Would Wyte hold up? Truff, please let him hold up.
Inside. Down the hall. Gun drawn. Leaking.
Wyte always went first now. He’d accepted that role voluntarily. It only made sense.
At the green-gold-purple splotched door of Bliss’s apartment on the first floor, Wyte signaled his intent. The door didn’t look that strong. Wyte would batter it down. Finch would storm through behind him.
A strange mewling whine came from inside. Just strange enough to make Finch shiver.
Finch mimed, Wait.
Took out his handkerchief, turned the knob.
The door opened.
Wyte was through before Finch could stop him, yelling, “Detectives! Hands up! Weapons down!”
Finch followed. Heart like a hammer. Gun squirting out a little between his hands in his hard double grip.
The first four rooms: empty, trashed. Someone had destroyed or ransacked everything. Tables, couches overturned. Books shredded. Torn pages everywhere. A smell of shit or rot or both. And blood. Lots of blood. Sprayed. Pooling. But no bodies. From the looks of the furniture, the arrangement had always been meant to be temporary. Or at least, it was now.
In the back bedroom they found the source of the mewling.
“Oh fuck,” said Finch.
“Is that him?” Wyte asked.
“Yes.”
Ethan Bliss had been nailed alive against the far wall, above a bed. His face was crusted with blood. White shirt red. Blood welling from his punctured extremities. His hands and feet still twitching as he tried to pull free of the green nails that looked like hard mushrooms. Whimpering and looking down at them through eyes crusted by something purple and brittle.
The eyes through the crust registered Finch, Wyte. A bright red mushroom had been rammed into his mouth. But he’d managed to get most of it out.
In a muffled roar: “Don’t just stand there like a couple of fucking idiots. Get me down!”
Bliss began to weep.
* * *
Finch held Bliss while Wyte worked at the hands and feet. Too close. Sweat. Funk. Some underlying sweetness that was worse. For a sixty-year-old man, Bliss was wiry and muscular. Odd. To be here with someone who had been so well-known. Nailed to a wall. Blood all over the place. Would’ve been a scandal before the Rising. Now it was just another day on the job.
It took ten minutes to get him down. They tried to wipe the crust from his eyes. Managed to smear his face with green residue from his wounds. Looked like pollen dusted over the blood.
Wyte muttered, “Should we take him back to the station?”
Finch shook his head. “No. Let’s do it here.”
They took him to the couch in the living room. Pulled the couch upright. Wyte pushed the glass off it using his sleeve. Finch found towels in the kitchen, brought them back and offered them to Bliss.
Bliss angrily waved Finch off.
“No, not yet,” he said.
“For Truff’s sake, aren’t you glad to be alive?” Wyte said.
Finch gave Wyte a hard look. “He’s probably in shock.”
“Shock’s overrated,” Bliss said. “Hand me that red mushroom. The one they stuffed in my mouth.”
It had fallen onto the bed. Finch went back and got it. Wondering if Bliss would recognize him. Probably not. Finch had changed his appearance completely, and Bliss had last seen him about twenty years ago.
Bliss smeared the remains of the fungus, soft cheese consistency, all over his hands and feet. Glistening. Already he had stopped bleeding.
“Now the towels,” he said, taking them from Finch. He glared at Wyte, then Finch. “Who are you anyway? How did you find me? What do you want?” Even in anger, he had a youthful face. One of those faces that got more rigid as it aged. But you could still see the boyish features under the wrinkles. Under the neatly trimmed mustache.
Finch stood in front of Bliss. Wyte to the side, tapping his foot. Restless. Disturbed by something.
“I’m Finch. This is Wyte.” Finch showed Bliss his badge. “You don’t look happy. Should we put you back up there?”
“I wasn’t dying,” Bliss snapped. “Someone would have come along.” Emphasis on someone made Finch think Bliss knew exactly who.
Bliss at the old desert fortress, turning slowly at his approach. A sound of metal locking into place. A kind of mirror. An eye. Then a circle of stone, a door, covered with gray cap symbols.
“Who did this, Bliss?” Wyte asked, kicking a broken chair out of the way. “Whose blood is all over the floor? Who’d you piss off?”
Bliss appeared not to hear this question. He stared instead at Finch. Measuring him. Like a light had clicked on behind his eyes. That weathered face had hardened remarkably, even as it managed a good imitation of a smile. Said to Finch, “You look familiar to me, Detective. Do I know you? You obviously know me.”
Wyte barged in, to Finch’s relief: “Shut up. We’re asking the questions.”
Bliss registered Wyte as if for the first time. Said in a smooth voice that drove in the barb. “Why don’t you find who did that to you, instead of wasting your time with me?”
“I said, shut up!” Wyte slapped Bliss across the cheek. Hard.
Finch had never seen Wyte hit a suspect who hadn’t tried to hit him first.
Bliss took it quietly. Cursed. Put a hand to the mark. Like it had happened before. Or like pain was just an inconvenience to him. “What do you think happened, Detective? They surprised us, lit us up, and didn’t leave much behind. Ten of my best men.”
Finch, supporting Wyte: “Answer the question, Bliss. Who did this to you?”
An exasperated sigh that seemed to signal a decision.
“A new man, from the Spit. He asked a lot of questions about gray caps. About the towers.”
“What’s his name?”
“He kept telling it to me over and over so I wouldn’t forget. Even while they butchered my men. Stark.”
“Just Stark? What’s his full name?”
Wyte broke in. “I know about Stark. He’s only been here eight weeks. He’s from Stockton. New blood. He’s been liquidating the opposition the past few weeks.” Wyte was the station’s Stockton expert. Ran a few snitches in that organization.
“And we’ve been letting him?”
Wyte shrugged. “Makes our job easier, doesn’t it?”
Finch gave him a look that said we’ll talk more about this later. Found it odd that Wyte knew something he didn’t.
He turned to Bliss. “Why the hell did he leave you alive?”
Bliss shrugged. “Maybe he wanted to send a message.”
I don’t believe you.
“What kind of message? To who?” Wyte asked.
Silence.
“Take a guess about what he wanted, Bliss,” Finch said.
“Part of what he wanted to do was to hurt me. He enjoyed that a little too much. I think he would have done it even if he hadn’t wanted information.”
“Anyone with him?”
“Just his god-awful muscle. His second-in-command goes by the name of Bosun, like on a ship. He’s built like a kind of wiry circus strongman with a bullet-bald head. Once you see him, you recognize him forever. He’s the one who lifted me to the wall with one hand and drove the nails in with the other while Stark watched. All this before they asked me any questions.”