Darker Than Noir
Page 22
The lawyer, unlike the PR woman at the hospital, showed that he was human, and winced at the image. “I can only imagine how you must feel, but I still think you should just let it go. It would be a long trial, and even if we win, the settlement wouldn’t be worth it.”
Yael studied the lawyer for a moment. “Why are you lying to me?” he asked finally.
The guy’s surprise showed, and Yael could almost hear what he was thinking: this little brown guy who can’t even speak English without an accent shouldn’t be able to see through me so easily. He should just nod and accept what he’s told.
But then the lawyer surprised Yael in turn. He leaned back on his chair, rubbed his nose again and sighed. “This is Detroit, Mr. Moreno. Ever since Ford shut down the last plant, they’ve been trying to find something to bring money back to the city. Those reanimates have done it. Do you know that the only place where they can build reanimates able to function at a high level is over on Lincoln Avenue?” He paused. “I’d love to stick it to Adams Memorial, but they have the best lawyers and they can drag it out. After all, you can’t prove any of what you’re saying.”
Yael was about to interrupt him again, but the lawyer held up a hand. “But that’s not the real reason I won’t take the case. The real reason is that no judge is going to hear a case against the reanimates. The city won’t let them hear any cases, and the state and Federal courts will be… well, they aren’t going to allow one man to jeopardize one of the few growing industries in this country. This isn’t the twentieth century anymore.”
“But I’m not talking about the ones we sell to the rest of the world. Those are just workers, they don’t hurt people. You just put them in a factory and they work until their tendons dry up. I’m talking about the smart ones, the ones they’re using in the hospital. I even heard that they’ve got them in the airport as air traffic controllers.”
“Yeah, I read all about it. They’re supposed to be able to take all the stressful situations that anyone can throw at them. If the tests are successful, they’re supposed to make the quality of life for everyone alive much better.”
“Well, I can tell you that the tests won’t be successful. I mean, how can they be? One of these things was carving on me despite the fact that I told him I could feel it. They’re doomed to failure anyway, so no one will even care if we sue.”
The lawyer sighed again. “I misspoke. I said ‘if the tests are successful’ when I should have said ‘when the tests are successful’. There’s no question about the outcome. A surgeon who works twenty-four hours a day and does it for free is worth his weight in gold. The whole country could use the cash. I wouldn’t touch it even if it was just the government pushing it. But it isn’t.”
“Who is, then?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do want to know.”
“Well, I’m not telling you.”
Yael got up and left, his fury barely contained.
***
Yael looked at Stephen Eddings. He wasn’t particularly impressed. “You don’t look like an investigator.”
The man across the table was blond-haired and blue eyed, thin as a rail and not particularly tall. But his eyes were hard—probably as hard as Yael’s own, and he was smoking in the non-smoking section—there probably wasn’t a smoking section either—of the diner. They were eyes that had been bred on the street and in the factories – when there were still factories. “Should I have worn a hat? Maybe a trench coat?”
“I thought you’d have an office…”
“Have you seen what it costs to rent an office? You know better than that. When people come to me, they want two things: cheap and fast. That doesn’t come with an office.”
“I guess so.”
“So what do you want?”
That was the hardest part. How could he explain that what he wanted was evidence so that some lawyer could help him sue the hospital? He knew no one wanted to risk it, but he also knew that lawyers were greedy. If it looked like they could win a high-profile case, one of those bloodsuckers would take it. “I need you to find a file for me,” and then on impulse, he amended it: “two files.”
“Tell me.”
“I want the hospital’s report, or file, or whatever they call it for an operation I had three weeks ago, as well as the file for the doctor who did it.”
“What did you get operated for?”
“Appendicitis.”
“Ow. But at least it doesn’t sound like something that would be under too much security. I can do it. Give me your full legal name and the exact date, and I’ll get right on it.”
“It was at Adams Memorial.”
Eddings flinched. “Adams Memorial,” he repeated flatly.
“Yeah. Are you going to back out on me?”
The detective gave him a long, hard look, and it was easy to see the street tough under the delicate façade. “I said I’d do it.”
Yael nodded his respect. One real Detroiter to another.
***
The next couple of days passed in listless anticipation. Yael went back to work, thankful that his job at the call center—Spanish language assistance—wasn’t subject to replacement by the living dead, probably because of the fact that, despite their fine control of limbs, the zombies simply couldn’t speak effectively at all. Sadly, however, he would jump each time the phone rang, thinking it would be Eddings with some kind of news. Towards the end of the second day, his paranoia had gotten to the point where even the calls coming in through the IVC were suspect. Maybe the detective had gotten hold of his work number somehow.
But the call didn’t come at work, it came at home, after his weekly call to his daughter in New Orleans—his ex had a good gig there, waiting on tables in restaurants where a reanimate would have been a serious faux pas. As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again.
“Lilly?” he asked, certain that this was just a follow-up by his ex, asking for money, or telling him something she didn’t want the girl to hear.
“I charge a lot more for that kind of service, Mr. Moreno.” The voice on the other end was deep, rasping, a smoker’s voice.
“Eddings.” Finally.
“Yeah, although it sounds like you had a busy night planned without me. Look, I can’t really talk right now. I need to keep moving.”
“What? Why?”
“I’ll let you know when we get together. I need to meet you. You know the 24 hr. McDonald’s over on Vine?”
“Yeah, not a nice neighborhood.”
“Meet me there at one AM. Make sure no one is following you.” The detective hung up.
Yael tried to call him back, dialed the number on the caller ID, but the phone rang and rang until someone—a drunk by the sound of it—picked it up and said “Washa want? This is a pay phone dude.” And Yael was left asking himself how the hell the detective had found a pay phone. He hadn’t seen one in at least ten years.
Night fell, and the decision on whether it would be wise to go or not still hadn’t been made. Was there any sense in doing so? It was one thing to send a detective to build a case against a hospital so the lawyers could take over, and quite another to suddenly be forced into a secret meeting with a man he’d only met once in the middle of the night. Completely different.
But he knew he would. After stewing for forty-eight hours, there was no way he would forgive himself if he didn’t go. The guy probably had a dinner engagement and couldn’t make it earlier, or was working a parallel case which meant he would work late but still wanted to make sure he got paid for his time on Yael’s investigation. There was no need to create phantasms.
He took a cab, one of the new automated ones built in Puebla, the ones that beeped when you got wherever you were going. He still felt a pang of fear whenever he saw one, a remnant of the time when his job depended on Ford keeping the imports at bay. Ford had failed, but he had survived – though his marriage hadn’t. It was the first time he’d ever been in one of them, although a very
pregnant Lilly had taken one the day she walked out. He wondered if that had been a premeditated insult.
The McDonald’s wasn’t just in a bad part of town—it was in the middle of the Crimson Mile, Detroit’s drug central. It was a good place to get mugged, but no one was going to mug an immigrant as obvious as Yael. But they might beat him up.
He left the cab before the worst of it and hiked the rest of the way: it was better to risk walking than for people to know you had an actual functioning form of payment for automated rides. Even embedded credit chips could be found and extracted with a kitchen knife, a metal detector and a lack of respect for the screams of others. He preferred to avoid a repeat of that particular sensation.
Eddings was already seated when Yael arrived. There was a bruise flowering under one eye, but the detective looked up with a grin. “Milkshake?”
Yael shook his head, bewildered, not quite understanding what was going on. “You said you needed to talk to me.”
“Yeah, but buy something to eat first. No use getting tossed out by security.” And then Eddings laughed, as if at some deeply funny private joke. Yael didn’t bother to ask what was so funny, he walked up to the counter – deserted even though the restaurant itself was full of people, and bought a small Coke and some fries. On his return, Eddings gave him a sour look. “You know you’ve fucked me over good, don’t you?”
“What?” Yael nearly knocked the top off of his soda trying to thread his body between the seat and the table. “What are you talking about? I’ll pay what you asked. A deal’s a deal.”
The detective laughed again. Yael could smell beer on his breath and sweat—acrid and stale—on his clothes. “It isn’t about money anymore, is it?” He stopped laughing, and gave Yael a steady look. He might have been drinking, but he wasn’t drunk. “Look, the only reason I’m meeting you at all is that I gave you my word. I didn’t want you to think I’d turned chicken shit on you and skipped town. But I’m gone tomorrow.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“That job you gave me, that’s what I’m talking about. I knew it was a hot potato—hell, every job I ever get hired for is a hot potato – but I didn’t know how much. I’d heard rumors about that Adams place, of course, but I thought I’d just dig up a little dirt on a public official or two, maybe even get the files you needed. Things like who’d signed off on the permits or whatever. Hell, I don’t know what it was that I wanted to prove, but it was something. Dumb, isn’t it?”
“Why? You’re still not making any sense.”
“I’m talking about the mob, Moreno. And I don’t mean these punks here. I’m talking about the old crime families and the Russian Mafiya. If I’d known they were the ones behind this, I would have stayed clear—hell, I would have shot myself and saved them the trouble.”
“The mob? I asked you to investigate a hospital! What have you gotten me into?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? The mob is behind the fucking zombies. Seems to have been an offshoot of their drug rings.” He held up a hand, obviously not wanting to deal with any questions. “They used to bring opium stuffed into the bodies of the soldiers killed in Iraq, and then they did the same thing for that screwed up little war in Bangladesh – lots of bodies from that one. But they couldn’t process the drugs unless they had a licensed, government approved funeral home. And suddenly the mob owned every parlor in Detroit.”
Yael swallowed. You heard rumors, of course. You always suspected that there were too many cheap drugs on the street, and that it wasn’t like that in Chicago or Cincinnati or Minneapolis, or any other city around there. Like this was some kind of distribution center. “But the war’s been over for three years.”
“Bingo.” Eddings snapped his fingers in Yael’s face. He wasn’t drunk, but his eyes bulged. For a second he looked stoned—or just insane. “What do you do with all the bodies? The legitimate ones, I mean. Funeral homes just weren’t giving the kind of return on capital that the mob expected.” He chuckled dourly. “Or should I say mobs? After all, nothing unites Russians and Italians faster than a nearly-legal profit.”
“Oh, my god… You’re saying that the mob is part of the reanimates industry? That they’re making money off of people dying?”
“Part of it? They own it. From that shiny little building on Park Street all the way down to the patents for the molecules that make it possible in the first place. And the contract for the ‘high stress working corps’ was put together by the Mafiya’s number one shyster.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
It took a while for Eddings to stop laughing that time. “Look Moreno. Just stick to your job from now on. They caught me sniffing, so they’re after me, but they don’t know about you. They can torture it out of me, I guess, but they have to find me first. Just remember that you’re messing with the biggest source of income for this city. Tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars. People would kill you for a hundred bucks and a crack fix, so just imagine how many people would kill you for something like this. Don’t even think about trying to find me again after today.”
“If you’re running from criminals, why would you meet me here? Isn’t this like giving them home field advantage? Or are you just bullshitting me because you want to up the rates.”
Eddings sighed. “Fuck you, Moreno. I’m not charging you anything. Just forget about this. Do me and yourself a favor, and if we ever meet again, pretend you don’t know me. And you might want to pray that they don’t catch me, while you’re at it.” He looked around. “And why here? That’s an easy one. The mob isn’t popular here.”
“Why not? Looks like they’d fit right in.”
“Yeah, they used to, until they suddenly began needing to hit their quotas on the reanimates front and there weren’t enough bodies to go around. Tough to live in a poor neighborhood when dead bodies suddenly become valuable. No one ever blinks if a few more pop up. Now get out of my sight.”
Yael left. He called the cab right to the door of the McDonald’s, keeping an eye out for any kind of vehicle that might be used to transport a harvested body.
***
The doorbell rang and rang. It was seven in the evening, and Yael wondered who would be in such a hurry to see him. Even Mrs. Juanita, the landlady didn’t come knocking until his rent was later than it was right now.
“What? Can’t a guy watch TV in peace anymore?” Yael yanked the door open.
Standing in a shadow in the hallway was a man. He wasn’t particularly tall, and he was wearing glasses and a dark hat which made it hard to identify him. But as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he recognized the build and the face—even though he’d only seen it twice in his life, and that was more than a year before.
“Eddings?”
The detective stepped into the light, allowing Yael to see that he was dressed in a very expensive-looking suit, as dark as the hat. The sunglasses, too, were strangely out of place. “You look like a hit man,” Yael remarked. “I’d hate to…”
His voice trailed off as he realized that Eddings’ skin was much too pale, much too grey to be alive. He tried to slam the door in his face, but was unable to budge the thing in the entryway. “They got you? How did they get you?” he cried, hoping there was some mistake, hoping that Eddings had died on his own and simply been reincarnated into a singing telegram or something. But the suit said otherwise. So did the hat. This was a message.
The reanimate said nothing.
There was nowhere to run in Yael’s one room apartment, so he just looked the former detective in the eye, one Detroiter to another.
“So I guess this is a high stress job?”
The hit man said nothing, merely raising the gun so that its muzzle was level with his eyes. The last thoughts to cross Yael’s mind were that the gun wasn’t shaking and that the stress control must work after all.
He never even heard the gunshot.
MYBURGH
By Paul L. Bates
When Harold unwisely confessed he was a promoter, the policeman’s eyebrows rose in a universal gesture of doubt. Had the matter not been so serious, Harold was certain both of them would have laughed outright for very different reasons. Harold squirmed on the hard oak chair, lost in thought, struggling to give some credible account of that reversal of fortune.
Detective Masters eyed him as he might a small wriggling fish dangling from a hook, deciding whether or not to throw it back.
The detective was a hard man of medium height. His face was prematurely etched by his general misgivings as well as his having born witness to the result of nearly every conceivable callousness one man could do to another in this unassuming backwater. He resembled a bulldog in disguise with his rumpled suit and thick brown moustache, a holdover from another century.
Harold, on the other hand, was lean and gangly. Even slouched in his chair he was forced to look down upon the seated detective. He absently rubbed the stubble on his chin, contemplating the older man. Harold guessed the detective was endeavoring to pigeonhole him; something to be avoided, he concluded, if he were to extricate himself from this mess. He sensed psychotic, dupe and inbred were the categories currently under consideration.
“Let’s skip the part about the crocuses for now,” the detective encouraged him. “I’m more interested in the woman’s screams you recorded.”