Governor David Tate. Or, as I prefer to think of him, “the fucking asshole pig that I shot in the head for being part of the conspiracy that killed my sister.” He admitted it before he died. Well, before he injected himself with a huge quantity of live Kellis-Amberlee and forced me to shoot him. During the after-investigation, I got asked why I thought he’d decided to pull the classic super-villain rant before he killed himself. I got asked a lot of other questions, too, but that was the one I had an answer for.
“Easy,” I said. “He was a smug fucker who wanted us to know how awesome the world would have been if we’d let him take it over, and he was stalling for time, because he knew that if he managed to inject himself, we’d never find out whom he was working with. He wanted us to think he was the mastermind. It was all him. But it wasn’t. It never could have been.”
They asked me why not.
“Because that asshole was never smart enough to kill my sister.”
They didn’t have any questions after that. What could they have asked? George was dead, Tate was dead, and I’d put the bullets in both of them. Before the Rising, a statement like that would have been an invitation to a murder charge. These days, I’m lucky no one tried to give me a medal. I think Rick probably convinced then-Senator Ryman that even the suggestion would result in me assaulting a federal official, and nobody wanted to deal with that. Although I might have welcomed the distraction.
Speaking of distractions, there was something poking me in the knee. I cracked one eye open and found the pigeon was now industriously pecking at my jeans. “Dude, I’m not a breadcrumb vending machine.” It kept pecking. “Has Becks been putting steroids in your birdseed or something? Because don’t think I don’t know she’s been feeding you. I found the receipt from the last time she hit the pet store.”
“Since I haven’t made any attempts to hide it from you, it would be a little bit upsetting if you didn’t know,” said Becks, from about three feet behind me. “As it is, you noticed the receipt and not the twenty-pound bags of birdseed in the office coat closet. That doesn’t say much about your powers of observation.”
“But it says a lot about my attention to detail.” I twisted around to face her, sending the pigeon fluttering off to find a safer place to perch. “Is there a reason the sanctity of the roof has been violated?”
Becks crossed her arms across her chest in a gesture that was only semidefensive. I don’t know why she looks at me that way. I’ve never hit her. Dave a few times, and I broke Alaric’s nose once, but never her. “Dave says you’ve been up here for three hours.”
I blinked. “I have?”
I thought you needed the sleep, George said.
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered. You’d think having my dead sister living inside my head might have some helpful side effects, like, say, insomnia, but no such luck. I get all the negatives of being insane, with none of the bonuses.
“You have,” said Becks, with a small nod. “We’ve been going oway. Ithe footage. We got some great shots, especially from the sequence where Alaric was holding the crowbar. Before everything got bad, I mean.”
“You checked your license allowances before you let him do that, right?” I asked, levering myself to my feet. My back was stiff enough to confirm that whole “three hours” thing; I’d been sitting in one position for way too long.
“Of course,” she said, sounding affronted. “As long as I stayed within five feet and he was in no immediate nonconsensual danger, I was totally within my legal rights as a journalism teacher. What do you think I am, some sort of field newbie?” She sounded even more offended than the question would justify, because there was another question underneath it: When did you stop being any fun? Becks hired on as a Newsie under George and switched to my department almost before the ink on her contract was dry. She’s one of nature’s born Irwins, and she and I worked together really well. That’s why I gave her my department when I stepped down. And that’s probably also why she seems to really believe, deep down, that all she needs to do is find me a stick and a hole to poke it into and I’ll be fine.
It’s really a pity that I don’t think it’s ever going to work that way for me. Because damn, it would be nice.
“I don’t think you’re a field newbie, Becks, I just think there are some people who’d love to have an excuse to slap us with more violation charges. I mean, how much did we pay to get those ‘standing too close to a goat’ charges off Mahir’s record? And he’s in England. They still like goats over there.”
“All right, fair enough,” she admitted. “But still, Alaric did really well out there today. I think he’s almost ready for his exams.”
“Well, good.”
“He just needs a senior Irwin to sign off on him.”
“So sign.”
“Shaun—”
“Was that the only reason you came up here to poke at me? Because it doesn’t seem like enough.”