by Gregg Taylor
I drove back into Bountiful, stopping once at the bank to get a replacement for the ExStick I’d never had. This would be the real test. The girl never batted an eyelash. She even filed a request to have all my identification replaced and sent to my new address. She smiled at me the way one smiles at a customer with a comfortable little savings account and a nest egg for retirement. It felt good.
I parked the Hov fifteen blocks from my new office in a spot where I knew it would be stripped as soon as the sun went down. I wiped down every surface I could find and walked away. The office was still open and I needed to pick up my keys.
I felt like a new man.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Of course, I had made a couple of mistakes. I realized that a few hours later as I sat in the completely unfurnished apartment above my completely empty office. The wobbly pressboard desk back in Drake Finn’s office was mine now, but I didn’t really want it. I suspected that whatever was in his apartment would be just as nasty.
I ran a mental tally. I’d need furniture and equipment. I’d need personal effects and clothes, since the only thing I had to put on when I got out of my gleaming new shower and dripped dry was what I had just taken off.
I knew I didn’t deserve the little savings account I’d given myself, but I was loathe to give it up. I still had no idea if I could make a better go of Drake Finn’s career than he had. It was already getting dark, and even if the Hov were still in one piece, I couldn’t go anywhere near it in case it was being watched.
I slept surprisingly well on the hardwood floor, but woke up feeling like I’d been repeatedly punched in the spine.
I started with office equipment. I didn’t want to be on a terminal that could be traced to me in any way. The salesman had looked at me with suspicion, but when he got a sense of the size of my order, he had left me alone with an open ’Link terminal to take a test drive. Two minutes later the Golem Protocol had restored my unlimited access to the framework of reality.
I had sworn I would not go back to the well. By now the cops involved with yesterday’s Finn homicide would have found the case closed. Some of them might have trouble swallowing the “processing glitch” story. One of those might have been bothered enough to look at my file. It wouldn’t do for my account to suddenly take a massive, back-dated jump. But without a warrant, which they probably couldn’t get, they wouldn’t have access to anything but my balance. As long as I spent as much as I put in within a few hours, it would almost certainly go unnoticed. And even if it didn’t, they’d have nothing but the evidence of their own eyes, which would be completely at odds with official reality. I started feeling a little better about this.
I gave a little thought to Carter and Claire. I wondered how long it would take them to be found. I toyed with erasing the pair of them, but decided that the less meddling I did with reality the better. Let it sort itself out. I unplugged the mini-drive and started spending the new, improved portion of my bank balance.
If you set out to spend a lot of money in a short time, it can be a surprisingly stressful thing to do, but within a few hours I had a utilitarian but nonetheless presentably complete set of material goods en route to my new WestCenter digs, and a balance that was within forty-five credits of what it had been the day before. It was easy to see this becoming much too tempting. Sooner or later, Omniframe would figure out how to detect or defend against E2-476 and I couldn’t get caught with my hand in the cookie jar.
On the other hand, it was a hell of a trump card not to hang on to. I elected to think on this some more, at least until I was sure the heat was off.
Two days later I finally made my way to Drake Finn’s apartment. It took about five minutes to confirm that there was nothing in the place worth keeping. I cleared out any personal papers, paid my/his last month’s rent and left the door slightly ajar. In that neighborhood, the place would be cleaned out to the bare walls within a day.
The old office had fared a little better than that, in spite of Della’s failure to lock up when I’d left. I packed up his files in a hurry, figuring I’d end up shredding most of them, but I didn’t want any of it coming back to haunt me if I let a drifter sleep on it for a while. I took the only thing of value, which was the six-inch oblong box that housed Della’s program. It took me an hour to figure out how to change her recorded voice prints to accept me as Mister Finn, and ten minutes convincing her to call me “Drake” when we didn’t have company, but it was worth it.
Three days later the rental company that owned Carter’s Hov started wondering just where it had got to. They found it just the way I knew they would; stripped to a skeleton and covered with a hundred sets of prints, none of them mine. Then the search for Cyrus Carter began in earnest. It was everywhere on the NewsNets for weeks and I sweated bullets the entire time.
When they finally found his corpse next to that of a young woman from New Coast, the NewsNets had a field day. They played it as a lover’s quarrel. The cops said it was a murder-suicide. They never mentioned exactly how Claire Marsland had shot herself at point-blank range with a plasma cannon that was nowhere near her body after killing her lover. That would be the Citizen’s Committee of Bountiful looking out for our much-maligned fair city. The whole thing was laid at the feet of a jealous woman from New Coast. Bountiful City got a walk. No one ever mentioned my name. No one ever mentioned any other bodies found in the warehouse. I started to relax.
The detective business turned out to be less exciting than I’d thought, but more comfortable than it had ever been for the last Drake Finn. The sign hadn’t been up for more than a few days before the first few clients started sticking their noses in. A nice, professional office in a well-heeled neighborhood like WestCenter didn’t hurt. Lots of domestic drama, lots of snoop an’ peep. Not a lot of killing. A guy could get used to that. Part of me knew that it couldn’t last.
The day that I first had that thought, I pulled a certain mini-drive from the shoe box where some clever devil had hidden it and put it in a fresh bubble envelope. I sealed it and called for a pickup. The way-label instructed the courier to take it to the South Key Shipping Company deep in the Access Acre to be held indefinitely until called for. I left a two-word key phrase as the only code for its release.
Finn’s Golem.
--THE END--
Also by Gregg Taylor
(available in print and e-book editions)
Black Jack Justice
Hard-boiled, private eye mystery
It was a simple enough case. Sex, betrayal, sex, money, sex, murder and sex. But when a pair of His and Hers private detectives get involved, the sparks start to fly and the blood begins to spill in earnest. With every shot that’s fired, the hole digs a little deeper, and the list of people our sparring shamuses can trust gets shorter and shorter.
The Tales of the Red Panda series
The thrilling, two-fisted exploits of the masked protector of 1930’s Toronto
Tales of the Red Panda: The Crime Cabal
Even the united remnants of Toronto’s defeated underworld could not resist the city’s masked protectors. But when they join with the murderous might of some of the masked man’s deadliest foes, can even the Red Panda match the strength of... The Crime Cabal?
Tales of the Red Panda: The Mind Master
Sinister forces are at work, striking within the very heart of the city’s elite with powers that seem otherwordly. Are the attacks random? Simply for profit? Or is an unknown predator hunting our masked heroes themselves? If the mysterious Ajay Shah really does have powers that rival the Red Panda, will even the Terrific Twosome of Toronto be able to resist the might of... The Mind Master?
Tales of the Red Panda: The Android Assassins
Winner of the 2011 Pulp Ark Award for Best Novel (Gregg Taylor) and Best Cover Art (Thomas Perkins)!
An unseen manipulator is pulling the city’s surviving businesses to the brink of collapse for his own fiendish purposes just as an old foe returns to unleash his bit
ter fury upon innocent lives. Who will survive the power of... The Android Assassins?
PLUS
The Decoder Ring Theatre Podcast
All-new, full-cast adventure and mystery audio drama stories in the style of the classic broadcasts of Radio’s Golden Age! New episodes twice monthly with an extensive back catalogue, all available for Free Download! Visit www.decoderringtheatre.com today!
