Chapter 16: A Raw Deal

"Now listen, Jack-" Albright growls.

"No, you listen," I growl back, standing to full height. Both of them flinch. "They started the trouble. I finished it. I just took four killers off the streets-off your streets." I let out a disgusted breath. "And you wanna arrest me. Should be pinning a medal on me."

"So you confess to killing them?" Wilmer says.

"I was attacked without provocation, I responded out of fear for my own safety and the safety of civilians around me, and deadly force became necessary."

This one actually draws a smile from Jean-Luc. I've just recited-nearly verbatim-the Civilian's Right to Self Defense, as defined in the Democratic Trade Coalition's interplanetary code of law.

Behind us, the ambulance with its lone survivor lifts from the ground and flies away with lights bobbing back and forth lazily. Albright watches it go, then tosses the flash grenade shell in a rainbow arc, directly into the open lid of a nearby dumpster.

"You get anything out of the guy?" he asks.

I shrug. "Nothing good. We exchanged words when he came to, but he didn't feel like chatting."

O'Hara speaks up. "What does this have to do with the Harland case?"

"What d'you mean?" I say.

"The guy on the phone said-"

"Did he?" I say.

O'Hara's cheeks go red. I shouldn't have done that. Should have at least let him finish his sentence, but I'm still pretty sauced, and it's got my tongue looser than it should be. O'Hara starts to say something, but Albright touches his shoulder and gestures toward the bodies in the street. He takes the hint and trudges off.

Albright turns back to face me. He lights a cigarette, scratches his five o'clock shadow. "I'd lecture you about disrupting police investigations, but I guess you already got a pretty good idea what I'd have to say, Detective Tarelli."

"You read my file, huh?"

"I knew I'd heard that name before, so I looked into it. I remember your trial. I was pretty green at the time-working a beat down in Titan City... For what it's worth, I thought you got a raw deal. A lot of us did."

He pauses here. I don't say anything.

"It's bad, what's happened to this town," says Albright. "These days, you can't tell what side anyone's on."

I stare him down. "Yeah. Never can tell."

Albright sighs out a cloud of smoke. Hands me my gun.

"If you happen to see my hat-" I start to tell him.

"Don't push it," he snaps. "You got us down here. Might as well tell me what you want."

"I want to know the condition of the body of Nathan Harland."

He's genuinely befuddled for a second. "You saw the photos."

"I mean the condition on arrival. Before you moved the pallets."

I watch the befuddlement morph into understanding, then a sort of appraisal. "How'd you know about that?"

"A reporter for the Daily printed something one of your boys said. Something about the body never being found if not for the call, because the pallets looked like they hadn't been moved in years. Thing is, I was there. Not only were there no pallets near the body, but I didn't notice any sort of discoloration on the floor. If there had been pallets sitting there in the same place for years, you'd be able to tell. So something was moved. But it didn't look like your boys moved anything to me."

Albright hesitated, then makes up his mind. "Well, they did, but you're right."

"Come again?"

He sighs. "The caller gave us an address and said we'd find Nathan Harland in the abandoned factory, buried under some equipment. When we got there, we found a bunch of rusty old pallets, big metal ones, stacked up right in the middle of the factory floor."

"So you move the pallets, and you find the body. Right where the caller said it would be?"

"Right. But it took some work. Harland had been... entombed under the things. And like you said, no discoloration on the floor when we moved them. They'd been piled up. Recently."

"Somebody was trying to hide the body," I say. "Kind of ruins my theory about the tipster being the killer. Why go through all that trouble to hide it if you're just gonna call the cops?"

O'Hara is waving for Albright to come over. He's in the middle of a call on his datapad. Maybe something related to the case.

Albright unceremoniously flicks the cigarette butt at the dead bodies behind him. "You'll be called in for questioning about this, Tarelli," he says.

"That's fine," I say. "Just not tonight. I have work to do."

"You mean you don't like to have your work interrupted?" says Albright.

I grin. Message received.

Albright nods a grim-faced goodbye and heads over to join O'Hara, who relays some information to him that I wish I could hear. Then they walk to their cruiser and get in. An unexpected feeling creeps up and blindsides me. Envy. A homesick sort of feeling for my old job, for the life that's so far behind me.

The cruiser hovers off the ground and starts to ascend, but then it lowers back down again. The door opens. Albright leans out.

"Tarelli," he shouts over the whine of antigravity engines. "You were right. About forty-five-degree angles."

He shuts the door again. The hovercar lifts, turns, and takes off into the night sky at terrific speed.

Officers are cleaning things up and taking photos amid flashing cruiser lights, but nobody seems bothered as I search the garbage strewn across the street. I manage to find my hat. Somebody's stepped on it, though, smashing it all out of shape, so I leave it there.

I circle around the bar, heading not for home but the opposite direction. My close brush with death has me jumping at shadows, and the words I exchanged with my attacker when he woke up-words I chose not to disclose to Albright-have me even more on edge. Every dark alley hides a killer, and every sound is a hitman tailing me.

Twenty minutes later, satisfied I'm not being followed and sick of walking in wet pants, I cut back along the side streets for home.