Pet Noir

by Katharine Kerr

  Lacey smiles briefly and goes on studying the screen.

  “Oh hey!” she says abruptly. “Thanks, Buddy.” She turns to Bates. “He just reminded me of something that might tie in. Remember Mulligan’s fit? When he was trying to do a reading over the first corpse?”

  “Yeah. Did Buddy figure out what went wrong?”

  “He’s made a superguess. Found a paper from the National Psionics Institute demonstrating that it’s possible to put a psychic block on someone, to interfere with their psi functioning and—this is the old telling detail—to keep them from remembering that they were blocked. Mulligan no remembered a damn thing once he came round.”

  “Jeez! But wouldn’t someone have to be close by to do that to another psychic?”

  “Real close. Like standing in the crowd of rubberneckers at the scene of the crime.”

  Bates swears briefly but vilely. When he glances Mulligan’s way, he finds him wide awake and sitting up to listen, his face dead-pale, his eyes kid-wide.

  “Trying to remember, y’know?” Mulligan says. “It hurt like hell.”

  “Buddy says that pain is the usual outcome, yeah.”

  “So it’s someone who broke his oath,” Mulligan is beginning to get excited. “I mean, when they register you, you got to sign the oath, and the first thing it says is, like, you’ll never hurt nobody with your talent.”

  “Someone who goes around cutting people’s throats no is going to worry about a lousy oath,” Bates says with some asperity, then is immediately sorry when Mulligan shrinks back. For chrissake, why does he have to act like a kicked dog? “Well, that’s assuming it’s one person and not a pair of accomplices.”

  “Yeah, but I think Mulligan’s on to something anyway, chief. Look, the Institute’s paper is strictly theoretical, not a how-to manual. What if we’re dealing with a psychic who no was trained here in the Republic?”

  “Where, then? Some planet we never even heard of? Fat lot of good that's going to do me! Hell, sorry—I’m running on no sleep, and I no mean to keep insulting you guys.”

  “No sleep and a purple pill, I bet.” Lacey gives him a smile. “You got to watch those things, chief. That’s why they’re illegal, y’know.”

  Bates merely glowers.

  “But look,” Lacey goes on. “It fits, a murderer with psionics. That’s why he left the body out in the middle of the Plaza, so it’d be found right away, and he’d get his chance to zap the police psychic. I mean, the longer he hangs around there, the more likely it is that someone’s going to notice him, so he’s got to get the body discovered by the police fast. Sure enough, poor Ward comes along, calls the squad, and Mulligan appears—just what the dude wanted. He zaps Mulligan and fades away into the crowd, and there you are, afraid of asking another psychic to run the risk.”

  “Yeah, I sure was. Jeez, Mulligan, you scared the crap outta me. Anyway, sure, and then he killed Ward cause he realized that Ward saw Sally Pharis and could get her as a witness...no, it breaks down. How would he know that?”

  “You put out an all-points, dint you? Lots of hams listen in.”

  “Yeah, but there’s no use in killing Ward once he named the witness.”

  “Right. Damn!”

  “If he got psionics,” Mulligan puts in, “he no needs no comm tap to know who Sally was.”

  When they both slew round to look at him, Mulligan cringes again.

  “Go on,” Lacey says. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s say he’s walking away after the murder, y’know? He picks up that Sally sees him, but he no can stop to take care of her right then. Maybe Ward is coming along, or someone else, too many people to kill or something. So he like registers her mind. It’s hard to explain mind-prints, but they’re like a smell, some kind of thing like that. Everyone’s got one, and you can like pick it out in a crowd. So after he takes care of me, he goes looking for Sally. There’s no way he can know that Ward’s already told the chief her name.”

  “And so we’re coming right back to a killer with psi,” Bates says. “She-it.”

  “Ugly, yeah,” Lacey says. “But it does mean we got to find a motive for only one murder, Ka Gren’s. The others are just covering that one up.”

  “Well, if we’re right, and I think we are, mind. I don’t suppose I got a hope in hell of swearing you to secrecy.”

  “Why? Cause Ka Gren was spying on the Lies for the Cons, and you no want an interstellar incident?”

  “How the hell did you know that?”

  “I dint. It seemed logical, and I just tricked you into confirming my guess.”

  For a moment Bates is speechless with mingled rage and admiration.

  “Hey, man, anyone could draw the same conclusion. The whole damn planet knows that the Lies and the Cons come here mostly to spy on each other.” Lacey pauses to type Buddy some message. “Dunt get so uptight.”

  Bates takes a deep breath and reminds himself that she’s right. For some minutes she reads from the screen while Mulligan watches her with abject devotion.

  “Okay, chief,” she says finally. “I got something to tell you if you swear on a stack of Bibles that you won’t ask me where I learned it. No, two things.”

  “Two stacks and a Koran thrown in.”

  “Swell.” She pauses, types, reads, types some more. “First, for the past couple weeks the Lies have been tracking something in a solar orbit in-system. My informant dunt know what it is, exactly. From what he could pick up on his sensors it’s either a comet or something travelling with a comet. Suppose Ka Gren knew about it and was trying to find out more? It’s a long shot, yeah, but it’s also the only shot we got.”

  “It’s enough so I can try dropping a hint or two at the Con embassy, anyway. What’s the other thing?”

  “It might not be related to the murders, but I’m willing to bet it’s related to item number one. Out in the Rat Yard there’s a fresh grave. Some of the crazies murdered a sentient yesterday, and I’m willing to bet anything you want that it’s a species we’ve never seen before. Think you can get an order to exhume?”

  “Damn right! Would you ask Buddy to tap into comm for me? I want to get right on that. How’d you find—no, sorry. I meant what I said.”

  “Good. Then I’ll give you a map that’ll take you right there. Oh yeah, you better have a couple of guys along with riot guns. The crazies are going to think you’re digging up the Devil.”

  oOo

  Nunks is surprised at how hard Maria works. There is something ferocious about the way she crouches over each delicate tomato plant, her face skewed in concentration as she coaxes the tendrils onto the wire mesh supports and traps them there with cotton string, as if this job is for her a drug to wipe away the memory of the rest of her life. Since she’s latently psionic, he can read something of her mind, a welter of fear that this idyll of normality will end with her pimp dragging her back to their smelly little flat on the other side of Porttown. Nunks wants to reassure her, but she cannot read his thoughts in return, not yet, anyway. In some irritation he casts around for Mulligan’s mind, finds it awake, then realizes that Bates is still up in Lacey’s office with the little brother. After Mulligan’s revelations about pimps bribing the police, Bates is a person that Nunks never wants to see again.

  Mulligan, however, has registered his contact.

  Big brother >need me?

  >Need talk Lacey> BUT| >cop goes away.

  Okay BUT| >cop goes, Lacey goes>>

  [aggravation] She can waitnot wait?

  Not wait. Big brother, woman Sally name/Lacey friend real danger [fear] >>throat slashed open. >Lacey find/must find before then.

  Leaving the tomatoes to Maria, Nunks walks slowly down the length of the garden, breathlessly quiet in the last of the sunset. Soon he will send the maglev lamps floating out so his helpers can do their night’s work in something more reliable than the flare and crackle of the northern lights, but for the moment he merely enjoys the orange-and-apricot sunset, stip
pled here and there with red. Young Rick, the deserter from the Alliance Marines, comes yawning and stretching down the staircase to join him—on time this evening, after the dressing down Lacey gave him last night. Although Nunks cordially dislikes the fellow, he reminds himself that in a day or two Rick and his forged papers will be gone, on board the RSS Montana as a comm tech.

  “What do you want me to do tonight, Nunks?”

  Nunks points to a shovel leaning against a wall, then to the compost heap, which needs turning. Although Rick groans in an unnecessarily dramatic manner, he does follow the order. Nunks watches him for a minute or two: a very large young man, with well-muscled shoulders and long arms. Since he also owns a laser pistol, stolen from the Lies when he deserted, he should be perfectly capable of guarding Maria from her drug-sodden pimp, a necessary precaution because Nunks intends to take Mulligan and Lacey out to the Rat Yard as soon as she’s finished with this other business. He can still feel the despair of that distant sentient mind like a taste of poison in his mouth.

  In a few minutes Bates and Lacey come clattering down the stairs. Although the chief hurries on ahead, she stops to talk. From the tense set of her mouth Nunks can tell she’s more worried than he’s ever seen her. With a light blue shirt and gray shorts she’s wearing a dark blue vest, part of her old Fleet uniform, so she can carry her laser pistol in reasonable secrecy.

  “Nunks, look, I remember that you need to tell me something. Can it wait?”

  He nods a yes and makes a sweeping hand-gesture to indicate that she’s not to worry about it.

  “Gracias. Mulligan told me that you know about Sally, but this thing goes way beyond her. I think we got some kind of homicidal maniac running loose in town. Look, take real good care of Mulligan, will you?”

  Nunks nods again and pats her reassuringly on the shoulder. He decides that he’ll have Rick lock the only door into the garden and stand guard there, gun in hand. From what little he’s heard on the subject, he can assume that maniacs look for easy prey, not fair fights.

  oOo

  Porttown has two shopping areas. One, not far from A to Z, caters to visiting spacers with all the usual tawdry attractions: overpriced restaurants, souvenir stands, bars, sexual partners in a wide assortment, and here and there a store that sells more respectable things like towels and other travellers’ necessities. Sentients who live in Porttown call it the Outworld Bazaar and rarely go there unless they’re employed by one of those businesses dedicated to parting spacers from their treaty-credits. Round the other side of the port, on North F Street mostly, you can find sonocleaners, foodmarts, skimmer repairs, and other such sensible if mundane services, including neighborhood bars and the everyday sort of recreational drugs, legal and illegal. Since parking is generally impossible on North F, Lacey takes the Metro and leaves her skimmer back at the warehouse.

  Little Joe mentioned that Sally has just moved into an apartment over a slice’n’fry place, but he neglected to say which one. Since that particular kind of lizzie fast food is also popular with humans, there are slice’n’fries all over the North F neighborhood, and a lot of them have apartments above. Lacey gets off the Metro at Twenty-third and walks down a block to the Freefall Inn, a tavern owned by her aunt Maureen, a big, bony woman whose blonde hair sweeps upward into a ribbon only to cascade down again in curls and whose lower lip is generally stained purple from chewing spice. Since Maureen was forty when rejuv drugs were finally perfected, she has crows’ feet wrinkles around her eyes and deep lines at the corners of her mouth, but as she likes to remark, it’s not bad for a boozy old broad of seventy.

  Lacey finds her behind the bright red plastocrete bar with polished brass railings that makes the Freefall such a cheerful sort of place. Since there’s a replay of an off-planet ball game on the enormous three-dee viewer that fills one wall, most of the patrons—and the place is crowded with regulars—are nursing alfalfa beer and watching with the occasional muttered oath for an error or bad swing. Lacey finds a place at the bar, orders whiskey and water from a servobot, and waits until Maureen notices that she’s there.

  “Bobbie! Whatthahell? You sick or something?”

  “Nah. What makes you think so?”

  “You watering your whiskey. Put the damn card away—this one’s on me—no, I no arguing about it. What are you doing over our way?”

  “Looking for a friend. She just moved, and I no got either her comm number or her address, but I got to find her.”

  “On business, knowing you.”

  “Sort of.” Lacey leans over and whispers. “You know Sally Pharis.”

  “I heard los verdes were hot-lining her.”

  “Look, they only want to save her little ass. She’s in big trouble, man, I mean el mucho grande. Someone’s gunning for her.”

  “Oh.” Maureen pauses to scratch her upper lip with the bright red nail of her little finger, carefully avoiding the mole at the corner of her mouth. “Well, no one knows where she is. Ibrahim came in here when I opened round sunset and had a couple shots of gin. He was pissed as hell, saying she never did come home yesterday. Maybe she got an all-day trick, I tell him. Yeah, he goes, but she supposed to call me if she does. Look man, I go, it’s no romantic, having a girl her john that she’s got to use the comm so just hang on a minute, okay? So Ibrahim drank his gin and left. Dunt know where he went.”

  From overhead comes a long low rumble: a ship getting ready to launch from the port. They both pause automatically, Lacey sipping her whiskey, and wait, holding their thoughts in mind easily through long practice, until the ship is gone and they can hear each other again.

  “Anyone else seen him since?”

  “Nah, not that I know of.”

  “She-it.”

  Since Lacey rarely swears, Maureen looks appalled.

  “That bad, honey?”

  “That bad. They could both be dead by now. Look, if Sally or Ibrahim comes in, or anyone else who knows where they are, you tell’em to get the hell to the police.”

  “Jeezchrist. Sure will. Hey, Sally’s living over a place called Crunch ’n’ Chat. Down on Fifteenth, just off F. No bet she’s there now, though.”

  “Neither do I, but I’ll give it a look, anyway. Thanks for the drink.”

  “Welcome. You ought to come visit your poor old auntie more often.”

  “Yeah. Well. Y’know.”

  With a wave Lacey leaves, walking fast, wondering why it still gripes her soul to have one of her many relatives call her Bobbie, which is, after all, her given name. At least Maureen refrains from retelling family stories, a common practice in the rest of the clan and the reason that Lacey rarely visits them. Over the years she’s done her best to bury her childhood memories deep in her mind. Although in Porttown it’s no real disgrace to have a father who’s always in and out of prison, she hated it and hated him for it, too, with his endless big talk and big schemes that always came to the same tedious end: the police showing up at the door either to take him away or to tell his wife that they already had. Twice the authorities declared him rehabilitated and sent him off to another city in the polar region with a respectable job and a clean start; twice his family ended up coming back to Polar City to live with relatives while he was in slam. When her mother finally had enough, Lacey was only thirteen, but she still can remember her feeling of relief that Dad would never come home again. Aunt Maureen took her out for a real meat hamburger to celebrate the divorce.

  She pauses for a moment, looking at the stacks of used clothing in the window of the charity store, discards, most in good shape, from the well-off black folks who live far from the noise and fumes of the port. Her mother dressed her kids out of that store, as so many mothers in Porttown do. Lacey hated that, too. She saw the Fleet as her way out of the ghetto, enlisting young, serving well, getting her chance at an education in OCS. As she looks down the dirty street, kids playing ball and picking their way around a drunk sprawled in front of the post office, a gaggle of women with tired eyes tal
king on the street corner, she wonders why she came back to Porttown in the end when she could have retired on any planet in the Republic. Maybe, she supposes, she would have felt ill-at-ease elsewhere, always wondering if she was good enough for her fancy neighbors, or maybe Bates spoke more accurately than he could have known, and she quite simply would have been bored in some quiet city where sentients mostly play by the rules. When she glances up at the endless flicker in the gaudy-colored sky, she realizes that Polar City is also one of the few places in the Mapped Sector where the stars are always invisible at night. Maybe that had something to do with it, too. She never has to stare up at the night sky and remember what it was like to be free out in deep space.

  With a shrug to throw off the melancholy mood she walks on, past the tiny store that sells chewing spice, sodas, and odd lots of whatever Mr. Chen has managed to pick up cheap (children’s socks, special today; writing paper and pens for sentients who’ll never be able to afford a private comp unit), past the liquor store where they cash welfare vouchers in the back room for a ten per cent commission, the tiny storefront mosque for those few true believers in this nest of infidels—all the places that seem utterly unchanged from her childhood even though that was thirty years ago. She wonders if her memory’s playing tricks or if this neighborhood truly never does change, if change is only for those with the bucks to open new businesses in newly-built shops rather than passing the old counters and stock and debts down in the family year after year.

  The most prosperous shopkeepers, too, have scraped together the money for rejuv and thus look no older than she remembers them, all those years ago, just as she still has the face and body of a young ensign rather than a woman in her late forties. As she passes, some of them hail her: Bobbie Lacey, ain’t it? Fancy that, good to see you, still have your Uncle Mel’s warehouse? And the answers: sure is, sure is, sure do: as she walks on with a smile and a wondering if any of these men, women, and lizzies have done or seen something that’s brought them to the attention of Ka Gren’s murderer. Like Chief Bates, Lacey is scared, not for herself, but for Polar City, where a highly-skilled killer is determined to cover his tracks no matter how many deaths it takes.