by Jeff Edwards
The flash of heat across my face dried my tears. Anger, sorrow, and regret lay crystallized in the salty residue on my skin.
I slid into the back seat of the car and let them close the door behind me.
EPILOGUE
Rico filled my glass and limped away without attempting to start a conversation. He could see that I had things to think about.
Out of long habit, I reached for the glass with my right hand, until I caught sight of the blue gel-pack bandages that swaddled my wrist and hand like a mitten. I lowered the healing hand to the table top. The skin grafts were coming along nicely.
I picked up the glass with my left hand and silently toasted Sonja. She had disappeared shortly after I’d loaned her the money to pay off her indenture. I took a swallow of scotch and shrugged. I guess a part of me had always known that it wasn’t real.
The loan, if you could call it that, had taken me from comfortably independent to as near broke as I had ever been. I still had a few thousand stashed away, but it was time to start looking for work. Or, it would have been, had I not been living in the shadow of the proverbial sword.
The cops had to know about Rieger’s murder by now. From their perspective, I had method, motive, and opportunity. I’d undoubtedly left fingerprints, DNA, and hair and fiber evidence all over the crime scene. Not to mention that the murder weapon was registered to me.
Today, tomorrow, the next day at the latest, Dancer and Delaney—or others cut from the same piece of cloth—were going to walk in the door and drag me away. They were going to take me for a little ride on the Inquisitor.
By itself, that didn’t seem too bad. The Inquisitor would ferret out the truth, that I was innocent of the murder of Kurt Rieger. And, who knew, maybe all the rumors about the Inquisitor, the whispers of brain damage, were exaggerated, or even outright bullshit.
My real problem ran deeper. I couldn’t afford to let them put me on the Inquisitor at all, because—if they did—they were going to find out the truth. All of it, including the part about the puppet chip. I wasn’t sure that I could let that happen.
If the police got their hands on that chip, it might just end up in an evidence locker. Then again, they might think it was weird enough, or dangerous enough, to buck it upstairs. Sooner or later, it would pass across the wrong person’s desk. There are always factions in the Government that can find uses for something like that. Puppet-soldiers, puppet-assassins. As Jackal’s skull-mechanic, Lance, had put it: ‘technological slavery on a scale that even Orwell never dreamed of.’
There were undoubtedly copies of the puppet-chip laying around, but without John or the AI to help, it would be difficult or impossible to figure out what the chips were for, or how they had to be implanted and programmed.
The R&D team at Neuro-Tech knew about it, but they’d built the chip as a neural shunt, to help John walk again. My instincts told me that John would have kept the unexpected side effect, the personality transfer aspect, to himself. So there was a decent chance that the secret of the puppet-chip had gone up in smoke, right along with the Neuro-Tech Building.
Which brought me around to my dilemma. If I let the cops wire me up to the Inquisitor, I’d be exonerated of Kurt Rieger’s murder, but the secret of the puppet-chip would be out. The only way to refuse the Inquisitor would be to plead guilty to Rieger’s murder up-front, which would lead to certain brain-lock.
I took a slug of scotch. Either I was screwed, or the whole world was screwed. A hell of a choice.
I downed the rest of my scotch, and was about to signal for another, when someone set a glass down on the table in front of me. “Buy you a drink, Sailor?”
It took me a second to recognize Lisa. She’d lost some weight, and done a kind of wild lion’s mane thing with her hair. I realized for the first time how pretty she could be when she took care of herself.
Lisa smiled. “Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down?”
“By all means,” I said.
She dropped a short piece of computer hardcopy on the table and sat down.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a present,” Lisa said. “Your reprieve.”
I picked up the printout and looked at it. It was an excerpt from a corporate immigration request. The Gebhardt-Wulkan Informatik logo was printed in the upper left-hand corner, along with a date/time stamp.
I looked up at Lisa. “This says that Kurt Rieger flew back to Germany yesterday afternoon.”
Lisa nodded.
“That’s not possible,” I said. “Rieger is dead. I saw it myself.”
Lisa shrugged. “Gebhardt-Wulkan has decided to cover it up. It appears that the big dogs at GWI were aware of Rieger’s taste for little girls. They are apparently under the impression that he was killed by the father of one of his underage lovers.”
Lisa did the rabbit-scrunch thing with her nose. “I guess somebody claiming to be an irate father posted a few threatening notes to Rieger’s e-mail account at GWI.”
I stared at Lisa.
“Relax,” she said. “I used a public access terminal. I paid cash and kept the video pickup turned off. There’s no way anybody can trace it.” She smiled. “Besides, GWI is too busy covering up and trying to avoid a scandal to investigate too closely.”
“So...”
“So, Rieger’s death officially didn’t happen,” she said.
I let out a breath of air that I’d been holding for two weeks.
Lisa leaned across the table and kissed me. “You taste like scotch.”
“Yeah. I’ve been drinking a little.”
“I’m sorry that she ran out on you,” Lisa said. “I wish I could say I saw that coming, but I didn’t. I really thought there was something between you guys.”
She reached across the table and squeezed the back of my hand.
I picked up the fresh drink, looked at it, and put it down without tasting it. “Guess not.”
Lisa dipped the tip of her index finger in my scotch and traced it around the rim of the glass. “I erased Tony,” she said.
She looked down at her hands for a second and then back up to meet my eyes. “He was a wonderful dream, but I guess a person can’t live on dreams forever.” She raised her hand to her mouth and licked a drop of scotch off her fingertip.
I picked up the glass and took a sip. “That sounds like a good first step. Where do you go from here?”
Something touched my right leg just above the ankle. Lisa’s toes slid under the hem of my pants leg and began to trace circles on the bare flesh above my sock. “Both of us need a fresh start, David. Why can’t we do it together?”
I took another sip of scotch to stall for a second, while I thought of the best way to say it. The silence stretched between us.
Lisa frowned a little and her toes stopped wandering.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “I know that this is the part of the story where the intrepid hero rides off into the sunset with the pretty girl.”
I raised my left hand and touched her cheek. “And you’re certainly pretty enough... But I just can’t do this right now.”
Lisa started to say something, but I put my finger to her lips.
“I wouldn’t be any good for you now. Maybe later, when I get my head back on straight, but not now.”
Lisa’s foot retreated. A few seconds later, she stood up slowly. “I’ll wait,” she said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I will,” she said.
I started to open my mouth, but she pulled my own trick, shushing me with her finger across my lips. She leaned over and kissed me gently, her finger still between our lips. “Don’t be too long,” she whispered. She turned and walked away without looking back.
When the door closed behind her, I set my drink down and tried to pretend that it was the alcohol that was blurring my vision. I closed my eyes and prayed for a Billie Holiday song.
A little while later, I gulped down the rest of my scotch and signale
d for another.
Demi set a fresh glass in front of me and nodded toward a woman in the next booth. “Already paid for,” she said. “Your secret admirer...”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I began writing the first draft of Dome City Blues in 1992. Needless to say, a lot has changed since then. Global economics and the international political situation are radically different. Technology has taken some interesting turns, and I have somehow managed to grow a couple of decades older.
The world we now live in is a very different place from the one I inhabited when I first sat down to work on this book. In 1992, most people (your faithful author included) had never heard the word ‘internet.’ Cellular phones were the size of cinder blocks, and nobody I knew could afford one. The first movie of the Matrix trilogy was still seven years in the future. And the date 9/11 had no special significance to the average person on the street.
When I made the decision to release Dome City Blues now, nearly twenty years after it was written, I found myself faced with a dilemma. How heavily should the book be edited? Should I tear the entire thing apart word-by-word, or just knock off a few of the rough spots?
I have to admit that I was sorely tempted to go over the entire thing in microscopic detail—polishing the language, refining the story, smoothing out the dialogue, and updating the technology. Ultimately, I resisted that temptation.
With the exception of a few minor tweaks here and there, I’ve left the story pretty much as I originally wrote it. As a result, the book you’ve just finished reading is not the meticulously re-engineered product of a novelist with several award-winning books under his belt. It’s the first attempt of a fledgling writer who’s just gotten up the nerve to try his hand at a piece of novel-length fiction.
The world depicted in this book is not the future I see from where I stand today. It’s the future I saw back then, in 1992, when a fictional character named David Stalin first began to speak to me about a darkly dystopian vision of Los Angeles lurking just over the horizon.
— JEFF EDWARDS
OTHER BOOKS BY JEFF EDWARDS
Sea of Shadows
The Seventh Angel
Table of Contents
Reviews
DOME CITY BLUES
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
OTHER BOOKS BY JEFF EDWARDS
