“Oh, I’m thick!” Aiofe cried. “You’re looking for cute hoors.”
Olivia wasn’t sure she had understood Aiofe correctly, especially since most of the prostitutes hadn’t been particularly attractive. “Cute whores?”
“Cute hoor,” Aiofe carefully pronounced the second word. “A person that engineers things quietly to their advantage. People that dropped out of school after coming to Pittsburgh on student visas or never had visas in the first place.”
“Yes.” Olivia braced herself for more negative comments.
“Well, the EIA hasn’t been collecting anyone like that.” Aiofe sat down at the table so she could type on her keyboard. “After the Viceroy was attacked, Maynard pulled everyone off rounding up people on the expired visa lists and focused on finding the oni.”
“I see.” Olivia had been hoping that the missing prostitutes had simply been arrested by the authorities.
“We keep lists of arrests, hospital admissions, and deaths.” Aiofe pulled up the EIA system. “Before August, we rarely had to update any of them. Pittsburgh was a fairly safe town even with the jumpfish and the river sharks and strangle vines. We got lucky that the tengu learned of the attack on Oktoberfest. Station Square had been evacuated before the train derailment. There were, however, a lot of injuries and deaths from the confusion and the fighting that happened afterward. We just need to check for the names of your lads and lassies.”
Tommy hadn’t given any names, he’d only specified “prostitutes working Liberty Avenue.” It seemed to imply that both the women and the men were missing. No one working the streets, though, used their real name, not even Olivia. The EIA lists would be useless for learning if people were accounted for or not. She didn’t even know who had disappeared.
She did know, though, that all the prostitutes were a few years older than she. “We’re looking for people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. They would have been admitted to the hospital or arrested after the keva-bean handout.”
Olivia had talked with all the prostitutes from Stateside the night before the handout, trying to convince them to join her in getting the free food. The streetwalkers were like the proverbial grasshopper, never worrying about tomorrow. Peanut Butter Pie had been the only one who’d come with Olivia.
Aiofe refined her search. “That does narrow things down. With Pitt on summer break, eighteen to twenty-five is the smallest age group in Pittsburgh. We can also see who they list as emergency contacts; normally locals our age give a landline that belongs to a older relative.”
Olivia cringed with guilt; Aiofe didn’t know that Olivia was only sixteen.
Aiofe pulled up two lists of names. “The police didn’t arrest anyone since the handout. I guess that they were too busy to deal with minor offenders. The list from Mercy Hospital doesn’t look promising. Everyone seems to have given emergency contact and doctor information. Since I don’t have a general practitioner — something I should do something about — I doubt any illegal immigrant would have one.”
That left a short list of the dead. At the very top was “Doe, John.”
“That means he has no identification?” Olivia asked even though she was fairly sure of the answer.
“I’m sorry,” Aiofe said. “It does.”
Olivia steeled herself against the fear that was starting to grow in her. She really didn’t want to go into a place filled with corpses and see someone that she knew lying dead. Who else would do it? None of the other prostitutes had the resources to find out what happened to one of their own. “I need you to take me to the morgue.”
She needed Aiofe’s help partially because she had no clue where the morgue was, but also because Aiofe had some pull as an EIA employee that Olivia lacked.
Aiofe typed on her keyboard a moment and then shook her head. “He’s not at the morgue. The city ran out of space at their building on Penn Avenue. They’ve set up an overflow to handle all the dead with refrigerator trailers and are looking for other alternatives. I can take you to where he is.”
Olivia had come across the border between Earth and Elfhome at midnight during the July Shutdown.
She’d learned that trucks carrying big construction equipment to Pittsburgh had first priority to cross. The vehicles were searched as soon as they arrived, kept in the most secure parking lot at the edge of the quarantine zone, and flagged through immediately after Shutdown started. All other trucks were subjected to multiple, random searches. With the exception of certain medical supplies, everything else was given permission to enter the quarantine zone only if traffic patterns allowed it. It meant that any other vehicle might not even reach Elfhome.
She had reached Monroeville a day and a half before Shutdown. She could see the huge fenced-in parking lots from her hidden advantage point. All the areas were filling up while a giant digital clock counted down. UN forces directed traffic, checked paperwork, and searched vehicles. In the first priority lot, there were three big yellow construction vehicles and a host of smaller backhoes and bulldozers and forklifts and skid loaders, all on trailers. While the parking lot was secure, drivers were allowed to come and go. Between the trucks entering and the drivers walking in and out, she should be able to slip through the checkpoint.
She’d hoped to hide inside one of the smaller bulldozers or backhoes, but the cabs were all glass. It provided the operators a full view of their surroundings but it meant that she wouldn’t be hidden from scrutiny. She would have to hide under one of the bigger vehicles. Most had large wheels that gave the machine plenty of clearance but exposed anyone under them. Her best hope looked to be a John Deere logger with caterpillar treads. The cab created a long, narrow crawlspace under it. The logger sat on a low-boy trailer being pulled by an old blue Kenworth with a sleeper cab. Betts Farms was written on the Kenworth’s door, along with a Pittsburgh address.
Olivia had studied the vehicle through her binoculars, wondering if the driver actually slept in his truck. There was a sprawling truck stop beside the larger nonpriority staging areas with showers and toilets. There were also many cheap motels within walking distance. She watched the Kenworth for nearly an hour but saw no signs of its driver. She knew that this meant nothing; he could be asleep. She also knew that her scrambling around on the trailer might be loud enough to alert anyone awake in the cab.
She had a narrow window of opportunity. She had to risk it. If she didn’t find a hiding place during the cover of this night, it would be another month before she could attempt crossing the border. After years of sneaking around the Ranch, trying to keep hidden from all her various stepsisters and — brothers and extended family, it seemed ridiculously easy to ghost through security. The low-boy trailer’s deck was only eighteen inches high. She stepped up onto wooden floorboards and then crawled between the caterpillar treads of the logger. Lying down, she had only inches of clearance above her head. It smelled of sawdust, engine oil, diesel fuel, and mud.
She was barely in place when the door to the Kenworth opened. There was the familiar jangle of a choke-chain collar. Her heart stopped. She hadn’t considered that the sleeper cab would allow the driver to travel with a dog. She went still as possible, barely daring to breathe.
The dog raced around the truck, the jangle of its collar marking its fast loops. It was a big dog if it was wearing a choke chain. It came to a stop near where Olivia had scrambled onto the trailer. It was close enough for her to hear its loud snuffing.