by Ron Goulart
A line of white light leaped from the barrel and stabbed into the blonde girl’s breast. She grabbed hold of Jake’s hand. “They’re our favorite floaties …” she said in a pale, singsong voice. Her grip tightened for a second, then she died.
Jake shook free of her dead touch, went for the stungun in his shoulder holster.
“Take a nap, sappo,” suggested Woodrow.
A plume of misty yellow gas came spitting out of the carnation on the dummy’s checkered lapel. It caught Jake in the face, rushed into his mouth and nose.
He took a nap.
CHAPTER 8
“WHY SO PALE AND wan?” Jake asked the image of his wife on the dash phonescreen of his parked skycar.
Hildy had short-cropped sand-brown hair, her usually tan face was a stark, indoor white, she wore a high-collar two-piece charcoal-grey bizsuit and a severe pair of decspecs. “Tell you momentarily, but first fill me in on your search for your lost day. Was it painful?”
“Somewhat, yeah,” he admitted. His vehicle was sitting in a secured park/land lot just outside Ghetto Village. The neon signs of the exclusive suburb throbbed and blinked in the early afternoon. “Worth it, though.”
“Do you know who killed her?”
He nodded, saying, “I saw the deed done. A lady ventriloquist name of Trina Twain did the actual shooting. I don’t as yet know who’s behind her.”
“Could she have been acting on her own?”
“Nope, this is a conspiracy for sure,” Jake assured her. “Are you flying someplace right now?”
“To Houston,” his wife answered. “Hence the clever disguise. But finish your story first.”
“One of the classic ingredients of a conspiracy is a cast of more than one,” he resumed. “So far there are … were, rather, three. Trina and two black chaps who tried to kill me on Skullpopper’s doorstep.”
“Jake,” she said, making a small gasping sound, “are you okay?”
“I’m in mint condition, but one of my assailants was transmuted to ashes when his buddy’s kilgun blast hit him instead of me.”
She shuddered. “They might have been sweeping you up, sending you home to me in an urn.”
“What I’m curious about, Hildy, is how anyone knew I was going to visit Skullpopper.”
“Secretary Strump knew,” she said, a frown on her newly pale face. “Yes, I mentioned it to him when I was setting up the deal to get you out of the pokey. Do you think he’s got a leak in—”
“Has to,” said Jake. “I double checked our home security system last night after that discount wino went staggering off. No bugs or taps. And I just went over my skycar.”
“What did the Hatchbacker girl tell you?”
“Nowhere near enough. Trina and her dummy … that’s who was wearing the carnation that mindgassed me, by the way, her snide little dummy.”
“I assumed as much when you mentioned there was a ventriloquist in the woodpile. That little foot we saw on the phone tape belonged to him, too.”
“Little putz named Woodrow,” said Jake. “He and Trina snuck into Prop Room 24C before Palsy could even get to the point.”
“Didn’t she tell you anything?”
“About her college life mostly. And as she was dying she sang that cereal jingle. The one for Bloaties, the Ballooned-Oats Breakfast.”
“A dying message?”
He hunched one shoulder. “Not sure yet.”
“Where’d she go to college?”
“I’ll be checking that.”
“I suppose this Trina Twain is no longer touring with the Girl Commandos.”
“Nope, she gave notice and vanished while I was languishing in Murderers Home,” answered Jake. “Turns out she wasn’t a regular, just a last-minute replacement for the lady juggler who usually did the warm-up act. Been with the tour less than a week, only since the juggler got clumsy and fell off a pedramp in the Northfield Sector of Minn-2 and broke both legs.”
Hildy said, “So somebody planted Trina and Woodrow to watch Palsy.”
“Appears so,” he said. “What did you get at the Wall Street Wally’s outlet?”
“A lot of admiration from the parking ’bot,” Hildy said. “Ross, after I expertly cajoled him, gave me a possible source of information on Novem, Ltd.”
“He doesn’t know who they are?”
“He doesn’t, and he broadly hinted I’d be better off letting my inquiry drop.”
“What’s the lead?”
“The Reverend Gully Lomax.”
“That button-down racist bastard? What in blazes does he have to do with—”
“Seems he would like to own a bigger hunk of several of the companies, most especially Newoyl, that Novem is into. Ross suspects Reverend Lomax may know something about his chief rivals.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Suzie Miller, roving correspondent for Pure, the Racist Weekly,” Hildy informed her husband. “En route to the PlainKlothes Klan’s Houston offices to interview Lomax. I hinted that we at Pure were seriously considering him for our Bigot of the Year award.”
“He bought that?”
Hildy lowered her decorative spectacles and fluttered her long eyelashes at him. “I might go so far as to say he gobbled it up,” she replied with a smile. “I’m seeing him at six.”
“Okay, but be careful, huh? He’s a nasty fellow, surrounded by a gang of crazed bully boys.”
“I’ll con him out of whatever he knows, don’t fear,” his wife promised. “Where are you bound?”
“Not sure. Maybe to Palsy’s old alma mater, once I find out where it is.”
“You be careful, too, Jake. Don’t let ’em turn you to dust.”
“Not just yet. Love.”
“Same to you.” The screen went blank.
Jake leaned back in his seat for a moment. He hadn’t mentioned the fact to Hildy, but the session with Skullpopper had left him a little shaky and unsettled. “Once more into the breach,” he urged himself, sitting up and pushing out another number on the skycar phone.
Secretary Strump himself answered. He was a stocky, pugnacious man, one year away from retirement. When he recognized Jake, he whapped his realwood desk with a large freckled fist. “Have you seen these?”
“Hold them up.”
“These filthy sheets.” The Secretary of Security held up a gossip faxoid.
“Quit quivering with rage,” suggested Jake, “so I can read the headlines.”
“I can tell you, Jacob, neither Mike nor Ike is at all pleased.”
“The Kind of People You Molest Reveals Your Personality, that can’t be the headline that’s annoying the presidents. Lose 23 Pounds A Week On The Discount Wine Diet! Is that it? I noticed Ike Zaboly was getting a little thick around the—”
“This one!” Secretary Strump abandoned one of the scandal tabloids so he could poke a front page headline on the other. “Government Throws Away Your Tax Dollars On Killer PI! Both the presidents are—”
“That’s me? The killer private eye?”
“And as if what The National Intruder has to say isn’t awful enough, look at Muck.” He displayed the second weekly. “Sex Killer Blows Your Tax Bux!” He was flipping through the pages. “And feast your eyes on the article they ran. I look like I have three chins and warts.”
“Sue them. You can prove you don’t have warts, can’t you?”
“Oh, certainly. That would look marvelous. My trying to establish that I’m not … what is it they dubbed me … ‘a senile tax squanderer who, when he isn’t stuffing Your Tax Dollars into the sleazy pockets of criminal private cops, adores dressing up in female garb to molest crippled children.’ Both the presidents, Jacob, are in a tizzy.”
“How’d the Intruder and Muck get their information?”
“What information? I don’t have so much as one dress or gown in my entire—”
“The news that you hired Odd Jobs, Inc.”
Strump lowered the scandal sheet, blinking. “I hadn�
��t considered that,” he said, taken aback. “Did you issue a press release?”
After grinning bleakly, Jake said, “Hildy and I don’t believe in that kind of publicity. Somebody in your office leaked.”
“Hardly possible. Each man and woman in my organization has undergone the most rigid—”
“It’s not only Muck who’s being told what my wife and I are up to,” cut in Jake. “I was anticipated on my visit to Cleveland this morning.”
“What? What?” The thickset secretary rose halfway out of his realwood swivel. “Are you suggesting—”
“I’m suggesting that two louts posing as ethnic androids tried to kill me about three hours ago.”
“How can you be certain this particular attempt on your life has anything to do with the Big Bang case?”
Jake laughed. “I’ve got a hunch.”
Absently balling up Muck, the Secretary of Security said, “I can run another check of my people, but—”
“Do that,” agreed Jake. “Meanwhile, I don’t plan to report to you too often or too openly.”
“Come now, Jacob, we’re paying you $500,000 to investigate—”
“I don’t, no matter what you hypnotized Hildy into accepting, consider lottery tickets legal tender of coin of the realm,” Jake told him. “But since you did get me out of that pesthole I—”
“Those Flago tickets could net you a bloody fortune. Not to mention such additional prizes as a trip to the Poconos, a silverplated—”
“I’ll be signing off now. Start weeding.” Jake shut off the call.
After another minute or two of leaning back, eyes shut this time, he sat up and tapped out a new number.
The small pixphone screen remained black, but a voice said, “Oho! It’s America’s favorite killer. How’re you, Jake? How’s your skinny wife?”
“We’re both doing as well as can be expected,” he said. “I want some quick background information, Steranko.”
“Then why not use that vaunted new computer system you installed at the old homestead?” The screen commenced clearing.
“I have to admit that, at the moment, you’re better than I am at digging out the kind of dirt I’m looking for.”
“At any moment, sweetheart,” corrected Steranko the Siphoner. He was a small man of thirty, absolutely bald and wearing a spotless two-piece lemon-yellow cazsuit with matching ankleboots. He was lounging in a lime-green canvas chair in the midst of an impressive electronic clutter. “Since you’re an old pal, Jake, and since your toke is in a sling and since it’s nearly Xmas and my tender heart is even more tender than usual, I’ll do what you want for a mere $2500.”
Jake grinned. “Very touching, only 40 percent above list price.”
The Siphoner said, “There is no list price for this kind of work, cookie.” He gestured at the modified computer terminals, wordproz machines, databoxes and not quite identifiable info retrieval devices that surrounded him. “There’s a simple reason I’ll always be superior to you when it comes to the gathering of data from hither and yon. Scruples.”
“Meaning you have none and I do.”
“Precisely, old buddy,” said the bald man. “I am absolutely shameless when it comes to gathering information. I can, and will, tap any source on Earth or orbiting it. I’ll unblushingly listen in as a virginal thirteen-year-old lass goes to confession, take advantage of a mike concealed in the toilet seat of the Queen of England, steal facts from blind grandmothers.”
Jake glanced at the dash clock. “Your commercials keep getting longer.”
“Listen, since I’m strangely fond of you and that skeletal spouse of yours, I’ll charge you a flat $2000 before I even hear what the job is. Even though I know you held up my own beloved government for a cool one million b—”
“$250,000 is what we got. However, if you’d like to be paid in Flago tickets I can go as high as—”
“Make it $1750. But cease the sad songs before my little heart breaks,” said the yellow-suited data bootlegger.
“A deal, send us a voucher.”
“Which address? Connecticut or the bastille?”
Jake said, “I want to find a girl named Trina Twain.”
“What category would she fall into?”
“Show business and espionage. She’s a ventriloquist and a spy.”
Steranko leaned, ran his fingers over the keyboard of the nearest terminal. He stared at the screen for a few seconds, scowled up at Jake, grabbed up a mike that activated a voxterminal. “TWAIN, Trina. Designation 99S.”
From a speaker somewhere beneath his chair a slightly Romanian voice said, “Nonesuch.”
“C’mon, c’mon,” urged the impatient Steranko. “Go around that obvious ID block, dope.”
“Nonesuch. Repeat non … bonk!”
The dapper siphoner hopped up free of his green chair, turned his back to Jake to peek at the speaker. “Who the hell is that bimbo, Jake?”
“You’re supposed to be telling me.”
“She’s important to somebody besides you, old pal.” Shaking his hairless head, he sat again, tapping his yellow-clad right knee with the mike. “Somebody got at all the standard ID sources, as well as every damn unorthodox one. If you believe them, no such lady ever drew a breath.”
“That’s an expensive process, sponging somebody out of existence.”
“Could the wench be government?”
“Don’t know, but it seems unlikely.”
“Yeah, it costs big dough to run a wipeoff like this.” He bit his lip. “Tell you what, this is now a challenge to me. Give me a few more hours and I’ll track her. No extra charge. When’d you see her last, or have you ever?”
“I did, in Chi-2 on—”
“Scene of the crime?”
“Committer of the crime.”
“Check back at sundown if you can. Anything else?”
“As long as I have you on retainer, you might as well do a simple trace for me. Girl’s name is Palsy Hatchbacker. I’m—”
“The unfortunate victim.”
“The same. I’m interested first off in her college years.”
Making a small grunting noise, Steranko kicked at a databox that was within kicking distance. “Did you get that name, dodo?”
“Got her, boss,” replied the gunmetal box.
“Looks to me, Jake, as though some gang with one hell of a budget is out to … hold it.”
An orange light atop the waist-high box had started to blink.
“Go ahead,” instructed Steranko.
“HATCHBACKER, Martha ‘Palsy,’ ” spoke the box. “Majored in Commercial Nutrition. Attended Poorman’s Harvard in Boston Sector, 1996-1999. Studied extensively with Professor Dickens Barrel, by the bye.”
“So what?” said Steranko.
“He’s missing.”
“So he is.” The Siphoner snapped his fingers. “Want something on Prof. Barrel, Jake?”
“He was doing food and nutrition research at Poorman’s Harvard, wasn’t he?”
“Right, much of his work financed by the food industry,” said Steranko. “Especially by Foodopoly, our largest food conglomerate.”
“Professor Barrel vanished about a year ago, didn’t he?”
“Without a trace.”
Jake was rubbing his fingertips along his cheekbone. “Foodopoly manufactures Bloaties.”
“Along with untold other types of edible garbage,” said Steranko. “Want me to dig you up stuff on the prof or on the Thrasher family who control Foodopoly or—”
“Nope, you concentrate on unearthing Trina Twain,” Jake told him. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Where you off to?”
“Boston,” Jake answered.
CHAPTER 9
THERE WAS BULLET BENTON.
The massive blond Federal Police Agency cop was looming at the other end of the tree-lined hallway, his muscled arms full of infospools, file folders, toktapes, voxboxes and several bulging nosee plyosax.
Jake sat
down on a green bench, crossed his legs and leaned back, waiting.
Bullet stomped toward him, chortling. “Returning to the scene of the crime, huh?” he boomed out.
Glancing around this corridor of the underground campus of Poorman’s Harvard, Pace said, “What crime?”
“Isn’t this where you first seduced that poor kid, while she was still a virginal coed?”
Several of the infospools and folders had Dept. of Commercial Nutrition/Highly Confidential stenciled on them in glored. “I have a permit slip from the Dean of Nutrition to look at that stuff,” Jake said.
“What stuff, Jake?” Bullet plopped down next to him, causing the bench to rattle.
“Background material on Palsy Hatchbacker and on the researches of Prof. Dickens Barrel.”
The federal cop deposited his armload on the grassy floor. “Let’s see the permit.”
Pace produced a rectangle of yellow fax paper.
Bullet took it from him. He tore it in half, then in quarters, then in eighths. Tossing the pieces away, he said, “You don’t have it now.”
Jake grinned. “Why are you interested in what she did in college?”
“Grist for the mill,” replied Bullet. “See, Jake, I’m going to see to it you end up castrated and permanently brainwiped. At the very least. When I get through perusing this, I’ll know more about that pure sweet child than even you do.”
“I don’t know much more than her name.”
Bullet laughed and the flowers in the wall vases quivered. “You can claim that now, but when I get through digging—”
“What about Prof. Barrel? Why are you interested in him?”
“Who says I am?”
Jake indicated two folders with his foot. “You’re hauling off everything the department has on him and his researches.”
“No, I left behind his wedding pictures and some recipes for pineapple upsidedown—”
“Did you work on his case?”
“When he disappeared? Naw, that went to the Missing Persons Squad,” answered the FPA man. “And those nurfs can’t even find their own families with both hands and a road map.”
“Figure Barrel took off voluntarily?”
“Yeah, sure, with that pretty little sloe-eyed coed he was so cozy with.” Bullet nodded, strong jaw outthrust. “All these middle-aged smartasses go bonko over underage lovelies sooner or later. Like you just did.”