Dames for Hire

by S. C. Jensen

  “Compared to nothing.” She shrugged. “Not everybody has a place of their own.”

  “You live with Flint at the funny farm full time?”

  “For years.” She wiped her mouth with a recycled cardboard napkin with flecks of green in it.

  “What’s the deal with Angelica Bell?”

  “There is no deal,” Constance said. “She’s a spoiled, rich brat who wasn’t happy enough spending her daddy’s money, so she had to start dipping into the inheritance that isn’t hers yet.”

  “How long has she been going out gambling on Thursday nights?”

  “Since as long as she could pass a fake ID” The woman crumpled up the napkin and tossed it on top of her empty taco wrapper. She ran a hand over her cropped grey hair and looked me in the eye. “Who do you figure for the job tonight?”

  “I don’t figure anything,” I said. “This whole operation is upside down. Tell me about the girl.”

  “What do you want to know? She’s a punk. Drinks heavy, likes to gamble and fool around with women of easy virtue.”

  “Violent?”

  “Not as such.” She leaned back on her elbows and gave me a hard stare. “She gave you the lump?”

  “She had a little help,” I said. “What about Flint?”

  “You’ve met him.”

  “Does he have any money?” I took a bite of my taco. Hunger won over the queasies and I took another bite. “Or is it all his old lady’s?”

  “Who knows,” she laughed a little, low in her throat. “The guy’s so tight he needs a straw to help him take dump.”

  “What a way to talk about your boss.”

  She shrugged and said again, “You’ve met him.”

  “You really think those gunnies were waiting for Miss Bell?”

  “Makes enough sense to me. She keeps a pretty regular schedule and has a habit of pissing off the wrong kind of mugs.”

  “She in tonight?”

  “Sure,” Constance said. “Wanted to sleep off a hangover instead of throwing in the chips tonight. Not the first time.”

  “You know why Flint hired me?”

  She nodded slightly. “I hear things.”

  “So, what do you think’s to be gained for a couple of thugs jumping Miss Bell’s ride?”

  “The set up is pretty obvious, isn’t it?” She looked at the stubby fingernails on her left hand and inspected a hangnail. “Probably didn’t mean to kill anyone. Just wanted to put the scare in her. But that punk was a loose cannon.”

  “I don’t know Mick Vector personally,” I said. “But I’ve met some of his associates. Those cock-ups don’t fit the bill.”

  “Maybe that’s why he picked them.”

  “Clever broad, huh?” I tossed in my napkin and chewed the last of my meal. “You sure you don’t do some dick work on the side?”

  She raised a silver eyebrow at me.

  “I think you and I can get along,” I said. “But what are we going to do about the stiff on your boss’ drive?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay. You can get rid of the gun, right? Are there cameras on the place?”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You’d better. No police,” I said, and my tattler rang.

  Wallace Flint’s beady little eyes blinked at me from the hologram. “Taking your time, aren’t you, Marlowe? Or did Constance get lost trying to find your hovel?”

  “We ran into a little trouble, Mr. Flint. Constance can tell you all about it.”

  “You listen to me, you so-called detective.” He sniffed and seemed to wonder what exactly it was he wanted me to listen to. “I’m the kind of man who is used to a certain—”

  “I’ve had a rough day, Mr. Flint. Your daughter and her girlfriend clobbered me from both sides, and not in the fun way. Then I find a couple of thugs waiting for me in my apartment, telling me to lay off the Bell girl. And now—”

  Constance shook her head slightly and I stopped.

  “Forgive me for not being more sympathetic, Marlowe,” Flint said loud enough to make the tattler’s speakers crackle. “But I did pay you for a particular job to be done.”

  “If you don’t like the way I operate,” I said. “You can find someone else to do the job. But with the bodies piling up, you might have a tough time finding anyone to take it. Did you get a visit from the boys in grey this evening?”

  “Grey?” Flint’s voice soured. “You mean police?”

  “You know the ones,” I said. “We were trying not to arouse their interest.”

  “Why should I have gotten a visit?” He bobbed his birdlike head in my direction, turned it slightly to one side and blinked furiously.

  “There’s a dead man on your driveway, Mr. Flint,” I said. “Most of him, anyway. I suppose some of him might have ended up on your fence. He’s missing the top half of his head.”

  Stunned silence made the tattler whine. “Excuse me?”

  “He took a shot at Constance and I. Must have recognized the car. Probably he was waiting for the return of your angel. Now what do you think of that?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “How can a dead man take a shot at anyone, I—”

  “Maybe I ought to let Constance explain to you,” I said. “Maybe you’re in shock.”

  “You get in that car and get over here at once!” The tattler really screamed with him this time. I took the volume down a notch. His face purpled with rage. “Do you hear me? On the double!”

  “Constance will tell you,” I said softly, and killed the call.

  Constance licked her teeth and stuffed the takeout wrappers inside the box we’d carried them in. She said, “Thanks for that. I thought we were making a plan.”

  “It’s his driveway,” I said. “He’s got to decide if he’s in it with the rest of us or if he’s just going to stand around on the sidelines and promise to throw some money at us.”

  “Save it,” she said. “I’ll see myself out. Good luck with Miss Bell.”

  She slammed the door behind her and stomped down the hallway. I picked up the remains of our meal and stuffed them into the appropriate disposal chutes. Most of it was trash. The tacos churned in my belly, and I rested my head over the sink until the feeling passed. Something about this job stank. I didn’t think my guts would feel any better until I uncovered the offending nugget and dealt with it appropriately.

  Footsteps pounded up to my door again. I leaned against the counter and flexed the fingers of my upgrade, wishing I had kept Dex’s gun. Maybe all this could have been avoided if I had. Someone banged on the door. I had a feeling it wasn’t Constance. Maybe the slim blonde was coming back to have a chat about her brother.

  I strode over to the door, put my flesh hand on the doorknob, and cocked my metal fist up by my head in case I needed to hit someone and get away quickly. I twisted the handle slowly. Too slowly for the heavy on the other side. The door slammed into my boot where I braced against the attack.

  A familiar voice shouted, “Open up, Bubbles. I know you’re in there.”

  No police, they said. Completely off Swain’s radar, they said. I groaned and opened the door the rest of the way. “You don’t give a girl much of a chance to get presentable, do you, Detective Weiland?”

  “By ‘get presentable’ do you mean ‘destroy the evidence’?” The big man shoved his way into my tiny apartment, seeming to suck all the air out of it as he went. His partner, a skinny slimeball I remembered as Clive Harold, slithered in after him and looked around my flat with half-lidded eyes and a self-satisfied smirk.

  “Would I tell you if I did?”

  Harold picked up my jacket from the chair and started going through the pockets. “Sounds guilty to me.”

  “You think the law applies any less to me because I used to be one of you?” I yanked the jacked from his hands and pushed passed him into the kitchen just so I could have a little breathing room. The boys followed.

  “You remember Harold, don’t you, Bubbles?”
Weiland opened my fridge, looked inside, and shook his head sadly.

  “Get your paws off my stuff, Tom,” I said. “This isn’t a social call.”

  Weiland glowered at me with muddy grey eyes that matched his uniform. He crossed his arms and looked at his new partner.

  “I hear you used to be a pretty good shot,” Harold said, and leaned against the counter and picked his teeth with a long pinky nail.

  “Depends on the kind of shot you’re looking for,” I said, and threw Weiland a look that said he’d get what was coming to him if he’d been flapping his lips about me.

  Harold pointed at me with a finger and mimed pulling the trigger. “A good shot.”

  I dug in my pocket for a piece of gum and made a big show of unwrapping it and putting it in my mouth. I chewed with exaggerated slowness until Weiland finally cracked.

  “Look, Bubbles,” he said. “Who do you know up in the low-tech compound? The Bricks? That’s not your scene.”

  “What do you know?” I turned on him. “You didn’t want to listen to me when we were partners. Maybe I talked about the Bricks all the time while you were busy polishing up the old career?”

  Harold snickered and Weiland’s face went pale. “I said I was sorry about that, Bubbles. You know—”

  “No, Tom. I don’t know. I don’t know a damn thing about anything. Never did, and I certainly don’t now. Why this interest in the Bricks? What’s it got to do with me?”

  “You been out tonight?”

  “Sure. In and out. You know how it is. You used to, anyway.”

  Weiland’s jaw clenched and through his teeth he said, “Who did you see?”

  “That’s none of your business, ‘partner.’ My clients have a right to their privacy.”

  “What clients?” Weiland swelled to twice his already considerable size. I worried he might pop before he worked up the guts to ask me what he really wanted to ask me. “Damn it, Bubbles. I’m trying to help you.”

  “No, Tom. You aren’t trying to help me. You’re trying to help your career and I just happened to get in your way. Now, is one of you goofs going to tell me what this is about, or do I have to wait for the phony papers to be filed?”

  Harold put up his hands and slid between Detective Weiland and me. He sidled into the living room and made a hack job of searching the place without searching. Weiland and I had a stare off in the kitchen. Harold glanced back at us a couple times, made sure we were still busy, and started sidling his way toward the hallway and my bedroom.

  “You seem to know your way around pretty well, Detective Harold.” I kept my eyes on Weiland to gauge his reaction. “You been here before?”

  Harold sneered. Even in the haze of my peripheral vision I could see the jagged, rat-like teeth in his skinny face. He came back to the kitchen and said, “Since lover boy here isn’t going to tell you, I will. We got a call tonight. About a body up in the Bricks.”

  “You keep harping on about the Bricks,” I said. “Didn’t you hear Weiland? That’s not my scene.”

  “We wouldn’t have pegged you for it,” he said. “Last the department’s heard, you were holed up after the accident, drinking yourself into an early grave.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Harold ran the long nail on his pinky finger along his teeth, making a click-click-click noise like a stick dragged across a chain-link fence. “Then we got another call.”

  “You get a lot of calls.” I pushed Weiland out of my way and grabbed my last can of NRG out of the fridge. “Must be nice.”

  “This caller said if we want to know about the body in the Bricks, we should talk to a Betty ‘Bubbles’ Marlowe who lives in a skid-hole apartment in the old industrial zone and keeps her nose a little too clean to be honest.”

  “Now, now”—I cracked the tab on my drink—“you embellished that last part. Nobody ever accused me of keeping my nose clean. That’s how I had my little ‘accident.’”

  Weiland rubbed his face with his big hands until the skin became raw and pink. His eyes looked bleary and the bags beneath them had thin, purple veins tracing away from them. “It was an accident, Bubbles.”

  “Keep telling yourself that, if it helps you sleep at night.” I finished the drink and crushed the can in my cybernetic fist. For once, it did exactly what I wanted it to. The detectives flinched at the noise and their eyes landed on the upgrade as if for the first time. I said, “But by the looks of it, you need a new mantra.”

  “How’s about you tell us what you know about the stiff out front of the Bell place,” Harold said. He licked his lips with a wet, red tongue. They glistened with a thick layer of saliva that sprayed when he spoke. “And then you can show us the papers on that piece you’re wearing.”

  “That’s not what we’re here for, Harold.” Weiland looked like he had finally figured something out that wasn’t spoon fed to him from the brass.

  “The hell it isn’t,” the rat-faced man said through his teeth. A fine mist exploded into the air between us.

  I stepped back. “Sounds like a nice tip. A little too nice if you ask me.”

  “All right, Bubbles. Here it is. We got a no-name phone call pointing us in the direction of the Bricks, and we find a skinny guy in a bad suit missing most of his hair and part of his brains, all laid out across the driveway of the deceased Last Humanist philanthropist, Evangeline Bell. The husband, Wallace Flint, is a big-time tech developer for Libra. Rarely leaves the lab. Nobody in the house saw or heard anything—not even the disgruntled maintenance staff, and there were a few of them. The consensus is that Flint’s big on brains and low on social skills. We ID’d the stiff as a Dexter Wagner. Small-time grifter, as far as we can tell, no history of violence but a little on the wacky side. Flint wouldn’t use a guy like that to clean his toilets, so that angle is out. They don’t use cameras up in the Bricks, so we got no leads there. The hole in his head looks like it was carved out by a cannon ball. Then we get this other call that says if we want to know about the stiff, we should ask you. So here we are. Asking.”

  “This is your asking?” I stuffed the crushed can into the recycling chute and leaned on the counter. “Well this is my telling. I don’t own a gun. I haven’t fired a gun since my service rifle blew up. Can’t stomach them.”

  “Okay,” Weiland said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “You buying this trash?” Harold spat the words. “I want a trace scan. You give me a trace scan that proves you ain’t got no residuals on you, and I’ll happily remove myself from this flea-bitten skid hole. Without a scan, these are just words. The words of a person known to the department to be deceitful and self-serving.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I got served up real nice.” Turning to Weiland, I said, “Is this guy for real?”

  “Let me scan you and we’ll leave,” Weiland said.

  “You’ll leave,” I said. “All right. It doesn’t rate, but I’m tired and I want to be able to sleep without hissy over here spitting all over me. You do it.”

  Weiland did a surface bio-sweep using a small, handheld scanner. There were smaller, cybernetic versions on the black market. Rae had offered to install one in my upgrade. But HCPD weren’t allowed to have any internal tech ever since a hacking incident thirty-some years ago turned HoloCity into a war zone with enhanced police officers and district kings attacking anything that moved. The brass still viewed cybernetic enhancements with a mixture of fear and envy. I could see Harold’s throat working as he watched Weiland scan the arm, his eyes darting back and forth beneath saggy eyelids.

  “She’s clean,” Weiland said.

  Harold threw his arms up in disgust and said, “I’m going down to the patrol car. Get her papers. And don’t linger, lover boy, or I’m taking this higher up the chain.”

  The skinny man slammed his way out the door and stomped along the hallway. Weiland sagged with relief. He said, “Thank you.”

  “I’m serious, Tom. I’ve had a long day and I want to go to slee
p.”

  “How have you been?” He looked me hard in the eye, studying my face without blinking.

  “You’re lingering,” I said. “That’s bad for you career, and for my reputation.”

  His jaw clenched again and he looked away. Then he moved his bulk slowly toward the door. A pang like regret hit me right between the ribs. Probably indigestion from the pseudo-beef tacos. He opened the door and put a hand on the jamb. He paused like he wanted to say something. I wanted him to say it, and I didn’t. I held my breath.

  He said, “You know a guy named Bobby Mook?”

  “Not your best line,” I said, trying to cover my disappointment.

  “Listen,” Tom said. “A little guy, one of Vector’s bookies. You ever heard of him?”

  “Nothing of interest,” I said. “But if he’s one of Vector’s he’s probably got more than one trick up his sleeve.”

  “He’s got a couple of new buttons on his vest,” Weiland said. “Lead ones. Little target buttons. Right over the heart. You know anyone who likes a small bore?”

  “Not many guys on the street have that kind of finesse.”

  “That was my line of thinking.”

  I said, “You’re still lingering.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  He closed the door gently behind him. I barely heard his footsteps as they disappeared down the hallway, but I pressed my forehead against the door and listened anyway. For the second time that day, tears stung my eyes. At least this time, there was no one there to see me cry.

  Chapter Eight

  I didn’t sleep. I sat on my wonky chair and sulked. Mittens came out of hiding and sat with me for a while. Then the cat said, “I recorded it. Just in case.”

  “Thanks.” I wiped the back of my hand over my eyes and pushed my bangs out of my face. “Not that anyone would care if they’d gotten rough.”

  “Maybe not,” Mittens said. “But the feedreels love that kind of stuff. It might be enough to make the Chief uncomfortable.”

  “Last time I made Swain uncomfortable, he returned the favour.”

  “You didn’t have the media behind you that time. You have to think about things differently now. You aren’t on the force. They don’t like you. But that opens other avenues of protection. Like this guy Vector that just called.”