Flatlander - Larry Niven [133]
I couldn’t think of a thing.
Naomi said, “Mayor, do you see where my finger is now?”
It was on the Return key for the phone keyboard. I saw that much, and then I stepped between Naomi and the gun. Hove didn’t react fast enough to stop me. “You’ll have to shoot through me,” I said. “You’ll never make it”
Naomi said, “One tap of this key and these four faces appear on every phone screen in the city.”
“We can negotiate,” I said quickly, soothingly, I hoped. Hove’s eyes were going desperate. “You tried to kill Chris Penzler for political reasons? Fine, so say we all. You sliced his hand off six days later? Fine. Do you want to tell us how you managed that?”
He’d been about to fire. Perhaps he still was. “When did it happen?” he asked.
“Chris could have died anytime in a five-hour period. You can’t possibly have an alibi. You must have posed as a policeman. The computer would have issued you a police skintight suit and lost the records.”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“And Chris left a dying message that points toward you.”
I saw the intensity setting on the laser start to unwind and saw Hove thumb it back to maximum. Hove said, “Did he? Did he really? That’s very interesting.”
“It points toward you,” I said, “but not directly. Chris was only three feet away when the laser sliced his hand off. He must have seen his killer’s face and his chest symbol, too. Why didn’t he just write TREE or MAYOR? Somebody’s bound to wonder. Of course, if you just turn yourself in, the case is solved.”
Hove seemed lost in thought. Then, “Gil, do you understand what this affair could do to my city?”
“It’s bad now. It could get much worse if things run their course.”
“Yes. God, yes.” He drew himself up and, looking down on us from a great height, said, “Here are my terms. I want an hour to escape. After that you can tell the police all that we’ve discussed. Agreed? Your word of honor?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” Boone said.
Naomi hesitated for several nerve-shattering seconds. Her hand was starting to tremble where she held it poised above the Return key. She said, “Yes.”
“That on the screen goes back into storage.”
“Yes,” Naomi said.
“Open the door,” the mayor said.
The laser was under his coat as he stepped into the hall. Naomi called the door closed. Then she said, “Well?”
I mopped away sweat with a napkin. “My word of honor is good.”
Boone, faintly smiling, was looking at his watch.
“And so say we all,” Naomi said. “The bastard! Where will he go?”
“Someplace where he can’t be questioned,” I said. “He’ll get a puffer and go till he’s out of air, then find a dust pool.”
“You think so?” She looked at the hologram portraits. Four of them. Chris Penzler, and Mayor Hovestraydt Watson, and Alan Watson, and a very tall, elfishly beautiful young woman with long light brown hair. I could guess who she was from the context. Naomi said, “I wonder how she died.”
“You think he killed her? Maybe. It hardly matters now.”
“Right.” Naomi typed rapidly. The screen cleared.
We waited.
13. PENALTIES
We found the guard snoring outside Naomi’s door. Hove had fired a cloud of soluble anesthetic crystals into him from an ARM-issue handgun. It was mine. I’d turned it in on arrival; Hove must have persuaded the computer to release it.
Hove … well, we waited it out, more or less grimly. He had checked out a puffer and gone. We searched the projected moonscape while we could; he probably hid until Watchbird Two set. Jefferson’s police searched old mines and known cave systems. Nothing. He certainly hadn’t reached the Belt Trading Post; the Belters were looking for him, too. Jefferson sent men to search the launch head for the Grimalde mass driver.
Their mistake, I think, was in assuming Hove was desperate to live. Hove’s problem was to hide a puffer and a corpse; his own. My own theory is that he blew them both to bits by exploding the puffer’s fuel and oxygen.
Alan Watson came in late that night, looking used-up. He came back to life when he saw Naomi. They talked seriously for a while, and then she went off under his long