It was close to midnight when Angel made it home. Lei’s quiet, regular breathing told her that her roommate was asleep in the darkened living room. Angel found Lei curled into a brown ball on the couch, tail wrapped around her muzzle. The comm was in the middle of a pop-political broadcast with a panel of commentators indulging in verbal mud wrestling.
“—Harper is the only potential presidential candidate who’s advocating peace—” one of the ones to the left was saying.
“Appeasement you mean.” An offscreen voice stepped on his line.
“Merideth’s approval ratings have been in free-fall since the crisis began,” he continued, ignoring the interruption. “The Democrats are in the worst position they’ve been in since the CIA scandal. If her Committee manages to reach some diplomatic sol—”
“You must be kidding, Fred. No one seriously thinks a NOA party candidate can win the presidency—”
Angel walked in front of the comm and heard Lei stirring behind her. After a long yawn Lei said, “Finally came back? What did you think you were doing?”
“I don’t know.”
On the screen, a balding pink was leaning into the camera frame to berate somebody. “You remember what you said about the Greens, Dave? The country’s ready for a candidate like Har—”
Angel shook her head. “Wanted to talk to the punk I put in the hospital.”
Lei sat up and stretched, Angel could hear her joints pop. “What could he possibly have to say?”
“—the None-of-the-Abovers are a lot more radical than the Greens,” the one woman on the show was saying.
“I don’t know,” Angel said, “the bastard’s dead.”
“What?”
“—ideth avoided getting tarred with the same brush that hit the rest of the Democrats during the CIA indictments in ’54. He’s bounced back from worse numbers—”
“I accidentally walked into the morgue. The guy was laid out colder than—”
“Sure it was the same guy?”
“—had over two years to recover for the ’56 election, with a better economy, and this “alien” business isn’t helping him—”
Angel walked around the coffee table and sat down next to Lei. “How many tattooed pinks you think check in there with their dicks looking like overripe eggplant? It’s him.”
“Didn’t see anything about it on the news.”
Angel picked the remote off of the table and put her feet up. The argument on the comm was reaching a fever pitch with three or four people shouting at once.
“—Gregg and the Constitutionalists are the Democrats’ only real rivals—”
“—believe those ‘aliens’ were cooked in some gene-lab—”
“—ideth had any sense he’d resign now and give his successor a cha—”
“—NOA never held more than ten seats, and that was fifteen years—”
Angel changed the comm to a sports channel, and hit the mute button. “News is fucked, news’s always fucked. The police’re probably scared shitless about what news of another death’d do.”
“How’d the guy die?”
“Some computer glitch.”
Lei shook her head and Angel could hear her tail batting against the couch. “Why keep digging? What’s the point?”
Angel was silent for a long time before answering. “If I just sit around, I might have to start thinking about this crap, and I’m not ready for that.”
“You might have to.”
Angel waited for an explanation.
“Half a dozen reporters called while you were out. It’s not going to be long before you have to talk to them.”
“Why me?” Angel tried to sink into the couch.
“And that priest what’s-his-name—”
“Collor called again, great. Any other good news?”
“Well, this lawyer—”
“DeGarmo?”
Lei nodded. “Wants to know about funeral arrangements for Mr. Dorset.”
“Byron.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” Angel sighed.
“So, are you going to tell me where you got this car?”
Angel turned to see Lei staring at her, muzzle cradled in her hands.
• • •
With Sunday came a storefront sweeping in from the northwest. When Angel glanced out the window, the steel-wool storm-clouds seemed to be parked in a holding formation across the Golden Gate and over Oakland. The spires of Downtown were still sunlit, carving light holes in the dark horizon. All backed by the bone-white egg-shell that had swallowed Alcatraz.
Daily, hourly even, the city was becoming more surreal.
A chain of lightning flashes began to her right and shot back to the west.
Angel looked back down to Twenty-third. The Dodge Electroline van was still there. “He hasn’t moved.”
“You’re going to let one guy and a van trap you here all day—”
“He’s been pointing a vid unit up here.”
Lei walked up next to her and waved out the window. “You can’t avoid reporters forever. They’re like children, the more you deny them something, the harder they go after it.”
Angel turned away from the window as the sound of thunder reached them. She didn’t want to mention the fact that she thought that the van wasn’t a reporter. The van was much too generic—a solid unmarked gray job. And the guy with the vid unit bore an uncomfortable resemblance—down to the reddish eyes—to the Fed-boy she’d run into at Frisco General.
Angel shrugged. “What the fuck? Like you said, it’s inevitable.”
Angel walked back to her room and opened her underwear drawer.
In the drawer, under a collection of pink-designed clothing she owned and never actually used, was a Beretta 31-S nine-millimeter automatic—a matte-black carbon fiber design that fired caseless ammo. She emptied a few dozen rounds of ammunition out of a sock that had been balled up near the back of the drawer.
Lei’s voice came from behind her. “What the hell is that?”
Angel didn’t look up. She arranged the various components on the clean area on top of the dresser. “You should know what a gun looks like.”
“What are you doing with one?”
“Cleaning and loading the damn thing.”
Lei watched for a long time as Angel did her best to undo a few years of neglect. When she began to load it, Angel said, “Don’t worry, Lei. I’m not about to take potshots at some vid guy.”
“Thinking of getting yourself into trouble, aren’t you?”
Angel rummaged in her closet until she came out with a loose blouse that would cover the gun when she shoved it in her jeans. “All I’m thinking about is the possibility that a screw-loose morey who offed Byron might still be out there and might have enough reason to do me—”
Lei looked unconvinced.
“Believe me, I am trying hard to avoid becoming a charter member of the paranoia parade.” Angel walked out of her room and back to the bay windows. The stormfront was still stationary, and so was the van. “It ain’t easy.”
Lei stayed by the door to Angel’s room. “What are you going to do?”
“Right now? Visit Byron’s condo. Nice low-risk activity that shouldn’t attract anyone’s attention.”
“I’ll go with you—”
“You don’t have—”
Lei walked up and put a hand on Angel’s shoulder. “To keep you from doing anything stupid.”
Angel sucked in a breath, about to say something, and thought better of it. She spared a last glance at the pink in the van with the camera and said, “Let’s go.”
Down the stairs to the front door, Angel added, “I wish I knew where they got my address and the comm number.”
“It’s their job.”
As they passed the first-floor apartment, Angel heard the ghost of Balthazar’s comm. The explosions and bonging sound effects made everything feel that much more surreal. Angel thought about the old, nearly blind lion sitting alone in his apartment, watching the same cartoons over and over again. For some reason, all the humor had leeched out of the image. Now it seemed nothing if not tragic.
It seemed that even Balthazar wasn’t immune to the change sweeping her life—even if it was only her perspective.
Angel opened the door and stepped down to the sidewalk. The Fedboy/cameraman, who had intermittently pointed a vid out the driver’s side window on the van, was nowhere to be seen. The van was still parked across the street, and the only noise was the distant thunder—
Angel felt her hand creeping toward her waistband. She restrained herself. She looked up and down the street. A few moreys were gathered at an intersection up the street.
“Angelica Lopez!” came a call from down the street. Angel turned with Lei to see a too-perfect-looking Hispanic pink making his way up the hill toward them. Following him was a spotted-white ratboy with a remote vid setup. In an instant, the reporter was upon her. The rat was focusing the camera and Angel had the bad feeling that they were on a live feed, because the Hispanic was already turning toward the camera and saying, “Daniel Pasquez, here with a BaySatt news exclusive—”
“Fuck this.” Angel made an end run around the camera, stepping over the camera rat’s naked pink tail.
The rat panned after her and Angel felt a hand on her shoulder. Angel slowly turned to see Pasquez. “Miss Lopez—”
“Get your hand off of me.”
“Miss—”
“I’m not here to boost your ratings. Move the hand or you’ll shit your own teeth for a week.”
Pasquez gently let go of her shoulder. “If you could please give me a few minutes—”
Angel turned and walked to the BMW. Lei had beat her to it. Apparently the press didn’t think she mattered. Behind her she heard Pasquez saying, “Don’t you want your view heard?”
Angel gave him the finger without looking back. “What an asshole,” she said as she hit the combination on the BMW, letting her and Lei in.
Lei got into the passenger seat. “Do you think spouting off at him was a good idea?”
“I don’t give a shit.” Angel floored the car and rocketed down the hill, leaving Pasquez and the ratboy running for whatever vehicle they were using. “When I find out who leaked my address—”
“Where exactly are we going?”
“South Beach Towers.”
Lei let out a whistle of air from the side of her muzzle.
Angel weaved the BMW past the construction clinging to Sixteenth as she aimed for the coast. Without realizing it, she turned on to Mission and drove toward The Rabbit Hole.
“Jesus Christ.” She had to slow down because there were fire engines crowding the street. Traffic had slowed to a crawl. Angel could smell the smoke through the air recyclers before she even saw the rubble where the bar used to be.
“The bastards burned the place down.”
“It could be an accident—”
“Bullshit.” Angel hit the comm on the dash and started scanning through channels hoping to catch some word on what was happening.
She had to stop because one of the ambulances ahead of her was lifting off. As the ambulance cleared ahead of her, she saw what was happening.
The comm latched on a news station. “—of arson. This bar was the scene of the alleged attack police believe—”
The pink Angel saw across Mission was white, slight of build, and wore a leather jacket. She had a flaming sword tattoo and a stupid smile on her face. She was almost hidden from view in an alley across the street from the chaos.
She was totally bald.
Damn it!
Horns blared behind the BMW. Lei said something, but Angel didn’t listen. Instead, she popped the door on the car and dived out after the pink.
Angel cleared the twenty meters separating them in five running steps. She was in the air in a ballistic arc aimed at the pink’s neck before the woman turned to notice a crazed rabbit pouncing on her.
The pink’s eyes went wide, and she started raising her arms.
“Shi—” she began to say.
Then Angel landed on the evil twitch with both feet. The flames across the street roared in her ears and Angel had to shout to hear herself. “You fucked shitheads!”
Angel’s head throbbed with sirens, the roar of flames, the smell of smoke, air heavy with humidity from the hoses, and the vicious pink face framed by wet, dirty sidewalk—
Pinky tried to push her off, but Angel grabbed both sides of the bald head and put her foot into the pink’s throat. Pinky gagged and pushed harder but Angel had her fingers firmly hooked around Pinky’s ears. A jagged earring was cutting into Angel’s hand.
“You want to burn? You want to fucking burn?” Angel let go of one ear and reached for the Beretta. “You wanna see Hell?”
Pinky’s eyes opened even wider as she saw the gun. She redoubled her efforts to dislodge Angel, but fighting and trying to breathe at the same time seemed beyond her.
“Angel!” called a voice from behind.
Angel brought the gun out of her pants.
“What are you doing?” The voice was Lei.
Christ, what the hell was she doing? Was she going to turn this pink twitch into street-pizza with the cops only a few—
Angel whipped her head around to look back at the fire. Thank God, she thought. Everyone was still intent on the torch The Rabbit Hole had become. It and three adjacent buildings.
If she didn’t draw any more attention to herself, she wouldn’t be up on charges for the gun she was waving around. What the hell had she been thinking?
She took her foot off Pinky’s neck, letting her roll away. Pinky made a croaking noise, and there was a slight tug from Angel’s left hand.
Angel had kept a grip on the jagged earring.
“Crazy freaked hairball,” Pinky managed to croak.
“Let’s go, Angel.” Lei grabbed Angel’s arm.
Angel slipped the gun back into her waistband. “Fuck this shit.”
Pinky looked her right in the eye as Lei led her out of the alley. “We know who you are.”
“Bullshit.”
“Come on, Angel.” Lei kept dragging her back to the BMW.
When they reached the BMW, Angel could hear Pinky croaking, “A flaming sword of righteousness—” Then the door closed.
Angel floored the car as fast as she could move, past the bottleneck.
“What is possessing you, girl? You looked about to kill—”
“I was.”
“Are you going to start blitzing out on me? If you are, I’d like to know. You going to jump any human you run into now—”
“She wasn’t any human.”
“Then who the fuck was she? And why were you tap dancing on her neck?”
Angel turned down Beale, under the old Embarcadero Freeway on-ramp. As the BMW passed under the new Oakland Bay Bridge, she said, “She, or someone like her, set that fire.”
“How the fuck do you know that?”
“You saw. She’s Knights of Humanity—”
“So-fucking-what? Is it suddenly open season on every freako nutball group out there? That’s half this city, Angel. I don’t think you have enough bullets.”
“Don’t you see what’s happening?” Angel slammed on the brakes and a green GM Maduro laid on the horn and swerved around them.
“What?”
“They set that fire in retaliation. Someone else is going to retaliate for that, it’s going to keep going, someone has to, to . . .” Angel leaned her head against the steering wheel. Why did she feel that she was spinning down into some dark abyss? She told herself that the smell of smoke that was clinging to her fur was making her dizzy.
“Has to what?”
Angel felt her eyes watering. “God. I don’t know.”
Lei hugged Angel’s shoulders. “You’ve been stressed out. It’s understandable. Let’s go find that condo you inherited and get you something to drink, all right?”
Angel nodded, and took a deep breath. “Sorry. Lei. I’ve been losing it lately.”
South Beach Towers was at the corner of Stanford and Townsend, right on the coast of the bay. In fact, it sat right on the terminus beyond which the Embarcadero and a few million tons of landfill slipped underwater in the ’34 quake. Now that she could see it without the benefit of fog, Angel thought the look of the city might improve immeasurably if the white concrete and black glass neo-Aztec building joined the last half-klick of Townsend under the bay.
Angel parked the BMW in the reserved garage and led Lei up to the building.
The combination that DeGarmo gave her let her into the lobby, and she had to spend a few worthless minutes explaining the situation to the security personnel. The rent-a-cops were nice and professional enough that Angel could pretend that it didn’t matter that she wasn’t human.
Even so, Angel could smell the tension. The veneer was cracking on these guys.
It took a few minutes to double-check and clear Angel through to the elevators. They gave her a personalized ID card and promised that she was now on the computers and wouldn’t be hassled again.
On the elevator ride up, she asked, “Did you see it?”
“What?” Lei asked.
“Those guys. They feel it, too, in the air.”
“What’s in the air?”
“Violence. We aren’t immune here. People are beginning to realize it.”
“You’re just paranoid.”
The doors whooshed open on the fifteenth floor, where Byron had his apartment. “Lei, I think it’s only a matter of time before all Hell breaks loose.”
“This isn’t New York or Los Angeles. I think you’re too close to all this. You’re losing perspective.”
Angel led her down a corridor to apartment 156. She tapped in the combination on the keypad next to the door. “What’s so different about San—”
Angel stopped talking as the door swung open on Byron’s apartment.
They both stood there, silent, staring through the door.
“Shit.” Angel finally said.
“I’ll go call the police,” Lei said.
Angel nodded, not really listening. She walked into the room, stepping over cushions that had been tossed from the couch and shredded. The coffee table was in three pieces, the glass top shattered. The wall-to-wall pile carpeting had been cut neatly into five-centimeter-wide strips, as had the upholstery on what remained of the furniture.
Angel could smell a faint animal musk hanging in the air. Canine or feline, she couldn’t tell. It had taken a while to fade, but she knew it wasn’t Byron she was smelling.
Yes, Angel thought, Lei had to go to the lobby.
That was the comm there, and there, and there—Angel thought she even saw a piece of it on the balcony.
Angel walked through the rubble to the remains of the wet bar and hoped the folks who trashed the joint had left her that drink.