The Easytown Box Set

by Brian Parker

  She blanched. “They were gonna pay me for doing what they said, not—”

  “They were gonna kill you, maybe rape you first, then torture and kill you. And then take back the two hundred they gave you up front.

  She sniffed and said, “I can handle myself.”

  I read the list aloud. “Karimov, synthaine, drugs, Ortega. Fuck, that means he was involved.” We’d thought Ortega had been an accidental victim in all of this, a victim of circumstances, but this put him right back in the thick of things. If Karimov was removing his name, he thought it could point back to him somehow. Something still nagged at the back of my brain about their method, though.

  “After you deleted documents and folders with these keywords, what did they want you to do?” I asked Jewel.

  “Ensure they were completely erased, both locally and on the net, then wipe the hard drive with a reformat to completely get rid of everything. After that, I was supposed to infect the machine with a worm.”

  Smart. A scan of the box would reveal the virus, so a tech investigator would have to work on it off the network, where the real computing power is. Plus, deleting the specific files, then reformatting would ensure they were lost forever. Computers automatically backed up tons of information to the net during a reformat, so anyone looking to restore it as evidence would only be able to recover what was backed up as part of the reformat. A cursory examination would only see the files Jewel had intentionally left, making the overworked tech investigator conclude that the shoddy attempt at wiping the hard drive had been a waste of time for whoever did it since there wasn’t any evidence to be found.

  “Did you completely delete the files?”

  “Not yet. I dumped all the pictures, like I said, but hadn’t cleaned out the autorecover files yet.”

  “So everything is still there,” I said.

  “Yeah.” She glanced longingly at the door. “Those guys are gonna come back for me.”

  “You’re safe with me, kid. Don’t worry about it.”

  “What about tomorrow, or the next day, or the next? They picked me up in my neighborhood, man. They’re gonna find me.”

  “Somehow, I doubt those two will survive telling their boss that they botched this.” It might be a long shot as far as evidence went, but Karimov had sent Corrigan over here last week, then laid low for a few days until no one was looking, and tried it again. Those two unmodified lackeys weren’t worth anything to a guy like Karimov. Fail him and you’re done.

  “You didn’t upload the virus, right?”

  “No,” Jewel replied. “That was gonna be later tonight once everything else was done.”

  I unplugged the computer’s power cable from the wall, and scooped up the palm-sized box. There weren’t any other wires to deal with, making it much easier to collect than the larger, hardwired systems that some people used.

  I slipped the computer into the pocket of my duster and glanced around. There wasn’t anything obviously out of place. Drake and I had done a cursory inspection of the drawers and cabinets on the night Henderson was murdered, with nothing out of the ordinary showing up.

  I weighed my options. I could stay and rifle through everything once more, or I could take the computer that I was now positive contained some type of evidence down to the precinct. After a few seconds of deliberation, I made the decision to abandon further investigation of the scene. There wasn’t anything else here.

  The girl was problematic. I couldn’t leave her at the apartment or send her home in a cab. They’d follow her and snatch her once more to find out if she’d completed her mission.

  “It’s time to leave, Jewel.”

  “Okay,” she replied.

  “The best way I can think of for you to get out of here is to leave with me in handcuffs—but you’re not under arrest. It’s to make those guys think that you are. We’ll go over to the police station to drop this computer with the tech guys. Then, we’ll leave the precinct by a different way and I’ll take you home. You should probably lay low for a couple of days, just to be safe.”

  Staying out of sight was the best thing for her right now. “Where do you work? Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m a service tech at The Mother Board.”

  I groaned. “They knew what they were doing grabbing you then. It’s even more important that you stay out of sight for a few days. I’m going after the guy who did this, but with everything going on, I don’t think I’ll be able to get him off the streets until the weekend.”

  “Alright. Let’s do this,” she said, turning away from me and placing her hands behind her back.

  I clicked the metal links over her wrists, only tightening them two clicks for comfort. She could have easily slipped her hands through them if she wanted to.

  The hallway was clear and so was the lobby when we got off the elevator. There wasn’t any sign of the two men from earlier. I hoped for Jewel’s sake, they just crawled back under the rock they’d come from.

  Somehow, I didn’t think it would be that easy, but without hope, what else did we have?

  FOURTEEN: WEDNESDAY

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  I stood back, at the corner of the block as the SWAT guys moved up to surround Solomon’s Flowers. The commander had positioned her drones on all four corners of the building and one hovered over each doorway. The SWAT drones were more neutered than regular police drones; they were armed with electric shock rods, capture nets, and crowd control gel only. They could incapacitate criminals, but not kill them—important when the men and women of SWAT were likely going to be up close and intermingled with the bad guys a lot of the time.

  I glanced at the video feed from the commander’s helmet camera, then back at the real scene before me. The teams were at the doors, ready to breach, if needed.

  A member reached out and pushed the flower shop’s door tentatively. It was unlocked.

  “NOPD!” the Lieutenant Fairchild shouted as her men rushed through the doorway. “We have a warrant to search the premises.”

  The SWAT team filed inside and out of my line of view, so I turned to the holographic display of the commander’s camera. I saw the little old lady, Terri Solomon, standing behind the counter with her arms up.

  “What’s happening?” she screamed.

  “NOPD, ma’am,” Lieutenant Fairchild, the SWAT commander, stated. “We are serving a search warrant for the premises, and for all business and personal vehicles of employees present as of zero-nine-hundred hours, today.”

  “Search warrant?” Solomon asked, feigning confusion. “On a flower shop?”

  “We have reason to believe that this business is a front for an illegal cybernetic enhancement facility.”

  “Is that so?”

  I saw the change in the woman’s demeanor. It was the same look I’d seen cross her face yesterday. Before I could warn Fairchild, the old woman crouched down and several large weapons burst through the ceiling tiles, sending squares of insulation in all directions. The camera blurred and went black as the SWAT commander dove for cover.

  I heard the telltale sounds of the pneumatic weapons firing from my position across the street. It sounded like several of them going at once. Branch Corrigan had only used one of the impressive devices and it was scary as hell, I couldn’t imagine what must be going through the officer’s minds right now as several of them fired at once.

  “I’m going in, Drake,” I shouted.

  I saw his mouth move, but all sound was drowned out as the back door exploded. From where we were in front, I wasn’t sure if it was our SWAT guys breaching to go in, or if there was an explosive charge that detonated to keep them out. A giant plume of black, oily smoke snaked skyward over the top of the squat flower shop.

  “Was that us?”

  “I don’t know, Detective,” Drake replied.

  “You two,” I said, pointing to two uniformed cops. “Go with Sergeant Drake around the back of the building and see if our guys need help.”

  They n
odded and took off running. “Come on,” I said to the remaining uniformed cop. “Let’s go in there and see what we can do.”

  I realized too late that it was Liam Tidewell.

  He nodded enthusiastically and said, “I’m right behind you, Detective. Jake is in there.”

  Shit. It made sense that the kid had tried out for SWAT. He dreamed of big gunfights with the bad guys, and of being a hero. SWAT offered him the opportunity to do all of the cool guy shit, while still patrolling the streets during his normal shift and making a difference in citizens’ everyday life.

  The pneumatics had stopped firing, but I could hear a massive air compressor refilling. We only had a small window to get inside and put a stop to this madness before the compressor was full and they began firing again.

  “Cut power to the building!” I heard a woman order, screaming to be heard above the noise. “Cut power and stop those air compressors!”

  I realized that the voice was in my earpiece. I’d been monitoring the SWAT frequency. Lieutenant Fairchild was on the radio. Someone else answered her quickly, “All power to the target building is now off. Unless there’s a backup generator, it should be sufficient to interrupt the electricity going to those compressors.”

  The sounds of small arms fire began to pepper the air as someone fired a pistol. Several Heckler & Koch MP713s responded, their high-pitched report easily recognizable to people who’d been around them enough. It meant some of the SWAT team was still alive and fighting back.

  Tidewell and I were ten steps away from the building when a basketball-sized hole appeared in the front visalum window. The strings of the molten metal dripped from the seared edges. Pulse rifle.

  “What the—” Tidewell cut himself off as he ducked an imaginary blast.

  The phantom pain of healed burns flared in my mind. It’d only been a few months since I’d fought hand-to-hand with a guard at the Biologiqué International Headquarters building. I’d gripped the barrel of his pulse rifle as he fired it, keeping it away from my face, but destroying my hand in the process. It took extensive surgery and regenerative genetic stimulation to make it work properly once more.

  “Pulse rifle.” I shouted. “Stay low.”

  “Medic!” Drake’s voice rang out on the radio. “We need medical support at the back of the—NOPD! Drop it!”

  Automatic weapons’ fire erupted from around the back where Drake and the two officers had disappeared. Within seconds, the distinctive sound of NOPD Sig Sauer pistols, began to respond.

  The return fire from SWAT inside picked up in intensity as they settled into their established patterns of coordinated, alternating fire. We were beginning to gain control of the situation. A concussion grenade exploded and Fairchild’s voice rang out over the net, “Baker Team, move up. Make sure that big bastard is down.”

  I changed course. While I frequently ended up in dangerous situations, SWAT was specially trained for them. It was best to let the professionals handle whatever the hell was going on inside that shop. My partner was in a gunfight out back and it sounded like the third SWAT element was down.

  As I ran, I felt Tidewell keeping pace. Fairchild’s voice came over the net, calling for a status of Charlie Team. They weren’t answering, and she had no situational awareness stuck inside that building, so she didn’t know about the explosion.

  The gunfire had ceased by the time we rounded the corner. One of the massive SWAT drones straddled a large guy in military-style pants and black tank top. A series of electrical probes darted from his chest and legs. Several lines of bullet holes were stitched across the drone where it must have taken the brunt of the man’s assault through what was left of the back door.

  Sergeant Drake and one of the other cops were elbow-deep in gore, trying desperately to save the life of the third officer who’d gone back with them. He’d been shot in the face, but appeared to be alive somehow.

  Carnage reigned in the back parking lot. Parts of the Charlie Team littered the ground. From the looks of it, they’d been stacked on the door, ready to breach when an explosion ripped through them.

  I went from torso to torso, feeling for any type of pulse or other signs of life. There were none. The explosives had been perfectly set, wiping them out before they even had a chance to respond.

  An inhuman wail came from somewhere behind me and I knew that Tidewell found the remains of Jake Hannity. His was the first corpse I’d came to, quickly moving past the young cop to see if there was anything I could do for anyone else.

  There wasn’t.

  I heard the slapping of feet against the pavement and turned, awkwardly to meet Tidewell’s foolish rush. “You son of a bitch!” he screeched.

  I ducked under a wild haymaker, counterpunching with a jab that allowed my leg to stay planted. It took him across the bridge of the nose, shattering it. Blood erupted from both nostrils, quickly covering his lips and chin in dark streaks.

  He feinted right, then went left and landed a solid punch into my ribs. I closed my upper arm over his forearm and clasped my hands under his elbow.

  The fight was over instantly as I jerked my hands upward. With his forearm trapped, the tendons and ligaments in his elbow tore and then the elbow joint popped out of socket. Tidewell screamed in pain and rage.

  I stepped across, unholstered his weapon and then shoved him roughly away. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shouted. “We have six dead officers here.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Tidewell grimaced. “I’ll kill you. I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”

  “Get in line, you stupid fuck.”

  More shoes pounded on the pavement as members of SWAT came around the building. They stopped several feet away, surveying the bloody masses of flesh that used to be their teammates.

  I felt bad for them. I truly did. They’d come to this little flower shop, not expecting much, and their reality had been shifted forcefully for them through a solid kick in the balls. We may have won the fight, but it sure as hell didn’t feel like it.

  “Hey, Detective,” Drake’s voice rumbled out of the office where he was going through files.

  I glanced up from the collection of weapons I was putting tags on. Across the dingy surgical ward of Terri Solomon’s chop shop, I could see Sergeant Drake sitting on a low stool, hunched over an old-fashioned file cabinet. He didn’t look up at me, so I yelled back.

  “Yeah, what is it?”

  “Your boy Ortega purchased one of those handgun pneumatic pistols that the old lady had up front.”

  The old lady in question, Terri Solomon, was dead. She’d been killed a couple of hours ago when she ambushed the SWAT team and initiated the explosion that wiped out Easytown SWAT’s Charlie Team.

  “He did, huh?” I wasn’t surprised. I’d already begun to think Ortega had more to do with Henderson’s death than simply being his employer.

  “Yes, sir. He picked up one of those things a month ago.”

  I was impressed with Solomon’s record-keeping skills. She couldn’t risk putting the information into a computer, so everything was meticulously recorded on paper and filed away for future reference—or blackmail.

  That sales document was the piece of evidence I needed to take to Judge Hennessey. I was certain the person who killed Henderson was an acquaintance. Now that I knew Ortega had access to the same type of weapon that killed the thumper club doorman, he was firmly on a very short list of suspects.

  “We can use that document to justify a search of his home,” I said aloud.

  “That’s just what I was thinking,” Drake replied as he set aside that document specifically by itself.

  I went back to tagging the weapons for transport back to the evidence locker. The DA would build a case against the two cyborg bodyguards that we’d arrested during the raid. Turns out, both of them matched the description of the cyborgs who’d shot up the Liquid Genesis, which meant it was also highly likely that the weapons used came from this shop.

  Sometimes luck was
the big break we needed in a case.

  “Detective Forrest, can you come here a moment?” Ben Roberts, the precinct’s forensic photographer, asked.

  “What is it, Ben?”

  He pointed to a large, framed garment of some type hanging on the wall behind the counter where he photographed the very dead Terri Solomon. Three .45 rounds to the face from an H&K MP713 tended to do that.

  “Yeah, what am I looking at?” I asked in confusion. It was a red, oversized long-sleeved shirt with a bunch of random color spirals all over it. It sort of reminded me of an outfit from Sub-Saharan Africa, but they weren’t quite the same.

  “You probably don’t know this about my wife, but she’s an immigrant. Her grandparents came to New Orleans from Tajikistan. Her father was some white guy who took off after getting her mom pregnant in high school.”

  I waited for him to get to the point. We had a lot of work to do if we were going to search the premises of the other three chop shops we’d raided today.

  “Anyways,” he continued, sensing that I didn’t need the full backstory. “Her family still gets dressed up in traditional garb twice a year to celebrate some holidays.” He pointed at the framed shirt again and said, “That’s a traditional Tajik or Uzbek embroidered silk tunic dress. They’re very difficult to make and are only given away to special friends outside of the community.”

  “So someone in the Tajik community gave Solomon, a Caucasian woman, that shirt as a special gift…” I trailed off. “Ben, do you happen to know the name Farouk Karimov?”

  He shook his head. “Not in the sense that you’re asking. I’ve heard the name the last few days in the department, which is why I wanted to point out that tunic dress to you, but as far as I know, he doesn’t participate in Tajik community events. There are more than ten thousand Tajik descendants right here in New Orleans, though, so it’s entirely possible that I simply never met the guy.”

  “Thanks, Ben. Your keen eye helped to add another nail in Karimov’s coffin. I have a suspect who said he worked for Karimov who got cybernetic enhancements from this shop. I think he may be more involved in this cyborg bullshit than we’d originally thought.”