XV #2
He looked at me as he said, “Whatever you’ve lived through— survived —Gillian Hamilton, I am sorry.
Sorry that you endured immeasurable pain and heartache at such a young age, and without trust in our current systems, were forced to carry that sense of abandonment into adulthood.
I am sorry. But you said you remembered everything I told you in Arizona?
Remember this: we aren’t so different.” He stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind him.
The steam-powered lights of my apartment weren’t bright enough to work by.
I’d collected the bulbs from the water closet and bedroom, piled them onto my cleared-off writing desk in the parlor, and touched each of the foot contacts until my magic fueled the filaments and filled the apartment with a low hum.
I fetched the toolkit from the bottom drawer, unrolled it across the tabletop, then walked across the parlor while tugging the purple-tinted goggles over my eyes.
I fetched my gin from the windowsill, McCarthy’s PDD from the settee, and settled down to conduct a little engineering of my own.
I knocked back half of the cocktail, attached an ocular loupe to one of the lenses, and began to unscrew the tiny mechanics of the handheld transducer.
Unfortunately, McCarthy either hadn’t owned it for long or didn’t use it often, such as my own tendency, because the brass punch buttons still shone and suggested no wear on the most commonly used numbers.
A man I loved died from an overdose of strychnine.
Had that man loved Gunner back? Had he ever lain awake in bed, until that moment late night becomes early morning, thinking about Gunner?
Had he ever kissed Gunner and equated it to touching Heaven?
Had he realized what a good man Gunner was?
That he deserved honesty and integrity, and this cat-and-mouse game with his heart and his freedom was further proof of what a despicable human I was—
The nerves in my hand spasmed and I fumbled with the tool.
I cursed under my breath, flexed my fingers for a moment, then finished taking the cover off the transducer.
Tightly coiled wires were attached to plugs activated by the push buttons.
I pushed the second ocular loupe down for a greater magnification, switched tools, and started testing the wires for repeated usage.
Brutal and immediate poison .
How did I compare to that man? Was he taller?
Stronger? More kind than me? More handsome than me?
Was he afraid like me, holding back from meeting Gunner even halfway, begging for more time because I wasn’t ready to lose him (and that would most assuredly happen when I told him the truth), or did that man…
did he just love Gunner and damn everything and everyone else?
5… 5… 3…. Two more digits and I’d have the code most initiated from McCarthy’s PDD.
I tinkered with the next coupling of wires and plugs.
What side of the law had that other man been on?
Gunner’s, probably.
At least, I was fairly certain Gunner hadn’t made it a habit of fucking coppers prior to me.
“Danny,” I muttered.
Wait—what?
I dropped the tool and leaned back in my chair. “Danny?”
I glanced at the cocktail, picked up the glass, and sniffed.
Gin, yes, but Gunner had added absinthe as well.
No surprise, what with the subtle licorice flavor associated with the Green Fairy.
But I should have told him not to use absinthe—it got me drunk quicker than most liquors.
Maybe it even caused mild hallucinations, because I had not a clue where—then, quite simply, I recalled the last thing Milo Ferguson had said to Gunner, while we were aboard his airship in Shallow Grave: I’m going to make you suffer. The same way that Danny did.
Pushing the chair back, legs stuttering loudly against the wood floor, I stood, fetched my coat from the settee, and began to pull it on in order to go find Gunner.
Sure, he didn’t lie, but he also wasn’t the talkative sort.
If I didn’t ask, point-blank, he rarely offered further explanation on any given subject.
So I’d go find him and I’d ask: who’s Danny?
Is he the man you loved? And then I’d tell Gunner—I’d tell him I was sorry for earlier.
But I didn’t make it to the door.
I didn’t even leave the settee.
If I asked, Gunner would tell me. But why was I asking?
Why did it even matter ? I was behaving like an insecure fool.
Jealous of a man who’d held Gunner’s affections before we’d even met, for Christ’s sake.
And now that man—be it Danny or someone else—was dead.
He was dead, and Gunner, for at least the time being, was mine.
As long as I didn’t make a mockery of Gunner’s trust and emotions—and yes, I did still need to apologize—time would be in my favor for a minute more.
I immediately shrugged out of the coat and returned it to the cushion beside my own PDD.
It was a touch disconcerting however, that Milo Ferguson was part of the conversation.
I could be wrong about Danny, of course.
He might very well have been someone else, and the reference to suffering, although applicable to a painful death by poison, could have been nothing more than my panicked brain trying to turn over parts of a mystery where my sleuthing was not appreciated.
But perhaps I could receive confirmation via a safer route—one that wouldn’t jeopardize the complexities between Gunner and myself.
I was a federal agent, after all. And one with considerable security clearances.
What the hell was the Bureau even doing with funding and contacts if I couldn’t manage some basic information about a likely dead felon?
It’d appease my curiosity, assure me that Gunner wasn’t in any sort of danger himself, and then—done. Matter dropped.
I picked up my PDD, set the receiver over my ears, punched in a code for the Bureau’s rogues’ gallery department, and identified myself when I was answered by the agent on duty.
“I need a file pulled, if there is one—suspect went by Danny—cross-check with any Daniels on record. Last name unknown, occupation unknown, now deceased.”
The static voice on the other end asked in a slow, disbelieving tone, “You want me to find a file for a now-dead rogue, based on absolutely nothing but a first name?”
“I don’t believe I stuttered.” I wasn’t sure if that knee-jerk response was my natural salt, as Gunner called it, or the absinthe.
“Do you have a last known location?”
“No. Prioritize the West Coast, but the entire country is fair game.”
A prolonged sigh was followed by, “It might take a bit of time.”
“It’s not an emergency.” I thanked the agent, disconnected, and tossed the PDD back on the settee. “Happy?” I asked myself. “Christ Almighty….” I returned to the writing desk, parked my backside, and resumed solving a mystery that was entirely my business.
55387.
McCarthy’s most pinged recipient was 55387.
It took longer than I’d anticipated to crack the final digit.
McCarthy seemed to have had a tendency to mispunch the code and so I’d waffled between 7 and 4 for some time, but when I’d finally made the call with 4, I received an obnoxious, high-pitched tone in the receivers that indicated the code routed nowhere.
I removed the ocular loupes, set them on the table, then tugged the goggles down to rest around my neck.
I downed the rest of the cocktail and studied the recently taken-apart, now put back together, device.
This code might very well lead to Tick Tock himself, as McCarthy had suggested, and hearing his voice was going to be our biggest lead yet.
If he answered, I could request Convey & Dispatch, the country’s leading purveyor of PDD support, to triangulate the code’s location.
I’d avoid running blind into the dangers of Mulberry Bend, and arrest this bastard gangster threatening not just humanity as a whole, but specifically the magic community.
Because without expedited control of these illegal weapons and bullets, we were in trouble.
I’d seen firsthand the devastation that uncontrolled magic could do, but worse, my very existence had only been legal for seventeen years.
Seventeen years ago, my ability to control the elements, a skill I never wished to possess, was seen as something to fear, to attack .
And if Tick Tock wasn’t stopped… well, society hadn’t made enough strides forward to not slip back into that old dread. Of this, I was certain.
I heard the snap , snap , snap of my fingers being broken and a cold sweat came over me. I told myself this was not the time, took a few deep breaths, then punched in 55387.
“McCarthy?” Tick Tock answered brusquely.
It took a heartbeat for the voice to register.
And then a fury I hadn’t known in years welled up inside me, my blood like that of the Seventh Circle of Hell: The river of boiling blood in which are steeped, All who struck down their fellow men .
“Henry Bligh.”