The Long Way Home

by Richard Chizmar

  When the message was finished, Neely said, “Jesus, can you believe that?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She frowned. “Dead guy. With his wang cut off.”

  “Wow,” I said, smiling and protectively covering my crotch with my hand, “his wang?”

  “That’s right, smartass,” Neely said. “His wang.”

  2

  We decided it wouldn’t take long, so we pulled the robbery on the way over to the cybersex bar.

  The Alatians probably didn’t think they’d become convenience store clerks when they met up with one of our satellites out near Pluto or wherever the hell it was. Alatians are something else, let me tell you. They’re these little bluish gill-guys. At one time — or so our scientists say — Alatia, which is somewhere way out there in what they used to call the space sea, was a mighty interplanetary empire. But then this mad emperor-type took over the planet and got them into all these wars and used up all their natural resources…so now the Alatians travel the space sea looking for planets where large numbers of them can make a home. Mostly they do low-skill work. Kind of intergalactic immigrants, I guess you’d call them.

  Three things you need to know about Alatians:

  One: Yes, they have two eyes much like our own, but they also have one in the back of their head, staring out from a bald spot in their ratty orange hair. This third eye never blinks.

  Two: They’re short. Not midgets, just short. Tallest I’ve ever seen is about five-one, maybe five-two.

  Three: They like old-fashioned country western music. Don’t ask my why, hell if I know. But that’s why, when you go into one of the stores where they’re pulling the graveyard shift, you hear all that twangy bullshit. They even wear t-shirts that say

  i ♥ little Jimmy Dickens

  and ridiculous stuff like that.

  Weird little fuckers, these Alatians, let me tell you.

  I put the hover car down in the alley behind the liquor store and as I was doing that, Neely was slipping into her coveralls and gorilla mask.

  We have one rule about stick-ups. We never shoot, not even in self-defense. Lot of coppers, they don’t draw that line, so an Alatian hassles them a little bit, they blow him away. But not us. It’s not that we like Alatians so much, it’s just that you kill somebody, there’s always an investigation, because there are so many anti-copper political groups out there. A guy you want to execute, that’s one thing, worth the risk. But one of those little blue bastards? Uh, uh. Not worth risking your career over.

  “Smush ee uck,” Neely said.

  “I can’t understand you.”

  She lifted the gorilla mask and said, “I said ‘Wish me luck.’”

  “Oh. Yeah. Luck, Neely.”

  She pulled the mask down and got out of the car.

  She was gone five, six minutes.

  Then she came running out to the hover car. I had the door open, waiting.

  When we were up in the air, she said, still out of breath, her face glistening from sweat, “You know what he did?”

  “The Alatian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How would I know what he did? I wasn’t there, remember?”

  “He defecated.”

  “Huh?”

  “Crapped his pants.”

  “Oh.”

  “‘Oh.’ You woulda been in there with me and smelled it, you wouldn’t just be sayin’ ‘Oh,’ believe me.”

  “How much?”

  “Could you give me a minute, Mulligan? Christ, I haven’t even had time to open the bag.”

  She opened the bag and counted.

  “Not bad,” she said. “Five thousand nekars.”

  “Wow.”

  “I always get more than you do.”

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  “Bullshit? Who got six thousand nekars that time at that Alatian dance club?”

  “Once, you lucked out.”

  “Once,” she said, shaking her head. “You just can’t admit that a broad is a better robber than you are. That’s all.”

  I was going to say something but the thing was, right now I wasn’t worried about my ego. I was thinking of the two months overdue rent my share of the robbery credits was going to pay.

  “You did good, Neely.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But it was still my turn to be the robber.”

  “Right, Mulligan,” she said. “Right.”

  ****

  Couple nights ago one of the newsies was wondering aloud on the holo why so much violence took place in the middle-class cybersex parlors.

  Proving once again that newsies don’t know shit.

  What he was really asking was: how come rich guys weren’t getting killed?

  Real simple.

  Rich guys can afford to keep all their diversions and perversions at home. But for most people who want cybersex, it means going out to the bars. And renting the full-body data suits the wealthy have hanging in their closets at home.

  Of course, it took the rich folks to discover that cybersex is even better if you do it in conjunction with hormones that are laced with steroids. These days, the people who go to the bars don’t just get hooked on sex. They get hooked on the drugs, as well.

  Until three months ago, when the killings started, about the worst calls we ever got around here were to stop crazed cybersexers from running down the middle of the street with their genitals exposed. Men and women alike. Hell, sometimes, I’d swear the gals like cybersex even more than the men.

  The thing is the cybersex bars start to take their toll mentally on the people who use them. After a while it fucks with their heads in a bad way. So, from time to time, there’s a lot of violence. And of the nasty variety.

  When we got there, there were maybe two hundred people out on the street, most of them glassy-eyed cybersexers. Over by the alley, a naked guy was bopping a naked girl against a signpost. Nobody seemed to notice.

  The dead guy was on the sidewalk, being sprayed head to toe to keep everything intact. It was like coating him with plastic.

  There were at least twenty coppers and twice as many newsies.

  The huge sign out front kept flashing on and off:

  CYBERSEX BOOTHS!

  CUM THREE TIMES AN HOUR GUARANTEED!

  The whole thing reminded me of one of those old holos where they show Times Square on New Year’s Eve. People and lights and noise everywhere.

  Neely said, “I can’t figure out why guys get into this stuff when the real thing’s so easy to get.”

  I said, “It’s never been all that easy for me to get.”

  “That’s because you don’t know how to treat women, Mulligan. We want a little romance once in a while. The real thing, you know? You’re strictly belching, scratching, farting, and coming.”

  I felt my face start to get warm.

  “My wife seemed to like me all right,” I said.

  She smiled. “You’re a nice guy, Mulligan, it’s just you got no class.”

  Then the detectives were all over us, asking us questions about the previous murder here four nights ago, which we’d covered.

  It was the usual boring shit, all this Q&A crap, the homicide boys and girls very spiffy in their shiny black jumpsuits and styled hair. Never mind that they weren’t very smart and were even more arrogant than the newsies. I suppose these were the role models Neely had in mind when she told me I had no class.

  ****

  Half an hour later, I was wandering around outside the cybersex place asking questions of my own. A hover car with another uniformed officer had beaten us here by fifteen minutes, and I found him a little ways down the street. He was young, too young, and was intimidated by the fact that I wore the insignia of Kop5, meaning I could double as a homicide dick when necessary. So could
Neely. Given the publicity these cybersex murders were getting on the holos, the administration needed every homicide dick it could find.

  “So, as far as you know, there weren’t any witnesses?”

  “No sir,” said the freckle-faced kid.

  “Who found the body?”

  “One of the rovers. Inside.”

  “You get her name?”

  “Yeah. Gwen Fordham.”

  “She in there now?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so?”

  He looked embarrassed. “I shoulda told her to stick around, huh?”

  “Hell, yes, you shoulda.”

  “I’ll be more careful next time.”

  He looked like he was going to cry.

  “Hey, kid, it’s all right. We all fuck up once in a while.”

  “It was pretty stupid, not making sure she hung around.”

  “I get the time some day, I’ll tell you all the stupid things I’ve done over the years.”

  He smiled.

  ****

  Neely was already inside, showing around the holo she’d just snapped of the corpse, trying to see if anybody knew him or had seen him earlier in the evening.

  When I walked in, she was talking to this big red-headed guy who wasn’t being much help at all. His nose had been broken a couple of times. So had most of his knuckles.

  He leaned against the tall, tubular booth he’d been using. He seemed very protective of it, as if somebody might try to steal it from him.

  “So you knew him?” Neely said.

  “Didn’t say I knew him. Said I saw him.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight and a lot of other nights.”

  “He was a regular?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that would make you a regular, too?”

  Neely always jabs people when she interviews them. Says jabbing them lets them know who the boss is.

  “Yeah, I’m a regular. So what? I’m single, I work hard, I can spend my fucking credits any way I want to. Free country, you know.”

  I tried to hide my smile. Seemed like maybe Neely had finally met her match in the surly department.

  “You ever see him arguing with anybody?”

  He shrugged. “You know how steroids affect some people. He argued with a lot of people. So do I. Doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You see him argue with anybody tonight?”

  “One of the rovers, I guess.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “Short, blonde hair, nice ass.”

  “You see her around here now?”

  The guy’s eyes scanned the first floor of the cybersex bar. The tubular virtual reality booths ran twenty-five deep on each side of the wide floor. In the middle was a bar and curtained fuck booths where, if you wanted actual sex with an actual woman, you could have it. If you had the money. The women in here were called rovers because they roved around all four noisy floors of this place. Every few minutes, you’d hear somebody screaming in one of the booths. Ecstasy. The women screamed just slightly louder than the men.

  “Yeah, there she is,” the guy said.

  He pointed to a blonde rover standing at the bar. A very intense black man was talking to her.

  “We’ll go pay her a visit,” Neely said, and started to turn away.

  “Hey,” the big guy said.

  Neely turned back to him.

  “You’re about the rudest fucking copper I ever ran into,” he said.

  Neely smiled. “You should meet my sister some time.”

  ****

  When we walked up, the black man was saying, “So I thought what we’d do is both of us, we’d drop some magenta and then you’d get in the booth with me—”

  “Are you crazy?” the blonde said. She was topless and wore tight red shorts with a slitted section over the crotch. “They’d fire me in a minute.”

  “And then,” I said, putting my hands on the black man’s shoulder, “the coppers would bust your ass.”

  For one thing, taking a rover into a VR booth is against the law. Especially when they’re mixing drugs, the guys in the booth can get pretty violent. VR lets you take out all your sado-masochistic impulses without getting hurt. But you have a rover in there, you start to confuse reality with VR. A while back, a cybersexer snuck a rover into a booth one night and got so excited he ripped her apart with his bare hands. When he got done with her, she was just piles of hot bloody flesh.

  For a second thing, magenta is the kind of drug that lands you in prison. Strictly verboten. About thirty percent of all homicides in the city are committed by people stoned on magenta.

  The black man turned and looked at me. “We were having a private conversation, this lady and I.”

  “And she was being smart enough to turn you down,” I said. I nodded to the booths. “Why don’t you go have yourself a nice, legal time tonight?”

  The black man, who was wearing one of those trendy aqua tunics, made a face at the rover and then made a face at me. And then pushed past us, and vanished into the crowd.

  “He’s all right,” the rover said. “His old lady dumped him a couple weeks ago. He’s just looking for kicks to help ease the pain.”

  Neely pushed the holo in her face.

  While the rover checked out the holo, I checked out her breasts. They were small and perfectly shaped. You’d think that bare breasts would lose their appeal when they were constantly exposed this way. Not with me. I felt a painful stirring in my groin.

  “That’s him,” the rover said to Neely.

  “Him?” Neely said.

  “Yeah. He was real drunk and raisin’ hell earlier tonight.”

  “Anything in particular he was raisin’ hell about?” Neely said.

  “Something with one of the girls.”

  “Which girl?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You work here and you’re not sure?”

  “Never saw her before. Figured she just started tonight. Lot of times the boss’ll meet somebody and just put her on the floor without telling us.”

  “You describe her?”

  The rover shrugged nice, silken white shoulders. “Dark hair. Early twenties maybe. Real good body. Nice high-riding tits.”

  “Plastic?”

  The rover shook her head. “Didn’t touch ’em but looked like the real thing to me.”

  Jesus, she was making my mouth water.

  “You have any idea what they were arguing about?”

  “Not really. But he grabbed her by the wrist and shoved her against one of the booths.”

  “Lot of people notice, you think?” Neely said.

  “We were pretty busy in here. People packing the booths. I don’t think many people saw.”

  “Where’s your boss?”

  “Right over there.”

  She pointed out a man dressed in a black evening-wear jumpsuit.

  “The guy with one arm?” I said.

  The rover nodded. “Used to be a copper just like you two. But he got in a bad accident. Hover car took him up with his arm caught in the door.” She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “I think he likes this job a lot better anyway.”

  His name was Phil Anders. He had nose diamonds, ear diamonds, teeth diamonds. And his perfectly shaved head gleamed even more than his diamonds.

  He was leaning over the bar talking to his bartender about something secret. He knew we were waiting to talk with him, but he wasn’t going to give us the courtesy of wrapping things up quickly. I watched the light bounce off the back of his smooth head as it bobbed up and down as he spoke. From where I was standing he looked like the world’s biggest woodpecker.

  Then, abruptly, he came over, following his big white slab of a hand. He
had a grip that could crush iron. He wanted me to know who was in charge here.

  “That’s the kind of shit I always hated about being a copper,” he said, laughing in a deep baritone. “Some asshole like myself keeps you waiting just to prove how important he is.”

  I said, “The dead guy outside—”

  “Yeah,” he frowned. “Just the kind of publicity I need, right?”

  I said, “One of your people says the dead guy had an argument with one of your rovers.”

  “Oh yeah? Which rover?”

  “She said she guessed it was a new one. Probably one you just put on the floor tonight.”

  “I didn’t put anybody new on the floor tonight.”

  I described her to Anders just the way she’d been described to us.

  He shook his head. “No way. I’ve never hired anybody for this place who looks like that.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “That’s strange, then.”

  “Very strange,” Anders said. He looked, and probably was, very upset. “I don’t want some chick preying on my customers. You fuckers better do something about it.”

  “We’ll do everything we can, Mr. Anders,” I said. I figured the “mister” might calm him down a little.

  It didn’t. “You mean, you’ll do everything you can in between sticking up liquor stores and pawn shops and executing people and selling little boys and girls to international pedophile rings.” He smiled icily all the time he spoke.

  Neely smiled right back at him. “You seem to know the drill pretty well, Mr. Anders.”

  He laughed. “How do you think I got enough credits to buy this place? By saving my copper’s salary?”

  “Just one thing,” I said. “We don’t deal kids under any circumstances. Never have and never will.”

  “Yeah, and we kill anybody we catch dealing kids,” Neeley said.

  “Just so you know the facts,” I said.

  He could see we were pissed and we must have impressed him at least a little bit because suddenly he didn’t look half as sparkly or tough or swaggering.

  He said, “Well, do the best you can, okay? I’d really appreciate it.”