Chapter 8
UP BEFORE THE BEAK
“You have to admit,” Benson says ponderously. “Looks pretty damn suspicious.”
The worst of both worlds sometimes seemed like the advertising tagline for the whole Gehirner project, but it was sure as hell where Skotch’s actions had landed him now—the actions he’d taken immediately after finding the corpse of Fitch cooling in his nook.
Because the smart thing to do would have been to just turn on his heels and pretend he’d never gone home that night and hadn’t, therefore, discovered the cadaver of his onetime workmate stretched out on his own floor.
On the other hand the diligent thing to do would have been to go running to the treads of Benson’s tank just as if he’d never taken the Uzco collar off, make a clean breast of it, and hope that washed all the blood off.
What he’d actually done was go up to Ikelos’ to put in a single call to Uzco, to tell them where their overdue employee had got to.
Just your basic twinge of—well, not even conscience, really.
Just that odd stab of instinct that has raccoons—even unrelated raccoons—form odd little gangs of a couple or three, for no particular reason other than, maybe, being alone isn’t fun.
That instinct, transmogrified into a sense of responsibility for the other.
Not to take the bullet, but at least to mark the death.
And, having taken that much time, when he leaves Ikelos’ place to head to Sly’s, there are Uzco goons all over, because they were already on the hunt for where the hell Fitch had got to, and they found out, and then they found Skotch.
Hence Skotch is up before Benson again, and this time there’s no advance payment and no avuncular turtlage going on.
“Chief,” Skotch says, “I don’t even own a shooter.” Because gun doesn’t quite cover the various contraptions Gehirner have constructed to fill the gap in their natural arsenal, and Skotch hadn’t taken the time for a forensic look over his conspecific’s corpse.
“Have done, though, haven’t you,” Benson rumbles from the base of his throat. “Maybe you do again. Territorial little bastard, aren’t you. Find another raccoon going through your stuff, you get jumpy.”
Skotch is rubbing his hands over and over, that old ingrained behaviour.
Stress brings it on like he’s burlesquing Herod.
Maria and another couple of possums are right behind him, and they do have guns.
Just spikers, but bigger and better-made pieces than Eddi and his crowd were packing.
Enough to put some inconvenient holes all the way through him.
Under pressure, he does what his nature always prompts him to do, finds a different line to push back on.
“You going to tell me just why he was doing that?”
“Word said you’d got the mouse,” Maria says from behind, jabbing him with a spiker.
And Skotch, having been jabbed and threatened with a number of ersatz firearms in the last couple of days, rounds on her—on all three of them—showing his teeth, standing up, looming.
Maria snarls right back at him—nothing snarls like a possum.
The other two scrabble back, which is the exact wrong thing when you’ve got a weapon with an accurate range of only four inches max.
For a moment Skotch is going to go for Maria’s gun, get his bigger hands over it and shake her off it.
And then he’d be in the clench of Uzco’s fist, with their regional manager, and a weapon, and that would be lines crossed that nobody could go back on.
And Benson’s tank doesn’t have a turret but that doesn’t mean the old reptile hasn’t built some ordnance into the thing.
And he reckons he reads something into Maria’s furious defiance.
That part of the engineered Gehirner brain where the base animal concept of kin is stretched to cover colleague, guild, all the wider associations and circles they’re made to move in.
That part which was jabbing at him after Springer died.
Maria’s lost a friend, basically, and she cares, and she’s fighting mad over it. He can respect that.
“There’s a lot of that about,” he tells the room.
“I don’t have him. I’m on his trail. Like you hired me.
I’ve got leads to follow up. I’m on the case, chief.
I almost got him at Ferdinand’s but a…” Stoat, except raising the slender spectre of Szerky here would be as good as calling Benson a liar over who Uzco is helping out, because it sure as hell isn’t the farms. “War got in the way. But I’m on it.
You hire this raccoon, he does the job.”
Benson scrabbles at the side of his bowl, hooks a claw over the rim, cranes his wrinkled neck over.
Surprising amount of binocular vision, in a snapping turtle.
The sign of something that’s evolved to strike swift and sudden despite all the cold-bloodedness.
And needless to say, the tank has a heater, so Benson’s mind and metabolism are working at 100 percent efficiency 100 percent of the time.
Sharp guy, that turtle. Enough to read mammal body language, every hair and bristle of it.
“Skotch, this is big business,” the turtle says ponderously.
“Yeah,” Skotch says, understatement of the century, “I get that. Big enough that Fitch got himself killed over it. And I didn’t do it but I’d sure as hell love to hear who you thought did, that being so.
I mean, come on, chief. You hired me for this, so you don’t think I’m some dumb animal.
If you could just let me into what this Meece’s deal is then maybe it means I make some right move down the line that gets him to you.
” For the love of Jeff will someone tell me what’s going on?
Skotch feels like every damn beast in the green city has had a detailed dossier on the truth of what makes Meece so damn dangerous, and he’s the only one who somehow missed checking his mail. Just left guessing.
A ponderous silence, then. Ponderous because it’s Benson’s silence.
Maria isn’t saying anything either, but she’s got nothing to say.
Just a good obedient owner of an Uzco collar, doing what she’s told.
But the turtle knows. The knowledge is heavy in him as the rim of his plastron scraps against the side of his tank.
For just a moment Skotch thinks he’s going to spill.
The old turtle closes his eyes and nostrils for a moment, shutting a chunk of the world out.
“The mouse,” he says heavily, “is dangerous. The mouse being in this city is bad news, Skotch. That’s what you need to know.
That mouse doesn’t find a trap soon … chaos, panic.
” He lifts his plated head, eyes still closed.
“One damn mouse, can you believe? A single maus worth of gelt, and all this trouble.”
“So who was it got Fitch?”
“There’s trouble in the world, there’s always someone wants to own it.
” Benson’s withered eyelids slide apart again, the regular two and the transparent third.
“You know, those who aren’t part of the guilds and service companies.
Who don’t just help make the city work. Armies, parasites.
Freelancers.” The baleful reptile stare on Skotch again.
Putting him in his place: useful but only because the world’s such a broken, twisty place.
“You bring that mouse in alive, that’s good.
But I’ll take delivery of him dead and still pay you.
More than enough to afford the mausgelt on him. ”
“Well, fine, sure,” Skotch says vaguely.
“Thanks for untying my hands, chief.” Hands which are still washing one another, over and over.
Skotch has no intention of turning assassin for Uzco, especially given that the market seems so crowded right at the moment, but it seems politic not to parade his scruples just now.
“Also I reckon you need a partner, Skotch. Given how dangerous the world just got for raccoons,” Benson says.
“No, chief. There’s a reason I left—”
But Benson and his tank just roll over that. “Maria can go with you. Keep your hide free of holes. Keep you on the straight and narrow. She won’t get in the way. You lead, she follows. Just a few discreet steps behind, right?”
“Come on, chief. I need to go places where an Uzco collar won’t win me any friends.”
“She’ll take it off for the duration.”
Maria twitches at that, doesn’t like the idea, but she’s an obedient enough wage-slave that she’ll pretend not to be if that’s what her paymasters tell her.
“You’ll barely know she’s there, Skotch,” Benson assures him. “Like your shadow.” Except Skotch’s shadow doesn’t make the back of his neck itch and doesn’t carry a spiker. And doesn’t, maybe, still blame him for Fitch being dead.
When he departs the tower of Das Uzcogeb?ude though, there’s a possum-shaped shadow skulking along behind him.
And he wants to go to Sly, to find out whatever the hell has the old fox so spooked, but he sure as hell doesn’t want to share that tidbit with Maria.
Instead, he goes to his nook, now free of bodies.
Uzco has cleaned up after its own, and has added one raccoon’s worth of mausgelt to the ledger as it tries to find someone to pin the death on.
After which it’ll decide whether to do things in the open, take the thirty-seven maus of compensation, or else get medieval on the other party, who hasn’t, after all, fessed up to the deed.
In the nook there’s a note, though. A corner of some human piece of paper, ripped out of a book. An inherently transgressive and destructive act, bordering on violating Rule One. Come to the Saint tomorrow. We’re ready.
The Mauler anarchists—the ones who actually have the mouse, if Skotch has any grasp at all on what’s going on—want to talk. And Skotch doesn’t want to share that with Maria either, but he doesn’t reckon they’re a patient crowd, so he’d be wise not to keep them waiting.