The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  Chapter 11

  Angel took Anaka to an anonymous bar wedged between Haight-Ashbury and Japantown. A dark musky place that, if it didn’t quite welcome moreaus, didn’t turn them away.

  She and Anaka sat in a booth far to the rear of the place. Angel gnawed on a succession of stale pretzels while Anaka ordered beer bulb after beer bulb. For once, Angel didn’t know what to say.

  “Didn’t get much of anywhere,” Anaka was saying. “First, Earl, our little songbird, dies of computer error. Then Dr. Ellis disappears after a perfunctory autopsy and the fox’s corpse gets cremated—because of a computer error.”

  Anaka shook his head.

  Angel kept gnawing her pretzel, wishing for something tougher to work out her tension on. Anaka was staring consistently at the table, his eyes seemed focused at some point beyond the holo-menu hovering under the surface.

  “Two sequential computer screwups at two different hospitals? One kills a suspect, one destroys the victim’s corpse. That’s too much. And now Chico and Dwayne are plea bargaining on the assault charges.”

  “You need to stop thinking about this—damn it, what is your first name?”

  “Kobe,” Anaka looked up from the table with tired eyes. “You, of all people, should understand.”

  “Damn straight I understand, but when was the last time you slept?”

  Instead of answering, Anaka downed the last of his beer. He stabbed at the menu, ordering another.

  Angel tapped Anaka on the back of his hand with half a pretzel. “You need some sleep.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Anaka yawned. “Tired people make mistakes, and I can’t afford any mistakes now.”

  “Huh?”

  Anaka’s beer arrived and he popped it open. “Well, isn’t it obvious why they suspended me?”

  Angel looked at his tangled hair and the circles under his eyes and held her tongue. Pretty damn obvious, if you ask me.

  “I was too close to what’s going on in this town. They took me down the same day I started digging into VanDyne. This close to the source of the corruption in this town—” He spread his hands like a man explaining the blatantly obvious. “I can’t stop now.”

  Angel got a sinking feeling. She wouldn’t trust White on a lot of things, but White seemed to think his partner was a bit of a nut. Angel had to admit, Anaka looked like a bit of a nut. “Why? You don’t have a personal stake in this.”

  Anaka glared at her. “My job’s my life. That’s as personal as you get.”

  The silence stretched. Anaka drank quietly.

  Eventually Angel realized how deeply she’d cut into him. “Sorry. Lei says I’ve been reacting weird to stress lately.”

  Anaka smiled. “Don’t worry, the system hasn’t succeeded in screwing me yet.”

  Angel had seen that kind of bravado before. She’d seen it mostly in moreys who were about to go ballistic after the gang that roached their best friend, lover, parents, car, whatever— “You’re going to take on VanDyne all on your lonesome?”

  Anaka shrugged.

  Angel shook her head. Great. Anaka was convinced that the ex-Byron Dorset was working for the evil empire that ran this town. Even so, Anaka seemed to be trying to recruit the ex-Byron’s ex-lover in some left-handed fashion.

  When she started listening to him again she heard, “—what you went through in Cleveland.”

  “How the fuck—”

  “The FBI has a whole division that keeps track of moreaus with criminal records.” He shrugged. “I read your file.”

  “You have no idea how safe I feel now I know the Fed is protecting my rabbit ass,” Angel felt a wave of paranoia that Anaka would probably have taken for granted. “What’d it say?”

  “Led a small gang. Gang was wiped out by the original Zipperhead gang in ’53. Almost skinned alive by—”

  “It’s called shaving,” she whispered. It was why the fur on her legs was off-white. If it hadn’t been for a tiger named Nohar, she would have bled to death in a sleazy motel east of Cleveland.

  “Not much else I could access,” Anaka said, interrupting her train of thought.

  “What?”

  “The Fed can be sticky about releasing information to local departments. That was it. The FBI wouldn’t release any of the file they had on the Zipperhead gang. Even though from all accounts they just about self-destructed six years ago.”

  “Great.” Angel could picture some Fed bureaucrat at a terminal, highlighting parts of her life and hitting the delete key in the name of national security. Angel drank her own glass of water.

  Anaka rambled on, and Angel let him. She was only half listening. The pink cop wasn’t telling her anything new, or that she couldn’t figure out herself. Of course someone was after something Byron was involved in.

  The question was, what someone?

  White would think that the someone was the Knights. Anaka would think that the someone was VanDyne. Father Collor would say it was the cops. Pasquez would do a five-part report on the cover-up in the civic government. Lei would tell her she was being paranoid—

  The missing Dr. Ellis pinned the murder on a feline morey. But, with the doctor missing and the body so much ash, Angel might be the only one who had that particular tidbit of information, without a shred of evidence to back it up.

  However, Earl—that bald bastard of all people—had sung loud and clear to the cops that the Knights were meeting Byron when he got offed. And Byron got offed in the Knights’ own hotel room in the Tenderloin.

  But the lawyer, DeGarmo, fed credence to Anaka’s paranoid fantasies by saying Byron had worked for VanDyne, in something that the amounts of money involved suggested was a little left of legal.

  None of that even approached the question, why?

  Her mind was going all over the place and she hadn’t even taken a drink. She ran her hand over her ears and tried to fight the sense of creeping unreality.

  • • •

  An hour later, she was helping an exhausted and inebriated Anaka to his house in Pacific Heights. She had to drive him in the BMW, and the best she could do for coherence was getting the address out of him.

  Somehow she managed. She got lucky on most counts. Anaka’s house was on the crest of a hill, so all the tilting he did was alcohol-related. It was on the first floor, so she didn’t have to help him up any stairs. Lastly, it didn’t have a combination, but an expensive palm lock and retinal scanner. A half-dozen bolts chunked home, opening the armored door.

  Anaka’s place was a study in austerity—polished wood floors, stark white walls, light fixtures hidden behind frosted-white globes with no personality whatsoever.

  Anaka was more of an anal neat freak than Lei. In fact, when he collapsed on the futon that was the one piece of furniture in the living room, his rumpled form seemed an affront to the rest of the apartment.

  “Thanks for the lovely afternoon.” The sarcasm was lost on Anaka, who had probably lost awareness halfway to the futon. She found herself debating whether or not it would be a good idea to leave him alone.

  She shook her head. What did she care? The guy was a nut. Just look at this place. The only decoration was a large plaque over the futon on which was mounted a Steyr AUG assault rifle. Angel didn’t want to know if it was some sort of replica, or a working model.

  She sat on the bare wood floor, across from the futon, and thought.

  What was she going to do? Anaka had seemed to be her one potential ally in the whole Frisco establishment, and he’d just been canned.

  Even if she ignored Anaka and his rampant paranoia, even if she decided to ignore the fact that Byron’s killer was still out there, someone was still after something. Someone had trashed Byron’s condo, and someone had been through her own apartment.

  Why?

  It was clear that she wasn’t going to be able t
o relax until she’d fingered who’d killed Byron and who’d done the break-ins. The problem was, she had no idea how to proceed.

  All she knew was that it was allegedly the cops’ job, and the cops didn’t seem to help at all.

  “Damn it.” She wasn’t any great brain. Her greatest intellectual achievement was teaching herself to read. She knew how to run a small-time protection racket. She knew how to wait tables in a cocktail bar. She knew how to defend herself when the shit got thick. But this—she needed help.

  She knew who to call for advice. The inspiration struck her so hard that she felt a need to pounce on it immediately, as if hesitation would lose her the ability to do anything constructive.

  Kobe Anaka’s comm was as sterile as the rest of the nearly empty apartment. It was a black cube resting on a glass table, the only thing to mar its smooth black lines was the necessity of the screen. The screen was so flush with the box she thought the designers would have gladly done without it to achieve a sort of archetypal black cube.

  Angel saw no sign of a remote control.

  “Comm on,” she whispered.

  The comm responded voicelessly. After a blue flash as the picture activated, the screen stayed blank, waiting for her.

  She didn’t like voice-activated comms, and what really irked her was the lack of an obvious manual control. She was left to try and intuit what the thing parsed for commands.

  It finally responded to her plaintive cry of, “help.”

  The comm responded with a menu, a screen full of options.

  No wonder the designers left out the damn remote. There were about four dozen options on this thing. And that was the first of five pages.

  The layout made it clear that the screen was touch-sensitive. Which made her life easier. She didn’t want to have to spend all day shouting at an unfamiliar chunk of electronics.

  She started calling Los Angeles with only a slight twinge of guilt about running up Anaka’s phone bill. Only a twinge. It was buried under the need for her to do something now, and the creeping sense that her comm at home and in the BMW couldn’t be trusted, not for this.

  Every time she told herself that she was worrying needlessly, she came back to the fact that person or persons unknown had read every single ramcard in her apartment. Bugging her comm line didn’t seem that much of a stretch.

  Detective Anaka probably swept for electronic surveillance the way some people shampoo the rug. Even if it was only a case of her catching some of his neuroses, she felt better using his comm. Besides, she figured she could pay him back eventually.

  And she needed to talk to Nohar.

  Nohar Rajasthan might be able to give her some advice, even though she hadn’t seen him since he left Cleveland. He’d seen her through some shit back in her home town and saved her life twice over. Had circumstances been different, Angel could have seen him in Byron’s place in her life.

  Angel sighed to herself and thought that maybe she had something for big guns.

  It took her four tries to get into the Los Angeles public directory. The first two times she only got electronic garbage, an asynchronous beeping, and a screenful of scrolling blue and red lines. The third time she got a computer and the Pacific Bell logo asking her to only stay on if her call was an emergency situation, and then cut her off.

  The fourth time she got through to dead air.

  Five was a dim low-res representation of the directory listings for Los Angeles. Angel put her request through, hoping that she spelled Rajasthan correctly.

  She got the number and it took another half-dozen tries to get through to it. The fighting in LA was making hash out of the communication net in the city. It would be impossible to get through to Nohar if his comm was on the other side of the National Guard. She was pretty sure that there was a data embargo to inner Los Angeles, though the only folks it really hurt were the media types and the people who wanted to find out if cousin Ed in East LA had bit the big one.

  Lucky seven, she got a hazy Pacific Bell logo. The red, blue, and green parts of the animated logo were all a fraction out of sync with each other. It melted into blurred computer text that said something like Rajasthan Investigations.

  Nohar answered the phone.

  God, he’d changed. The massive feline face had-aged.

  It made Angel uncomfortably aware of her own mortality. Moreaus weren’t given to long life, and rabbits were given less than most. If she’d been a rat . . .

  “Angel?”

  His voice was barely audible through the shitty connection. But it was Nohar, all two and a half meters, three hundred kilos of him. The tiger’s fur had lost some of the sharp definition between the lines, white hairs were beginning to scatter themselves across his face, and there were now deep lines above his broad nose, but it was Nohar. Up to and including the subtle expression of disbelief.

  “Yes. Angel. From Cleveland.”

  The picture fuzzed and jarred as Nohar must have hit his own comm. “Surprise to hear from you.”

  “I’m in Frisco.” Angel raised her voice in case Nohar was having as much trouble hearing her.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Angel took a deep breath and dove into the story. Even when she only hit the high points, it took a long time to make herself clear over the interference on the line. She ended with Detective Kobe Anaka’s involuntary retirement.

  “You want my advice?” Nohar said as the red part of the image separated and began slowly sliding to the right, pixel by pixel.

  “Yes.”

  “Blow Frisco. Go north, Seattle.”

  “Kit, you must be kidding.”

  “I’d tell you that if you weren’t in trouble. Do you like urban warfare?”

  Angel sighed. “I can’t leave this hanging.”

  “Why?”

  “Look, I’m staying. Now can you give me an idea about—”

  The picture faded into incomprehensible snow.

  “Nohar, you still there?”

  “Yeah,” came a small fuzzed voice. There was the scream of some feedback overlaid with static. “Can you hear me?” Nohar’s voice was gravely distorted and barely audible. “I maxed the gain on this, but the vid’s shot.”

  “Yes. Do you have anything useful to say before the line dies?”

  “Okay, after what you—ffff—looking for something. Did Byron give you anyt—ffff—” Nohar’s voice was fading in and out wildly now. Black pixels were starting a shotgun effect as the signal’s data degraded.

  “I can’t make you out.”

  “—can’t hear you anymore. If you—ffff—en call Bobby Dittrich in Cle—ffff—can tell you people to—ffff—ver they are—ffff—eem to be looking for data—ffff—Dittrich in—ffff—hope you—ffff—try signal—ffff—fuck it—ffff—”

  The screen went dead black and the sound died.

  After a few seconds the Pacific Bell test pattern came up informing Angel of technical difficulties. She shot a dozen calls down to LA, none successful. All her calls came up with the same test pattern and the information that the data flow into LA was temporarily blocked.

  She supposed she was lucky she’d gotten through at all.

  Well, Nohar had told her to get a hold of someone named Bobby Dittrich in Cleveland. At least it gave her something to do.

  Chapter 12

  It took Angel a while to find Mr. Dittrich. Fortunately, whatever urban violence plagued her home town hadn’t affected the data lines into the city. Her only problem was sifting through a succession of different Bobs, Bobbies, Roberts, Robs, and Bobbis. Not to mention a half-dozen Dittrich’s who only bothered with a single first initial.

  Her tenth call was forwarded to a place called Budget Surplus. The call was answered by a chubby, red-bearded human. “Budget Surplus, can I help you?”

  On the bottom of the video, und
er Anaka’s comm’s date-time-status stamp, the picture was scrolling a hyperfast line of gibberish. Something that looked like neoelectronic hieroglyphs was whizzing by under this Bobby’s face.

  “You know a tiger named Nohar?”

  “May, may not. Who’re you?” There was a weighty look of suspicion in this pink’s eyes, but there was an impish smile under the red mustache.

  A square block of the scrolling hieroglyphs froze. The block was to the far left, and the remaining line of pixel gibberish redoubled its speed.

  “My name’s Angelica Lopez—”

  “Angel?” One of the pink’s eyebrows arched.

  Two more blocks of garbage froze, traveling from left to right. The rest of the line was now a total blur, it was changing so fast.

  “Yes. Nohar told me, sort of, that I should talk to you.”

  “Now why—” Dittrich paused and his gaze flicked downward. It was the first sign that he could also see the line of strange flickering characters on the bottom of the screen. As he paused, a few more blocks froze. He looked back up. “—would you be forwarded to someone of my talents?”

  “Well—”

  “Shh,” Dittrich said quietly, raising a hand to his lips. He was staring at the scrolling line on the screen. Three more blocks of it froze, the line of gibberish seemed almost to form a coherent pattern. Angel could hear Dittrich say to himself, “I love this.”

  The rest of the line suddenly fell like a row of dominoes. The bottom line of the screen froze.

  Suddenly the picture blanked, briefly became a negative version of itself, turned black and white, and reversed.

  The picture was now a substantially lower resolution black and white image of Dittrich grinning from ear to ear.

  “What the hell was that?” Angel asked, hoping that she hadn’t somehow busted Anaka’s comm.

  “A little security.” Dittrich shrugged. “I’m in a sensitive line of work.”

  “What did you do to my comm?”

  “Oh, that. The lower quality pictures frees up the data signal to handle all the encryption data.”