CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Rocks.

I had to have a more than sizable assortment of them in my head to be standing here in the dark at the side of the raw country road, waiting for the one person to show up who'd sucked me into this imbroglio to begin with. Brigit.

The bully boy with the patches on his face had shoved me, hard, when I passed him on my way out of Plagiar's suite, and I was down in the street before I thrust my hands deep into my jumpsuit pockets and felt the tiny stiffness in one of them.

I stopped under the nearest crime-light to read the note. On a scrap of paper that looked like a corner torn from a larger sheet, the message was classic.

I must see you. The road behind the Wayfarer's Home. In an hour.

And it was signed, Brigit.

In an hour, in the dark, and from the hand of the bully boy.

Great.

The word taxi was unknown beyond the limits of the town and the spaceport itself, so I'd ridden as far as I could and walked the rest of the way. It could have taken me an hour, I didn't know, my timepiece was still safely sending its signal from inside the safebox at the transhaus.

Rolf Sklar, whoever he was, seemed sure, at least ten thousand credits' worth, that I knew something that I didn't know.

About the corporal and the police there was no doubt. They knew I knew something I didn't know.

And Plagiar. Plagiar hadn't said the words, but he was giving me only the shortest of possible times to make up my mind to tell him what he wanted to know ... and what I didn't know.

In the dark I sighed. All I needed now was for Brigit to hit me with the same line, when she showed up.

If she showed up.

She showed up.

And I got it.

It was dark, but all the same I stared in the direction of her voice.

"You can't mean it," I said. "If anybody should know that I don't even know what they're talking about, it should be you. You picked me out of the air to begin with." I couldn't make out more than the simple feel of her presence in Poldrogi's moonless blackness, but the shrug was plain enough in her off-world-accented voice.

"I did not exactly pick you out of the air, as you say. Your name and your ..." she fumbled for a word, "... your place of staying were given to me."

She had come looking for me, armed with my name and location? But who could know I was on Poldrogi, who could even care? There had to be other Pikes ... it was a big galaxy. Some of them named Eli, and some of them even photographers. It had to be a mistake.

I told Brigit so.

She did not contradict me, but from her voice it was plain that she did not believe me any more than did the others. It was also plain that here was a girl who thought she'd snagged a fish, thrown it back, and then discovered that what she'd taken to be a minnow was really a fat catfish. A fat catfish.

Me.

She was out to get her hook into me again and her way was one that had worked for centuries ... and would keep on working for centuries to come.

But not tonight.

Not with me.

Not with the things that I had pressing me, no matter how warm the dark night, no matter how great the lure of her scent and the feel of her against me.

I had other things to think about and I didn't need the scar on the top of my head to keep me in mind of them. Lord, but was it itching. And for once I was going to pay it some mind.

I disentangled her arms from around me ... at least I tried to.

"There is money," she was saying against my chest. "More money than you or I can imagine ... can ever dream about. There is power . . . there is everything . . . everything. . . ." I spoke into her hair. "Why me?" I said. "Why did you come to me?"

I felt her shrug. "It was as I told Anton. It was best that you be where we could see you, except..."

"Except what?"

"Except that I did not know when he told me where to find you that Sklar meant for you to die. You must believe me. You must."

And if her arms around me could have matched in their strength, the sincerity of her voice, I would have had a few bruises.

"You must believe I did not know he meant for you to die. I warned you. I tried to warn you when I saw. You must remember that."

I remembered. I remembered her waving on the rim of my vision just as I pressed my camera release and the masher beam whirred past my head.

I remembered her waving, but I'd have to take her word for it that she meant it to be a warning.

"Sklar gave you my name ... and tried to kill me? So why did he offer me all that money in the gasthaus? Try to shut me up and then offer me all his cash to talk?"

"He did not know then that Kval was dead, and afterward

... there was only you to go to."

If Sklar did not know that Kval was dead when he took his shot at me then he could not have been the one who killed him. But if Brigit was lying and it hadn't been Sklar sniping, then he could be the killer.

In that case, who'd taken the shot at me ... and why kill one of the only two men whom you think have information worth . . . what had Brigit said? Money . . . power . . . everything?

Or maybe with two possible sources in mind, whoever'd put the question to Kval hadn't been too careful with him. That left, if the killer thought like Brigit, only me to go to. Me ... to keep alive ... and she was trying her damnedest to weasel the information out of me.

"Tell me," she was repeating over and over ... in different ways, but it all added up to the same thing. "Tell me where you have hidden the boy and I will go on from there. You will see. Trust me."

I'll bet you would, baby ... and not hardly.

"Who is the boy?" I asked.

I felt her pull back, perhaps in surprise. "You do not know?"

From what she'd said it would appear that Kval and I were in this together. I took the chance.

"Kval did not tell me," I said. "Why should he?" I could sense her chewing on that one.

"It is possible," she finally said, and from her voice, she was talking to herself as well as to me. And then, more strongly, and I felt the sudden tensing of her body disappear and she was close to me again. "It is not only possible, but necessary. Kval would have been a fool to tell his accomplice the value of the boy. It is too much ... too much to tempt a man with. No, it was necessary that he lead you to think it was no more than an ordinary act to work with him."

"You will tell me?" I asked, and I held my breath.

"Yes," she said. "After we have gone to where he is." I let go my breath. If I was standing up well to her personal brand of temptation, she wasn't about to try me with another kind.

I laughed. "Can you trust me to give you the right boy? Do you know him?"

"Sklar knows him, of course, and Anton has his birth records, childhood pictures, things of that sort ... and the fingerprints from his school records ... and then of course there's the one big test. You saw that."

"Yes," I said. "The one big test." The one big test? I saw it?

There was a silence between us and I think both of us knew that we'd gone about as far in our exchange as each of us could get the other to go.

She may not have gotten all that she'd arranged the meeting for, but she was sure, I felt, that she'd made her impression on me and that all I needed was a little tune to work up a hankering.

And I'd added to my store of things to keep me worried.

"Another time," she said in my ear, and she may have brushed her lips against my cheek in the dark, I couldn't tell from the feel of it. It could just as well have been the touch of a trailing spider tendril or the wind of a night thing passing.

She was gone, along the road from the sound of it. I heard her stumble and give a small gasp, and then the roar of her skimmer stoking up and taking off in the direction of the town.

I shrugged. I might have asked her for a lift to at least the edge of the transportation area if I'd thought of it ... if she hadn't gone so quickly.

I settled myself for the long walk ahead of me. I needn't have.

I walked only a few steps in the blackness and I found out what it was that had made Brigit stumble, made her gasp. I stumbled over it too.

I fumbled in my sleeve pocket for my record camera. Its flash unit was the only light I had with me, but the splitsecond bursts would be enough. I knew what I'd stumbled over.

I had to know who.