by Jeff Edwards
A split second after I rounded the corner, the longshoreman night manager stepped into his office and closed the door.
I walked around the end of the counter and rapped on the door with the barrel of the machine pistol.
“I didn’t tell them nothing.” His voice was muffled by the cheap wooden door.
“Then what are you hiding from?”
“I’m calling the cops.”
“What are you going to tell them? That you sent someone up to my room to murder me in my sleep, and I had the nerve to get pissed-off about it?”
“I didn’t send nobody nowhere.”
“But you told them where to find me, didn’t you?”
“Go away,” he said. “I don’t want no trouble.”
“Open the door. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Go away. I got a gun in here.”
“Open the door or I’m going to start shooting through the wall.” I knocked on the sheetrock with the end of the silencer. “Sounds pretty thin,” I said. “Think it’ll stop bullets?”
Actually, it probably would stop the machine pistol’s ceramic flechettes, but he didn’t have to know that.
“The door ain’t locked,” he said.
“I didn’t ask you if it was locked. I told you to open it.”
The door opened a couple of centimeters.
“Open it the rest of the way, then back up slowly.”
He did as he was told, backing away from the open door with his hands held out to show that they were empty. There was no sign of the gun he had mentioned.
I glanced around the room before stepping inside.
Longshoreman blinked several times rapidly. “What do you want?”
“Two things,” I said. “First, is there a back way out of here?”
He jerked his chin toward a metal door on the other side of the desk. “What else?”
I dropped the key chip on the desk top. “I want my key deposit back. I’m checking out.”
CHAPTER 24
I hopscotched across the darkened parking lot, using parked cars and shadows for cover. I didn’t see any sign of Bobby Dean, if there was such a person. I had no doubt that Ryan had backup, but I didn’t trust his version of the details. For all I knew, there were six of them, and none was named Bobby Dean.
On the far side of the parking lot, I stopped in the shadow of a coffee shop. A purple neon sign on the front of the building spelled out Knick Knack Kerouac in misshapen lettering designed to resemble graffiti. Cute.
I stood for a second, scanning the area for Ryan’s buddies, and considered my next move. I could keep walking. I didn’t really need to talk to this Bobby Dean. On the other hand, I wanted to see that trid. Besides, Bobby had come to pay me a visit in the night; it seemed only polite to return the favor.
I walked a block North on La Brea, turned left on Waring, walked another block, and turned left again on Detroit. I watched the shadows carefully, paranoia riding my shoulders like a pet demon.
The stretch of Melrose leading back toward the Velvet Clam was reasonably well lit. I stuck to the middle of the street to avoid being silhouetted by the streetlights.
Bobby was crouched in the shadow of a dilapidated brown Chrysler, eyes glued to the front door of the Velvet Clam.
Surprise. Bobby was Bobbie.
I swept the area with my eyes, looking for more of Ryan’s friends. Nobody. Just Bobbie.
I crept up behind her, machine pistol ready if she turned around.
Sneaking up on her didn’t exactly require ninja-like stealth. The idiot had brought her jam-box to an ambush.
I set the travel bag down quietly.
A machine pistol identical to Ryan’s lay on the sidewalk beside her.
She was so wrapped up in watching the hotel and listening to her music that she didn’t even notice when I picked up her weapon. I flicked on the safety and stuck it in my waistband.
A gentle tug on the trigger of Ryan’s machine pistol kicked on the laser sight. I pointed the green dot at the fender directly in front of Bobbie’s face.
She spun around, scrabbling frantically for her gun. She stopped when she realized that the green dot was dancing on the bridge of her nose. She sat down on the sidewalk and pulled the earphones out of her ears.
I could hear the music now, distant sounding and tinny. I didn’t recognize the song, but the band was called Albino Safari, a white supremacist slash-rock group popular with skin heads and other Nazi wannabe’s.
“Are you Bobbie?”
The woman nodded quickly.
“Move away from the car,” I said, “into the light.” I drew a path for her on the cement with the laser.
She started to get up.
“No. Don’t stand up. Just slide over.”
Bobbie planted her hands on the sidewalk and crabbed sideways in sort of a scoot-shuffle.
“There. That’s good.”
She settled to the sidewalk.
I got a better look at her in the light. She was a little older than Ryan, but not much.
Her left eye was artificial, a chromed steel sphere with a glowing red LED for a pupil. The left side of her head was shaved, her scalp tattooed with black zebra stripes. The tattoo flowed out of sight down the left side of her neck and re-emerged from the left sleeve of her black tee shirt. It probably covered the entire left side of her body. The hair on the right side of her head was a stiff ruff, cut and teased to resemble the mane of a zebra, and dyed to compliment her tattoo.
She wore tight red jeans and a wide black leather belt with silver swastika-shaped ornaments. The laces of her ultra-white Korean running shoes were threaded through a pair of steel military dog tags.
“How many of you are there?”
She spit her chewing gum on the sidewalk. “Just me and Razor.”
She was probably lying.
“Where’s Razor?” she asked. “Did you kill him?”
I planted the green targeting dot on the center of her forehead. “What do you think?”
“Shit.”
“You’ve got a trid,” I said. “I want it.”
She reached around her back.
“Careful...”
Her hand came back around slowly. In it was a trid.
I took it carefully from her outstretched fingers. It was me all right. There was a printed message on the back, just like Ryan had said. I didn’t have time to look at it closely; one of Ryan’s thugs might come to Bobbie’s rescue any second. I stuck the trid in the pocket of my windbreaker.
“Turn around. Lace your fingers behind your head.” I gestured with the machine pistol.
Bobbie did as she was told.
“Listen to me carefully. I’m going to walk away. If you so much as sneeze before I’m out of sight, I’m going to cut you to ribbons. You got that?”
She nodded.
“If I ever see you again, you’re dog food. You understand?”
Another nod.
I picked up my travel bag and backed away. When I got about ten meters, I turned around and started jogging toward a line of parked cars that represented the closest cover.
A half-second before I reached the nearest car, something shiny whistled past my right ear.
I spun around, dropped to one knee, and squeezed off three rounds.
Bobbie was standing, her right arm poised to loose another swastika-throwing star.
One of the flechettes caught her in the right leg, mid thigh. Another punched a hole through her left leg, just above the knee. The impact drove her back against the side of the Chrysler.
Unlike Ryan, she didn’t scream when she went down. Instead, she gave a strange squeak followed by a guttural keening.
I walked away quickly, using the cars for cover as much as possible.
Shiruken. Goddamned throwing stars. I should have checked her belt.
I took a right at the first corner and began sprinting immediately, constantly watching the shadows. I turned left at the next corner
and continued sprinting, trying to distance myself from the Velvet Clam as rapidly as possible.
When I had three or four blocks behind me, I ducked into an alley, and waited in the darkness, hoping to ambush any pursuers.
After several minutes, I began to hope that I’d escaped. The tension gradually drained from my shoulders as my muscles started to relax.
I pressed the illumination button on my watch and stole a glance at the numerals: 2:17. Jesus. The day was less than three hours old, and I’d already shot two people.
I felt the shakes coming on. I tried to squelch them, will them away, but the tremors hit me hard enough to make my teeth chatter. My knees went wobbly. I made a vain effort to ignore the churning in my stomach. A surge of naked fear washed over me and left me sagging against the wall of a building.
A psychologist would probably call it a defense mechanism; I call it my war face. When the heat is on, I project this aura of invulnerability, the fearless persona that John had dubbed Sergeant Steel. It’s a mask that I hide behind; a cold hard edge that protects me from my own weaknesses. But when the pressure is off, my war face deserts me, and leaves me wallowing in my own fear and self pity.
I hid there in the darkened alley until the tremors finally played themselves out. I pushed myself away from the wall and straightened up. I rolled my shoulders and drew a breath to steady myself.
I put both machine pistols in my travel bag and zipped it shut. The Blackhart hung ready in my shoulder holster if I needed it.
I moved to the edge of the alley and looked both ways. All clear. I stepped into the street and started walking.
I found an all-night convenience store on Willoughby Avenue. A blonde woman with an advanced case of middle aged frumpery sold me a printout of the latest news feed, a plastic bulb of coffee, and a pack of Marlboros to replace the ones that Ryan had shot to pieces.
I stood under a streetlight in the parking lot and read the news. The headlines centered around a major bombing in San Diego. Six simultaneous explosions had partially collapsed one of the big domes downtown. The death toll was in the hundreds and escalating rapidly as rescue crews uncovered more bodies. A radical Luddite Cult was taking credit for the catastrophe, calling it “A return to God’s Plan.”
The number two story outlined the crash of a JAL orbital passenger shuttle at Narita International.
Rieger’s murder wasn’t mentioned at all.
I shoved the printout into my travel bag and twisted the button-shaped top off of the coffee. The plastic bulb only took a few seconds to heat the coffee to a decent drinking temperature. I took a sip. The coffee was surprisingly good.
There was a public terminal in the parking lot. I used it to call a cab.
Across the street from the entrance to Nexus Dreams was a male strip club called Tuff Guise. The club’s holo-facade showed the harem chambers of some fabulously rich sultan, with an obvious twist on the gender-angle: the sultan’s harem girls were half-naked male body builder types. Their stern-looking scimitar-wielding guards were (naturally) female.
Every ten or twenty seconds, one or the other of the sultan’s harem boys seemed to find an excuse to lose his breechcloth, or whatever they’re called. From my perspective, I couldn’t understand why anyone would bother to go inside the club; the show seemed to be out here.
The entrance to the club was the only part of the building’s front not hidden behind the holo-facade. It was one of those weirdly fluted archways that people associate with Arabic architecture. It blended into the illusion so well that the club had run arrow-shaped strips of orange bio-florescent tape from the sidewalk to the arch to show that it was the real doorway.
I glanced around to make certain that no one was looking in my direction, then reached my left arm into the hologram. My fingers found the brick front of the building. I half expected my touch to somehow disrupt or distort the image, but the laser-projected illusion flowed seamlessly around my arm, hiding it every bit as well as it hid the front of the strip club. Perfect.
I looked around again. Nobody was watching me. I closed my eyes and stepped into the heart of the holo-facade.
Even with my eyes closed, the laser light that created the projection was bright enough to paint shifting blobs of color on the insides of my eyelids. I knew that a few seconds in here with my eyes open could damage my retinas.
I groped around inside the travel bag until my fingers found the plastic case that held my night goggles. It seemed to take an eternity of working by touch to get the Night-Stalkers out of their case and settled in place over my forehead. I felt for the power switch and flicked it on. The electroptic image amplifiers squealed softly as they powered up. I flipped the lenses down over my eyes.
Night-Stalkers work by super-amplifying available light, illuminating near total darkness into something approximating daylight. I didn’t need that right now; it was already too bright inside the holo-facade. But the Night-Stalkers had a safety feature, an instant-reaction filter-mode that could subtract dangerously bright light sources, leaving only wavelengths and intensities that were safe for human vision.
I almost didn’t open my eyes. Theoretically, I should be able to see through the holo-facade as if it were not there. But what if I was wrong? What if the Night-Stalkers were super-amplifying the already too bright light of the holo-facade? I hoped that the split second it would take me to check wouldn’t be enough to cause permanent eye damage.
I jerked my eyes open and slammed them shut just as fast, a rapid-fire blink that told me what I needed to know. The Night-Stalkers were working perfectly.
I opened my eyes. The view through the lenses was cool, and green, a ghostly soft-focus rendering of the street without the unpleasant glare of the lasers.
I smiled to myself. This was the perfect vantage point. I could see the front of Nexus Dreams on the other side of Santa Monica Boulevard, and everything moving on the street. As long as I stayed within a meter and a half of the front of the building, the Tuff Guise holo-facade would keep me totally hidden. People strolled by me on the sidewalk just a few meters away, oblivious to my presence.
The brick wall of the club was covered in graffiti. Among the traditional obscene and gang-related scrawlings was the curved-X symbol I’d seen on the Lev a few days before. Under the symbol was written ‘TRUST THE FLESH. CONTROL THE MACHINE. WATCH FOR THE CONVERGENCE, YOUR FUTURE HANGS IN THE BALANCE.’
There was that word again. Convergence. It was popping up all over the place, and I still had no idea what it meant.
I leaned against the wall and reached into my pocket in search of cigarettes. My fingers came across a plump little bundle of fabric: the socks. I pulled them out of my pocket. The outer sock was still dry; Ryan’s blood hadn’t soaked through. I dropped both socks onto the sidewalk and used the toe of my shoe to shove them into the layer of trash that was accumulating against the front of the building. Just another bit of garbage hidden behind the clean illusion of the hologram.
I went back into my pocket for the cigarettes. They hadn’t been opened yet; I peeled off the foil wrapper and pried the first one out of the pack.
The smoke triggered a fit of coughing when it hit my lungs. I stifled it as quickly as I could; disembodied coughs were bound to attract attention.
I read the fine print on the pack: Mexican Marlboros. Damn. I should have checked before I bought them. I hated Mexican tobacco.
I jammed the pack into my pocket and pulled out the trid that I’d strong-armed from Bobbie. I wanted to read the printing on the back; I expected the three-dimensional image on the front to be distorted or washed out by the combined influences of the holo-facade and my Night-Stalkers. Instead, the image of my face was somehow reinforced, standing out with a lurid clarity unusual for a trid. Except for the green skin tones imparted by the night goggles, it was an excellent likeness: a close-up shot on the street through a high-powered lens. The background was blurry, but I could make out an arched doorway framed in neon. The pic
had been shot in the Zone, on the sidewalk in front of Trixie’s.
I flipped the trid over. On the back, printed in bold black typeface, were my name, a phone number, and four lines of text.
“THE TIME HAS COME,” THE WALRUS SAID,
TO TALK OF MANY THINGS:
OF SHOES - AND SHIPS - AND SEALING WAX -
OF CABBAGES - AND KINGS -
Maybe it made sense to someone else, but it sounded like gibberish to me.
The phone number didn’t look familiar. The trid went back in my pocket.
I chain-smoked the harsh Mexican cigarettes, swallowed my cough reflex, and watched Nexus Dreams from my hidden position inside the hologram. Even at nearly four in the morning, the traffic in and out was reasonably frequent.
Every twenty minutes or so, a police car would cruise by, making its rounds. I had to fight the urge to jump for cover, reminding myself that the police couldn’t see through the holo-facade any more than the people on the street.
Half a pack of cigarettes later, Jackal walked out of the front door.
As soon as I was sure that she was alone, I stepped out of the hologram and pulled the Night-Stalkers off my forehead. I had to jog across Santa Monica Boulevard to catch up to her. When I was two steps behind her, I slowed down to match her pace. “Jackal.”
She stopped and turned around. Her eyes were glassy. She was either drunk, or exhausted, or both.
“Just a minute.” She pulled a memory chip out of her pocket and plugged it into the back of her head. Her eyes closed for a second. When they opened, her expression went wary. “Stalin?”
“Yeah. I need to talk to you.”
“You need to talk to somebody,” she said. “The word is out. You’re slicked, you just don’t know it yet.”
I walked a few steps in the direction she’d been heading and motioned for her to follow. “It’s better if we keep moving.”
She didn’t follow. “It’s better if you keep moving. Whichever way you’re heading, I’m going the other way.”
I stopped. “Come on,” I said. “I’m serious. I need to talk to you.”
Jackal shook her head. “I’m serious. You’re a homicide waiting to happen. Whenever it goes down, I don’t intend to be around. What in the hell did you do, anyway?”