Dames for Hire

by S. C. Jensen

  “Mick Vector?”

  “I intercepted that one too.” Mittens purred and rolled over to expose its belly. “Figured the uniforms were giving you a hard enough time without that angle. He left a message for you.”

  I tickled the nanoparticle fur absently. “What message?”

  “Wants to meet you at the Heights,” it said. “To talk business.”

  “Great. You know he’s the one behind the shill I’m supposed to smear for Flint, right?”

  “Doesn’t hurt to keep your options open,” Mittens said and grabbed my hand with its claws. “You don’t even like Flint.”

  “I like Rae.” I shook the tingling sensation out of my hand and glared at the SmartPet. “And I don’t like Vector’s methods.”

  Mittens shrugged in a way no real cat ever could. “Want to call him back?”

  “I’ll go,” I said. “Might as well spend a bit of this retainer before I get myself faded.”

  “You want a ScanAnon pass? You can afford it.”

  “Nah,” I said. “Let them watch me if they want to. I don’t feel like hiding anymore.”

  “It’s your funeral.”

  I set the cat on the floor and pulled on the overcoat and hat I’d gotten from Dickie. “Do I still look like a pro skirt?”

  “Maybe one that doubles as a hitman.”

  “Close enough,” I said, and called in the ride.

  I had to hoof it a ways to the nearest pick-up point. The auto-driving hacks don’t go down the tertiary roads without video surveillance on every corner. Too easy for a mob of desperate skids to overpower a slow-moving pod, knock out the maglev system, and piece it out for the hock market. I knew HCPD could be watching me. My ID would pop up in the hack system, and if I was flagged—and of course I was—someone down at headquarters would hear about it. But it was late, and the night shift was notoriously lazy, so there was a chance they wouldn’t catch my movements until morning. In any case, they probably wouldn’t try anything inside Gibson Heights. Even Swain watched his step around the highbinders.

  So I got inside the hack pod, sat back, and let it take me back to the pretty glass dome that protected HoloCity’s richest, most virtuously delicate snowflakes. The hack slid smoothly and silently along the grid, first through the Grit strips thick with crowds partaking in the night trades, then through the quieter but heavily surveilled corridors of the Biz District, where back-alley dealers kept to the shadows between towering skyscrapers. Gibson Heights sat above it all, a glittering mound of wealth in a city of deep disparity. What was I doing mixed up with people like this? The case was smelling worse with every passing moment, and somewhere in the middle of it all, I knew I’d find the worm of corruption digging beneath the surface. I closed my eyes and let my mind wander over all the little details, trying to find what I was missing.

  Hawkins let me into the Heights through a man door reserved for staff. Rental hacks weren’t allowed in the garages, he said. Only privately owned cars. But he’d been expecting me.

  I said, “I hear Vector’s in.”

  “Sure.” His dark eyes, partially hidden behind the visilenses, slid nervously over me as he held the door open. Probably he was scanning me again, just in case. “I’ll take you up.”

  He led me through a narrow, white corridor and filed me into a narrow, white box like the lift I’d shared with Mungo. But Hawkins didn’t take up half so much space and he smelled nicer, Like the way perfume companies want us to imagine fresh running water smells like. We know it’s a lie, but it hits all the same buttons in the brain anyway, so we keep buying into it. Hawkins gave a verbal code, and the room shifted almost imperceptibly. A small, orange light above the doors indicated that we were in motion and shouldn’t attempt to open the doors, though they had no handles I could see. Hawkins tapped long brown fingers against a lean, muscular thigh, the pink moons of his fingernails making a soft scratching noise in the otherwise silent transporter.

  When the doors opened, Hawkins led the way into the strangely luminous corridor. Shadows moved on either side of us, performing acts both lewd and banal. Hawkins didn’t look at them and I didn’t either. He stopped in front of Miss Martinez’s suite and said his code again, then moved aside so I could pose for the cameras.

  “Beat it, Hawkins,” a gravelly voice said over the intercom. My chaperone narrowed his eyes and twitched his jaw a couple of times. Then he spun on his heels and stalked back toward the lift. Once he was gone, the door opened.

  A barrel-chested man—not so big as he wouldn’t fit through the doorway, but almost—filled the space between the frames. He leaned down to look at me a little closer. He had a soft, brown face with tawny cheeks and a wide, hooked nose. His thick black eyebrows looked like they had their own personal stylist and curved delicately up over his nose in a way that made him appear both sinister and comical.

  “You must be Marlowe.” He grinned at me and I stepped back, not sure what the grin meant. “What brings you to the Heights?”

  “I was under the impression that I’d been summoned,” I said. Then, uncertainly, I added, “Sir.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “If you’re Scarlett Martinez, your looks have taken a bit of a dive.”

  He leaned back and laughed heartily, his belly bouncing up and down like a balloon dancing in the wind. He said, “Come inside. Come inside.”

  “Is Miss Martinez in?” I stepped inside the apartment for the second time that day and noticed a different feel in the air. The scent of cloves still lingered, but the air no longer held the haze of kretek smoke. Another big man with a bigger gun leaned against the glass table where Scarlett had prepared her drink. He wore black sunglasses and turned his head so that he wasn’t looking in my direction, which almost certainly meant he was.

  “No.” Vector seated himself in a low-slung chair that looked like a melting meringue. “She told me you’d been bothering her, though. Asked me to have a chat with you about some of your stranger ideas.”

  “My ideas are strange?” I didn’t sit. “Here I thought I was the only one who made any sense.”

  “Does working for Flint make sense?”

  “Not the way he likes it,” I said. “But if I can do it my way, I don’t see the harm in it.”

  “Why are you busting Scarlett’s chops?” Vector leaned forward so that his belly hung between his knees, straining the fine pearly buttons that held his silver suit jacket together. “Don’t you believe in true love?”

  “Not with that kind of money involved,” I said.

  The man’s oversized eyebrows drooped in oversized sorrow. “Such a cynical heart.”

  “Don’t twist this around on me,” I said. “None of this is my idea. Now why am I here?”

  “Scarlett told me something about you,” he said. “Something that interests me very much. I’d like to hear your version of it.”

  “Forget Scarlett for a minute,” I said. “Where’s the Bell girl?”

  “She owes me some dough. I don’t keep her on a leash.”

  “No, but Miss Martinez does and then she brings it to you when it needs a sharp tug, is that right?”

  “What exactly do you think the nature of Scarlett’s work is for me?”

  I clenched my teeth together, knowing that if he had to ask, I probably had everything upside down. “I know what it looks like.”

  “Scarlett Martinez has one of the finest unadulterated minds in HoloCity.” Vector steepled his fingers before his round, moon face and leaned back in the chair. It made an inorganic squeaking noise, but it held. He watched me with dark irises encased in heavy folds of flesh so that his eyes looked like the thin hollow crescents of a mask. “She can run numbers as fast as most computers and has an eye for human ticks and tells that machines still can’t replicate. If I suspect someone’s trying to game the house, all I have to do is have Scarlett watch them for a hand or two and she can tell me what they are doing and how they are doing it. She is invaluable to me. So, if she
happens to fall for a girl who can’t hold her liquor or her holocreds, I am inclined to indulge the relationship.”

  “Never mind the eight mil the Bell girl is set to inherit in a few weeks.”

  “I will take back what she owes me,” Vector said. “Not a single chip more.”

  “How noble.”

  “The thing is, Marlowe, you’re thinking like a Grit skid. You can’t help what you are, but you can’t see the whole picture from where you are, down there in the gutter. I understand human nature. I understand that inheriting millions of cred is not going to cure the angel of her habits. I don’t have to take what isn’t mine. I simply have to wait for her to give it to me.”

  I turned my back on Vector and looked at my own reflection on the wall behind me. My pink hair hung in lank strings around my face. Black smudges darkened the shadows beneath my eyes. Fresh red scars peeked out beneath the collar of my black jacket, glistening faintly in the low, yellow light. I looked every inch a Grit skid in a class joint like this. It ground on me a bit. But worse was that he was right. This was an angle I hadn’t considered.

  I said, “It might interest you to know that someone tried to hold up the Bell girl’s car this evening. Got himself shot in the process.”

  “You think I play games like that?”

  I walked over to the glass serving table where the thug leaned with his gun. He didn’t acknowledge my presence in the least. I reached behind him and flipped up the hidden door that opened the ice box and pulled out a bottle of lunar water. I felt Vector’s eyes on me as I took out a glass and filled it with crushed ice. I poured the crystal-clear liquid out of the blue bottle and into the glass and sipped it. I leaned on the serving table next to the thug and stared back at Vector.

  “I asked you a question,” he said.

  I took another sip and said, “I know. I’m thinking about how to answer. The short answer is no—I wouldn’t have. But it happened. I was there. I saw it. I just dealt with a couple of my old pals in the HCPD to convince them that I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger. The truth is, I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “Let me help you to understand,” he said. “Tell me about it.”

  “It happened in the Bricks.” A trickle of condensation slipped from the glass, along my fingers, and down my wrist. “I was on my way to discuss matters with Flint.”

  “What matters?”

  “The kind of matters I’m too myopic to understand.”

  “And you think I had something to do with this would-be heist? It doesn’t rate.”

  “It doesn’t look too good on you if something happens to the Bell girl when she owes you so much dough.”

  “That’s not the way I see it.” Vector rested his hands upon his generous belly and leaned back until the chair protested. “If the Bell girl dies, I’m out a hundred K stacks. I should be paying you to babysit her.”

  “Might be you wanted to send a message to anyone else holding out on their debts,” I said. “Might be you just wanted to scare her. I don’t know. It’s hard to see from down here in the gutter.”

  He laughed his bouncing laugh again and his eyes disappeared beneath the heavy black brow. “You’re sore now. Don’t be sore. I like you.”

  “I hope no one holds it against me.” I said. “Now why did you really want to see me?”

  “There’s another guy got himself shot up today,” Vector said. “A one-time friend of mine named Bobby Mook. You went to see him after your left Libra. I know this because you had a tail.”

  “The guy I almost ran over outside of Glitter Haus?” I asked. “Or the old guy poking his head out of Vitality Industries?”

  Vector leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily. “You are good. You are very good. One of them. Maybe both. Maybe more. It doesn’t matter. This tail knows you went in to see Mook shortly after you took the job from Flint, but that you were too late to ask him any questions. You didn’t call the brass. This makes me think you and I could get along just fine.”

  “Mook’s shooting looks worse for you than anything with the Bell girl,” I said. “What kind of black paint was he slinging?”

  “That I don’t know,” Vector said. “And now it seems we won’t find out.”

  “That’s all you wanted?”

  “I wanted to see Scarlett,” Vector said. “But it looks like she’s not coming back this evening. I have to get back to work.”

  The thug pushed himself off the cabinet and stood himself up next to the door. Vector heaved his bulk out of the misshapen chair and wiped some imaginary dust from the sleeves of his silver suit. He put his hands in his pockets and said, “You coming?”

  “Mind if I stay and finish my drink?” I tipped my glass at him. “Not very often I get to wet my whistle with the pure stuff.”

  Vector’s rounded shoulders shrugged. “Why not? I pay the rent. And it will annoy Hawkins.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Just do me a favour and stay out of Scarlett’s way.” He rolled toward the door.

  “Just so long as she stays out of mine.”

  “Stay sharp, Marlowe.” Mick Vector opened the door and closed it again, leaving a big empty space where the boys had been.

  I looked around the apartment again, feeling a little dizzy. Nothing fit together worth a Grit strip pinch. Vector was right. Out of everyone, he had the least motive to go after Angelica Bell. Scarlett had the means and the motive, but she was better off with Angelica alive too. At least until they were married and the inheritance came through. I poked around the room again, looking for the ideas I might have had and lost before Angelica clobbered me.

  The bedroom was more or less as I’d left it this morning. A tall, hurricane-style lamp on one end table swirled with dancing bubbles and emitted a soft, yellow glow. The drawer of the end table was slightly ajar. I peeked inside, but it was empty except for a charging port. The bathroom was as simple and elegant as a woman like Scarlett might expect. A rumpled hand towel sat next to the sink that wasn’t there before, so someone had been in and out since the girls left me napping under the chaise lounge.

  I came out of the bathroom and looked around the bedroom again. The clove smell was still there. But there was something else, faint, like a dream you can’t quite shake. It wasn’t the first time I’d smelled it today. I bent down and lifted the skirt of the bed. Something glinted at me from the darkness. I reached under with my upgrade, hooked a metal finger around the thing, and pulled it out.

  An elegant handgun, the kind highbinder broads favoured to go with their evening dresses, dangled from my finger as I stood up and sniffed at the barrel. The acrid stink of burned power lingered inside. Another small bore. Wake up, HoloCity, the ladies have learned to shoot. I dropped it in the pocket of my trench coat and eyed the room for any signs of a struggle. I had an idea about who it might belong to, and for some reason, I didn’t want one of our illustrious HCPD detectives finding it.

  My gaze landed on the pearlescent folding door separating the clothes closet from the rest of the room. It was a delicate looking thing, designed to reflect light and attention from the mundanity within. Or I supposed that was the idea. I didn’t give a gutter-rat’s ass about interior design. This particular door sat a little crooked, though, and that did interest me. It interested me very much.

  I pushed on the door. It stuck. I pushed harder. The slender ovular knob dug into the palm of my flesh hand and I threw my shoulder into it too. The door flexed and then broke. Its slider jumped out of the track and, unhinged, the door fell sideways and away, revealing a pile of tough looking black techwear and leather. Then the shape tumbled forward, and Angelica Bell stared up at me with two dead blue eyes and one red one right between them.

  I fell backward and tripped on the corner of the bed, landing hard on my right hip. The young woman’s face leered at me, and her left hand flopped over her muscular chest and pointed with blunt fingernails. An internal tattler had been torn out of her right forearm,
leaving behind a reddish-brown hole and a pool of congealed blood. Her subdermal implants made her skin mottled and scaled, and somehow, more human in death than she had seemed in life. Her black hair fell across her forehead in a childish way, like she’d just woken up from a nap.

  I pushed myself out of the room, crawling backwards on my hands and feet like a crab. Stood up. Checked my pocked for the gun. Then I wiped down every surface I thought I might have touched on either visit, knowing full well I’d be obliterating the biomarkers of the killer as well. I found a stairwell opposite the lift and took that rather than calling Hawkins up, and somehow managed to find my way out of the building and into the cold, rainy, HoloCity night. Outside the gate, I threw up on the grid.

  A holomonitor popped out of the sidewalk and shook a finger at me. “Ah, ah, ah! Someone’s had too much fun tonight. Would you like me to call a private car? SecurityFirst Chaperone Services guarantee that you will arrive at your destination safely. Complimentary medical flushes available for when you’ve really overindulged! Package pricing is available—”

  I stumbled away from the advertisement, barely feeling my feet hit the spongy surface of the kinetic sidewalk. I closed my eyes and turned my face up to the drizzling rain as if I could wash away the job if I stood there long enough. This was bad. Very bad. Three bodies now, and all of them linked to me. Chief Swain would have a field day if Detective Weiland and his slimeball partner connected the dots. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t done the killing. Swain wasn’t going to concern himself with details like that. It was a wonder he hadn’t already pulled a handful of fake charges out of his ass and served me up with an extended holiday in the can. Probably he was biding his time, hoping to land something stickier on me in case I had friends in low places.

  I did. But not the kind that could help me now.

  I heard the click before I felt the cold barrel of the gun kiss the back of my neck. The chill of déjà vu crept across my shoulder blades. The last guy to pull this move was dead. Which meant—