High Tech / Low Life: An Easytown Novels Anthology

by Brian Parker

  He then let me go.

  “Fuck,” I wheezed, taking a deep breath. “They got us good.”

  “So it seems,” Shaun said.

  Details occurred to me. “Wait a damn minute. You find a dead body in my house and you don’t think to text me about it? Maybe warn me not to come! What the hell!”

  Shaun X shut the door behind us. “I was hoping to dispose of the matter before you arrived.”

  That was sweet, you know, in a psychotic sort of way. “How much danger are we in right now?”

  Shaun X turned to the body and headed toward it, proceeding to pull out a switchblade and start carving up the carpet around it. I winced as I’d loved that carpet. “Probably a lot. If this was a kill by Mr. White to set you up, then there’s no reason not to call an anonymous tip in to the police.”

  Almost as if on cue, an old battered vehicle drove up and parked in front of my house. A Caucasian man in a trench coat got out of it. He looked familiar and I wondered if I’d seen him in the news. Maybe the Pope assassination attempt when every NOPD detective was trying to get airtime. All I knew was it wasn’t Detective Zach Forrest. I’d had a few run-ins with the Easytown homicide detective before and he was the kind of fellow you didn’t forget—somehow immensely interesting as well as infuriatingly judgmental.

  “Well, crap,” I said, looking out the window to see the man approaching. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas?”

  “Distract him,” Shaun said, pulling out the late councilman’s cellphone. “At least for a few minutes.”

  “Oh, that’s brilliant,” I grunted, frowning. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “You asked,” Shaun replied.

  I stepped out the front door and intercepted the police detective on the way. “Are you a police officer?”

  “Detective Mark Morrissey and I’m here—” the man started to say.

  I interrupted him. “I want to file a complaint. That low-down, no-good, cheating bastard thinks that he can just toss me aside!”

  “Excuse me?” Mark started to say.

  I put my hands to my temple and did my best disaffected hysterical woman look. “I knew getting involved with a married man was a bad idea, especially a politician, but is that an excuse to treat me like a whore?”

  “Ms—” Morrissey started to say. “I know who you are. That seems like an accurate way to treat you.”

  I would have slapped him if not for the fact that he was a cop. “You brute! How could you?”

  That was a reason I both loved and hated the cops of New Orleans. They tended to be of a more conservative sort than the population as a whole, which inclined them to easy judgments and answers—especially about women in my profession. Even when I hadn’t been part of said profession in years.

  “Ms. Jeanette—”

  “Poole,” I corrected him, doing my best not to let him get a word in edgewise. “Belle Jeanette was my stage name and I will have you know that I never actually hooked up with clients. I was a dancer and in some countries without the Puritan values, I would be considered an artist.”

  “Ma’am—”

  A lot of that was complete crap, but I managed to keep the distraction going for almost ten minutes, which told me he wasn’t actually taking the call he’d gotten all that seriously. Unfortunately, he was taking it seriously enough that he finally did lose patience. “Ma’am, we had a call that there were shots fired in this neighborhood and that Councilman Blackwell was in your home. I have orders to investigate and if there’s any sign of him in your house then I’m going to arrest you.”

  “He’s not there,” I said, sounding appalled. “He left before you arrived.”

  The detective pulled out a small handheld computer the cops called the Pingback. “Oh, really?”

  I sucked in my breath.

  He tapped it a few times. “Well, it says he’s across town so it’s your lucky day.”

  I blinked a few times. “Do you think he’d take me back? Maybe he was too hasty dumping me? I mean, he said he preferred droids, though!”

  Morrissey stared at me. “It’d be less noisy.”

  It took all of my effort—again—not to slap him. He bid me a good day and returned to his car. I watched until he was out of site.

  When I stepped back into my house, X had removed the entire area of the carpet where Justin’s body had been and placed my couch in the spot. It was evenly spaced enough to look like an odd artistic choice versus something suspicious. There was no blood, no corpse, or any sign that my house had been a murder scene just a few minutes ago.

  “I’ve never been more grateful for the stupidity of the NOPD,” I said softly, shutting the door behind me. “Usually I have a lot more trouble getting them to go away, though.”

  I had the sneaking suspicion it was because I was a middle-aged woman who worked in Easytown’s sex industry. The three identifiers made me undesirable company for any cop in the city. They all seemed to think twenty-something girls from nicer parts of town should be begging for a moment of their time.

  “They’re fools,” Shaun said, exiting from the kitchen. “It’s taken care of.”

  “Not until that body is eaten by the gators in the Bayou,” I replied, growling. “Assuming there’s any left.”

  “Mr. Ladeaux has ways of disposing of bodies which aren’t quite so classical,” Shaun X said. “Even city councilmen.”

  “Will he turn on us for this?” I asked, honestly worried the crime boss would do so. After all, he’d been trying to move into legitimate business for some time.

  “It was a strike at him through you,” Shaun answered, pausing. “But I don’t think he’s the type of person who turns on his friends.”

  “He’s still a man,” I said, blinking. “It’s a rare one who won’t when things turn rough.”

  Shaun looked at me. “He didn’t when he found out what I was. He won’t on you.”

  I smiled, not caring about the implications of his statement. It surprised me. “How did you manage the trick with the cellphone?”

  He lifted up Justin’s phone. “You can download an app to bounce police tracking. I put it in the middle of an Easytown, kiddie robot bar.”

  I grimaced in disgust before grinning. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. What are we going to do now?”

  Shaun X smiled. “Mr. White is staying at the Grand Royale. I plan to make sure this is inside his room when Detective Forrest enters. I’ll avoid the usual orgy of evidence and make it look like a proper slip up.”

  “Neat and tidy,” I said, smiling. “Do you think it’ll work?”

  “If not, then Blackwell will simply be another missing person in a city full of them,” Shaun paused. “He was involved in covering up the whole clone murder thing last year. The city government carries a certain level of Ted Bundy-esque stink even now. No one will look very hard.”

  I nodded. “Then it’s all wrapped up.”

  “No,” Shaun X said, pausing. “The councilor was lured here by the Red Queen. It’s on his cellphone.”

  I couldn’t believe who was responsible.

  “Why, Polly?” I asked, holding a gun on her. It was equipped with a built-in silencer, illegal as hell, but so was what I planned to do with it.

  I found her in a cheap motel on the edge of the city, which didn’t take much effort on my part since the police weren’t the only people capable of pinging cellphones. It was a good thing she hadn’t bothered to download X’s app. I probably should have come with him, but I didn’t necessarily want to end this with murder. But I didn’t see any other way it was going to end, either. The motel manager had sold me the key and I suspected it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d called the police to clean up a body.

  Polly, who conspicuously hadn’t brought her daughter with her, was shocked at my arrival, but didn’t go for the gun on the bed beside the duffle bag of cash. Instead, she just backed away from both.

  “I should’ve expected you to outsmart t
he cops,” Polly said, looking once more at the gun before I maneuvered myself between it and her.

  “That’s not why I asked,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Did you kill Blackwell yourself or just lure him to my house?”

  Polly didn’t answer.

  “I see,” I sighed. “Just for the money.”

  “I work in a robot whore house,” Polly hissed, narrowing her eyes. “For a woman who kicks up twenty percent of her profits to a crime boss. A woman who dates a fucking clone.”

  I noticed it was the clone part which disgusted her more than the fact that he was a hitman. “So, you’re disgusted by the fact that I’m a criminal and that justifies you becoming a murderer. Where is your daughter, Polly?”

  “With my sister,” Polly said. “I’m going to start a new life. The money Mr. White offered me was enough to do it. She’ll be better off with her.”

  “You’re right,” I replied, debating what I was going to do. I kept the gun aimed at her heart. “I severely misjudged you. You were like my daughter.”

  “You were like my mother,” Polly said. “A selfish bitch too absorbed to know she was being used by a series of men.”

  “And women,” I amended. “You played me from the beginning, didn’t you?”

  I thought about all of our interactions over the years. I’d paid for her education, gave her room, gave her board, and let her keep far more money than my other employees. Polly was an excellent whore—she knew what I wanted and played the role.

  “I learned from the best,” Polly said, more or less confirming my observation. “If you ever want to escape Easytown, you have to do whatever it takes.”

  “No one escapes Easytown,” I rebuffed.

  I pulled the trigger three times.

  ABOUT C.T. PHIPPS

  C.T Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek.

  He’s the author of Agent G, Cthulhu Armageddon, Lucifer’s Star, Straight Outta Fangton, and The Supervillainy Saga.

  LINKS

  C.T. Phipps is a regular blogger on “The United Federation of Charles” http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/

  https://www.amazon.com/C.-T.-Phipps/e/B00L32LLDY/

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  Throw Aways

  by Brian Parker

  The gangers were at it again. Automatic weapons fire paused long enough for two loud explosions to rattle the windows of the first floor apartment that Javier rented for himself and his two sisters before starting up again.

  “They’re gonna bring the cops for sure this time,” he mumbled as he placed the last dish from dinner on a towel laid open on the counter.

  The Easytown gangers and dealers were always getting into scrapes, but they’d been in full-on combat with one another for several weeks now. Each night, they crept from whatever hole they’d slept in to kill one another. And then those things appeared, making the warfare much deadlier.

  Javier hadn’t seen them up close; people who saw them up close usually ended up dead. The gangers had altered their best soldiers with all sorts of tech, giving them athlete-fast reflexes and drone-like weaponry. The word on the street was that they’d gone crazy, their brains couldn’t handle all the torture they’d subjected themselves to as street docs lopped off limbs, strapped on experimental weaponry, and sent them back into the fight.

  Now the residents of Easytown had another nightmare to deal with.

  The pickpocket kissed his sisters lightly on the forehead and adjusted their blankets. He hated leaving them at night, but rent was due and he had to go to work. He stuck his head into the hallway quickly to make sure it was safe, then stepped outside. The apartment’s biometric scanner that controlled the electronic locks was garbage, so he locked the old deadbolt with a key. Living on the first floor, they were an easy target for thieves, murderers and rapists, but it was all they could afford, so Javier and the girls made the best of it.

  He passed several junkies on his way to The Lane, where he worked. Most of Easytown’s drug addicts usually fell into three categories: tweakers, deaders, and Dusters. The deaders injected heroin or huffed industrial chemicals. They weren’t a problem to anyone but themselves—unless you happened to be in their way when they fell over, dead. Dusters, sometimes called snufflers, huffed mind-altering drugs from time-released capsules they stuffed up their noses and then plugged into the virtual reality of the Cybersphere. Half the time, the stupid fuckers would forget to eat or drink anything because their virtual bodies didn’t need the stuff. A lot of them ended up dying after a week or so without water.

  But the tweakers, they were dangerous. They dropped liquid synthaine into their eyes for rapid absorption and were wildly unpredictable. Synthaine was also a mind-altering substance that made the user believe they were in a different place and time; anywhere but the present. Javier had gotten his ass beat more than once by a tweaker who thought he was something other than human.

  It was a quick, four-minute walk from the dangerous back streets of his neighborhood to the bright lights and relative safety of Jubilee Lane. NOPD patrolled The Lane heavily, using a combination of beat cops and drones, making Javier’s job much harder. These days, it seemed like there were more cops than ever and he hadn’t had a successful score in a week—that had to change tonight or his family would be out on the streets by morning if he couldn’t pay the rent.

  He canvassed the crowds standing in line at the thumper clubs under the watchful eyes of doormen with pulse rifles. Too risky, he thought, angling toward the robo-sex clubs further down The Lane.

  The sex clubs didn’t have the long lines of people waiting to get inside like the thumper clubs did. Their clients were ushered inside quickly, away from the watchful eyes of the street cameras and the prying eyes of the public. The patrons were usually so flustered—both coming and going—that they didn’t notice their wallet getting lifted until it was too late and Javier was gone.

  The teen saw his mark in front of Art’s Performing Center.

  An older man paced back and forth rapidly, glancing furtively at the door to the sex club and the promises of pleasures beyond his wildest dreams. He’d turn away, only to turn back again. Finally, he appeared to have made up his mind to go in and Javier rushed forward, bumping into him. His hand slipped inside the man’s coat pocket, pulling away a firm, rectangular lump. Bingo!

  “Watch where you’re going, old man,” Javier chastised him and then kept walking. A quick glance behind him showed the nervous man ducking inside the sex shop.

  He turned down an alley to check his score. “Goddammit!” he shouted, flinging away the phone that he’d snatched thinking it was a wallet. The damn thing was sure to be tracked; tech like that was no good to a street rat.

  As the night stretched on, Javier hadn’t gotten anything useful. He made the decision to try the lines at Club Megasonic. It was risky, and dangerous, but he needed a score.

  Near the end of the line, far away from the watchful eyes of the doorman, a man stared intently at four scantily clad women in front of him. Javier stood under a tree watching his new mark. The clear outline of a wallet in his back pocket decided it for the youth and he stepped forward.

  He expertly twisted the pocket’s button without raising an alarm and reached inside. The supple texture of expensive leather tickled his fingers and he pulled it free, dropping the wallet into his own pocket.

  Then his body went rigid with pain. He fell, convulsing.

  “Citizen, you are in violation of New Orleans Criminal Code, Article Four, Section Fifty-Four dash One Eight Six: Theft,” the monotone voice of a police drone announced from above. “Please remain calm until a uniformed officer arrives. Do not resist further.”

  “I’m not resist—argh!”

  Thousands of volts of electricity coursed through his body as the drone shocked him again. He was dimly aware of the c
rowd that had gathered around him parting. A man wearing a long, heavy raincoat and a ridiculously out of style fedora appeared.

  “Citizen, please stand back so you are not harmed,” the drone warned the newcomer.

  The guy took off his hat for identification and flashed a badge. “Detective Zach Forrest,” he said. “I’ll cuff the suspect and wait for transport.”

  For good measure, the drone shocked Javier again while it spoke to the detective.

  “Stop juicing him and let me put the handcuffs on,” the detective ordered. Mercifully, the drone extracted the barbs from his skin.

  “What were you thinking, kid?”

  Javier tried to explain to the cop that he needed money for food and rent to take care of his sisters, but the bastard didn’t care. He didn’t care that the cyborgs were ruining Javier’s normal routine. The only thing that seemed to interest him was the information about the ganger’s monstrosities themselves, not what they did to the local economy. The cop asked several questions about those things, still refusing to release the boy after he told him everything he knew.

  The eyes of the law were blind to Javier’s plight and his motives. The officer put him into a black-and-white that hauled him off to the Easytown Precinct Headquarters. By the end of his two-hours of processing he got a one-way ticket to Sabatier Island, the city’s prison island in the middle of Chandeleur Bay.

  Six long, miserable days later, the police released him from Sabatier with a court date and he returned to his apartment. The girls were gone, taken away to satisfy his debt to the landlord, and a new set of tenants slept in his bed.

  That day, the city’s uncaring police force turned a two-bit criminal into an enemy. When he finally stopped crying, Javier vowed that they’d regret arresting him and separating him from his sisters—especially that Forrest guy.

  He’d get that son of a bitch. He’d make him pay dearly for the girls’ suffering at the hands of… Well, he didn’t know who had them, but he’d make sure that they all paid.