city blues 02 - angel city blues

by Jeff Edwards

  But I made it to the door with all my fingers and toes intact.

  Jackal was waiting for me on the sidewalk. Her sleeveless tee-shirt was photo-active, an animation of a chromed robotic mouse scampering on shiny piston legs through a scrolling labyrinth of cereal boxes and other packaged foodstuffs. Her bare arms were spindly, but with a core of wiry muscle. I could see faint tracings of circuitry beneath her pale skin.

  She turned her head as I came out, and I caught a glimpse of the gold alloy jacks in the back of her shaved skull, the tiny receptacles glimmering with reflected light from the club’s abstract holo-facade. The center jack carried an ordinary-looking microchip with a pulsing blue LED. The other two sockets were empty.

  She unselfconsciously scratched her left breast. “So… What kind of weird shit have you got up your sleeve this time?”

  I pulled out my phone, fumbled with the file browser for a couple of seconds, and called up a vid recording. I held the phone’s display so that Jackal could see it. On the screen, Nine-fingers and Arm-twister strolled through the lobby of Leanda Forsyth’s apartment building.

  I let the scene play long enough to give Jackal a good look at the two Asian thugs, and then I toggled to a second vid, this one featuring Messenger-boy, as recorded by one of House’s many security cameras.

  “I want to know who these assholes are,” I said. “I’ve got several minutes of video, showing all three of their faces from several angles. Is there some kind of facial-recognition thing you can do? Search databases or something to find out their identities?”

  Jackal reached for the phone and held it closer to her eyes as the vid of Messenger-boy looped and began again. “Maybe…”

  She flipped back to the vid of Nine-fingers and Arm-twister, showing an instinctive familiarly with the user interface of my phone. She regarded the pair of goons marching across the apartment building lobby. “These guys look like muscle.”

  “They are. Is that a problem?”

  Jackal handed me the phone. “Yeah. Hardcore criminal types tend to avoid licensed surgical boutiques. Unless these guys have single-digit IQs, the faces they’re wearing aren’t registered to their real identities. Which means that any database tagged to their facial patterns will only give us whatever bogus IDs they want us to have.”

  “There’s no way to track them down?”

  “That’s a different question,” Jackal said. “Based on these vids, I probably can’t tell you the identities of your three muscle boys. But I may be able to get you periodic pings on their locations.”

  “How?”

  “Same basic technology. Facial recognition. But instead of trying to backtrack a bunch of phony IDs, I hack the aggregator feed from the government anti-terrorism spooks.”

  I motioned for her to continue.

  “There are about fifteen-bazillion security cameras in this town,” Jackal said. “Government facilities, corporate warehouses, banks, apartment buildings, LEV depots, public data terminals, cash machines... There’s a surveillance camera attached to everything but the crack of my ass, and the Federal Department of Rectal Investigation will probably sneak one in back there the next time I go in to have my butt cheeks realigned.”

  “We can talk about your butt-cam another time,” I said. “What’s this aggregator thing?”

  “A lot of those cameras are on the grid,” Jackal said. “Most of them. Private locations—people’s houses, and shit like that—are usually exempt. But the rest are legally compelled to give the Feds real-time access to their vid feeds. The government spooks use semi-intelligent aggregators to filter the imagery from all these millions of vid sources, to pick out the faces of known terrorists, major criminals, and other bad actors. If somebody on the government’s shit list walks past a cash machine at three in the morning, it rings the cherries in some federal mainframe, and a response team is rolling about thirty seconds later.”

  “How well does it work?”

  “In Government Fantasy Land, it’s a smooth and efficient system,” Jackal said. “But in the real world, it doesn’t work worth a damn. It turns out that the actual bad guys aren’t stupid enough to run around wearing faces that are known to the fucking Feds.”

  “So, it’s a piece of shit,” I said. “What good is it to us?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the hardware and software,” Jackal said. “The only problem is that the high-profile crooks and crazies tend to change their faces more often than you change your underwear.”

  I finally saw what she was getting at. “And my three knuckle-draggers are probably from the shallow end of the pool. Which means that they’re low-profile enough that they don’t need to change their faces so often.”

  Jackal nodded. “Exactamundo.”

  “You can use the aggregator feed to track their movements?”

  “Not continually,” she said. “If I try to run a full-time program, the Feds will spot it and shut it down. But I think I can slip in low-priority subroutine that triggers at semi-random intervals. Maybe give you a ping on your phone, every hour or two. Let you know if and where your three shit-birds have been spotted.”

  “Sounds good to me. How heavy is this? Are you sure you want to risk hacking the Feds?”

  Jackal grinned. “Won’t be the first time. But it is dicey, and you will be paying accordingly.”

  “Name your price,” I said. “I’m on an expense account.”

  She reached for my phone again. I handed it over. She pulled out a slender cable, connected one end to my phone, and the other end to one of the jacks in the back of her head. “Before I go snooping through your files, is there anything on here you don’t want me to see?”

  I shrugged. “Might be some pictures of me getting romantic with a goat. You know... What-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation kind of stuff.”

  “I’ve already got those,” Jackal said. “The goat uploaded them to the web, so pretty much everybody has seen ‘em by now.”

  She unplugged my phone and started typing on the screen. “I’m putting my number into your speed dialer. It’s a throwaway, good for a couple of weeks. Try to avoid drunk-dialing me if at all possible.”

  Before I could think up a pithy reply, she handed my phone back. She coiled the cable around her fingers, and slipped it back into her pocket.

  “I guess we’ve got a deal,” she said. “I’ll get started on my shit-bird tracker, and you tell your client to warm up his bank chip.”

  “Her bank chip.”

  “Whatever,” Jackal said. “As long as the transaction goes through, I don’t care if your client is a three-headed baboon.”

  “She’s a goat,” I said. “The one from the pictures.”

  Jackal gave me a fake grimace. “That’s one ugly goddamned goat, Stalin. I think I’m gonna have to charge you double.”

  CHAPTER 15

  A cop car pulled up to the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Olive, just as I was reaching the intersection. Unlike the tactical units we get at my end of town, this one actually looked like a car. It bore the usual LAPD color scheme and markings, but it lacked the armor and external weaponry that I was used to seeing. Still, there’s a certain implied menace when a police car singles you out, even if you aren’t doing anything wrong.

  The front passenger door gull-winged open and a cop stepped out onto the sidewalk about five meters in front of me. She wore a thin flak vest, but the rest of her uniform seemed to be ordinary synthetic fabric. No ballistic carbon nano-weave. No visored assault helmet. She looked like a regular police officer, doing ordinary police duty. The stenciled name tag on her vest said, “Warren.”

  She stepped directly into my path, and turned to face me head-on, giving me enough room to stop gracefully without walking right into her. The expression on her face was businesslike, but polite. “Are you David Stalin?”

  I was tempted to sidestep her, and keep walking, just to see what she’d do. Instead, I came to a stop and nodded. “Yep. You caught me. I confess to ever
ything.”

  I may have seen the tiniest flicker of a smile, but it was gone so quickly that I couldn’t be sure.

  “Mr. Stalin, can you come with us please?”

  “That depends,” I said. “Are you taking me into custody?”

  “Not at all, sir,” she said. “It’s a request, not an order. You’re not accused of anything, and you’re perfectly free to refuse.”

  Now that was something I wasn’t used to hearing from LAPD.

  “If I go, what’s our destination? West Hollywood Headquarters?”

  “No, sir. Dome 2. Someone wants to meet with you.”

  “Someone?”

  Officer Warren may have actually blushed. It was difficult to tell under the amber glow of the streetlights.

  “We don’t know who, sir. I assume it’s a senior member of the department, but we haven’t been briefed on the details. All I know is that there’s a city-wide call out to all ground units. Our instructions are to locate you, and transport you to an address in Dome 2. Assuming that you’re willing, of course.”

  “Of course. And what if I’m not willing?”

  “Our instructions are to issue the invitation. If you decline, we notify HQ, and they cancel the alert. I guess they go back and tell the VIP that you’re not interested.”

  “You’ve got my curiosity up, now,” I said.

  This time, I definitely got a smile.

  “Ours too,” said Officer Warren. “I’ve been on prowler patrol for three years, and I’ve never heard of a squad car being pressed into taxi duty.”

  “Must be a heavyweight VIP,” I said.

  Warren nodded. “That’s what my partner and I are figuring. But if you don’t take advantage of our complimentary LAPD Limo Service, we’re never going to find out.”

  She opened the rear door with a flourish, as though the cop car was actually a limousine. There were sensors imbedded in the doorframe.

  “I’m carrying a sidearm,” I said. “I’m licensed for concealed carry. I just don’t want you to be surprised when I climb into the back seat and alarms start going off.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” Warren said. “I won’t ask you to surrender your weapon, but try not to shoot anything while you’re in the car.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. I stepped past her and slid into the rear seat. True to my prediction, red tattletales began flashing on the driver’s control console, and a metallic buzzer gronked repeatedly.

  The driver silenced the alarm, but the red warning lights continued to wink furiously. Apparently there was no way to disable the visual alert, so the car’s computer persisted in reminding the cop at the wheel that there was a large caliber handgun in the rear passenger area of his vehicle.

  I closed my door, and Officer Warren climbed into the front.

  We pulled away from the curb and headed west, toward Dome 2. Assuming that Warren and her partner were not a secret hit-squad playing dress-up, I figured I was relatively safe from the Nine-fingers gang for the next few minutes.

  I settled back into the industrial-strength vinyl upholstery, and enjoyed the ride.

  The address turned out to be small coffee shop on Roscomare Road, in Bel Air. Warren called in our location as we were pulling into the parking lot. A few seconds later, she received instructions to wait.

  She punched a button on the dash, and my door unlocked itself and powered open. I climbed out and lit a cigarette, mildly happy that I hadn’t been forced to ask the cops to release me. Apparently, Warren and her unnamed partner really were just providing a police taxi service.

  Warren’s window slid down. “Zeto and I have a bet,” she said. “He thinks you’re about to meet our brave and fearless commissioner. I’ve got fifty marks says it’s some high-level ass hat from the mayor’s office.”

  “But not the mayor,” said the other cop, who was presumably Zeto. “Just somebody from his office.”

  “Screw that,” said Warren. “The mayor counts. He definitely qualifies as a high-level ass hat. And—last I checked—he works in the mayor’s office.”

  “That’s bullshit!” Officer Zeto grumbled. “I get one guy, and you get every brown-noser in the mayor’s office, including the mayor? How is that fair?”

  Warren gave her partner a malicious grin. “Not my problem. I picked my side of the bet, and you picked yours. Didn’t your mama teach you not to gamble with somebody who’s smarter than you are?”

  “Yeah, well she also taught me not to trust weasel-assed cops who try to cheat their partners.”

  Warren was about to fire a counter-broadside when two cones of light swept across the patrol car and centered on the doors of the closed coffee shop. A limousine was pulling into the parking lot. A Dornier hover-model, long and silvery-gray in color. The side stream from its blowers tugged and snapped at the fabric of my lower pant legs.

  “Looks like we both lose,” Warren said. “I don’t think that’s the mayor’s office or the commissioner.”

  The limo slid to a halt about ten meters away, and settled onto its apron. It sat there, doors and windows closed, and I knew instantly what I was supposed to do next. I had been summoned by some unnamed member of the wealthy elite, and I was now expected to trot over to the big shiny car, and present myself to the Great and Powerful Oz.

  Screw that. I hadn’t asked for this meeting, and I didn’t particularly care who was behind the dark-tinted windows of the limo. I took a leisurely hit off the Marlboro and exhaled slowly.

  Warren slipped me a discrete smile, low wattage, but definitely there. She clearly understood that I wasn’t following the script, and the idea seemed to amuse her.

  I gave her a raised eyebrow. “How long do you think Mr. Big will wait before he sends a flunky over to fetch me?”

  “I give it about ten more seconds,” she said.

  Her guess wasn’t far off. About eight seconds later, the left rear door of the limo powered itself quietly open. A blandly-handsome man in a business suit climbed out and made his way over, straightening his necktie and shirt cuffs as he walked. He had the sort of clean and ineffectual air about him that you usually find in mid-level functionaries who overestimate their own importance.

  His glare was probably calculated to put me in my place. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  I took another drag off my cigarette and shook my head. “Not as far as I know.”

  He waited for me to say something else.

  I didn’t.

  His expression wavered between condescension and exasperation. “Well…”

  “Well what?”

  “The senator is waiting…”

  I finished the Marlboro and ground out the butt with the toe of my shoe. “Waiting for what?”

  “For you,” the flunky said.

  I glanced toward the limousine. “Do we have an appointment? I don’t remember any senators on my calendar.”

  “He’s your employer,” the flunky said. “Senator Elden Forsyth. He pays your salary, in case you weren’t aware. And you’re keeping him waiting...”

  “I don’t work for Senator Forsyth,” I said. “I work for his wife. And unless the financial columns have got their numbers twisted, Ms. Forsyth’s personal fortune is considerably larger than the senator’s. So I’m pretty sure that she pays my salary.”

  The flunky looked at his watch, the limousine, his watch again, and then back to me. He was clearly accustomed to playing by the unspoken rules of power and intimidation. I was refusing to go along with the game, and he had no idea how to proceed.

  He opened his mouth; closed it, and then tried again. “I… That is… Senator Forsyth would like to talk with you, Mr. Stalin. If you’re available…”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can spare a few minutes.”

  I closed the back door of the patrol car, and nodded toward Officer Warren. “Thanks for the lift.”

  “All part of that serve-and-protect thing,” she said. “Do you want us to wait around and give you a ride back into to
wn?”

  “I’ll call a taxi,” I said.

  “We’ll see that Mr. Stalin gets wherever he wants to go,” the flunky said.

  “I’ll call a taxi,” I said again.

  The flunky bristled at this, but didn’t say anything. He began walking toward the limo and I followed.

  The patrol car pulled away as the flunky was opening a door for me. I waved at the departing cops, but I couldn’t see if either of them returned the gesture.

  I slid onto a silvery couch of tucked leather, facing the back of the limo. The flunky closed the door behind me, walked around, and climbed into the car on the opposite side. He settled onto his end of the couch, touched the control to close the door, and immediately busied himself with the contents of a briefcase.

  On the equally-opulent couch across from me, the senator was talking quietly on his phone and pointedly ignoring me.

  Cosmetically, he seemed to be a couple of decades older than his wife. Craggy good looks, silver hair within a shade or two of his fine leather upholstery, and a flawlessly-tailored suit in blue-black cashmere.

  His hushed phone conversation dragged on for about five minutes, and didn’t show any signs of wrapping up in the near future.

  I nearly laughed. The senator was playing the same power games that his flunky had tried on me. The man had just proven that he could use the entire Los Angeles Police Department as his personal courier service, and he had driven up in a car that cost more than my entire neighborhood. But that wasn’t enough to demonstrate his importance. Now, he was showing me how busy and in-demand he was. The subtext was unmistakable. I had been summoned into the presence of royalty, and I would have to wait until the mighty prince stooped to grace me with his attention.

  I took out my own phone, ran a quick search for local taxi service. After some fumbling around with the interface, I found the menu to request immediate pickup. I punched in the address of the coffee shop, and authorized a twenty-mark bonus if the cab arrived within fifteen minutes. This spawned a small popup window with the estimated time of arrival. Fourteen minutes, twenty-nine seconds, and counting down.