Liquid Cool (Liquid Cool, Book 1)

by Austin Dragon

  "Driver," I said.

  Dot didn't see it, but I did. There was no reason we should have been in the sky-lane we were in. The guy was either lost or trying to gouge us on fares. We were heading for a bridge and I knew if I didn't get control of the situation fast, things were going to get very bad.

  "Driver," I repeated. "I need you to slow down and pull to the side."

  The driver either was ignoring me or had music playing in his ears.

  Dot saw the approaching bridge and screamed out. The driver reacted and glanced back at us.

  "Pull the cab to the side and stop!" I yelled.

  "What's happening?" he yelled back.

  Dot's eyes were closed tight, her teeth were clenched, and she was in the beginning stages of a violent fit.

  "Pull the cab to the side!"

  "Why? What's happening?"

  My anger took me, and I pulled my piece from my jacket and pounded on the glass partition between the driver and the passenger seats. I grabbed it and slid it to the right, so the only thing separating us was his seat. In the rearview mirror, I saw the driver's eyes had opened to the size of baseballs, as he knew what I was about to do. He jerked the steering wheel to the right and took the hovercab out of the main sky-lane to the side and stopped, just as I was about to yank his head back through the space between the front and back.

  "Move into the passenger seat!" I yelled.

  "Are you crazy? We're three hundred feet in the air..."

  "Put it in park!"

  He continued to protest, but I had already opened the passenger door and was out, my foot on the side steps. I clung to the hovercab as I looked down, then kept moving. We were over thirty stories up, hovering in the air, as every kind of hovercar and van whipped past us. I opened the driver side and was ready to pummel him, but he was already in the passenger seat.

  "Don't shoot me, mister. You can have the hovercab."

  I jumped into the driver seat and fastened the seat belt. "You bum! Why didn't you do what I said?"

  "I'm sorry."

  "I should shoot you."

  "You can take it."

  "I own a classic Ford Pony, free and clear. Why would I want your dirty ol' hovercab!"

  "You can take it."

  I disengaged the air-brake, looked into traffic, and pushed the cab into drive. I took the cab down to the lowest sky-lane—one story up, then moved to practically touching the ground.

  "Dot!"

  The driver looked at me and then to the backseat, where Dot was fighting a complete mental collapse.

  "It's okay. We stopped and we're close to the ground. We're close to the club, so it makes no sense to turn around now. Come up to the front and get in your position." I leaned towards the driver with menace and yelled, "Get in the back!"

  The driver leaped out of the seat and climbed over the seat into the back.

  Dot took awhile to calm down and slowly come out of it. Finally, she opened her eyes and looked around. The driver was quiet as a mouse, but watched both of us. Dot climbed into the passenger seat next to me and reclined it as far back as it would go, as the dumb driver moved behind my seat.

  "It's okay," I said. "I'm putting it in drive, but I'll go slow."

  The one thing drivers in this city hated more than hoverbikers was slow drivers. They hated them with a passion. They'd shoot them out of the sky or have someone else do it if they could legally get away with it. We were the slow driver. I never exceeded fifty miles an hour with an uproar of honking hovercars all around us. We were far from the fast lane, but it didn't matter. We were a moving hazard.

  As we passed under the bridge, Dot closed her eyes again and gripped the armrests with all her might. We were under, through, and out. Dot's eyes opened slightly, and her breathing started to get back to normal. When we were far enough away, I put it in gear, and we were off. I was up and into the fast lane. We made it to Booty Shakers in no time.

  Booty Shakers wasn't just a dance club. It was one of the platinum dance clubs, and you didn't set foot inside, unless you planned to dance all night long nonstop and have obscene amounts of fun. No one ever left there unsatisfied and when you did, you were ten to twenty pounds lighter from all that sweating on the dance floor.

  I pulled up to their valet service, self-park was not allowed, and immediately got out before the valet could get to the drivers' side and opened the back passenger door. I yanked the driver out.

  "Please don't shoot me. You can take it."

  I leaned close to him. "When my girlfriend was a little girl, she was a go-cart champion. Won races all over the country. At one of those races, they had this brand new course, the hardest course ever for the kiddies. One of the obstacles was a path that went under a bridge. Well, you can see where I'm going with this story. Those kiddies were going around the course at 80 miles per hour. My girlfriend was in the lead, but she had to win and pushed her go-cart to 100 miles per hour. Her go-cart hit a bump and jumped the course, just as she went under the bridge. She was decapitated. Lucky for her and me, there was a medical team right there, and they were able to save her. Her neck and all down to her shoulder is bionic. So you can imagine what such a trauma like that would do to a child, especially when you clearly remember your head lying on the ground and your entire body in the go-cart ten feet away from you. You can imagine what going under any bridge as an adult could do to you. You could imagine what a driver not stopping his dirty hovercab and ignoring her boyfriend's call to pull to the side and stop could do."

  "Mister, your point has been made in the clearest possible way. There's no charge for the fare."

  Dot didn't want to go in the club, and she was in no mood for dancing or any kind of fun.

  "Let's just go inside and call another cab," I said.

  "Cruz, I'm not going to fall for it. I'm not dancing. I want to go home."

  "I understand. Let's go inside, and I'll call Flash. He has a spotless cab, and he's probably on duty now."

  "Cruz, it's not going to work. I'm not dancing."

  "Yeah, I know. We'll go in and call Flash."

  "Where's your mobile?"

  "I left it at home. It's date night. Where's yours?"

  "I'm not falling for it, Cruz. I'm not dancin' and I want to go home."

  "Let's call Flash then."

  We walked inside, and I immediately told the bouncers we were only going inside to make a call. They were fine with that, as long as we paid full price. I handed them my pre-paid tickets, and we were in. Booty Shakers first got you with the beat. The music was so loud the sound waves practically levitated you up in the air, and the beat forced your feet to move whether you wanted to or not.

  Dot and I were dancing maniacs. We each had our own separate hobbies, but this was our hobby as a couple and we were good at it. My Pops always said that couples last longer when there is something that they can do together (besides the obvious one). Not something that either does separately, but that you do together, prefer to do together, something fun. For Dot and I, it was ripping up the dance floor.

  Dot had forgotten she was not going to dance. The music had transported us to the dance floor with the hundreds of other people on one of their many football stadium-sized floors. Through the night, we got to display our dance prowess with all our favorite moves: the Cold Lampin, the Dead Woman's Hips, the Flava Wave, the Peter Perfect, the Perfect Peter, the Honey Dipper, the Sucka Sipper, the Big Dippa, the Gettin' Busy... We could do the Booty Rumble, the Swing Slide, the Mad Robot, the Beat Box, the Devo, the Michael Moon Walker, even the Tango Terminator—old and new. We knew them all.

  This was how I passed my first night out of the box, with my girl, China Doll.

  Chapter 40

  Box

  WHEN I WAS IN THE BOX, I did more than just assimilate data. I had to think big picture. Thinking about being different is far different from being different. I couldn't yell "oh, snaps" one day and ask to do life all over. It was a commitment, and I intended to be the best
detective out there—I had to be that internally arrogant—as I had done with restoring classic hovercars. I could only do that by knowing more and doing more than the other guy. Strangely, the two professions were similar in that way. It was about knowledge. Knowing those factoids that no one else knew. Being able to see connections that not even a computer could see. As a kid, I learned every relevant and irrelevant factoid about hovercars, beyond what could possibly be known, which is why my name was always bandied about in the same breath when people asked, "Who'd you recommend for my hovercar restoration gig?" Like me or hate me, everyone agreed on one thing: I knew my hovercars. I had to get to that level with this profession.

  That's why I visited Compstat Connie. She was a true data Einstein—could see the higher cosmic mathematics, but couldn't do the basic arithmetic. Well, that myth about Einstein was never true. He could do basic math just fine. And Compstat Connie could balance her checkbook just fine, but she possessed the ability to see through the data and even she admitted, if she wasn't careful, she'd end up as one of those sidewalk sallies, talking to herself on the corner. The human mind craves order. It seeks it out, even when there is none. It swears by it even when it is an illusion. That's why those optical illusion tricks work; your mind wants order. Connie could see the real connections in the data and that's why I visited. She solved my whole case in five minutes and didn't even know it. My two weeks in the box was to figure how she made those connections. She did it in five minutes. It took me ten days to figure it out, but I did.

  Here I was. It was funny; I called my little mini-isolation retreat in my own place, the Box, and came across my first step in my Easy Chair Charlie case by the revelation of a scumbag detective, named Box.

  It may never have been sunny in Metropolis, but sometimes, the bright neon lights were as bright as the direct sunlight as you came around certain sky-lanes. I zipped along the fast lane in my red Pony, this time wearing my open knuckle driving gloves. I wore them when I wanted to be especially serious about my driving. I wore them to keep me in the right frame of mind, when I needed to do some real hovercar driving. Sometimes, my instincts whispered in my ear I was being followed, so I accepted it was true. With the madness of hovertraffic, someone could tail you for hours, and you would never know. It wasn't like in ancient days when cars were on the ground, and there was two-way traffic—maybe multiple two-way traffic lanes. Now, it was the equivalent of going from a regular chessboard to tri-dimensional chess. You could hide and follow someone from above them or below them, besides just following directly behind. Only the government and corporatists had the means to pay for fancy anti-tailing security. For the Average Joe, you were on your own.

  Whiskey Way was where I was going. Another low-end, high-crime town I would have preferred not to go anywhere near.

  Before I decorated my own offices, I did a tour of all the detective firms in the city. They all fell into two categories: the high-end, one-hundred man firms that looked and smelled like a high-end legal practice, and the bottom-end, small firms that always seemed to share space with some bail bonds outfit. There seemed to be no in-between, and I immediately planned to establish myself in that space, along with taking all kinds of clients—private persons, government, and corporate. Those two things were to make me unique, and I desperately needed to be unique in this industry to have any chance to survive.

  Box was a one-man outfit, nothing to stand out from any other in the Yellow Pages, but he had a reputation as a licensed private eye, who'd do any job you wanted, as long as the price was right. "Any job" was code for illegal. Those who knew the detective biz called him a "scumbag." I had no reason to doubt them.

  His offices were on the fifth floor of a business tower in Whiskey Way. Across the hall was a bail bonds office, and as a result, there were the smelliest, grungiest place with people hanging around. Since it was a common set-up for low-enders, it must have been a mutually beneficial situation for all involved.

  I pushed open the front door to enter; the interior was dim and dank. Box's office was not even an office, but a half-office. The other half he shared with some other detective firm. I could see a haze of cigarette smoke hanging near the ceiling.

  "What do you want?" a male voice asked.

  My eyes finally made out the figure of a man, standing at a file cabinet, who turned and was looking at me.

  "Looking for Box," I answered.

  "You got an appointment?"

  "Do I need one?"

  "That didn't answer my question."

  "I'll go to another detective then, where the customer service is a bit more customer-friendly."

  "Don't do that. Wait there."

  The man closed the file cabinet and disappeared, or I couldn't see him anymore, as I stood there continuing to glance around.

  "He'll see you." The man had returned.

  I stepped forward, even though I had no clue where I was going; it was that dark.

  "The office in the back with the light on," the man said.

  This was some kind of office. It seemed the lack of light was to hide all the unsightly clutter. I walked back to the only place that had light. I stopped and peeked into the office. There, seated behind a desk, was Box.

  "Box?" I asked, even though I knew it was him, but he didn't know I had been checking up on him.

  "You know it's me, so why are you asking?"

  I stepped inside and didn't ask as I took a seat.

  He cracked his knuckles, then put one hand on his desk, while the other hand was out of sight behind the desk. I put both of my hands on the desk.

  "I came to hire you for information."

  "Information? I'm a detective. I don't give information. Who are you?"

  "I'm a detective," I said.

  His unfriendly face turned to a solid frown.

  "Why are you here?"

  "I need a bunch of information from you, and I'm happy to pay for the information if I have to."

  "What information?"

  I held my left wrist to my face and looked at the electronic wrist pad strapped to my inside forearm. "A Mr. Ergot and his assistant, a Mr. Peri."

  I looked up, and Box's frown was now accompanied by the squinting of his eyes.

  "What did they hire you for?" I asked.

  "Detectives don't reveal any details about clients."

  "Since both of them are dead, murdered, they won't mind," I said.

  Box watched me closely. I could see his scumbag mind racing around trying to figure out how much I really knew.

  "I don't know those names."

  "Never meet with them?"

  "No."

  "Never talked to them?"

  "No."

  "They didn't hire you?"

  "No."

  "You didn't take a taxi to Mr. Ergot's office in The Wharf District?"

  "No."

  "You didn't deposit a check from Mr. Ergot in your bank account?"

  "No."

  "You weren't at the scene of Mr. Ergot's murder? Where someone fed him to his own piranhas."

  "No."

  "And threw his assistant, Mr. Peri, to become one with the pavement after a sixty-story fall."

  "No."

  "You didn't receive a call from a..." I looked at my electric notepad, "Red Rabbit?"

  "How the hell do you know that?" Box sat up straight. "Mr. Cruz, I don't know what you're talking about."

  I smiled. "So, you do know who I am."

  "Get out of here."

  "I want that information. How much money do you want?"

  "Nothing from you."

  "Why do you have to be like that?"

  "You can't spend money if you're dead."

  "Did you tell Mr. Ergot and Mr. Peri to be especially careful around this Red Rabbit character?"

  "I got paid."

  "I knew it! You got my brother killed!"

  The voice behind us startled us so completely that we both jumped up from our chairs and turned. A man in a white suit f
ired at Box. I dived to see Box collapse to the ground and turned to see the stranger pointing his gun at me.

  By this time, it was all reflex. I flicked my wrist. Pop! The shot hit him in the face.

  The man in the white suit fell back out of the office, his gun flying from his left hand. He stopped his fall, snatched his gun in mid-air with his right hand, and fired at me.

  Oww!

  I can't remember if I screamed out loud, like a girl, or if it was my inner voice, but the blast brushed past my cheek.

  I was mad now! Four times I was shot at! Enough!

  I rolled away from the doorway as I grabbed my own piece from my jacket and jumped up. Now, it was my turn. I fired multiple times and heard a male scream and then footsteps running away. I shot out the light in the office and ducked to the floor. All I heard was more shots and then the footsteps running further away.

  I waited, crouched on the ground. More shots flew into the room. Then, I heard a beep and feet running again. The elevator had arrived, and the man in the white suit ducked into it. With these old towers, there was only one elevator, and undoubtedly thought he was getting away scot-free, but I knew something he didn't.

  I had psychologically prepared myself to get shot. I didn't prep myself to get grazed by laser blasts. It was like someone took a dull razor and tried to slash the side of my face with it. It hurt bad. But that wasn't why I was mad as I found the exit window. I was thinking about Box. He was a scumbag, but that didn't mean he deserved to get killed. I saw the body of the guy who "greeted" me in his rude way on the ground, motionless. He didn't deserve to be dead either. Being a scumbag or rude was not a reason to get killed. Maybe they weren't dead, but I gave chase under the assumption they were. That man in the white suit was mine. I knew I shot him in the face, so I don't how he was walking around. For all I knew, he had an inorganic face with no nerve endings from some freak accident. So many people had so many inorganic and bionic parts they weren't born with. You could never tell these days.

  Old towers like this had maintenance sections on the lower floors. It's where the technicians did their communications, cybernet, power, and any other electrical work that needed to be done. It also had back entrances, straight to the street.