny because he was the only one to have broken out of the paralysis of shock. While the captain crouched down and inspected Gill’s bloated face, Kane reached out and linked his hand with Cassia’s. The act was reflexive, like breathing.
Renny puffed a sigh and stood up. “Poor kid.”
“An overdose, you think?” Kane asked. “I could tell he was on something.”
“Oh, he was definitely using,” Renny said. “But I don’t think that’s what killed him. I imagine this was an occupational hazard.”
Nobody spoke for a while. They let the implication hang in the air, unwilling to acknowledge that a young man had died because they’d paid him to dig in a land mine.
“But it had to be drugs,” Solara said. “The door was locked from the inside.”
“And there’s no sign of a struggle,” Doran pointed out. “He’s not bruised or stabbed or shot. Probably he died in his sleep.” Doran sounded confident, but he looked away from the body and began chewing his thumbnail.
“Check his pockets,” Cassia told Renny.
“Already did. They’re empty.”
“Then look under the mattress.” She pulled her hand free from Kane’s and crossed both arms across her chest. “No matter how he died, addicts always hide their stash. If he found any information, maybe he put it there.”
While Renny knelt on the floor to lift a mattress corner, Kane glanced around the room for a place to hide money or drugs. There was no furniture other than the bed, and anyone smart enough to reset the keypad after killing a man was also smart enough to check for loose floorboards or removable heat registers. If there was anything to find, the killer had probably beaten them to it. On a whim, he reached up and skimmed his fingers along the ledge over the door. At first he felt only dust, but then his hand brushed something, and a folded piece of paper fell to the floor.
He unfolded the scrap and recognized Cassia’s meticulous handwriting. It was the paper she’d given the ferret, the one with Marius’s transmission code on it. Kane turned the slip over and squinted at the messy scrawl on the back. In letters so jumbled he could barely make them out, it read, adelvice.
He handed the paper to Renny, who spoke the word aloud. “It sounds like ‘edelweiss,’ the little white flower that grows on Earth.”
“Maybe he misspelled it,” Kane said.
“Could be. Whatever it means, if someone killed this kid for finding it, there’s a good chance he gave up our names before he died. We should go. Preferably out the back door.”
“But what about Gill?” Solara asked, casting a sideways glance at the mattress. “Shouldn’t we tell someone what happened?”
Renny placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “It’s best if they don’t find him until we’re gone.”
She nodded, and together they all made their way out of the room as silently as they’d come, but using the emergency exit at the other end of the building instead of the main stairs. Minutes later, they were back at the marketplace, which was beginning to bustle with morning activity.
Steam rose from food carts, heating the air and sending up the scents of bread and sausage. Ordinarily, the combination would make Kane’s mouth water, but here it mingled with the stench of unwashed bodies and turned his stomach. He kept pace with Renny, eager to return to the docking station and put some distance between himself and this hellhole.