Free Mercury Rises by Robert Kroese Page A

like doing it anyway. It tends to stir up some things that I don't...It's hard to talk about." She removed her sunglasses and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. They were moist and red.
    "Hey, that's impressive," said Eddie.
    "Thanks," said Cody, suddenly sanguine again. "That's gotten me cast as the grieving wife at least a dozen times. It's also handy in infidelity cases, you know, when I have to break the news about some cheating bastard. People love it when you pretend to care." She took a swallow of her drink and said, "So you're one of them . A demon."
    This last caught Eddie off guard, but there didn't seem to be much point in pretending after his miraculous recovery from five gunshot wounds to the chest, not to mention the chocolate bullet thing. "Yes," said Eddie. "I'm one of them. But I'm not a servant of Ti...Katie Midford, if that's what you're thinking."
    "Yeah," replied Cody. "I kinda figured that from the fact that you broke into her house. So what's your deal?"
    Eddie told her about Wanda Kwan and his need to find the real Charlie Nyx ghostwriter. Cody laughed. "A screenwriter, eh? That's aiming a bit low, isn't it?"
    "What about you?" said Eddie, a bit defensively. "What are you doing here?"
    "I work for Katie. Or I did, anyway. Lately I've been trying to figure out what happened to her. She owes me twenty grand."
    "Twenty grand? For what?"
    "Heh, that's the funny part," said Cody. "You and I have something in common. She hired me to find out who the real writer of the Charlie Nyx books is."

TEN
     
    Christine had been in the remote Kenyan village of Baji for three hours before becoming violently ill. She lay moaning in a cot in the back room of the rundown concrete building that served as the local headquarters of Eternal Harvest. On the wall across the room was the same poster she had seen in the former electronics store in Yorba Linda. It continued to assure her, despite much evidence to the contrary, that "YOU CAN HELP." It then went on, less certainly, "EH?"
    So far she was proving to be a severe drain on the personnel and resources of the already strapped Eternal Harvest organization. Leaning over the edge of the cot, she vomited into a bucket, which was then spirited away and presumably emptied in some unhygienic fashion before being returned to her. She was under constant watch by two local women who doubtlessly had better things to do. Far from helping to make this godforsaken place more livable, she had actually managed, in the few hours she had been here, to detract significantly from the local quality of life. She could only hope that whatever malignant entity had seized her insides would kill her quickly, putting her out of her misery and letting the locals get on with their already miserable lives.
    The EH facility was currently staffed by a total of six people, three men and three women, most of whom seemed to be volunteers. One woman had some medical training; the others filled a variety of roles from construction foreperson to nutritionist. Any overt proselytizing that occurred was secondary to the hands-on work EH was doing in the community. At least that was the impression Christine got from the materials she had read on the plane to Nairobi and the three hours she had spent touring the town before being overcome by nausea.
    The next day she felt somewhat better, and was volunteered to assist Maya Keenan, the director of the group, in an errand: they were to drive to an agricultural test facility to pick up a shipment of surplus seed that Maya intended to use to help the locals produce more of their own food.
    Barely recovered from her illness, Christine was experiencing a new round of vertigo precipitated by a jarring ride in an ancient Land Rover down a remote track in Kenya.
    "Can we pull over?" she moaned. "I'm going to be sick."
    "Again?" asked Maya Keenan, who was driving. "How can you possibly have anything left to throw up?"
    Maya, a tall, wiry ex-Manhattanite, was a