Hunter's Run(49)

"You were fighting over a fucking woman?" Elena breathed.

"No," Ramón said. "It wasn't like that. There was this lady he was with but-"

"And you didn't like how he was treating her, so you picked a fight. You drunk, selfish sonofabitch! And what the fuck was wrong with the woman you had waiting for you here? You had to go risk getting your ass killed for some puta because of what?"

Ramón felt the rage swelling up in his breast. He'd told her, he'd bared his soul to Elena, and all she could do was turn it into some kind of bullshit jealous fight. He'd been really talking to her, talking like real lovers are supposed to, and this was what he got for it. Another fucking bunch of accusations. Another load of shit. His face flushed, his fists clenched.

But then it faded, the bottom dropping out of the rage. Elena threw her plate at him, the food splattering against the wall, immediately gathering a swarm of skitterlings. Ramón watched it like it was all happening someplace else, to someone else. He'd known, hadn't he? He'd known she wouldn't be able to hear him. That even if he explained himself the best way he could, she wouldn't understand. If lions could speak, he remembered Ibrahim saying.

"It's not happening," Ramón said, his voice gentle and matterof-fact. His calm seemed to startle Elena out of her rage. He saw her trying to get it back, and rose to his feet. "You're not a bad person, Elena. You're a little crazy, but I don't see how anyone lives in this fucking city all the time without getting a little crazy. But this  … "

He gestured at the food dripping down the wall, Elena's small hands curled tightly into fists, the apartment. He gestured at their life together.

"This isn't going to happen anymore," he said.

Elena tried. She baited him, she screamed. She shouted obscenities at him and taunted him about his sexual inadequacies, all the things she had done before, the familiar, habitual sickness. When it was clear that he was going to leave, she wept and then grew quiet as if she were thinking through a puzzle. She barely raised her head as he closed the door behind him. An hour later, Ramón was walking down the riverside, listening to the music coming off the boats. He had a satchel packed with two changes of clothes, a toothbrush, a few documents that he'd left at her apartment. Everything he owned. The sun shone on the water, and the air was cool with the first bite of autumn. It was like being born again. He had nothing-and yet he couldn't stop smiling. And somewhere nearby, in one of the small apartments with their weedy courtyards and leaking roofs, Lianna was making her life. She wouldn't be that hard to find. And he was a free man.

First, though, there was Manuel Griego and the problem of the van. There was a future to create. And now, he had a plan to do it.

"Ramón Espejo?"

Ramón stopped, looking back over his shoulder. The man looked familiar, but it took the two uniformed brutes coming from the van behind him to give the face and voice context. The man from the constabulary. The cop. Ramón considered running. It was only a few yards to the river; he could dive in before they caught him. But then they could also get boats out and haul him up like the world's ugliest fish. Ramón raised his chin in greeting.

"You're that cop," Ramón said. His mind was racing. Elena. It had to be Elena. She'd called the cops and passed on all he'd told her about the European. Johnny Joe Cardenas had just gotten his prayers answered.

"Ramón Espejo, I have a warrant from the governor for your detainment for questioning. You can come with us of your own free will, or I can put you in restraints. Any way you want."

There was a glitter in the cop's eye, a lilt in his voice. He was having a very good day.

"I didn't do anything," Ramón said.

"You aren't accused, Se?or Espejo. We just need to talk to you about something."

The station house was one of the oldest in Diegotown, grown when the first colonists had arrived, and not updated since. Where the chitin superstructure showed, it had become gray with time. The plaster and paint had been freshened for the Enye, but the building still seemed old and sad and brooding, ominous.

The interrogation room wasn't entirely unfamiliar territory for Ramón. Dirty white tiles lined the walls, marred by unidentifiable stains and threatening dents and cracks. A long table set just a little too high, a metal chair bolted to the floor and set just a little too low, so you felt like a kid. The light was too bright, and blued to make anyone look dead. The air was stale and close and still as the grave; Ramón felt like he'd been breathing the same four lungfuls since he'd entered. There was no clock, no window. Nothing to tell him how far the hours had stretched. His only company had been the uniformed guard who'd told him he couldn't smoke, and the old flat-black surveillance camera set into the wall at the corner of the ceiling. The design was intended to make a man feel small, insignificant, and doomed. It worked pretty well, and Ramón found his resentment of it fueling his anger.

Anger at Elena and the constabulary, the European and the alien hive and his dead twin. It wasn't rational, it wasn't even coherent, but it was what he had to carry him through this, and so he cultivated it. He didn't have money for a lawyer. There would be no one to defend him besides himself. And what defense could he give? That he was so drunk he didn't remember doing it? Elena would be more than happy to flirt with the judge, say what she knew, and sink that story forever. That it was in his own defense? The defense of the straighthaired woman? He couldn't even remember what had happened, not in any real detail. He'd be better off claiming he hadn't been at the El Rey when it happened, no matter what all the witnesses said or the fingerprints on the gravity knife showed.

No, as far as he could tell, he was well and rightly fucked. By the time the door opened and the sound of voices at last cut the thick air, Ramón had just about decided that he might as well assault whatever poor pendejo they sent in to talk to him. At least he could do some damage going down. And he might have done it if a human had come into the room.

The Enye was like a boulder; its green-black skin the texture of lichen, oyster-silver eyes set in pale, fleshy, wet gouges. A tiny pucker of a mouth-lipless and round-marked where its beak lay concealed. The stink of acid and soil filled the room as the thing lumbered into the corner below the surveillance camera and hunkered down, its eyes on Ramón. The constable who'd visited him in the hospital and collared him on the street came in behind it. The man was less pleased with himself now, his mouth set in a professional scowl, his shirt freshly starched and ironed and looking uncomfortable. He carried a black cloth case in one hand and a cigarette in the other. A second man followed him; older and better dressed. The poor fucker's boss. Ramón looked up into the black mechanical eye of the camera and wondered who else was watching him.

"Ramón Espejo?" the constable said.

"Better be," Ramón said, then gestured at the alien with his chin. "The fuck is this?"

"We're going to ask you some questions," the constable said. "You are under warrant from the governor to answer completely and honestly. If you fail to do so, you will be charged and punished. Do you understand what I've just said?"

"I been arrested before, ese. I know how this works."

"Good," the constable said. "Then we can get straight to business."

He lifted the cloth case to the table, unzipped it, and pulled something out. With a flourish that the cabrón must have practiced for an hour, he unrolled something.

Dirty rags, colorless where they weren't bloodstained, cut almost to ribbons in places. They might have once been leather or a thick cloth. It was his robe. The one he'd worn tracking through the northern wilderness, the one he'd wrapped around his arm in the final knife fight with his twin. The one Maneck's aliens had given him. He looked up into the Enye's glistening eyes and saw nothing he could understand. The alien hissed and whistled to itself.

"Se?or Espejo," the constable said. "Would you please tell us exactly where you got this?"

                       
       
           



       Chapter 27

They began God only knew how far away, how many hundreds or thousands-or, with time dilation, shit, maybe millions-of years ago. They came up from some alien sludge under some forgotten star; struggling and fighting and evolving just like humanity rose from small, unlikely mammals dodging the dinosaurs. And then the Silver Enye came, killed their children, and scattered them to the stars. Centuries in the darkness, fleeing blind. One group carried this way, another that. So many lost. And then here, to S?o Paulo, far to the north where they pulled the mountains up over them like a child with a blanket. Don't let the monsters see me.

So long, and so far, and then to have everything rest on some selfish fuck more than half in trouble with the law. Ramón almost felt sorry for them.

I will kill you all, Ramón had thought, back on that first day, the