She wanted to scream.
I took a sip of my coffee and outwaited her. The clock on the wall ticked its slow rhythm. After a few moments she took a breath deep into her lungs, then let it out in a rush. Then she spoke. “My daughter isn't returning my telephone calls, and hasn't for some time.” Silence again. I didn't fill it. “I'm worried about her. She's all that I have.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Alisha said she didn't want to see me anymore, and she hasn't been in contact with any of her friends either. I didn't know where to turn.”
“Have you called the police?”
She didn't say anything. I took a guess. “Are the two of you here illegally?” It was a few moments before she nodded.
“None of my business,” I said, and told her my fee.
When she was gone I started with social media. Alisha Williams was slim, attractive. Baseline. Pretty. A few friends, not many. Active until about a week ago, then nothing.
I leaned back in my chair and called Esther.
“Hey, babe,” she said. “What's up?”
I pictured her leaning back in her own office chair, putting high heels up on the desk. Stockings. Seamed. In her hand the cold Bakelite handset, in front of her the plugboard for the telephone connections.
That's not what happened, of course. Telephone companies haven't used plugboards or Bakelite phones for decades, and the chances of seeing Esther gussied up for an evening out, let alone at work, were on the slim side of nothing whatsoever. Also, I called her on her mobile rather than the company number. Also, she wasn't interested in dinosaurs. Or men. So the picture I painted myself was wrong in just about every single detail.
Doesn't stop a dino from dreaming, though.
“Need a ping. Missing person called Alisha Williams,” I said and reeled off her phone number. “Whenever you get a chance.”
“Any guesses yet?”
“Could be a runaway, could be worse,” I said.
“And what's in it for me?”
Ah. Negotiation time. “Hold on a moment while I see what I've got.”
I leaned down to the filing cabinet under the desk and pulled it open with my free hand. It'd been a few months since I'd needed to call on Esther, so I knew the figures weren't up-to-date, but we work with what we've got. I pulled a big folder out of the drawer and laid it open on the desktop. Dozens of cards, all tucked safely into their plastic protective sleeves, each with a dollar value scribbled on the masking tape on the top of it. I flicked to the middle pages, considered my options.
“Mana Drain?”
“Got it. You know that, I stiffed you with it six months ago.”
“You might have sold it.”
“Yeah, right. Try again.”
I frowned. “I got a Karakas from the same deck, if that's any good to you.”
“Maaaaybe. What sort of condition?”
“Moderately played,” I said, pulling it out of its sleeve and taking a snapshot of it with the phone. I heard the ping of arrival at her end filtered through the cell. There was silence for a few moments while she looked at it.
“Got yourself a deal, big boy,” she said. “You can hand it over when I thrash you on Wednesday.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Talk is cheap. Let me know when you got it.”
She hung up. “No, you hang up,” I said to myself.
* * *
While I was waiting for Esther to find a few minutes unobserved by anyone in her office, I drove out to Alisha's apartment in Van Nuys. The intercom on the door was cracked, but looked like it still worked. I tried her buzzer for a solid minute, but there was nothing doing. Not there or not answering. My eyes drifted to the button marked apartment manager.
She came to meet me at the door. Forties, strawberry blonde, running to seed. She'd seen better days, but then so had I. When she saw me she pasted a false smile onto her face and said, “I’m so sorry, but we have no vacancies right now.”
It was a lie. I let it pass.
“I’m not looking for an apartment,” I said, waving my ID at her like a charm. “I’m looking for Alisha Williams.”
Her mouth puckered in disapproval. “She's late with her rent.” Then, like it took a moment to come through: “Why, what's she done?”
I raised my arms, as far as that went. “Nothing. Probably. She hasn't checked in with her mother for a while, the old lady was getting concerned. Does she normally pay her rent on time?”
“Always.”
“I'd like to see her room.”
“One of the services we provide is privacy.”
“She might be dead. Can't rule that out yet,” I said. She looked like she might be willing to push it a little further. “Or I could come back with the police?”
Her lips thinned. She obviously didn't know that I couldn't.
“This way,” she said, and led me into the complex.
We walked through too-small corridors to Apartment 328. It was at the front of the building overlooking the street. No sign of a struggle, no body. Neither messy nor tidy. An apartment. Looked like she went of her own accord, at least.
I looked out of the window. A bright yellow excavator sat lonely in the middle of the road, halfway through tearing up the tarmac. Waiting for its owner to get back and restore it to life.
“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.
“A couple of weeks ago. I don't make a habit of checking in with the tenants. Everyone has a right to their own business.”
I turned back into the room and checked over the tables by the sofa. There was a flyer on one of them, and I picked it up. Do you work as a domestic or industrial cleaner? We want to hear from you as part of a study on working conditions. We'll pay for your time in cash. Such and such address, a telephone number. And a scribble on the side of it in pen: 7pm Wednesday.
I pocketed the flyer and told the apartment manager I'd see myself out. She seemed happy to see me go.
* * *
The phone number had been disconnected, but the address took me to a strip mall. The place was two from the end, a small office rental tucked in between a liquor store and a thrift store on the edge of the block. I peered through the window and saw junk mail stacking up beneath the letterbox. Looked like nobody had been home in a while.
Movement from the doorway to the liquor store. I turned to see a dirty blonde watching me, vape in hand. I raised my hat at her. She half-raised her hand in response, then pushed it back down again and took another puff, white smoke haloing her as she exhaled.
I strolled round the back of the block and into the loading alley. When I reached the second door I took a quick look to make sure no one was about and a few moments later, should anyone have asked, it would have been My goodness, officer, I found the doorway had been broken open and went inside to check that everyone was all right. Just a community-minded citizen, that's all.
No one appeared. I wondered if my dirty blonde would turn up at the rear exit to the liquor store to see what was happening, but she didn't.
The door opened into a small break room and storage area, while an internal door opened into the main office at the front. I looked the place over. Rentable by the week or month, nothing you don't see the world over. Nothing of interest.
So why was it empty, and why had it been full?
I exited the way I'd come and went into the liquor store. Dirty Blonde was there behind the counter. I pulled out my license and waved it at her. “Mike Valentine. Looking into the people that used to be next door for a client. Wondered if you'd seen anything unusual?”
Gold. Her name was Trish, and she loved to watch her neighbors, and she loved to gossip. She'd never met a dinosaur before, she was so excited, she'd seen a documentary about changing on TV the other week but didn't really understand it, she thought it was fascinating, she couldn't wait to tell all her friends, she'd seen a cat girl in the clothes store the other day, what was it like being a different species?
I told her the basics about the process to prime the pump.
I got g-therapy from one of the big corps, back when it was still fairly new. Dinosaur genes retrieved from flies in amber, patched with DNA from humans and other species where necessary to fill the holes, yadda-yadda-yadda, you know the drill. So now I've got a skin full of scales and a mouth full of dinosaur teeth.
For as long as I can remember, I knew that there was something different about me. It was only when I saw my first TV show about dinosaurs that I knew that's who I was. Inside. And it was only when I saw the results of the first commercial g-manips that I knew I could actually live my dream. Encode the brain, save it on a hard drive while they rebuild the body to your specifications, download the old brainstate into the new body, and at last I had become what I'd always dreamed of being.
A dinosaur.
Anthropomorphic, true. But you still gotta live in human society. Sleep, eat, work. You need to be the right body shape for that sort of thing.
They give you various options at the g-bank. How close to the original dinosaur do you want to be? The original rexes only had little arms in proportion to their bodies. Everybody knows that. I went for something in between, about two thirds of what they'd been beforehand. Do you want the instincts of the original species, or would you prefer the underlying nervous system to be closer to baseline human? Well, unless you want to attack and eat everyone you meet, baseline is the way to go there, if only because eating people is wrong.
Then there's the teeth. Mine are a bit bigger, sharper than an ordinary human’s.
To be fair, I've got a lot of mouth to fill.
Trish hung on my every word, fascinated. I let her ask a few more questions. How was the treatment? Painless, you go to sleep and wake up a year later in your new body. How much did it cost? Everything I had, including my marriage. I didn't tell her that bit. Were there any problems? No, they've been doing the procedure for long enough that everything's pretty much under control now.
And after a while, I moved the conversation on to the folk next door. As expected, Trish was just as happy to tell me about them as she would be telling her next customer about what it was like to meet a real, actual dinosaur.
They'd moved in about three weeks ago, a research company, she didn't know researching what exactly. There'd been a steady stream of visitors over the following week, some had popped in for a can of soda or something stronger on the way home, and Trish had asked them what they were in for. Surveys, apparently. Some sort of market research organization. The people came in and did their surveys, were paid cash in hand for their time, and went away again.
“Anything unusual about the people who came by?” I asked. Never hurts to be thorough.
“They were all dark-haired women,” she said. “And all about the same age.”
Coincidence? Maybe. Probably not. Certainly fitted Alisha's description.
“Lookers?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “Now you mention it, I suppose.”
Then one morning, nothing. The people disappeared as quickly as they'd come. No more visitors, no more gossip. Nothing. As you can imagine, Trish was heartbroken.
Still, at least I'd cheered her up. I said goodbye and left.
* * *
I got a phone call from Esther at about ten that evening. “Her phone's still on, and it's moving between cell towers.” That was good. It meant that she was probably still alive. Esther gave me the address and trash talked a bit about our Wednesday game before hanging up. I got in the car and drove downtown to the hotel.
A valet in the parking lane stepped forward to take my keys, a young fox desperate for tips and kindness. Probably twenty or so. Unless I missed my guess, that wasn't the only job he did either. Muscles were tight and he filled the suit nicely. And there are a lot of well-off housewives in this area.
“You on all night?” I asked.
He nodded. “Till the club closes.”
I dropped him a fifty as I got out and handed him the keys. “There's that again if you get the car fast when I need it.”
The money vanished, as did the car.
I went up to the reception desk and told the woman there that I had a message for Ms. Williams, and would she be kind enough to pass it on? She tapped some keys and informed me that I must be mistaken as there was no one under that name staying at the hotel. So Alisha was either a) under a different name b) elsewhere to her cell or c) not in the hotel itself.
Work with what you've got. If it was either of the latter, I wasn't getting a thing, so I made the assumption she was in the building but not checked in. I could see into the restaurant from the front desk, so that only left The Thirtieth, a swanky bar up on the thirtieth floor. Guess the owners weren't that big on creativity. A private elevator led you straight to the top, and a twenty-deep queue was already waiting behind the velvet rope for the glamorous young foxpeople to check their reservations. Looked like foxes were the theme. Only for the staff, I noticed — all of the patrons were baseline. So this was a touch of the exotic to entertain the rich while they drank champagne and expensive cocktails. The transformed people were part of the decor rather than part of the club. It was that sort of a place.
I looked down at myself. Wasn't my best suit, and I didn't think they'd have let someone like me in even if it was.
I pulled a battered old paperback out of my pocket and settled down in one of the reception chairs to wait. Figured I could be here for a while. This is why a professional always carries a book with them. Sure, some of us use personal readers and whatnot, but for my money nothing beats the smell of an old paperback.
It wasn't a good book, and I ran out of it too soon. An hour after that, and I was pondering whether it was worth starting again from the beginning or whether I'd rather chew my own arm off. It was a close call, but fortunately not one I had to make because it was at that point that Alisha Williams stepped out of the elevator and headed for the door. She had two handsome young gentlemen with her, one on each arm, and I was pretty sure they were trust fundees. That particular smell of insouciance and too much money. Her eyes swept straight past me and she guided the two of them towards the door of the hotel.
Funny, I thought. A cleaner picking up old money for a three-way at a swanky nightclub. A touch above your average level of self-confidence.
I walked out into a light drizzle and waved at my fox friend. He disappeared sharply.
Alicia's handbag rang, and she let go of one of her companions for a moment to reach inside and pull out her telephone. She looked at the screen before answering it.
“Hello, Stephen. No, stop talking. Don't call me again.” Stephen didn't have time to respond before she thumbed the screen to cut him off and dropped the phone back into her handbag. Then she started taking turns kissing her companions again. They seemed to like it.
My car pulled up and the fox got out. As I paid him his second fifty, Alicia's taxi arrived and the three of them fell in the back, continuing to nuzzle each other. All right for some, I thought, and drove after them.
They went north, straight to Upper Laurel Canyon. Definitely money. The taxi turned into an automated gate — presumably Alisha had the key in her purse — and came out again twenty minutes later.
I recorded the address in my notes and went home to bed.
* * *
The next morning started with a quick phone call to Ms. Williams Senior informing her that she could settle her account. An hour later, I had the rest of the money and an earful of thanks, and she had her daughter's new address.
It wasn't until the afternoon that it all went sideways. I was building a new deck for Wednesday evening — I thought there were some strategies in Control-Combo that could give me an edge over Esther's usual Aggro play — when the phone rang.
It was Ms. Williams Senior on the other end. “That isn't my daughter,” she said.
I fired up the computer. There she was, smiling out of the picture at me. Same contact details
. And most definitely the same woman that I had tracked to the mansion up in Laurel last night.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But that was definitely where she went. The rest is up to you.”
“I don't think you understand. The woman you followed. She looked like her, but she wasn't my daughter. She laughed at me. She said I should just go away. My daughter would never say that to me.”
“I’m sorry, but you hired me to find your daughter. Which I've done. I’m not a therapist.”
She started to cry. I held the phone for a few moments, decided there was nothing I could do, and hung up on her.
Some things you just can't fix.
I turned my attention back to the deck building.
I'd been staring at the cards on the table for about five minutes without seeing them before I gave in and called the Office of the Assessor to find out who owned the property I'd trailed Alisha to the previous evening. Which is how I found out the property owner was none other than one Alisha Williams, at least as of a week ago. The previous owner, one Miranda Swain, had signed everything over to her. I thanked the fellow on the other end of the line and hit the internets. Apparently Miranda Swain had passed away gently in her sleep at the ripe old age of 93 with a lot of money. No, a lot of money. No, more than that.
Miranda had started out in big oil, moved to big pharma, then big silicon. No known relatives, so no one to challenge the will or claim that she hadn't been in her right mind giving it away before she died. (And let's face it, if there'd been any sort of relative knocking around they'd have taken a crack at it.) Instead of leaving her money to charity or cats, she'd left the lot to Alisha Williams, formerly of Van Nuys and now a very wealthy young woman.
The Jurassic Chronicles (Future Chronicles Book 15) Page 27
