Skin Game Read online

  “You’ll love it here,” Max said, and pulled the gate open a little.

  Clemente came cautiously through. Slowly, he scanned the twisted metal and derelict buildings rising around him, making ominous abstract shapes in the rain-streaked night.

  “They’re around,” Max said, referring to the transgenics he was checking for. “But they’ll leave us alone.”

  She led him inside a nearby building that had once housed a stem cell research facility. It was a low-slung brick structure and the glass door had long ago been shattered, but at least the roof didn’t leak. The receptionist would have sat to the right. A door on the left led to what had once been offices, while another door in front of them went to the former labs in the back.

  Inside what would have been the receptionist’s cubicle sat a desk with a straight-back chair on either side. A single lamp perched on one end of the desk, and in the middle was a tray with a pot, two cups, two spoons, a carton of milk, and a bowl of sugar.

  The walls were white, the floor dusty but free of clutter, and a window was to their right. Looking out the window, they could see the main gate, and would be able to make out any movement around it.

  “I wanted you to have a nice view,” she said. “But when I turn on the lamp, we won’t be able to see outside.”

  “But your snipers will be able to see their target,” Clemente said, “just fine.”

  “Then maybe we won’t turn on the lamp,” she said. “Doesn’t bother me none—I have pretty good night vision.”

  Which of course was an understatement.

  “Cozy is fine by me,” Clemente said.

  Max walked around the desk, and waved for the detective to take the seat across from her.

  “You want that coffee I promised you?”

  “Kind of late for me,” he said. “I may want to get back to sleep someday.”

  “Whatever—but we may be here awhile.”

  He considered, said, “Make mine black.”

  She poured for them both. She had hers black as well.

  Clemente sipped his coffee, and his expression had mild surprise in it. “Hey—this is good.”

  “We’re multitalented. I’m sure the outside world would rather we drank blood or crushed insect guts. But we’re people, Detective.”

  He drank some more. “Yes—people who are in a lot of trouble.”

  “You might be surprised how long we can hold out,” she said. “We’ve anticipated this kind of situation for months. We’ve stockpiled food and water. We’re well-armed.”

  This wasn’t exactly true, though with Logan’s tunnel supply line, they could indeed hold out for a good long time.

  “Anyway,” she said, “you’re the one that’s risking his health inside Terminal City. Ordinaries can’t stay in here long—this is no-man’s-land, a real biochemical bad trip for everybody but the transgenics.”

  “Are you suggesting that I tell the general who called me—it was a general, not the police chief, Max—and say all we have to do is back our troops out, and let you . . . people inhabit Terminal City?”

  “We aren’t negotiating yet . . . but why not? What good does Terminal City do anyone but transgenics?”

  “Max, this is not going to end well.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t see it that way. Call me an optimist, but I think this can turn out for the best.”

  He looked at her as if she were insane. “How in hell?”

  “That’s what you and I are going to hammer out.”

  Clemente patted the air in front of him. “Whoa, whoa. You think the two of us are just going to talk this thing out?”

  Max sipped her coffee. “Why not?”

  “We can’t—”

  “We already did it once—at Jam Pony.”

  He shook his head. “We didn’t keep the peace there and we sure as hell didn’t talk it out. You jumped White and his goons and kicked their asses.”

  She smiled.

  “If one little victory makes you smile, fine,” he said. “But us talking. . . . Max, I can’t negotiate this. And nobody else wants to.”

  “You have to reason with them, Detective. Encourage your superiors to sit down and talk with us.”

  He looked into her eyes in the darkness. “You have two options, Max. One is put your hands in the air and walk en masse through that gate into custody, and hope that in the light of day, given due process and a full-scale public hearing, you’ll get a fair shake.”

  “I can’t wait till I hear the other option.”

  “It’s a lot worse. Last time, we were lucky—only one person died. There’s a hell of a lot more at stake now, and a lot more emotion on the outside. The media has people all stirred up, crying out, ‘Kill the monsters.’ Most of the military is up for just storming the place and painting the walls red.”

  She didn’t break eye contact and her voice remained matter-of-fact. “You know that trying that would be a big mistake.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. “Do I?”

  “You have the numbers, but don’t forget—this is what we were trained for. Frankly, Detective, we’d wax your ass, then we’d disappear into the night, and you’d never know where we would hit next.”

  His expression was grave enough to indicate he’d taken that as the promise, not threat, that it was; but he said, “There’s a far superior force mustering on the other side of that fence.”

  Shaking her head, she said, “They’re not superior, Detective—there’s just more of them.”

  And now, despite it all, he smiled. “You are one cocky little shit.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t call me a ‘cocky little bitch,’ ” she said, “’cause I woulda hated having to kick your ass.”

  His smile disappeared, but she chuckled and patted his arm. “Look, Detective Clemente—”

  “If I’m going to call you Max, you call me Ramon.”

  “All right, Ramon. Look . . . I’ve been running since I was nine. Most of the residents of Terminal City will tell you the same or something very similar. I’m tired of running, we’re all tired of it. We didn’t bring this on—they made us, then they tried to kill us. All we did was defend ourselves. In that situation, anyone would have done as much.”

  “Most people aren’t genetically engineered killing machines.”

  “From what I’ve seen, Ramon, the so-called ordinaries may not be genetically engineered, but they kill way more often . . . and for far less reason than the transgenics ever have.”

  “I can’t argue that. But those ordinaries you speak of aren’t going to be able to identify with you, Max—some of you have monstrous appearances, and all of you have superhuman abilities that make you dangerous.”

  “We have to make them understand that we have hearts and minds and maybe even souls, too.”

  “So, how do we do that?”

  She shook her head. “We’re still trying to figure that out. I’m hoping we can get the word out, stop some of this media garbage that—”

  “Wait, wait. Max, a battalion is waiting outside your door, and you want to stave that off with a PR campaign?”

  “Ramon—I’m looking for answers. I need you to look for some, and seek allies within your ranks, cooler heads that don’t have a hidden agenda served by the blood of my people.”

  He sighed. “Fair enough.”

  “It’s going to take some time, and you’ve got to do anything you can to hold back the troops—keep them from storming our castle for a while . . . okay?”

  “And if I try to accomplish that, do I have your word that the transgenics will stay inside?”

  She gave him a decisive nod. “Those that are in will stay in. The others, the ones that are still out there,” she said, and gestured toward the other side of the fence, “them I can’t control.”

  “All right,” Clemente said, and sighed. “How long do you need me to stall this thing?”

  “I told you. We’ve got supplies for the next year—how ’bout yo
u guys?”

  “Max,” the detective said forcefully, trying to brush aside her glibness. “Just how the hell long do you think I can keep them from attacking?”

  “Ramon,” she said, “this is my first transgenics-versus-the-United-States-military siege. I’m making this up as I go.”

  Clemente looked as if he were trying to decide whether to laugh or cry. Before he made any decision, his cell phone rang. He looked at her, and she said nothing. It went off again and he pulled it out and checked the caller ID.

  “Fed number,” he said.

  “Take it—see what they want.”

  He touched a button and held the phone to his ear. “Clemente,” he said, but the identification sounded more like an angry question.

  Max watched the detective’s face as the caller spoke. Ramon Clemente did not look happy.

  “Yeah, I remember you,” he told the phone, his disgust apparent. “Do you have any idea what fucking time it is?”

  Clemente listened some more, his face shifting from pissed to serious.

  Then the cop asked, “Where and when?”

  Max felt herself growing uneasy—something wasn’t right somewhere.

  Clemente’s expression was blank now, except for a fire in his eyes. “And why do you think a transgenic is responsible?”

  A sick feeling oozed into her stomach.

  “That’s the opinion of your superior officer?” he asked whoever he was talking to. “You wouldn’t happen to mean Special Agent in Charge White?”

  Max rocketed to her feet. Wanting to rip the phone out of Clemente’s hand, she started pacing behind the desk.

  “You know I can’t trust that son of a bitch,” the detective said.

  Did he mean White?

  “I know he’s high-ranking, but he’s still a son of a bitch. . . . Where are you now, Agent Gottlieb?”

  The caller said something—if the phone hadn’t been pressed so tight to the detective’s ear, Max would have been able to hear it—and Clemente’s expression shifted back to pissed off.

  “You left the scene of a murder?”

  Now her stomach did a little back flip into the pool of nausea flooding her belly.

  “You people never fail to amaze me,” Clemente said. “We need to talk, and soon. . . . All right you tell me where and when! God knows I should defer to your high standards of professionalism.”

  Again the caller’s response didn’t help Clemente’s mood.

  “You better know in one hour, Agent Gottlieb, and you better call me back within that time span or I’ll have a warrant issued for your goddamned arrest. The last I heard, federal agents weren’t exempt from the laws of this land.”

  And the detective thumbed End.

  “Murder involving a transgenic?” Max asked, stopping to lean on the desk. “What the hell is going on?”

  She was doing her best to stay cool; she wanted to project power and control to this man. The half of that phone call she’d just heard raised too many questions, and she had a feeling she wasn’t going to like any of the answers.

  Clemente seemed to be working at controlling himself as well, though his anger and anxiety were clearly not directed at her. “A sector officer at the checkpoint between Eleven and Twelve was killed tonight.”

  Max tried to keep the rage out of her voice, with little success. “And Ames White thinks a transgenic did it.”

  Clemente nodded once, gravely. “And he’s supposed to have proof.”

  “What kind of proof? That wasn’t him on the phone; that was his stooge Gottlieb, right?”

  “Right. As you probably gathered, Otto discovered the body but left the scene, so I don’t know how the hell they secured any kind of evidence.”

  She drew a deep, slow breath; then she let it out and said calmly, “You do know that there’s more to Ames White than just your typical government pain-in-the-ass scumbag.”

  “Well, he’s definitely a government pain-in-the-ass scumbag. You don’t have to talk hard to convince me of that.”

  “Ramon, if you just take a close look at him, you’ll find out that there’s a lot more going on than NSA duties.”

  Clemente’s eyes tightened. “Such as?”

  “White’s—”

  She stopped.

  She knew that whatever she said was going to sound completely crazy, and she would lose all cred with the cop.

  “Go on, Max. What do you know about White? Is he . . . dirty, somehow?”

  “That hardly covers it.”

  “You have to tell me more.”

  Hell, she could barely believe the true agenda of Ames White herself . . . and she’d seen the agents of the cult firsthand. How could she hope to convince Clemente without the risk of losing his confidence completely?

  “You just . . . need to take a good hard look into him,” she managed.

  “I can only look so hard.”

  “You’re a detective, aren’t you? Fucking detect!”

  He gestured with open hands. “Max—if there are bad things to be found out about Ames White, what makes you think that either White or the government will let a local cop find them?”

  “I found out, didn’t I?”

  “Then take the load off my shoulders—share what you know.”

  She sighed and sat back down, heavily; she wished the darkness of the room would just swallow her. “Look, you’re not going to believe me . . . so I want you to check it out on your own. Seeing is believing, you heard of that?”

  Intrigued, Clemente rubbed a hand over his chin. “What makes you think I won’t believe you?”

  Max rolled her eyes, shook her head. “It’s too whack to be true. . . . It just is.”

  A tiny, teasing grin appeared. “Like the government making genetically engineered killing machines without the public’s knowledge?”

  She smirked at him. “Yeah, like that—only a whole lot weirder.”

  The detective’s smile disappeared. He looked confused, and she could hardly blame him. At last he said, “You said you trusted me. Well, that goes both ways. Trust me with this, Max—trust me that I’ll take you seriously.”

  And, so—taking a deep breath, and a leap of faith—she launched into the story of the ancient breeding cult whose snake-worshiping conclave of leaders manipulated events and people, and had for centuries; she pressed on, telling the detective how these crazies had been trying to breed genetically superior humans for the last thousand years or so, an objective that had eventually led to the modern-day creation of Manticore.

  To some degree, they had succeeded in their attempt to build a “better” human. She had seen Ames White, who did the bidding of the conclave, perform acts of strength and daring that rivaled anything any transgenic could accomplish . . . with the added detail that White and the others like him could feel no pain.

  When she had finished what even she knew sounded like the most absurd of tall tales, Clemente looked even more confused, and a little bit like she’d punched him out.

  But at least he wasn’t eyeballing her as if she were a madwoman. In fact, her gut instinct told her he believed her, or at least believed in her sincerity.

  “Can you prove any of this?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Not really—anytime I’ve gotten anything, they’ve covered up, sort of a scorched earth policy. But that team that came into Jam Pony—you saw those pumped-up uber-humans—they didn’t work for any government agency. . . . They worked for the conclave of the snake cult.”

  He said nothing for a long time. They just sat there in the darkness, with his eyes moving in thought, and Max studying him to see if she had outright lost him.

  Finally, quietly, Clemente said, “You’re right, Max—it does sound crazy.”

  Max’s heart sank.

  “But,” he said, getting up, shaking his head and grinning wryly, “in this job, it doesn’t pay to not look into things, just because they sound crazy.”

  A warmth for this man filled her, and she sto
od and extended her hand; they shook, and she said, “Thanks, Ramon.”

  He checked his watch. “I’ve got to split . . . but I’ll dig into this weird shit, as much as I can. Snakes, huh?”

  “Snakes.”

  “Those I may not dig into.”

  She smiled a little. “Don’t blame you.”

  “Why is White’s agenda—the snake cult’s agenda—antitransgenic? Shouldn’t all you genetic wonders hang together?”

  “I don’t understand it myself, Ramon. Still putting pieces together. The point is, White wants to wipe us out . . . and blaming murders on transgenics is a good way to win that PR war we were talking about.”

  “People don’t usually die in PR wars.”

  “I don’t mean anything light by that, Ramon. I’m sorry that the cop got killed, no matter who did it.”

  “Thanks, but getting killed wasn’t the worst of it, not for him or your PR war—he was another skinning victim.”

  Max let out a long breath. “Skinned—how many does that make?”

  “Three. One we found two nights ago . . . it was all over the news, you saw that, right? . . . Now this one tonight, and there was another a few months ago.”

  “All cops?” Max asked.

  Clemente shook his head. “The first guy’s prints came up on the computer that he was a shoe salesman, but there was something hinky about that one.”

  “Hinky how?”

  Another head shake. “I’ve already told you way too much, Max. Now I’m outta here.”

  She walked along with him. “We’ll talk again?”

  “I don’t know,” Clemente said with a shrug. “This cop killing will be a priority, and if we are looking for a transgenic, well . . . you might not want to invite me back in.”

  “Ramon, this changes nothing about what we discussed; in fact, it shows we were on the right track—Ames White and others like him will try to use this to further inflame the public.”

  “Yeah, and it’ll work.”

  “So find the real killer, why don’t you?”

  “Even if it’s a transgenic?”

  “It certainly won’t be a transgenic from inside Terminal City.”

  “Are you saying it would be impossible for one of you to sneak out of here?”

  That made her uncomfortable. “We are penned up, but . . . it would be possible, yes. So I tell you what—we’ll look into this from this end too. After all, if the killer is a transgenic, we want him caught as much as you do.”