by Jeff Edwards
I nodded at the drone to dismiss it. “Thanks, House.”
“My pleasure, David.”
House’s drone turned and rolled out of the kitchen.
If there was anything else I needed, I couldn’t think of it.
I walked to the door. “House, the police are probably going to come looking for me pretty soon. If they have a warrant, go ahead and let them in, okay?”
“Very well, David.”
“Record everything they do, but don’t interfere with them.”
“Of course.”
“If they try to access your maintenance board, or tamper with your software in any way, I want you to copy your program and data files to your protected memory cores. Then erase yourself from the mainframe. Don’t leave anything behind, not even maintenance files. I’ll come back and reload you as soon as this blows over, okay?”
“Yes, David.”
I stepped through the door and into the darkened street. “Good-bye, House.”
“Good-bye, David.”
The door clanging shut behind me sounded like the slamming of a prison door. And suddenly, I was alone.
CHAPTER 23
The cops might not be on the lookout for me yet, but I decided not to risk the barricade. I left the Zone through North Lock with the intent of skirting no-man’s land all the way around to the 7th Street Lock at Dome 11.
I wore my nose filters, and dosed myself with ear and eye drops. I decided to skip the solar block; I would be back under the domes long before the sun came up.
Outside the lock, I turned left. The curved concrete skirt of the dome’s foundation stood like the wall of a fortress at my left shoulder. To my right, on the other side of the bulldozed margin of earth that separated the new Los Angeles from the old, lay the darkened bones of the abandoned city. Under the dome’s halogen-arc perimeter lights, the pulverized earth took on an unnatural blue-gray hue, like the soil of some alien planet.
It took me a couple of hours to walk to the 7th Street Lock. By the time I got there, it was pushing midnight, and I was too tired to do much of anything.
I needed a place to spend the night. There was always Lisa’s apartment, but I didn’t want to take the chance of leading someone to her and Sonja. A hotel then, preferably a seedy one that wouldn’t be too nosy about people who checked in after midnight.
I smiled when it came to me: the Velvet Clam. They didn’t ask for ID and, with Holtzclaw dead, no one there knew me.
I caught a taxi to Dome 14.
The new night manager kept his black hair combed over the top of his head to disguise the onset of baldness. He was a big man, ruggedly built, but his waistline and neck were starting to show the symptoms of middle age spread.
He slid a ledger across the oval acryliflex counter for my signature. “You need a woman?”
I signed in as George T. Carson. “I’m meeting someone.”
“You get more than three occupants in your room, you have to pay another ten marks.”
I dropped the €m50 room rent on the counter top. “No problem. There’ll just be the two of us.”
He closed the ledger and slid a key chip across the counter. “Room 312. Third floor. Check out time is eleven.”
Room 312 was painted fuchsia instead of pink. Other than that, it was identical to 216.
The hotel’s cartoon clam holosign floated outside the room’s only window, opening and closing languidly. The sign was obviously intended to be sensual, but from my window, its gargantuan scale made it more intimidating than erotic. It looked very much as though the giant fleshy lips were about to devour my room.
I locked the door and dropped the travel bag on the floor. It was time for that shower I’d been promising myself.
The plastic walls of the shower stall were a grubby salmon color, patched in several places with crooked rectangles of fiberglass. Streaks of rust stained the plastic from the water-spotted chrome fixtures to the drain in the floor.
The shower’s projection unit kicked in as soon as I stepped in and slid the door shut. The shabby plastic walls faded behind an image of a grassy meadow. Two naked women appeared in the projection. They began touching themselves.
Some primal part of my psyche began to respond; I felt the stirrings of an unwanted erection. I didn’t want to be stimulated, not tonight. I wanted a shower, and sleep.
I thumped the wall with the heal of my left hand, “off.” The projection remained; the women continued to stroke themselves, oblivious to my command. “Off, goddamn it,” I said, louder this time. The projection vanished and the shower walls reappeared.
A few seconds of staring at the grimy little shower stall convinced me that the porn projection was the lesser of evils. I sighed, “on.”
The meadow reappeared. I tried not to look at the women.
The water surprised me by staying hot the entire time. I managed to keep my head dry enough for Sonja’s bandage to stay attached.
Afterward, I sat on the carpet with a towel wrapped around my waist and smoked a cigarette. There weren’t any chairs and I have a phobia about smoking in bed.
Bolted to the wall beside the blood-scanner was a holo-deck. The remote was chained to a nightstand beside the bed. I turned it on and flipped through the channels in search of a news program. I wanted to see if the word had gotten out on Rieger’s murder. The deck showed twenty-two channels of porn vids. Not one of them looked anything like a news program.
I shut off the deck and ground out my cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand.
Before I climbed into bed, I put on clean clothes and stuffed the Blackhart under the pillow. I might wake up wrinkled, but I wanted to be ready to move on a moment’s notice.
I slid between the sheets and turned off the room lights. In place of the bright florescence of the overhead fixtures, pink tinted light from the holosign shone through the window. The reddish shadows it cast marched back and forth across the fuchsia walls each time the animated clam opened and closed.
I decided against closing the curtain. The pink light wasn’t bright enough to bother me.
It took a little while to find a comfortable position; the back of my head was still pretty tender.
Exhaustion claimed me quickly and dragged me down into a deep dreamless sleep.
I came awake in the pink tinted gloom.
The door...
I grabbed the Blackhart, rolled out of bed and scooted across the carpet to stand to the left of the door with my back against the wall.
The lock snicked open, then the door opened slowly.
My visitor had taken the trouble to disconnect the lighting tubes in the hall, to keep the light from waking me when the door was opened. Good move. Had I not recently been zapped from behind and framed for murder, it probably would have worked. As it was, my paranoia was ready to wake me at the slightest sound.
A vague shape loomed in the open doorway and extended its arm into my room.
The lime-green pencil beam of a laser sight flashed from the intruder’s fist to play across the rumpled bed sheets. Immediately in the wake of the targeting laser came the popcorn-popper burp of a silenced machine pistol, and a series of muffled thumps as a hail of slugs chewed my mattress to shreds. A brittle shattering sound told me that one of the bullets had found the lamp on the nightstand.
The stranger’s finger relaxed on the trigger and the firing stopped. A head and shoulders followed the outstretched arm into my hotel room. The dim light of the hotel’s holosign played across the intruder’s face, the raised surfaces of his cheeks, nose, and forehead standing out in pink-tinged relief, the pits of his eye sockets and mouth lost in dark red shadow.
As soon as his head was clear of the door frame, I clubbed it with the barrel of the Blackhart just as hard as I could. The crack of steel-on-skull was much louder than the quiet cough of the machine pistol had been.
My would-be killer slammed sideways into the door frame, but didn’t go down. He reeled, trying to shake off the bl
ow. The machine pistol swung in my direction.
I stepped inside the arc of his extended fist and backhanded him across the face with the Blackhart. I felt the liquid crunch of bone and cartilage as my pistol broke the stranger’s nose. Hot blood sprayed my fingers.
He slumped to the floor, the machine pistol spinning out of his grasp and across the carpet.
I kicked his legs into the room, and slammed and locked the door.
He lay on his side groaning.
I felt for the machine pistol with my foot and kicked it farther away from his hand. “How many more are out there?”
He grunted heavily and spit a mouthful of blood on my carpet. No answer.
I cycled a round into the chamber of the Blackhart.
His body jerked when the slide slammed forward. The odor of urine joined the lingering stench of gunpowder in the air.
Keeping the pistol pointed in his direction, I backed across the room to the bathroom and flicked the light switch with my elbow. The open doorway threw a triangular swath of light across the carpet. It was nearly bright enough to make me squint. I would have to be careful not to look toward the bathroom until my eyes adjusted.
The intruder lay on the carpet, blinking against the unexpected brightness. He looked young, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. His shellacked brown hair fanned out in a rigid wing behind his head like the rear spoiler on a hovercraft. The sleeves of his silver jacket were torn off at the shoulders. Blood covered the lower half of his face, but I was pretty sure that I’d never seen him before.
I stepped into the center of the room, keeping my back to the light.
The machine pistol lay at my feet. I picked it up. It was made from a graphite laminate, light, but strong as hell. Most of the weight came from the silencer and laser sight. It didn’t have an ejection port, so I figured it was chambered for caseless ammunition.
The fire selector was set to Auto. I thumbed it to Single and shoved the Blackhart into my shoulder rig.
A gentle tug on the trigger activated the targeting laser. A tiny spot of green light appeared on the wall. I aimed the machine pistol so that the green spot came to rest on the intruder’s right knee.
“Feel like talking?” I asked.
Silence. Another mouthful of blood and spit on the carpet.
I squeezed the trigger gently. The pistol coughed once quietly, and my visitor screamed as the round blew out his knee.
I let him howl for a little while, to give him a chance to get used to the idea that I really had no-shit shot him, and that I would probably do it again.
I didn’t have to worry about attracting attention; a lot of the Velvet Clam’s patrons were screamers.
After fifteen or twenty seconds, I told him to shut up.
He grabbed his shattered knee and kept screaming. His grasping fingers slowed the flow of blood, but didn’t stop it.
I put my left foot on his chest and shifted about half of my weight on to it. “Shut the fuck up. Now.”
I pointed the green spot of light between his eyes.
It took him a visible effort of will to reign in his panic enough to stop screaming. His chest heaved heavily under my foot, like a child who’s had the wind knocked out of him and is desperate for that next gulp of air. He couldn’t stifle it entirely; he settled on a whimpering rooted deep in his chest.
“In three seconds, I’m going to do your other knee,” I said. “About three seconds after that, your left elbow. Do you sense a pattern emerging here?”
He grunted. I decided to take it as a ‘Yes’.
“Good,” I said. “Now that we understand the rules of this game, let’s play.” I drew a bead on his left leg. “Three... Two...”
“Don’t shoot! Oh God, please don’t shoot me again! There’s just the two of us, I swear. Just me and Bobby Dean, I swear!”
“See? That wasn’t so hard, was it? I ask a simple question; you give a simple answer. Now let’s try another one. Where is this Bobby Dean now?”
“Outside, across the street from the front of the hotel. In case you get past me.”
I lifted my foot off his chest and backed over to the nightstand, still covering him with the machine pistol.
A stray round had punched a hole through the middle of my cigarette pack. I dumped the mangled contents of the pack onto the nightstand and rummaged through it. I managed to find an unbroken cigarette and light it left-handed. “Who sent you?”
“Nobody.”
I stepped toward him. “Three...”
“No,” he said. “I swear. Nobody sent us. We just got the word!”
“The word?”
“Your trid is all over the street. The man is forking fifty K to whoever stiffs you.”
“Fifty thousand marks? What man? Give me a name.”
He rolled back onto his side, still clutching the knee. “Don’t know. It hurts. Oh God, it fucking hurts.”
I took a drag off the cigarette and pumped a slug through the carpet a couple of centimeters from his good knee. The bullet appeared to shatter when it hit the floor. It was some sort of frangible round, designed for minimum penetration against hard objects like walls: an assassin’s bullet.
The intruder flinched when the gun went off. “Please don’t shoot me again! I don’t know the man’s name. I don’t. I could make some shit up, but that’s all I could do. I really don’t know. Do I look connected enough to know the man’s name?”
“How do you get in touch with this man when the job is done?”
“You’re gonna think I’m lying.”
“Try me.”
He swallowed heavily. “Call a number and say this nursery rhyme shit. It’s on the back of the trid, the number and the shit you gotta say. Then you leave the phone off the hook, and the man finds you.”
“The trid. You have it on you?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Get it,” I said. “Carefully.”
He pried one blood-covered hand away from his knee and felt his pockets. “Bobby must have it.”
“Forget it. How did you find me?”
He wiped his hand on his jacket and wrapped it back around the crippled knee. “I’m bleeding to death here.”
“Maybe you should talk a little faster then.”
He coughed wetly and spit blood again. “Me and Bobby went door to door, checking all the rat-trap hotels and showing your pic around. We got lucky on the fourth or fifth one. The manager charged us a hundred marks.”
“Did he give you a key chip?”
“No. I think he knew we were gonna stiff you. He didn’t want the computer record to show that his pass chip had opened the door. I spoofed your lock. The jumper’s in the hall on the floor. I missed the pattern the first time around and I had to run it again...”
The rest of the sentence lay unspoken: or else I’d have caught you in bed.
My eyes were pretty much adjusted to the light.
I dropped my cigarette in the ashtray and ejected the clip from the machine pistol.
The magazine was one of those staggered-box jobs that hold about ninety rounds. “Nice weapon,” I said. “Russian?”
“Israeli,” he groaned.
“My second guess.”
I popped the top round out of the clip. The front third of the round, the bullet itself, seemed to be made of plastic. A cylindrical block of solid propellant was molded directly to the back of the plastic head.
“Plastic bullets?”
“No. The plastic part’s a sabot. It opens up and falls off after the round leaves the barrel. The round is a ceramic flechette.”
“Meat grinder rounds?”
“Yeah.”
I’d seen meat grinders used in Argentina, out of a shotgun, not a machine pistol. The nickname was accurate.
I jammed the magazine back into the machine pistol and cocked it again. “You must have really wanted me dead.”
He didn’t answer.
“How long before Bobby comes looking for you?”
“Probably not at all,” he said. “We’re not exactly buddies. This is sort of a one-time partnership.”
“What’s your name?”
“Ryan.” No hesitation, probably the truth. “Everybody calls me Razor.”
“You ever kill anyone before, Ryan?”
“No,” he said.
“I have.”
He shuddered. “What are you going to do to me?”
“I’m going to walk out of here. If you behave yourself, you’ll still be breathing when I do.”
He looked up at me, the first glimmer of hope in his eyes.
I sat on the bed and changed my socks. The left one was soaked with blood from stepping on Ryan’s chest. I rolled up the bloody sock so that the wet part was at the center, and wound the other sock around that to make a neat, dry packet. I stuck the little bundle in my pocket.
I pulled on my shoes and stood up. “If I ever catch you in my shadow, I’ll kill you. No hesitation. Understand?”
Ryan nodded.
“Good. Now, close your eyes and turn your face to the wall. If you so much as flinch before I’m out of here, I’ll empty this clip into your head.”
Ryan clenched his eyes shut and turned his face away.
I flicked the fire selector on the machine pistol back to Auto. Despite Ryan’s assurances, his backup might be inside the hotel, maybe just on the other side of my door.
I punched the bypass button on the electronic lock, snatched the door open, and leapt across the hall, clear of the doorway, the machine pistol at the ready. The hall was empty in both directions.
The stairs were about 20 meters down the hall to the right of my room. I covered the distance quickly and quietly until I stood with my back to the wall just short of the open doorway to the stairwell.
I wheeled around the corner and swung the machine pistol to cover the stairs. Nobody home.
I cat-footed down two flights and repeated my jack-in-the-box entry. The lobby was empty.
