Dames for Hire

by S. C. Jensen

  “Except common sense, apparently.”

  Flint smiled the way a buzzard might smile before it ripped into the intestines of a sun-bloated corpse. “That was never her mother’s to give.”

  “So, what? I’ll smear up Scarlett with Angelica and Vector and buy enough time so that she can pay her own debt?”

  “That,” Flint sighed. “Or I’ll pay it with my signing bonus when I get picked up by TZR&D. Once the money is hers, it’s on her to protect it. But until then, she’s my responsibility.”

  “Your wife didn’t leave you an allowance?”

  Flint scowled.

  “TZR&D is very competitive,” Rae explained.

  “I put everything I have into this scouting opportunity,” Flint said. “If I don’t get the job, I’m busted. Just clean up Angelica’s mess. I can’t stand the thought of a slime like Vector getting his hands on that money.”

  “Not when you won’t see a single cred of it.”

  Flint bared his teeth, his thin nostrils flaring. “Can you do it or not?”

  His shoulders heaved beneath the white lab coat as he struggled to contain his disdain for me and his eagerness to have the job done. The beady black eyes bore into me like he could see inside me if he stared hard enough. I let him wait. His fingers drummed against the desk like gunfire.

  “I want a K spot up front,” I said, and his posture deflated with relief. “And get word to Mook that I’m coming.”

  “You’d better be good for it,” Flint said. “I’m paying for results, and I expect to see them promptly.”

  “If I don’t deliver,” I said. “You can send flowers to my mother.”

  Flint sneered again. He was pretty good at it.

  “I’ll show you out,” Rae said.

  I inclined my head to her, and she clipped on the headgear. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  “Let’s get you outside safely before you get too mushy,” Rae said.

  Rae became a green dot in a sea of blackness, and I heard the door click open. She left it that way as I followed the green lines toward the exit. I felt Flint’s eyes burning into me as I walked away, itching like a rash between my shoulder blades.

  “I can see why you like the guy,” I said when Rae took my blinders off and led me into the damp alleyway.

  “I’ll make sure he transfers you the creds,” she said. “And thanks. The sooner TZR&D picks that scab off my back, the better.”

  “I’m relieved it’s not a Libra job,” I said. “Gamblers and shills I can handle. You scientist types give me the creeps.”

  “You made that very clear earlier.”

  “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. I’m just nervous.”

  “I get it,” she said. “We’re still good, right? We’re miles off Swain’s turf.”

  “Sure,” I said. “As long as the girl doesn’t end up dead.”

  Chapter Three

  Bobby Mook ran a semi-legit bookkeeping agency on the cusp of the Biz District and the outskirts of the Grit. Flint hadn’t paid out my retainer fee yet, so I decided to hoof it rather than shell out for one of the hack pods zipping past me on the maglev grid. Early morning light washed the city in a sickly, off-white haze, but the rain had given up some. HoloPop ads lurched out at me as I passed storefronts, offering me all the things I needed to make my life complete—today it was smart toasters and sexual performance enhancers. Uncanny. I kept my head down and walked through them, keeping my eyes on the narrow strip of pavement next to the grid.

  The Biz District didn’t have much in the way of sidewalk. Its clientele was strictly made up of the private-boiler-car type. But the strip was whole and unblemished. The black, porous surface collected rainwater to be treated for drinking, solar energy—when the sun deigned to show its face—and the kinetic energy of pedestrian traffic, feeding it all back into the grid. It made for nice walking compared to the cracked and heaving concrete slabs in the Grit District, which was left over from another century and not considered to be worth the cost of maintenance.

  I left the glittering black spires of Libra’s R&D sector behind me and cut through the financial sector where the massive towers of Trade Zone bean counters, stockbrokers, and day traders acted as a dour wall against the sprawl of the Grit. Elsewhere, the border between the impoverished inner city had been softened by the flow of drugs, illegal tech, and sex workers, allowing the Grit to ooze out of the centre toward other districts like a wave of toxic sludge. The wall of trade buildings, though, was an immutable barricade designed to keep sludge out.

  Which meant I made people nervous. Catching a glimpse of myself in the glassy surface of an anonymous holocred pumping institute, I could see why. The sodden imitation fur of my pink jacket made me look as auspicious as a castoff teddy bear stuck in a drainpipe. But the Biz District dealt in cush, not pity. Unless you had creds, you might as well be invisible. The kind of invisible that makes people step anxiously back inside office buildings as you pass. Just as well. Made it a little easier to stay on the sidewalk.

  By the time I worked my way out of the towers and into the low-slung stacks of commercial apartments next to the Grit, I was about ready to be seen again. I rang up Mook’s number on my tattler and a ’gram of a mousey little man with a pointed nose and jug ears popped up above the wrist of my upgrade.

  “This Bobby Mook?” I said.

  His eyes flitted from side to side nervously. “Yeah.”

  “This is Bubbles Marlowe. I’m doing some legwork for a guy called Wallace Flint.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m heading in your direction,” I said. “Can I come up to talk to you a minute? Flint told you I was coming?”

  “Sure.” He twitched. “Sure. Yeah.”

  He didn’t wait for further pleasantries. My tattler blinked and Mook’s face was replaced with the spinning icon for PingComm, my half-rate service provider. I shrugged and dropped the upgrade to my side. Nice chat.

  Before hitting Mook’s joint, I ducked into a convenience strip for something to eat. It was more like an alley with vending machines wedged in between dumpsters, but transparent awnings provided some shelter from the spatter of rain. I plugged a couple credit chips into the NRG soda machine and cracked the tab while I browsed the selection. Noodle bowls and imitation sausages held little appeal this early in the day. I chugged the energy drink, lobbed the can into a recycling chute, and grabbed a Kreme Kween donut covered in bubble-gum-pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles. Breakfast of champions.

  Coming out of the alley, I almost ran into a man with a transparent overcoat covering an expensive black suit. He wore a grey hat pulled low over his eyes, but his wide mouth scowled at me. Hard to ignore the riffraff when they plow right into you. He side-stepped, expertly avoiding the puddle collecting where the porous sidewalk ended and the concrete began, and slipped inside a building whose ground floor proclaimed it to be Glitter Haus, a nightclub fashion wholesaler that recycled last decade’s styles into trash even the Grit District pro skirts wouldn’t wear.

  The haphazard stack of portable apartments that made up Mook’s office building looked like something a giant toddler had constructed. Siding in various shades of dingy blue and grey clashed with each other in a recycled patchwork of not-quite-flush corners and edges. Dull neon signs blinked and flickered beneath years of smog residue outside every peephole sized window. A sign for Bargain Bookkeeping, half lit and missing most of its letters, flickered on the third floor. Dark patches on the wall filled in the blanks with ghost letters, but the sign seemed to read Bar Bokee from the street.

  I licked the last of the icing off my fingers, wiped them on my jacket, and stepped into the narrow vestibule. Inside, thin light filtered through the scuffed plastic windows, illuminating a faded directory of the various services offered within. At the bottom I read: B. Mook, Bookkeeping, Suite 317B. I opened the door into a dirty grey corridor filled with nondescript doors beneath black, stencilled unit numbers. One of the doors opened, and a wizene
d old man in green scrubs peeked out beneath a sign that read Vitality Technologies. He worked his jaw back and forth as if testing to see if any words might pop out. When they didn’t, he receded back inside his hole in the wall and closed the door.

  The stairwell to my right barely had enough room to turn around inside and twisted sharply enough that, by the time I’d made the fifteen or so necessary rotations to make it to the third floor, my Kreme Kween donut threatened to evacuate. I pushed through the doorway into another dirty grey corridor and knocked on the door of unit 317B.

  No answer.

  I pinged Mook on my tattler again. It rang until an answering service picked up. The sound echoed in the hallway and on the other side of the door like a poorly recorded audio file. I let it go until the beep, then killed the call and tried the handle.

  Bargain Bookkeeping was open for business. The thin door swung open to reveal a tiny, dark reception area. A narrow brown desk sat in the centre of the room with a clunky computer monitor angled to one side. Two dented, beige filing cabinets stood behind the desk like weary sentinels with drawers that didn’t quite close all the way and the yellowing corner of some ancient document poking out of one of the seams. Above the desk, a bare dome light glowed with a dull yellow light. A tacky, painted metal sign on the desk read Administration. Other than the faint hum of the resting computer, the place was silent. Downstairs, somebody stomped along a corridor and slammed a door.

  At the back of the room, tucked in next to the filing cabinets, was a door about the right size for a supply closet. Another painted metal sign proclaimed this to be Office.

  I said, “Mook?”

  The door didn’t open. I went over and listened to the silence on the other side. Knocked. Nothing. I tried the handle and it turned, so I opened the door and stepped inside.

  The place had probably been a supply closet before Mook put on some airs and decided he needed his own private mouse hole. A side table with scratched brown paint acted as a desk that took up most of the claustrophobic space. An acidic tang hung in the air, sweat and ammonia and something else. Atop the desk, an open ledger sprawled across the surface, covering the entire thing. Little neat letters and numbers filled the pages. The pen that had scratched them lay on the floor. A stale looking pastry sat on a thin paper plate on the edge of the desk, untouched. The stained, grey fabric of an ancient task chair squeezed into the back corner as if it had been knocked aside. A scuffed grey shoe peeked out the side of the desk. I sidled around the edge and looked underneath.

  If it wasn’t for the thin strands of colourless hair scraped across his spotty scalp, Mook could have been a child dressed up in Daddy’s suit. Brown fabric bagged around his knees and elbows, and the yellowing collar of a once-white shirt pulled tight against his throat where it had caught against the height adjustment lever of the little chair. He’d fallen like a broken doll, cast aside for something brighter and flashier. A dark stain crept out from beneath one threadbare sleeve and a sour taste flooded into my mouth.

  I knelt next to the little man and felt his wrist for a pulse. His skin was clammy and not quite cool, but nothing flickered beneath the surface. He held a crumpled piece of paper in his left hand, which I removed. It would have been nice if this had held some clue, but it was just a scrap of paper with my name on it, written in the same neat handwriting that filled the ledger above.

  The nerves in my left shoulder twinged beneath the upgrade, and my metal hand balled into a fist. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath in, and exhaled slowly, trying to relax the muscles that sent biofeedback into the prosthetic. Rae had said it would stop happening once the wound had healed and I was more used to wearing the arm, but every time the upgrade seized up on me it was like a punch in the gut. A reminder that Chief Swain had won. He’d shut me up and taken a piece of me that I’d never get back. My throat ached, and I swallowed against a dryness I thought might never leave. Then I stuffed the paper in my pocket and looked around the rest of the space.

  Nothing caught my eye. Nothing worth the life of this nervous mouse of a man, no matter how pitiful a life it was. I backed out of the supply closet and wiped down the door handle. The reception area held nothing of interest either. A couple paper receipts for takeout food were balled up in the wire waste bin beneath the desk. A calendar marked today and tomorrow as “Judy Off,” which I supposed was why there was no receptionist here to protect Mook from the repercussions of wheeling and dealing with the wrong crowd. I glanced at the computer monitor, but in the centre of the screen was a small box requesting a password. Deciding there was nothing more I could do, I wiped down anything I thought I’d touched and closed the door behind me.

  The corridor was still dirty and grey and just as empty as before. I took the back stairs down and out into the alley. As far as I could tell, no one had seen me. I put my head down and hurried through the alley toward the Grit.

  Chapter Four

  I checked the file Rae had sent me on Scarlett Martinez’s luxury apartment in Gibson Heights, a platinum security haven for highbinder politicians, district kings, and celebrity feedcasters. How she afforded to rent a place in the Heights was beyond me, but I suspected she did more for Mick Vector than collect errant loan payments. Getting past security to talk to her was going to be tough enough without looking like a drowned lab rat. I decided I’d better head back to my flat to change.

  My building was one of the few left standing in the old warehouse sector on the eastern edge of the Grit. There weren’t many people in my neighbourhood at this time of day. Those few who wandered around looked as if they’d been at it since last night, stumbling from stoop to recessed stoop to rest their weary bones in the relative cover of torn awnings and crumbling doorways. The block out front of my squat, grey-faced building with its board-blinded eyes was deserted. I avoided going in the faded red door facing street side. It had been torn off the hinges months ago, and the superintendent had simply propped it back into the door frame rather than fix it. The thing was as liable to crush me as let me pass, so I keyed in my code for the electronic lock at the side entrance, which opened to a staircase of crumbling steps covered in torn carpeting so stained it was hard to imagine it was once blue. At least, I think it was blue.

  The keypad into my actual apartment was in worse shape than the front door; it had been broken a couple weeks before my “accident.” I had thought it was the usual kind of break and enter in this neighbourhood. A smash and grab. I had nothing of value to grab so it was more like a smash and smash. The place had been trashed, but it wasn’t much better before so I hadn’t bothered reporting it. I’d put a repair request in to the super, but getting him to act on it was a bit like trying to tie a shoestring on a bottle fly.

  Looking back, I figure it was some of Swain’s goons—maybe in uniform and maybe not—checking the place out to see if I’d been working after hours on Whip Tesla’s drug case. Normally I was too soused to give a second thought to work once I clocked out. That’s what Swain had liked about me. But the Tesla case was different. We’d let Tesla go. Less than twenty-four hours later, Tropical Punch hit the streets and my friend Jimi Ng, Rae’s boyfriend, OD’d on the pinch ... I obsessed over it. It was my fault. I kept asking questions, had to know the truth. Swain didn’t like that quite as much. Must have hit a nerve though. The next time I hit the training circuit, my brand-new plasma rifle overcharged, blew up, and took half of me with it. I wasn’t dead, but I’d never work for the HCPD again.

  I tried the keypad, just for fun. It made a pained squealing noise that grated on my eardrums like electronic feedback. I punched the thing with my metal fist and the shattered remains of the number pad tinkled to the floor of the hallway. Thanks, Swain. I needed a new one anyway. I pushed the door into my apartment open and stepped inside.

  A little black-and-white cat peered around the wall into the living room and blinked at me disdainfully with half-lidded, yellow eyes. It said, “You woke me up. I was in the middle of an upgrade.”<
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  “So sorry, your highness.” I slammed the door closed behind me and threw my sodden jacket over the back of a saggy armchair I’d rescued from the dumpster behind Anachronism Antiques. The jacket was an improvement. The rest of the apartment looked like something coughed up by a disgruntled waste-disposal bot with a personality disorder. A nice place if you liked asymmetry and grease stains. The cat padded over and sniffed at my feet.

  “Where have you been?” It reached forward on long black legs with little white mittens on each end, arching its back and pushing its tail into the air. “I was worried.”

  I scratched the base of its tail and felt the tingle of nanoparticle feedback of the SmartPet’s cat-skin. It purred.

  “The hell you were,” I said.

  “You’re supposed to check in every eight hours when you aren’t in the apartment,” the cat said and sniffed at the sleeve of my jacket, which hung over the edge of the chair and onto the floor. It glared balefully at me. “It’s been ten and a half. I’ll have to report this.”

  “I know, I know.” I crouched down and let it take a handful of biometric readings for my file. “I’m clean. I was just delayed.”

  Mittens the Kitten was a certified, addictions-recovery model SmartPet I’d shelled out for after drying out in the hospital and decided I should probably try to keep it that way. I might be lying low as far as Swain and the HCPD were concerned, but I hadn’t forgotten what I owed the Chief of Police. Getting sober after years of casual abuse wasn’t something I thought I could do on my own. Coming home after work to an empty apartment had been bad enough. Being trapped in an empty apartment, alone and jobless, while I recovered from the explosion and subsequent surgery was more than I could take. Rae had suggested the SmartPet. I’d thought it was silly, but I knew I had to do something. I wanted revenge, and drunks don’t make very good vigilantes. In any case, I had been surprised how much I enjoyed the little jerk’s company.