by Jeff Edwards
If I were a vid detective like Mike Hammer, I’d have pulled the foil wrapper off a stick of gum and used it as a mirror. Then I could have spied on the Japanese guy behind me from the safety of my hiding place. Or, if the laser were in the next car, I could have used my foil mirror to reflect the deadly beam back into the killer’s face. No muss, no fuss: Bad Guys dead in time for the commercial.
I didn’t have any gum, and I couldn’t have reached it if I had.
Come to think of it, Mike Hammer wouldn’t have dived for cover anyway. When the shooting started, he’d have whipped out his automatic and shot it out with the Bad Guys on the spot.
This entire line of thinking took place in the ten seconds following the first laser shot. That left me with two minutes and change before we pulled into the 52nd Street depot.
All I had to do was wait. The killer was bound to take off as soon as the doors opened.
Two things changed my mind. First: it occurred to me that, on his way out, the killer might just decide to ease up to the side of the train and shoot me through the nearest window. Second: my right arm was beginning to fall asleep.
I mentally tossed a coin. It came up heads.
I threw myself sideways, uncoiling my body until I was stretched most of the way across the aisle. If that nice Japanese gentleman happened to have a laser, I was now a perfect target. I snatched the Blackhart out of the shoulder rig and rolled over, ready to spray 12mm slugs toward the rear of the car.
The Japanese man was still sitting up. There was a neat round hole the diameter of a cigarette in his forehead. The laser had taken him just over the left eyebrow.
I touched the half-moon shaped notch in my left ear. The flesh was cauterized, no blood, but it stung like hell. I was alive by an accident of geometry. If the beam had been a few centimeters to the right, it would have been me sitting there with a hole in my forehead, instead of that poor Japanese man.
I scrambled to a crouch and turned forward, most careful to stay below window level.
I spotted a crumpled sheet of hardcopy on the floor. I carefully reached for it, picked it up, and rolled it into a cone. I poked it above the lip of the window for about a second.
The laser fired again, cutting perfectly circular holes through both sides of the paper cone.
Two shots. A hand laser on batteries was only good for about five shots at maximum power, and that one certainly seemed to be cranked up to the limit. Which left the killer with three more shots, four at the outside.
A totally irrational urge came over me. Suddenly, I wanted to pop up like a jack-in-the-box and start pumping 12mm slugs through that window. I couldn’t do it; I knew that. The killer wasn’t alone in that car; there were people in there with him, people whose only crime was riding the wrong train at the wrong time.
The Lev braked suddenly, taking everyone by surprise. Levs never brake sharply unless there’s some type of emergency. Thrown off balance, I lurched forward out of my crouch.
My head and left shoulder slammed painfully into the door. Somehow I managed to hang on to the Blackhart. The body of the Japanese gentleman pitched forward, bounced off a seat-back, and fell sideways into the aisle. Behind me, I could hear fumbling and cursing; the teenagers had gotten banged around a bit too. I knew that everyone else on the train had suffered similar fates. Everyone except my friend with the laser, that is.
I had no doubt that the killer was expecting this, and had prepared for it. He was probably the only person on board not nursing a few new bruises.
Now that I thought about it, it made sense. Even if no one was monitoring the security cameras, probably two-thirds of the people on the train were carrying phones. At least two dozen passengers had called the police by now. When the Lev pulled up to the platform at the 52nd Street depot, the place was going to be crawling with LAPD Tactical.
The killer would have foreseen this, and planned for it. It was a perfect recipe for hit-and-run murder: follow Stalin until he gets on a train, boil his brain with a laser, stop the train suddenly (well short of the next depot), and run like hell. It would have worked too, had I not leaned my head against the window at the last second.
The doors hissed open on both sides of the car as soon as the Lev came to a stop.
My options were limited. I couldn’t fight back with innocent people around. So I had to lure the shooter to a place where I could fight back. I had to get the killer off the Lev.
On hands and knees, I scooted across the floor to the door at the left side of the car. A quick look both ways told me that the killer was either still on the Lev, or had gone out the other side.
I gathered my body into a crouch and threw myself out the door.
The ground came up hard and fast. I rolled with it and came up running.
A pencil thin finger of ruby light flashed by the right side of my head. I swerved suddenly to the left and kept running.
Three shots. Which meant the laser was down to two charges, maybe three.
I changed course every few seconds, darting to the right or left with intentional randomness, trying to make myself a difficult target. I was angling toward a trash dumpster behind the closest of the apartment stacks, about twenty meters away.
The ground under me was cracked plast-phalt, littered with broken glass that crunched beneath my shoes as I ran.
I made the edge of the dumpster, and darted behind it, breathing hard. Up close, I saw that the dumpster was an old orbital cargo module, no doubt reduced to trash duty after its seals could no longer hold pressure against the vacuum of space.
I peeked over the top of the dumpster, the Blackhart in my fist outstretched like an accusing finger. My pursuers had covered maybe a third of the distance between us. It was the lovers, moving toward my position in sort of a weird half-walk/half-stumble. The man was in front, the woman with her left arm around his neck.
The woman raised the laser over the man’s right shoulder and fired in my direction. The beam scorched a line of paint across the top of the dumpster. Four.
The man was struggling and it was throwing off her aim. She was using his body as a shield.
The hostage thing might be a ruse. They’d gotten on the Lev together, been huggy-kissy at the depot. They were probably working together. On the other hand, his struggles obviously weren’t helping her aim.
I had a couple of brief opportunities to take her with a head-shot, but I passed them up. It had been a long time since I’d even pulled the trigger. I certainly wasn’t ready for trick shooting.
She pointed the laser at me again, then changed her mind and jammed it against her hostage’s right cheek. He stopped struggling, and started cooperating with her.
She pulled him to the side, angling away from me. What was she doing?
She moved cautiously, careful to keep her hostage’s body between us. I was equally careful to keep the dumpster between us.
They were moving toward an alley between two of the apartment stacks. She was probably down to one shot, and had decided to abort the hit while she still had enough firepower to get away.
They broke and ran into the alley.
I took off after them.
The Blackhart led the way around the corner into the alley. I could see them up ahead. I was gaining on them.
A flight of steps was coming up: a good tall one, maybe twenty-five steps high.
They hit the steps about four seconds ahead of me and I was still gaining fast.
I took the steps two at a time. By the time I was halfway up, they were at the top. I expected them to keep running. Instead, they paused at the top and turned to face me.
I froze on the steps, my automatic pointed up at them. We looked at each other.
The woman shoved her hostage down the stairs and ran.
The young man came bouncing down the concrete steps in a jumble of arms and legs. I don’t think a professional stunt man could have taken that kind of fall without breaking a few bones.
I could have jump
ed out of the way and let him tumble past. Lady Laser was expecting me to stop and help the poor bastard. I had a split second to decide. I stepped to the side and lowered my center of gravity. When he rolled by me, I reached out and grabbed him. His momentum dragged us both down three or four steps. For a half second, I thought we were going to end up careening down the steps together. Then, thankfully, we ground to a stop.
I could hear the woman’s footsteps receding in the distance. There was still time to give chase.
One look at the young man’s battered face made up my mind for me. He was badly injured, maybe critically. I let the woman go and tended to her victim.
His pulse was weak and rapid, but he never stopped breathing and his heart never stopped beating. He undoubtedly had several broken ribs. If I’d had to use CPR, he’d have died for sure.
Two grunts from LAPD Tactical found the bottom of the alley after about ten minutes. One was female, one male. Both were decked out in riot armor, carbon-glass helmets with full HUDs and enough firepower to depopulate a small town.
I left the Blackhart about five steps below us and kept my movements carefully non-threatening. When they got close enough to hear me, I pointed up the stairs. “The Bad Guy went that way.”
They ignored me. Tarzan covered me with a mini-gun the size of a small refrigerator while Tarzana recovered my automatic.
They obviously weren’t going to chase the nice lady with the laser. I tried Plan B. “Listen, you’d better call for medical assistance. This man is dying.”
Twenty-five minutes later, I sat in an interview room at Southwest District Headquarters.
A thoughtful police sergeant brought me coffee in one of those plastic bulbs that come from vending machines.
I twisted the button-shaped top off and felt the bulb start warming in my hand as soon as the air hit the thermo-chem coating on the inner layer of plastic. The coffee smelled like charcoal. I drank it anyway.
I thought about a cigarette, but someone had taken them, along with everything else in my pockets. A plastic sign reminded me that smoking was forbidden in Municipal buildings. There were about forty cigarette burns in the sign and a hundred more on the top of the only table in the room.
Just as I was settling in for a long wait, the door opened and my good friends Dancer and Delaney walked in.
Delaney sat in a chair across the table. This time he didn’t ask my permission before he started his recorder.
Dancer tossed my cigarettes on the table.
I pointed to the sign and raised an eyebrow.
Dancer glanced at the sign. “Screw em’.”
I lit up.
Dancer scratched the side of her nose. “Holy shit, Stalin. Two bodies in three days. People are just dropping dead all around you. If that asshole who fell down the stairs happens to flatline, you might be three-for-three.”
“I didn’t kill any of them.”
“I know that,” Dancer said. “If we thought for a second that you had, we’d have been up your ass with a microscope by now.”
I took a hit off the cigarette and waited.
She leaned forward and rested her hands on the table. “We also know that the Jap on the Lev...” She snapped her fingers several times.
“Takamura,” Delaney said. “Joseph Takamura.”
“Right. Takamura was zapped by a Caucasian female perpetrator armed with a military surplus hand-laser. Harvey Miller, the guy you danced with on the stairs, managed to talk for a little while before USC Medical sedated him. He claims the perp walked up to him out of nowhere and offered to get naked and horizontal.”
Dancer rolled her eyes. “I guess this woman is supposed to be nice looking, and Miller is kind of a zero. Naturally, the stupid bastard went for it. They were supposed to be riding the train to her apartment, when she whipped out a laser and started frying shit. Miller tried to hide behind a seat like everybody else. The perp found him and grabbed him for a hostage. You know the rest.”
I nodded. “How is he?”
Dancer shrugged. “Last I heard, he was pretty fucked up, but the Trauma Unit said he was probably going to make it. Frankly, he’s not my problem until he flatlines.”
I took another drag off the cigarette.
Dancer straightened up and stretched. “Are you going to tell us what in the hell is going on here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t play stupid. We’ve talked to seven or eight people who were on that Lev. They all say the woman was shooting at you, and only you. The witnesses also said that, when you got off the Lev, she followed you.
“We got a preliminary readout from LA-Trans; looks like their mainframe was crashed by a virus, just in time to stop the Lev and let our female perpetrator get off. The virus also slicked the vid recordings from every security camera on the Lev. No other Levs were affected, just that one. Hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say? That was an attempted hit, Stalin. You know it, and I know it.”
My turn to shrug.
Her face clouded. “Don’t try to hand me that strong silent shit! You’ve got somebody pissed off at you, Stalin. Somebody bad enough to pull a whole lot of heavy kink down on your ass. I don’t want any more fucking bodies! I want some fucking answers! What in the hell are you messing around with?”
I followed the grand tradition and ground out my cigarette on the table top. “Can I have my gun back now?”
Delaney said, “obstructing an investigation is a crime, Mr. Stalin. We could charge you...”
Dancer snorted. “Don’t try to play the badass, Rick. You’re not equipped for it. Okay Stalin, you can pick up your gun at the Property Desk. I think you’re a goddamned idiot, but that’s not against the law. I promise you, though: if you turn up any more corpses, I’ll shoot you myself.”
I stood up and walked to the door. I stopped and turned. “Dancer, what was in the old man’s package?”
“The one with the fancy Jap paper? It was some sort of Kabuki doll. I guess it’s his granddaughter’s birthday.”
I searched Dancer’s eyes and wondered what it had taken to create the streamlined shell that armored her against feelings and compassion. How much time spent staring into the ugly guts of human nature had it taken her to transform an elderly and dignified gentleman like Joseph Takamura into a dead old Jap with fancy Jap paper?
Dancer returned my stare, something glinting like ice behind her eyes. I started to say something, and then changed my mind. I turned and stepped through the door.
I heard it slide shut behind me.
CHAPTER 10
Dancer had a squad car drop me off at the barricade. It wasn’t even four-thirty yet. I still had time to take care of an errand I’d been wanting to run.
I stopped by my house just long enough to grab the vid chip with Michael Winter’s suicide recording, and to print out a copy of his credit reports from the LAPD case-files.
According to the records, Michael had made three credit transactions on April 14, 2063, the day of his death. One had been the room rent at the Velvet Clam; the other two were purchases made from Alphatronics, a retail electronics outlet on Hudson Avenue, at the southern end of Dome 14.
When the hard copies were finished printing, I walked to the barricade and caught a cab to Hudson Avenue.
Luckily, Alphatronics turned out to be a small, family business. If it had been part of a big chain, my chances of talking to the right person would have been slim.
The owner was a hulking Samoan named Henry Mailo.
I introduced myself and told him what I wanted.
He glanced at my hardcopy of the credit transaction and stuck his head through a curtain covering a doorway behind the counter. “Hey Tommy, get up here.”
A few seconds later, a slightly scaled-down copy of Henry powered through the curtain like a tank. Tommy looked about seventeen and already he had the classic Samoan walk, that utterly self-confident swagger that suggests that even walls would do well to get out of the way. “Yeah, Po
p. What’s up?”
Henry showed him the printout. “Did you sell this camera?”
Tommy furrowed his brow. “Pop, that was four months ago. How am I supposed to remember?”
Henry looked at the printout again. “A Hitachi 1250. We don’t move a lot of those. Are you sure you don’t remember?”
“Oh, the H-1250. Yeah… I remember, now. That was the guy who made me swap the recording chip.”
I leaned on the counter. “What do you mean?”
“The H-1250 comes with a blank recording chip in the box,” Tommy said. “All the good holo-cameras do. The 1250 comes with an ultra-high grade Hitachi Platinum series. That’s a five-hour chip. But, this guy didn’t want the Platinum. He wanted to swap it for a twenty-minute chip. I tried to tell him that he was losing money on the deal, but he didn’t care. He wanted the twenty.”
“Did he buy anything else?”
“Yeah. A camera tripod.”
I nodded. “Do you remember what the man looked like?”
“Yeah, now that I think about it. He was slender, about your height, kind of muscular. Red hair. A pretty-boy.”
I showed him a trid of Michael.
“That’s the guy, alright.”
“Was there anyone with him?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Were there any other customers in the store?”
“There was a woman in the shop too. Dark hair, kind of pretty, I think. I didn’t pay her a lot of attention.”
I wished I had a holo of the woman on the Lev. Could it be the same woman?
I looked around for security cameras; there were four, one in each corner. “Do you keep recordings from your security cameras?”
“Sorry. We only hold the chips for seventy-two hours. After that, we reuse them.”
Damn.
“The dark haired woman and the man who bought the camera, did it look like they were together?”
Tommy shrugged. “Hard to say. I’m pretty sure they didn’t talk to each other or anything. On the other hand, she didn’t buy anything and I think she left about the same time he did.”
