Made to Kill

by Adam Christopher

  “I agree.”

  “So get rid of her.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Do you mean—?”

  “Self-preservation, Ray. Self-preservation.”

  The girl was still looking at me. I zoomed in a little on the pulse in her neck and I started counting. It was fast. Too fast. I checked her pupils. They were a little small but seemed to be working. She was nervous, that was all. I didn’t blame her. She’d made a mistake, and maybe now she knew that.

  Because I couldn’t let her leave the office. Not while she was still breathing, anyway.

  Then she lifted herself up on her toes, like she was waiting for a long-lost love to step off a train. “I can pay,” she said.

  Ada went quiet. I didn’t say anything either.

  The girl bent over and picked up the leather athletic bag. She did it with both hands, and even then the bag stretched what muscles she had in her arms to their limit. She swung the bag low to the ground, like it was filled with solid gold bars. Then she puffed her cheeks out and brought it up onto the desk in one single movement.

  Ada ticked in my ear like the second hand of a fast watch. “Ray…”

  I held the phone away from my mouth and I looked at the girl. She was standing back from the desk, hands clasped in front of her.

  “Ray!”

  I brought the phone up again. “Okay, okay,” I said. Then I moved it back down and nodded at the girl. “Look, lady, this isn’t how it works—”

  The girl didn’t speak. What she did was step back up to the desk and reach forward to unzip the bag. Then she pulled back the edges so I could get a good look at the contents.

  I looked. As I looked there was a pause in the clattering sound from the computer room.

  Inside the bag were solid gold bars. Maybe two dozen of them. They weren’t the usual kind, the kind of long, fat gold bricks that sat happily in the vaults of Fort Knox. These were about the size and shape of playing cards—if playing cards were half an inch thick and made of gold. Easier to move around than normal bars, but a bag full of them still had to weigh a hundred pounds, if not more. The girl was small, too. How she had even gotten the bag up the stairs I didn’t know, but it must have been slowly.

  The clattering from the computer room started up again.

  “I said I can pay,” said the girl.

  I said nothing.

  “I’m listening,” said Ada inside my head.

  3

  We sat opposite each other, me behind the desk in the chair that was specially reinforced, her in the chair on the other side. She sat perched on the edge and she kept her knees together and her hands clasped on her knees.

  Whoever she was, she had some kind of training. Finishing school at least. Something else, too. Her clothes were not flashy but they were expensive. Designer. Likewise the hair. Likewise the makeup. I figured the Egyptian princess look was part of it. Nothing about her was accidental.

  I wondered who she was, because she hadn’t said. In fact, she’d refused to say an awful lot, so far anyway.

  I considered again. Neither of us had spoken in four minutes and fifty seconds and those seconds just kept ticking on.

  I hadn’t said yes to the job yet, either. Just getting information out of her felt like a case in itself. She was fighting me and she wasn’t even trying to hide it.

  “So how do I get hold of you?” I asked.

  “You don’t,” she said, nothing moving except her lips. Then she blinked and she adjusted her fingers. “I’ll call every day until you have something to tell me.”

  I shook my head. She just blinked at me again.

  “I’m going to need a name,” I said.

  Her mouth twitched. “You have it already.”

  I simulated a sigh, on the inside. Ada was listening in from the computer room. I wondered what she made of it all.

  “The name I’m looking for is yours.”

  She shook her head. It was just two moves, one left, one right, and her hair swung in the same direction.

  “You don’t need my name,” she said. “I’ve paid up front. I’ll call every day. You just need to find Charles David and eliminate him.”

  Eliminate. Interesting choice of word. It made Charles David sound less like a person, more like a problem. Which was exactly why she’d chosen to use it now we were talking business talk.

  Charles David. Movie star. Big time, apparently. If I’d known who he was once, I didn’t know now. Being a robot had certain limitations, chief among them being one simple yet important fact.

  I couldn’t remember a damn thing.

  Inside my chest was a memory tape. It was a work of art, an act of miniaturization that would count as a scientific miracle if only it were used in more than just me. Still, it was something my creator was proud of inventing. But squeezing so much portable storage into such a small space was difficult and while Professor Thornton managed to do it, it came with a cost: the tape could only hold twenty-four hours of data before it came to the end of the spool and needed switching out for a new one. The old memory tapes—years’ worth of the things—were stored in a room hidden behind a concealed door on the other side of the office. That room was pretty big. Or I thought it would be pretty big.

  I didn’t remember.

  So every day I needed a new, blank tape. I was still me—my electromatic brain ran off of a template of Professor Thornton’s mind that was hardwired into my circuits, and there were plenty of basics I had on permanent silicon storage: I knew how to speak English, who Ada was, that I lived in Hollywood, California, and that the capital of Australia was Canberra.

  Actually, I wasn’t sure about Canberra, and now that I thought about it my knowledge of Australia was fuzzy at best.

  Otherwise? Poof. All gone. A pain in the ass for detective work, let me tell you. At least I had Ada to keep track of everything that I couldn’t.

  But for my new job? Actually, not remembering things was a nice little safety net. One we’d never had to test, of course, but still. As Ada said, ours was a private business.

  So when I looked at the photo that the girl had produced not from the leather bag but a pocket on the front of her dress, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that it was of the famous star of the silver screen, Charles David.

  The photo was color and the party on it was a sturdy-looking fellow with red-blond hair that was starting to thin on top but was still ample enough to make an effort with. He had a red beard with flecks of gray in it that were nicely symmetrical. The beard was well groomed but it was bigger than typical. The bottom of the thing touched at least the second button of his shirt below the neck.

  Charles David was looking somewhere out of shot with an expression best described as wistful and that was rarely seen, so I imagined, outside of the confines of a movie star publicity shot.

  As I took in the view of the target my mysterious client spoke.

  “Do you want this job or not?”

  I sighed on the inside. Ada kept on typing in the other room.

  “I’m going to need more than a photograph,” I said. “Maybe you don’t know how this works, and I’d say that’s a good thing. Nobody should, not really. I’m just providing a service that sometimes people decide they require. That’s none of my business. But if I’m going to carry out this job to the satisfaction of the both of us, I need information. Data. Remember, you’re talking to a walking computer bank. You need to feed me the right kind of information if you want the right kind of result.”

  The girl’s pulse was racing. She looked unsteady on the edge of the chair. I wanted to tell her to plant herself on it properly and was about ready to get up and help her off the floor when she seemed to snap out of it.

  “Look,” I said. “You said Charles David is missing. Why is he missing?”

  “I … I don’t know. He just is.”

  I shook my head. “He just is.”

  “I can give you an address.”

  “That’s a start.”
r />   “That’s all I can give you.”

  I ground something inside my workings. It sounded like a car trying to start on a cold winter’s morning.

  “That and the payment,” she said. She stood up and reached over the desk. From the same pocket the photo had come from she pulled a mechanical pencil and she used it to write something on the blotter in front of me. I watched her write it. Then I watched her stand up and put the pencil away.

  I looked at the address. It didn’t mean anything to me.

  “Where did you get the gold from?” I asked.

  Instead of giving me an answer, she said, “I’ll call tomorrow.” And then she was gone and I was left steering the desk.

  The telephone rang. I picked it up.

  “I guess our quiet patch has come to a conclusion,” said Ada.

  I rubbed my chin. The sound of steel rubbing steel was irritating, even to me, so I stopped. Another of Thornton’s mannerisms, no doubt.

  Huh. Thornton. It was a shame about him, and that was a fact.

  “Ray?”

  I snapped out of it and dropped my hand to the desk. “I don’t like it,” I said.

  “She paid up.”

  I looked at the athletic bag. It was still on the desk. It was still open. I reached forward and peeled the edge back like I expected the bag to be full of snakes. It was still full of gold. Lots of it. I reached in and picked up a bar.

  The ingot was perfect. I turned it over in my hands, recognizing the dull yellow sheen that the twenty-four-carat stuff had and that didn’t look quite real. I turned the ingot over and over again. It wasn’t marked. No stamp, no etching, no hallmark. I didn’t think that was right. It might even have been illegal. The small thin bar was gold and nothing but. I squeezed it a little between two fingers and made a little dent, like the thing was butter fresh out of a very cold refrigerator.

  “Where did she get it from?” I asked.

  Ada hissed like a middle-aged woman rocking back in an office chair with the late afternoon sun coming in through the blinds behind her might hiss.

  “Doesn’t matter. She’s paid up. This looks like our most profitable job yet.”

  I wasn’t so sure and I said so.

  “Raymondo, you worry too much.”

  “And you don’t worry enough, Ada.”

  “What was that I said about lightening up, Ray?”

  “Part of what worries me,” I said, “is that you’re not worried.”

  “Gold is clever, Ray.”

  I put the ingot down on the desk and eyed it and then I sat back in the chair. It creaked. “I get it,” I said. “Unmarked, untraceable. Gold is gold is gold.”

  “Could be a bag full of melted pocket watches, all we know.”

  I sniffed. It sounded like a Lincoln Continental with a dead battery. “That’s a lot of pockets.”

  “The only thing we know for sure, Chief,” said Ada, “is that she’s paid us for a job, which means we’d better get to it.”

  I had a vision of Ada relaxing and taking a long drag on a long cigarette, not a care in the world.

  I looked at the gold. I looked at the bag. I wondered how much it was all worth. It bothered me quite a lot and I said so.

  “Easy, Ray.”

  “Someone might want it back,” I said.

  There was a pause and a ticking sound.

  “Go on,” said Ada.

  I levered the chair back to the upright and kept going, reaching for the gold ingot and holding it up between an articulated forefinger and thumb. I turned around in the chair. There was a window behind me, a big one, and it was full of sunlight. So I held the bar up to that sunlight. I wasn’t sure what that was going to tell me but I was looking for options. The bar glinted a little, but not a lot.

  “The gold isn’t hers,” I said. “I mean, not personally. It can’t be. Nobody keeps gold like this.”

  “Lots of people keep gold,” said Ada. “Governments, for example.”

  “And big banks and Fort Knox,” I said. “Yes, I get it. But not like this. And not regular people.”

  “So she isn’t regular people.”

  I considered. Maybe Ada had a point. The girl had been young and pretty, dressed casually but in expensive gear and she had expensive hair. The bag itself, even without the gold stretching the seams, was top drawer. She wasn’t short of funds.

  She had also been strange. No name. No conversation. She was afraid but calm at the same time. If it was an act, it was a good one. She’d kept her cool.

  But it still didn’t fit. People didn’t have gold. Which meant she got it from somewhere. And the way she acted, I figured she didn’t want anyone to know she’d come calling.

  Which meant the gold not only wasn’t hers, she’d taken it without permission.

  Our mystery girl was a thief and that’s what I said to Ada.

  “She’s also our client now, Ray,” said Ada. “And she’s paid in advance.”

  “Someone might want it back,” I said again, making sure Ada hadn’t conveniently wiped over that part of the conversation on her great big magnetic memory tapes in the other room.

  “Ray, don’t tell me Thornton programmed you with a conscience?”

  I laughed. I’d been practicing. It sounded like two rocks going for a joyride in a clothes washer.

  “Maybe he did,” I said. “You know I think about him, sometimes.”

  For a moment it felt like Ada took a drag on a cigarette, and then the image was gone.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That was a terrible accident he had.”

  “It was.”

  “Very sad.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t worry. We sent flowers.”

  “Good.”

  “And you should keep your mind on the job, Chief. She gave an address. You should go take a look.”

  “Okay,” I said. I lifted the hat from my desk and I stood up. I kept a firm grip on the telephone because something was bothering me.

  “The girl…” I said.

  “What about her?”

  “She knew about me. She knew where to come.”

  “These are true facts.”

  “I’m going to have to find her and kill her, too, aren’t I?”

  “At least she paid in advance.”

  “Seems a shame.”

  “She made the choice to come here, Chief. We are obliged to take precautions.”

  Ada was right and I knew she was right but I still thought about it for a few seconds as I stood by the desk.

  “First things first,” said Ada. “You’ve got work to do.”

  I frowned. Then I hung up the phone and put on my hat and made sure it was straight. And then I headed out the door and locked it behind me.

  4

  It was a hot day. That’s why I liked LA. I was good with heat. Kept the circuits ticking. Some people said that this town got too much sun for its own good, but I didn’t remember where I had heard that. Maybe it was from Thornton. I could remember his pipe and his glasses and the heavy suit he always wore, and he seemed like the kind of guy who liked to stay inside. More echoes from his template, I guess. But although my electromatic brain might have been based on the mind of my creator, I wasn’t really him. I was my own robot.

  Me? I liked sunshine. Sunshine was good.

  I’d pulled out of the garage underneath the office and then decided to give the engine a little nap as I sat in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard along with what seemed like every other car in town. The traffic crawled forward in fits and starts. I sat tight. Maybe traffic was always like this and I just didn’t remember. I was in no hurry. As I rolled forward at a hundred miles a week I first counted all the clothes boutiques with women’s names that ended in an I. Then I counted all the colors of neon used in the signs for steak houses. There were a lot of both and I came to the conclusion that the citizens of this town liked dresses and they liked steak. Didn’t seem too bad a combination.

  After an ice age I re
ached the point where, according to the address the girl had written on my blotter and the idea of a street map I had embedded in my permanent memory, I was going to take a right and head toward the Hollywood Hills. Then I saw why traffic was so sticky.

  The street ahead was blocked in one direction by a string of big trucks parked at the curb. There were cones out and two traffic cops in dark glasses and white gloves played chess against each other with cars and buses as their pieces. I changed lanes and slid forward to get a look.

  Behind the trucks and the cops and the cones was the most famous picture house in town: Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The temple-like frontage was mostly covered in scaffolding, which would have been a disappointment to tourists if the trucks weren’t blocking the perfect photo op anyway.

  Of course. The special nationwide film premiere of Red Lucky was set for Friday, and along with the cast dancing the red carpet, Grauman’s was the star attraction. Today was Tuesday. They just had time to get the green and gold and red woodwork polished up. There were four trucks; the backs of two were shut but two were open. One looked like it was filled with cables, thin and fat and sizes in between, all wound around big reels, and behind those were wooden crates stacked to the ceiling. Equipment for the special film transmission, I guessed. The other truck was filled with enough rolls of red carpet to get to Mexico and maybe even back again.

  I wondered how the transmission was done. Probably something like television. Then I wondered why they hadn’t done something like that before and then I’d passed the theater and the traffic cops and Hollywood Boulevard opened up like an empty airport runway. I changed lanes back to where I had been then took the next left. Then I realized I’d gone one over so I took the next left and then the next right. With the car now pointed in the right direction I applied pressure to the accelerator and drove into the hills.

  As I wound my way to a higher altitude, I saw the Hollywood Sign looming first on my right, and after a few minutes it was more or less dead ahead. It looked big up there on the hill. It sat there almost reluctantly, just waiting for the spotlight to move off it so it could go do something more interesting. As I got closer it seemed to shrink somehow in that way that all landmarks big enough to be seen from afar shrink when you get closer. Then it was gone, hidden by the hills. As I headed toward the mystery address I was surrounded by nothing but winding tarmac and dry scrubby flora that clung to the hills like fluff on a teenager’s chin. Above me and the car the sky was very big and very blue.