by Jeff Edwards
If God was listening to my prayers, the cops were still in the dark. I was counting on it; I needed to borrow Rieger’s car. It was time to take the fight to the bad guy’s home-turf, and public transportation didn’t seem up to the challenge of providing a silent approach or a reliable get-away.
It took me fifteen minutes to catch a cab. I gave the driver the address of Kurt Rieger’s apartment building in Dome 11. He drove a lot faster than necessary, but I didn’t care.
Los Angeles slid by my window unnoticed. I felt around inside myself for my anger. It was still there, a hard little ember in my chest, smoldering with the quiet insistence of the cigarette burns on the backs of my fingers.
My right hand stole into my jacket just far enough to verify the presence of the Blackhart. I’m coming, John. In just a little while.
The garage under Rieger’s building was deserted. His BMW was still parked in slot 11-A. The key chip was still behind the fire extinguisher, right where I’d left it.
I unlocked the car and slid behind the wheel. At the touch of a button, the gull-wing door powered shut behind me. I stuffed my purple travel bag into the front passenger seat.
I plugged in the key chip. The wraparound dashboard flared blue with plasma display instrumentation. The computer chirped and bleeped softly for a couple of seconds as it ran full-spectrum diagnostics and sequenced the car’s various systems on line. The car’s soundproofing was excellent; I could barely hear the turbines as they spun up.
I decided not to cut in the blowers right away; I hadn’t driven in close to five years, and I’d never driven anything anywhere near as advanced as Rieger’s car. I spent a minute or so cycling the double pistol grips of the control yoke through their full ranges of motion. The control surfaces on the front air-foils and rear spoilers flexed in instant response, the angry mosquito whine of the control servos oddly louder than the muted wail of the turbines.
My reflection stared back at me from the rear view mirror. The blonde buzz-cut and two-day beard made me look like Kurt Rieger’s brother on a downhill skid. My face seemed different now, more gaunt, cheekbones prominent. I didn’t remember those creases at the corners of my eyes. I lit the last of the Mexican Marlboros and glanced at the mirror again. I saw the face of a stranger.
I thumbed the button that kicked in the blowers and felt the BMW rise softly as the apron inflated. I backed slowly out of the slot, and drove out of the garage. The police could now add grand theft auto to my list of crimes.
The BMW handled like a dream. It cornered as well as can be expected from a hover vehicle, and had power to spare. I cruised the streets at random, putting some polish on my rusty driving skills. But I was too preoccupied to appreciate the luxury of driving such a superb machine.
After driving an hour or so, I plucked Rieger’s phone out of its recess on the dashboard and punched up Lisa’s number. If I was going to go beard the lion in his proverbial den, it would be better to have Lisa and Sonja tucked away somewhere safe. I wanted them to check into a hotel and lay low until the dust settled.
Lisa’s phone rang about forty times without an answer before I gave up.
I turned west on Wilshire Boulevard, toward Park La Brea, and Lisa’s apartment.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said aloud. I stepped on the accelerator.
I punched the redial key as I turned north on McCadden, and let the phone ring until I cut west again on 3rd Street. Still no answer.
Stay calm. Don’t get bent out of shape. Knowing Lisa, they probably went out for a pizza or something.
I pulled up in front of Colosseum Apartments and was about to shut down the turbines when another car left the curb and raced away. I caught a glimpse of it under a streetlight; it was a Mercedes sport sedan: the same model as John’s car. Judging color under a street lamp is tricky, but the car’s paint was dark, maybe midnight blue. Like John’s car.
I tried to get a look into the car as it drove under the light, but the window tint was too dark to see anything.
Was I being paranoid? Leaping to wild conclusions? Or was this really John driving away from Lisa’s apartment?
I paused with my hand on the BMW’s key chip. Shut it off and go inside? Or chase a car that could belong to anyone?
I looked around at the rest of the cars parked along the curb. Chevy’s. Suzuki’s. Fokkers. Middle-class cars in a middle-class neighborhood. And somehow, the only two high-end European cars in the neighborhood had both ended up in front of Lisa’s apartment, and Lisa wasn’t answering her phone.
I punched the redial key again. Still no answer. I held the receiver away from my ear, powered down the passenger window, and listened. In the distance, I could just make out the sound of the phone ringing in Lisa’s apartment. Nobody home.
Sometimes, you’ve got to go with your gut reaction.
I let a couple of cars get between me and the Mercedes before I pulled away from the curb and slid into traffic. The Mercedes turned right onto Cloverdale, then left onto Olympic and out of Dome 6. I followed.
In Dome 8, the Mercedes cut south to 15th Street, and then east and through the 15th Street Tunnel into Dome 11. Where was he going?
At the entrance to Dome 10, the Mercedes started to pull away from me rapidly. I must have gotten too close and spooked him.
My question had answered itself; an innocent man wouldn’t have any reason to run. It had to be John.
I stomped on the accelerator. The pitch of the turbines jumped an octave, and the BMW surged forward, narrowing the gap.
John’s Mercedes stood on it hard, but the BMW had no trouble closing on his tail lights.
A red Suzuki truck turned out of a side street directly into my path. I swung the control yoke hard left and tried to pass it. No such luck. The maneuver left me staring into two pairs of headlights. Both of the oncoming cars leaned on their horns.
I couldn’t go right, and I couldn’t go straight. I jerked the controls to the left again and abandoned the street entirely. In the rear view mirror, I saw one of the oncoming cars miss the back of Rieger’s car by centimeters.
The BMW bounced crazily when the curb and sidewalk interrupted the air cushion under its apron. The entire car shuddered as the left front fan ate the ground just past the border of the sidewalk. Dirt and mutilated grass sprayed out from under the front end. The car slid sideways through a row of bushes and ate them as well.
I found myself barreling across the front lawn of an apartment complex at close to 120 kilometers an hour. My right front bumper tagged a garbage can and blew it sideways into the street.
I glanced over the hedge: no oncoming traffic. I cut to the right, mowing down another stretch of bushes as I careened back into the street.
The tail lights of John’s Mercedes were just turning right at the next corner. I punched the accelerator to the floor. The damaged front blower screamed, but the car rocketed forward at my command.
The soft blue plasma readout for the front blowers began flashing red warning tattletales.
I barely held the turn, swinging across both oncoming lanes and scraping the apron against the far curb before swerving back onto the right side of the street. If there had been any oncoming cars, or any parked cars for that matter, my trip would have ended right there.
I backed off on the speed just enough to regain control.
The Mercedes was disappearing into the tunnel that led to the vehicle side of the Humboldt Street Lock. John was leaving the domes.
I stepped on the brakes. The control-vanes on the rear spoiler expanded, and bit the air hard; the car decelerated heavily. The chase wasn’t over, but the flashing amber lights above the tunnel entrance told me that I wasn’t going to make it into the lock before the doors closed.
True to my prediction, the huge steel doors slid shut long before I got to the tunnel. Damn.
I pulled up to the entrance to the lock and lit a cigarette.
It takes about a minute and a half to cycle through all three stages of the vehicle
lock. No matter what I did, John had a ninety-second head start on me.
After what seemed like an eternity, the lock doors slid open to admit the BMW. Ninety seconds later, I drove slowly out the other end and into the flat desolation of no-man’s land.
Outside the circle of arc lights at the dome’s perimeter, the only light came from the moon, the stars, and the headlights of Rieger’s car. There was no sign of John or his Mercedes.
To make matters worse, the BMW’s fans whipped the pulverized earth of no-man’s land into a sandstorm that enveloped the car like a cloud. Soon, I couldn’t see a thing. The blowing sand reflected the headlights back at me. I turned them off; they weren’t helping anyway. I crept across the kilometer-wide ribbon of sand in total darkness.
The blinding cloud evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. I had driven out of no-man’s land and on to the cracked remains of a paved street.
I flipped the headlight switch to low beams and cruised slowly. I had no idea where John had gone. For all I knew, he could have doubled back and returned to the domes by now. I didn’t have a clue. All I could do was drive and hope for a lucky break.
My course through the abandoned streets was chosen partly at random, and partly through necessity. Some of the streets were too broken up or clogged with debris for the BMW to get through. Sometimes I had to back up a block or more before I could find a place to turn around.
Occasionally, one of the blowers would suck a small piece of debris off the road and rattle it around under the apron for a while before spitting it out.
I drove aimlessly, with a cigarette clenched between my teeth and the Blackhart cradled in my lap. The dilapidated buildings and skeletal cars made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I didn’t like this place. It felt of decay, and of death.
My headlights revealed the remains of a Post Office, its rusted flagpole fallen to block the street.
I made a U-turn and was driving away when I realized that I had been here before. I had a vague memory of having stepped over that very flagpole on some night long past.
When it hit me, it was like a punch in the stomach. I knew suddenly why this area looked familiar.
I turned right at the next corner. There was the burned-out bus station. A block farther along was the factory clothes outlet with the collapsed roof, right where I expected it to be.
I parked the car and walked the last block. The sharp chemical air stung my eyes and nose. When I inhaled, my lungs burned. I didn’t care. Somewhere, John’s Mercedes was speeding away into the night, and I didn’t care about that either.
The warehouse squatted in the moonlight like the dark castle in a low-budget fantasy vid. I hadn’t actually seen it since the night that Maggie died, but it had featured in my nightmares a thousand times.
I stared at it, tried to fix it in my mind as a building, just an old building. Rotting. Crumbling.
The years had obviously not been kind. Only a few of the corrugated steel roof panels remained. A good number of the rusted rafters had collapsed. Only one of the high windows had any glass left: a single triangular shard hanging like a stalactite from one of the upper frames.
Had John been leading me here? Or had my subconscious quietly steered me to the one spot in the universe that featured in my darkest dreams?
It mushroomed inside me: a seething, roiling maelstrom of pain, and anger, and fear. I thought for a moment that I would explode, or that the rage blazing inside me would leap from my eyes like laser beams and burn the old warehouse to its foundations.
I didn’t remember drawing it, but suddenly the Blackhart was in my fist. It was a lightning rod, the barrel a steel conduit for my anger. The cigarette burns on my fingers tingled in anticipation as my index finger tightened on the trigger.
The first round slammed into the side of the warehouse, punching a fist-sized hole in the wall. The decaying steel rang like an anvil under a hammer, particles of rust exploding into a blood-colored cloud. Again. And again. And again. My trigger-finger squeezing rhythmically until the hammer of the Blackhart fell on an empty chamber. I ejected the empty magazine onto the ground and shoved another into the handle of the pistol with the heel of my hand.
I cycled the slide forward to chamber the next bullet. I raised the barrel toward the old building and set my finger on the trigger.
The last pane of glass slipped free of its window frame and fluttered end-over-end toward the ground. For a second, it almost seemed as if the glass might be caught by the wind and sail away like a crystalline leaf. But gravity plucked it from the air and shattered it into dust against the cracked cement.
I lowered my Blackhart. The warehouse was dead. The years would continue to wear away at its corpse until nothing remained at all, but that wouldn’t matter. The old building was dead, and not a thousand centuries of entropy could make it any deader.
I slid the Blackhart into my shoulder rig and turned back toward the car.
I had work to do.
CHAPTER 29
The knob turned easily in my hand; Lisa’s apartment wasn’t locked. Not good.
I pulled the Blackhart and used the barrel to push the door. It swung open silently. None of the three alarms made a sound.
The living room was wrecked. Two of the fake walnut bookcases lay on the floor, one half atop the other. Book chips and ceramic animal salt shakers were scattered across the carpet. The pepper shaker giraffe had broken his neck again.
My first thought was that the room had been searched, but only the two bookshelves closest to the door had been upended. There had been a struggle, just inside the door.
I followed the Blackhart into the hall, moving as quietly as I could, listening for any sounds that the intruder was still here. The scent of blood hung heavy on the air.
The first door on the right led to the bedroom. The doorframe near the latch was split. The door had obviously been kicked open, but it was closed now. I listened for a couple of seconds before easing the door open. No Sonja; no Lisa; no bad guys.
The smell of blood grew stronger as I moved down the hall.
The second room on the right was the bathroom. The door was already open. I peeked around the corner. Empty.
The only doorway on the left side of the hall led to the last room in the apartment, the kitchen. I stood in the hallway and listened carefully. I heard something, just barely louder than my own breathing, a mewling sound. The cat? No, it didn’t sound like a cat.
The blood-smell was powerful here. I didn’t want to look around the corner. I wasn’t afraid of finding the killer. I was afraid of finding Lisa, or Sonja, or both.
I tightened my grip on the Blackhart and spun around the corner, swinging the pistol to cover the entire room.
No intruder.
Lisa sat on the floor, her back against the cabinets, face hidden in her hands. She was weeping softly; her sobs had that low child-like keening that sometimes comes at the end of a prolonged cry, when the person’s energy is just about spent.
A long strip of cellophane tape hung from the circular florescent light above the table. From the end of the tape dangled a sheet of paper: a note turning slowly in an unseen draft.
The table top under the note was smeared with congealing blood, the stain turning brown against the white lacquered wood. At the center of the bloody smear lay the twisted corpse of Mr. Shoes. The cat’s lithe gray body had been sliced from throat to tail, spilling his entrails all over the table.
I knelt down and put my hand on Lisa’s shoulder. “Lisa...”
She flinched at my touch and nearly screamed. She snatched her hands away from her face, and for a half-second, her eyes were wide with fear. Then she recognized me, and she threw her arms around my neck and buried her face in my shoulder. “Oh David... Oh God...” She broke down into uncontrollable sobbing.
It took the better part of ten minutes to get Lisa calmed down enough to tell me what had happened.
“I... I didn’t see anyone. I was... in the bed
room when I heard...” She broke down again.
I held the Blackhart down and away from her; I didn’t want to holster it until I knew for certain that we were safe. My left hand cradled Lisa’s head against my chest and stroked her hair.
Finally, she sniffed and tried again. “The front door opened. I heard it. I don’t know if Sonja opened it, or if... I don’t know; I didn’t see...”
“Okay,” I said. “You were in your bedroom and you heard the door open. Then what happened?”
Lisa took a deep breath. “I heard... I don’t know, a fight. A struggle. Things falling over. Glass breaking. I... panicked. I locked my bedroom door. I was trying to call the police when someone started trying to break my door open. The latch... I could see that it wasn’t going to hold. I ran to the door and tried to keep it shut with my body. Something hit the door... hard. I think I screamed... I don’t know. And then the door flew open. It knocked me down, and before I could get up, someone had a foot or a knee in the middle of my back. I tried to roll over, but they stuck something in my neck. It... burned me... shocked me, and I passed out.”
“Who?” I asked. “Did you get a good look at them?”
“I didn’t see anything,” Lisa said. “One second, the door was closed, the next I was on the floor and that electrical thing was jammed in my neck.”
Lisa glanced up at the table and began to sob again. “My baby... My poor little baby... He never hurt anybody. He didn’t deserve this.”
I shook her shoulder softly. “Lisa. Where is Sonja?” She didn’t answer. I shook her a little harder. “Lisa. I need to know where Sonja is.”
“Gone...,” Lisa sobbed. “Gone... and my poor little baby...”
I gently pried Lisa’s arms from around my neck and stood up. Lisa’s hands came up to cover her face again. On the left side of her neck were two circular blisters, twins to the ones on my own neck. She’d been zapped by a police riot wand, way over-charged.
I looked at the body of the cat. I’d never gotten the chance to get to know him, but the sight of his mangled little carcass added a few more grams to the weight of guilt that hung on my heart. Maybe he was only an animal, but he was dead because I’d dragged Lisa into the middle of this thing. Now, Sonja was gone, and a severely endangered species was one step closer to extinction.