The Big Sheep

by Robert Kroese

  Erasmus Keane’s response to these events was as brilliant as it was perverse: he leased a rundown office building that was literally on the border of the DZ and Los Angeles proper. It was located in an area known as Boyle Heights, just east of Downtown. The front of the building was inside LA proper, while the back door exited into an alley inside the DZ. (We couldn’t legally enter the building that way; the authorities had boarded up the back of the building to prevent anyone from sneaking through.) Keane’s theory, as I understood it, was that human-created borders, particularly ones as stark and arbitrary as the ones between the DZ and LA proper, were unnatural things, akin to a sort of societal psychosis. Setting up shop as a private investigator (or phenomenological inquisitor) at such a juncture was the equivalent of being an immunologist at ground zero of a viral outbreak. Keane figured he could just sit back and wait for the symptoms of the disease to present themselves. For better or worse, he was right. Over the past three years, we’d had no shortage of clients, and while most of them tended to live in the protected areas of LA, more often than not there was some connection to criminal elements in the DZ.

  I parked the car on the roof and followed Keane into the building. His office was on the top floor, and I knew he’d want to be left alone to think, so I continued downstairs. Keane lived on the second floor, and my quarters had been cobbled together out of the offices on the first floor behind the lobby. It was a fairly dismal place to live, not least because the windows facing the alley were boarded up, but you couldn’t beat the commute. I took a seat at my desk, with the intention of doing some research on Esper Corporation’s genetic-engineering work. I supposed Keane might be doing the same thing upstairs, but it wouldn’t hurt to educate myself a bit. Keane tended to play things pretty close to his vest, and in any case he’s what you might call a big-picture thinker. That’s a nice way of saying that details tended to elude him, and keeping track of those details was one of the reasons he kept me around.

  I had barely gotten halfway through the About section of Esper’s website when I was interrupted by a knock at the front door. I sighed, grabbed the SIG Sauer nine-millimeter I kept in the top drawer of my desk, and made my way down the hall toward the lobby. My ability to handle a gun—as well as just about any other weapon—was another reason Keane kept me around. The SIG was my gun of choice; there had been a lot of technological advancements in firearms over the past twenty years, from biometric authentication devices to smart bullets that could go around corners, but for my money nobody in the past hundred years had really improved on the basic idea of making a hunk of metal go really goddamned fast in a straight line.

  Am I paranoid? Maybe a little. But as I mentioned, while the front of our building was technically in LA proper, it wasn’t exactly what you’d call a nice neighborhood. Whoever was knocking on the door was probably just a religious freak or a guy selling vacuum cleaners, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. The knocking became more persistent.

  “Coming!” I shouted, strolling across the threadbare carpet of the lobby. The whole building was in pretty sad shape, but the lobby was like the waiting room for Hades. The carpet, which must have been hideously ugly even before it faded to a sort of dusty plum color that didn’t match any of the four layers of paint peeling off the walls, was so worn in spots that you had to be careful to lift your feet completely off it or risk tripping on loose fibers. The walls were dotted with vaguely sconcelike light fixtures that required a type of light bulb that was no longer legally available anywhere in North America, and in any case at least two of them had failed catastrophically during a lightning storm at some point, leaving impressive scorch marks on the walls. Minimal sunlight filtered in through small frosted windows on either side of the front door, just enough to give you a good sense of the unrelenting oppressiveness of that room. I swear, you could stand in the middle of that lobby and actually feel your soul being sucked out. I walked briskly.

  The knocking had become a banging. Whoever was out there was really laying into it now. That was either a very desperate vacuum cleaner salesman or a couple of very motivated religious fanatics. Whoever it was, they were going to be disappointed. Both our carpets and our souls were beyond saving.

  “Look,” I said, opening the door a crack, holding the nine-millimeter in front of me, “you don’t have to pound the door off its…” I trailed off, having momentarily lost touch with the language center of my brain.

  The girl was gorgeous: flawless brown skin, long wavy black hair, big blue eyes that made you want to dive into one and come out the other. She wore a sleeveless brown T-shirt, a denim skirt, and knee-high brown suede boots that left just enough skin uncovered to give rise to a sudden montage of really bad ideas. Some primordial part of my cerebellum, just above the brain stem, urged me to throw my arms around her waist, toss her over my shoulder, and seek shelter in the nearest cave. Higher brain functions countermanded this order just in time, and I stood there for a moment, awaiting further instructions from my nervous system.

  “You gonna let me in?” she said impatiently, and I realized I had been standing there for a good ten seconds, the door still open.

  “Of course!” I managed to say. I opened the door wider and stood to the side as she walked in. I smelled cherries and vanilla.

  I recognized her, of course. Priya Mistry, darling of Hollywood, star of the smash drama DiZzy Girl. She had a decidedly more uptown appearance in person than she did on the show, but there was no mistaking that face. I managed to close the door behind us and smile in what I hoped was a nonthreatening manner.

  “Are you him?” she asked.

  “Haa?” I said, momentarily baffled. “Oh no,” I managed after a moment. “He’s upstairs.”

  “Can I see him?” She was growing impatient, and I sympathized. I wondered if all her interactions with men went like this. What might it be like, going through life so beautiful that the males in your vicinity are all reduced to drooling dullards? I wanted to hug her, reassure her that it wasn’t her, it was us. Apologize on behalf of my gender, for all the inconveniences she had suffered at our hands. She hadn’t asked to be born beautiful, after all. Cruel fate, cursing such a delicate creature with—

  “Hello!” she shouted. “Mr. Keane. Can I see him?”

  “Yes!” I shouted back, inadvertently startling both of us. “Sorry. Yes. Of course you may see him.” Of course! Except that I was fairly certain Keane wouldn’t want to be disturbed. In any case, it was my job to vet any potential clients before letting them talk to Keane. Why had I violated protocol for this girl? Another glance at Priya, and the answer was obvious. Her face was like logic Kryptonite. I was struck by a brief impulse to make a run for it, dash past her out to the street, and wait for her to leave while things sorted themselves out. But that was my low brain talking again, the lizard brain. Fight or flight. This situation called for a third alternative: finesse. I would handle the situation as delicately as I could and hope for the best.

  “Listen, Miss Mistry—” I said.

  “Priya is fine,” she said.

  “Okay, Priya,” I said. I found that if I focused on the wall behind her, she became a vaguely attractive blur, albeit a blur with a voice like an angel who smelled like cherries and vanilla. “Here’s the thing: Mr. Keane is a brilliant investigator, but he tends to be a bit, uh, scattered. I find it helps if I interview any potential clients before they meet him, to ascertain the core facts of the case.”

  She said nothing. I’d have wagered she was regarding me dubiously, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the wall sconce just over her right ear.

  “I don’t mean to be presumptuous,” I babbled on. “You are looking to hire Mr. Keane, correct?”

  The blur nodded.

  “Okay,” I said, feeling like I was gathering some momentum. “Why don’t you come with me to my office?”

  The blur shrugged, which I took as agreement. I turned and led her to my shabby little office behind the lobby. The room was small
and filled with mismatched office furniture and bookshelves lined with paperbacks, mostly pre-Collapse crime novels. The décor was only a couple of steps up from that of the lobby, but it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant place, owing largely to the nonbarricaded window behind my desk that looked out on the alley on the side of the building. The brick wall of the building next door didn’t provide much of a view, but at least there was some natural light and you didn’t feel like you were in a prison cell.

  I took a seat behind my desk, and the blur that was Priya Mistry sat in one of the plush vinyl chairs across from me.

  “So, what brings you to the offices of Erasmus Keane?” I asked, looking intently at the door hinge just over her left shoulder.

  Priya took a deep breath. “I … I think someone is trying to kill me,” she said.

  Something about the way she said it gave me chills. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard those words from a potential client, but with Priya there was a weird sort of detachment behind them. It wasn’t that I thought she was lying (and I’m pretty damn good at telling when someone is lying to me), but she gave me the impression that being afraid for her life was the least of her concerns.

  I risked a glance at her face, and was surprised to find myself looking at a scared little girl. It’s odd how physical perfection can blind you to a person’s basic humanity. Now that I looked at her—really looked—I could see there was more to her than her beauty. She had a sort of haunted sadness that reminded me a little of Gwen. Gwen was blond, though, and older. She’d just turned thirty when she disappeared. Priya was what, twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Her entire adult life had been lived in the bubble of Hollywood. She spent most of her time pretending to be someone she wasn’t, and the rest surrounded by obsessed fans and sycophants. You had to wonder how that sort of artificial reality affected a person’s mental and emotional development. Did she have any sense of what the real world was like? This wasn’t a mere academic question: it was one thing to have a client who lied to you or withheld information; it was quite another to have a client who was delusional. Was her life really in danger, or was that some paranoid fantasy? After all, paranoia was just the flip side of narcissism: it’s a short walk from “everybody loves me” to “everybody is out to get me.”

  “What makes you think someone is trying to kill you?” I asked.

  She reached into her purse and pulled out a sheet of paper that had been folded into fourths. “I found this in the pocket of my jacket yesterday.” She unfolded it and handed it to me. It was a handwritten letter addressed to Priya. The first line read:

  SOMEONE IS TRYING TO KILL YOU. TRUST NO ONE.

  I nodded. “Well, that’s fairly conclusive,” I remarked. A few lines below that warning was the entreaty:

  FIND ERASMUS KEANE

  It was signed NOOGUS.

  “Any idea who Noogus is?” I asked.

  Priya shook her head.

  “Hmm,” I said. It wasn’t much to go on. And frankly, it looked more like a cry for attention than an actual warning. The letters were all uppercase, so it was a bit hard to tell, but it looked like a woman’s handwriting.

  Apparently sensing my skepticism, Priya hurriedly went on, “It’s not just the letter. I’ve had this feeling for a while now that I’m being watched. People are following me. Like, I’ll see a homeless guy down the street from where we’re shooting, and then later on we’ll be shooting in a different area of town, and I’ll see the same guy. And he’ll be looking over at me, and talking to himself. Stuff like that happens all the time.”

  I nodded slowly. Could this girl really be that oblivious to her effect on men? She had rendered me incoherent just by showing up at my door, and I was a relatively high-functioning member of society. There was no telling what her presence might do to some schizophrenic misfit living on the streets in the DZ.

  “I’m not crazy,” she said, the crack in her voice not helping her case. “I know how this sounds, but I’m not. Please, just let me talk to Mr. Keane. He’s the only one who can help me.”

  “Don’t you have bodyguards to worry about these sorts of things for you?” I asked.

  “I have a bodyguard, yes. And Flagship Media has security guards who are supposed to keep us safe on location. But they all answer to Élan, and I don’t know if I can trust him.”

  I nodded. Élan Durham, the creator and producer of DiZzy Girl, was something of a golden boy in Hollywood these days. He had been a pioneer of the DZ drama, finding an untapped well of commercial potential in the post-apocalyptic conditions of Los Angeles’ backyard. DiZzy Girl was the most successful program of all time, and it had inspired dozens of knockoffs. Few of these programs were actually filmed in the DZ, of course. Only a producer with Durham’s clout could convince a production company to negotiate with a DZ warlord for rights to film on his territory. The knockoffs were filmed mostly in Bakersfield, Fresno, or sound stages set up to look like the DZ. Despite the popularity of DZ culture, it was simply too dangerous to film there unless you could negotiate some kind of protection deal with one of the DZ warlords. It was only three weeks ago that production on a reality program, Surviving the DZ, was shut down after a car bomb killed three of its stars.

  Whatever else could be said about Élan Durham, he was a smart businessman, and he knew the success of DiZzy Girl was in large part due to the appeal of Priya Mistry. I tried to broach the matter gently.

  “I don’t know Élan Durham personally,” I said. “But he seems like a smart guy. He’s not going to let anything happen to you.”

  “But the note says not to trust anyone,” she replied.

  “The note from Noogus,” I said.

  She bit her lip.

  “I wish I could help you, Priya,” I said, allowing my gaze to linger for a moment at the hint of cleavage visible above the dip in her shirt. Man, did I wish I could help her. “But frankly, this isn’t a lot to go on. My guess is that somebody is playing a joke on you. Noogus is probably one of the other actors on DiZzy Girl, someone with too much time in between scenes. Or maybe some bitter actress who you once beat out for a part. You know how this town breeds crazies. They’re mostly harmless, though. And if there’s ever a real threat, well, that’s what the security is for. If they work for Flagship Media, they’re pros. They’re not going to let anything happen to you.” I tried not to think of some of the knuckle-draggers who had worked security for me at CSI.

  Priya leaned forward and put a hand over her face. As her shoulders began to bob slightly, I realized she was crying.

  “Hey,” I said, by way of comforting her. I couldn’t think of anything to say after that, though, so I just said it again. “Hey.”

  “Maybe I am going crazy,” she said, sobbing. “Like you said, this town breeds crazies. Maybe I’m just one of the crazies.”

  I felt like hugging her, but something told me that would be wildly inappropriate—not to mention logistically difficult, since she was hunched down in a chair on the other side of my desk. “You don’t seem crazy to me,” I said. “You’re probably just under a lot of stress. I know how it is, shooting a hit show like DiZzy Girl. We worked this case once for this producer who was being blackmailed by … well, I can’t really go into details, but—”

  “Have you seen that commercial for that face cream, Prima Facie?” she asked, taking her hand from her face and looking up at me. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

  “Probably a hundred times,” I said. “‘Approach life the way I do: face first.’” I did my best to muster the sort of enthusiasm Priya had evinced in the ad. She made a compelling pitch: I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the target audience for the ad, and even I had given some thought to buying a tube of the stuff.

  She burst into tears again, sobbing loudly into her hands.

  Her reaction confused me. “I thought you were great,” I said sincerely. “Are you worried about having sold out or something? Because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with—”

  “I never ma
de that commercial,” Priya said, continuing to sob.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of this. “You mean they misrepresented what you were going to be selling or…?”

  “No!” she exclaimed, looking me in the eye. “I … never … made … that … commercial!”

  “Oh,” I said. “Wow. It’s an amazing simulation, then. Like I said, I’ve probably seen that thing a hundred times, and I never noticed it was a sim. And I used to work for Canny Simulations, Inc., so I’ve seen a hell of a lot of them.”

  “It’s not a sim,” said Priya. “It’s me.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I know! I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s me in the commercial, even though I never made it. Don’t you think I would know?”

  “Know what? That it’s you, or that you never made it?”

  “Both!”

  I sighed. I wanted to help her, but she wasn’t making any sense. This girl didn’t need a private investigator; she needed a psychiatrist.

  “I did sign a contract with the Prima Facie people a while back,” she was saying. “But I never agreed to have my likeness used in any advertisements. They can’t legally use a sim of me to sell anything.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Well, using unlicensed sims to sell products isn’t unheard of, although it would be rare for such a high-profile advertising campaign. There was probably some misunderstanding about the licensing. If your attorney—”

  “You’re not listening!” Priya shrieked. “It’s not a sim. It’s me. I can tell.”

  I threw up my hands. I’m a pretty patient guy (witness my ongoing tolerance for Erasmus Keane), but continuing in this vein was pointless. “Listen, Priya,” I said. “You seem like a really nice person. Honestly, a lot nicer than I would have expected. Smart, too. Not to mention without a doubt the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. But, sweetheart, I can’t help you. Erasmus Keane can’t help you. Your life isn’t in danger. Men stare at you because you’re gorgeous. You get weird letters because you’re famous. You don’t remember every commercial you’ve made because you’re exhausted from filming too many commercials. Mystery solved. I’ll see you to the door.” I got to my feet. She did not. I sighed.