Part 18 (1/2)
”Are there rules?”
”Of course there are rules.”
”Restrictions?”
”Those too.”
”Oaths of loyalty?”
”Now you're just stabbing in the dark,” I accused. ”A House is all that s.h.i.+t and more. Under the best of circ.u.mstances, it's a family. It's your backup. On paper it's very Three Musketeers-one for all, all for one, blah blah blah blah. In real life, it's just like belonging to the mob. Sometimes it works for you, and sometimes it works against you. It depends on who's in charge and how willing you are to follow rules.”
”So, the Atlanta House. Is it a bad one? Bad vampires in charge, bad rules?”
He didn't know the half of it. I told him the truth without telling him anything. ”I've never been part of the Atlanta House. I'm not from around here, okay? I've never tangled with them, and I don't care to. Largely because, as you've so astutely noticed, I don't have any House of my own to back me up.”
”But you must know something something about it.” about it.”
Well, yeah. I knew that the Barrington House of Atlanta was not the House with which you wanted to f.u.c.k-and if his little sister had been brought on board there, she should've been in pretty secure company. If the House had turned her over for...for what, medical experimentation? Like in that Monty Python movie? Then she'd probably done something to royally p.i.s.s somebody off.
Vampires tend to take care of problem members ”in House” you might say. They don't outsource their problem people. They find other ways to make examples out of them. Unless the times, they were a-changing.
So I decided to tell him, ”Look, I know what you're thinking.”
”You do?”
”I'm psychic. A little.” May as well stick to the truth while it was convenient. The rest was easy to guess. ”You're thinking that if there's some organizational structure in place, you can infiltrate it or at least learn enough to navigate it. And you're wrong. The Atlanta House”-I made a point not to tell him its name-”isn't just bulletproof. It's nuke nuke-proof. You'll have better luck fighting Uncle Sam, and your corpse will be more readily identifiable when he's done with you.”
”What about you?”
”Me? If you think I'm going to go around ringing doorbells, looking to find out what happened to your sister, you've got another think coming.”
”What if I could pay you?”
”You can't,” I said flatly.
He asked, ”How do you know? Name a price.”
”There isn't enough money.”
”In a drag queen's stash?”
”In the world,” I specified. ”Now are we going to dig up your sister here, or what?”
Adrian scowled, and s.h.i.+vered.
It was cold out there in Memorial Lawn. Not as cold as Minnesota, but cold enough that I was uncomfortable. They don't tell you that about Georgia. They tell you it's all peaches and suns.h.i.+ne, but it isn't. It's a sauna in the summer and, come winter, it's cold enough to freeze. Cold enough to snow, sometimes. But I'm pretty sure I've never seen that on any of their tourism brochures.
Adrian hoisted the shovel up high and straight, and drove it down into the gra.s.s in front of the headstone. I did likewise. Together in the near-perfect dark, we swung and shoved, grunting and flinging dirt over our shoulders, onto the graves nearby. Every now and again one of us would hit a rock or a particularly tough root, and the steel shovels would chime like church bells-pinging loud and clear in the emptiness.
The whole time we worked, no one drove by on the road where we'd left the Cherokee. And even though I kept one eye on that road the whole time, I never saw a single person come or go, as if the cemetery and all its surroundings were truly abandoned, and forgotten, or avoided.
Finally, after fully four feet of mud, worms, and rocks as big as frogs, my shovel sc.r.a.ped up against something decidedly un-dirt-like.
I stopped. I tapped at the something and Adrian did likewise, probing at the ma.s.s with the tip of the shovel and prying out a corner on his side of the corpseless grave.
With some wiggling, cursing, and further excavation, we were able to pop it up out of its spot and onto the gra.s.s. I looked for a place to sit that wasn't covered with loose dirt, but gave up and sat down on a little heap of it. Adrian came to sit beside me. He held the box on his lap and picked at the latches.
The box wasn't terribly interesting; it was just a metal jobbie that he'd put inside a very thick plastic bag to keep the rust and rot off. The bag had mostly held up and the box was mostly intact, though threads of rust ate the corners and the latches. One of them broke off in his hand. The other took only a small tug to release.
Adrian had thoughtfully wrapped the interior contents in plastic, too, so they looked pretty good. Some of the edges were curling, and some of the pages were turning the color of an old photograph, but everything appeared intact.
Impatiently, I took the lump out of the box and set it in my own lap, peeling the plastic away even more. ”Is this everything?” I asked.
”It's everything I took. And if you want the truth, I don't even know what most of it means,” he confessed. ”It's coded, like most of the paperwork they filed on me, too.”
And there was Ian's serial number.
Right there, in black and white, 636-44-895. I dragged my finger down the page and stopped on it, then kept skimming. ”It's too dark to read much out here, right now,” I observed. Technically I could see it well enough to read, but Adrian was right and everything was coded anyway. I wanted to take the docs back to my condo and examine them in the comfort of my own home, with the help of my own artificial lighting.
”You promised,” Adrian said softly.
”What?”
”You promised you'll use these to help your friend, or your client, or whatever he is. And you'll try to shut the program down. That's what you promised. Did you mean it, or did you only say it so I'd take you here?”
”Oh, I meant it meant it. This-” I said, indicating the paperwork, the program, and everything that was wrapped up with it. ”It horrifies me. Do you know what they were doing, here? In these tallies?”
”Not really.”
”They were cla.s.sifying people like your sister, and my client, and me me...as animals-and treating the doc.u.mentation like this was all some experiment on apes. Some of the subjects didn't survive. One of the ones who did did survive is maimed for life.” I climbed to my feet, and used the plastic-wrapped papers to swat dirt off my pants. ”Worse, really. He's maimed for afterlife. And whatever you believe and however you feel about what your sister became, she was a person, and she could still feel pain. She could still be survive is maimed for life.” I climbed to my feet, and used the plastic-wrapped papers to swat dirt off my pants. ”Worse, really. He's maimed for afterlife. And whatever you believe and however you feel about what your sister became, she was a person, and she could still feel pain. She could still be killed killed. And she deserved better.”
Adrian was still holding the empty box, at least until he gazed back down at the hole and tossed the container back inside it. He didn't respond to anything I'd said, which was maybe a little uncool, but he was having a moment there so I didn't disturb him. All he said was, ”We should fill this in.”
”Why?”
”Because a freshly dug grave in a graveyard is less suspicious than an empty one that somebody dug up. Are we trying to cover our tracks here, or what?”
He had me there. I sighed.
I put the bundle down on top of Isabelle's headstone and retrieved my shovel once more. A fresh grave in an effectively abandoned cemetery was, in my estimation, only marginally less interesting to any pa.s.serby than an empty one, but Adrian was right. In the grand scheme of things, anyone who noticed would be less likely to call the cops if there wasn't a gaping hole in the ground.
We weren't grave robbers, after all. There'd never been a grave.
There'd only been a package of incriminating doc.u.ments, left in memory of a girl who wasn't even a girl anymore when she'd died.
Later that evening, back at the homestead and on the far side of a nice hot shower, I sat at the kitchen bar and busted out my laptop. I had a note from You-Know-Who.
Abigail,You're going to be in D.C. next weekend, you said? Actually, that's pretty convenient. If you do a good job getting inside that Pioneer Square location, I'd like to talk to you about it. a.s.suming you pull it off, can I talk you into coming out on Friday afternoon or Monday morning?Swing by the receptionist's desk on the way in. Give her my name, and she'll point you in the right direction.While you're here, you might want to check out some of the local parkour groups. There's one that meets near my office called Presidential Parkour. You may find it interesting.
Below his name he'd added an address. I demanded that Google Maps give me the satellite view of the location, because two can play at that game, that's why.