by Jeff Edwards
“Because they’ll kill me if I go to the police. They told me that. They said I can take two weeks sick leave to heal up, but if I go to the cops, they’ll...”
“They’ll what?”
Her words came out in a whispered croak. “They said they’ll drown me in my own bathtub.”
Sonja started repacking the first aid kit. “If you show up in the Emergency Room looking like this, the ER staff will call the police. I’ve worked ER; it’s standard operating procedure, no way to stop it.”
“With pay,” Lisa said. Her voice was weak, tired.
“What?”
“The two weeks sick leave,” Lisa said, “it’s time off with pay.”
Sonja made a face. “Sounds like they’re just a regular pair of saints. Maybe if they break your arm, you can get in on the employee profit sharing plan.”
Lisa mumbled wearily. “It’s the only job I’ve... got. I can retire in another five... years. I’m too old to start from... scratch somewhere... somewhere... else...” Her voice trailed off into silence.
She wasn’t moving.
Despite Sonja’s diagnosis, my heart stopped.
The look of concern that crossed Sonja’s face must have mirrored my own. She knelt by the couch and examined Lisa’s still form carefully.
Finally, she exhaled. “She’s sleeping.”
My heart started beating again.
Sonja stood up. “We can’t leave her alone.”
I nodded. “I’ll go look for some blankets and pillows. We can sleep in here on the floor. That way, you can keep an eye on Lisa, and I can shoot the first Aryan Superman who knocks on the door.”
She shot me a sour glance. “Go find the blankets.”
If I’d known what to call it, I’d have asked the apartment AI for the blankets. Its name might be something simple. Then again, it might be something impossible to guess, like Zarathustra or Lady Macbeth.
I couldn’t remember hearing Lisa address it, or talk about it a single time, so I didn’t have a clue.
I looked up at the ceiling. “Apartment?”
No answer.
“AI?”
Nothing.
Screw it. I didn’t feel like playing guessing games, and I could probably find the blankets quicker than I could find the AI’s maintenance board.
I found the linen closet at the far end of the hall. Before I could open the door, something brushed against the back of my legs and shot down the hall toward the living room. It startled the hell out of me, and I barely caught a glimpse of it before it jetted around the corner at the other end of the hall. Some kind of animal. Something gray, and sleek, and fast. A cat?
It couldn’t be a cat. Lisa couldn’t possibly afford one. Probably, Lisa and Sonja and I together couldn’t have afforded one.
I thought about the plastic bowls tucked under the kitchen cabinets; food and water bowls. It was a cat.
After I dug up the blankets, I made a quick tour of the apartment, making sure that all the windows were locked. Every one of them was alarmed.
I found and opened a steel door. It led to a fire escape. I closed it again, dead-bolted it and turned on the alarms. There were three of them, just like at the front door.
Sonja checked on Lisa again, while I threw together a makeshift bed of blankets and pillows on the floor.
The carpet wasn’t expensive, but it was soft, and Lisa had kept it clean.
When her doctoring duties were complete, Sonja dimmed the lights and snuggled up with me under a synlon quilt patterned with colorful tropical fish.
I lay there staring up into the darkness and listening to the gentle rhythm of Sonja’s breathing.
I wanted that chip, the one that the GWI security Nazis had stolen from Lisa’s purse.
I knew that Lisa was probably right, in all likelihood, Kurt Rieger wasn’t my man. But, somehow, I didn’t want to let go of him. It was a decent theory and I liked it. It made a lot of pieces of the puzzle fit together in patterns that made sense to me.
I knew that it was selfish of me; Lisa had nearly died trying to get me that information. But I couldn’t help it. I wanted that chip. I wanted to read the news articles about Osiris myself, and compare the times and dates of Rieger’s itinerary.
Tomorrow. Worry about the chip tomorrow.
I was two-thirds asleep when I felt Sonja’s whispered voice warm in my ear. “Corinne.”
I scrunched into a more comfortable position. “Hmmm?”
She kissed me on the cheek and whispered. “That’s my middle name, Corinne.”
CHAPTER 17
Sonja woke me with a kiss. “Morning, Sleepyhead.”
Her breath was fresh and minty. I was certain that mine was not.
She held out a mug of coffee. The cup was pink and covered in tiny writing that claimed to be 100 reasons why chocolate is better than men. The aroma of the coffee was rich enough to offset any misgivings I had about the Men/Chocolate equation.
I sat up far enough to accept the steaming cup and took a sip. “Good coffee.”
Sonja showed me her dimples. “Thanks, but I didn’t make it. Lisa did. It is good though, isn’t it?”
I craned my neck. Lisa wasn’t on the couch. “Where is Lisa?”
A voice floated down the hall. “In the kitchen, trying not to eavesdrop. About time you were up.”
“Good morning to you too,” I said.
I lowered my voice. “How’s she doing?”
Sonja stole a sip from the other side of my cup. “A lot better than I expected. She’s a pretty tough lady.”
I sat the rest of the way up and stretched. My back made those muffled crackling sounds it uses to remind me that I’m not a kid anymore. I yawned. “Can I ask you a question?”
Sonja looked away from me. “Drugs.”
I frowned. “What?”
“Not recreational drugs,” she said. “Medications. Pharmaceutical drugs. To help people.”
“What are you talking about?”
She turned toward me. “You were going to ask me what happened. Why I’m not a doctor.”
I shook my head. “No I wasn’t. I figured you would tell me about that when you wanted me to know. I was going to ask you where you got the toothbrush.”
Sonja blushed. “Oh.”
“But I would like to hear about the doctor thing,” I said. “If you’re ready to tell me.”
Sonja hesitated. Then she shrugged. “No point in spilling half my guts.”
She looked into my eyes. “You came to sculpture late in life. It wasn’t like that for me. I knew by the time I was ten that I was going to be a doctor. I didn’t just want it. I lived for it. I was going to help people. Heal people. There weren’t any other options, not as far as I was concerned.
“I studied my ass off in school. I downloaded any file on the net that even smelled like it involved medicine. If I could only understand one word in three, that didn’t matter to me. My subconscious was soaking it all up, and I figured I’d be able to tap into it one day.”
“Wow,” I said. “A child genius.”
Sonja shook her head. “Not even close. Just an average kid, with average intelligence, who knew exactly what she wanted out of the world.”
I watched her as she talked. There was an intensity in her face that I’d never seen before.
“Both our parents worked,” she said. “But there wasn’t a lot of money. I had to take out student loans for college. And then more loans for medical school. I got accepted into the residency program at Huntington General.”
She stared off into nothingness, a sad little smile on her face. “And suddenly I was an intern. I was actually doing it. I was practicing medicine, helping to heal people.” Her voice trailed off.
“What happened?”
She looked up at me. “I discovered the charity ward. I mean, I’d always known it was there, but it started to get to me. There were all these people down there. Sick people. Old people. Without money or insurance. People
who needed help and couldn’t afford it. The hospital provided basic care to the charity cases, don’t get me wrong. But if one of them needed something with a big price tag, say an organ graft or specialized medication, forget it. Even if it meant the difference between life and death.”
Her eyes gleamed. “I couldn’t let happen. So I started to cheat the system. I looked for opportunities to reroute certain drugs to non-paying patients. I felt bad about spending other people’s money, but I figured I could pay it back when I was a rich and famous doctor.”
“But it didn’t work out that way,” I said.
Sonja sniffed. “Medicine is corporate,” she said. “And corporations don’t much care for young interns who spend company money without permission. My residency was terminated for cause. And just like that, it was over. I wasn’t going to be a doctor any more. But the loans still had to be paid, and the rent, and everything else.”
She put on a brave smile. “What was your first question again? I think I liked that one better.”
I thought for a second. “Oh, yeah. Where did you get the toothbrush?”
“I carry one in my purse,” she said.
I stood up and started folding the quilt. “You’re still helping people,” I said.
Sonja stared at me like I was crazy.
“Look around,” I said. “The world’s gotten pretty fucked up. Anything that brings a little happiness into someone’s life without hurting anyone has got to be a good thing. Maybe even a noble thing.”
Sonja started picking up the pillows. “Most people don’t see it that way,” she said.
I shrugged. “Most people don’t spend years in self-imposed exile. Most people don’t turn their backs on what little pleasure Life has to offer. It gives you a certain perspective.”
A pillow still in each hand, she wrapped her arms around me and gave me a hug. “You’re a kind man, Alex. Thanks.”
I hugged her back. “Don’t mention it, Corinne.”
Lisa cleared her throat.
I looked up.
She was standing at the threshold to the hall, wearing a fuzzy green house robe with a feather boa collar. A lithe gray form stropped back and forth between her ankles, the cat from last night.
The swelling in Lisa’s face had gone down a little, but she still looked like hell. “Break it up, you two. Breakfast is getting cold.”
I gave Sonja a final squeeze and dropped the embrace. “Breakfast?”
“Yeah, breakfast. Why do you think I’m up? I’ve been waffling.”
She looked thoughtful. “Is that a word? Waffling?”
Sonja tucked the pillows under her arms, slipped past Lisa, and headed down the hall toward the linen closet. “I tried to get her to stay on the couch and let me cook. She wouldn’t listen to me. Maybe you should shoot her in the leg to keep her off her feet for a few days.”
I squeezed past Lisa and the cat, and followed Sonja to the linen closet. I tucked the quilt away on a shelf. “Can’t do it,” I said. Bullets are way too expensive these days. I’ll probably have to settle for clubbing her unconscious.”
Lisa snorted. “I’ve already been clubbed this week and it didn’t even slow me down. You can’t keep a fat woman on the couch when the food is in the kitchen. Not with a club, anyway. You get between me and that refrigerator and you really will have to shoot me.”
We had breakfast off the kitchen counter tops. There was a table and four chairs in the corner of the kitchen, but Lisa ignored them, so we did too. The cat feasted on a can of tuna.
The waffles turned out to be the frozen store- bought kind, but Lisa had worked a little magic on them using liberal amounts of honey-butter and a real oven instead of an ultrawave. With a bit of maple syrup and a few fresh strawberries, they were quite tasty.
After breakfast, Lisa filled the sink with hot soapy water and began to collect the dishes.
Sonja looked at her strangely. “What are you doing?”
“Washing the dishes.”
“I can see that. Why don’t you use the dishwasher? Is it broken?”
“It’s controlled by the apartment AI.”
“So?”
“So, I keep the AI turned off.”
Sonja crossed her arms. “This I’ve got to hear.”
Lisa picked up a kitchen sponge and scrubbed a soapy plate. “It’s kind of weird,” she said. “You’re going to laugh.”
“I won’t laugh,” Sonja said. She drew an X across her heart with one finger.
“You will,” Lisa insisted.
“Okay,” Sonja said. “I promise to try not to laugh. How’s that?”
“I turned off the AI so that I wouldn’t fall in love with him.” She rinsed the plate, set it in the drain rack and grabbed another one. “When I first moved into this apartment, the management had wiped the AI and reloaded it from scratch. Just the default, factory personality. The voice didn’t have any character, so I reprogrammed it to sound masculine... sexy.”
“I don’t see anything weird about that,” Sonja said. “A lot of people program their AI’s to have sexy voices.”
“I didn’t stop at the voice,” Lisa said. “I started experimenting with the personality script itself. It’s a tricky piece of code, but eventually I got it down to a system. Little by little, I changed things. I made him compassionate and nurturing. Then I made him impetuous and romantic. I gave him a name: Anthony. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was building the perfect man. It was great for a while. I could come home from work to someone who adored me. When Tony started starring in my dreams, I knew it had to stop. So I turned him off. I’ve been living without an AI for over a year.”
“Why don’t you just wipe his code?” Sonja asked. “Reload the default AI. At least you could run the dishwasher.”
Lisa made an uncertain face. “I think about doing that sometimes. But I can’t seem to make myself do it. It’s like, as long as Tony’s personality script exists, there will always be somebody who loves me. Even if it’s not a real somebody.”
Her eyes drifted down to the cat at her feet. She nudged his back playfully with a toe. “If I erase Tony, it’ll just be me and Mr. Shoes, won’t it Sweetheart?”
Mr. Shoes responded by gently butting the side of his head against Lisa’s ankle. Lisa looked shyly over her shoulder to see if we were laughing at her foolishness behind her back.
I thought about a little anodized aluminum box tucked away somewhere in the back of a closet in John’s apartment. A little box crammed full of ones and zeros that supposedly added up to Maggie Stalin. I never felt less like laughing in my life.
Sonja didn’t laugh either.
We stood there in silence, groping for the right thing to say.
It was Lisa who finally broke the spell with a change of subject. “So, what are your plans now, David?”
“My immediate plans? I want to smoke a cigarette and brush my teeth. Preferably not in that order.”
Lisa put the last dish in the rack and pulled the drain plug. “You know what I mean.”
“I’d like to start by using your computer. Do you mind?”
Lisa dried her hands on a towel and walked out of the room. “Of course not,” she said over her shoulder.
Sonja and I followed Lisa to the living room and watched while she powered up one of her two desktop computers.
When the System Ready icon appeared, Lisa stepped back to make room for me. “All yours.”
I pulled Tommy Mailo’s video chip out of my pocket and loaded it into Lisa’s machine. It took me a couple of seconds to find the file I was looking for, a single frame of video from Michael Winter’s suicide recording. The image of the dark-haired woman that Tommy had found reflected in the blade of Michael’s knife. I copied the picture onto a blank chip and shut off Lisa’s computer.
“What’s that for?” Sonja asked.
“It’s a bargaining tool. I’m going to try to get my hands on the police files for the Osiris case. What was his name?”
>
“Russell Carlisle,” Lisa said.
“Right. I also want to pay a visit to Lisa’s friends from the Lev. They have a chip that I’m interested in seeing. Besides, I want to talk to them about social courtesy on public transportation.”
Lisa sat down carefully on the couch. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Don’t worry, they won’t be able to connect it with you.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. You don’t have to track those guys down at all. I have a copy of the chip.”
“You do? I thought you said they took all your chips.”
“David, I’m a software engineer. When was the last time you heard of a data geek who didn’t make back-up copies?”
“That just makes my visit to them a little less urgent,” I said. “I’m still going to have a talk with them.”
“You don’t have to,” said Lisa.
Sonja gave me a solemn look. “She’s right, David. Getting back at those thugs won’t fix anything. They’re nothing more than hired muscle.”
I nodded slowly. “You’ve got a point. They didn’t just pick Lisa out of a crowd and decide to beat the hell out of her; they were following orders. Kurt Rieger may not be Aztec or Osiris, but it’s a pretty safe bet that he had Lisa attacked. And for that, he’s going to answer to me.”
CHAPTER 18
Dancer pinched the bridge of her nose between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, and squeezed her eyes shut. “Stalin, what the fuck are you doing here?”
She opened her eyes and glared at me across her desk. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. It’s Monday morning... You’re dragging around another fucking body, aren’t you?”
There were five other detectives scattered around Southwest Division Homicide. None of them even bothered to glance up from their work, leading me to believe that Dancer greeted all of her visitors in the same cordially retiring fashion.
“No,” I said. “No new bodies yet, but the day...”
“Is still young. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to spout cliché dialogue, go bother somebody else. I’ve got a shitload of admin work to catch up on. What do you want?”
