CHAPTER
44
Return to the Goody Too
Bero thought about the tunnel beneath the Goody Too. He thought about it a lot, and whenever he thought about it, he was filled with bitter rage. Janloon was at war over the death of Kaul Lan—his doing!—and there was jade being won and lost on the streets every day, but Bero was nowhere nearer to a single pebble of it for himself. Instead, he’d been forced to flee and hide, like a roach before a bright light.
He hadn’t fled far. After stumbling through the darkness for what felt like an eternity, wondering with each step when his flashlight batteries would run out and leave him to wander blind until he collapsed and died, Bero had felt a breeze on his face. A faint air current pungent with the smell of the harbor— sea salt and boat fumes, fish and wet garbage. The breeze preceded a distant circle of evening light, which Bero ran toward as if running toward his own dead mother. As Mudt had promised, the tunnel let out under an escarpment near the wharfs of Summer Park. In heavy spring rains or a summer typhoon, the tunnel would flood, but in the dry winter season it was an excellent smugglers passage. Dirty and exhausted, Bero paid for passage on a small private ferry, but he did not take Mudt’s advice to flee far from Janloon.
For weeks, he’d laid low on Little Button. The island was only forty-five minutes away by ferry boat, and it wasn’t officially part of Janloon, though on a clear day Bero could see the city from across the strait. Little Button was its own municipality. For centuries, there’d been a Deitist monastery here,
before the Shotarians had turned it into a labor camp, and now it was a touristy sort of place with a restored Deitist temple, a nature preserve, and a quaint town full of little shops selling overpriced knickknacks and handmade items. Bero hated it.
It was, however, a good place to not be recognized. Full of Janloon day- trippers and foreign visitors, it was easy enough to get a motel room and nurse the injuries to his body and his pride in glum solitude, watching television, eating takeout food, and plotting his return to the city. Little Button was run by a minor family clan that was a tributary of the Mountain, but from what Bero gathered, it was largely left alone by the Janloon clans.
Just to be safe, he moved to a new motel every week, so no one would start noticing him.
From the news, Bero knew that the city was a patchwork of street violence and there were parts of Janloon where it wasn’t clear which clan was in charge, if any. The Mountain had taken a good chunk of the Docks, but No Peak still held the Armpit and had conquered much of Sogen. Fishtown was anyone’s guess. Bero had been gone for more than a month. In all this chaos, surely no one was still looking for him. On a clear morning, he went down to the marina and took the ferry back across the strait.
Bero blamed Mudt and the goateed Green Bone for his situation. They’d set him up. They’d promised him jade and then reneged on him. They’d never intended to bring him in. The more Bero thought about it, the angrier he grew. Also, he thought about the tunnel under Mudt’s store and the hidden boxes he’d been too hurried and panicked to inspect or steal. Again, he kicked himself. All his misfortunes came from haste. What was in those boxes?
He knew where to get the jade that was rightfully his: from Mudt himself.
He didn’t have the Fullerton anymore, which was a shame, but he had plenty of money, and although civilian ownership of handguns was technically illegal in Janloon, conditions of disorder in a clan war ensured that the street sale of them was common. It took Bero one afternoon in the Mountain- controlled side of the Docks to get his hands on a decent revolver. His plan was to hold Mudt’s son hostage at gunpoint until Mudt paid with his jade. If that didn’t work, he would kill Mudt and take the jade.
An unexpected sight met his eyes when he got to the Goody Too that evening. The store was dark and the building was boarded up. The store’s
large banner had been torn down, and there was no sign of anyone in or around the place. Bero wandered up to the window suspiciously and peered through. It was a mess inside. The place had been ransacked. Shelves were empty and fixtures were tipped over. Most of the merchandise was gone, but what remained was scattered on the ground and already picked through— useless stuff like old magazines and sun hats.
Bero kicked the front door and jiggled the padlock angrily. He looked around. The street was empty. This part of town was so close to the border between Junko and Spearpoint that apparently no one in their right mind wanted to be loitering in it. He pounded the sidewalk-facing windows, which shook in their frames. A homeless man on the corner, the only other person in sight on what was typically a busy intersection, called out, “Haven’t you heard? Mudt’s dead, keke!”
Bero turned around. “Dead? Who killed him?”
The man grinned a toothless grin from under his blankets. He shrugged and giggled. “He did! Walking around with jade, you’re killing yourself!”
Bero found a heavy rock and broke one of the Goody Too’s windows. It made a gods-awful amount of racket, but there was no one but the hobo nearby to take notice. As Bero kicked in the glass and climbed gingerly into the ruined store, he was fuming with a peculiar mixture of disappointment and hope. So Mudt was gone, and his jade with him. Someone had beaten Bero to it. That was just to be expected, wasn’t it? Always, something would happen; fate would shine on him, it would dangle what he desired, then it would snatch it away. Lucky and unlucky, that was him. And now, maybe bad luck would turn to good again. Maybe. Maybe.
The closet in the back of the store was open. The drawers of the wheeled filing cabinet were open and the contents pulled out and dumped in the mad search for cash and valuables, but the thing itself hadn’t been moved. His heart in his throat, Bero leaned his weight against it and pushed it out of the way. He felt around in the dark to find the break in the carpet. When he rolled it back, he found the trapdoor he’d escaped through five weeks ago.
Bero closed the door of the closet and blocked it with the filing cabinet.
He pulled the chain of the single bulb overhead, flooding the small space with yellowish light. Bero tugged at the metal ring of the trapdoor; it lifted with a heavy scraping sound and a small cloud of dust. Queasy with anticipation, he descended warily down the steps into the tunnel.
It was still there, boxes and crates, untouched by the scavengers who’d torn through the rest of the store. Bero took one of the top boxes and set it on the steps. He cut the packing tape with a pocketknife and gaped at what he’d found.
Then he stared back at the small tower of containers. How had Mudt hoarded all this? Surely it hadn’t all come from the goateed Green Bone, who’d only brought him the one small box that first night Bero had seen him.
Mudt must’ve been a dealer. A grin spread across Bero’s face as he pulled one of the small sealed bottles out of the open carton in front of him.
Shine. A lifetime supply of shine. All of it, now his.
His hands shaking with eagerness, Bero scooped up as many vials as he could fit into his pockets. Then he replaced the half-empty box on top of the others, and with an avaricious backward glance, climbed back out of the tunnel into the store. He dropped the trapdoor into place, rolled the carpet over it, and moved the filing cabinet back to exactly where it had been over the entrance to the secret tunnel. Bero turned out the closet light and stepped back out into the demolished store, his pockets laden and his mind galloping.
This building would probably be taken over by someone else soon. He would have to move his treasure trove to somewhere safe that he could more easily access … A noise behind him and a flashlight beam falling across his shoulders made Bero jump and whirl in the dark. He scrabbled for his revolver and brought it up into the face of a boy, thirteen or fourteen years old. Mudt’s son.
“What are you doing here?” Bero shouted.
“I thought you might be him, coming back for me.” The boy’s voice was high and strained. He held a cheap, folding talon knife in his fist; his knuckles were white on the handle. The flashlight beam stayed on Bero as the two of them stared at each other.
“Who’s coming back for you?” Bero’s finger hugged the trigger of the revolver. He didn’t want this kid telling anyone he was back in the city, or getting the idea that his dead father’s store of shine belonged to him instead of Bero.
The junior Mudt trembled, shaking the weak flashlight beam, but there was wild hatred in his voice as he spat, “Maik. He killed my da. Maik Tar killed my da, and if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to kill him!” Tears
sprang into his eyes.
Bero’s finger was still curled, but now he hesitated. Slowly, he lowered the revolver. “It’s hard to kill a really powerful Green Bone,” he said.
“I don’t care; I’ll do whatever it takes!” Both the flashlight and the talon knife dropped to the teenager’s side and he stood nearly panting, glaring at Bero with flushed cheeks and maddened eyes, as if daring him to say otherwise.
“I’ve done it before,” Bero told him with a thrill of pride. “I’ve killed a Green Bone. No one figured I could do it, but they were wrong, all of them.”
The other teen’s eyes widened with greedy curiosity. Whenever he’d seen the younger Mudt before, Bero had paid him little attention. He’d always seemed obedient and unremarkable. He was skinny and his hair was greasy and his face had a ratlike quality. But he wasn’t as much of a pussy as either Sampa or Cheeky had been.
It wasn’t good to do things alone, Bero decided. Fate was like a tiger encountered on the road; best to divide its attention. When things had gone most wrong for Bero, someone smaller and weaker had always been there to draw the bad luck to themselves.
“I’m not scared of Green Bones,” Bero said. “They’re the ones who are scared of us, you know. They killed your da because they’re afraid of people outside the clan having jade. What we need is some jade of our own, keke.”
“Yeah,” said Mudt fiercely. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“And I know where to get it.”
Mudt’s flashlight beam came back up. “You do?”