Spooky kind of partnership, when you got to thinking about it.
Spookier still, just as they sat down, that Dekker showed up in the doorway. He came part of the way to their table and made a cautious little gesture like Can-I-join-you?
Bird waved his hand, swallowed his mouthful. “Grab your plate.”
Dekker was clean shaven, hair wet and combed back—quiet and polite. That was a plus. Good bones, under a jumpsuit that didn’t fit. A woman did notice things like that, if she was alive.
“Could do with feeding,” Bird said.
Ben made a surly shrug. Meg tried to think of something cheerful, took a forkful of The Hole’s best stand-in for sausage and eggs and a sip of not bad coffee, while they were all waiting for a lunatic to come and sit down with them.
“Want to bet he’ll ask the time?” Ben asked.
“Don’t you open your mouth,” Bird said sternly.
“Did I say a thing?”
“Nice rear,” Meg said.
“Doesn’t impress me,” Ben said.
“Quiet.”
“Yeah, he’d do that for hours.”
“Ben…”
“All right, all right. He’s doing just fine. Hasn’t jumped Price or anything.”
“Ben.”
Dekker came back, with his breakfast and his coffee—into a sudden quiet at their table.
“How are you feeling?” Bird asked him as he sat down.
“Hung over,” Dekker said, sipped the coffee with a grimace, and, from vials in various pockets, started laying out a row of pills: not unusual, for spacer-types—bone pills, mineral pills, vitamin pills; but Dekker’s collection was truly impressive.
“Dekker?” Ben said. “You having eggs with your pills, or what?”
Dekker gave this defensive little glance up, the cold sort that made Meg’s nerves twitch toward a knife she didn’t carry now—didn’t quite meet anybody’s eyes. “Yeah. Thanks, whoever put the crackers by the bed. Lived on them last night. My stomach was upset.”
“They give you a doctor’s number?” Bird asked.
Dekker nodded, swept up a fistful of pills, chased them one after another with coffee, and didn’t ever answer that. Bird shrugged. Dekker ate his eggs. They ate theirs. Finally Dekker got up and went back to his room, saying something about needing his rest.
“Yeah, well,” Ben said, staring after him.
“Man’s hung over,” Bird said.
Ben didn’t say a thing to that except, “Are we going in to the docks?”
“Yeah,” Bird said. “Afraid they’re not going to move if we don’t push. And we can pull those panels, right now. We can do that. But four’s too crowded up there.”
They were close to viable now on Way Out. They’d gotten the tanks mated three days ago, they’d gotten the interior blown out and certified for access, they’d gotten everything well toward completed, if they could just get the refit crews to keep after it and get the value assemblies connected… but when it was a case of getting skilled help on free time, it wasn’t easy. It took inducements andconstant look-ins to make tired crews on overtime look sharp and do it right.
“We’ll be back about suppertime,” Bird said. “And if you two wouldn’t mind to be staying here…”
“Hey!” Sal held up a hand. “Don’t make us responsible for this guy!”
“Don’t let him cross Price. Or Mike. All right?”
“No!”
“ ‘Appreciate that.” As Bird and Ben got up quickly and beat a retreat.
“Well, hell!” Sal said.
“There’s worse.”
“I’d rathervac the cabin.”
“Hey. Don’t judge too soon. That’s goodbone structure.”
Sal gave her a flat, disgusted stare.
Meg said, “You can go up if you want. I can hold it here. Or we can take a walk and I can tell you what I won’t say in the room.”
“ Yeah,” Wills said, on the phone, “ yeah, we did find him.”
Salvatore got a breath. “Damn right you’d better have found him.”
“ Yessir.”
“So where the hell is he?”
“ Sleepery, sir, just hadn’t paid a bill yet. No problem.”
“There’d better not be. You listen to me. If you can’t tag him any other way you keep somebody on it. You don’t let that guy slip. Understand?”
“ Yessir. Report’s coming to you right now.” Wills sounded upset. But he’d been on it, when a routine print had shown no card use for a sleepery. Couldn’t particularly fault Wills: Dekker wasn’t the only case Wills had on his lap, a couple of them felonies, while Dekker was Minimal Surveillance. But Human Services had dropped 5 whole C’s onto that card for the sole purpose of making sure Dekker stayed traceable, and it was embarrassing to the department to have him slip in the first couple of hours, in a place where he had no friends, no contacts, no credit and no way to get it.
Wills asked: “ You want Browning to ask a few questions?”
Salvatore scanned the report, how Dekker had spent 5-odd dollars in a Helldeck bar, 5.50 on beer and phone calls, and nothing else—
Browning had talked to The Pacific, who’d referred Dekker down the row to The Black Hole, and sent his card there when the management at The Hole had called for it. Browning had had the sense to query Wills before any next step, and Wills had told Browning not to follow that lead too closely: Dekker was apparently still there, The Hole was a quiet place with no apparent reason to lie to The Pacific, but Dekker hadn’t used the card at The Hole after he’d gotten it—which indicated Dekker must have some acquaintance there—or that he’d found some means of support—meaning hiring out for something, ditching the card for a while, not an uncommon dodge for a man evading the cops: prostitution was the ordinary way for somebody with reason to duck the System—or if not that, he had to have friends.
Wills said: “ Bird and Pollard are staying there. We checked them earlier.”
Bird and Pollard. Salvatore searched his recent memory.
“ The ones that claimed his ship,” Wills said. “ The ones that brought him in. Ship claim went through. The company paid. But Bird and Pollard saved his life. My guess is he looked them up, with what idea I don’t know, but evidently it wasn’t war. He’s staying there, evidently on one of their cards.”
Not necessarily looking for trouble, then—searching out the only two people he knew made perfect sense. Healthy sense, even. Salvatore sipped at a cooling cup of coffee, thought about it, and said: “All right, all right, the boy’s got himself settled. Long as he’s quiet, understand? Just get a list of the current residents. Run backgrounds. That sort of thing.”
“ Copy that,” Will said. “ We can do it on a tax check.”
“Do it.”
They’d gotten the lawsuit dropped—the report had convinced the EC board, a closer call than the kid knew about. But he’d signed the accident report—he was out of hospital and if he just for God’s sake got a job and settled, he was fine. Visconti said rehab might not be productive right now. There was a lot of hostility.
So let him run through the Human Services money. Let him settle and think about surviving. There wasn’t any negligence, there wasn’t any charge to file, and Dekker didn’t go to trial, however much Alyce Salazar wanted his head. Salazar was threatening civil suit now, to tie up the bank account and the insurance, but Crayton’s office said don’t worry about it: the daughter was over 18, the partnership was signed and legal, with a survivor’s clause, and the account was jointly acquired, anyway. Dekker was safe: there was no legal way Salazar was going to get at him.