THE GOAT CORE

Chapter 13: Two Hands

Two Hands

Halloran waited, so he gave it to her in order.

"The room would have told you," Ash said. "A man that size, that far along, you'd smell him through the door and down the hall. Steel drawers, cold air, a seal on the door — none of it covers that. I was in there long enough to know what was in that room, and there was no dead man in it."

"Alive," Halloran said.

"Alive, and dressed up like what a man turns into after a few days somewhere warm. That takes drugs. A lot of them, and somebody sitting with him to keep the dose where it has to be.

"One man can't get five hundred pounds off a bed and onto a gurney, and one man can't walk that gurney down a ramp. So she took the elevator. When I called it, it was sitting down on the basement level with the doors open, like somebody had walked off it and left it there. And down the hall I heard a hinge working. I took it for a door in the wind."

He lifted his head.

"It wasn't the wind. Somebody was in one of those drawers the whole time I was down there. After I was gone, they got up."

Halloran held it for a second. "Somebody was in the room with you."

"Somebody was in the room. It was dark, and I had other things going on."

Whitlock's head came around.

He'd been sitting the way he'd sat all night, weight down on the right side, the left hip clear of the table. For one second there was something else on his face. Ash got a clean look at it. Then it was gone.

Whitlock came off the table without hurrying and stood close, head tipped down to Ash's ear.

"What big body," he said. Quiet. "You're not making that up."

"No."

"I'm asking."

"I woke up on the floor of that room and it was on the gurney in the middle of it." Ash turned his head and looked up into his face, which he had spent the whole night not doing. Up close the eyes were the color of a plum and gave nothing back. Being looked at that close felt like being a machine somebody had opened the front of, to see how it worked. "It was there. I don't say things I didn't see."

Halloran stood, and the coat came off the back of the chair with her, and a cold draft came off the leather and went through the room.

"The basement cameras," she said. Not to Ash.

"Down," Whitlock said.

"Since when."

"Before I got here." He worked a thread off his cuff and looked at her the way a man looks at weather. "Who's going to stand in front of you and make that up."

Ash kept his mouth shut.

The ticket was still up on the nurse's station computer, in the shared inbox, where he had read it with his shoulder between the screen and the room. Camera fault, basement level. Sent in the afternoon. Facilities got to it a day later. A whole day for a dead camera on a floor with a body on it, and somebody with a key ring and a shift had sat on it. That made the missing officer the other half of Bowe's job.

"Two of them," Halloran said. "She moves him out. Somebody opens the vehicle door from the outside, and by the time the building knows it's been hit, they're on the county road."

She let that sit, and then put the orders out over the radio in pieces. Every vehicle that had come near the building after midnight. The county roads, closed and sat on. The second team, on the patient, tonight, while he was still alive.

Then she turned around.

"The cores," she said. "The ones you took off it. Hand them over."

Ash looked at Whitlock. Whitlock shrugged with one shoulder, keeping the left side still.

"She's got a job to do," he said. "Hand them over."

And standing there in the cuffs, with Bowe's finger in a bag somewhere down the hall, Ash understood the face Whitlock had made when the sirens started.

The Underline had one rule, and it wasn't written anywhere. Call us, and it's us. Call the county, the state, the Aerie, one of the other companies — you come off the list and you stay off it, and the money doesn't come back. It isn't loyalty. It's cores. Two decent ones out of one body go for thirty or forty thousand, and no company that answers the phone stays in business splitting that four ways.

An officer came around the desk and went over his front and his sides. Ash stood with his feet apart and his arms out and let it happen, and looked at the wall box and the chair and the corner of the desk while it did. The cuffs pulled his wrists down the whole time, the way they had since the room he woke up in.

The flake of blood he'd worked off the side of his shoe was still on the tile by the leg of the chair.

The analyzer came off his belt and onto the desk, and the lid came open.

Two cores, both blue. The dead one that had come out of his own eye, grey now that there was nothing left moving in it, and the goat's horn, cobalt, that he had never used. Both went into an evidence bag. The third bay was empty, and had been since somebody last closed the lid over it. The purple. Tier two, five uses left, gone.

Ash didn't say anything about it. He looked at Whitlock instead.

Whitlock was straightening his gloves. One hand and then the other, thumb down the seam, working at a spot on the leather that was still wet. He didn't look up.

Halloran picked her coat up off the back of the chair.

"Damon. He can finish his statement at the Aerie."

"Yes, ma'am." Damon brought the rifle off her shoulder and across the front of her body, which was the whole of the answer. "Ma'am. The cuffs stay on."

Ash didn't move. Two officers with sidearms. Damon and the rifle. The two hawks the Aerie had brought in with them, up on the desk, brass and hinged, beaks in their own feathers and lamps red, and nobody had told them anything.

He wasn't going to the Aerie. Nobody had told him what the cuffs were for, or who had decided they went on. The first question in there would be how he'd walked out of a basement full of monsters. He had an answer to that and no plan to spend it on a statement. The last time somebody had put his name in a file and sat down across from him with it, he'd been fourteen. If Halloran had been the one holding that file, he would still be paying on it.

He was not going anywhere with them.

His hand was cold, and wet from being closed that long, and then there was weight on it.

Whitlock had folded the tips of his fingers down into the middle of his own fist and set the flat of his knuckles across Ash's knuckles. No palm anywhere in it. He held it there, exactly that much and no more, and took the hand back and put it in his coat pocket.

Ash left his hand where it was a second longer than he had to.

Halloran went out. The door pulled itself shut on the gasket.

"What's to ask," Whitlock said. "She asked every question she had."

Then he had Ash by the back of the coat and the upper arm, and they were going backward, and the window came apart around them in one long breaking noise, and Ash's feet left the tile.

Glass, cold, air. Whitlock put his boot through the grille outside the window — rusted through, bolted to the wall a long time before either of them was born — and the frame came off and went down into the gap between the buildings and hit something on the way. The two of them went after it.

Behind them Damon's voice said Stop, twice.

***

Damon got the rifle up and did not fire. "Nurses in the hall," she said, and put the whistle in her mouth instead, and the two birds came off the desk and up into the air over it, wings half open, lamps red, waiting on a heading.

"I want both of you," she said, "to tell me what that was."

"We went when he went." The officer on the left had his sidearm out and no memory of drawing it. "Ma'am, he's got one foot on the sill and I've got him by the coat, and then I can't move."

"Why not."

"Something had me." He reached back and touched the collar of his own vest, at the seam, to show her where. "Here. And my arm, above the elbow. I put everything I had into it. It didn't give, and it didn't move, and I didn't get any closer."

"Same," the second one said. "Collar and arm."

"With what."

"A hand," the first one said.

Damon looked at the two of them for a while. Out in the corridor somebody was still asking a nurse questions. The wind came through the hole in the wall and moved the paper on the desk an inch at a time.

"He has two hands," Damon said. "I want the count noted."

The two hawks went out through the window, one and then the other, and the second one clipped the frame on the way and knocked a piece of the sill loose. The piece turned over once on the carpet and lay still.