THE CASE OF THE VANISHING BOY: A SPADE/PALADIN CONUNDRUM

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Day two of FleshCon and Con Ops already smelled like sweaty feet, stale potato chips, and rancid Coke. I expected it. By day two of a science fiction convention, the folks in Convention Operations had already been working 24/7 for five days straight. We might not have moved our headquarters to the hotel until the day before the convention began, but by then we were already exhausted, cranky, and surviving on too little sleep.

FleshCon isn’t as lurid as it sounds. Hosted in a Hilton-wannabe on the outskirts of Lake Tahoe, FleshCon was originally called CannibalCon in honor of the Donner Party. It was designed as a straight science fiction convention, with a masquerade, a literary track, a media track, and an entire wing set aside for gaming.

But the organizers of CannibalCon learned a sad truth about names: No one wanted to come to a convention that celebrated chowing down on human flesh.

FleshCon, on the other hand, sounded like a porn convention. And even though parents balked at sending their kids unchaperoned, the con’s new name had the rather fortuitous effect of bringing in new attendees. Once they’d paid their money and gotten their badges, they usually stayed for at least one programming item and one long tour of the dealer’s room.

Some even came back for the rest of the convention.

I thought that a great victory, but I’m a great promoter of science fiction conventions. I spend my weekends running conventions all over the country. I am, in fannish lingo, a SMoF—a Secret Master of Fandom.

Fandom is, by definition, made up of the people who attend science fiction conventions. Or if your definition is wider (like mine is), fandom is composed of the people who read science fiction and fantasy novels, or watch science fiction and fantasy movies, or play science fiction and fantasy games. In other words, most of America belongs to fandom—they just don’t know it yet.

My job is to convince them to join our little club. Sometimes I do that through public speaking, and sometimes it’s through my convention work.

I can do all of this because once upon a time, I took an offer that the great Bill Gates offered the employees of his then-fledgling corporation, Microsoft. He gave us the choice to be paid in full in cash or in part in Microsoft stock. As Microsoft grew from a small Seattle corporation to a global international giant, those of us who took the stock options became rich damn near overnight.

We were Masters of Our Own Destiny. We quit our jobs because our stock interest in Microsoft had vested and we were now worth a lot of money. In the Pacific Northwest, people still call us Microsoft Millionaires.

Now, decades later, a lot of the Microsoft Millionaires have become the Microsoft Poorionaires. But there are still a handful like me, folks who knew how to manage money. I took my Microsoft millions and parlayed them into even more millions.

I’m not worth as much as Paul Allen, Bill Gates’s initial partner in crime (and founder of the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle—making him, yes, you got it, a member of fandom). But I am worth a lot. My goal is to turn my tens of millions into hundreds of millions before I turn sixty five.

But that’s a personal goal, one I don’t talk about often.

Nowadays, I indulge my hobby, flying across the country, helping conventions in trouble get back on track or setting up systems at young conventions like FleshCon, making sure they’ll survive in the Brave New World of the twenty-first century.

Besides, I like being an SMoF. It gives me more pleasure than all of my Microsoft Millions compounded at a twenty percent annual rate. I’ve met all of my favorite authors, most of my favorite television stars, and even a few of my favorite movie stars.

Mostly, though, I spend time with the hardcore fen. We speak the same language—like the word fen, which in fandom is the plural of fan, or the word filking, which is sf’s version of folk singing (with sf lyrics). We’re proud to call ourselves geeks. We provide a safe haven for the strange, the different, and the too-intelligent-for-their-own-good.

I love the haven. I love the conversations. Most of all, I love saving a convention for the future, making sure that it will roll around on the very same weekend in the next year, providing that safe haven year in and year out.

Science fiction fandom saved me from a lifetime of loneliness. It taught me social skills (kinda—the fen are not known for their social aptitude), gave me a place to go besides my imagination when things were really bad at home, and kept me from hiding in my basement.

It was the same kind of outlet provided by the books I read, the same kind of outlet that the good conventions are for kids even now. I want to preserve that.

We all need an escape.

I just choose to live in the heart of mine.

* * * *

So, back to FleshCon 2 and the smell of sweaty feet. By day two, Con Ops looked like a war zone. A stack of hotel chairs near the door had toppled. The fake wood tables near the walls were covered with paper, badges, schedules, programs and the daily con newsletter, as well as every snack known to man. Too many laptops fought for recharge space on too few electrical outlets, and the four big convention computers—still the old PCs with gigantic towers of terror—dominated the tables lining the back wall. Security’s cameras—a new addition since some of the scandalous cons of the late 1990’s—and the ubiquitous walkie-talkies covered another wall.

I always carve my workspace out of the corner between security and data operations. I bring my own Tower of Terror as well as two laptops, since my usual job is convention finance.

Believe it or not, these conventions are multimillion dollar operations. Or to be more precise, some conventions are multimillion dollar operations. If the con isn’t set up right to start, then it implodes under its own weight.

Since most cons are generally held in hotel chains these days, implosions reverberate throughout the country. Stiff one Hyatt-Regency and the entire chain looks askance at any sf con that wants a booking.

I’m the guy who tries to prevent these disasters.

But that’s not my only function.

Since the mid 1990’s, I have acted as in-house detective. I have solved more crimes than the now-retired Gil Grissom on CSI, Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS, and Don Epps on NUMB3RS. I’m not up to Perry Mason’s level, but I’m working on it.

That’s why, at sf cons, people only know me by my nickname.

Spade.

That’s for the real Sam Spade, the one made famous in the movies by Bogie. My Humphrey Bogart imitation would be perfect if you turned out the lights and listened to me speak. Turn them on and you know that the short, hard-smoking, long-faced man of film fame and I have only our voices in common.

I’m six six, nearly four hundred pounds, and smoke free.

I also hadn’t yet found my Lauren Bacall.

Not that I’d been looking. I figured no great beauty would ever flirtatiously teach me to whistle, let alone fall in love with this mug.

Which was why I always looked askance at pretty women. Even pretty women who somehow found their way to a science fiction convention.

* * * *

At the crack of dawn on day two, which at an sf convention is eight a.m., I wandered into Con Ops with my double chocolate espresso and a box of two dozen donuts from the Donut Hut next door. I headed directly for my chair. I had four chairs specially made for my frame, and I always shipped one ahead of each convention.

The other SMoFs called my chair the captain’s chair—a reference to Captain Kirk’s chair in the original Star Trek because he always glared at anyone who used his chair (and damn if I don’t glare at folks who use my chair as well). My chair has more buttons and knobs than the engine room of a Navy destroyer.

Captain’s chair indeed.

I was the first person in Con Ops who arrived to replace the night crew. The night crew looked even more haggard than they had when I left. Three people, two men and a woman, wearing jeans and FleshCon 2 T-shirts (all one size too small), sat in front of the main computer towers. All three leaned their cheeks on one fisted hand while the other hand tapped something on the keyboard in front of them.

“Good morning!” I said as cheerfully as I could. Cheerfulness annoyed most fen, particularly at eight in the morning.

The volunteers jumped at the sound of my voice. One of the men, who’d been introduced to me as Pat From Reno, actually looked frightened.

Then he glanced at my chair.

The women looked down. I set the donuts on the snack table against the wall, but kept a firm grip on my espresso. Then I walked slowly, deliberately, to my chair.

As I did, Pat From Reno said, “She won’t leave.”

A cold chill went down my back. I didn’t see legs dangling from my chair or an elbow hanging over the armrest. But I knew the “she” that Pat From Reno referred to had to be in or near that chair.

I grabbed the thick leather headrest and spun the chair toward me.

“She” was sitting crosslegged in the center of the seat, so small and slender that I initially thought I was looking at a child. Then I realized that no child would grin at me like that, with a mixture of mischief and daring, and just a hint of good old-fashioned sensuality.

She wore capri pants, flat sneakers, and a T-shirt with a Thomas Canty painting of a knight spread over her small but rather delicious breasts.

“That’s my chair,” I said. “No one sits in my chair.”

She shrugged one shoulder, then tucked a strand of her long blonde hair behind her right ear. It was tiny and faintly pointed on its top—what I had once described to a friend of mine as the ideal science fiction fan ear because it could, when wedded with the right masquerade costume, make its owner look like an elf.

She was small enough to be an elf. Her features were delicate enough, except for her luminescent eyes. But I doubted elves wore gold rings on every finger and filigree sword earrings with the hilts curving around the earlobe.

“I’m sitting in your chair, and I’m someone.” Her voice was musical but firm. A soprano with a touch of alto. Someone who knew how to use her vocal richness to charm and beguile. “In fact,” she added, “I slept in your chair. It’s quite large, you know.”

My face warmed. I hadn’t blushed since Keira Knightley at her one and only ComicCon had taken my hand and curtsied in front of me, saying in her delightful British accent, “Such a pleasure to finally meet the famous Spade.”

“She probably confused you with David Spade,” said a friend of mine later.

“Yeah,” I quipped, “because I’m the thin and wiry type.”

“The chair,” I said to the elf, mostly because I was shaken, “is not made for sleeping.”

Her eyes narrowed playfully. “You’re telling me the great Spade has never fallen asleep in his own chair?”

The great Spade had fallen asleep in his own chair many times and awakened later, his face pressed against the keyboard in front of him, the side of his mouth covered with drool.

“The great Spade,” I said, “is cranky without his caffeine and would like to sit down.”

“All you had to do was ask.” She placed her tiny hands on the arm rests and levered herself out, keeping her legs crossed until she had balanced her torso over the ground.

Not many people at science fiction conventions were able to leverage themselves out of a chair, let alone remain crosslegged while they supported themselves with their arms.

She grinned at me, then leaned against the table, her long fingers uncomfortably close to my keyboard.

I sat down heavily and, to my shame, grunted as I did so. The entire chair shook. It didn’t want my weight, not after hers. The leather smelled faintly of jasmine, and I realized that it had to be her scent.

“What makes you think you can sit in my chair?” I asked.

“Sleep in your chair,” she corrected with a grin.

“Be in my chair,” I said, not willing to take her lead. I knew I was sounding grumpy. I was grumpy. I’d learned long ago there was no point in charming pretty women. They all saw me as a tall lurching fat guy who could be a good resource or a great pal, but never ever as the romantic lead.

Of course, I never saw myself as the romantic lead either.

“I liked being in your chair,” she said, and the way she emphasized “being,” she made it clear she was playing off both of its meanings. She liked sitting in my chair and she liked existing in it.

In spite of myself, I was beginning to like her, and not in a great pal kind of way.

“Well,” I said even more grumpily. “You weren’t invited to be in my chair and you’re not part of Con Ops, so you need to leave.”

“No, I don’t,” she said, tapping those rings against the edge of the table. “I came here to talk to you.”

I sipped my espresso. It had too much chocolate and not enough coffee.

“So talk,” I said.

Her fingers stopped tapping. “I’d like to hook up.”

I nearly did a spit-take. Only the idea that I would have sprayed espresso all over her stopped me.

Since I was choking, Pat From Reno spoke for me. “Hook up? With Spade?”

I didn’t need the disbelief in that last word, although I probably would have put more disbelief into it myself.

“Hook up with him on a case,” she said, giving Pat From Reno a cold glare, one that clearly communicated that he was not part of this conversation.

Then she turned back to me, and her eyes became warm again.

She extended her right hand. “Maybe you’ve heard of me. Folks around these parts call me Paladin.”

My breath caught. I had heard of someone named Paladin, but I had always assumed it was a man. In fact, I figured he was some slightly nutty fanboy who had found illegal dupes of Have Gun, Will Travel, the once-popular Western television show from fifty years ago. Richard Boone played Paladin, a jack-of-all trades who offered his services for hire out of some saloon in San Francisco. The show got into some weird copyright troubles and hasn’t been seen on the air since 1974.

And the fact that I can pull such details off the top of my head is why sf fans hire me. I notice and remember detail. I also am a repository for way too much useless information. Which is probably why I am so large.

“Paladin,” I said with all the sarcasm I could muster. “No one ever said Paladin was a girl.”

“People talk about me?” she asked.

Yeah, they did, in those hushed tones folks used when they were impressed or talking about something they didn’t entirely believe in. I knew someone named Paladin existed in the convention circuit. I just never believed the actions attributed to Paladin—taking down an art dealer who was selling fake limited edition prints, finding and capturing (single-handedly) a slippery identity thief who specialized in breaching the best con computer systems, and of course, the most important story to fen, finding a kidnapped Chihuahua (a famous Chihuahua, one that had won many masquerade contests all by its lonesome) and preventing any harm from coming to its very famous doggy self.

“The Paladin?” I asked.

“Well, no. Not really,” she said. “Technically, there is no the Paladin. Even if you go back to the word’s origin, which comes from Charlemagne’s court, you’ll see that there were initially twelve—”

“Peers,” I said. “They were called the Twelve Peers of Charlemagne’s Court. Over time, the word paladin, which literally means an officer of the palace, became tied with the idea of any well-known hero—”

“Or knight errant,” she said. “I prefer the knight errant version myself.”

We were outgeeking each other and we knew it. Wordplay, intellectual one-up-manship, and I-know-more-than-you-do games had been around as long as fandom had. We were speaking the language of our people.

And that, more than her Tom Canty T-shirt, convinced me that she was a member of the fen, which automatically made me more comfortable with her.

She reached into the back pocket of her capri pants and pulled out a business card. Without even looking at it, I knew what it was.

It would say in fine Old West script:

Have Gun, Will Travel

Wire Paladin

San Francisco

Only it didn’t. What it actually said was:

Have Gun, Will Travel

E-mail Paladin@paladinsanfrancisco.com

“So this is the version for the new century,” I said. “What are you? A shill for a revival of the TV show?”

Her cheeks flushed and her eyes glittered. My tone had finally made her mad.

“I work as hard as you do,” she snapped. “Maybe harder, since I don’t have Microsoft millions to keep me happy. I heard you were good. That’s why I’m seeking you out. I need your expertise.”

I took another sip, not even tasting the espresso. I was just hiding behind the giant disposable cup with the Starbucks quote of the day stamped all over its side.

With my free hand, I extended the card to her. “I work Con Ops all over the country. I sit in front of computers all day. It’s work, but it’s fun. You don’t need me. You need someone like me.”

“You solve mysteries,” she said, refusing to take her card back. “I’ve got one I can’t solve on my own. And I thought the great Spade could help me out. Guess I was wrong.”

I should have tossed her card at her. I should have swiveled my chair away from her and told her that I had waaaay too much work to keep FleshCon running, that I had an obligation.

But of course I didn’t.

Because she had used the word “mystery,” and damned if that word didn’t get me every single time.

Particularly when it was spoken by a dame.

* * * *

We needed to go somewhere private, so I walked her to the hotel’s restaurant.

It was one of those sprawling restaurants that covered half of the lobby and one of the few features I liked about this hotel—you could have privacy while eating, yet still see everyone passing by.

As we stepped out of Con Ops, I said to her, “So do you have gun?”

“Of course,” she said. “I will travel too.”

She spoke as if having a gun were normal among the fen. It wasn’t. Fannish weaponry was often real—that was why conventions had a no-weapons policy—but the real weapons were swords of all types, from broadswords to rapiers and knives, usually of a decorative medieval type. Bowie knives were too Wild West for our people, except maybe here in Tahoe, where the West still lingered, not just in the memories of the Donner Party but in the toughness of the locals as well.

“You get a lot of work this way?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“I’m not trying to steal your clientele,” I said. “I’m really more of a Nero Wolfe than a Sam Spade. If work comes to me, I’ll do it, usually from the quiet of my computer terminal.”

“You don’t have orchids?” she asked.

I grinned at her. A few fen read mysteries, but not enough to know the distinction between Wolfe and Spade. That’s how I got my nickname. I actually suggested folks call me Wolfe, but the people around me at the time grinned. They saw someone named Wolfe as a feral tough guy, probably a wiry man with unruly hair. They didn’t realize that of all of mystery’s detectives, the one I most resembled, from my wealth to my hobbies to my girth, was Nero Wolfe.

“I still like Spade, though,” she said. “It’s a rather gloomy pun, especially if you’ve worked on murders.”

I had worked on everything except murders, although the case I’m most renowned for, which happened at the very first Dinocon, initially looked like a murder.

“No murders yet, thank heavens,” I said. “I can’t imagine what one would do to fandom.”

Her lips thinned. She slipped her long fingers through the crook of my arm, sending a chill through me. She did smell faintly of jasmine, and I knew I would associate that scent with this moment for the rest of my life.

As we emerged into the large lobby, I half expected applause. It wasn’t often I walked through the halls of a convention with a beautiful woman at my side. (It wasn’t often that anyone did.)

I got a few thumbs up, one from a hobbit whom I recognized, another from a werewolf whom I did not, and many more from members of the Con Com, recognizable by their Bluetooth headsets and the walkie-talkies clipped to their jeans. Like a proper doofus, I grinned at all of them, and tried hard not to blush.

Paladin and I entered the restaurant. It was set off by a low-level shelf covered with real plants. A waitress led us to a booth near the back, surrounded by tall indoor trees. Unlike Nero Wolfe, the one place I lacked expertise was plants, so I couldn’t identify anything by type. All I knew was that the plants were the normal kind you saw in restaurants, with broad green leaves and thick, well-pruned branches.

We sat. I ordered a Belgian waffle since I left without having my donuts, and she ordered the FleshCon Feast off the special convention menu. I raised an eyebrow at her, deliberately Spocklike.

The FleshCon Feast had everything: waffles, French toast, pancakes, eggs, toast, and three kinds of meat. If she ate all of it, she would consume at least five thousand calories.

I had no idea where she would put them all.

She grinned at my expression. “I have a high metabolism.”

“You want to loan me some of that?” I asked.

“I could,” she said with all seriousness, “but I like you just the way you are.”

That flush returned, like a cough you couldn’t shake. There was a thermal coffeepot on the table. I turned over one of the coffee mugs, poured myself some fresh coffee, added more cream than I usually did, and said, “So which of my expertises do you need? Computers? Convention organizing? Solving minor crimes?”

“I need your logical brain,” she said. “You understand subtleties. I do not.”

I thought about that for a moment. She had named herself after a character who did understand subtleties. But the paladins that she claimed she admired, the knights errant, weren’t subtle men at all. They were chivalrous adventurers, usually out to save the damsel in distress.

“I’m more of a bulldozer,” she said, mistaking my silence for confusion. “I barge in, get the job done, and stomp out. That’s not your reputation at all. You see things that no one else sees.”

That flush deepened. I wondered if she thought that I was normally red faced.

“What do you want me to look at?” I asked.

She slid a photograph at me. It was a picture of a young boy, maybe thirteen, maybe an immature sixteen, skinny, with dark hair and haunted eyes. He wore a Halo T-shirt that had been washed too many times.

There were probably ten kids who looked just like him at this convention alone, not counting the ten kids who looked like him at the twenty other conventions being held across the country this weekend.

“His name is Dyson Emmanuel,” she said. “He’s a runaway. His family has hired me to find him.”

“His family belongs to fandom?” I asked.

“Actually, no. He does. So they think he’s traveling from con to con, surviving on food in the con suites and crashing on the floor in someone’s hotel room.”

Sounded pretty logical. It was a good way for a kid to stay away from home, so long as he had transportation to a convention the following weekend.

“I’ve been tracking him all over the West,” she said. “He bums rides from convention to convention. Sometimes people put him up for the week in between. He claims he’s older than he is.”

“How old is he?” I asked.

“He says he’s eighteen.”

“What does his family say?”

“I never asked,” she said. “They hired me and gave me a lead. I had to run to a small con in Sacramento. I nearly caught him there, but he slipped by me.”

I was still staring at the photograph.

“Looks scrawny for eighteen,” I said.

“I think he looks scrawny for sixteen,” she said. “But he registers as an adult at cons.”

“How does he afford that?” I asked.

“Usually he bums an extra membership off a friend. That’s how I’ve been able to track him so far.” She poured herself some of that coffee. “Plus he’s moving on a rather predictable trajectory. He always goes to the con that’s closest to the previous weekend’s con. I tracked him here, but he’s vanished, as if he knew I was looking for him.”

“I can check the membership roster,” I said.

“He’s on the membership roster,” she said. “A friend paid his fee, but in cash, so I wasn’t able to track down who.”

“We could look at security videos,” I said. “If he eats in the con suite, we can track him. We’ve learned to have a camera in the con suite at all times.”

The con suite was the convention hospitality suite, where the convention itself kept a spread of food and beverages. In some conventions, the con suite had only chips, fresh fruit, and soda. At other conventions, it was a true spread, sometimes purchased and refreshed by the hotel itself, featuring cold cuts, cheeses, sweets, breads—everything except hot food. And I’ve been to some particularly wealthy conventions—usually the large ones in places like Los Angeles and Chicago—where the con suite put out trays of hot food at lunch and dinner, as well as a full continental breakfast in the morning.

“Do you keep an hour-to-hour video record?” she asked.

“We keep footage from the entire convention,” I said.

Vandalism happened at cons—no matter what we did, the con com could never prevent all of it—and sometimes we didn’t find out about it until the hotel told us as we settled the final bill. By keeping video records, we usually caught the culprit, even if he had left the premises two days before.

“Well, that’s a start,” she said. “Normally, I wouldn’t even need it, but this kid seems to have literally vanished.”

“Literally?” I said dryly. Sometimes people weren’t very precise when they were speaking. I felt a little disappointment in her exaggeration. I had thought she was a precise person, even though she had described herself as a bulldozer.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve already checked the hotel security systems, particularly all the footage they have of the various doors. The kid is inside this building. I saw video of his entrance last night. But whenever I close in on him, he’s nowhere to be found.”

“He’s good at hiding, then,” I said.

“I hope so,” she said, “because I could swear I saw him disappear in front of my own eyes.”

“You mean, like, magic?” I asked, snapping my fat fingers.

“I mean, like, magic,” she said, making gently fun of my Valley Girl construction, a part of speech I picked up in the early 1990’s and haven’t been able to rid myself of since.

Then she leaned toward me.

“You have to understand something,” she said softly. “I don’t believe in magic.”

I believed in magic, but only in the kind of magic I felt when she took my arm, the way she looked when she sat crosslegged in my chair. I believed in the kind of magic that made me hope, if only for a second, that a woman like Paladin would have a meal with me because she wanted to instead of because she needed to.

Of course, I said none of that. I hoped none of it showed on my face. I made myself focus—that legendary focus of mine, the focus that brought her to me in the first place—on the kid.

“Why did he run away from home?” I asked. If we knew that, then we might be able to find him.

“The family doesn’t know,” she said. “It’s the standard thing. You know, he’s unhappy, he’s tried it before, things like that.”

“Could they pinpoint a starting point to his changed behavior?”

“Not really.” She shrugged. “I get the sense that they didn’t pay much attention to the kid until he ran away.”

“What about his friends?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find any outside of science fiction,” she said.

“You mean fandom?” I asked.

It was an important distinction. If he had science fiction friends in his hometown—other gamers, other kids he went to movies with, other readers—then we could ask them about his day-to-day activities, and what he really said about leaving home.

If all of his friends were in fandom, then they were scattered all over his local area, if not all over the country. They wouldn’t see him from day to day, and they would only know him by his fannish persona, just like I only knew Paladin as Paladin, not by her birth name.

“I’m sorry,” she said, apparently apologizing for not being specific. “I did mean fandom.”

I sighed heavily. That made things difficult. I couldn’t tell if the difficulties came from her own admitted lack of subtlety—Had she interviewed enough people about the kid?—or if it truly came from a lack of information.

As I pondered that, the food arrived. The waitress set my Belgian waffle down in front of Paladin, and then proceeded to give me the FleshCon Feast. Waitstaff made that kind of mistake all the time. I was the fat guy, so I got the pile of food.

As the waitress was setting down the pile of food, Paladin shoved the Belgian waffle at me, and then grabbed the Feast plates.

“You made a mistake,” she said to the waitress. “I’m the piggy eater at this table.”

I’ve had friends say things like that with a smile, but Paladin wasn’t smiling. She was admonishing the waitress for her faux pas.

The waitress had the grace to look embarrassed. “Sorry,” she said, setting the remaining plates in front of Paladin. “I must have had my ticket mixed up.”

“Doesn’t make it right,” Paladin said, stabbing her egg yolks with her fork. Yellow bled all over that plate.

The waitress hovered, uncertain what to do.

I waved my hand. “It’s okay. It’s a common mistake.”

The waitress fled.

“You were too easy on her,” Paladin said.

“And you were too harsh. Is that your normal interview method?”

“I said I’m a bulldozer,” she said. “You don’t hire me for delicate jobs.”

She was digging into the food like she hadn’t eaten in weeks. The eggs had disappeared while I was trying to deal with the waitress.

I hadn’t even looked at my waffle yet.

“This job sounds like a delicate one,” I said.

“No kidding,” she said.

“Why did you take it?”

She paused in the act of switching the now empty egg plate with the plate of sausage, bacon, and ham. She frowned at me.

“First,” she said, sounding irritated, “I didn’t know it was a delicate case until I was into it. And second, I handle a lot of missing persons. I even work as a bounty hunter occasionally. That’s not a job for a delicate person. Let’s see you corner a felon, handcuff him, and bring him across country sometime.”

I shuddered. The last thing I wanted to do was deal with the underworld. The bits of it that crept into science fiction conventions was too much for me, and those were usually white-collar criminals.

“I wouldn’t have brought you in,” she said, shaking a half eaten slice of overcooked bacon at me, “if I didn’t need someone delicate. I got in over my head. Hence this conversation.”

She had raised her voice. I had really angered her.

Then I realized what I had done. I had questioned her professional competence.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really I am. I was just hoping for more information.”

“There isn’t any we can get right now,” she said. “His folks are in Compton, and they don’t know anything. And going back there will probably take all weekend, which would mean we’d lose the convention.”

I nodded, but she didn’t seem to notice because she went on.

“I mean, I know he’s here. I saw that video on security. I’ve tracked him this far. I just don’t know how he vanishes.”

“What do you mean vanish?” I asked.

“I saw him down a corridor,” she said. Then she stopped and glared at me, anticipating my next question. “It was him. Right down to the T-shirt. His hair was longer, and he was skinnier than he was in that photo—” (I had no idea how anyone could be skinnier than the kid in the photo.) “—but his face, his movements, everything told me it was him. He didn’t see me, not that it would have mattered. He has no idea who I am. He walked into the con suite, so I went in there too. I saw him, right beside that pile of exotic fruit. He had picked up the whole pineapple that they’d used as decoration. Someone called my name, I turned, waved hi, and when I turned back, he was gone.”

“He went out again,” I said.

She shook her head. “He would have had to walk past me to get out and believe me, I would have seen that.”

“So he ducked into the bathroom,” I said.

“He wasn’t there either. And no one else saw him, that’s the weird thing. I was asking people. They had no idea some kid in a Halo T-shirt was waving a pineapple around. They would’ve thought I was nuts for asking, but it is an sf convention.”

I grinned. She was right. At a real convention, filled with business people, the kid would have stood out. Here, he blended in with everyone else.

Then I frowned. He blended in. Some people were really good at blending in. Some—particularly teenagers of a certain type (the type that often frequented sf, comic, and gaming conventions)—were experts at blending in.

“You know roughly what time that was?” I asked.

“I know exactly,” she said. “I have to keep track of time and locations for billing purposes.”

I shuddered at that thought too. If you had to label me anything, you’d call me an amateur sleuth. No one pays me. I just meddle now and then.

The idea of trying to bill for my investigations made me very uncomfortable. I wouldn’t know how to establish rates. Did you charge by the second for the flashes of insight? Or by the hour for the long hard work of subconscious cogitation?

I didn’t ask her. Instead, I said, “As soon as we finish, we’ll go back to Con Ops. I’ll look up your video for you.”

“Okay.” She was finished. She had already stacked all five empty plates on the side of the table. For the observant, focused guy I was supposed to be, I had somehow missed her eating most of her meal.

I finished my waffle quickly, paid the tab for both of us over her protests (“Microsoft Millionaire, remember?” I said when she argued), and then let her take my arm as we headed back down the corridor to Con Ops.

* * * *

The smell of sweaty feet had oozed into the stench of unwashed bodies. Mid-convention, Con Ops. Half the volunteers had forgotten to bathe. The other half had pulled on whatever clothing they could find, whether it had been balled into a corner of their hotel room or not.

Someone had turned the overhead fan on high, but that only added a layer of burnt dust on top of the stink. The night crew had left, taking most of the donuts with them, and the day crew was scattered in front of the Towers of Terror, entering data as fast as they could.

I went to my chair. No one sat in it this time. Paladin followed me. As I sat down, she leaned against the table, half turned away from the computer screens.

At every con I’d worked since the mid 1990’s, I had linked my computer with security’s backup videos. In the old days that meant I needed an extra hard drive, but modern computers had so much memory they could eat days of footage and not even burp.

I called up yesterday’s footage for the floor in question, then asked Paladin exactly what time she had gone into the Con suite.

“Midnight,” she said. “On the nose.”

On the first night of a convention, everyone stayed awake long past midnight. The parties had started, old friends were greeting each other, and the gaming wing had just finished its setups.

I reversed the time-stamp on the hallway video until I found 11:50 and started from there.

“Midnight,” Paladin said again, as if I hadn’t believed her.

“I know,” I said. “Just looking for your kid.”

She frowned at me, then leaned forward. At 11:59, Paladin appeared in the video. She was wearing the same Tom Canty T-shirt and capri pants that she wore now, proving two things to me: She had spent the night in my chair (and that made me tingle in ways I didn’t want to contemplate), and she was a True Fan since she hadn’t changed clothes for the first twenty-four hours of the convention (and she clearly didn’t care).

On the video, she was striding through the corridor toward the Con suite, her head turned toward the side of the hallway.

“He’s over there,” she said now, touching my computer screen and leaving a buttery fingerprint on the edge. I resisted the urge to remove my handkerchief (yes, I’m old-fashioned enough to carry one) and wipe the screen off.

But I’d offended her enough for one morning.

I slowed the video down and went frame by frame, but all I caught was a blurred image on the edge of the screen. The kid was just outside camera range.

I tried using the other camera, the one mounted at the opposite end of the hallway, and managed to catch the kid’s back. If that was him (and I wasn’t sure it was), then he was skinnier and his hair was longer, just like Paladin had said.

“How did he do that?” she asked. “This isn’t bank security. The cameras aren’t stationary or obvious.”

But they were stationary and obvious to anyone who had worked a lot of conventions. There were standard places to put security cameras, like above doorways at the end of major corridors, so that we could watch the attendees go in and out, or near the food in any con suite, so that we could get a good glimpse of faces.

I didn’t say that to Paladin, though. She was good, but she was a bulldozer, and I didn’t want all of our secrets out.

“Let’s try the Con suite,” I said. I switched to the Con suite’s backup vid and started it from 11:59.

It was impossible to avoid getting caught on camera when you entered a con suite. But the kid seemed to know that too. We saw him all right, but his head was down, his longish hair covering his face. I couldn’t even confirm if the T-shirt he wore was the much-washed Halo T-shirt or just some generic gamer’s shirt.

He hovered near the food table but didn’t look at anything there either, so I only caught a glimpse of his back and his empty belt loops.

The doorcam showed Paladin as she entered, her expression tense. She looked left, mouthed “hello,” and then turned her head back toward the boy. Her eyes widened and she stopped walking.

The boy had disappeared.

“See?” Paladin said to me in real time. “He’s gone.”

I didn’t answer her. I switched to the food cams, focusing on the fruit. A scrawny hand with dirty fingernails snatched two tangerines, pocketed them, and had just grabbed a pineapple when it froze over the table itself.

His image blurred—he had been moving fast—and then he was gone.

“See?” she said. “Vanished.”

I still didn’t say anything, and I could tell she was getting frustrated.

Instead, I went back several frames and slowed the images down. As his hand opened to get the pineapple, the camera caught a great image of his palm.

Dirt streaks ran along the heel and his lifeline. Numbers had been scrawled in the very center. 4236. 2203. 3236. 5578. 7733. A few names had been written on his fingers. The names were all fannish monikers, which would take me a while to look up.

I didn’t point them out to Paladin. Instead, I let the images go by, frame by frame. His movement—which seemed blurred in real time—wasn’t really blurry at all. The kid was just quick.

He must have seen the camera, and he moved away from it.

“He’s still there. See?” I pointed a pudgy finger at the side of his T-shirt, which brushed the decorative lettuce leaves the hotel staff had placed under the fruit. “He just moved out of camera range.”

Paladin leaned closer. She frowned at that little bit of T-shirt, and the empty belt loops. “How do you know that’s him?”

So I played it for her again, showing her the detail as the kid moved from the food section to a gap in the cameras’ range.

“He can’t be that good,” she said.

“You don’t believe a member of fandom understands camera angles, but you believe he has magical powers and can vanish on his own?”

It was her turn to blush. “I told you. I don’t believe in magic. It just seemed like he vanished.”

The day crew was listening this time. It had been years since anyone had seen the great Spade arguing with a pretty woman at a convention.

In fact, no one had seen it. This was going to be the talk of fandom for months.

“Well, he didn’t vanish,” I said.

I used the door camera’s imagery to show her where he was. He stood between the table and the door into the suite’s bedroom. Someone had covered the wall behind the food table with a curtain—probably to dress it up—and he leaned behind that as he watched people go by.

His faded T-shirt blended in with the wall’s beige, and his thin frame was nearly invisible behind the curtain’s folds. People walked past him without even seeing him, especially as he set the pineapple back down and grabbed two bananas, an apple, and a handful of raisins (which he promptly ate).

“He’s just stocking up for the night,” I said.

“I looked there,” she said.

As if to prove her point, her video image did walk toward the door, but from the angle she was standing at, near the table, she probably couldn’t have seen him. She was moving her head back and forth, clearly searching for someone. Then she turned away and he slipped into the suite’s bedroom.

I’d been in the con suite. There was no door leading back into the hallway from the bedroom. But there was a large walk-in closet. The FleshCon’s chair had laughed about it when she showed it to me, saying she planned to fill it with supplies so that no one would try to move in.

“He’s just a kid who’s really good at blending in,” I said.

“I would have seen him,” she said.

I shook my head. “You looked around, then went and looked in the bedroom and both bathrooms, right?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And then you started asking people if they’d seen him.”

Her entire expression froze. “He figured out who I was.”

“No,” I said. “He figured out that someone was searching for him, and he’s going to avoid anyone he doesn’t know who seems to know who he is.”

“Because he’s done something wrong?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe because he’s running away and scared.”

Those dirty fingernails haunted me, and so did the snatching of food. He was hungry. He wasn’t having as much luck finding places to stay as he had when he first left home.

“Well, we know what happened last night,” she said. “But he could be anywhere by now.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

She frowned at me. “You think he’s still at the con? Even though he knows I’m looking for him?”

“He’ll avoid you. And he’ll stay for the free food.”

“So we hang out at the con suite and capture him when he comes back?”

“Nah,” I said calmly. “I was thinking of something easier.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Like getting him out of his hotel room,” I said.

“He can’t afford a hotel room,” she said.

“You already told me that he bunks with friends,” I said.

“Yeah, but I don’t know who his friends are. Do you?”

Those last two words were sarcastic. And the sarcasm, as misguided as it was, pleased me.

It meant she was going to be surprised.

“I know where they’re staying,” I said.

She frowned. “Where?”

“Come with me, and I’ll show you,” I said.

* * * *

As we walked to the service elevator, I grabbed two people off our security team and made them accompany us. We could have made do with one, but I still didn’t know Paladin very well and the fact that she had a gun when she traveled bothered me more than I could say.

So when I pulled the two security guards aside (both male, both younger than I was, both just as tall, and four times more muscular), I gave them the rundown, only quietly I asked one of them to keep an eye on Paladin, instead of looking for skinny little Dyson Emmanuel.

Then our cadre went to the west wing of the fifth floor.

The west wing of the fifth floor looked like a normal hotel wing. Lots of closed doors and, since it was only ten thirty in the morning (still barely past dawn in fannish circles), lots of do not disturb signs. Outside a few doors were room service trays, showing the remains of burgers and nachos, and other late night snacks.

Room 5578 was in the middle of the corridor, with two other doors (5576 and 5580) equidistant on either side. That meant Room 5578 was not a suite, so it only had one potential exit.

I put my guards on either side, sent Paladin to lean against door 5580 (telling her in the service elevator that if the kid saw her, he’d bolt), and then I knocked.

“Security,” I said in my deepest voice.

Paladin looked panicked. She waved a hand, trying to convince me with very bad sign language that I had made an awful choice.

I hadn’t. I wanted to alarm the people inside the room.

No one answered, but I heard rustling. On the fifth floor of any hotel, especially one this new, the windows did not open. Still, I imagined the kid trying to get out that way and failing.

I knocked again. “Security. Open up or I will open the door myself.”

Not that I could. I hadn’t even checked with the hotel before coming up here. Privacy laws prevented them from giving me the names of the legal occupants, and I had no real knowledge of any kind of crime or terrible activity that would allow me to involve them.

So I was going it alone.

I heard more rustling behind the door. Then the door opened as far as the privacy slide would let it.

A twenty-something girl with the remains of glitter makeup and three cat whiskers still glued to one cheek peered at me.

“What?” she asked.

“Reports have come in from all over the floor of an illegal party. I need to inspect the premises. If we find you’re serving alcohol in here, we will have to ask you to leave.”

“We aren’t,” she said and tried to close the door.

I put my hand on it, and pushed just enough. “If you aren’t holding a party, then you have nothing to hide. I just need to do a walk-through to placate my dark masters.”

“You’re not with the hotel,” she said.

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m with the con com. You want me to get hotel security? Because if they see any damage or any hints of damage, they’ll add a hefty fine to your hotel bill.”

“We haven’t damaged anything,” she said.

“Okay,” I said in that unreasonable tone that actually meant, Do what you want, idiot, but you’ll pay for it. “Of course, it’ll be your word against theirs. And hotels love getting more revenue from con goers.”

Someone said something softly behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, then back at me.

“Just a walk-through?” she asked.

“Just a walk-through,” I repeated.

She closed the door, disengaged the security bolt, and pulled the door open.

The hotel room smelled of shampoo, stage makeup, and coffee. A thin young man sat at the only table, eating a piece of cold pizza, while another girl—also twenty something—was hovering over the hotel-supplied drip coffeemaker.

The two beds had been slept in, and one had an extra pile of blankets on top, with a pillow in the middle. A cat costume was hanging over one of the chairs, and another cat costume hung from the open bathroom door.

I walked in, glanced longingly at the pizza, and then wandered around as if I were inspecting.

“See?” the girl who answered the door said. “No party here.”

I peered in the bathroom, saw more makeup, and some very long claw-like fake fingernails still in their case.

“Hall costume or masquerade?” I asked. The masquerade was tonight, and some participants got very serious about it.

“Masquerade,” the girl who answered the door said.

“You doing a number from Cats or is this something more elaborate?”

“Midnight Louie,” the other girl said grumpily.

“Wow,” I said. “Mystery fans. I adore Carole Nelson Douglas.”

“Really?” The girl who answered the door looked at me. “You think we have a chance? It’s not really fantasy.”

“Talking cats aren’t fantasy?” I asked.

“He doesn’t exactly talk,” the boy at the table said. “He just thinks a lot.”

“Don’t we all?” I said, as I pulled open the double mirrored doors leading into the closet. I didn’t see anyone inside, but I didn’t expect to.

Instead, I reached around the ironing board hanging on the wall, and grabbed an arm.

I pulled, and Dyson Emmanuel stumbled out. Up close, his Halo T-shirt looked threadbare, but he smelled pleasantly of the hotel soap. Someone, at least, had let him use (ordered him to use?) the shower.

“Well, well, well,” I said. “What have we here?”

“Lemme go,” he said.

“Sure.” I let go.

He stumbled backward.

“You do know your parents are looking for you,” I said.

“No, they’re not,” he said.

“They hired my friend Paladin to find you,” I said. Then I raised my voice. “Paladin!”

She hurried into the room, followed by her personal security guard. The other one remained in the hall in case the kid managed to get past all of us.

“You caught him,” she said.

I shrugged a shoulder. I didn’t turn around and look at her. “Tell him who hired you.”

“Your family,” she said to the kid.

Her construction caught me. She had been saying family all along. Not parents. Family.

Dyson was staring at her. “Like hell.”

“They did,” she said, and was going to continue, but I held up one hand.

“They just want to know you’re all right.” I reached into my pocket and grabbed my cell phone. “Call them. Tell them you’re fine. That’s all they need.”

His eyes filled with tears, but he didn’t reach for the phone.

“Spade...” Paladin hissed at me. I ignored her; I knew what she was going to say. The family had hired her to bring the kid back, not to have him call.

“They’re worried,” I said. “Call them.”

The kid shook his head.

“You don’t have to go back,” I said. “And if you use my phone, they won’t be able to find out where you are.”

He stared at the phone.

“You can keep traveling,” I said. “It’s fun, isn’t it? Never the same place week to week.”

His gaze met mine. His eyelashes were wet.

“Of course,” I said, “there are lots of dangers on the road. You almost didn’t make it here, did you?”

His lips thinned.

“You had to jump from that last car, didn’t you?” I asked.

He looked at me, startled. In fact, everyone was staring at me now. I could feel Paladin’s stare boring into my back.

“You probably should get someone to look at your hands,” I said. “That dirt’s embedded pretty deep.”

His eyes narrowed. “How’d you know?”

“We keep cameras by the food in the con suite,” I said. “I got a good view of your palm. Took me a while, but I finally figured out why the dirt bothered me so much. You’d written over it.”

He rubbed his right hand on his pants.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I expect the room numbers vanished in your shower. But the dirt’s still there, isn’t it?”

He clenched his right hand into a fist.

“And you probably have scraped knees, maybe a scraped elbow or two. Is it really that bad at home? I know your stepfather is a prick, but he isn’t as bad as the guy in the car, is he?”

The stepfather line was a guess, but it was an educated one, based on the word “family,” not on the word “parents.” And the guess seemed to hit home.

“He hates me,” the kid said.

“He yells a lot,” I said.

The kid nodded.

“He wants you to stop playing games, stop hanging out with your friends, maybe go out for a sport or two, something a skinny kid like you could handle, like cross-country.”

“He told you?” the kid asked.

I shook my head. “I never talked to him. But he was the one who put up the money to find you.” (I hoped. I couldn’t turn to Paladin for confirmation.) “And he never, ever told Paladin that you were his stepson.”

“He said you were his son.” She stepped up beside me, understanding what I was doing now.

I felt a small thread of relief. I had guessed right.

“He’s worried,” Paladin was saying. “Your mom is beside herself. Take up Spade’s offer. Call them.”

The kid stared at the phone.

“Has he ever hit you?” I asked.

The kid shook his head.

“Physically harmed you?”

The kid’s lip trembled. “He wants me to be someone else.”

“Because he wants you to put on some muscle,” I said.

The kid nodded.

“So that you can fight back when the other guys at school pick on you,” I said.

This time, a tear did fall. “He said it was my fault. He said if I was just normal, they’d leave me alone.”

How many times had I heard that one? How many of us had become fen because we knew we would never ever be normal?

“Bill Gates wasn’t normal,” I said. “Steven Spielberg wasn’t normal. I’ll bet they got picked on in school too.”

“I know they did,” one of the girls said.

“It’d be great to stay here,” I said, “but here only lasts the weekend. Then you’re on your own. And people in the real world can be a lot meaner—a lot scarier—than the kids at school.”

He nodded, probably thinking of that last car ride.

I pushed my phone toward him. He took it and punched a few numbers into the keypad.

I could hear the ringing. Then a woman answered.

“Mom?” he said, and his voice broke. “Mommy?”

He slipped into the closet and rather than go after him, I pulled the double doors closed.

I could see Paladin in the mirrors. She was staring at me.

I moved away from the closet to give the kid some privacy. “His folks’ll be here either late tonight or tomorrow. If I were you, I’d wait with him, so that you get your check.”

She crossed her arms. “How did you know all of this?”

“The room’s easy,” I said. “He wrote it on his palm.”

“But there were a dozen numbers on his hand,” she said.

“All room numbers, all in the party wing, except this one.”

“And the family stuff?” she asked.

I shrugged again. “That’s what you hired me for. The little details.”

The recognizable details. My stepfather had wanted me in sports for the opposite reason. You’re already chubby, he said. You lose some of that babyfat and you can play basketball. You don’t need to make models in the basement while you watch monster movies. It’s not normal.

“You’re scary good, Spade,” Paladin said.

“Nah,” I said. “I just know my people.”

The closet door slid open. The kid came out, his face blotchy, eyes red, but empty of tears. He handed me the phone.

“You can keep it for the weekend if you want,” I said.

He looked at it as if I had offered him a million dollars. “It’s your phone.”

“I have others,” I said.

He almost took it, then stopped. “It’s okay.”

“You can call them again if you want,” I said.

He shook his head. “They’re coming to get me. They’ll be here tonight.”

He directed that last at the two girls and the guy who still sat at the table.

“Then you won’t be at the masquerade,” said the girl who opened the door. She sounded disappointed.

“Yes, I will,” he said. “If they get here early, they can watch.”

The beginnings of a truce, only neither part of the family knew it yet. I handed the kid my phone.

“In case they call back,” I said. “They have a way to reach you.”

“I can’t keep this,” he said.

“Then leave it at the front desk when you go,” I said. “For Spade.”

“You’re Spade?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Okay,” he said, and closed his injured hand around the phone. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” Then I took Paladin’s arm and hustled her out of the room. The security guard followed.

Paladin didn’t dig in her heels, which I expected her to do, but when the door closed, she turned on me.

“Great,” she said. “Stick by him, you said. Make sure you get your money tonight, you said. Then you leave. The kid could run off. I’m never getting paid.”

I hurried her down the hall so her voice didn’t echo. When we reached the service elevator, I said, “My phone is linked to my computer. I can track it in real time. You’ll know where he is. Just meet up with him at the masquerade.”

“Your phone is linked to your computer?” she asked. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I can,” I said. I didn’t tell her the real reason: I lost my phone more times than I wanted to count. Tracking it through its GPS had saved me from buying a new phone after each and every convention.

She shook her head. “Someday are you going to tell me what made you know how that kid wanted to go home?”

“That’s easy,” I said. “He teared up when I told him his folks wanted to hear from him. He thought they didn’t care. If he’d thrown the phone at me, we would have had a different conversation.”

“He was that lonely?” she asked.

“He’s that scared,” I said. “And that young. I don’t think he’s much older than fourteen. It won’t be peaches and cream when he goes home, but he knows now it’s better than the road.”

The service elevator stopped and the doors opened. All four of us got out. The security guards checked to make sure we no longer needed them, then headed down the hall.

Paladin didn’t move.

“We should team up, Spade,” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t believe in guns,” I said. “And I won’t travel.”

“You travel every weekend,” she said.

“To a convention, where I see the people I like.”

“But you’re good at figuring things out,” she said.

“Yep,” I said. “And I figured out a long time ago where I belong.”

I extended my hand. She stared at it.

“See you around, Paladin,” I said.

“But I owe you money,” she said.

I shook my head. “I was happy to help out for free.”

She still hadn’t taken my hand. So I let it drop. I gave her a wistful smile, nodded, and headed down the hall to Con Ops.

After a moment, she caught up with me. She had run silently through the corridor, but the scent of jasmine preceded her.

“I can make you change your mind,” she said.

“No one makes me change my mind.”

She grinned up at me. “I’m not no one.”

“Indeed you’re not,” I said.

She slipped her arm in mine. “Besides, I can’t let you go. You know where the kid is. I have all day to work on you.”

I flushed. “I doubt,” I said, wishing I had enough courage to accent the innuendo, “that all day will be long enough.”

Copyright © 2010 Kristine Kathryn Rusch