The Archaeologist's Mistress

by Jamie MacFrey

  My car was a beat up old Zond V that I’d bought with my first paycheck on the force, and kept for nostalgia reasons, and also because newer vehicles just looked more and more the same to my eye. It used to make suborbital flights, but I wouldn’t trust it these days. I punched in the address of GJS’s Research and Design lab, and continued to review the dossier Theed had given me on the way over. My Zond parked itself across the street, and I waited for Xu’s purple Jupiter to appear, like the flimsy told me he’d be driving. Apparently the the GJS CEO sat on the board of Jupiter Autocars and it was their default company car.

  At 6:34pm, Olympus Standard, a purple Jupiter with Hary Xu’s license plate number pulled out of the corporate lot.

  It had cost me, and I’d had to know the right mechanic, and then I’d had to know how to convince the right mechanic, but eventually I’d got her to bend the rules of what was technically legal and alter the Zond V’s nav computer to locate and follow specific cars. Every car had this ability, technically, but it required asking the other car if they’d let you follow them. Not very useful for a private eye. Good for me I’m so persuasive.

  Hary Xu did not head for the address listed as his house on the flimsy. Instead, we flew from the Outskirts to Low Amazon, which meant we went from shithole factories and enclosed office spaces to the seediest neighborhood in New Angeles. Xu was supposed to be heading home to Kennedyville, but here we were in New Canaveral. We went down Gates Boulevard until we banged a right onto Hippolyta Street. Xu’s Jupiter began to settle down and I quickly punched in a location a little way up the block so that the Zond drove on by. I kept my eye on Xu. He got out of his car and walked into a nearby building carrying a suitcase: Juan’s Neuro Solutions. A neuro den. I pulled it up on my optical and plugged in the address on the Zond’s computer, and we turned around and parked across the street.

  Nothing to do but wait. And wait I did. I sat for about twenty minutes, watching as a few folks trickled out of the neuro den, blinking in the brightness of the sun as they recovered from the netstate.

  It occurred to me, suddenly, that Xu had a wife and a sidepiece. He was unlikely to be using a neuro den for the same reason I might or half the net-drunk fucks who stumbled out of the place might. So what the fuck was he doing in there?

  “Fuck,” I said. I was going to have to go in there.

  I unzipped my leather jacket a little, enough to get a rise if I wanted one and popped the car door open. New Canaveral had less heat shielding than other parts of New Angeles, and the air was dusty and dry. I slipped in the door to the neuro den. At least they had air conditioning.

  There was a rickety set of stairs to go up, and then I was in a shitty little lobby, a bunch of folding chairs pushed up against the walls to simulate a bench and a bead curtain separating the back from the front. Nobody was there except for a kind of scrawny guy with tattoos and one side of his head shaved pointed manning the desk. His only concession towards a shirt was a ragged denim vest. He had a mustache he’d waxed into a jagged shape and dyed green.

  “You Juan?” I asked.

  “Who’s asking?” he returned.

  “WARNING!” screamed a muffled artificial voice from under his vest. “Parolee…James Murado…is currently experiencing thoughts of an extremely violent or sexual nature. Please be advised to treat him with caution. You can report all crimes committed by parolee...James Murado...by calling System Police at 991.”

  “Ex-con, huh?” I asked. “Guess you’re not Juan. My name’s Sare Jeffries.”

  “Stupid fucking intent broadcaster,” said Murado. “I barely even considered anything. You a cop, Sare Jeffries?”

  “Was. Now I’m working freelance.”

  “WARNING!” blurted the intent broadcaster. “Parolee...James Murado...is currently experiencing thoughts of an anti-authority nature. Please be advised -” Murado beat on his chest for a while until it shut up.

  “What do you want?”

  “This guy came in here, maybe half an hour ago,” I said, blowing up Xu’s face on the flimsy and holding it up. “He still here?”

  Murado looked at the picture, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Look, pal,” I said, settling my elbows down on the desk so he could get a good look at my cleavage if he wanted. “We can either do this the easy way where we make nice-nice, or we can do this the hard way, where I call up a few of my old buddies on the force and they come down here and comb over the place. Are you guys plugged into the net here, or are your chairs running closed circuits?”

  Murado rubbed his neck. “Closed circuits.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Your classier neuro den, such as Juan’s Neuro Solutions here, disconnected their chairs from the Universal Wide Web so their clients couldn’t be traced if their created realities tended into a certain level of depravity not permitted by the government. They wiped the chairs on random cycles to further hide their tracks. But if a police raid caught them by surprise, well, both the client and the proprietor could go to Deimos on long charges of illicit sexual material and aiding and abetting, respectively.

  “Then why don’t you make nice?” I asked. “Is this guy here?”

  “He’s here,” said Murado.

  “Show me.”

  Murado led the way into the darkened hallway beyond the bead curtain, and I kept Mari’s handcannon trained on him in my jacket pocket, just in case he did decide to try anything. The intent broadcaster would let me know well before he did, but I didn’t want to risk anything. He paused at a door marked Room 8.

  “After you,” he said.

  I took out Mari’s handcannon.

  “Don’t try anything,” I told him, and carefully turned the handle, opening the door to Room 8. Murado waved me in.

  Hary Xu was in there, all right, but he wasn’t in any particular state to talk. In netstate, a person’s eyes are closed, and they’re tranquil and relaxed. Hary Xu’s eyes were wide open and his face was a mask of shocked pain. His hands were frozen, clawing at his neuroshunt, which was smoking. The man was dead as a doornail. And naked to boot.

  “Hey, did you know—” I began, but as I spoke, Murado slammed the door shut. I tried to stop him, but he was quick. I saw the keypad on the wall turn green as the code was entered, then flash red indicating the lock was engaged. I briefly tried slamming the door open, but it was a solid metal block with reinforced hinges. I was trapped.

  The room was a shithole, as the whole place had proven itself to be. A solid concrete floor they’d initially tried to put faux-wooden tile over, but that had worn away over the years. The place smelled like the one-sided sex it was generally used for. A single solitary window, the glass frosted opaque, sat on a side of the room that was clearly not getting any sun. They’d used cheap LEDs for the lighting, so that it was far too bright, like being in a bathroom.

  I looked back at Hary Xu’s corpse. In addition to the wires which tethered his neuroshunt to the chair, a couple more ran out to a little device with a dish on the floor. A transmitter. The clever bastard had turned the chair into an outside line. This was probably how he met his mistress. He came to Juan’s, a known closed circuit den, then used the transmitter to beat the chair, and reach out to the girlfriend, so they could rendezvous in netstate. Pretty good, as long as you didn’t mind stripping naked and sitting in a chair with a jack in your neck, rather than getting real cock and real pussy. Or, in Hary’s case, fried. Now all I needed to figure out was where he’d been fried: my end or the girl’s end. In a private meeting like that, it would be hard to have a 3rd party eavesdropper. But an invited guest could throw an overload virus back to Hary, if they’d wanted. Or Murado could’ve come in here and just stuck a screwdriver in his shunt, which also would’ve done it.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “About time,” I called. “I don’t know what kind of shit you were pulling, but -”

  “Open up!” came a gruff male voice. “This is the System Police. We have a report of a homi
cide.”

  The doorknob jiggled a little, but of course it stayed locked. The door clanged against what was obviously a shouldered being lowered into it. Someone swore on the other side and then said, “get the ram.”

  When I’d been part of the SPD, we’d never in our life been this fast to the scene of a homicide. If Xu had been killed on this side, then only Murado could’ve known. This was a seedy neuro den in a seedy part of town. Its patrons had a vested interest in keeping their noses out of other patrons’ business lest their own business get noses in it back. Which meant the SPD had already been on their way when I’d entered the room.

  Someone had set me up to take the fall for a murder, and all signs were currently pointing to Murado. If he wasn’t the actual killer, then he probably knew who was. But to get to him at the moment, I’d have to shoot my way through the SPD SWAT team currently trying to bash in the door. That wasn’t an option. But there was only one other way out.

  I aimed the handcannon at the window, where the two sashes came together, and pulled the trigger. The plasma arc cut a perfectly round hole through them, and then both sashes came tumbling down.

  As the warm air of New Canaveral came rushing into the room, I went hurtling out the window.

  Chapter 3

  I was falling and my body was screaming out in terror, but I managed to keep my own mouth shut, and forced myself to tuck my legs under me, and roll when I hit the ground of the alley behind Juan’s Neuro Solutions. I’d rolled over a bit of the broken glass from the window I’d shot out, my favorite pair of jeans had a lot of fresh tears, my leather jacket was scuffed to hell, and my legs felt like the devil had been playing them for a xylophone, but other than that, I’d managed to come through it mostly unscathed.

  I clipped Mari’s handcannon onto my belt. I didn’t need a gun out with the cops crawling around.

  I began to sprint up the alley when two uniformed SPD officers stepped into my path. I think they were as surprised to see me as I was to see them. The nearest one fumbled his service pistol out of its holster, but I was too close, slipping my right arm under his elbow and grabbing his wrist with my left hand. I pressed his arm like I was pushing a lever until he screamed in pain as his forearm broke in two places and the pistol in his hand went clattering to the ground. When I let go of him, he went down the same as his pistol, groaning and clutching at his arm.

  His partner had a little better resolve. He hadn’t been top of his class in unarmed combat at the academy like I had (they’d even asked me back to teach a class once...and then never again), but it didn’t matter when you had a punch that could drop a mule. It certainly put me down, a shockingly powerful blow to my gut that sent me crashing to all fours to catch my breath while the world decided to do the tango in front of me. I noticed one of the world’s dancing partners was a stray brick.

  “Where the fuck are you running to?” asked guy who’d hit me.

  “Your balls,” I said, and grabbed the brick, bashing it up against his crotch with as much force as I could muster. There was a brief moment where I was afraid I hadn’t hit him hard enough and he just stood, his eyes bulged, before he too went rolling on the ground, a blubbering mass of pain and suffering.

  Now he knew how I felt.

  I struggled to my feet, stumbling to the edge of the alley. We were on the other side of the building from the neuro den’s entrance, and there was just the one lone squad car the two officers I’d just assaulted had come in. I slipped across the street, then down another alley, and another street, before I stepped into a cafe.

  “Does your bathroom have an autodoc unit?” I asked the barista.

  “Yeah, but you have to order something,” he said.

  “Coffee, cream and sugar,” I said. “Now where’s the bathroom?”

  The autodoc was a piece of shit StreetDoc, a junked-up wall unit that someone had written a phone number across. When I plugged in my symptoms it only gave me some over-the-counter painkillers and recommended I take it easy for a while. I stripped off my jacket and used the penknife I kept in a sheath on my ankle to cut the scuffed up sleeves off, then tossed those in the trash can. I liked this jacket, but I liked not being arrested more. My sweater came off and I threw that away as well. I glanced at the rips in my jeans and sighed. It was going to look old-fashioned as hell, but there was no help for it. I dug my fingers into the tears, pulling them a little wider and looser and used the penknife to fray the edges of the rips to make like they’d come that way off the rack. Maybe someone would think I was trying to pull off a retro punk look. I could always claim to be a reenactor. I unhooked my bra and into the trash it went as well. I was going to keep my newly made leather vest unzipped and it could to pay to have every asset available. I could buy a new bra and sweater, but I couldn’t necessarily make bail for suspected murder and assaulting two cops. The ripped jacket hung gently over my breasts, and I zipped it up until there wasn’t any danger of it flying off them, but there was a generous well of cleavage for onlookers. Guess today was a day to get used to the feeling of leather on my bare skin.

  My coffee was almost cold when I got out, but the barista didn’t make a comment on that or my change in appearance. I tipped him more than the cost of the coffee in appreciation, and sat in a corner booth where I could watch the street while pretending to read on my optical. About ten minutes later a couple of cops went running past the shop. One stopped and looked in, then shook his head at his partner and moved on.

  I sat for another fifteen minutes, looking up James Murado on the web. I tracked down his criminal history; armed burglary in one of the nicer New Angeles suburbs. He’d gotten ten years, but been paroled in three for good behavior. A search for Juan’s Neuro Solutions turned up a website. The “Meet our Qualified Staff!” page had Murado’s headshot and a description, including the website where he ran a neuro-chip modification side business. That produced a phone number, and a back search on that turned up an address.

  Finally, I hailed my Zond V on my optical. The battered thing collapsed to the street just in front of the cafe, and I dumped my coffee in the gutter before I got in and I punched in Murado’s address, making sure the route had a proper autodoc I could stop at on the way.

  It was dark out when the Zond settled down outside the rubbish heap James Murado called a home in the Low Amazon. I snuck up to his house, creeping along the side until I found an unlocked window and slipped into the building.

  The room I was in was a kitchen, sort of, but I’d be shocked if the stove worked. It was more like a pantry with a refrigerator and a table. I adjusted my optical’s night vision to take advantage of the low-light and glanced around the corner of the kitchen’s door.

  The next room was a living room, and then a single hall, with two doors off one side and a final door at the end. I could see the light under the last door. Murado.

  But my instinct was to clear the house first, so I moved carefully across the living and tried the first door. Bathroom, the shower curtain hanging by only a handful of loops and a couple of towels dangling from a bar. No mat, and the whole place could use a clean. I didn’t understand how you could let a place get like this. A cleaning bot barely cost anything these days.

  The next room was immaculately clean, however. Even in the dark. It had probably been a bedroom at one time, but not anymore. Now it was something like an office or editing room. Computer equipment and electronics I couldn’t identify were set up all over the room. Place was probably drawing half of Mars’ power. A neuro-chair was tucked into a corner. I whistled. That explained a lot of the poor upkeep on the rest of the building. Those chairs were expensive as hell. Five monitors had been hung on the wall in a straight line, and at the center of the table was a holomonitor.

  On it, an older woman was having sex with a series of disembodied cocks, one in each hole and hand. Porn, I initially thought. But there was something about how she was behaving. She wasn’t your classic porn model, so maybe she was an amateur, but even a
mateurs knew to at least try and keep it in shot. She wasn’t bothering to adjust for some unseen camera, not even a sideways glance as she got fucked.

  I bent over the desk and pulled the file details up on one of the nearby wall monitors. The filename was a string of numbers that matched the file’s creation date, and a person’s name. I checked the directory. Every single file was like that, the names varying wildly, always just one name per file.

  “WARNING! Parolee...James Murado...is currently experiencing thoughts of a violent or sexual nature!” bleated Murado’s intent broadcaster. I spun, Mari’s handcannon leaping into my hand.

  Murado froze as he caught sight of the handcannon. He was even less dressed than I was, down to just his boxer briefs. The speaker for the intent broadcaster sat embedded in his chest under his right shoulder. He was scrawny, but he was fit, and had an extensive set of tattoos up and down his torso. Some lizard part of my brain was appreciative.

  “You have a warrant to search my house?” he asked.

  “I don’t need a warrant, I’m not a cop,” I said. “And no one’s going to complain about that when I get you for the murder of Hary Xu.”

  “Who?”

  “The roasted guy in the chair this evening.”

  “I didn’t kill that guy. I’d never kill anyone.”

  “No? Your jacket says you beat some millionaire in the Valley half to death, trying to rob his house.”

  “That was an accident. Pendejo tried to jump me with a kitchen knife. When I hit him, he smacked his head on his marble countertop. DA blew it up to get me to take a guilty plea.”

  One cynicism you always develop as a cop is that everyone lies. The victims, the perps, the guy you just ticketed. Everyone breaks the law, no one likes getting caught at it. So they bend the truth to suit it. Except in this case, I believed James Murado, convicted armed burglar, more than I believed his jacket.

  “You didn’t kill Hary Xu?”