It took a full two minutes for security to show up. Long enough for a crew of sailors to lift and haul the big guy out of the gym and off to medical, his entourage in tow. The others in the gym didn’t move a muscle, just gawked at Finn.
After a half minute of silent stares he spoke up quietly. “He’ll be fine,” he said.
No one said a word. They didn’t believe him, but it was true. Finn’s fighting style was a cross between water and lightning: fluid, electric, lethal. Though not literally, in this case. Delivered with full force, that throat strike would break the windpipe and sever the vessels, causing the opposing combatant to bleed out in minutes. Or choke on his own blood. Whichever came first. Finn had pulled it. No major damage, and certainly nothing permanent. Although Tucker wouldn’t be able to talk in anything over a whisper for the next few days.
What a loss to the world.
When the security team arrived Finn was still sitting in the same spot. The two MAs stood him up, read him his rights as they cuffed him—moving warily, as if he were made of high explosive that might detonate at any moment—and marched him out of the gym.
Two minutes later they ushered him through a massive, capsule-shaped door, then a second, steel-grated door, down a narrow ladder and through yet another door to the subfloor suite that constituted “Precinct 72,” the ship’s brig, and into the custody of the two masters-at-arms currently on duty.
“You’re kidding,” said one in a high gravelly voice.
Frank and his silent partner, Dewitt.
Lo and behold.
After dismissing the two escorts, Frank proceeded to pat down the prisoner, starting with his torso, then carefully along one arm, then the other, then starting on the legs.
“So, Chief Finn,” he said.
“Frank,” said Finn.
“Have to say, I am surprised. How the hell did you get yourself in here?”
“Getting in is easy,” said Finn. “Getting out, that takes practice.”
Frank chuckled as he patted down Finn’s left leg toward the foot.
Just then the bolts on the brig’s door shot back and in walked Cheryl Hawkins, the security officer who ran Precinct 72, triple-sized morning mocha in hand.
Hawkins was a skinny, wiry thing, tough as sheet metal rivets, with a hacksaw voice that could cut through anything. She also had the foulest mouth on the ship. “The Sheriff,” they called her.
The Sheriff ordered the same damn coffee drink every single day: a triple mocha, at 0630 on the dot. According to Finn’s internal timepiece it was now 0635. A five-minute amble from Jittery Abe’s to Precinct 72.
Creatures of habit.
“Well, fuck me sideways, mean and hard.” The Sheriff stood just inside the door and stared at him for a long moment, then walked over behind her desk and took her seat. Noted Finn’s gaze and turned in her chair, looking up behind her.
There, mounted on the bulkhead behind her desk, was a photo of a much younger Cheryl Hawkins, standing proudly on the deck of a fishing boat, holding a speargun at port arms; a second photo of her posing with an enormous yellowtail; and in between the two framed shots, a short American-style mahogany speargun, mounted along with a single steel-tipped bolt.
Finn had heard her bragging about this speargun in the coffee line, about how she’d won her “little beauty” in a shooting contest during a training workup. Seemed the Sheriff cut her teeth on the California docks, too.
The Sheriff swiveled back to look at Finn.
“See something you like, Chief Jizz?” she said.
Finn gave no reply.
She leaned forward on her desk and spoke in a soft rasp.
“Listen to my words, Mister Titanium Ballsack. I see you up to anything suspicious, I see you even thinking anything suspicious, so help me God I will pull my little beauty down and send that steel shaft straight up your butthole and out between your googly eyes.”
Finn nodded. He tried to picture her swimming in the deep, hunting yellowtail and abalone, cursing at the sharks. He could see it.
Frank put one hand on Finn’s forearm and ushered him out of the office, past genpop (currently empty), and back to one of the solitary cells, where he would be their guest for the next three days.
Finn sat down on the steel bunk’s thin padding, then lay back and stretched out his frame, hands folded behind his head while his grated door clanged shut and locked.
“Don’t envy you, Chief,” said Frank through the door’s steel-mesh grating. “Three days in a cell, no exercise, nothing but bread and water.”
That was not a figure of speech. Actual bread-and-water punishment, referred to officially as “diminished rations,” was not supposed to exist anymore, having been recently retired from the books; the new mandate was for all prisoners to be fed a normal three squares. The Sheriff, though, she was old school. Chain of command looked the other way. Bread and water it was.
“It’s not perfect,” Finn agreed. “But it has its advantages.”
“Such as?”
“If anyone else gets killed out there while I’m in here, you’ll know it wasn’t me who did it.”
Frank started to chuckle, then abruptly stopped. “You serious?”
“I’m always serious.”
Frank chuckled again as he walked away, leaving their prisoner in the semi-gloom. Finn stared at his cell’s ceiling and thought about his last conversation with Jackson.
Commodities.
He knew the CMC’s team had no leads, nothing at all, and that Jackson was counting on Finn to give him something.
All Finn had to work with was the files in his head.
He thought about Stevens, the psychologist, and what he’d said about Finn’s memories. Maybe those are just the ones you remember.
What was he not remembering?
Finn closed his eyes, took a series of long, slow breaths, and began to think back.
From outside there came a long loud booming sound, a single five-second blast on the ship’s horn, audible for miles around: the signal for getting under way. They were pulling out, bound for their Pacific crossing, their killer still on board.