A pit opened up in my stomach and I tried to pull the trigger just a hair too late as a great wide hand gripped the side of my head, slamming it sideways into the wall. The derringer discharged, and I saw the COO flinch as it fired through the window, cracks in the glass echoing out from the shot hole. And then my world collapsed into darkness.
* * *
The room picked up its focus again and a breeze let me know I’d been relieved of my trench and my pistol. I looked up and one pane of glass, the one I’d shot out when whatever had hit me had dropped me like a bad habit, was gone. This high up and the wind was whistling through the place, setting every loose bit of fabric to flapping.
There was a pain in my neck and I glanced up into the face of a shorter man with a mustache in a white coat. He took away a syringe, then retired to a couch next to a clear glass coffee table, placing it in a hard shell case.
“What the fuck?” I asked. I tried to rub my neck, but was stopped by a pair of soft cuffs.
“M. Gannard was simply healing that nasty blow to the head you suffered,” said a voice. I looked up across the living room to where the GalaxJonesStein COO was sitting. Max Yallen was a gaunt sort of man, with pinched features and long spindly fingers. I couldn’t determine his age, I doubt anyone could, the sort of man who’d undergone enough gene therapy that he might live forever as long as they kept inventing new treatments to extend the end of life.
His forest green hair had come undone, though, whatever gel he used evidently unable to withstand the high altitude wind coming in through the new hole in his wall.
“Sorry about your window,” I said. “It seemed kind of stuffy in here.”
Yallen laughed, a sharp, uncontrollable bark that seemed out of place from so dry a man.
“And here I thought you were here to kill me.”
“I just wanted to ask some questions.”
“With a gun?” asked Yallen, holding the derringer up. He turned it over once and then held it up.
“I wanted to ask some difficult questions.”
He barked again, then held up the gun in the air, pinched between two fingers.
A shadow, a shadow built for boxing, detached itself from the wall, striding over to Yallen. He would of been a sort of nondescript man, not too tall, hair not too dark, features not too striking. He was wearing a suit, but not such a remarkable suit that it looked flashy or fit him at all poorly.
In fact, outside that he clearly knew his way around a gym, the only remarkable thing about him was the tie he was wearing.
“What do you think of this, Ivers?” asked Yallen, handing him my derringer.
Ivers took it, rolling it in his hand.
“Light, good grip, kind of small, but I’d have big hands for a woman,” he rumbled. “Good choice if I wanted a secondary. You could carry it in your pocket, if you wanted. Easy enough to slip by security anywhere else.”
“An assassin’s weapon?”
Ivers took it, pointing it directly at me, finger going to the trigger. I flinched, in spite of myself.
“Only from this range,” he said, putting it up.
“What were you hoping to do with it, M. Jeffries?”
I wanted to say something witty and quick, like I always did when I got stressed, but what came out was something else.
“I wanted to talk about Theed Montgomery,” I said.
“Dressed like that?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m dressed.”
“No, I wouldn’t, either. What were you hoping for in that outfit?”
“Lure you into a false sense of security?”
“My dear, do you think I’m the type of man who hires prostitutes, invites them up to his penthouse apartment, and then just soldiers on with them if they don’t fit the bill? Don’t you think I have more sense than that? Your way would have me robbed by junkies in a heartbeat.”
“To be honest, and I don’t know why I am being honest, no. I only knew you hired prostitutes.”
“And who told you that?”
“Patri Beaver.”
“Theed’s assistant?”
“Yes.”
Yallen smiled, a thin curving of his lips.
“M. Beaver knows more than what’s good for her, and says more than what’s good for others. She ought to be rewarded for it.”
The mustachioed short man in the lab coat approached Yallen, bending down and whispering into his ear. Yallen waved him away.
“No need to be too cautious, Gannard, she’ll be dead soon enough, won’t she?”
I cocked my head. There was that smile again.
“Oh, yes, M. Jeffries, I’m afraid you’ve reached the end of your rope. Gannard, prepare the second dose.”
The short man walked over to the couch and coffee table, where he picked up the syringe and took a bottle out of the case, then drew a harsh looking green liquid into the chamber of the syringe.
“You’re probably wondering why you’ve been so accommodating in answering my questions. Not so agreeable in your normal life, I’m told. Rather a bitch, all in all.”
“It usually takes people a lot longer to figure that out. You’ve only just met me,” I said. Ah, there was some of the old charm.
“Well, to be fair, you did introduce yourself by trying to shoot me,” said Yallen. “I put two and two together on that one.”
He watched as Gannard approached me. I struggled a bit, trying to get clear of the needle.
“Ivers,” said Yallen.
The tough in the tie strode over to me, grasping my head in his hands, one steel mitt encompassing my jaw, one bracing the top of the my head, holding my neck stock still. I hissed as the needle pressed into my neck, breaking the skin, and the burning sensation of having whatever the liquid was fired directly into my veins.
“It’s actually quite a tragic story, you see,” said Yallen. “When we paid for the expedition to Ganymede, we were hoping for some new compound or protein or what have you. But instead, the late Hary Xu and his compatriots found a whole alien skeleton or two. And, eventually, we located what we believed to be some sort of attachment to the Ganymede aliens’ brain. And lo and behold, our lovely little compound.
“The effects were quite magnificent. An insatiable drive for sex in the lab rats, and then in our early human test subjects. And a wonderful side effect: an incurable bout of truth telling. Or belief telling, I suppose, since who can know the truth from one person’s story?”
“What’s the catch?” I asked, through gritted teeth. I hadn’t noticed it before, the stress at being tied up, but with the second dose administered, I was beginning to feel it. My nipples were hard, and not just because of the clamps, but because of the way the breeze was running over my skin, and I rubbed my thighs together slightly.
“Well, frankly, it’s incredibly easy to sustain a lethal overdose. The human body just isn’t built for ganinine, I’m afraid. M. Xu theorized that they had some sort of sexual selection for honesty. No idea if he was right. Would’ve cost us a fortune to test. And he was already costing us a fortune leaking to ThorGen. And our then head of security just wasn’t up to the task of stopping him.”
“So you did kill Theed.”
Yallen laughed, the uncontrollable braying breaking free of his lips again.
“I hope you aren’t trying to record this on your optical, M. Jeffries. I don’t have one myself, but I’m told they’re quite the security hazard. That’s why Gannard there has his dampener.”
Gannard, on cue, took a small black object about the size and shape of an ancient computer mouse from his coat pocket and placed it on the table. I tried to photograph it with my optical, only to get an error display. Fuck. Fuck fuck shit fucking dick fuck.
Sometimes I have a way with words.
Left with no options, I took the only one available to me. Desperately try to convince my murderers I was bigger trouble to them dead than alive.
“I was in the System PD. I won’t just disappear you know. My frie
nds on the force will come looking for me.”
“M. Montgomery was in the SPD, too. He had friends there too. Look where that got him,” said Yallen.
“The morgue,” answered Ivers, in case I was too thick to figure it out myself.
“Theed wasn’t a person of interest in two murder cases, though.”
Yallen looked at Ivers.
“I thought you said there weren’t loose ends.”
“I didn’t know she even existed until you called me,” said Ivers. He’d been poked now, and it was clear there was something violent and angry lurking just underneath the surface of his calm exterior. “I can hardly be expected to clean for something I didn’t know of.”
“I pay you to clean for the unexpected.”
“You pay me to troubleshoot. I’ve done that. Xu, Montgomery. I’m not even on the fucking security cameras for five kilometers around. Don’t fuck with me, Yallen. There’s no one here to impress by chewing out an underling. Jeffries isn’t going to live long enough to be impressed and Gannard is already your lapdog.”
“Besides,” he said. “The SPD won’t be able to figure a cause of death from ganinine. It’ll just look like she fucked herself to death.”
Yallen sighed and looked at me. I noticed his gaze traveled up and down my body, the clamps still tight around my nipples and clit. I was silently cursing myself for them. The ganinine was really beginning to affect me, any hint of desire in the three men in the room with me making me a little wild, and the clamps themselves were making me crazy. I would’ve been able to get away with actual clothes for this job, I figured.
On the other hand, I shuddered to think what the feeling of fabric might have done to the heightened sensitivity of my skin. There was another breeze in from the broken window and I gasped audibly.
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Yallen to Ivers. “How are you feeling, M. Jeffries?”
“Never been better,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Not crying out for release? Wouldn’t you like me to lick that nice little pussy of yours?”
Fuck, yes, I would. I wanted to feel his hot mouth on my body, to have his tongue roaming around inside me. To have him pull the clamp off and rub my clit back and forth the whole fucking time. I wanted him to stand up, unzip his pants and—
Holy fuck, Sare, hold it together.
“No, thanks,” I moaned. “I’ll bet you’re lousy at it.”
Yallen’s laughing yelps followed hot on the heels of this, and when I glanced up, I saw Ivers smirking quietly to himself. Good. Yallen might be the most dangerous man in the room, but Ivers was the deadliest. If he got nervous, he’d kill me just for the simplicity of it. But keep him thinking of me as a silly wiseacre who’d blundered into something over her head (not that far off the mark, although, technically, Theed had pushed me) and I might make it out of the building alive, at least.
“So I’ve been told,” he said. “My heart’s just not in it. Gannard, fetch her coat. Ivers, you and Gannard get her out of here.”
“I’ll take her down to the river,” said Ivers.
“I don’t give a damn,” said Yallen. “I’d prefer not to know, actually.”
He walked over to a marble bust of some historical Earthling, God only knows who it was, and pulled it off its shelf, then hauled it over to the window I’d shot out, dropping it out of the wreckage. We heard a tell-tale breaking of stone.
“Hit the landing below,” said Yallen. “Damn, I was trying to make it to the sidewalk. Anyhow, I have to call someone to come replace the glass after I accidentally threw the statue through my window.”
Gannard reappeared with my trench coat, and Ivers undid my cuffs, pulling me to my feet in my heels. I stumbled a little into him, and he pushed me away. In spite of myself, I almost tried to kiss him, but he just laughed and shoved me away, wrapping me up in my trench coat and hustling me with Gannard, carrying the dampener, to the elevator.
“Not out into the lobby, hmmm?” said Yallen.
“Yes, boss,” said Ivers. He pressed the button for the basement.
“That guy’s a dick,” I said, after the doors closed.
“He’s a brilliant administrator,” said Gannard.
“And a giant dick,” said Ivers. “But he pays well.”
“Better than sex?” I asked. “Because I’m offering sex right now to spare my life.”
Ivers laughed again.
“Much better than sex, M. Jeffries. For what GJS pays, I could buy you a hundred times over.”
“What about you?” I asked Gannard.
“I get paid better than Ivers,” the short man said.
“Fuck. Are you both shooting me down?”
“Doesn’t happen to you a lot does it?” asked Ivers.
“No.”
“I can see that,” said Ivers. “And, really, if you weren’t a private eye hired by the ex-cop I had to off and I didn’t know it was just the ganinine talking, I wouldn’t have rejected you.”
I turned to face Gannard, staring down at him. I lifted my hands, pushing the flaps of the trench coat apart and rubbing up my body until I was cupping a breast in each palm, the soft flesh spilling out.
“What about you? You put off by the drugs, too?” I asked. “Why don’t you want to fuck me?”
“Well...I…” said Gannard. His eyes ran down my body. “It’s against the—”
“Oh, fuck, look how wet my pussy is,” I gasped, dropping one hand between my legs to spread my pussy lips apart. I ran a finger across them, moaning as I did. Gannard’s gaze was transfixed as I lifted the finger up to show him how the skin glistened with my own juices, then fed the finger into my mouth and licking it before pulling it slowly out. Even Ivers was watching me.
I reached out and pulled the emergency stop lever.
The elevator slammed still and I lurched forward, smashing into Gannard’s nose with an elbow. He shouted and grabbed at it, the dampener falling from his grip. I dived to the floor, grabbing it, fumbling with it for an off switch.
Ivers was on me in a flash, wrenching the dampener out of my hand. He gave me a bruising kick to the ribs and I folded like a chair.
“You stupid fucking bitch,” he swore at me. “This is fucking elevator, where did you think you were gonna go?”
“Shwee bwoke myb noise,” Gannard cried from where he was curled up in the corner of the elevator.
“No shit,” said Ivers, staring down at him.
“Attention occupants!” came a voice over the elevator’s loudspeaker. “You are in a private-use elevator and all cameras have been turned off. Are you experiencing an emergency? If you do not respond or are in an emergency situation, we will activate the cameras in five seconds.”
“We’re not in an emergency. Someone pulled the emergency stop by accident,” Ivers shouted.
“Ah,” said the voice. “Would you like to activate the easy listening music option? We can also display your choice of holographic aids, if you would like.”
“Just the music, please,” said Ivers. The song “Your Heart’s Red (Like The Dust)” came on over the loudspeaker. I gave a rueful snort. It was actually my favorite song to play when Mari and I had made love. A duet between Hollis O’Brien and Nalan Pasha.
Well, I was fucked now.
Ivers seemed to think so, too. He lifted me up off the floor, so he could look me in the face.
“Jeffries, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I didn’t kick you too hard?”
“No,” I said.
“Good,” said Ivers. And he dropped me with a haymaker to the jaw. The world blinkered white and then faded back into black and all I could think was that I really needed to stop losing consciousness.
Chapter 8
“M a’am? Ma’am? Are you okay?”
“Sare…” I gasped.
“What?”
“My name’s Sare,” I said.
“Are you okay, Sare?”
Was I? I
wasn’t sure. I coughed a little, then spat up some water. I was soaking, I realized, or would have been if I had any clothes on. It felt like I’d taken a breath underwater. I looked over at the canal.
The New Angeles River was a sorry excuse for a river, at least, if you were going by the pictures of Earth rivers. But it was pretty deep, unlike its Earthling counterpart in Los Angeles. Deep enough that, if you dropped in a body, it would be awhile before anyone found it. I don’t know what they call that, but there should be a name for it. “Corpse hiding deep” I guess. I dunno, I’m a PI, not a writer.
“I saw them dump you in there,” said my new best friend. I looked up into the eyes of the autocab attendant who’d taken me to GJS headquarters earlier in the week. He really was soaked through, his formerly crisp uniform hugging him tightly, the white fabric practically see through.
He had a good shape to him. Good enough to pull a full grown woman out of a canal on his own, certainly. My body was beginning to react, although part of that was me hoping it was the adrenaline of Ivers having attempted to drown me. I gazed at where I could see the curves of his pecs, the nipples at the end. He said something and I glanced up.
“We’d better get you inside. I don’t know if they’re coming back.”
They wouldn’t be. Ivers had figured on me drowning in the river before anyone found me. A couple of cracked ribs, a facial bruise, none of that would matter in the grand scheme of things when the SPD was pulling my waterlogged corpse out of the river, so long as it looked like I just drowned. Easiest thing in the world, then. Dump me in and go. It was the reason I’d felt confident hailing the autocab in the instant the dampener had been in my hand. Turn off, send the hail, turn back on. Ivers hadn’t seen and neither had Gannard. They’d thought I was stupid and desperate. Well, they were wrong: I was just desperate.
The autocab attendant picked me up off the ground and for a moment I just hung to him. I wanted to kiss his cheek, to lick his jawline, to grab his shoulders and push him to his knees and have him just go to town on my pussy.
Desperate in more ways than one, it turned out: the ganinine was back with reinforcements. I tried to harden myself to my own body’s pleas for release, following the attendant into his autocab.
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