by S. C. Jensen
“How about you call up a cab, sweetheart,” the ice-blonde woman whispered in my ear. “We need a little privacy, don’t you think?”
She jabbed something through my jacket and into my left shoulder, just above the upgrade. The metal arm seized up, curling in on itself like the leg of a rusted up robotic insect. She said, “Don’t get any clever ideas.”
“Sure,” I said. “I never had many of them anyway.”
I tested to see if the tattler still worked, then called up the hack-pod service I’d used to bring me here. We stood there in silence, her behind me with the skinny barrel of the target gun pressed into my spine. The rain found its stride, and the cold water cascaded over my face and soaked into my clothes until I was as wet as one of Dickie’s sewer gators and about as mad. But when the hack pulled up, I let the blonde push me inside and I didn’t make a fuss when she crawled in beside me.
The silence continued inside the hack, the drumming of the rain and the woman’s soft panting breath the only sounds to be heard. Now I could see her; her gentle coif of frosty hair had collapsed into damp waves like albino seaweed. Her thin, red lips stretched thin in her pale face and her eyes had hardened into something like iced metal, as cold and grey as early morning light. Streaks of mascara crept from the corners of her eyes toward the hair above her ears, which the rain hadn’t been able to wash away.
“Get out,” she said when the hack pod pulled up in front of my building. I complied and let her march me up the back stairs and to my door.
The emptiness of my flat hit me harder than it ever had before. It was a pathetic place to live. It was an even more pathetic place to die. The woman wrapped her frigid fingers around the back of my neck and pushed me into the lopsided chair by the door as the gun pressed insistently against my temples. Mittens, the little traitor, was nowhere to be seen.
“I told you to lay off the Bell girl,” she whispered. “You shouldn’t have been in that car.”
“Easy there,” I said. “You don’t want to do something you’ll regret.”
“What makes you think I’d regret it?” She jabbed me in the side of the head and then walked around so I could see her in front of me. A narrow, red scarf wrapped around her throat like a knife wound. The thin, black jacket gaped open at the chest, revealing a white blouse gone transparent in the rain. A small pink nipple poked through beside the lapel like it was ready for a party but had shown up at the wrong address. The cigarette shaped jacket was longer than her skirt, and her pale bare legs stuck out the bottom like doll’s legs, straight into a pair of heels not made for running in. She said, “You killed my brother.”
“He shot at me.” I searched the room behind her for some clue as to how to get out of this mess. Nothing knocked me over the head. “You said his gun wasn’t loaded.”
“He fooled me on that,” she said, and sighed. “That’s on me. I should have watched him closer. But you dropped him. He’s dead.”
“I didn’t drop him,” I said. “I don’t even carry a gun.”
“That so?”
She held her pistol a little sideways so that it glinted in the dim kitchen light. A clear, gel-like substance wrapped around the barrel of the gun. Some kind of organic silencer. Nobody in my building would be concerned with a little gunfire, but I appreciated the effort.
Through her thin lips, she said, “You should have laid off.”
“Maybe. I can see that a little better now. I always was a slow learner.”
“Not anymore,” she said. “Now, are you comfortable? I’d like you to be comfortable. I don’t want a lot of fuss.”
Where the hell was that cat? It could call someone for me ... not the police, but Dickie maybe. Or Rae.
And then we’d probably all get shot.
Would Tom be off duty yet? He owed me. He knew I was right about Swain and he kept his big yap shut. A career man through and through.
Stupid cat.
I said, “I don’t know when’s the last time you looked a gun barrel in the eye, but I’m not too comfortable.”
“I never did like a big emotional goodbye. Dex went nice and quick, I’ll give you that. You didn’t let him suffer.”
“Are those big, icy greys of yours nearsighted?” I snapped. Nerves made me edgy. “I didn’t shoot. The heavy in the front took care of that. She didn’t even blink.”
“It’s a nice story,” she said. “She said you’d say something like that.”
“Who said?”
A thumping noise from the kitchen made her flinch, and I ducked. But she didn’t fire. She didn’t even turn her head. Too bad. That might have given me an angle. Another thump and then a crash as the stacks of who-knows-what I had stacked in the storage closet fell out and scattered across the kitchen floor. She glanced quickly, too quickly for me to react. Then locked her gaze on me again. A grinding sound, like nuts and bolts being chewed up in little metal teeth, came from somewhere in the middle of the mess. A dusty cardboard box lurched out of the pile and moved toward us. She wasn’t watching it.
“What the—” I stared at the box, trying to figure out what was going on.
She laughed and shook her head. “Nice try.”
“No, there’s a ...” Words failed me. What was it? Was Mittens in there?
“Dex must have knocked something loose,” she said. “You almost had me with that look on your face. Maybe you should have been an actor. Feedreels love watching people screw up their own lives.”
The box crept closer. It was almost directly behind her. I said, “That’s not a bad idea.”
“Why don’t you get up,” she said through clenched teeth. Her hand trembled a little. The ice-cold broad was no cold-hearted killer, but she seemed determined to see it through. “I’d feel better if you were laying down.”
“Sure,” I said. I stood slowly, keeping my flesh arm up and the upgrade curled against my chest. “It’s important to feel good when you’re murdering innocent people.”
“Shut up,” she hissed. “And move.”
I moved. I stepped straight toward her, slow but deliberate. Not so fast that she’d panic and shoot me, but close enough that she had to step back. The back of her bare calves connected with the box. Her jaw dropped open and her big eyes bugged. She flailed her arms once, twice. The box pushed into her calves and she toppled backward. The gun went off. I saw a little spout of fire but didn’t hear anything until the bullet made a soft puff in my drywall. The box tipped over to reveal my sweeper bot, trailing wires like some kind of undead sea creature. It grinded its way toward the woman, reached out with a skinny arm, like an antennae, and zapped her.
The woman cried out. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she dropped the pistol, rolling onto her side to protect herself from whatever the little bot was juicing her with. I lunged forward and kicked the gun into the hall. I pulled the woman’s arms behind her back and twisted them with one hand.
“What did you do to my arm?”
She didn’t respond. I rolled her onto her chest and kept my weight on her shoulders. I quickly reached up and felt around the top of my upgrade. Something was wedged into the flesh behind the metal shoulder cap. I grabbed onto it and pulled. Pain seared across my shoulders and down my arm, and the upgrade spasmed. My eyes burned and I gritted my teeth. The arm jerked and twitched with each pulse of pain my nerves shot into me. But then it settled and the upgrade relaxed. I flexed my fingers a couple times to make sure it was working normally again. Then I pulled the scarf from the woman’s neck and used it to bind her hands behind her back.
I looked at the thing that had incapacitated the upgrade, an elongated teardrop shaped needle slick with my blood. I dropped it onto the floor and crushed it beneath the heel of my boot.
“Well,” said a voice from the hallway. Yellow eyes blinked at me. “That went much better than I expected it to.”
I looked from Mittens to the mangled sweeper bot. “Were you ... driving that thing?”
“You said I could ord
er a new one,” the cat said. “So I decided to play with it a little before I killed it. I am a cat, after all.”
“I don’t think that’s how cats usually play with their food.”
The cat’s eyes narrowed and it licked a little white paw. “You’re welcome.”
“What was that thing she stabbed me with?” I asked the cat. “Have you ever come across something like that?”
“Nothing chemical, but it wouldn’t have to be. Your nerves and muscles control the arm. If she hit the right nerve in the right way, it might be enough to confuse the biofeedback systems.”
“Great,” I said. “Anti-tech acupuncture.”
I kicked the bot away from the woman and checked her pulse. She blinked rapidly in my direction. And as her eyes focussed on me, she let out a stream of curses that would make a Grit District pro skirt blush.
“Cool it,” I said. “You should be thanking me. You’re no killer.”
She started crying then, big wracking sobs that shook her whole body. She glared up at me through a stream of tears, and her red mouth twisted away from her teeth in a look of pure despair. “Why did you have to do it? Why did you have to kill Dex?”
“I didn’t kill your brother,” I said. “It was Flint’s supposed chauffer. Constance. You know her? What made you show up then, I’d like to know. Who were you trying to give the shake to?”
She pressed her lips closed tight and shook her head.
“I don’t suppose you know a little flake called Bobby Mook, do you?” I bent to wipe her hair from her forehead. “The guy got shot with a small bore like yours sometime this morning. Maybe it’s yesterday morning now.”
She shook her head again.
“Who hired you to kill the Bell girl?”
Her eyes got wide and she sniffed. “That wasn’t in the contract.”
“You just wanted to put a scare on her?”
She closed her mouth and turned her head away from me.
“Fine,” I said. “You can tell your story to my friend Detective Weiland. He’ll be decent enough to you.”
Mittens padded over to the woman and batted at the sole of her shoe with its paw. “You’re going to give him a cookie after what he did to you?”
“Put the call in,” I said. “But give me a half hour head start. I have to deliver some bad news to Mr. Wallace Flint.”
I picked up the woman’s gun and stuffed it in the icebox. “You know, someone’s gone to some effort to make stiffs with small bullets in them. If I were you, that’d make me a little sore.”
I felt the pocket of my jacket. The gun from Miss Martinez’s apartment was still there. One more tick in the “enthusiastic amateur” box for the icy blonde. She cursed me one more time before I slammed the door and headed down the threadbare stairs and out into the rain.
Chapter Nine
I called Dickie on my way down and told him what I needed. He was half asleep and drooling in his shoes but managed to catch the drift after a couple of flybys. I felt a little guilty about waking him after the rough morning we’d had, but I couldn’t afford to have HCPD track me to the Bricks.
I needed to talk to Flint. Alone.
I didn’t feel like standing around, so I had Dickie pick me up in front of my old drinking and dancing haunt, techRose. I hoofed it from the old industrial wasteland toward the dirty neon and misty holograms of the strip. As soon as I got there, though, I regretted it. It came at me like a long-forgotten dream, or a nightmare. Bodies clothed in more sequins and glitter than actual clothing huddled beneath the scattered awnings along the Grit’s famous clubbing zone. The pinches and drunks were out in full force, stumbling out of blackened doorways, crouched in the narrow corridors between multi-level party houses, puking in the gutters. The rain came down. It didn’t make a dent in the filth.
Standing outside techRose, with the bass from the music inside thumping out into the streets and the laughter of streetwise girls and boys getting their glow on, I felt my throat constrict and the muscles in my chest tighten. The rain and the glitter and the lights, the smell of street cart food wafting out from beneath kaleidoscopic awnings. It made me hungry; hungry for the life I’d left behind, willingly or not. There was a hole inside my soul that had been scraped out, slowly, after years of filling it up with this place. I had been washed away from the inside out, like the caves left behind by an underground river. Now that fluid life force had dried up, and I was an empty shell.
When Dickie’s boiler car pulled up, I jumped in as fast as I could. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Where are we going again?”
“The Bricks,” I said, slouching down in my seat and closing my eyes against the memories creeping in. “A weird, low-tech compound ... here, I’ll show you.”
I gave him the coordinates from my trip with Constance.
“Never heard of it.” He shrugged and punched them in. “You don’t look so good.”
“I’ll be okay,” I said. “I just have to get the smell of gin and vomit out of my nostrils. I’m having flashbacks to my misspent youth.”
“You mean, like two weeks ago?”
I massaged the back of my shoulder where the glass dart had stuck me. The nerve jumped and my upgrade twitched. The unfamiliarity of the arm was itself becoming familiar. “It feels like a lifetime.”
“So, what’s the smoke?” Dickie turned in his seat and crossed his ankle over his knee. He leaned forward eagerly, his brown eyes comically wide. “You any wiser than the last time I picked you up?”
“Wise might be a stretch.”
“What do you need me to do?” He rubbed the seam of his tailored pants between his thumb and middle finger. The slick, slightly iridescent fabric made a hissing noise. “I know I didn’t rate for much last time ... Hawkins makes me nervous. But I could stick to the shadows, though, be a lookout. Or I could—”
I let him blabber about all the things he could do and watched the lights streak by as we zipped along the grid. I needed to get off this job without doing any damage to Rae’s career. How would Flint take the news of Angelica’s murder? Or did he already know? There had to be a way to play it so that I could be out of the picture before the HCPD greys started throwing their weight around. What made a man like Flint tick? The man was a tangle of incongruences. A childless father. A broke man with a rich, dead wife. A high-tech R&D hotshot living with the low-tech nutjobs. There was a thread there. I just needed to tug it and see which bits fell apart.
“So what do you think?” Dickie asked.
The boiler car had pulled onto the darkened streets of the concrete village. This time the houses looked less like adobe homes and more like burial mounds, squatting and grey with the gaping black holes of windows like eyeless sockets staring into the night. The car’s lights cast dancing shadows between the buildings so that they seemed to loom out in front of us and then slip away to either side where they followed us in the darkness.
“Creepy,” Dickie said, his question forgotten.
I said, “Just drop me in front of the old Bell place and then wait for me down at the entrance to the compound. If I’m not back in an hour, call Tom Weiland. He might need help finding the place.”
Relief flooded across my friend’s features and he surveyed the strange community. Then he turned back to me with his mouth in a hard, tight line. “You sure you want me to do that?”
“By then I’ll either be gone or dead,” I said. “Someone will have to clean up this little mess of Flint’s. Might as well be Weiland.”
“Sure, Bubbles,” Dickie said. He didn’t look happy as we pulled up in front of Flint’s Luddite fortress. Dexter Wagner’s body had been removed, but the rain couldn’t wash away the evidence of his death. The ghost of his blood stained the wet pavement, black on dark grey. The big, metal gate leaned crookedly, the circular E.B. monogram cracked in two with one side opening toward us as if inviting me inside. I opened the beetle-wing door and ducked into the rain.
Dickie said, �
�Be careful.”
I reached inside the car and squeezed his shoulder. I wished I had something to give him besides gratitude. “Thanks, Dick. For everything. If something happens to me, take care of Mittens, will you?”
“Oh. Um.” His eyes bugged out at me and he bit his bottom lip to stop it from trembling. “Maybe Rae? I’m allergic. To nanoparticles. It’s a rare—”
I closed shut the door and slipped through the opening in the gate with a smile on my face that made my cheeks ache. It felt like a long time since I’d stretched those muscles. I held it there until it became a leer as I approached the ominous grey building. I clenched my teeth together and climbed the wide, moulded-concrete terrace steps toward the front door. As if to further proclaim the Brick’s dedication to backwardness, a pair of torches lit either side of the great, black entryway, burning with chemical blue flames. I pounded on the door with my metal fist. A twinge of satisfaction burned in my belly when I saw the dent I’d left in the smooth, black wood.
The door cracked open, and the glowing barrel of a plasma rifle poked out into the rain to greet me. A voice growled from the other side of the gun from a face I couldn’t see. “Beat it, skid. The boss ain’t accepting any more visitors.”
“Does Libra’s top R&D scientist always have heavies guarding his front door?”
“I said drift, if you know what’s good for you.” The glowing barrel jabbed me in the chest and made a humming noise as the E-mag field began charging up. The noise made the nerves in my left arm burn.
I shifted my weight away from the gun. “I work for the boss.”
He grunted. “Appointment only. No exceptions.”
“He invited me,” I said.
“He didn’t say nothing.”
“I’m a little late,” I said. “You can ask Constance if she’s around.”
The gun disappeared and the door slammed shut. I put myself on the opposite side from where I’d been standing and pressed my back against the wood. After a minute or two the door cracked open, and the rifle nosed out again.
