city blues 01 - dome city blues

by Jeff Edwards

  Los Angeles: 2063

  David Stalin was one of the best detectives in the business, running head-to-head with data-jackers, organ thieves, and the tech-enhanced gangs who ruled the shadowy streets of Los Angeles. He could do no wrong, until what seemed like an easy case got out of control, and left his wife dead among the abandoned ruins of old LA.

  After four years of self-imposed retirement, David suddenly finds himself back on the job, struggling to unravel a crime far worse than murder. This time, he’s not the hunter. As he’s about to discover, the past isn’t finished with him yet.

  “DOME CITY BLUES is a smart, action-packed mystery thriller set in a future reminiscent of Blade Runner. Edwards combines the mind-twisting surrealism of Philip K. Dick with the hard-boiled characters of Elmore Leonard. I can’t wait for the next one!”

  — JAK KOKE, Bestselling author of ‘THE TERMINUS EXPERIMENT,’ and ‘THE EDGE OF CHAOS’

  “Ex-private detective David Stalin inhabits a world you might not want to live in, but you definitely want to visit. Whether or not you’ll survive the trip is anybody’s guess... but you won’t stop flipping the pages until you’re done. An impressive achievement!”

  — JEFF MARIOTTE, Author of ‘THE BURNING SEASON,’ and ‘CITY UNDER THE SAND’

  DOME CITY BLUES

  Jeff Edwards

  Stealth Books

  DOME CITY BLUES

  Copyright © 1994, 2011 by Jeff Edwards

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Stealth Books

  www.stealthbooks.com

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9830085-7-6

  Published in the United States of America

  To Don Gerrard,

  who has been waiting for this book far too long.

  When you live inside a plastic bubble,

  Hidin’ from the sky.

  You know that this ain’t livin’,

  But you ain’t got sense to die.

  The air you breathe comes from machines,

  It kills your soul and steals your dreams.

  And you think you might be human,

  But you can’t remember why.

  Rusty Parker — Dome City Blues

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the following people for their brilliant technical guidance in the creation of this book. (Any errors that have crept in were my fault, not theirs.)

  Mitchell Pearlman, Forensic Psychologist

  A. E. (Art) Crosby, Royal Canadian Mounted Police

  Dr. Richard G. Courtney, Neurosurgery Resident

  Dr. S. Chawla, Neurologist

  Annette J. Grosshans, U.S. Secret Service, Forensic Services Division

  Dr. Kevin Gerhart, MD, PhD, Neuroscientist

  Lt. Bill Nelson, SWAT Captain, San Diego Police Department

  William Reese, Retired U.S. Army Intelligence Officer

  I’d also like to acknowledge the contributions of several people whose assistance was of a less technical nature, but every bit as valuable:

  Cary Stevens, for his help with Homo Trovectior and other matters of cultural anthropology; Michael I. Turner, Commander, USN (Ret.), for his assistance with the geography of future Los Angeles; Brian Morgan, the original model for David Stalin; the Phoenix Arizona Public Library, for providing exceptional research support to a complete stranger who had all manner of crazy questions; Brenda Collins, for helping me drag this story into the twenty-first century; Crystal Larson, for her fantastic painting of the Los Angeles domes, and for allowing us to stage the simulated murder of her daughter; Eyler Larson, for his creative and wonderfully devious enhancements to the realism of the aforementioned mock homicide (and—of course—for allowing us to simulate the death of his daughter); Megan Larson, for lying very still and looking extremely dead whenever the camera was pointed in her direction; Christy Coulter, for allowing her daughter to pose as Simulated Homicide Victim #2; Candice Russel, for volunteering to be our second (and equally convincing) murder victim, and for posing as our figure model for early versions of the cover image; Maria Edwards for her untiring support, her excellent research, and for protecting my writing time so that I could actually write this book; my editor and long-time friend, Don Gerrard, for his endless patience and unfailing optimism; and the staff of San Diego’s finest specialty genre bookstore, Mysterious Galaxy, for loving Dome City Blues for almost as long as I have.

  Finally, I would like to thank the many (many) advance readers, who put their love and time into making this book everything I wanted it to be.

  CHAPTER 1

  The City Planners called it Los Angeles Urban Environmental Enclosure 12-A. Those of us who lived there called it the Zone. By either name, it amounted to a geodesic blister of translucent polycarbon fused to the east side of LA Dome #12 like a Siamese twin joined at the hip. It lacked the graceful sweeping arcs of the domes that covered the rest of the city. It was ugly, but then it was never designed to be pretty. It was an afterthought, thrown together after the inhabitants of East LA had made it violently clear that they didn’t appreciate being left outside under a sky that pissed acid rain and streamed dangerous levels of solar ultraviolet.

  I leaned against a wall and pried a Marlboro out of a squashed pack. The lettering on the box said, “crush proof.” It wasn’t. The box, like the cigarettes it contained, was a Brazilian knockoff—one of a hundred offshore counterfeit brands that had sprung into existence after the collapse of the American tobacco industry.

  I stroked the wrinkled cigarette a few times to straighten it. It was still pretty rumpled, but it didn’t look too mangled to be useable. I touched the tip against the black circle of the ignition patch on the bottom of the box. It took two or three seconds for the catalytic reaction to light the tobacco. I took a longish drag, and blew a gout of smoke into the air.

  The last rays of the sun were starting to crawl up the tops of the buildings. Night was coming to the Zone. I watched as it crept over the decaying structures, hiding the sandstone texture of crumbling cement and rusting steel under a humid cloak of shadow.

  Holographic facades flickered and appeared across the faces of most of the buildings: glamorous mirages that concealed graffiti-covered walls behind idealized projections of fairy tale palaces and pirate ships under sail. Here and there, enough sunlight still filtered through to weaken the holograms, leaving patches of drab reality visible through the bright fabric of illusion. In a few minutes, when the sun dropped a little farther, the holographic facades would become seamless, and the illusion would be perfect.

  Above the street, triggered by the failing light, holosigns winked into phantom existence. Neon colored lasers woke up and began painting nightclub logos on the underside of the dome.

  Two meters above the main entrance to Trixie’s, a hologram of a naked woman crackled to life. The woman writhed suggestively through a ninety-second loop of canned video data. A glitch in the software caused the dancer’s left leg to vanish in a smear of video static for the last few seconds of the loop. Lately, the glitch seemed to be spreading to the upper slope of her right breast.

  Somebody tried to tell me once that the dancer was Trixie herself, the hologram built up from video footage shot when she was young. I’ve seen Trixie up close. I don’t think so.

  When half of the cigarette was gone, I ground it into the cracked sidewalk with my shoe and started walking again.

  The strip was still mostly deserted, people ju
st beginning to filter in. Four or five early-bird whores staked out their turf. A small knot of sailors cruised the bar fronts, waiting for the action to start. The inevitable sprinkling of tourists wandered around goggle-eyed, too ignorant of street-level protocol to realize that their chances of making it home safely were dropping with the sun.

  A nocturnal creature, the Zone hibernated during the day and came to life when the sun went down. After sunset, even LAPD Tactical didn’t venture through in less than squad strength.

  I passed a pair of muscle-punks leaning against the carcass of a vandalized police car. They were decked out in the severely retro fashion popular in the Zone: black jeans, Gestapo boots, and synthleather jackets with too many zippers.

  Both had peroxide white hair shaved close on the sides, left long on the top, and combed into crests like exotic birds. Their well-used leathers reeked of old blood and chemical reflex boosters. They watched me closely as I walked by, predatory eyes sizing up my potential as a target. Some signal passed between them and they decided to leave me alone.

  I crossed Santa Fe Avenue, and walked in the front door of Falcon’s Nest. I waited a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim illumination, and then scanned the room. I was looking for John Hershell, a friend I was supposed to be meeting for drinks.

  John and I were technically cousins on my mother’s side, through some geometry that had been explained to me once and then promptly forgotten. We had been buddies right up through our teens. We’d even ended up in the Army together.

  John wouldn’t be hard to spot. He was strapped into a powered exoskeleton, compliments of a perimeter defense laser that our squad had tangled with in Argentina. The laser had sliced through his spinal cord, leaving his body pretty much null and void from the chest down. Turns out, he was one of those lucky one-in-a-million people who are allergic to the DNA modifying retrovirus that stimulates growth of spinal ganglia.

  John wasn’t here yet.

  Unfortunately, Preacher was here, sitting at the bar, and he was in full cry. I slid into the booth farthest from his stool and signaled for my usual: Cutty Sark on the rocks.

  Preacher’s real name was Robert Treach, and he was an expert on everything. As usual, he was talking loudly to everyone within earshot.

  “Natural selection,” he was saying. “You can’t wipe out disease. You just can’t do it. They tried it in the Twentieth Century, right? Antibiotics, vaccines, miracle drugs, all that. Wiped out polio, smallpox, measles, and a bunch of other diseases.”

  Someone in his general area must have asked the obvious question.

  Preacher squeezed a swallow from his tube of beer and shook his head. “Hell no it didn’t work. It can’t work. Not in the long run. Nature always figures out a way to restore the balance. When the population gets too high, natural selection kicks in and a new disease shows up, usually something real ugly. Where do you think AIDS came from? And then AIDS II, and AIDS III? Too many people bumping into each other, that’s where. It’s not healthy. Nature had to cull the herd. Worked too, didn’t it? Culled the hell out of the human race.”

  I ran his words around in my head for a second: “Culled the hell out of the human race.” Only Preacher would choose such a banal phrase to describe the disease that had ultimately wiped out a third of humanity.

  “It’ll happen again too,” Preacher said. “Nature will keep on weeding out our weak bloodlines until we wise up enough to do it ourselves.”

  He downed another squirt of beer and nodded in response to something I couldn’t hear. “That’s what I’m telling you,” he said. “Compassion is not a pro-survival characteristic.”

  I tuned him out just as he was spouting some nonsense about Darwin.

  Falcon’s Nest was a dark and cozy little blues bar. As far as I knew, it was the last one left in Los Angeles, maybe even the world. It was an anachronism, with its exposed beam ceilings, dark Portsmouth paneling, and worn leather upholstery. The owner, Rico Martinez, had kept it as true to the traditions of his grandfather as possible. It remained an island of quiet sanity in a sea of designer drinks, psycho-rock, and holo-neon.

  When Rico finished pouring my drink, he shooed the waitress away and brought it to me himself. Watching him hobble across the room made me wish I’d sat at the bar.

  His round face split into a huge grin as he slid the drink across the mahogany table. “You’ve finished a piece, haven’t you?”

  I pushed an ice cube around the top of my scotch. “What makes you say that?”

  Rico’s grin got wider. “You bastard, you have, haven’t you?”

  It was my turn to grin.

  He slapped the table. “I knew it! When do I get to see?”

  I took a sip of scotch. “I’ll probably shoot a couple of holos tomorrow. I’ll drop you a copy in a day or two.”

  “Is this piece as good as the last one?”

  I shrugged. “You’ll have to be the judge of that.”

  Demi, the latest in a long line of temporary waitresses, slipped up behind Rico and whispered something in his ear.

  He glanced back toward the bar and nodded. “Duty calls, Amigo. I have thirsty customers and the booze must flow.”

  I lifted my glass and toasted him silently as he limped back to the bar.

  Rico doesn’t talk about it, but rumor says—when he was a kid—his mother sold the musculature in his left leg to a black market organ clinic. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’ve seen the leg. From the knee down, it’s not much more than skin stretched over tendon and bone.

  I asked him once why he’s never gotten a muscle graft to replace the missing tissue. But Rico had given me a sad smile, shaken his head, and told me that you never can be sure whether organ donors are volunteers, or victims.

  Lonnie Johnson’s Low Down Saint Louis Blues found its way out of the speakers. I took another sip of the scotch and settled down into listening mode.

  “Getting started without me, Sarge?”

  I looked up into John’s grinning face.

  “You’re late,” I said. “There is scotch to be drunk, Johnny Boy, and you are not carrying your end of the load.”

  John eased himself into the booth; the servomotors that drove his exoskeleton bleated softly as they bent his unresponsive lower body into a sitting position.

  “A problem that can be quickly remedied,” he said. He waved Demi over and ordered a drink.

  John wore dark colors as usual, slate gray pants and a pleated black jacket with flyaway shoulders. The dark color scheme was supposed to hide the narrow gray ribbing of the exoskeleton. Under the dim lights of the bar, it almost worked; the exoskeleton was nearly invisible.

  “What’s the big news?” I asked.

  “My R&D team is getting close to a breakthrough on the neural shunt,” he said.

  The neural shunt was one of a hundred crazy schemes that John had cooked up in his drive to free himself from the exoskeleton. I didn’t understand most of the technical details, but the shunt was basically an attempt to wire around the damage to John’s spine, sort of like jumpering around a bad circuit.

  It consisted of a custom-designed microchip implanted in his frontal lobe. The chip was supposed to interpret synaptic firings from John’s brain, and transmit the signals through a fiber optic strand that ran down his spine to a second chip implanted below the injury. It had been an ugly piece of surgery, and it hadn’t really done the trick.

  “You’re going to try that crap again?”

  “Of course I’m going to try it again. That’s why I built Neuro-Tech in the first place. Owning a medical R&D team isn’t exactly my life-long dream. If anybody else would work on the problem for me, I’d sell the company in a nanosecond. Until that happens, I’m going to have to keep trying myself.”

  I took a swallow of scotch and tried not to frown. “I thought the neural shunt was a dead-end.”

  John shook his head. “So did I, but my engineers have worked up a new angle on it.”

 
; “John, you told me yourself, every time you power up that chip, you go into a full-blown seizure. You’ve got to stop screwing around with your brain.”

  John tapped a fingernail on the carbon laminate ribbing of his exoskeleton. “I’ve got news for you, Sarge. My brain is about all I’ve got left to screw around with.”

  I set my glass down a little too hard. “Damn it, John. You know what I’m talking about.”

  John nodded. “I know,” he said. “And I appreciate your concern. I honestly do. But I’m going to be okay, Sarge. Really. This is going to work.”

  I bit back the obvious comment. When it came to getting his legs back, John’s weird projects were always ‘going to work.’

  It was his quest, his single-minded obsession. In an age where medical technology could cure cancer, transplant organs, and rewrite DNA, John was just about the only crippled person left. He wanted out of that exoskeleton, and he didn’t care how many fortunes he had to spend to get there.

  “What about the seizures?” I asked.

  “We’re getting a handle on that,” John said.

  I gulped down the rest of my scotch and signaled Demi for another.

  When it came, she waved away my money and jerked her head toward a woman in the next booth. “Already paid for,” she said. “Your secret admirer.” Her nasal accent made it sound like saykrit admoyra.

  I glanced at the woman for a second and then felt my eyes drawn to her again. She definitely had the goods. She was also definitely a hooker.

  Her hair was a tousled auburn mane falling well past her shoulders. She had opaline green eyes with improbably long lashes. Her lips were a deep glossy red, with a swollen bee-stung look that suggested she had just climbed out of bed. The soft prominence of her cheekbones tapered to a pointed chin.

  A skintight bodysuit of dark green synlon clung to her as if sprayed on. The fabric was photo-active, oval cells of the material cycling to transparency, revealing her white skin in sharp contrast to the dark green synthetic cloth.