Touch of the White Tiger

by Julie Beard

  “Oh, my God, he’s not dead, is he?”

  Lola cackled and put her hands on her plump hips. “Don’t you wish?”

  I stopped next to Mike and looked down at the unconscious figure with dread. “What did you do to him?”

  Mike rubbed the knuckles on his right hand, then blew on them as if they were lucky dice. “You do not want to know.”

  “Whatever it was, I should thank you. I think.”

  “Freeze!” The shouted command came from the upstairs porch. In unison, we looked up to find a Chicago police officer with a fazer aimed our way. “Don’t move or I’ll shoot.”

  He carefully walked down the steps, staring at us over his extended arms, two hands clamped on the small but potentially deadly weapon. A second social services transporter followed, dressed in orange like his partner on the ground. When he spotted his colleague, he hurried down the stairs past the cop and knelt by his friend.

  “Joe, you okay?”

  The bald transporter blinked open his eyes, then pointed toward the shed. “The kid’s back there.”

  The second transporter hurried after Lin. I tried to follow, but the officer shouted at me to stop. When the transporter came out with Lin kicking and screaming in his arms like a whirling dervish, I shouted to the police officer, “He has no right to take her, Officer. She’s my foster child. This is kidnapping!”

  “He has a warrant to remove her from the premises,” the cop shouted in reply. “No temporary foster child can stay in the home of a suspected murderer.”

  The transporter had almost reached the garden studio door. From there it would be an easy exit through the lower level and out to the street. Then Lin would be gone, perhaps forever.

  She seemed to realize the same thing. She reached out with her wraithlike arms over the man’s shoulders and wailed, “Angel! Don’t let them take me!”

  Acting with a mother’s instinct that I’d hoped I had but had never truly felt before, I ran after her, not knowing or caring whether 150-thousand volts of electricity from the cop’s fazer were about to painfully zigzag through my body.

  “Stop!” he shouted. “Last warning!”

  I ignored him, and only faintly heard the sound of fighting behind me as I barreled in on the beast who was stealing my girl.

  “Let go of her, you creep!”

  Startled, the transporter loosened his grip on Lin, and she crawled into my arms like a monkey. I quickly lowered her and gave the transporter a knock-out punch. I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t grab Lin again.

  When he keeled over, I turned and found her staring at me wide-eyed. I thought she was afraid of me, but her face shuddered with gratitude. She rushed into my arms and I held her tight, feeling as if I had just taken my first breath of air after nearly drowning.

  “I’m so sorry, kiddo.” I looked up and found Lola aiming the fazer at the cop, whose hands were raised in submission. Mike was finishing off a tight knot on a rope binding the bald transporter’s hands behind his back.

  “Officer, I’m sorry about this,” I said, “but we can’t let you take Lin until I speak to her caseworker, Harriet Gross.”

  Not waiting for an answer, I engaged my lapel phone. Lin wouldn’t release her death grip on my waist, so we awkwardly wandered like conjoined twins back toward the fishpond while I had an intense conversation with Harriet. I explained, cajoled, begged, pleaded, and finally threatened, but to no avail. By the time we concluded our conversation, I had to find a way to tell Lin that she did, indeed, have to go.

  “Officer, Harriet Gross wants to speak to you,” I said numbly. “Can you call her at DCFS headquarters?”

  Lola reluctantly lowered the fazer, looking at me as if I’d just stabbed Lin in the back, which I suppose I had. Frowning, Mike began to untie the one transporter, then went to revive the other.

  I sat down on the stone bench in front of the pond, pulling Lin into my lap. She clutched at my back, and together we took in hitching breaths, letting out sounds of grief we couldn’t stifle. We hadn’t known each other long—only a month. But we knew each other well enough to know we were two lost souls who needed each other.

  Sometimes at night I would lay down beside her and listen to her short breaths. I’d hear my own heart beat and savor her warmth. If she woke, she’d nestle into my arms with more abandon than she could when she was awake. It was hard to tell which one of us hugged harder. Slowly, silently, she was becoming a part of me. How could I let her go?

  I pulled away far enough to press my cheek to hers. Our tears mingled between our flushed cheeks. She smelled like a little girl, and I inhaled that innocence, imbedding it in my memory. I stroked her hair, my desire to protect her burning my insides raw.

  “Sweetheart, I’m sorry,” I whispered in her ear. She scrabbled closer, pressing her head to my chest. I kissed the silky black hair on top of her head. “Harriet Gross says you have to leave…but only until I can clear my name.”

  “No!” she squealed, wriggling closer to my heart.

  “If I don’t let you go now, I’ll lose you forever. If I don’t cooperate, they’ll judge me as an unfit parent. I have to let you go now so I can keep you in the long run. I want you to be my forever daughter, Lin, but first, I have to prove my innocence for a crime I didn’t commit. Do you understand? Please, tell me you understand.”

  Desperate, I took her face in my hands and forced her to look at me. The light in her shining dark eyes had died. She had shut down on me.

  “Please,” I whispered, tears pouring down my cheeks. “Please tell me you understand. That you’ll wait for me to come get you again. I will. I swear to you.” She watched me without judgment or sorrow. “Lin? Do you understand?”

  Suddenly, tears welled in her eyes again and coursed down her high, flat cheeks. Her frozen look thawing, her eyes, lit by the faintest of sparks, met mine. She was hurt, angry, but still trusting, just barely. She nodded. That was enough. God, that was a miracle. I let go a shuddering breath and pulled her into my arms, rocking her back and forth.

  “Oh, my sweet girl. My sweet, sweet girl. Thank you. I won’t let you down. I swear.”

  Harriet cursed a blue streak on the phone when she found out that the transporters had acted like men in black, bursting in without showing the warrant for Lin. The breach in protocol, topped off by Harriet’s esoteric bitch-slapping of the patrolman who’d allowed it, kept me from having my bond revoked. The cop wanted to keep the whole incident as quiet as I did.

  Unfortunately, he wouldn’t leave without a few ounces of flesh, or rather many pounds of it. He insisted on taking Lola down to headquarters for questioning when he found out she had a rap sheet as long as the Great Wall in China. After all, she was the one who had held him at gunpoint, a no-no under any circumstances.

  “Ta-da, dahling,” Lola sang as the cop escorted her out the front door, looking like Methuselah the Circus Clown but acting like Queen Elizabeth III, flipping a little clam-wave with one hand over her shoulder. Her flaming red nails and glittering costume jewelry winked in the sunlight as Officer Unfriendly escorted her to his squad aerocar, to the delight of the news crews still staked out in front of my apartment. As they piled into the car, she triumphantly declared, “I shall return!”

  I had no doubt of that. Lola knew the criminal justice system like the back of her hand. My birth mother’s histrionics had humiliated me as a child. Now she made me proud. I didn’t even care that this scene would be repeated ad nauseam on the local newscasts.

  Mike and I were just happy that she could escort Lin to police headquarters, where Harriet would be waiting for her. I wouldn’t even allow myself to think about what sort of temporary foster home Lin would land in. Harriet promised me it would be a good one. Lin was, after all, a high-profile case since she had been part of the group of Chinese girls I’d rescued from the Mongolian Mob. The media would be following her fate, and that was some reassurance.

  In any event, I could waste no more time on tears. I had to
prove my innocence. I headed for the front door before the gaggle of reporters shooting footage of Lola’s grand exit turned from the receding cop car back to me. Three enterprising journalists had staked out positions by the door while Mike and I waved goodbye at the curb. One of them was Rodney Delaney.

  “Oh, great.” I tugged hard on Mike’s sleeve. “Let’s disappear while we still have half a chance.” We made a beeline toward the front stoop. I pushed past Delaney, who had a frenzied, piranha look in his bloodshot eyes. It had been a while since he’d had a scoop. If he didn’t produce soon, his reporting contract might not be renewed.

  “So, Baker, they got your old lady. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?”

  Something made me glance down. “You’ve got mustard on your tie, Delaney. You better cut back on the nitro dogs. They’re turning your brain to mush.” When he looked down, I turned and nearly crashed into two slender young men dressed in white who had just come down the stairs. I couldn’t tell what company they worked for and didn’t care.

  “Your delivery is complete, ma’am,” one of the guys said, holding out an electronic clipboard. “Put your print here.”

  “I don’t understand. How did you get inside?”

  “The door was open,” he replied. “We thought you left it open for us.”

  “I don’t even know what you—” I stopped abruptly when Delaney pushed his way back into my personal space.

  “Here,” I said to the delivery guy and I pressed his touch pad with my thumb, then yanked Mike into the foyer and slammed the door shut.

  “Whew!” I said. “I can’t believe we left the door open. Let’s find out what I just signed for.”

  I bounded up the stairs two at a time and viewed my quiet, empty flat with confusion. “What on earth did those guys deliver?”

  “Baker,” Mike said a strange voice.

  “Yes?”

  “I think I know.”

  I turned around and followed Mike’s wary gaze to the corner shadows. How on earth I had walked past this was beyond me.

  “Good Lord,” I said, dragging the words out in wonderment.

  There sat a middle-aged man who had neatly cropped, slicked back auburn hair with a dusting of gray at his temples, a long, amiable face and handsome, hooded eyes. Lean and graceful, he would look good in a suit, but presently sat in tailored pajamas, with a hip-to-toe white plaster cast encasing what was presumably a broken left leg. It was propped up with a foot pedestal, part of his old-fashioned wheelchair, the hand-operated kind used a hundred years ago.

  “Who in the hell are you?” I finally managed to spit out.

  He gave me a folksy, confident smile, mostly with his eyes, which contained just a flicker of seduction, and handed me a business card. “L. B. Jefferies, here on assignment.”

  The name rang an ominous bell. I studied the business card. It read:

  L.B. Jefferies

  Played by James Stewart in

  Rear Window

  Compliments of AutoMates, Incorporated

  “Lights! Grid 4!” I shouted, and the southeast quadrant of soft-fill ceiling lights surged to life. I stepped closer for a better look. “I’ll be damned. It is Jimmy Stewart.”

  “Who?” Mike said. He wasn’t a film aficionado. He wouldn’t have recognized an actor if he’d won last year’s Academy Award, much less a star from the twentieth century.

  There hadn’t been a U.S. President in the last seventy-five years who wasn’t a former movie star. The last politician to take the nation’s top spot who didn’t hail from Hollywood was President John Turner, a computer geek turned billionaire turned senator. In 2029, he was booted out of office by Cool Funk Indigo, a reality-TV child star turned rapper turned senator. Of course, by then Cool Funk preferred to use the name on his birth certificate and took his place in history as President Bufford Johnson. But the power of the entertainment industry was lost on someone as inwardly directed as Mike.

  “This is a compubot,” I rasped, unable to hide my impatience. “And one designed to look exactly like the old movie star, Jimmy Stewart. He played the role of ‘Jeff’ in an Alfred Hitchcock thriller about a magazine photographer who breaks a leg. He’s stuck in his apartment and spends so much time snooping on his neighbors through his high-powered camera lens that he discovers one of his neighbors has murdered his wife.”

  Mike digested this, then exhaled a rare, judgmental sigh. “Angel, did you order him?”

  “No!” I snapped, then caught myself. It was a question Mike had every right to ask. I had employed a Humphrey Bogart compubot for years as a lover, I’m embarrassed to admit. I was lucky enough to get a Compubot Classic because I’d done a retribution job for an AutoMates executive. He knew about my obsession with classic movies and was grateful enough to supply me with a top-of-the-line companion gratis. Last month, after falling for Marco, I’d deprogrammed my relationship with Bogie. I guess some wise guy in the supply department of the robotics firm thought I might be getting desperate about now. “Okay, that’s it! Jimmy, I’m sorry, but you’re outta here. Speaker phone, dial AutoMates, Incorporated.”

  Sometimes I preferred the house omnisystem over my lapel phone. Especially when I was in the mood to raise my voice. But instead of blasting a customer service representative, I found myself pacing the room, arms crossed, as I battled my way through the company phone directory.

  “We’re sorry, but all our representatives are busy,” a sickeningly sweet female voice intoned. The women in these inclusive corporation answering systems always sounded like reformed vampires who sucked on sugar instead of blood, and the men sounded like defrocked television preachers.

  Unfortunately, these days the “If you speak English…” option with international companies was usually nine or ten. If you got impatient and called out “zero” for the operator, which didn’t exist, you’d be punished by going back to the beginning of the greeting and then find out the option menu had grown to twenty.

  Actually, it was possible to reach a live human being at AutoMates. I’d accidentally done it before. I think it happened when I won a Hollywood trivia contest while I was on hold.

  “If you speak Spanish,” the orgasmically contented voice intoned, “press 1.”

  I began to pace. From the corner my eye, I caught Jimmy trying to wheel himself closer to the window.

  “Don’t even think about it!” I admonished him. “Some reporter will get you on camera and the next thing I know the newscasts will be announcing that I’m sex-starved and emotionally incapable of a real relationship.”

  I paused a moment when I realized that wasn’t far from the truth.

  “If you speak Cantonese, press 3,” the sugary voice dripped from the omnipresent speaker phone. “If you speak Mandarin, press 4.”

  “Come on, come on,” I muttered. I thought English was 8, but if I was wrong, I’d have to go back to the beginning of the menu.

  “If you speak German—”

  “Eight!” I shouted, unable to wait any longer.

  “Yo!” a hip voice replied, “Watchu want?”

  I pounded my forehead with a palm. I’d chosen American slang. Close enough. “Give me customer service,” I said, swallowing my frustration.

  I spent the next ten minutes being bounced from option to option, then realized the double-murder case I’d been embroiled in would turn cold before I got through to the right person.

  “Hang up,” I commanded the phone system and sank into the couch. “Jimmy, it looks like you’re stuck here for a while. And if you’re going to stay, you’re going to have to make yourself useful. What can you do?”

  “Well, I excel at two things. One is spying. The other is—”

  “I don’t think I need to hear about the second thing,” I interjected. “I don’t exactly look like Grace Kelly, do I?”

  “Well, sweetie,” he said, eyeing me speculatively, “you look pretty darned good to me.”

  “Save it for Gigi over there.” I tipp
ed my chin in the direction of my Personal Listening Device, a head-and-shoulders model stashed in the corner.

  PLDs looked like manikins, but had pliable synthetic skin and contained interpersonal reactive programming that made them good listeners. They weren’t nearly as sophisticated as AutoMates, but they were an affordable alternative for lonely people on a budget.

  Increasingly, PLDs were taking the place of compubot dating services and psychotherapists. People loved having a pseudo human who would listen to them kvetch without interrupting, except for the occasional preprogrammed, “Oh, my!” and “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I thought PLDs were a pathetic new addition to our increasingly isolated electronic society. But I’d received this one as a freebie at a CRS convention. With blond hair and pink lipstick, it looked vaguely like my wicked foster sister, Gigi, so I’d kept it to amuse myself. I’d turned it on maybe once.

  A PLD was one thing. A resident compubot was another. I glanced at Jimmy, wondering how I could take advantage of his unexpected arrival. I noticed two connected cylinders in his lap. “What’s that?”

  “Binoculars.” He raised them and put them to his eyes by way of show-and-tell.

  “Did you get them from a museum? Or are they just pretend?”

  “They work,” Jimmy replied defensively.

  “Then get over to the window and keep an eye out for trouble. But be discreet.”

  I could just imagine the headlines if a reporter caught sight of an AutoMate at my window: Sex-Starved Murder Suspect Hires Disabled Gigolo.

  Jimmy wheeled himself to the edge of the couch and raised his binoculars, scanning the crowd still mingling on the street below. “So exactly what kind of trouble should I be looking for?”

  I sauntered to his side and surveyed the scene from over his shoulder. At the same time Marco pulled up to the curb in his aerocruiser. He stepped out of the car and fended off a swarm of reporters as he headed toward my door.