The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1

by S. Andrew Swann

  Nohar looked up from the corpse, and at Hassan. “Me now?”

  The dog shook his head and raised his gun. “Not today. This was a lesson. Lessons need witnesses.”

  Hassan began backing away, keeping his eyes on Nohar.

  When Hassan reached the door, he gave the carnage a brief inspection. Then he looked back up at Nohar, who was still standing by the rear wall. “Advice, tiger. Next time be more careful who you work for.”

  No shit.

  • • •

  It took all of fifteen minutes for the first police to descend on the party side of the flats. In twenty minutes the east side of the Cuyahoga River was illuminated by a wash of dozens of flashing blue and red lights. Even though Nohar was the one who called in the shooting, he had to sit on his tail in the back of a very cramped Chevy Caldera sedan. At least the pink uniforms didn’t cuff him—not that they hadn’t tried, but this far out of Moreytown they didn’t have cuffs that would fit him. They simply deposited him in the back seat and kept their distance.

  Nohar squirmed to get his tail in a comfortable position and looked out the windows facing the river. Not much to see, water for a few hundred meters reflecting the police flashers. The water terminated at the concrete base of the West Side office complex. The office buildings were so dark at this time of night that they seemed to be trapezoidal holes cut in the night sky, revealing something blacker behind it.

  There wasn’t much else to watch out the other window. The forensics people were all in Zero’s. He’d end up talking to Manny later anyway. Not that there was anything to discuss. It wasn’t like he was on a case any more.

  Twenty-five hundred dollars. Gone. The first of the month was at the end of the week, and he only had about two hundred in the bank. Served him right for working for a pimp.

  Nohar had his pride. He didn’t want to have to ask Manny about his old room—

  He shook his head. Things would work out. They usually did.

  A soft rain began to fall. It broke up the reflections on the river.

  Nohar heard the scream of abused brakes. He turned around to face the entrance of the parking lot. A puke-green Dodge Havier that was missing one front fender jumped the curb and skidded to a halt in a handicapped parking spot.

  It had to be Harsk.

  Indeed, Irwin Harsk’s bald head emerged from the driver’s side door of the unmarked sedan. Harsk stormed out like an avalanche. Many standards of pink beauty escaped Nohar, but some forms of ugly transcended species. Harsk’s black face resembled a cinder block.

  It had been only a matter of time before Harsk got involved. He was the detective in charge of Moreytown. He had jurisdiction over anything involving moreaus, and, by extension, any product of genetic engineering. In the case of the shoot-out at Zero’s that covered the victims, the suspect, and the witness.

  This obviously didn’t please the detective.

  Harsk stood a moment in the rain, looking over the scene—the ambulances, the forensics van, Manny’s medical examiner’s van, the seven marked and two unmarked police cars. Even over the twenty-meter distance between them, Nohar could hear Harsk grunt.

  After giving the scene the once-over, Harsk targeted a lone uniform who was standing by the door to Zero’s. Harsk looked like he wanted to unload on someone. The cop by the door was the unlucky one. Nohar supposed Harsk chose his victim because of the cup of coffee the guy was drinking. Harsk walked up to the guy, and even though Nohar wasn’t great at reading human expressions, the way the poor cop bit his lip and gave forced nods indicated that Harsk wasn’t having a nice day and was doing his best to share the experience.

  Harsk pointed at the Caldera that Nohar was sitting in and yelled something that Nohar couldn’t quite make out. The cop shrugged and tried to say something, and Harsk cut him off. Harsk grabbed the guy’s coffee and pointed back into Zero’s.

  Nohar wished he could read lips.

  The cop went inside and Harsk started walking toward the Caldera. He took a sip from the uniform’s coffee and grimaced. He looked into the cup, shook his head, and dumped it on the asphalt.

  Harsk walked up to the door and opened it. “Rajasthan, how did I know you’d be involved in this crap?”

  “Deductive reasoning?”

  Harsk grunted. “Get the fuck out of that patrol car. The city just bought those and we don’t want you shedding on them.”

  Nohar ducked out the door and stretched. The misting rain started to dampen his fur immediately. He wished he had worn his trench coat to the meeting. “No apology for treating me like a suspect? I didn’t have to call this in.”

  “Be glad that some downtown cowboy didn’t shoot you. Half these kids are just out of the academy and tend to shit if they see a moreau. This ain’t your neighborhood. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Nugoya was a client.”

  Harsk looked at Nohar. “So when are you going to start selling yourself to the flush peddlers?”

  Nohar had his right hand up, claws fully extended, before he knew what he was doing. Harsk’s face cracked into an ugly grin. “Do it, you fucking alley cat. I would love to put you away and get you out of my hair.”

  Nohar took a few deep breaths and lowered his arm. “What hair?”

  A lithe nonhuman form left Zero’s. The moreau wore a lab coat and carried a notebook-sized computer, the display of which he was reading.

  Nohar called out, “Manny.”

  Manny—his full name was Mandvi Gujerat—looked up from the display, twitched his nose, and started across the parking lot toward Nohar and Harsk. Manny was a small guy with a thin, whiplike body. He had short brown fur, a lean, aerodynamic head, and small black eyes. People who saw Manny usually guessed he was designed from a rat, or a ferret. Both were wrong. Manny was a mongoose.

  Manny reached them and Harsk interrupted before Nohar could say anything. “Gujerat, what have you got on the bodies?”

  Manny gave Nohar an undulating shrug and looked down at his notebook. “I have a tentative species on six of seven. The three bodies outside were all a Peruvian Lepus strain. From the white fur and the characteristic skull profile, I’d say Pajonal ’35 or ’36. They all have unit tattoos, and some heavy scarring. Infantry, and they saw combat.”

  Manny tapped the screen and the page changed. “The bartender was definitely vulpine. Brit fox, Ulster antiterrorist. I think second generation, but I can’t be sure. The British ID their forces under the tongue and most of the fox’s head is gone.

  “The tiger—” Manny looked at Nohar briefly. “Second-generation Rajasthan. Indian Special Forces.

  “The bear, I would guess Turkmen, Russia, or Kazakhstahn. That’s only on my previous experience in ursoid strains. Her species—”

  “Her?” asked Harsk.

  “Yes. I think she was a parthenogenetic adaption. But as I was saying, her species isn’t cataloged. She’s either a unique experiment, or one of the few dozen species that fell through the cracks during the war. From the corpse, for all I know, she could be Canadian.”

  Nohar snorted.

  Manny shrugged again. “I supposed you already have a file on the one engineered human. But his strain checks out against what we have on Sony’s late human-enhancement projects. The one we have here underwent a massive reconstruction after some major trauma. The hardware in his body was worth a few million when there were people who could make and install the stuff.”

  Harsk nodded. “Any leads on the suspect?”

  “Some hairs from the mirror check out as canine. From that and a description, purebred Afghani, Qandahar ’24. Attack strain, one the Kabul government ‘discontinued’ after the war.”

  “Enough. Rajasthan, I’ll get your statement from the uniforms. Get out of here before you attract more trouble. Gujerat, dump the rest into the precinct mainframe.” Harsk started to go toward Zero’
s and paused. “The Moreytown precinct.”

  Manny nodded. “Where else?”

  Harsk left.

  Manny folded up the computer and twitched his nose. “So, stranger, what the hell are you doing at this bloodbath?”

  “Bad sense to let Nugoya hire me—”

  “Let me guess. Female Vietnamese canine who shot herself so full of flush that she thought she was avian? The one you asked me to ID for you?”

  Nohar nodded.

  “I know you don’t like my advice—”

  “Then don’t give me any.”

  “—but something dangerous is going on. I don’t think you want to be involved, even tangentially, with anything that has to do with the flush industry.”

  Nohar leaned against the Caldera. His fur was beginning to itch. “Sounds like you know something you think I don’t.”

  “Something’s in the air. The DEA is crawling all over downtown, and the gangs in Moreytown are acting up. Most of the bodies I’m looking at the past few weeks are young, second-generation street kids.”

  “I can handle myself.”

  “So I worry. You were once one of those second-generation street kids.”

  “I can handle myself,” Nohar said a little more forcefully.

  Manny backed off. “Anyway, we do have to stop meeting like this. When are you going to come back and let me cook you some dinner?”

  You’ve been trying to get me back there for fifteen years, Nohar thought. “I’ll make it over one of these days.”

  “The door’s always open.”

  “I know.”

  Manny turned and started back to Zero’s, where a gaggle of pink EMTs were trying to manhandle the ursine’s corpse out the door.

  Nohar sighed.

  “I know,” he whispered to himself.

  Nohar uselessly turned the collar up on the irritating pink-designed jacked and headed for his car. There wasn’t anything left for him to do here.

  Chapter 2

  Nohar’s apartment had holes in the wall, a leaky roof, a sagging floor in the kitchen, and wiring that hadn’t been up to code when it was put in forty years ago. However, the place had one redeeming feature. Someone had installed a huge stainless-steel shower that Nohar could fit into. Four in the morning was a god-awful time to take a shower, but Nohar wanted to get the city off of him—as well as pieces of bear and Nugoya.

  Nohar stood under a blast of warm water, feeling the grit melt off his fur. Through the open door of the bathroom, he listened to the news coming off his comm and tried to forget the fiasco he had left downtown.

  “. . . major demonstrations through the Economic Community. However, despite public pressure and threats of violence, the European parliament followed through on its vote to eliminate most internal restrictions on nonhuman movement. The French and German states are braced for a massive influx of unemployed nonhumans from the rest of the economically troubled European nation.

  “The French and German interior ministers issued a joint statement condemning the parliament’s decision to outlaw screening across internal borders.”

  Nohar sighed. The pinks in Paris and Berlin were worried about a few thousand moreaus—relatively benign moreaus for the most part. The EEC had a few combat designs in reaction to the war, but it never produced many moreaus. Most of their nonhumans were designed for police and hazardous industrial work.

  The European parliament probably would still have considered their moreaus as not better than slaves or machines if the Vatican hadn’t screwed everything up with the pope’s decision that moreys had souls. The EEC was still dealing with the repercussions of that, even fifteen years after the production lines stopped.

  “In a related story, a car bomb exploded in Bern, Switzerland, today outside of the Bensheim Genetic Repository Building. No injuries were reported, and no one has claimed responsibility. Damage to the Bensheim building was estimated at a quarter of a million dollars. The Bensheim Foundation issued a statement to reassure their clients that no damage was done to their inventory of genetic material which is kept in an undisclosed location. The building that was bombed housed only administrative offices. The Foundation says that this will in no way affect its worldwide collection and distribution of semen.

  “Dr. Bensheim himself issued a statement from Stockholm deploring the attack, and saying, ‘the right to reproduce is fundamental and should not be denied on the basis of species.’

  “In local news . . .”

  Nohar turned off the water and leaned his back against the cool metal wall of the shower. He couldn’t get that two and a half grand out of his mind. How the hell was he going to pay the rent—how the hell was he going to eat? He knew too many moreaus who lived out on the street, and he had already done time there himself.

  Nohar slid the shower door aside and Cat looked up quizzically. The yellow tomcat was curled up on top of the john and was looking annoyingly serene. Sometimes Nohar thought there was something to the idea that you shouldn’t have pets too close to your own species.

  Nohar turned on the dryer and Cat made a satisfying leap out the bathroom door. Served the little fuzzball right for not having the sense to worry about where his next meal was coming from. After a few minutes, Cat peeked around the doorjamb and gave Nohar a peeved expression.

  Nohar allowed himself the luxury of standing in front of the dryer until his entire body had aired out. Who gave a shit what this month’s utility bill cost. Moot if he couldn’t pay it. He needed the time to relax. He was too tense to think rationally.

  “. . . buried tomorrow. Graveside services to be held at Lakeview Cemetery. The police have no suspects as of yet, and the Binder campaign has yet to issue an official statement other than appointing Congressman Binder’s legal counsel, Edwin Harrison, as acting campaign manager.

  “Former Cleveland mayor, Russell Gardner, expressed sympathy for his opponent and said that he did not intend to make rumors of alleged financial irregularities in Binder’s fund-raising a campaign issue.

  “Binder finance chairman, Philip Young, could not be reached for comment.”

  Nohar turned off the dryer and walked out of the bathroom. He collapsed on the nearly dead couch in the living room. There was the sound of protesting wood and permanently compressed springs. He shifted on his back, and Cat ran up and pounced on his chest. Nohar winced as four cold little feet kneaded his fur. Cat curled up to take a nap.

  Nohar lifted his hand to push him off, but a loud purring made him stop and simply pet the creature.

  “. . . more violence on the East Side today. There was an apparent clash between nonhuman gang members on Murray Hill—”

  Only newscasters and politicians still called it Murray Hill. It was Morey Hill now, had been for nearly a decade. Nohar sighed. The guy on the news couldn’t bring himself to say the word morey—or even moreau. Nohar looked at the guy on the comm. Pink—what else—slick black hair, a nothing Midwestern accent, dead gray eyes, all the animation of a cheap computer graphic. The bodies on the screen behind him were more lively.

  “—fifteen dead, all of various species, making this the most bloody incidence of cross-species violence since the ‘Dark August’ riots of 2042. Local community leaders have expressed concern over the latest escalation of violence in the nonhuman community . . .”

  To prove the point, the newscast started to show clips of interviews with said “community leaders.” Nohar snorted, with the token morey exception—Father Sean Murphy, a Brit fox who defected to the Irish Catholics, one of two ordained morey priests in the United States—the “community leaders” were all human.

  The newscast then went into the obligatory human fear/responsibility versus moreau poverty/empowerment segment. Same shit, different day. Nohar closed his eyes and listened for something interesting to come on.

  • • •

  Nohar wo
ke to the sound of the comm buzzing for his attention. Grayish daylight streamed through the windows. The comm’s display was still on the news channel. More gang violence, even worse this time. It barely registered on Nohar that it had gone down only three blocks from his apartment. Flashing text informed him he had slept through two other calls and nearly eight hours.

  The incoming call was from Robert Dittrich. Nohar called out to the comm. “Got it.”

  The newscast winked out and was replaced by a red-bearded human face. “I wish you’d put on some clothes before you answer the phone.”

  Nohar growled. “What the hell do you want, Bobby?”

  “Tough night?”

  Nohar closed his eyes and sighed. “What do you think?”

  “Heard about Nugoya. Tough break—”

  “Tough all over. What do you want?”

  Bobby coughed. “If you’re going to be like that. I was going to give you the background I hacked on Nugoya—”

  “Great, real useful.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you can be a real asshole at times, Nohar? As I was saying—” Bobby paused. Nohar didn’t interrupt. “As I was saying, I was going to give you that data when the Fed landed on my doorstep.”

  Nohar sat up, fully awake now. Cat tumbled off his chest and ran off into the kitchen. “Shit. You in trouble?”

  Bobby laughed and shook his head. “No, apparently I’m still clean. As we all know, everything I do on my computer is perfectly legal.”

  Nohar shook his head at that.

  Bobby went on. “Wasn’t me at all. They were asking about you. That’s how I heard about Nugoya and last night.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, thought I’d call you. They wanted to know about your politics, of all things.” Bobby put his hand to his forehead and chuckled. “They had this babe with them. Was she a hard case—”