by S. C. Jensen
“What are you on about?” I tossed a pen at him and knocked the Homburg off his slicked-back black hair. “I don’t even have business cards.”
“Bubbles Marlowe: Psychic Detective.” He waved a hand over the glass as if magically conjuring a new sign. “It does have marketing potential.”
My secretary was endlessly enthusiastic to expand his tattler and email handling repertoire into other realms. Interior design. Marketing and promotions. Assistant P.I. He wanted to do it all so badly I didn’t even have to pay him. Good thing, too, because I couldn’t afford to. Dickie comes from money. His parental units run a wildly successful PornoPop franchise out of the HoloCity Biz District. Big money. I met Dickie when I busted up a gang of petty thieves who thought they’d hit the big time with a quick and easy kidnapping scheme. Trouble is, Dickie’s parents hadn’t realized he was missing yet, and the thieves were too small time to get themselves noticed. He’d been hanging upside down in a makeshift cell for a week when I found him. I’ve always wondered if all the extra blood flow to his brain sent him over the edge. Anyway, he never did go home after that. He hung around the station for a while, trying to get my number, and when I got canned, there he was with a business proposal. And a personal allowance.
“Dickie, have you been day drinking?”
Dickie dropped the magnifying glass on the desk and picked the gunmetal grey Homburg off the floor. He wiped off some imaginary dirt and hung it on the coat rack. His lips pulled down into a sad clown frown. “Funny you should ask. I was just wondering the same thing about you.”
“I’ve had a rough night.” I stood up and cracked my head on the desk for good measure. Cursing, I fell back into the chair and crushed the backpack. I tugged it out from under my ass, tossed it on the floor. “But I’m sober. If this keeps up, though, I’m going to reconsider my life choices.”
“You look like last night’s dinner splattered on the transport grid.”
I checked my skull for soft spots. “I bet you say that to all the ladies.”
“When did you enter the Lucky Bastard Sweepstakes?” Dickie opened the little office cooler and tossed me an NRG can.
“Exactly never.” I iced goose-egg number three and started rifling through drawers. “Are you going to help me or not?”
“I’m no Private Eye,” Dickie said, kicking the fridge closed and cracking open his own can, his voice a little wistful as if to say some day … “But I’m pretty sure you have to enter to win.”
“The only thing I’ve ever won is an early retirement.” I found a piece of stale gum along with a ten-spot chip tucked in the back of the filing cabinet. I shoved the gum into my mouth. “And I had to blow off my arm to do that.”
“Well then, consider yourself a Lucky Bastard.” Dickie punched a button on the wall and HoloPop of the new luxury cruise satellite ship Island Dreamer spun in the middle of the room. Beneath the behemoth space craft neon block letters screamed CONGRATULATIONS! BETTY MARLOWE, YOU ARE A WINNER!
“When did you get this?”
“You received the notification shortly after you left for your stakeout last night.” He punched the button again, and the HoloPop disappeared. “I tried to ring your tattler, but you’ve got comms blocked. Again.”
I checked my settings. He was right. I flicked on comms and notifications again and was assaulted by a barrage of tuneless pinging. Wincing, I opened my energy drink and took a swig. “Sorry. You didn’t sleep here all night, did you?”
Dickie rubbed a faintly stubbled chin. “Well. I didn’t sleep that much.”
Most of the pings were the usual ads and garbage, but I did have a missed call from my client at about the time Weiland was wagging his gums at me. I hit the recall and leaned back in my chair.
“Marlowe? Oh … I’m sorry. I hope this message reaches you in time.” The client’s breathless voice whispered through the office speakers. Like the last time we spoke, it was filtered through a tone scrambler so that she sounded like many people speaking at once. “The job I hired you for … everything’s going sideways. I have reason to believe my sister is already … Look, I’m sorry to have wasted your time. Do not attempt to contact her. It may be too dangerous. I’m sorry.”
“It was that bad?”
“Worse,” I said, showing him the welt on my neck. “The girl was dead when I got there, and another one got me with a ring-stinger before her insides got shown the way out.”
Dickie crushed his can and popped it into the recycling chute. He tipped his head at the tattler. “At least she’s sorry.”
“It was a setup.” I balled my can up into a tight sphere with the upgrade and made a shot for the chute.
The can fell short, but Dickie dove for it and smacked it with the palm of his hand just far enough for the vac seal to open up and suck it home. He did a victory lap of the office with his hands raised about his head, hissing the sound of distant applause. “And the crowd goes wild!”
“Sit your ass in a chair, Dick.” I dug the pitiful collection of cred out of my pockets and stacked them on the desk. “This is serious.”
Dickie plunked into a silver task chair and spun around to face me. “How much do you need?”
“I’ve got a whopping seventy-eight cred to my name right now,” I said. “And with that last gig busting out, it’s not getting better any time soon. There must be something around here we can sell. You can transfer the cred to my account. I’ve got to move before the time runs out on my transit pass.”
Dickie brought up a holoscreen from the other side of the desk and started flipping through files. “Is a 500 spot enough?”
“We don’t have anything worth that much.” I looked around the office, bare except for the shared desk, a couple of chairs, the coatrack, and the mini-fridge. Minimalist Chic, according to Dickie. Looked more like Poor Man’s Industrial to me. “Can you live without the cooler for a couple of—”
My tattler pinged a notification. A stack of five hundred cred landed in my main account. “Dickie, you can’t—”
“I didn’t.” His eyes folded into gleeful crescent moons above his round cheeks as he grinned through the holoscreen at me. “That was your apologetic benefactor.”
“Her sister was dead before I could deliver the message.” I flipped through the statement screen. No notes. Just the client code. And a fat stack of cred. “I can’t accept this.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a setup,” Dickie said.
“I know a steaming pile when I smell it, Dick.” I ran my fingers through my hair and pulled hard enough to make my eyes water. “I don’t have time to sit here and puzzle it out. I have to scatter. The chief is out for blood this time.”
“You think Swain is behind it?” Dickie’s cheeks dropped and his brown eyes widened. Then he clapped his hands together so hard I felt it in my teeth. “Excellent!”
I glared and kicked him in the shin under the desk. He yelped and spun into the middle of the room.
“I didn’t will the agency to you,” I said. “So don’t order the cake and holostreamers just yet.”
“HoloCity PD has no jurisdiction—” A thought dawned on him like a poke in the eye. He squinted at me. “Wait, who did you will it to?”
“Focus, Dickie.” I stood, stuffed the measly pile of credit chips back into my pocket, and grabbed my backpack off the floor. “The goal is for me not to get faded by Chief Swain’s goons.”
“Why scatter in the suburban slums when you can drift away on an Island Dream,” Dickie said, grinning again. He kicked himself over to the wall and hit the button again. A massive ship with Island Dreamer plastered across its hull in crisp white lettering hovered in the middle of the office with CONGRATULATIONS! blinking underneath it.
“A vacation.” The pieces started to click together like hungry teeth. “And HCPD—”
“Can’t touch you.” Dickie did another v
ictory lap around the office. “They don’t have jurisdiction outside the stratosphere directly above HoloCity limits, or in any station associated with international space travel.”
“You checked it out?” I ask. “This thing’s legit?”
“Boarding started three days ago,” he said. “Today’s the last day to catch a public bangtail. Tomorrow the private shuttles will dock and then—” He made a soaring motion with his hands.
“Seems too good to be true.”
“You’ll probably have to fend off an army of timeshare pushers.” His shuttle crashed and burned into an open palm. “And your room is going to be full of Lucky Bastard gin. But …”
“Gift horses,” I said. “Got it. What time is the next shuttle?”
“There’s a nooner and a four o’clock.” He picked up his Homburg and placed it delicately atop his slicked-back ’do. “Enjoy the vay-cay. I’ll hold down the fort.”
“Thanks, Dickie. You’re a peach.” I snagged another can of NRG. “Don’t sign for any packages with my name on them. No telling when Swain’s going to try to blow off another chunk of me.”
I flung open the door and crashed directly into a tall, black-skinned woman who cracked me in the face with a long metal case the size of a plasma rifle.
“You’re not going anywhere, Bubbles.” She pinned me to the wall with a steely eyed stare from behind huge, thick-rimmed glasses. “I’ve got a little gift for you.”
“What are you doing here, Rae?” I rubbed the bridge of my nose “I didn’t order a nose job.”
“I have something else for you.” She squeezed between me and the door frame and squinted her eyes at my swelling sniffer. “Sorry about your face. Though it might be an improvement. Are you going for washed up hooker or poorly maintained sex-doll?”
“Either will do if it earns me an ounce of invisibility where the cops are concerned.” I shoved her into the room and closed the door again.
Rae Adesina blinked big black eyes at me. She had electric-blue eyeliner drawn all the way into her hairline. “I do like the lipstick. Is that a Cosmo colour?”
“Blood of my Enemies.”
Rae grinned. “I knew it. I have been a good influence on you after all.”
“Not good enough,” Dickie piped up from behind me. “Apparently.”
Rae’s blue eyeliner matched her impeccably teased afro, which had been sculpted into a long, egg-shaped protuberance from the back of her skull. On anyone else it would have looked like an aborted alien fetus, but somehow, combined with her height and the intensity of her eyes, the outlandishness of her coif added to the gravitas of her appearance. Below her face, she donned a simple white lab coat and a sensible pantsuit of an equally shocking blue. “What did you do this time?”
“It’s less what I did and more what I didn’t do.” I folded my arms and watched her cross the room and set the metal box on my desk with a clang. “And what a certain Chief of Police would like to do to me.”
She flipped open the lid to reveal a layer of protective foam padding. “They still giving you the shake down over that drug bust that wasn’t?”
Dickie spun slowly on his chair without taking his eyes off the Cerulean queen with his gob smacked into next week.
“All I know is someone went to a lot of trouble to make me look like a half-rate hitman, and it has Stench-O-Swain dripping out of every orifice.”
“Lovely visual, thank you for that,” she muttered over the box.
Dickie’s chair had spun to face the wall, and he craned his contorted himself like a dancer with the rent due to keep his eye on the prize. “What’s in the box, Rae?”
“Before I show you”—Rae whirled on me, ignoring Dickie completely—“I want a promise.”
“There is a literal time bomb with my name on it ticking in my tattler right now, Rae. I had two opportunities to get out of town, and you’ve blown the first one. So say what you think you need to say and let me get out of here. My promises are worth about as much as a pinch’s piss. I’ve got a price on my head. Even if I smile and nod, I can’t make good on it when I’m dead.”
“It’s about Jimi.”
I rolled my eyes to the ceiling and said a silent prayer to the Last Humanist Church of the Mezzanine Rose. Why not. I’d tried all the other deities over the years, and they’d gotten me into this hole. “I told you about Jimi. There were drugs in his system. You saw what happened to me the last time I asked questions about a drug case. There won’t be anything left of me for you to put back together if I ask about another one; I’m not a uniform anymore. Jimi Ng’s case is closed as far as HCPD are concerned. If I start digging into it, Chief Swain is going to send the circus after me.”
“He’s already after you.” Rae’s broad mouth flattened into a thin line, and she hit me with a hard stare. A nerve in my shoulder gave me a twinge for good measure. “Even he can’t kill you twice.”
“He can probably take twice as long doing it, though. That’s what scares me.”
“When was the last time your upgrade was refitted?” She cocked her head at me, and with the alien mane attached to the back of her head, the effect was slightly predatory. “Your left arm is hanging about and inch lower than it should.”
I groaned. I dropped the backpack, whipped off my jacket, and stood reluctantly in front of her, trying to prepare myself for the tirade. “It hurts a bit.”
“Of all the jingle-brained—” Rae interrupted herself with a sigh like opening the floodgates on a raging river. She closed her blue-lined eyes and counted silently under her breath. “Bubbles, you have to take care of yourself. Proper equipment maintenance is essential to your health, like getting enough sleep, drinking filtered water, and eating vegetables.”
“Vegetables are too expensive, I can’t remember the last time I slept, and the last glass of water I drank cost me a hundred cred and came straight from the tap at techRose.”
“If you treat your body like a black-market dumpster—” She turned around and peeled off the layer of protective foam. “—some day you’ll end up in one.”
“The circle of life.” Dickie grinned. “You should be glad she hasn’t ripped the arm off and sold it by now.”
“Think I’d get anything for it?”
Something shiny glinted from inside the box and Dickie’s eyes went wide. His jaw scraped the floor. He shook his head at me. “Play nice with the lady, Bubbles. She brought you a hell of a present.”
Rae picked up the thing in the box and turned to face me. A new cybernetic prosthesis, long and slender and looking more like an arm than an exoskeleton, lay across her arms like an offering. “If this attachment shows up on the hockmarket, my job will be forfeit.”
I made a low whistle. “Who did you have to kill to steal that thing?”
Rae shook her head and tapped a stilettoed toe impatiently. “It’s a prototype. And I didn’t steal it, I have it signed out for field testing.”
“Looks like it’s made out of well-chewed bubble gum,” Dickie said. “Bet you have to pay extra for the pink model.”
Rae said, “You can change it in the options menu.”
The arm had a pearly sheen to it and almost perfectly matched the colour of my hair. “Going for the hard sell.”
“Take off your shirt and I’ll get you fitted.” Rae’s bedside manner voice kicked in. “Dickie, help her get the old one off and place it in the box for me.”
Dickie hopped to like a well-trained soldier and held onto my metal arm while I shrugged out of my thin white t-shirt. He winked at Rae. “Who says I’m not getting paid?”
I swung the arm into his gut and listened with satisfaction to the rush of air that escaped his lungs. “For old time’s sake.”
I loosened the fasteners and twisted out of the attachment. It released with a sucking sound and the sour metallic smell of sweat and titanium. D
ickie wrinkled his nose and shuffled over to the box on the desk, still slightly bent over and gasping. I avoided looking at my bare shoulder where the stump of bone was covered with a gnarled mass of scar tissue like red tree-bark.
He brought a container of talc from the box and dusted the damp flesh. “You’re a little ripe under there. When’s the last time you took that thing off?”
My muscles twitched to send the arm into his stomach again. My phantom arm swung, but nothing happened. He grinned.
“That’s enough,” Rae said and approached with the new arm. “It’s going to take some time to get everything connected properly. I want you to listen to me—”
“The arm rates, Rae, it really does. But I can’t help you with Jimi. We’ve been over this before. Weiland and I nailed a low-level pusher with those vials, but the bust went bad. The buyer got away, and the vials ended up being a hoax. Chief Swain made it very clear we’d made some very important people very angry.”
“And within twenty-four hours Jimi was very dead from a drug overdose along with about three hundred other people.” Rae slipped the arm on gently but she spoke through gritted teeth.
“Whip Tesla, the pusher, was out on the streets before the end of our shift. We knew it stunk. Weiland shut up and wagged his tail like a good little doggy. When the body count started climbing, I nosed around a bit and got my arm blown off for the trouble.”
“Jimi didn’t use drugs.” Rae wrenched a little harder on the arm than she needs to. A nerve shock spasmed through the metallic pink fingers. “He was a brilliant scientist. I loved him but I wasn’t blind.”
“There were plenty of people who would have sworn I wasn’t a drunk.” I rolled my shoulder to test the fit. The joint was so smooth it made my real ones feel like rusty old machinery. “I’m sorry he died. I liked Jimi. But sometimes our numbers get called before our time. There doesn’t have to be a reason for it.”
“Jimi’s death wasn’t some tragic mistake or a goddamned coincidence, Bubbles.” Rae dropped the doctor act and punched me in the chest with both fists. Tears threatened her carefully applied makeup, glittering like diamonds around her coal-black irises. “He was onto something big. I need to know why he was killed. I need you to help me.”
