Crowe and Coyote

PART II, Crowe and Coyote II

Out in the waiting room, the blue-haired man heard the screaming begin. He scrubbed a hand over his face.

"I wish it didn't have to be this way," he said to the woman next to him, whose arm was in a sling.

"Shit, Jase. You know it had to happen. Would she have come with us willingly? Hell no. Her head's been pumped full of all the newscast bullshit for ten years. She thinks we're evil. Even if she doesn't think she thinks we're evil, she does. They've been feeding her images of shredded corpses and blasted buildings in combination with our name for ten fucking years.Honestly, I'm amazed she came at all."

"It's just--" he trailed off. "You never knew her. You're too young for that. You never knew what she was."

"I've heard." For a moment they were both silent, listening to the piercing screams from the other room.

"Jase," the woman said at last.

"Yeah?"

"Even if we can fix her. Patch her up, restore her memory. She won't be the same person."

"She will be," Jase said. "More or less. She'll be the person we wanted her to be. I paid the doctor some hard credits for it, and I have faith in the doctor."

The woman shook her head, looked like she was about to say something. She had just opened her mouth when a man stepped through the outside wall.

"Shit," Jase muttered. "He's very early."

The man was tall, broad-shouldered, long black hair streaked with grey. His clothing was dark and simple--simple enough, in this age of glitter and holoprints, to stand out quite prominiently in a crowd. He didn't look like the sort of person who would care. He exuded calm, great cold rivers of it. He stood perfectly erect.

Calm, Jase found himself remembering, was not always reassuring. It was calm in the center of a black hole. It was calm in the eye of a hurricane.

"Hello, Crowe," he said.

But the tall man's eyes were already narrowing. He could hear the screaming just as well as they could.

"Jase," he said slowly. It was the slowness of a glacier crushing rocks in its path. "Is there something you or the good doctor would like to tell me?"

"She's in there," Jase said, knowing better than to attempt an open lie.

"So I hear," Crowe said. His mouth quirked at one corner. It was not quite a frown--Jase had never, in twenty-some years of acquaintance, seen the man actually frown. "My question is, of course--why is she screaming, Jase? The treatment shouldn't make her scream."

Along the edges of the room, the injured PAINTers were readying themselves. A few shifted, put unmangled hands on weapons.

"She must've been drinking," Jase mumbled.

"Yes," Crowe said. "She must've. As you well knew, since I told the good doctor she was drunk when I found her. If I had to posit a quick guess--"

Several of the PAINTers stood. Everyone in the room knew what happened when Thelonius Crowe posited quick guesses. Jase found his own hand inching backwards, to the spot at the small of his back where he kept his emergency knife.

"As I was saying, Jase. If I had to posit a quick guess, I'd say someone--perhaps tempted by the payment of someone else--injected her with a very large amount of said treatment. Enough, this person may have been hoping, to hasten the purging of her percomm. Certainly enough to cause her great pain. Hopefully, I'd imagine this person was thinking, not enough to chew through her actual brain cells. At least, not the ones this person needed."

Those PAINTers able to move were circling now, closing in on Crowe. His eyes flicked over them, unconcerned. His breathing didn't even quicken.

"I would further posit," he continued, "that this person belonged to an organization--PAINT, perhaps--that would dearly love to take the six hour interval between the breakup of Miss Greer's percomm and the time I was scheduled to arrive and spirit her away to some very difficult to locate safehouse. They would perhaps wish to brainwash and indoctrinate Miss Greer. Change, perhaps, a few of the memories she'd have that might be more troublesome than others."

One of the PAINTers circling, a man with a broken nose, went for a gun in a shoulder holster.

Crowe's arm blurred. The man, who had been directly behind him, was suddenly pinned to the wall by a rather nasty-looking longknife. The blood that seeped down from his impaled throat mingled with the peeling paint, sent strips of it fluttering to the floor.

Jase swallowed. Hard.

"This person," Crowe said. "Would be very stupid."

The silence in the room was crystalline, save for the echoing screams from the office. One of the PAINTers made a break for the door. Crowe, turning and releasing effortlessly, pinned her to the wall with another knife in the arm. Her screams joined the screams from the office in duet.

"I represent the Order Gestalt," Crowe said, "a group your people have had very profitable commerce with for twenty years. Should you try and kidnap Miss Greer, that profitable relationship will be at an end. Not to mention, of course, my personal retaliation, which will take the form of sticking every single one of you to the wall like insects in a museum shadowbox. If you are all lucky--very fucking lucky--the woman you are currently torturing is whole and undamaged. If you are unlucky--if one cell in her skull that was there before erasure is destroyed, if one hair on her head is permanently crimped--I will personally hunt every person in this room down. Including you, Jase. Including you--last."

Crowe smiled. The smile did not reach his eyes, not at all.

"I don't like to hurt. I don't like to kill. But this woman is worth killing for. Even if she knew nothing--even if she was a housewife, a barmaid, a clerk--she would still be worth killing for. Keep this in mind, please, as you plot your future movements. And, of course, as you do so, pray."

He took Jase's hand in his own. Jase jumped. Crowe shook the hand.

"If your luck is bad, dear Jase, I'll be seeing you soon."

When he went into the office, no one stopped him. Jase sat down, shakily, in one of the empty chairs. When Crowe returned, a redheaded woman wrapped in a filthy sheet in his arms, not a one of them made a peep. The woman was silent, her eyes glassy. Crowe had sedated her. Her head nestled against his shoulder; he had rolled up a part of the sheet to make a more comfortable pillow for it.

He paused only briefly at the wall. "By the way," he said. "I kept my end of the bargain. The information you want is scrawled in the third stall down of the public men's room, Blushing Meadow Station. It's a numeric code. Use Mandi Caradino's latest obnoxious pop hit as your key, and you'll have it."

He left.

It was a full thirty seconds before anyone in the room dared to breathe.

"Fuck," Jase said at last. "Fuck. Somebody get Ginger down from the wall. Luc, check on the good doctor. Make sure that bastard left him breathing."

"What do we do now, fearless leader?" the woman beside him asked, contempt evident in her voice. She had been one of the smart ones. When Thelonius Crowe entered, she hadn't even stood up.

"We try to find him," Jase said. "And next time, we're smarter. We need that woman. We need her."