Standard Hollywood Depravity--A Ray Electromatic Mystery

by Adam Christopher

  “Huh,” I said. “Athena,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. “Suits her.”

  Honey laughed and the laugh pushed her chest toward the dash and pressed her head back against the headrest

  “Suits her! Yeah, right, suits her!”

  I eyed the telephone that sat on the cradle between her seat and mine. I thought Ada might like a little update on the situation and what I had in the car with me right now. Then I changed my mind and decided to make it all a nice surprise.

  I still didn’t know where the mysterious something came from and how Athena had got it or even what it was for. I took a left turn and pushed the car onward and I put those questions to Honey. All that got me was the same laugh, the same arched back, the same creak of leather as she pressed the back of her black wig into the seat behind her.

  “You’d know as much about that as me, baby. But I can tell you what it’s for, no problem.”

  She told me. As I listened I pursed my lips on the inside. It helped with my thinking and I liked it.

  When she was done we sat in silence a while. Honey was smiling. I knew why she was smiling. If I had the box that was sitting in the footwell by the heels of her white leather boots then I’d be smiling too.

  “So Athena,” I said. Honey’s smile stayed where it was while her eyes darted sideways in my direction. “Why was she selling it? Couldn’t she have used it herself? Because it sounds to me like it’s worth a whole lot more than that pocket change she sold it for.”

  Honey just shook her head. “That’s not what she does. I told you, she’s independent. She doesn’t work for nobody anymore. That puts her in a particular kind of position. A dangerous one. So she specializes. She sells things. Guns, drugs, stones, people, information. Whatever she can get her hands on that she thinks a certain type might be interested in. Hell, she even sells money.”

  I nodded. “And what she was selling needs an organization to fully realize. Which she doesn’t have.”

  “Which she doesn’t want to have,” said Honey. “Listen. She operates on the outside. What her customers do with their purchases isn’t her business and she keeps it that way.”

  We drove on and I thought about Athena for a while. Then we took a left.

  “How long have you known Boxer?” I asked. It seemed like a sensible question. We were, after all, two colleagues out on a job.

  According to Honey.

  Honey frowned again. “How long have I known Boxer?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You mentioned going to New York last year. You must have been working for him a while.”

  Honey turned to look at me with narrow eyes.

  “You’re asking how long I’ve known Boxer?”

  I felt a resistor coil behind my faceplate grow warm. “Sure,” I said.

  Honey turned a bit more toward me. From the corner of my optics I could see the muscles cord in her neck.

  “You said you worked from him,” she said. “But you don’t work for him, do you?”

  I’d made a mistake somewhere.

  “Because if you worked for him then you sure as hell would know who I was. He’d make sure of that.”

  I ran some audio back from earlier in the night. Honey had said she was Boxer’s girl.

  “And you’d sure as hell know that Boxer is my father.”

  Oh.

  Then the telephone rang. I kept one hand on the wheel and I used the other to pick up the handset. Saved by the bell.

  “I appreciate you keeping to the speed limit,” said Ada inside my head, “but you’re taking the scenic route back to the office.”

  I glanced at Honey. She was watching me but her whole body was tight, ready to run or to fight or most likely both. She dropped her hand onto the door handle, but we were going too fast for her to make a safe exit. I increased the pressure on the pedal under my foot anyway while I moved the hand holding the telephone to the wheel and the hand that had been holding the wheel to the button that was on the console on my side of the car, right by the door. There was a click that sounded from all around. It didn’t have the velvety depth of the locks on Falzarano’s car but mine were electric and the effect was much the same.

  Honey was in the car with me and I wanted it to stay that way. I glanced at her and she didn’t look too pleased, but so far she hadn’t moved. She was still waiting for her moment.

  I reversed the position of my hands and into the telephone I said, “What do you know about Boxer?”

  “Sounds like your audio inputs need a retune, Raymondo,” said Ada. “I told you, my information is out of date.”

  “What about a lady called Athena? Ring any bells?”

  “Nothing there, Ray, nothing there. But questions make me nervous, Ray. You asking them makes me even more nervous. What’s going on?”

  I thought about that for a moment while Honey vibrated next to me and the roar of an ocean came down the phone line and into my head.

  “Earth to Ray, come in Ray.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay what?” Ada asked. “Is the girl dead? She’s not dead, is she?”

  I looked sideways at Honey. Honey glared at me. She pushed her face forward just a little. Like she was trying to listen in on the conversation I was having with my boss. That wasn’t going to happen. She could hear me speak but whatever Ada said in reply was beyond the capabilities of any part of the human ear to hear.

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  Ada sighed. There was no other sound. No coffee being drunk. No cigarettes being smoked. No creak of the office chair.

  Not that there had ever been any of these sounds. Like a large part of my world, those only existed inside my head. Echoes. Fragments. Reminders of another life that wasn’t mine to remember.

  “Work on it a little harder, chief,” said Ada. “You don’t have much time left.”

  Ada was right but there was still some padding. “I have two hours,” I said. Then I’d have no choice. I had to be back at the office and in my alcove. The memory tape inside my chest held only twenty-four hours of data and I’d burned through nearly twenty-two.

  “Then use them, Ray.”

  I kept driving. The road was straight. We were heading west. Toward Bay City. Honey’s eyes went to the windshield. We seemed to be on the right track for wherever it was she wanted to go.

  “Ada,” I said.

  “Ray,” said Ada.

  “This information you don’t have.”

  “You’re becoming obsessed, Ray.”

  “I might be able to solve that problem for you.”

  Ada didn’t answer straight away. What I heard in the second before she spoke sounded an awful lot like a cigarette lighter coming to life.

  That was more like it.

  “Tell me more, chief,” said Ada.

  “I’ll fill you in at the office.”

  “Looking forward to it.”

  Then I hung up.

  I kept on driving. Honey sat next to me and she was watching my hands as they eased the steering wheel.

  She had to die. That was the job. I was a killer. I killed people. Ada got the jobs and I did the jobs and somewhere a numbered bank account got a little fatter. It didn’t matter what the job was. The target could be the president of the United States or the president of the Midwest Carpet and Flooring Traveling Salesman Association.

  It was what I was programmed to do.

  And I had two hours left to do it. I kept on driving. I didn’t speak and neither did Honey. Finally she seemed to relax a little bit, but it wasn’t like before. She was still waiting, still ready.

  “We’re nearly here,” she said. “Second right. Then kill the lights and pull into the lot. I don’t think we were followed, but they might have taken a different route. And then you and I are going to have a particular kind of conversation.”

  I followed her directions and I killed the lights like she had asked and I rolled into the parking lot.

  It was a motel. The
kind where the parking lot was in the middle and the motel wrapped around it. Three levels with balconies. There was neon in the office window at the back of the parking lot but the neon was dead. The whole place was. There was a sign on the window of the office that said CLOSED UNTIL JANUARY. HAPPY NEW YEAR! but the year posted underneath wasn’t this one or the next. The joint had been abandoned and was now slowly falling to pieces.

  I picked a spot and nosed the Buick into it.

  Honey turned to me.

  “Now unlock my door and follow me. Room two ten. Second floor. Bring the case. There’s a little something I have to take care of.”

  She slipped her prize out of the laundry bag and squeezed the door handle with her free hand.

  I reached over and pressed the button on the console and four doors of the car unlocked themselves. Honey got out and didn’t say a thing.

  I got out and watched her as she walked across the parking lot with the box cradled against her bare middle. There were steel stairs that ran up to the balcony on the second floor and kept on going up to the third. She took the first exit. I watched her until she was out of sight and then I reached into the back of the car and got out the briefcase. That nice weight was still there.

  Then I got out and I closed the driver’s door. The hinge squeaked and the door felt light and disappointing.

  At least that disappointment would be short-lived. In the morning I wouldn’t remember Falzarano’s car.

  I gripped the briefcase and went up the stairs. They were rusty and they shook and they rattled and they creaked. I didn’t waste any time on them.

  The balcony on the second floor gave a great view of the parking lot. I headed back the way I had come until I was standing more or less over my car. I checked the room numbers. Two ten was the next one over. The door was closed. The curtain was drawn tight and there was no light from within. The city had cut the utilities a long while ago.

  I stood and I looked and I listened. There was nobody around to admire the great detective doing two things at once and there wasn’t any sound from the room.

  I reached for the handle. It was unlocked. I stepped inside. I closed the door. I looked around. It was dark and then suddenly it wasn’t.

  Honey was standing by a bed that was just a rotting mattress. The jewelry box was on the bed, as was the bound and gagged form of a lady wearing nothing but a set of matching underwear that covered not very much at all. She had black hair and she looked at me with eyes ringed with blue and pink makeup. She looked like she should be wearing the knee-high white leather boots and red two-piece covered in tassels that Honey was currently occupying.

  The woman on the bed didn’t move. Neither did Honey, on account of the gun pointing at her head along with the beam of a flashlight.

  There were two other flashlights pointed at me along with four other guns.

  Five of them. Two of us.

  I recognized them.

  The man holding the gun against Honey’s head smiled. I tried smiling back but I’m not sure he saw it.

  And then he said, “I’m so glad you could both make it,” in an accent stiff enough to butter toast with.

  He was English. Just like the other four men were.

  The Hit List.

  And I had a feeling I knew what they were going to ask for next.

  12

  “I would probably advise you to stand just where you are,” said the Hit List’s singer from underneath all that hair. I looked at his friends. There were in identical silvery suits and they all had the same volume of blond locks that had a tendency to drive ladies wild.

  The Hit List. The only group at the club who hadn’t been at the auction. I hadn’t paid that any attention then and I knew that was my mistake now. Because it seemed they’d been there to sing for the same reason Honey had been there to dance. They were after the mysterious something the lovely Athena had been there to sell, just like everyone else in town.

  Me now included.

  I looked at Honey. She looked at me. She had both elbows locked and her arms straight by her side. There was only one gun on her and four on me but it wouldn’t have taken much for one or more of those four guns to swing in her direction. I had a feeling the boys from across the pond knew what they were doing, the way they held their guns and their nerve at the same time. That was generally harder to pull off than it looked and they were doing a fine job.

  Which meant they weren’t a band. They were a gang, just like all the others that had turned up at the club for the auction. Only they’d come a little farther than the rest of them.

  Honey looked at me and she said, “I’m sorry, Ray.”

  I glanced at Honey and I didn’t shrug so she did it for me. I gestured to the girl trussed up on the bed.

  “Don’t mention it,” I said. “I’m just glad you were coming back to let the girl you replaced go before you skedaddled with the goods. Or at least I hope you were going to let her go.” Then I looked at the boy with the gun and the hair. “Only you got here first.”

  The singer smiled. He flicked the barrel of his gun more or less in Honey’s direction. “We’ve been watching her for several days. She’s a sly one. Smart too. Only we’re smarter. Finding this place was a doddle.”

  My eyebrow was itching to go up but it wouldn’t move no matter how much I tried, so I let a few circuits fizz instead.

  The singer from the band reached for the jewelry box. He held it up and then he smiled. “We’ve invested a lot of time and money in acquiring this little box.” He held it up in case I didn’t know what box he was talking about. “Inside is the key to the whole of the west coast. It’ll put us ahead by months, if not years.”

  I nodded. “I get it. Nice little shortcut. With that box you can just move right in. The work has been done for you and your hands are clean. And I can understand why you wanted to steal it rather than buy it. Moving your boys in from across the pond is a big operation. Like you said, it’s already cost you time and money. So why not just take the box? Easy, especially if you know that somebody else is planning to grab it. All you gotta do is let them do the hard bit and steal it from the auction, and then you can steal it from the thief. As criminal enterprises go, I’m impressed by the simplicity of it.”

  The singer gave a laugh that was more an exhalation, like he was apologizing for serving the wrong vintage at his country house garden party.

  “Whoever—whatever—you are, I like you.”

  “You weren’t too bad yourself,” I said. “Your way in was inventive. Pretend to be a beat group and you’re right in the middle of it. You boys even had a little fun while you were at it. What did you do? Go around your hideout back in London asking who knew their way around a glockenspiel? I have to say you boys weren’t bad, but you won’t see my review in tomorrow’s paper. I’d take my hat off to you but I’m afraid you might fill it full of holes.”

  The singer showed me his tonsils. Maybe that was how English people laughed. “Any monkey can learn three chords and hold a note. You Americans are so infatuated with us you’ll hire anyone with long hair and an accent to stand on a stage and make a noise. Now, I like you, and I’m sorry it had to end like this, but you do rather talk a little too much.”

  The others hadn’t moved a single muscle and neither had I. I frowned but the guy couldn’t see it. I still had the briefcase in my hand. I glanced at the girl on the bed and she looked back at me with eyes that were wide and wet above the gag that was pulled tight between her teeth. Beside the bed the singer chuckled to himself. He put the jewelry box back down on the bed next to the girl. Then he swapped the gun into his other hand. Getting tired of holding it most likely. It was still pointed at Honey but in a less pointed way. His thumb danced over the end of his gun. It was an automatic and there was no hammer to cock but he made the motion anyway. He was getting ready for action.

  Honey smiled and she pushed her chin up. This got the singer’s attention. He aped the motion with his own chin and I had the
feeling he didn’t know he was doing it.

  “You do this and you’ll be making an enemy of Boxer,” she said. “He won’t make it easy for you. If you expect him to just roll over you’ve got a screw loose.”

  The singer did the tonsil thing again. His friends didn’t. “My dear,” he said. “Mr. Boxer will not be a concern.” He waved the end of the gun around the room. “He might have been a kingpin once upon a time, but nobody in this godforsaken city of yours pays him the least bit of attention now. And once everyone else has sworn their fealty to us, it will be Boxer who finds himself in something of a sticky situation, not us.”

  He raised his gun. He jerked his head at his friends. They got the message. So did I.

  I laughed. It sounded like the gears in my Buick slipping.

  The singer’s expression flickered like a dying lightbulb. I ignored him and nodded at the girl on the mattress. “In a few seconds you’re going to want to roll off the bed and, if you can manage it, roll under it.”

  The girl looked at me with those wide eyes and then after a million years she nodded and while she was nodding the singer looked at her and he looked at me and he looked at Honey.

  Then he looked at his friends.

  “Kill them.”

  I don’t know what they expected to happen. They were good at their jobs but they weren’t perfect and they had overlooked something.

  They had overlooked me.

  More specifically, they had overlooked the fact that I was six feet and plenty of change and some more again across the middle and all of it was bronzed titanium steel alloy and that “kill them” didn’t really apply to me on account of the fact that bullets didn’t really apply to me either.

  I could see how they’d made a mistake. They couldn’t have foreseen that the only robot left in the world was going to get in their way. Maybe they hadn’t had robots in Merry Olde England. I didn’t know. I didn’t seem to have that information anywhere in my permanent store.

  While I thought about that I saw the girl on the bed roll off it with a muffled whimper followed by a thud as she hit the moldy carpet. As she disappeared over the edge and as the boys were adjusting their grips on their guns I stepped forward while sweeping out with the arm that was holding the briefcase. That arm caught Honey and shoved her backward and then behind me. I felt her grab the briefcase and hold it against herself as I stepped right in front of her. She was much smaller than I was and she knew when to keep her head down.