by Jeff Edwards
He stopped about a meter away, resting his weight on his good leg. He set my drink on the table and slid it toward me. “How’s it going, Amigo?” His trademark grin was missing.
I reached for the scotch. “Maybe I should be asking you the same question,” I said. “You look like somebody licked all the red off your lollypop.”
Rico glanced around the bar and then looked back at me. “There was a cop in here asking about you,” he said. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
I took a sip of scotch. “I’ve got one cop sort of pissed at me, a missing-persons type named Bruhn. But he’s just upset because I’m crowding one of his cases. I haven’t actually done anything he can shake me down for.”
I took another sip of the Cutty. “Not yet, anyway.”
Rico shook his head. “This guy’s name wasn’t Bruhn. It was Delaney. Or, at least that’s what it said on his ID chip.”
I frowned. “Older guy? Gray hair? Bad suit?”
“That’s the one,” Rico said.
“Did he bring his partner with him? A woman named Dancer? Female body-builder type, packing about ninety kilos of muscle, and two hundred kilos of attitude?”
Rico shook his head. “He came in alone, maybe an hour ago, asking about you. I told him I didn’t know where you were. He ordered a beer, but I don’t think he ever touched it. He hung out for a while and then left.”
“Did he try to strong arm you?”
“Not at all,” Rico said. “He said he wanted to see you about something personal. Not police business.”
That surprised me. What personal business could Detective Delaney have with me? Whatever it was, it seemed safe to assume that it was related to the two phone messages from Dancer. Was this just an extended version of Bruhn’s threat? Or was it something different?
Rico held out a business card. “The cop gave me this. He said he needs to ask you for a favor.”
I took the card. A holographic image of the LAPD logo hovered a few centimeters above the plastic surface. Delaney had scratched out his work number on the front, and scrawled another number on the blank plastic of the back. His personal number? A favor? What was this all about?
Only one way to find out...
“Thanks,” I said. I dug around in the pocket of my windbreaker, and retrieved my latest phone: a disposable EuroSony with a bright green plastic casing.
I don’t like carrying phones. They can be dangerous to a guy in my line of work. Unless you turn it off, a phone or data pad can be localized and tracked—not a good thing for someone who needs to move surreptitiously. Besides which, any jacker worth half his silicon can peel the security system of the average phone like a grape. Again, not a good thing.
So I had taken to buying pre-paid disposables, usually from vending machines. I always paid cash, to avoid any linkage to my name or my credit accounts, and I never entered any personal data into the damned things. I would keep a phone for a week or so, turn it on only when I needed to use it, and—when the paranoid part of my subconscious mind decided that it was time for a change—I’d destroy the phone and buy a new one.
I didn’t pretend that my precautions made me untraceable, but they narrowed my digital footprint. These days, that’s about the best you can hope for.
Rico eyed the obnoxious green plastic of the phone. “Ooh, that’s a nice one. Even better than that pretty pink job you had a few weeks ago.”
I thumbed the power tab. “Don’t get too used to it,” I said. “This thing has a date with my garbage grinder.”
Rico shrugged and began hobbling back toward the bar.
It took the phone a few seconds to finish waking up. The vid screen was flat, smaller than a playing card, and the resolution wasn’t great.
The tiny display began to fill with advertisements. Korean sports cars competed for screen space with squeeze tubes of beer, brightly colored sports drinks, and vids of naked women. The last might have been sex for-hire ads, or sales pitches from surgical boutiques. On the cramped screen, it was difficult to tell.
I popped the audio bug out of its recess, and fitted it into my left ear. When it was properly seated, I punched in the number from the back of Delaney’s card.
The ads got shoved to the margins as the detective’s face appeared in the center of the screen. Once again, I was struck by his resemblance to an aging used car salesman. His expression was guarded, but it seemed to relax a fraction as soon as he recognized me.
“Mr. Stalin, I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
“So I hear. What have I done to piss off LA’s Finest now? Is this about the Bruhn thing?”
Delaney’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “Bruhn?”
“Never mind,” I said. “What can I do for you, Detective?”
He hesitated for a second or so. When he spoke, there was a tinge of embarrassment in his voice. “Can we… ah… meet somewhere?”
I was tempted to make a lame joke about the quality of his pick-up lines, but I decided to skip it. “Sure,” I said. “Drop by my house. You can kick down my front door and stick electrodes on my head, just like old times.”
“We never kicked your door down,” Delaney said. “And as for the electrodes, that was a routine multiphasic truth-scan, conducted in strict accordance with—”
I held up a hand. “Relax. I was kidding.”
I checked my watch. “I can be home in half an hour. Come by any time after that.”
Delaney nodded. “I appreciate it, Mr. Stalin. I promise not to take up too much of your time.”
I returned his nod, and thumbed the end-call tab. Detective Delaney’s face disappeared from the screen, and the advertisements instantly reclaimed the center of the display.
I held down the power button until the phone shut itself off. Threats from Bruhn, messages from Dancer, and now a visit from Delaney. What in the hell had I done to suddenly have so many cops in my life?
I had a feeling that I was about to find out.
CHAPTER 6
Delaney showed up about twenty minutes after I got home. Perfect timing, as usual: close enough to our agreed-upon meeting time to show genuine interest, but not soon enough to feel like he was rushing me.
I met him at the door with coffee, and led him to the living room. Despite our earlier run-ins, this was evidently intended to be a social call. I had decided to treat Detective Delaney as a guest, until he started acting otherwise.
I settled into my favorite wingback chair, and motioned Delaney to a seat on the far side of the coffee table.
As he settled into the cushions, I got my first good look at him. His face carried deeply-graven lines of exhaustion. He seemed to have aged at least a decade since I’d last crossed paths with him, about a year or so earlier.
It occurred to me that I’d never seen Delaney without his partner before. I took a sip of coffee. “Where’s Dancer? Is this her day off?”
The expression that flickered across his face was somewhere between a wince and a grimace. “No,” he said. “She’s not my partner anymore. In fact, she’s no longer on the force.”
I hadn’t been expecting that.
Before I could formulate a reply, Delaney spoke again. “Priz has been brainlocked.”
That was the knockout punch—no windup, and no warning. “Wait… Priz? You mean Dancer?”
Delaney nodded. “Yes. Her first name is Priscilla. Or, it was. And she would have kicked anyone’s ass who tried to call her Priss. So, we called her Priz.”
I was still trying to process the news he’d just dumped into my lap. “Hang on just a second… You’re telling me that Dancer has been brainlocked?”
Delaney nodded again, and looked at his watch. “About six hours ago.”
I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “Bullshit!”
Delaney shook his head. “I wish it was bullshit, Mr. Stalin. But I was in the room when the sentence was carried out. I was one of the legal witn
esses to the procedure.”
Of their own accord, my hands groped for my smokes. I had a lit cigarette between my lips before I was even conscious of reaching for the pack.
I could feel a subtle shift in air currents, as House automatically redirected the room’s ventilation system to draw the smoke away from my guest.
“How did it happen? Why did it happen? Dancer was a cop. Why in the hell would they brainlock her?”
“That’s a long story,” Delaney said. “And I’m not the right person to tell it. For now, let’s just say that Priz was guilty of multiple homicides.”
“Bullshit,” I said again. And I meant it. Don’t get me wrong; there was no love lost between Dancer and me. As far as I was concerned, her personality was underdeveloped, and her musculature was overdeveloped. Not a good combination in any human being, and even worse in someone who carries a badge. If there was a gram of compassion in her soul, she had never shown it to me.
She was too much of a hardass for my taste, but none of that made her a murderer. For all her lack of the finer human sentiments, she was as straight-laced a cop as I had ever seen. Or rather, she had been. If Delaney was right, and I didn’t really doubt him, then all of that was in the past. Dancer’s brain had been saturated with synthetic neurotransmitters, and her hippocampus had been cauterized by a concentrated electron beam.
Her body would go on breathing in and out, and her heart would continue pumping, but her conscious mind had been electronically flatlined. She’d spend the rest of her life, if you could call it that, as a semi-ambulatory vegetable.
The idea turned my stomach, and—as much as I had disliked the woman—it made me want to beat the shit out of someone.
I treated Delaney to a hard look. “Okay, I said. You’ve dropped your bomb, and you obviously don’t want to tell me the rest of the story. So, where do we go from here?”
His eyes darted toward the ceiling, and then back to me. “Can I ask you to disable your household AI?”
“Excuse me?”
“Just for a few minutes,” Delaney said. “I’d rather not have a record of what we’re about to discuss.”
My knee-jerk reaction was to tell him to shove his ‘rathers’ up his ass, but that was just the shock of hearing about Dancer. After a few seconds’ thought, I nodded and glanced at my watch. “House, we’re going to want privacy for about five minutes. Disable your cameras and shut off your ears until ten minutes after the hour.”
House’s voice was as impassive as ever. “Very well, David. Housekeeping and security sensors are now locked out.”
This pronouncement was followed by a soft chime to mark the beginning of the lockout period.
I looked at Delaney. “Okay, Detective, you’ve got your privacy. What’s this all about?”
Instead of speaking, he reached into the pocket of his jacket and drew out a rectangle of black carbon-polymer, about the size and shape of a candy bar. He laid the object on my coffee table. On the end closest to me, I could see narrow oblong shape of a fiber optic connector slot.
“Do you know what this is, Mr. Stalin?”
I stared at the small dark form of the device. I had never seen one this compact before, but I knew instantly what I was looking at. It was a Turing Scion. A digital image of a human mind, complete with thought patterns, personality traits, idiosyncrasies, and even memories—current right up until the moment the recording had been made.
I waved my cigarette toward the thing on the table. “Is that who I think it is?”
Delaney nodded. “It’s Priz.”
And I suddenly understood his caution. The legalities surrounding Turing Scions are dicey at the best of times, but it was a class-three felony to record a Scion from the mind of a convicted criminal. Just having the thing in his possession could cost Delaney his badge. If he’d participated—even indirectly—in the creation of the Scion, he could be looking at time behind bars.
Of course, having it in my possession wouldn’t be particularly healthy either.
“Alright,” I said. “I assume you have some kind of reason for bringing this to me.”
“Priz needs your help,” Delaney said. He gestured toward the object, so I wouldn’t have any doubt about which Priz he was referring to.
I stubbed out the butt of my cigarette and resisted the temptation to roll my eyes. “Great. You’ve got a brain in a can, and it wants to hire me.”
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Delaney said. “But that’s about the size of it.”
This time, not rolling my eyes took a supreme effort of will. “And what will the lovely Priscilla and I be doing together? Will we be clipping coupons and swapping recipes? Or shall we wear masks and skintight costumes, and fight crime from our secret fortress under the polar ice cap?”
When Delaney spoke, his voice had a steely edge that sliced cleanly through my sarcasm. “Priz was married. I know she didn’t seem like a family-kind of person, but she was married—happily married—to a very nice lady named Rhiarra. A technician in the LAPD Cybercrimes Division. Smart. Quiet. Friendly.”
I suddenly wanted this conversation to be over. I had no desire whatsoever to hear what Delaney was going to say next.
“There were three of them,” he said. “Three perpetrators, all male. When they were finished raping her, they broke her neck. By the time Priz got there and called the paramedics, it was too late. Rhiarra was brain dead. Her body died a few hours later, in a trauma tank at Jefferson Park Emergency.”
Delaney nudged the Turing Scion a few centimeters closer to my side of the table. “Priz tracked down two of the perps, and put slugs in their heads. She was on the trail of the third attacker when forensics linked her to the shootings of the first two perpetrators.”
“And that’s where I come in,” I said. “I’m supposed to help her hunt down the one that got away.”
Delaney nodded.
“And what then?”
Delaney gave me a puzzled look.
“If I find the third attacker, what am I supposed to do with him? Do I turn him over to the police? Or do I put a bullet between his eyes?”
“You’ll have to talk to Priz about that.”
“Forget it. I’m not plugging that damned thing in.”
Delaney stood up and straightened his jacket. “I’ve taken up enough of your time, Mr. Stalin. Thank you for agreeing to see me. I won’t be bothering you again.”
“I’m not kidding,” I said. “That thing is going down the garbage grinder, so you might as well take it with you.”
Delaney gave me a rueful smile. “No. I’ve done what Priz asked me to. What happens now is up to you.”
When he was gone, I gazed at the Turing Scion for a long minute. In its disconnected state, the internal memory matrix would be inert. The digital reconstruction of Dancer’s mind would be inactive, or perhaps asleep. But the instant it was interfaced with an active computer node, the simulated mind would wake up. It would start to think, and talk, and plan.
The very idea made my skin crawl.
Looking at the Scion dredged up thoughts of John, and Maggie, and other things better left forgotten. No need to wander down Memory Lane.
Let’s just say that I’d had experiences with Scions before, and I didn’t like them. Not at all. I didn’t particularly like Priscilla Dancer either.
There are rare situations, where two inherently unpleasant things can combine to create something positive, but my gut told me that this wasn’t going to be one of those paradoxical cases.
I didn’t owe Dancer anything. She’d never shown me any particular kindness, and she’d certainly never done me any favors.
No… That wasn’t quite true. She had done me a favor once. She’d given me access to the LAPD case files for a closed murder investigation. She hadn’t done it gracefully, and she’d subjected me to her usual torrent of curses and veiled threats. But she’d come through with the information I’d needed.
Then, there was the matter of h
er two phone messages from the previous evening. I’d blown them off, assuming that Dancer had been calling to muscle me a bit, on behalf of Bruhn. But she’d been calling from the police detention facility, where she’d been held until the brainlock procedure was carried out.
I didn’t know the protocol for granting phone access to condemned prisoners, but it couldn’t be very liberal. Somehow, Dancer had managed to wrangle two calls to me in the final hours of her conscious life, and I had ignored them both.
What had she been trying to ask me? (Or tell me?) Maybe she’d wanted to see me face-to-face, to share the story of her wife’s assault, and convince me to go after the third attacker. I didn’t know.
A low chime announced that House’s lockout period had expired. His housekeeping cameras and audio sensors were back on line.
I blinked, and tore my eyes away from the Turing Scion. Maybe I did owe Dancer something. Not a lot. But something…
CHAPTER 7
Tommy Mailo lowered the cranial rig onto my head and spent a half-minute or so fiddling with the placement of the three feedback pads. Two of the tiny ceramic disks were centered on my temples, and the third was positioned just above the knob of bone where my spinal column joined my skull.
The cranial set was light, made from some sort of extruded carbon fiber, with enough flexibility to adapt to the contours of my lumpy and oversized noggin.
“You don’t want to know what this thing costs,” Tommy said.
I shrugged. “My client’s footing the bill, and she can certainly afford it.”
Tommy lifted an eyebrow. “She?”
“Yes,” I said. “She. But don’t overload your motherboard. This is strictly a professional relationship.”
Tommy eyed the final position of the head rig and then turned his attention to the SCAPE deck. “Yeah, well there are professional relationships, and then there are professional relationships.”
