City of Night

glass, uncountable plastic items from bleach bottles to broken toys, drifts of moldering landscape trimmings—palm fronds, free limbs, grass—full trash bags knotted at their necks…
    He saw a doll with tangled legs and a cracked brow. Pretending that beneath his foot lay a real child of the Old Race, Nick stomped until he shattered the smiling face.
    Turning slowly 360 degrees, he studied the debris more closely.
    He sniffed, sniffed, using his genetically enhanced sense of smell to seek a clue as to what might have caused the unusual rolling movement in this sea of trash. Methane escaped the depths of the pit, but that scent seemed no more intense than usual.
    Rats. He smelled rats nearby. In a dump, this was no more surprising than catching a whiff of garbage. The musky scent of rodents pervaded the entire fenced grounds of Crosswoods Waste Management.
    He detected clusters of those whiskered individuals all around him, but he could not smell a pack so large that, swarming through a burrow, it would be capable of destabilizing the surface of the trash field.
    Nick roamed the immediate area, looking, sniffing, and then squatted—rubber boots squeaking—and waited. Motionless. Listening. Breathing quietly but deeply.
    The sounds of the unloading semis at the east pit gradually receded, as did the distant growl of the garbage galleons.
    As if to assist him, the air hung heavy and still. There was no breeze to whisper distractingly in his ears. The brutal sun seared silence into the day.
    At times like this, the sweet reek of the pit could convey him into something like a Zen state of relaxed yet intense observation.
    He lost track of time, became so blissed-out that he didn’t know how many minutes passed until he heard the voice, and he could not be certain that it hadn’t spoken several times before he registered it.
    “ Father? ”
    Soft, tremulous, in an indefinite timbre, the one word question could have been posed by either a male or a female.
    Dog-nose Nick waited, sniffed.
    “ Father, Father, Father…? ”
    This time the question seemed to come simultaneously from four or five individuals, male and female.
    When he surveyed the trash field, Nick found that he remained alone. How such a thing could be possible, he did not know, but the voices must have spoken out of the compacted refuse beneath him, rising through crevices from… From where?
    “ Why, Father, why, why, why…? ”
    The lost and beseeching tone suggested intractable misery, and resonated with Nick’s own repressed despair.
    “Who are you?” he asked.
    He received no reply.
    “ What are you?”
    A tremor passed through the trash field. Brief. Subtle. The surface did not swell and roll as before.
    Nick sensed the mysterious presence withdrawing.
    Rising to his feet, he said, “What do you want?”
    The searing sun. The still air. The stink.
    Nick Frigg stood alone, the slough of trash once more firm beneath his feet.
     
     
     

Chapter 17
     
    At a bush with huge pink-yellow-white roses, Aubrey Picou snipped a bloom for Carson, and stripped the thorns from the stem.
    “This variety is called French Perfume. Its exceptional mix of colors makes it the most feminine rose in my garden.”
    Michael was amused to see Carson handle the flower so awkwardly even though it had no thorns. She was not a frills-and-roses kind of girl. She was a blue-jeans-and-guns kind of girl.
    In spite of his innocent face and floppy straw hat, the master of this garden seemed as out of place among the roses as did Carson.
    During decades of criminal activity, Aubrey Picou never killed a man, never wounded one. He never robbed or raped, or extorted anyone. He had merely made it possible for other criminals to do those things more easily and efficiently.
    His document shop had produced forged papers of the highest quality: passports, birth certificates, driver’s licenses… He’d sold thousands of black-market guns.
    When individuals with a talent for strategy and tactics came to Aubrey with plans for an armored-car heist or with a scheme to knock over a diamond wholesaler, he provided the risk capital to prepare and execute the operation.
    His father, Maurice, had been an attorney who specialized in massaging juries into awarding outrageous financial compensation to questionable clients in dubious personal-injury cases. Some in his profession admiringly called him Maurice the Milkman because of his ability to squeeze buckets of profits out of juries as