by Jeff Edwards
“Please don’t be offended if I don’t make a great deal of eye contact,” he said. “My peripheral vision is highly developed. I can see you quite clearly, unless you happen to be almost directly behind me.” His speech was clipped: his words clearly and quickly annunciated, without very little inflection.
His chair swung farther to the right and angled him up to a more upright position. I quickly discovered that this was to be the pattern of our visit. Every few seconds he would spin in one direction or another and take in a different area of the video dome. I had no way of knowing if he made these movements at random, or whether he was following some sort of logical sequence.
I watched him. His forehead was a bit larger than most, and the ridge of his eyebrows was more pronounced than usual, but he didn’t look like one of the bulbous-headed Brainiac characters that seem to inhabit science fiction vids. If anything, the heavy brow line made him look a bit Neanderthal. His brown hair was limp and rather badly cut, as though he didn’t have patience for anything so frivolous as personal appearance.
“I appreciate your taking the time to see me,” I said. “My name is David…”
His chair swung abruptly to the left, showing me the other side of his face. “I am Gary Thurman, and you are Mr. David Stalin. I am Leanda Forsyth’s primary supervisor, and you are a Private Detective investigating her disappearance. Please don’t take it personally if I forego the niceties. As you can see, I am working. I will begin by answering all four of your major questions, and we can fill in the little ones afterwards.”
“I don’t mean to sound dense,” I said, “but what makes you think I have four big questions? I might have three, or sixteen.”
Thurman’s chair spun to face me. We locked eyes for a fraction of a second. “You and I are in much the same business,” he said. His chair moved again and our eye contact was broken. “We dig around in peoples’ trash cans in search of fragments and details. We sift through seemingly unrelated odds and ends until we have enough information to synthesize a gestalt. If we do our jobs properly, that gestalt will bear at least a passing resemblance to the truth. In short, I suspect that you will ask the same fundamental questions that I would ask.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll play along. What questions am I going to ask?”
Thurman’s chair swung nearly 180 degrees. “Number one,” he said. “Do I know where Leanda is? An affirmative answer to this question contains a built-in assumption that she is working on some deep undercover project which makes her disappearance either necessary or desirable. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Leanda is not working in any undercover capacity, or at least not for TransNat Telemedia. Nor are we hiding or protecting her.”
“Question number two—Was Leanda working on anything that might threaten or anger some unnamed person or persons? Specifically, do I know of anyone with a motive for kidnapping Leanda? I’m afraid the answer to this question is also no. I am confident that, given more time and seasoning, Leanda would have graduated to higher profile stories. But she simply wasn’t there yet. We hadn’t yet assigned her to anything with high enough stakes to make her a target.”
I gestured for him to continue. Apparently his peripheral vision really was excellent, as he seemed to catch my movement, even though he was looking away from me.
“Question number three,” he said. “What was it like to work with Leanda? Was she one of the boys, so to speak? Or did she wave her family’s money and influence in everyone’s face? I can only give you my opinion on this matter. Leanda had talent and she earned her pay. She never brought up her family, and—if the subject did come up—she was quick to point out that her parents had made their own ways in the world, and she was making her own way.”
His chair reclined sharply. “I am not suggesting that Leanda Forsyth was a saint. This is a highly-competitive industry. Leanda was not afraid to climb over someone to get what she wanted. But she depended on her own cunning, her own skills, and her own ambition. Her family’s influence didn’t enter into it.”
Thurman spun to face me again. “How am I doing so far?”
“Three for three,” I said.
His chair spun away. “I believe that question number four is a natural corollary of question number three. Did Leanda have any strong emotional ties, either positive or negative, to any of her co-workers? Did she have any enemies or lovers among the cast and crew of TransNat? The answer is not that I know of. And I believe that I would have known, Mr. Stalin. She stepped on a few toes, but no more than is normal in this business. And she kept her relationships with her co-workers on the coffee and doughnuts level. She planned to make her career in the news industry, and she was smart enough to know that a running feud or an office romance could damage her chances.”
He spun back to face me. “I believe that covers it. Do you have any more questions?”
“Just a couple,” I said.
His chair twisted away again. “Please continue.”
“Thank you,” I said. “First, is there any chance that Leanda was working on a story you didn’t know about? Maybe doing a little freelance digging in the hopes of latching on to a big enough story to take her national?”
Thurman hesitated before answering—his pause a bit surprising in view of his rapid-fire style of speaking. “I can’t be certain,” he said. “But I believe that she may have been freelancing. Leanda was understandably upset when we pulled her off the Dyson Pharmaceuticals piece. It was the first national-interest story that she’d been assigned to. I assured her that the reassignment had nothing to do with her handling of the story, but I’m not certain she believed me. It’s possible that she decided to go after a major story on her own, with an eye toward proving that she could handle it.”
“Why did you pull her off the story,” I asked.
“Our legal department advised us to expect a retaliatory suit from Dyson Pharmaceuticals as soon as the story broke. It’s difficult to sue an organ of the news media, but it can be done. Our attorneys warned us that Leanda’s family fortune would make her an attractive co-defendant in any legal action, thereby increasing the probability of a lawsuit. By severing her connection with the story, and moving her family’s money out of the reach of litigation, we were able to make ourselves less attractive as a target. The reporter we replaced Leanda with, a Ms. Evelyn Garza, has no real financial assets, outside of her salary,” Thurman said. “She would have made a poor co-defendant.”
His chair shifted again. “It was an effective strategy. Dyson Pharmaceuticals made a few preliminary legal inquiries, but they ultimately chose to forego formal action.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Last question… I couldn’t help but notice that you consistently refer to Leanda Forsyth in the past-tense. You think she’s dead, don’t you?”
Thurman hesitated again. His chair stopped moving and he stared down at his hands. “Yes,” he said. “I am very much afraid that Leanda is dead.”
“Do you have some specific reason for believing that?”
He shook his head slowly, still not looking up. “My brain is a tuned instrument,” he said. “Both physically, and by training. I saturate my conscious mind with streams of seemingly random data and my subconscious goes to work assembling order from the chaos. A mag-lev train derails in Houston... A computer virus shuts down cargo-handling robots in Sri Lanka… A crop of synthetic wheat fails in Rhodesia… My mind digests these seemingly unrelated events, and predicts a palace revolution in one of the Middle Eastern emirates. I send a news crew to ground zero and—if my subconscious model of the facts is correct—the cameras are already rolling when the first shot is fired. If my gestalt turns out to be faulty, my crew comes home empty handed.”
He glanced up at the shimmering array of wall-to-wall video. “That doesn’t happen very often.”
He looked at me… really looked at me… for the first time. “Sometimes I can reconstruct the logic behind these leaps of intuition, and sometimes I can’t. In this case, I�
�m afraid I cannot. My subconscious appears to have concluded that Leanda is dead. Unfortunately, it has not seen fit to let me in on its reasoning.”
He stared at me for a few seconds longer and then blinked several times rapidly. “Is that all, Mr. Stalin?”
“For now,” I said. “Can I contact you again if I think of anything else?”
“Certainly,” Thurman said, his voice suddenly crisp again. “I will leave word with my staff so that you won’t have to bluff your way in next time.”
“I appreciate that,” I said.
One corner of Thurman’s mouth went up a fraction, the closest thing to a smile that I had seen out of him. “For future reference Mr. Stalin, Vivien Forsyth does not own so much as a single share of TransNat Telemedia. Her husband is an elected official, and the Forsyth family goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest.”
“I’ll keep that in mind the next time I’m running a scam,” I said. “But I didn’t really expect my little ploy to fool you. It was designed to get me past your junior staff, and in that respect it did the trick.”
“It did indeed,” Thurman said. “The old adage of the lion and the gazelle is not totally without merit.”
“I don’t think I remember that one,” I said.
Thurman swung his chair to the right and began searching the vid screens again. “The reference dates back to pre-warming, when animals still ran wild on the African veldts. It was said that each gazelle—in order to survive—had to be able to run faster than the fastest lion. On the other hand—in order to eat—a lion had only to run as fast as the slowest gazelle.”
I grinned. “That’s it exactly. To get in here, I only had to be smarter than the dumbest person on your staff.”
“Quite correct,” Thurman said. “But the principle extends to more dire matters than wheedling your way past my least-gifted employees. Leanda Forsyth was an intelligent woman, with excellent instincts and influential connections. If she is in fact dead, it seems likely that the person who killed her¾the lion so to speak¾possessed particular speed and cunning.”
Thurman waved a hand at the hundreds of vid screens. “There are more than a few lions out there, Mr. Stalin. You’ll have to run very fast to stay ahead of them.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “On the other hand, I might just turn out to be a lion myself.”
Thurman’s eyes continued to dance over the chaotic display of video. “I hope so Mr. Stalin. For your sake, and for Leanda’s.”
He touched a control on the arm of his chair and the audio faded back up to its original volume. The interview was over.
I glanced over my shoulder as I walked out the door. Thurman’s chair had resumed its circular dance. “I really do hope so,” he said softly.
CHAPTER 5
I parked on Long Beach Avenue near the corner of East 57th. It made for almost the same distance to the barricade as my usual parking spot, but it brought me into the Zone by a different route. I had no particular reason to think I was being watched or followed, but shifting my routine suddenly felt like a good idea.
My stint in the Army had taught me two things: a nearly instinctive hatred of the lifeless shade of green that the Army calls olive drab, and that I should always trust my impulses—especially the ones with no discernible basis in rational thought.
According to the one of the basic theories of soldiering, a sudden irrational hunch is your subconscious mind’s attempt to warn you about some emerging situation that your conscious brain hasn’t clued into yet. My Platoon Sergeant had been full of stories about soldiers who had obeyed their split-second impulses and walked away from deadly peril with life and limb intact. The private who had followed a sudden urge to veer toward the right side of a path—narrowly avoiding a cluster of anti-personnel mines. The corporal whose instinctive decision to dive for cover in an apparently threat-free situation had saved her squad from a lethal encounter with a charged particle weapon. Army lore held at least a hundred variations of these stories, all purported to be no-shitters: the soldier’s equivalent of cross my heart.
I resisted the temptation to glance over my shoulder. Was the sudden urge to shift my routines a sign that my subconscious was picking up on some detail that I had missed? Or had I just been spooked by Thurman’s theatrical warning? I had no way of knowing. Which, in a nutshell, was the central problem with the Army’s theory. If you followed an impulse and nothing bad happened afterward, how could you tell if your instinct had been correct? Had you just narrowly averted some unknown disaster? Or had there been no pending disaster at all?
I shook my head a few times to chase away the heebie-jeebies. It helped a little. I pawed around in my pocket for a Marlboro, lit it, and inhaled deeply. That helped a little too.
On the other side of the barricade, I shifted my plan again. I had been headed for home to check my messages and grab a sandwich. Instead, I made an unplanned detour onto Santa Fe Avenue. At two-thirty in the afternoon, the strip was a ghost town. About a million candlepower’s worth of sunlight poured down through the dome, revealing every crack in the old sidewalks and every crumbling brick in every decaying building.
An LAPD Tactical hover unit cruised the other side of the street at a speed barely faster than a walk. The backwash from its blowers spun off knee-high tornadoes of dirt and litter. The car was one of the new Focke-Wulf Marauders, sleek and dangerous-looking under its smoothly overlapping plates of compressed-plastic armor. The driver and his partner were nearly invisible under their own body armor and tactical equipment. A row of shallow bullet craters pocked the passenger’s side door. Someone had tested their armor for them. Judging by the spacing and the depths of the craters, it had most likely been some type of automatic weapon with limited armor piercing capabilities.
The cops watched me as they cruised slowly past. I couldn’t see their faces, but their helmets turned to follow me, a none-too-subtle reminder that they were the kings of this trash heap, and they were watching everything. The Zone was their turf, and they held every square centimeter of it in their carbon-armored fists.
I took a drag off the Marlboro and blew a cloud of smoke. I had to stifle a smile. In a few hours, when the sun began to sink into the West, the Zone would to come to life. The lengthening shadows would trigger light sensors on nearly every building on the strip. Holographic facades would flicker and sizzle into ghostly existence, pulling the bright cloak of illusion over tired walls and graffiti-covered brick. Decay and squalor would disappear behind the splendid towers of Arabian palaces, fantastic undersea cities, and elaborate Chinese pagodas of jade, ivory, and gold.
And the people would come, in fits and starts at first. Sailors. Hookers. Wire-heads. And then the muscle punks would begin to crawl out of their holes, and the gang bangers, and the fast-talking street dealers. The denizens of the Zone, unloved and unwelcome in other parts of the city.
The tourists would wander in with their holo-cameras and their underdeveloped self-preservation instincts—bustling through the infamous Zone like it was some sort of wild animal preserve for strange and endangered species of street life. Some of them would make it home, blissfully unaware of their own mortality and stupidly proud of having brushed against death’s elbow. And some of them would end up as recycled body parts in the liquid nitrogen coolers of the organ poachers.
I watched the police cruiser out of the corner of my eye until it was gone. For all of their swagger, they’d be out of the Zone before the sun went down. LAPD Tactical had gotten too smart to try to hold the Zone after dark, but it was a wisdom born of pain. They had lost a lot of foot patrols and several cars before they’d finally gotten the message: Cops who go into the Zone at night had better come in numbers. Otherwise, they don’t come back, and all their fancy armor and smart guns didn’t seem to make a lot of difference.
I passed the entrance to Trixie’s. The arched doors were closed and bolted; the blue bio-neon strips that framed the doorway were dark and li
feless. The light sensor that controlled the holo-sign was apparently broken because the sign was turned on in broad daylight. In her usual spot about two meters above the door frame, a hologram of a naked woman danced her way through ninety-seconds of suggestive bumps and grinds. She was nearly invisible under the glare of the sun, a feebly transparent apparition of laser-generated light, interrupted periodically by bursts of digital static where the software was breaking down. The sign had been degrading steadily for years, but Trixie was in no apparent hurry to have it replaced.
I crossed Santa Fe Avenue, and walked the last half-block to Falcon’s Nest. I knew the place would be open. Rico Martinez, the owner and chief bartender, followed in the traditions of his grandfather who had believed in opening the doors as soon as the sun was over the proverbial yardarm.
I pushed my way through the heavy wooden doors and into the near darkness of the club. The air was cool and smelled faintly of alcohol and cigarette smoke. I waited a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting.
Gradually, the Portsmouth paneling and exposed ceiling beams began to emerge from the gloom. The bar was nearly deserted, and my favorite corner booth was available. I slid in behind the table and settled into the red tucked leather upholstery just as Etta James was cranking up ‘All I Could Do Was Cry.’
I took a final drag off my cigarette and snubbed it out in an ashtray. Smoking was technically illegal in nightclubs and restaurants, but Rico ignored that particular law, and paid his fines with a smile when he got caught. Which was rarely, as the cops didn’t usually waste time on niceties in the Zone. It was difficult enough to maintain a semblance of order in the streets; they tended to overlook the minor stuff.
Not that stiffer enforcement would have changed Rico’s mind on the subject. Smoking had been allowed when his grandfather had opened the place, and Rico was not a big fan of change.
He caught sight of me and he was pouring my usual before I was even settled in properly. My eyes were still adjusting so I couldn’t make out his face very well, but his strange hobbling walk was unmistakable as he made his way across the room to my table. Even in the semi-darkness, every step was painful to watch.
