Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 by Gardner Dozois Read Free Book Online

shaving kit—and then he took Stephanie’s key from his pocket and held it in his hand. The key was simple, attached to a weighted doorknob-shaped ceramic plug.
    The jolt of fear and surprise that had so staggered him on first sighting the two men began to shift again into rage.
    They were drinking beer, there had been half-empty mugs on the table in front of them, and a pair of empties as well.
    Drinking on duty. Doing surveillance while drunk.
    Bastards. Trashcanians. They could kill someone simply through drunkenness.
    Perhaps they already had.
    He was angry when he left his room and took the stairs to the floor below. No foes kept watch in the hall. He opened Stephanie’s room and then closed the door behind him.
    He didn’t turn on the light. The sun was surprisingly high in the sky for the hour: he had noticed that the sun seemed to set later here than it did at home. Maybe France was very far to the west for its time zone.
    Stephanie didn’t have a suitcase, just a kind of nylon duffel, a larger version of the athletic bag she already carried. He took it from the little closet, and enough of Terzian’s suspicion remained so that he checked the luggage tag to make certain the name was Steph. Pais, and not another.
    He opened the duffel, then got her passport and travel documents from the bedside table and tossed them in. He added a jacket and a sweater from the closet, then packed her toothbrush and shaver into her plastic travel bag and put it in the duffel.
    The plan was for him to return to his room on the upper floor and stay the night and avoid raising suspicion by leaving a hotel he’d just checked into. In the morning, carrying two bags, he’d check out and rejoin Stephanie in his own hotel, where she had spent the night in his room, and where the air would by now almost certainly reek with her cigarette smoke.
    Terzian opened a dresser drawer and scooped out a double handful of Stephanie’s T-shirts, underwear, and stockings, and then he remembered that the last time he’d done this was when he cleaned Claire’s belongings out of the Esplanade house.
    Shit. Fuck. He gazed down at the clothing between his hands and let the fury rage like a tempest in his skull.
    And then, in the angry silence, he heard a creak in the corridor, and then a stumbling thud.
    Thick rubber military soles, he thought. With drunk baboons in them.
    Instinct shrieked at him not to be trapped in this room, this dead-end where he could be trapped and killed. He dropped Stephanie’s clothes back into the drawer and stepped to the bed and picked up the duffel in one hand. Another step took him to the door, which he opened with one hand while using the other to fling the duffel into the surprised face of the drunken murderer on the other side.
    Terzian hadn’t been at his Kenpo school in six years, not since he’d left Kansas City, but certain reflexes don’t go away after they’ve been drilled into a person thousands of times—certainly not the front kick that hooked upward under the intruder’s breastbone and drove him breathless into the corridor wall opposite.
    A primitive element of his mind rejoiced in the fact that he was bigger than these guys. He could really knock them around.
    The second Trashcanian tried to draw a pistol, but Terzian passed outside the pistol hand and drove the point of an elbow into the man’s face. Terzian then grabbed the automatic with both hands, took a further step down the corridor, and spun around, which swung the man around Terzian’s hip a full two hundred and seventy degrees and drove him head first into the corridor wall. When he’d finished falling and opened his eyes he was staring into the barrel of his own gun.
    Red rage gave a fangs-bared roar of animal triumph inside Terzian’s skull. Perhaps his tongue echoed it. It was all he could do to stop himself from pulling the trigger.
    Get Death working for him for a change. Why not?
    Except that the first man hadn’t realized that