Down These Strange Streets (George R.R. Martin) (Kitty Norville 6.50)

“Yeah. I couldn’t afford this either. When it was still there. It must have gone up like a match head.”

There wasn’t enough left to tell any more details. There was a heavy wetash smell where bits and blackened pieces rested on the scorched concrete pad of the foundation. He blinked again. That smell, and the way the bullets had chewed at the mud brick below the window, flecking bits of adobe into his face. The way his armor had chafed, the fear as he made himself jerk up over the sill and aim the M-4, laying the red dot, the instant when the mouj had stared at him wide-eyed just before the burst tracked across his body in a row of black-red dots and made him dance like a jointed doll . . .

“Eric?” Alice said, jarring him out of the memory.

“Sorry,” he said. “Deep thought.”

She spared him any offensive sympathy and he nodded to her in silent gratitude, still feeling a little shaky. Got to get over this. I can have flashbacks later.

“Let me have the workup when you can,” he said.

Of course, when I was on the rock pile I said I’d deal with it later, when it wouldn’t screw the mission. This is later, I suppose.

“I’ll zap it to your notepad,” Alice said. “I’ve got to get some more samples now.”

He turned away. Cesar Martinez was talking to the Lopez family, minus the three children who were with some neighbor or relative; the couple were sitting in one of the emergency vans, and someone had given them foam cups of coffee. His own nose twitched at the smell, though what he really wanted was a drink. Or a cigarette. He suppressed both urges and listened to his partner’s gentle voice, calm and sympathetic. He was a hotshot, and he’d go far; he was good at making people want to help him, soothing them, never stepping on what they had to say.

“I was going to go back in. They were gone, and I was going to go back in and then—”

Cesar made a sympathetic noise. “You were having dinner when the man forced you out of the house?”

“Takeout Chinese, from Chow’s,” the wife said. Her husband took up the thread:

“And this man came in. He had a gun . . . a gun like a shotgun, but smaller, like a pistol,” Anthony Lopez said. “It still looked pretty damn big. So was he.”

He chuckled, and Salvador’s opinion of him went up. It was never easy for civilians when reality crashed into what they thought had been their lives.

“How could you tell it was a shotgun?”

“Two barrels. Looked like tunnels.”

“And the man?”

“He was older than me—fifty, sixty, gray hair cut short, but he was moving fast. He had blue eyes, sort of tanned skin but you could tell he was pink?”

“Anglo, but weathered?”

“Right. And he was dressed all in black, black leather. And he shouted at us, just Go, go, go, get out, run, keep running. We did.”

“Exactly the right thing to do,” Cesar said.

“But I was going to go back. Then it burned . . .” he whispered. “If I had—”

You’d be dead, Salvador thought. On the other hand, if the guy hadn’t run you all out, you’d all be dead. There’s something screwy here. Arsonists don’t care who gets hurt and they certainly don’t risk getting made to warn people.

Mrs. Lopez spoke again. “There was a younger man outside, when we ran out. He didn’t do anything. He just stood there, with his hands in the air, almost like he was high or something. And there was a, a van or a truck over there.”

She pointed to the wall of the compound across the street from what had been her house. Salvador made a note to see if they could get tire tracks.

“When we were across the street the younger man sort of, oh, collapsed. The older man with the gun, the one in black, helped him over to the van, not carrying him but nearly, sort of dragging him and putting him in the backseat. Then they drove off.”

Cesar tapped at his notepad and called up the face-sketch program.

“The younger man looked like this?” he began, and patiently ran them through the process of adjustment.

Salvador stared, fascinated as always, watching the image shift, slowly morphing and changing and then switching into something that only an expert could tell from a photograph of a living person. He knew that in the old days you’d had to use a sketch artist for this, but now it was automatic. It would even check the final result against the databases with a face-recognition subsystem. When they’d given all the help they could, Cesar went on:

“Thank you, thank you both. We may have to talk to you again later.”