Dames for Hire

by S. C. Jensen

  I kicked the door wide and brought my upgrade up from underneath the gun, grabbed the barrel and twisted. The guy’s fingers cracked and he screamed, unable to release the E-mag grip fast enough. The rifle gave a high-pitched whine, and a bright ball burst out of the barrel, past the terrace, and into the rainy sky. After it had discharged, I wrenched it out of his hands, ripped the battery out of the bottom, and clubbed him with the butt. Blood burst from his nose and he fell to his knees with his hands covering his face. The index finger of his right hand bent at an unnatural angle.

  More amateurs. Someone was playing a dangerous game without understanding the rules.

  I stepped past the injured guard, kicked him out onto the terrace, and slammed the door behind him. Inside, I pulled a heavy bar down to lock the doors in place, grateful for the low-tech security. Darkness swallowed the entryway completely. I blinked to rid myself of the halos left behind by the eerie blue torches outside. They wouldn’t go away and I realized there were more torches farther down the corridor, illuminating nothing. Voices carried along the hall toward me, and I crept my way closer to them, straining my ears to make out who might be waiting for me.

  Another set of torches illuminated another black door, guardless this time, from behind which the voices emanated. I pressed my ear against the door, but they were too muffled to decipher. It didn’t matter anyway. I was going to do what I’d come there to do. So I pushed on the door and it swung inward on well-oiled hinges, without any effort and hardly a sound.

  They didn’t notice me immediately. Flint hunched over an old-fashioned wooden desk about the size of a short city block. He wore a deep-plum smoking jacket from a century so long forgotten I wondered if he might have invented time travel and forgotten to tell Libra about it. His thin, curved neck swayed slightly and bobbed his spotty, balding pate back and forth in the low, yellow light. Behind Flint, Constance stood like a woman made of stone, her grey hair and hard face barely visible in the shadows. She stared down on the top of his gleaming head while he blinked through his wire-framed glasses at the stunner to his right.

  Miss Scarlett Martinez wore a transparent, black evening gown veined with thin, green circuit traces and blinking processor chips which culminated in a river of parallel lines around her belly button and shot straight up between her breasts in an enthusiastic spray of wires that leaped off the dress and burrowed themselves in the flesh of her bare chest. She sat with one leg crossed elegantly over the other, the split hem of her gown parted to reveal a thick bronze thigh and emerald heels long and deadly enough to be classified as weapons in most corporate states.

  I stepped into the room and all three faces turned toward me, like puppets tied to the same string. Ironic, given the circumstances. I said, “I guess my invitation got filed in the junk mail.”

  “Good to see you again, sweetheart.” Scarlett gazed over a bare shoulder at me. “It was getting a little dry in here.”

  “Don’t blame me for the company you keep.” I grabbed an overstuffed armchair and spun it to face the desk. “Sorry to barge in here and rearrange your furniture, Flint, but I’ve had a hard day and I need to sit down.”

  “Well, what do you want?” Flint barked in his raspy bird voice at me. “Some detective you turned out to be. How’d you get in here anyway? Where’s Lou? Never mind that. I want some damned answers. I put you on a confidential job and the first thing you do is march up to Miss Martinez and tell her the whole story?”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  He stared at me. They all stared. Flint drummed his fingers on the desk hard enough to leave dents. “What do you mean it worked? Nothing worked.”

  “I happen to like Miss Martinez,” I said. “Or, ‘that red-headed vetch’ as you so eloquently put it before. And I have an idea that she’s here to make a little deal with you. A deal you ought to have made before we had the HCPD all riled up over the stiffs we’ve stacked up. Where’s Angelica?”

  Flint’s fingers stopped and he turned his beady eyes on me. “She’s missing,” he said. “And you are incompetent.”

  “I know you’ve got friends in the highest of low places,” I said to Scarlett. “But don’t you think this is a little risky? Do you even have a weapon?”

  Scarlett’s lips, painted a deep, glittering green to match her dress, spread in a wide smile revealing her big white teeth. “I am the weapon.”

  “You want me to get rid of her, boss?” Constance said from the shadows. I wondered if he ever let her out to play, or if she just stood guard over him like a gargoyle waiting for the bird to slap her with some fecal matter.

  “Don’t be silly,” Flint snapped, and Constance disappeared a little more. “We have to wrap this business up. I want to be rid of you, Marlowe.”

  “The feeling is mutual,” I said. “What do you mean your daughter is missing?”

  “I’m paying you good money,” he shouted. His long, bony fingers slapped the top of the desk to emphasize all the stacks of cred he was paying me.

  “When?” I asked.

  Scarlett laughed—a low, sultry sound—and flicked the blood-red waves of her hair over her shoulder. She said, “My question exactly.”

  Constance’s mouth hardened into a crooked line like a fissure in a rock face. A thin veneer of sweat glossed Flint’s forehead, and he clenched his fists into tight balls on top of the desk.

  “What do you think I mean? My daughter is missing. I should think even an obvious incompetent like you might be able to puzzle out the meaning of that sentence. Nobody knows where she is. I don’t know. Miss Martinez doesn’t know. She’s not in any of the places she usually goes to... to...”

  “To spend Mother’s money before it rightfully belongs to her?” I offered.

  Flint hissed.

  I leaned onto the armrest of the overstuffed chair, rubbing my fingers against the velvet brocade surface and marvelling that such a thing had ever been fashionable. “Well, maybe I am incompetent, but I know where she is, so what does that make you?”

  Nobody said anything for a moment. Scarlett shifted in her seat, uncrossed and re-crossed her legs so that she was facing me instead of Flint. Constance seemed to stop breathing entirely. Flint bugged his eyes at me. I let them sit on it for a bit.

  “What do you mean, you’re the weapon?” I asked the girl.

  She rang a finger along the plunging necklace of her gown and stroked the wires coming out of her chest. She said, “If I die, you all die.”

  My heart did a little stop-start. “Did Vector set you up with that rig?”

  “Vector paid the bill,” she said. “But I have other friends.”

  “He was looking for you earlier,” I said. “Where were you? Or are you telling? The Heights is a lonely place with only the goons to keep you company.”

  She laughed again. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “What have you done to Angelica?” From the other side of the desk, Flint wheezed. The sweat sheen became beads. The colour had drained from his skin, leaving the age spots in stark relief against the pallor.

  Scarlett licked her lips and said, “It’s no secret. We took a hack to one of Vector’s gaming houses. Angelica was feeling sore about the whole thing. You showing up. She kept going on and on about the money and how much she hated Flint. It kind of put a sour taste in my mouth. I love Angelica, I really do, but I don’t want her thinking I’m anything like her father. So I told her maybe we should put off the wedding. Get her accounts squared away and safe from prying hands. Then we could get married and maybe I wouldn’t ever see a chip off the block. Doesn’t matter. I can afford my brother’s schooling with what Vector pays me. I’d be happy just knowing Flint didn’t have it either. But Angel was hurt. She thought I was looking for an excuse to call everything off. We fought about it. She hit the tables pretty hard. I waited around, hoping she’d come out of it, but she was just digging herself deeper and deeper into her funk. So I called a hack pod and came here, to tell Flint I’d lay of
f if he made sure Vector’s loans were taken care of.”

  “You and Angel took a hack,” I said. “Why didn’t she call Constance? I understand that’s the usual arrangement.”

  I looked at Scarlett, but the question wasn’t for her. Flint’s voice cut through the silence like jagged metal. “Constance was picking me up from Libra. Why does that matter?”

  “Well,” I said. “Angelica’s back at the Heights. I checked in with Hawkins in security. She came back, alone, and she hasn’t left.”

  I watched each of them carefully, as well as I could with only one set of eyes in my head. But nobody moved. They just looked at me.

  “Good,” the old man said, finally. “I was worried she’d gotten herself into some trouble.”

  “Well, she’s not off drinking and gambling away her fortune if that’s what you mean,” I said. “Didn’t you try calling the Heights? When you were looking for her?”

  Constance stepped out of the shadows and nodded curtly. “I did. They said she wasn’t there. Maybe someone had paid the answering service to say she was out.”

  “That wouldn’t be necessary,” I said. “They’d just ring the room and Angel wouldn’t answer, naturally.”

  Flint blinked at me once. Again. Then he said, “Naturally?”

  I stood up from my chair and everyone in the room tensed. I held my hands up and paced in front of Flint’s desk, just close enough to make him nervous. “Now hold on. Let’s just line everything up before we start pulling on loose strings. Angelica owes Mick Vector a hundred K stack. She doesn’t have the money to pay, and Daddy Dearest refuses to do it. But a little birdie by the name of Bobby Mook sings a little song about a girl named Martinez who’d like to get her hooks into Angelica’s fortune. Does that sound about right?”

  Flint leaned back in the chair, looking small and frail. He nodded, but only slightly.

  “I went to ask Mook about the details of this ill-fated romance,” I said. “Only I never quite got around to it on account of Mook being dead when I got there. Shot three times in the heart with a small-bore pistol. Don’t worry, though, I didn’t call the police.”

  Flint’s shoulders trembled a little and his eyes bugged out even farther. “Murdered?”

  Constance still hadn’t moved a muscle. Scarlett bounced her green-tipped toes up and down and pressed her lips into a thin line hard enough to make the skin around her mouth turn pale.

  “Mook’s the kind of guy who likes a little blackmail on the side of his bookie biz,” I said. “So anyone might have topped him. Nothing necessarily ties him to Mr. Flint’s affairs except for the size of the bullets. Those little target-type guns aren’t common in the Grit. You have to have a steady hand and be able to get up close and personal. It’s the kind of weapon that requires a bit of finesse. A lady’s touch, perhaps. And the interesting thing is, there is a lady who favours such a weapon who is tied to this case.”

  The silence filled the air, thick as smoke and difficult to breathe through.

  “But why Mook was shot I don’t know. He was not a danger to Miss Martinez or to Mick Vector, as far as I can tell. Miss Martinez wasn’t too shy to talk about the eyes she had on Angelica’s fortune. Vector holds much larger debts. So I wondered if maybe Mook knew a little more than he had let on. Maybe Mook had some ideas about Scarlett and Angelica that he needed to get off his chest. But he didn’t get the chance. It doesn’t hurt my feelings too much. I didn’t know him.

  “But then I went to talk to Miss Martinez and we had a nice time until Angelica decided to swat me like a fly. I woke up to a headache and an empty flat. I called it bad luck and went home.

  “There I found the lovely with the small-bore pistol, she and her handsy half-wit of a brother named Dexter Wagner. I wasn’t too fond of old Dex. Even so, I didn’t relish watching him bleed out on your driveway earlier this evening, Mr. Flint, when your enthusiastic chauffeur blew his top off with a hand cannon after he tried to stick up your car. The greys do know about this one, as I’m sure you realized when they came to question your staff. They came to talk to me, too, after someone called them up and tried to pin the incident on me. It didn’t work, by the way. But that’s two killings. Which leaves the third.”

  Flint had gone as bright grey as the early morning sky. He spread his hands on the desk in front of him and said through thin, bloodless lips. “The third?”

  Constance’s expression hadn’t changed. The girl looked a little pale, but curious, too, perched on the edge of her seat with her bottom half hanging into open air. I charged ahead, if only to keep up my momentum.

  “I met Vector at the Heights, waiting for Miss Martinez, who never did show. He had wanted to share his intel on Mook’s shooting, though I’d already passed that little tidbit on to her. He wanted her to lay off Angelica for a bit, just until the greys decided what to do about their suspect list. We had a chat. He left me there, just to annoy the nosy security guard, Hawkins. I decided to have a poke around, just for kicks. And that’s when I found Angelica.”

  I reached into my jacket pocked and pulled out the little gun with the pearly handle, and I dropped it into Scarlett’s lap. “Another small bore. More common than I’d guessed. Do you recognize this pretty little piece?”

  Her voice trembled with her lips and she seemed to push the words out past a blockage in her throat. But her eyes were clear, and they met mine levelly. “It’s mine.”

  “Where do you keep it?”

  “In my bedside table,” she said. “I don’t really know how to use it, but Angelica insisted I have—”

  “Is that where you saw it last?”

  “Yes,” she said. Then, “No. Angelica had taken it out to show to me how to clean it. She’d left it on the mantel in the sitting room.”

  “So if someone had surprised her,” I said. “She might have picked up the gun?”

  She nodded with tears in her eyes. “What do you mean, you found her?”

  “You know what I mean. Everyone in this room knows what I mean. Angelica is dead. I found her body stuffed in the bedroom closet with a little, red eye opened up in her forehead and this gun beneath the bed, just waiting to be found.”

  Flint gurgled something in his throat and fell forward on the desk, his bony fingers clawing at the desk. He fixed his beady eyes on Scarlett Martinez and hissed between clenched teeth, “You!”

  The girl stroked the gun in her lap gently, almost lovingly, and loosely left her hand on the butt. I watched her thumb slide over the safety catch and heard the soft click. She didn’t know much about guns, but she knew that much.

  “There’s another possibility,” I said. “There’s the Wagner woman with the dead brother and the little target pistol, who was so insistent that I lay off this case. She could have shot Angelica. I left her and her gun for the HCPD to sort out. I think she might have some interesting stories to tell.”

  “You talk too much,” Scarlett said and lifted the gun a little. “Get to the point.”

  “It’s obvious who didn’t kill Angelica,” I said. “Let’s consider motive and opportunity. Mick Vector didn’t do it. He had 100 K resting on her living to see that inheritance. The Wagner woman didn’t do it, no matter who hired her. She couldn’t have gotten into the Heights to do the job. Miss Martinez stood to gain much more from having Angelica alive, as well. The only person who gains anything by Angelica’s death is Mr. Flint.”

  Constance lunged, suddenly, a living shadow with the cannon up and pointed at my face before I had a chance to blink. Scarlett was almost as fast. The little gun cracked and a little, red mouth opened up on Constance’s wrist. She dropped the cannon on Flint’s desk and grabbed her arm, falling back against the wall. Flint lurched forward out of his chair, scrambling for Constance’s dropped weapon, but I grabbed him by the back of the smoking jacket with my upgrade and yanked him out of the chair.

  “You’re a quick study,” I said to Scarlett. “Cover him while I call a friend.”

  Scarlett pin
ned Flint with the pistol, and I dialled Tom Weiland’s private number on my tattler. He didn’t pick up, but I left him a ’gram showing Flint and Constance with a short message. “Book ’em, Weiland. And lay off.”

  I bent Flint over his desk and twisted his arm behind his back. Constance whimpered in the corner and Scarlett bent to pick up her gun too.

  Scarlett said, “Of course. Constance could get into the apartment without Hawkins batting an eye. But how did she know Angelica was there?”

  “She followed you,” I said. “She had the car. Flint hasn’t been at the office today. I checked on my way over here.”

  “And what?” Scarlett turned to Constance. “You thought you’d pin it on me by using my gun?”

  “She killed Mook too,” I said. “Used the small bore because she knew that’s what Ms. Wagner preferred. She hired the duo to put a scare into Angelica so that when she got topped it would look like one of Vector’s thugs going too far. Shot poor Dex for believability. But I want to know what Mook died for. Why don’t you tell me?” I twisted Flint’s arm, and he wailed a high-pitched keening noise, snivelling against the desk.

  “You don’t understand what it was like,” he whimpered. “I married Evangeline so that she could help me fund my research. I landed a big contract with Libra, everything was perfect—”

  “The research you stole from my mother, you mean.” Scarlett’s eyes had hardened into something ugly. But I held up a hand.

  Flint went on. “Then she falls in with these New Humanists and the Mezzanine Rose. She decides my work is immoral. The corruption of the human form. She donated her fortune to anti-tech charities, bought this backward hovel and what was left she willed to Angelica on her twenty-first birthday. She wouldn’t let me have a single holocred. We fought about it, and I ...”

  “And you killed her,” I said.

  He nodded miserably, not out of guilt but at having been found out. He sniffed and said, “I gave her something we’ve been sitting on in the lab, a new drug that wouldn’t show up in the toxicology reports. It looked like a stroke. Perfect. But it wasn’t until after she was dead that I realized how airtight the inheritance contracts were. I wasn’t going to see a chip. It all went to Angelica. Unless she, too, died. Then, there was a loophole in the contract in which I could—with the right documents—have the fortune transferred to my name.”