The Shadow Fixer

by Matthew S. Cox

She looked down. “Thanks.”

  “But you can’t take them all home. The underwear machine will burn out. Especially with boys.”

  She snickered.

  “Oh, just wait until he’s a teenager. You’ll go to pick up a stray sock and cut your hand.”

  Kirsten glanced at him. “What? That doesn’t make any sense at all. How would I cut my hand on fabric? And what does Evan being a teenager have to do with the sharpness of socks?”

  “Huh?” asked Kurosawa.

  She gestured at Dorian—who no one else in the room could see—“He just said when my son’s a teenager I’ll cut my hand picking up a stray sock.”

  Kurosawa, Montez, and Morelli burst out laughing, making her feel clueless.

  Kirsten tapped her foot. “Is someone going to explain why that’s funny?”

  “Can’t do it.” Dorian patted her on the head. “I don’t want to be responsible for corrupting the innocent.”

  The other three laughed far too hard to speak—they all found excuses to be busy when she asked them for an explanation.

  Grumbling, Kirsten trudged off toward the garage.

  15

  The Cat House

  Many things in life fell under the heading of ‘extremely bad idea’—like walking into a Syndicate-run casino-brothel in full Division 0 uniform.

  Any cop entering such a place would likely cause a shitstorm, but a psionic cop would set off a nuclear shitstorm. Maybe the Syndicate would regard her like many grey zone and black zone fringers, figuring she had ‘psionic shit to do’ and would leave them alone, so they left her alone. More likely though, some paranoid underboss would assume the government sent her in to telepathically spy on them.

  Which, technically speaking, she intended to do. However, in spite of her feelings about the Syndicate in general, her goal had nothing to do with shutting them down or even causing trouble. She only wanted to investigate any potential connection between them and the death of Elan Mendoza. Of course, if she discovered any of the prostitutes to be held against their will, she couldn’t simply leave well enough alone.

  After submitting a notification to Captain Eze of her plan, Kirsten flew home to her apartment and changed into civilian clothes. The most outlandish outfit she owned wouldn’t raise a single eyebrow in a place where nude cat-modders pranced around. She went a little retro with a neon-green half shirt, black jacket and black mini-skirt. Since she didn’t have any, she ordered a pair of neon green boots, short topped with half-inch heels. A delivery bot arrived with them in four minutes.

  So backward. A damn pair of shoes gets here faster than the police could. She put them on, stood, and sighed. If we rode delivery bots, we’d get there faster.

  She stuffed her E-90 in a purse, since the size of the weapon made it impossible to conceal anywhere on her person under clothes. Maybe I should ask Nicole to come along for backup. Nah, she’s worse than I am. She will take ten cats home. Besides, I’m not going in there to do anything other than look around.

  Following normal traffic rules, it took a little over a half-hour to reach the place. The sector didn’t quite qualify as grey, but it came close, mostly containing residence towers built on top of commercial properties. An overriding sense of grunge clung to everything, including the pedestrians. Her patrol craft—hell, any hovercar—stood out here like a sore thumb. The black Halcyon-Ormyr sedans and a few sleek hoverbikes parked on the roof of the building where The Cat House occupied the first three stories had to belong to Syndicate bigwigs, being the only other hovercars in sight.

  Kirsten overflew the place, landing four blocks away in a deserted section of alley. If not for having Suggestion and an E-90 on her, she’d never have set foot in an area like this alone. The fermented stink of rotting biomatter, urine, and chemicals smacked her in the face when the door opened. Even the cryonic fog wafting out from under the patrol craft seemed unwilling to touch the ground here. She coughed, trying to take air in small sips, and got out. Some places in the city offered far worse smells than this, though it didn’t make breathing here pleasant.

  “Shall I keep an eye on the PC or go with you?” asked Dorian.

  She looked back at him. “Can you stash it on a roof somewhere safe and catch up? I’d feel better having you with me in there.”

  “Yeah, give me a moment.” Dorian’s expression made no secret he much preferred to be with her. He melted through the door into the car, which promptly took off.

  Kirsten cringed from the tingly electrified blast of air, shielding her eyes until the patrol craft flew off far enough for the downblast to stop. So strange not wearing the uniform. Guess I need to get out more. The alley didn’t look remotely safe, so she headed out onto the street and started walking toward The Cat House. Pedestrian traffic here seemed an even mix of lower-class normal people and those likely to be in gangs. Despite wearing a miniskirt and half-shirt, she felt like a prude compared to the amount of skin some showed. A few even wore transparent clothes.

  In order to be ‘cutting edge,’ fashion had two directions to go in: bizarre or extreme. One guy had a thing around his neck so similar to the appearance of a toilet seat ring she nearly laughed at him. Another woman wore a jacket with puffy shoulders large enough to hide toddlers in. The pedestrians around her not trying to stand out or announce gang affiliations tended toward plain and drab in their wardrobe. Compared to them, she felt a little conspicuous in neon green, but preferred no one noticed her.

  Dorian appeared beside her half a block from The Cat House.

  She smiled at him and kept going.

  The place didn’t have a line, though two large guys stood on either side of the front door like guards protecting the gates of a medieval castle. She’d been spending so much time with Evan in the Monwyn games, it struck her as strange they didn’t have halberds or plate armor. The thudding of an electronica beat inside the place seeped out onto the sidewalk by the entrance.

  “Hold up, hon,” said the guy on the left when she tried to go in. “Gotta be twenty-one. Try again when you’re old enough to have boobs.”

  Kirsten bit her lip. If she had Nicole’s personality, she’d have flashed him to prove she had them. Of course, her friend’s top half didn’t disappear under a semi-baggy jacket and shirt. While she frequently got mistaken for thirteen or fourteen, no one mistook her for a pre-teen. This guy meant it as an insult, not a mistake. She frowned. “Funny guy. I’m twenty-three.”

  “Yeah, sure, kid.” The other bouncer laughed.

  She glanced back and forth between them, concentrating on both men. “I’m twenty-three.”

  The brief glow in her eyes reflected back at her as two tiny points in the void of the men’s sunglasses. They stared at her in derpy silence. Ignoring them, she walked between them at the automatic doors, which slid open, revealing a short hallway decorated in dark blue and blacklight. On the left, a skinny young cat-eared woman wearing a black lace bra stood behind a coat and weapons check desk, regarding her with moderately bored disinterest. Holographic signs on the walls warned rather colorfully any weapons found inside would be inserted in random body cavities.

  “You could’ve shown ID.” Dorian chuckled. “Though, I agree. Much more satisfying.”

  “Showing ID would be the same as walking in here in my work clothes.”

  He pursed his lips. “Ahh. Yes.”

  Kirsten considered complying with the house policy about weapons but decided not to for several reasons. One, showing a laser pistol would cause a stir. Civilians couldn’t own them without holding a bounty hunting license. So, someone waving an E-90 around would either be a bounty hunter, law enforcement, or military intelligence, none of which would be popular guests at a Syndicate casino-brothel. Secondly, while businesses had the right to demand civilians check weapons at the counter, they had no legal standing to disarm a member of the National Police Force. She wouldn’t get in any trouble if someone caught her with it inside, at least not trouble in a legal sense.

>   If she got in the other sort of trouble, she’d rather have the E-90.

  She glanced at the Neko girl on the left, unable to help herself but skim the woman’s surface thoughts. Mostly boredom. Contrary to Kirsten’s expectation, she didn’t think about trying to escape or being afraid for her life. Even the most broken captives still thought about their situation, so this woman had to be a legit employee. Also, her cat ears somewhat picked up Dorian’s voice, but due to the music, she didn’t recognize what she heard.

  Dismissing the girl as a non-issue, Kirsten went through the next pair of doors into a massive room taking up almost the entire footprint of the ground floor, except for a small private area, likely for offices and bathrooms. Staffed game tables filled most of the right side. Banks of electronic gambling machines sat all the way in the back against the wall. Three women and three men, all with cat ears and tails, danced nude on six tiny stages arranged around the gambling area. Employees running the card tables and roulette wheels also had cat ears, though they wore fancy suits or gowns.

  The rear left third of the room contained numerous small tables, the bar, and an area where about seventeen young women and four young men—all Nekos—lounged on various divans, sofas, and padded chairs. She assumed it the brothel part of the business due to their skimpy or nonexistent attire and the way they kept trying to catch the eye of people nearby. While most acted relatively normal as prostitutes went, a few took the cat thing way too far, licking themselves or crawling around on all fours.

  She started to cringe, totally unnerved at the sight of people acting like animals, until she noticed a few of the catgirls appeared to be on leashes. Concerned, she made her way toward the bar, intending to skim their surface thoughts. Her heart rate increased, hands sweating. If she’d found kidnap victims, her information gathering mission just changed into something potentially over her head.

  Dozens of actual cats wandered around, climbed carpeted sections of wall, or draped themselves on small elevated platforms. The few cats she came close to stared at Dorian, making faces like they’d just huffed hard on a Flowerbasket inhaler. Any second now, they’d get the zooms and go racing around.

  Once she came within about a hundred feet of the prostitutes, she began surface thought reading, starting on the four leashed women. Much to her relief—and unease—they didn’t mind, wearing the collars as part of their ‘character.’ Two utterly adored being tethered to the wall, unable to escape on their own. One worried the mechanism wouldn’t auto-release if the fire alarm went off but got a nervous thrill from the risk.

  Ugh. What is wrong with people?

  Relieved her mission would not turn into a wild shootout with Syndicate thugs while trying to rescue trafficked women, Kirsten let a long breath out her nose. As far as she could tell from the surface thoughts she could understand, all worked here willingly, and got paid a decent amount considering the niche kink of finding people with cat mods willing to be sex workers. About half of them thought in Russian or German.

  “So weird,” whispered Kirsten.

  “‘Weird’ could be referring to far too many different things in here for me to have a clue what you mean.” Dorian whistled.

  She faced away from the prostitutes. “Why would they pay a premium to hire Neko modders as prostitutes? It’s not exactly uncommon.”

  “Most of the cat people are new-agey nature children, not sex addicts. They have some nonsense about clothing being the prison of a society they reject, getting close to the natural world… or something along those lines. They tend to get pissed off and violent when people automatically equate nudity with sex or them being promiscuous.”

  She blinked. “How do you know so much about them?”

  “It’s common knowledge. Their social movement is covered in school around the same time as the Marsborn political issues.”

  “Oh.” Kirsten slouched. “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, they did kind of fast track you to get out the door at sixteen.” Dorian gave her the pitying look she disliked so much, not for his sympathy but for it reminding her she once needed pity.

  “Still don’t get it. What is the attraction to people with cat ears and tails?”

  Dorian shrugged. “I have no idea either. Think it started in Japan centuries ago. It’s hardly the strangest kink out there though. Some guys get off on bots.”

  “Sex bots are way less rare than cat people.”

  “No, I mean like orb bots. Box bots, the little tank tread ones, too. Saw a guy grinding away on an orb bot once.”

  Her jaw dropped open. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. The most disturbing part was the little ball repeating ‘help me’ in a toneless voice.”

  “Stop.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re messing with me.”

  Dorian shivered. “Okay, the bot wasn’t begging for help, but otherwise, I’m being serious. There are some times when having the ability to walk through walls is a true curse.”

  “Wow. Do you ever wonder if the human race has gone past the point of being worth saving?”

  “Plenty of times.” He winked. “But I know you don’t.”

  She chuckled.

  “I mean, you don’t even understand how someone can cut themselves on a sock.”

  “Are you seriously not going to explain it to me?”

  He shook his head. “Nope.”

  “I’m not a little girl.”

  “Yes, I am aware.”

  Grumbling, she resumed scanning random people’s thoughts.

  From the bartender, she learned The Cat House did not, in fact, belong to the Syndicate, rather, a cybergang known as the Silicon Knights. She’d heard of them only in passing and knew little other than they acted more like a rogue corporation than a literal street gang. Most of their crimes happened online rather than in alleys, mostly prostitution, data piracy, and other tech related criminal activities.

  The Cat House, unlike the gang, had legit books and operated on the level.

  She took her NetMini out, brought up Elan Mendoza’s ID photo, and approached the nearest employee, a cat-eared man wearing only jewelry, carrying a tray of drinks from the bar over to the casino area. Kirsten approached, him, refusing to look down.

  “Excuse me.”

  He paused, smiling at her. “Oh, hi there.”

  “Ever see this guy?” she showed him the photo and peeked at his head.

  The man had a ‘he kinda looks familiar’ reaction, but couldn’t put a name to the face.

  “No idea. I see so many people here it’s hard to keep track. Maybe I saw him, but he doesn’t stand out.”

  “Thanks.”

  He walked off, tail swishing.

  Kirsten spent about twenty minutes intercepting table servers, showing the picture, and checking surface thoughts. Most had some degree of recognition to Elan’s face, but didn’t know much about him. She approached a woman who looked like a living shadow: unnatural ink black skin, black hair, black fur on her cat ears and tail. The only color on her came from her metallic gold irises and a thin gold anklet.

  “Aren’t you adorable?” purred the woman. “Sit wherever you like. You don’t need to ask to be seated.”

  “Have you seen this man?” She held up the picture.

  The woman remembered seeing him frequently over by the prostitutes and also in the gambling area, but never spoke to him. She frowned, having unpleasant thoughts toward anyone who would partake of prostitution or be one. The harsh opinion surprised Kirsten into stunned staring, given this woman traipsed about naked and worked in a brothel. A slight mental push wanting to understand the contradiction made the answer reverberate in the woman’s mind. She didn’t work for the Silicon Knights, she was a full member of the gang. In addition to waiting tables, she had combat grade speedware and claws, thus served as security. People here knew her as ‘Silo,’ pronounced like the first part of silhouette.

  “He’s been around a lot. Usually upstairs with a working girl or over there
losing money.” Silo gestured at the casino tables. “Mind if I ask why you’re looking for him? You a PI or something? The guy can’t be your father.”

  Kirsten laughed. “No. But he knows or knew my father. Hoping he might be able to help me find him.”

  “Aww. Sad. Sorry.” Silo made a pouty face at her. “I hope you find him. You are twenty-one at least, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m twenty-three.”

  “Damn, girl.” Silo looked her over. “You get a thing done?”

  “Nope. Just six years of malnutrition early in life.”

  Silo sighed. “Sorry ta hear it. Hope you find your father. And I hope he’s got a good damn reason for disappearing on you.”

  “Thanks.”

  The woman glided off toward the casino area.

  “I’m astounded you managed to lie so smoothly.” Dorian made a fake scolding face at her.

  “Fear is a strong motivator. Trying not to need the big stick.”

  He gave a thumbs up.

  Kirsten’s NetMini rang. When she swiped to answer, Samuel Chang’s holographic head appeared in miniature.

  “Hey, Sam. What’s up?”

  “Umm…” He looked around. “Interesting place. Are you okay?”

  “Fine, just trying to find information on a case. A dead guy I’m investigating came here a lot.”

  “I’m sure he did,” muttered Dorian.

  Kirsten gasped.

  “Following up on Mendoza?” asked Sam.

  “Hang on. Let me go somewhere more private.” She hurried to the bathroom and took a seat on a mini sofa right inside the door, close to the sinks. “Okay… yeah, I am. Any good news?”

  “Well, I didn’t see any evidence connecting him to any sort of shady dealings with other corporations. In my opinion, no one would’ve gotten rid of him to protect secrets. However, his NetMini account had terabytes of photos, all showing the same Neko woman. Couldn’t find her in the system by a face match, so she must be either off-grid or undocumented.”

  “What do you know about Silicon Knights?” whispered Kirsten.