Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 by Gardner Dozois Read Free Book Online Page A

his side had just lost. He had drawn a knife—a glittering chromed single-edged thing that may have already killed once today—and now he took a dangerous step toward Terzian.
    Terzian pointed the pistol straight at the knife man and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
    The intruder stared at the gun as if he’d just realized at just this moment it wasn’t his partner who held it.
    Terzian pulled the trigger again, and when nothing happened his rage melted into terror and he ran. Behind him he heard the drunken knife man trip over his partner and crash to the floor.
    Terzian was at the bottom of the stair before he heard the thick-soled military boots clatter on the risers above him. He dashed through the small lobby—he sensed the Vietnamese night clerk, who was facing away, begin to turn toward him just as he pushed open the glass door and ran into the street.
    He kept running. At some point he discovered the gun still in his fist, and he put it in the pocket of his windbreaker.
    Some moments later, he realized that he wasn’t being pursued. And he remembered that Stephanie’s passport was still in her duffel, which he’d thrown at the knife man and hadn’t retrieved.
    For a moment, rage ran through him, and he thought about taking out the gun and fixing whatever was wrong with it and going back to Stephanie’s room and getting the documents one way or another.
    But then the anger faded enough for him to see what a foolish course that would be, and he returned to his own hotel.

    Terzian had given Stephanie his key, so he knocked on his own door before realizing she was very unlikely to open to a random knock. “It’s Jonathan,” he said. “It didn’t work out.”
    She snatched the door open from the inside. Her face was taut with anxiety. She held pages in her hand, the text of the paper he’d delivered that morning.
    “Sorry,” he said. “They were there, outside the hotel. I got into your room, but—”
    She took his arm and almost yanked him into the room, then shut the door behind him. “Did they follow you?” she demanded.
    “No. They didn’t chase me. Maybe they thought I’d figure out how to work the gun.” He took the pistol out of his pocket and showed it to her. “I can’t believe how stupid I was—”
    “Where did you get that? Where did you get that?” Her voice was nearly a scream, and she shrank away from him, her eyes wide. Her fist crumpled papers over her heart. To his astonishment, he realized that she was afraid of him, that she thought he was connected somehow, with the killers.
    He threw the pistol onto the bed and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “No really!” he shouted over her cries. “It’s not mine! I took it from one of them!”
    Stephanie took a deep gasp of air. Her eyes were still wild. “Who the hell are you, then?” she said. “James Bond?”
    He gave a disgusted laugh. “James Bond would have known how to shoot.”
    “I was reading your—your article.” She held out the pages toward him. “I was thinking, my God, I was thinking, what have I got this poor guy into. Some professor I was sending to his death.” She passed a hand over her forehead. “They probably bugged my room. They would have known right away that someone was in it.”
    “They were drunk,” Terzian said. “Maybe they’ve been drinking all day. Those assholes really pissed me off.”
    He sat on the bed and picked up the pistol. It was small and blue steel and surprisingly heavy. In the years since he’d last shot a gun, he had forgotten that purposefulness, the way a firearm was designed for a single, clear function. He found the safety where it had been all along, near his right thumb, and flicked it off and then on again.
    “There,” he said. “That’s what I should have done.”
    Waves of anger shivered through his limbs at the touch of the adrenaline still pouring into his system. A bitter impulse to laugh again rose in him, and he tried to suppress