Turner comes back really fast, which is probably because the computer techs handed him a print-out of names and he doesn’t know how to read, and he wants us to help. He hands over the paper and waits expectantly for us to pat him on the head. Ping rolls up the window on his face, ignoring him completely. It takes him a minute or two to get the message and leave.
“Seamus has no friends at all,” she says, reading the very brief report.
“If you’d met him, it would make perfect sense,” I say.
“The only one on this page that looks even remotely good is Guster Boilon. Grand theft auto. But apparently not very good at it. He’s been caught five times in a year.”
“Well, he doesn’t need to steal a car to drive it in a jewel heist. All he has to do is step on the accelerator. Even you can do that kinda thing. With stilts, of course.”
“We’ve got an address on Boilon,” says Ping. “Let’s go see what we can shake free.”
She starts up the car and pulls away from the curb, and a second later her phone rings. She reaches for it, but I’m faster. I answer in a slow southern drawl.
“Ping’s phone, y’all.”
“Hey, it’s Jackson,” says Jackson.
“Ewok,” I seethe.
“Need to talk to Jei,” he says. “Put her on.”
“Fat fucking chance,” I say. “You and I need to talk. Why the fuck do you do what she asks this fast, but when I — your bestest friend in the whole fucking world, you fucking retarded bear — when I ask you for something, you put it off forever!”
He pauses.
“She pays me.”
“I fucking put a roof over your head!”
“I work from home, dude.”
Ping slaps the phone from my hand and puts it on speaker.
“Jackson,” she says, “sorry about that. Have you heard back from Monitor City yet?”
“Not yet,” he sighs. “Any second now.”
“Then let’s get you off the phone,” she says in a voice that sounds very compassionate. Gives me shivers. “What did you find out about the heist?”
“Well,” says Jackson happily. “There was no heist, for one.”
The car stops suddenly, and my face hits the dash.
“What?” yells Ping.
“Well, first I hacked into Cross Street’s servers, tried to see what they had on record. Nada, but I figure they would have erased all hints of it to avoid it getting out, right?
“So then I go through all the video feeds in the vicinity. Back a few weeks. Again, nada. No hijacking, no nothing. So then I think… maybe the trucks are getting hijacked somewhere further afield, so I track all the shipments to their destinations… and again, nada.”
“So wait,” says Ping. “You’re saying the Lemming isn’t stolen?”
I can hear Jackson’s body hair scraping against the phone as he shrugs. Horrendous.
“If it’s stolen,” he says, “it’s stolen from someplace other than a truck. That’s all I know.”
“Great,” says Ping with more kindness than Jackson deserves, the fucking useless hairball. “Thanks.”
She hangs up, puts the car into gear, and starts driving again.
“If none of the trucks were hijacked, it was an inside job,” she says. “That means it can’t be Boilon, because there’s no way Cross Street would hire an ex-con. No way. So the one we’re looking for might not be the driver at all. He might be the brains of the outfit.”
Oh well. I really wanted the brains to be Jimmy, but I have to admit it was pretty far-fetched. I try not to sulk the whole way to Cross Street, but my mood only worsens when Ping is allowed right up to the main security desk without being strip searched like I was. Maybe they don’t know how to check for weapons on people that small.
“I’m looking for information about a jewel you were housing a few weeks ago,” Ping says to the guard, who glares at me knowingly. I blow him a kiss.
“We can’t discuss the contents of our clients’—”
“Cut the crap,” says Ping. “I’m not asking you to give it to me, I just want to know if it was ever here. A big ruby in the shape of a rodent. Sound familiar?”
The guard scowls at her, crosses his arms defiantly. He thinks he’s tough, but that’s just because he’s new to the wonderful world of Ping. I notice he’s barely holding on to his tablet, so reach out and snatch it from his hand, try to log in before he beats me senseless.
Turns out, he has good reflexes.
As I’m lying on the ground, bleeding out of my ears, I catch sight of a spindly guy in a Cross Street jumper, edging out of the building while keeping a careful eye on Ping. I whistle to her, then motion with my broken nose. She looks over, catches the tail end of him bolting, and cracks the guard in the neck with what I can only assume is some kind of karate move. He falls back, and she picks me up and drags me outside.
The spindly man obviously didn’t expect we’d get out so fast, and when he sees us coming after him, he squeals and starts to run. Ping doesn’t even speed up, but she overtakes him, grabs his collar, and throws him face-first into a wall.
“I don’t know nothing!” he cries. “I don’t!”
“Then why’d you run?” Ping asks, twisting his arm around in a way that makes it look more like a tentacle than a human limb.
“I was… I was…”
She pushes harder, and he starts to cry.
“Tell me what you know,” she growls, “or I’ll make you a whole new elbow.”
Some people are such pussies. Me, I’m bleeding out of multiple places — some of which are probably internal — and I can’t see straight anymore… and you don’t see me whining, do you? Verbally, I mean.
“Okay, okay,” he whines. “I don’t know for sure, but… but…”
“But what?” Ping barks, cracking his arm.
“I fudged some records! That’s all! That’s all I did!”
“What kind of records?” she asks.
“Intake forms. Shipping forms. That kinda stuff.”
“For the Lemming?” I ask, getting in on the action. I wish I had an arm to abuse. I feel so left out.
“Nah, man, I don’t know what it’s for! All the records in the place are obfuscated, so nobody knows what’s what!”
“So why’d you run?” Ping says. “What are you afraid of?”
He sniffles, rests his face against the wall. “I knew things were goin’ bad the second you walked in. I never trusted that chick. Not once. I knew she was bad news, and I don’t wanna have my arm broke because of her! It ain’t worth the money!”
Ping pushes his face against the brick.
“What chick?” she asks. “Describe her.”
He starts to hyperventilate, so I kick him in the nuts. It’s bad form, sure, but he has to know we mean business. His knees buckle beneath him, and Ping lets him fall to the ground. She glares at me.
“What the fuck was that?” she snarls.
“Teaching him a lesson!”
“Stop trying to be a detective and let me work!”
“She’s tall,” squeaks the freak. “Skirt, businessy. Black hair. Highlights. White highlights.”
Anzia and I look at each other in disbelief.
“She drives a Lexus. The plate started with A55. I remember because it looked like ‘ass’, and she has a nice one. Heh. Ow.”
Ping looks over at me, pulls me aside.
“What?” she asks. “What is it?”
“That’s the inspector. Ryoma.”
“The inspector. So she’s faking documentation at Cross Street. Buy why?”
“I don’t know. She’s extorting them? I mean, she can use her position in the city to find easy marks, and then milk them for all they’re worth.”
“That’s a pretty good scheme.”
“Thinking of branching out?”
“Shut up.”
Ping looks back to the jerk. He whimpers immediately.
“You said she drove a Lexus?”
He nods urgently.
“Yeah, a silver one.”
Ping looks to me.
“If she has one, ten bucks says it’s still at the Docks. Twenty says the Scarlet Lemming is inside.”
