The world was being coated in freezing rain, encased in ice like glass, which thickened steadily. Under other circumstances—not traversed but viewed, say, from the bay window of a warm living room, with a fresh mug of coffee held to the sternum—the scene would have been a rapturous display of sparkling street light refracting everywhere, as sublime as a crystal cathedral. The accumulation was not enough yet to crack branches like gunfire, or to tear them slowly like nature gnawing off its own limb, or to break them like a black beam collapsing on a rusty hinge, but soon it would be.
It took Kevin twenty graceless minutes to shuffle treacherously a distance that usually occupied a brisk three. The humjet was on the canal, noisy and smoking (Global Patrol still wouldn’t trust electric engines), secured by a deployment of Ottawa police and a few Global soldiers, all looking none too pleased to have been called out in an ice storm on Christmas Day. They shuffled in expectation of some comradely banter from the legendary Detective Kevin Beldon. They got none. So somebody shouted at his butt in the humjet’s doorway, “How’s about a poem, Shakespeare!”
Ha-ha.
Word got around more quickly than ever these days, especially bad words. Jaken had worried he might never have the right words. He would distract himself further on this damned ride with meditating on every syllable of Death poem number five. It had come so easily he was wary, though he’d thought it was finished when Ali called him to the communicator. But he should have learned by now that it was never done so slickly; only painstakingly, until he hated it and every word in the signifying universe.
He sat up front with the pilot, who had smirked at the parting taunt. Kevin noticed that the pilot’s shave had missed two hairs like insect antennae near an old asterisk-shaped scar under his chin. The exit wound would have been…high on the right cheek—and there it was. The bullet would have torn and shattered, maybe even the eye socket. The pilot’s right eye twitched every…five seconds.
He should never have let Phil and Brigid talk him into reading that poem in New York. Vain old fool. The Death poems were for Jaken, though Jaken had insisted they were primarily for himself.
The canal ice threatened to collapse when a crunching sent the ground crew scrambling. Rather than throttle down, the pilot revved higher, and the humjet’s boosters and propellers fired like some saw-toothed beast come to chew up the icy world, sending walls of canal water over the scurrying security crew. The jet shot straight up, pushing Kevin down, and almost immediately they had ascended to high above the cloud cover, where the pilot smoothly folded back the blades and commenced jetting on a precipitous trajectory.
In twenty minutes they’d fallen into Syracuse and rain only. As they awaited clearance for the heliport, the pilot told Kevin that here too it was expected to turn to freezing rain at any moment.
To focus himself for the work ahead, Kevin mentally set his poem aside and shouted over the noise, “You don’t like to remember taking the pin bullet that put you out of front-line action, of course, but you’re a helluva good pilot. Thanks for the lift.”
The pilot pulled back his head, and shouted, “Ha! Show-off, give.”
With left forefinger tip Kevin touched the same spot under his own chin: “You’ve been missing whiskers when you shave, you don’t like going near the old scar.”
He first pinched his mouth. “A rookie mistake, near fatal, and I was no rookie. The perp had been hit, not by me, he was down, on his back, I thought he was out and approached carelessly. When he fired into my chin from below, I was sure I was dead. I can still taste it.” He’d gone from shouting to barely audible.
Kevin continued watching the young man’s face. “You wouldn’t shoot a man when he was down. Cops pay for compassion, and it’s worth the price, son. Thank you.”
The pilot smiled in relief. “Out with you, Sherlock! Or is it Shakespeare? Or Freud!… Uh, I’ll be here when you get back, Detective Beldon—and thank you!”
With LaPhoc behind him in the Global Patrol all-terrain, Kevin directed the driver to skip the murder site and take them to another location. LaPhoc was puzzled but didn’t countermand.
As they entered the rundown hotel, Kevin cocked his head this way and that like a robin listening for the worm to turn. The desk clerk needed a shave and comb, better breath; his brown suit hung on him like yesterday’s potato skins. He was no help. He’d never seen that particular occupant. Never? No. He’d once stood outside 808, banged on the door and shouted about the loud music, but got no answer. He’d gone no farther, afraid that the three big black boys who’d paid him five times what the room was worth would carry out their threat to decapitate him if he ever bothered the occupant.
“Loud music?” Kevin said.
“Worse, all drums, all day and all night.”
Kevin was fiercely rubbing his thumb and fingers for the room key. “Were they tom-toms like you hear in Native American shows?”
“That’s it!” the man said, displaying a mouth of teeth like charred tree stumps. “Hey, how’d you…”
In the slow elevator, LaPhoc recited, “Syracuse Syracuse Syracuse.” He shook a fist once near his sternum like a player about to throw craps and broke out—“I remember! Michael Mender passed through Syracuse two years ago while fleeing the Mandrake Bledsoe killing in Ottawa. You were tailing him, weren’t you, uh, Kevin?”
“Yes. Good memory, Detective LaPhoc.”
“But Michael Mender’s dead, and that was long before he became Malachai?”
The door opened into close mustiness: ancient radiator sizzling, window closed, room neat, bed made… Something on the pillow.
His casing quicker than Kevin’s, LaPhoc said, “What the hell’s that?” He went for it. “A welcoming monster chocolate? In this dump?”
Kevin stepped straight to the window and raised the sash: black dried blood on two of the sill spikes, but no dead pigeons below, no bones, nothing. Nothing signifying everything. How could I have been so stupid? No Sherlock Shakespeare, I’ve been Randome’s fool!
“Hey, it’s an old Saturday night special!” LaPhoc carried it dangling from a small clamp; its wooden handle was delicately braided, and the gun itself actually looked innocuous, even twee compared to current weaponry. “Somebody must’ve robbed a museum.”
Kevin took the gun carelessly and LaPhoc startled: “What the hell are you—”
“It’s okay, Phil, it’s my old thirty-eight. If anyone gives you trouble, tell them I got here first and contaminated the evidence.”
He checked that it was loaded, spun the chamber and tucked the revolver into the back band of his slacks.
“I don’t get it, Kevin,” LaPhoc snickered nervously. “Watch you don’t shoot yourself in the ass.”
“It was my wife’s suicide weapon. My son’s too.”
“What!… I’m sor… But what does it all mean, Kevin?”
“Either Randome himself or one of his thugs has been in my old home; you know, Kelly and Ali’s home. …Dear God. The gun is a little love note to me. Syracuse begins the word something, Phil. Maybe this is plan B for Randome, since he lost Malachai. Doesn’t matter.”
LaPhoc took it in. “Signifying something. Okay. And since we’re now collecting Beldon souvenirs, there’s something I wanted to show you, though I’d hoped it meant, like, nothing.”
He produced from his hip pocket Kevin’s old paper map, flapped it like a summons. “I wasn’t trying to steal it, Kevin. I was going to ask you if I could keep it as, like, a memento of the case, I mean, when we still thought it was closed.”
Kevin simply looked at LaPhoc.
“But this is not sentimentality. Look here.”
He unfolded the map on the bed. “A little thing I noticed, which I’d thought was coincidental. Here’s Norfolk.” He slid his finger northwards in a direct line: “Here’s Havre de Grace.” And farther northwards in as straight a line: “And here now is Syracuse, the beginning of our something. And if you continue directly northwards, almost right on seventy-six degrees latitude, you come to…Ottawa. The, uh, potential o site, like I said back in New York when we’d thought it didn’t matter anymore. Nothing or something, both need the o, that’s something.”
Kevin placed his left palm on top of his head. “Jesus H. Christ, LaPhoc, you confirm my worst fear.” He snapped, “We have to stop him here, when was the kill here, only an hour or so ago, right? Thank God for this storm.”
“Well, no. We took time scanning the scene at the Optimum Population clinic before bothering you. I figured there was no rush to ruin your Christmas too. So I’d say three, three-and-a-half hours ago.”
“Christ almighty! Randome could have got to Ottawa before the ice storm started! I have to get back right now. Give me your communicator.” Kevin keyed the Lundy’s Lane number.
LaPhoc mumbled, “I have to stay at this new scene till it’s secured and scanned. If I leave on a hunch I’ll be busted back to AquaSecure. You have Brigid back in Ottawa, right?… New York really was a wild goose then. Shit.”
“No wild goose, Phil, one helluva decoy. I should have known. I know how Randome works: misdirect us into thinking we’d solved the mystery of Havre de Grace as a g site, that we’d anticipated New York as the start of his nothing, and that it was all over. Then lure us here!”
LaPhoc was frowning. “N for New York in November, but a decoy. S for Syracuse in December? That doesn’t make sense back-to-back. I mean, like, literally for spelling out signifying something one letter per twenty-fifth of every month, we’re missing a month, can’t count the decoy month.”
Kevin continued nodding at LaPhoc, who held his chin and dropped his gaze to the right. He looked directly at Kevin: “There has to be two hits today, that’s it, isn’t it, Kevin? A correction for the n decoy of New York. Randome had always planned to sacrifice Malachai to make New York look like the big finale. And he always planned to be at your house Christmas day for a big-bang double. What style, pure evil, I’ll give him that. And someone’s already been in your home—I’m coming back to Ottawa with you.”
Kevin’s eyebrows stretched high, but he talked calmly into the communicator: “Dear, I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. Everything’s going to be fine. Put Brigid on. …Brigid, I need you outside and armed and watching the house right now. Tell them you’re needed down at the canal’s makeshift heliport to supervise for my return in the humjet. Okay? You alone. Extra cautious, please, Brigid. It is Randome. And I do not need another reason to hate myself. Tell no one else, not even Ali, especially Ali.”
Kevin looked at LaPhoc and for the second time that day pleaded: “We’ve been wrong too often in this, Phil. I have. Randome could still be here and biding his time. I need you to find him if he is.”
Finger poised to touch behind his ear, LaPhoc said, “I’ll call ahead for assistance at Ottawa. We’ll be there in no time. What’s the address again? Eighteen-twelve Luther Lane?”
“No! That would be disaster. And don’t think I don’t appreciate your willingness to sacrifice your career, Phil, but you have to stay here.”
“Go already! You’re incredibly full of shit, Beldon!”
The freezing rain had begun sealing Syracuse, but with sirens and flashing lights the driver had Kevin back at the Global Patrol heliport in fifteen dangerous minutes. There the exposed humjet was being de-iced slowly. If they were to fall at even an unacceptable risk into the raging ice storm blowing from the north, the blades of the humjet had to be hypertreated with Panogard and its belly protected for the braking manoeuvre with a good inch of Greeze. Nothing Kevin cried into the rain of ice made a second’s difference. The pilot with the sensitive chin dragged him inside the hanger. He said that he’d had to waive all Global Patrol liability even to attempt the return. But Kevin, in a state touching frenzy now, couldn’t have cared less about the man’s sacrifice. He abused him, accused him of gun-shy cowardice for not taking off immediately, no wonder Global wouldn’t trust him any longer with dangerous dick work!
It wasn’t till they were well under way that Kevin recognized he’d been using a Randome technique to shame the pilot. He didn’t care. He didn’t apologize.