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

The night outside was still dark, but there was a staleness, a stillness to it, that promised dawn.

Baffled, Salvador shook his head. The man held up his notebook. The smudge he’d recorded on the ledge turned into a print. A paw print.

“You notice a dog? Or something else like that?”

“No,” he said dully. “Just a cat.”

“Well, that’s not it.” The print was too large for a house cat. “Probably just something drawn by the smell.”

“Time of death?”

“Recent but hard to pin down, on a warm night like this. Everything’s fully compatible with sometime between the time you got the phone call and the time you called it in.”

The chief put a hand on his shoulder and urged him outside. He fumbled in the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

“You know you can’t be on this investigation, Eric,” the older man said. “Go home. Get some sleep. Crawl into a bottle and get some sleep if you have to. Take a couple of days off.”

Salvador nodded, flicked the cigarette into the weedy gravel of the front yard, and walked steadily over to his car. He pulled out very, very carefully, and drove equally carefully to St. Francis, down to the intersection with Rodeo and the entrance to the I-25. Only then did he pull over into a boarded-up complex of low buildings, probably originally meant for medical offices or real estate agents, built by some crazed optimist back in the late aughts or early teens.

“Okay, Cesar, talk to me,” he said aloud, and slid the data card he’d palmed into the slot on his notebook; nobody would notice, not when he’d left his shoes standing in the pool of blood. “This better not be your taxes. Tell me how to get the cabron.”

The screen came on, only one file, and that was video. Salvador tapped his finger on it.

Vision. Three ten in the carat at the lower right corner. Cesar was sweating as he spoke, wearing a bathrobe but with his Glock sitting in front of him within range of the pickup camera; the background was his home-officecum-TV-room, lit only by one small lamp.

“I’m recording this before you get here, jefe, ’cause I’ve got a really bad feeling about this. I was on the net tonight and I got a query from the Quantico analysis lab we sent the puke and blood to back when, you know? They said there were some interesting anomalies and did I want any more information on the Brézé guy, and they attached the file. It looked like a legit file, it was big enough.”

Cesar’s image licked its lips; Salvador could see that, but his mind superimposed how he’d looked with half his face lying in a pool of his own blood.

“Okay, it was stupid. I should have asked them Who dat? or just hit the spam blocker. We weren’t getting anywhere, creeping Adrian Brézé’s house is desperation stuff, so I downloaded. Here’s what I got, repeated a whole lot of times.”

Letters appeared, a paragraph of boldface:

—youaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouaresofuckedyouareso—

“I—”

“Cesar!” A scream, a woman’s voice, high and desperate. Then: “Don’t—don’t—please , don’t—”

Then just screaming. Cesar snatched up the pistol and ran. Salvador heard himself screaming too, as the shots began. Then more sounds, for a long time. Then another face in the screen.

It was the woman he’d seen in the dream; he could tell, even though her face was one liquid sheet of dull red. Only the golden flecks in her eyes showed bright, and then her teeth were very white when she licked them clean.

“You are so fucked,” she crooned, and the screen went black.

THE ROAD TO ADRIAN BRÉZÉ’S HOUSE WAS TEN MILES NORTH ON THE I-25 and then east. The empty highway stretched through the night, cool air flowing in through the open windows as the tires hummed. He was going to his death—but maybe he’d learn something. Maybe the world would make sense again.

Since when has it made sense anyway? I’m thirty-two years old, no wife, no kids, and my best friend just died because I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The only thing I’ve ever been any good at was killing people and frightening them. Cesar had twice my brains and now he’s dead and his girl’s dead.

East, and then north again on a dirt road. The Sangres low on the horizon in the light of the three-quarter moon. That and the stars were the only light as the last gas station fell away, and only a few distant earthbound stars marked houses. The road turned, winding in the pitch-dark night, and then a steep drop to his left, a hundred near-vertical feet; this was the edge of the plateau. He forced himself to stop when the wheels skidded and a spray of gravel fanned out and out of sight. He clenched his hands on the wheel.

“Am I trying to kill myself?” he murmured. Then: “No. Not yet. I’ve got to find out what this all means.”

Instead, he got out and walked down the last stretch of road. The night scents were strong, the sweaty leather of chamisos, the strong resin of the bleeding pines. Gravel crunched under his feet—it was nearly six months since Adrian Brézé had vanished, and the housekeeper came in only once a month to clean. The house itself was built right into the edge of the cliff; the final dip in the road left him looking down on its fieldstone walls. The high copper-surfaced door swung open to his touch, and a few soft lights came on under the high metal ceiling.

Yeah, about what I expected, he thought.

The whole of the opposite wall was glass, right at the edge of the cliff. It fell in crags and gullies washed pale by the moon, until the rolling surface of the semidesert stretched eastward to the edge of sight. There were a couple of pictures on the walls, ancient and beautiful.