When the blonde actress on Gable’s left winked at Jill, her plastiglass eyeball fell out. It hit the simulated white gravel of the path and bounced once. “Hiya, kiddo.”
The third mechanical actor, a lanky cowboy, lifted his pearl-white Stetson, bowing to the unknown blonde. He bent to retrieve the eyeball. “Allow me, ma’am.”
Losing his balance in the process, the long, lean cowboy fell flat out on the ground. His long legs twitched a few times and then he was still and the night fog came rolling in over him.
Jill hurried on, glancing back.
She was certain she was being followed. Back there in the thickening fog, there were at least two people on her trail. She’d caught glimpses of them in the swirling mist. A small, bald man and a larger, broader figure.
“Might be an andy, that second one.”
Jill increased her pace, then went running up the steps of what looked to be an old Southern mansion from several centuries ago. Another Clark Gable was there on the wide verandah, dressed as some kind of Southern gentleman this time. This android wasn’t quite as weather-worn and his grin was warmer.
“Good evening, my dear,” he greeted, tipping his Mississippi gambler’s hat.
She pushed through the door, shut it behind her and found herself in an immense drawing room. Some of the simulated furniture was flickering and more than one of the hidden holoprojectors was making odd humming sounds.
Crouching behind an ornate love seat, Jill yanked her palmphone out of her jacket pocket and, hurriedly, punched out Gomez’ number.
The curly-haired detective’s smiling face popped up on the tiny screen after the third buzz. “Buenas noches,” he said.
“Sid, listen—I’m in danger.”
He recognized her now, frowning. “You’ve got the wrong hombre, Jill. I’m your erstwhile husband,” he told her. “Erstwhile, a word often misused, means former. I no longer—”
“For Christ sake, knock off the whimsy and listen to me,” his ex-wife pleaded. “I’m in the old run-down Hollywood Starwalk Park—you know, near where the Hollywood Bowl used to be. You’ve got to—”
“If one of your multitude of beaus has abandoned you, chiquita, I advise you to phone a skycab and—”
“Let’s save time,” she cut in. “During the two and a half some years we were married, I was a Tekhead and I did fool around. Right now though, Sid, I swear, I think I’m in serious trouble.”
His frown deepened. “Okay, what sort of trouble?”
“I’m not completely sure,” she told him, glancing toward the door. “I’m back writing again, Sid, working on a vidwall movie. It’s a thriller called Hokori, and—”
“An entire movie about the late and sleazy Teklord?”
“Yes, but the point is—well, while researching the damn thing I came across something. Some information and—Sid, get here quickly. I’m sure I was lured to this dump. A couple of goons are trailing me.”
“Got any kind of gun?”
“No, I hate weapons and—”
“I’ll be over there in ten minutes. Meantime, call the cops.”
“The local police still don’t trust me because of all the trouble I used to get into when I was a Tekkie, Sid. I—”
“Call ’em nonetheless, cara,” he urged her.
“Sid, okay, I will,” she promised. “I’m in that imitation of the—I think it’s the mansion from an ancient movie called Gone With the Wind. And listen, this has to do with a plan to …”
She stopped talking then.
The door of the colorful old Southern mansion had started to swing open.
2
Gomez’ skycar came swooping down through the thick fog to make a bouncy landing in the empty parking lot next to the ramshackle Hollywood Starwalk Park.
“This isn’t the first dump like this I’ve had to drag her out of,” he said as he stepped out into the chill, swirling mist.
He went running across the damp rutted surface of the landing area.
“Never thought I’d be doing it again. Jill was … Whoa, bastante, enough,” he told himself. “She’s not your wife anymore so you can skip the self-pity, amigo.”
Sprawled flat on his back just outside the open, weather-worn plazmetal gate was the android Charlie Chaplin who’d long ago served as ticket taker.
Skirting the fallen comedian, Gomez eased out his stungun from its shoulder holster. He began to jog along a wide weedy passway.
Back in the days when he was a SoCal State cop, he’d visited this place a lot, unofficially. He still remembered where the old Southern mansion was located.
He halted, turning to stare into the swirling mist at his left.
Nodding, he moved on. The figure he’d spotted looming over there was only an android, a defunct replica of a dark-clad werewolf from some forgotten motion picture of another century.
A moment later Gomez became aware of arguing voices up ahead on his right.
“We only got one goddamn Tek chip, asshole,” a teenage girl was saying in a thin nasal voice. “And you dorfs promised me first turn.”
There were three of them, the skinny girl and two lean young men, huddled on the porch of a rickety log cabin. They were fighting for the possession of a battered Tek Brainbox.
Slumped in the doorway of the cabin was an android Abe Lincoln, stovepipe hat tilted far down over his craggy forehead. A plump grey rat was sitting placidly in the andy’s narrow lap.
The girl gave the Brainbox a violent tug, but didn’t manage to get it away from the others. She was red-haired and there were several green and crimson snakes tattooed on her pale bare arms.
The larger of the youths said, “Let go, Snooky.” His right hand flashed out, hit her, hard, across the face.
She let go of the box, stumbled and fell backwards. She landed directly in Gomez’ path.
He crouched and, keeping his eye on the two youthful louts, aided the skinny girl to rise. “Usually, pendejo,” he said in the direction of the one who’d slapped the girl down, “I’m noted as a gentle and patient teacher of morals and manners. Tonight, unfortunately, I’m in a hurry and this will have to suffice as your lesson in deportment.”
Gomez aimed the stungun and fired.
The sizzling beam hit the young man in his narrow chest. He went rising up on his tiptoes. The Brainbox he was clutching dropped from his splayed fingers.
As the lout toppled over backwards to sit beside Lincoln and scare the rat into flight, Gomez continued on his way.
“Thanks, greaser,” called the redhead. “Now I’ll get my turn ahead of this pissant.”
“De nada” he muttered, turning onto a side path that would lead him to the Gone With the Wind mansion where his former wife had been when she phoned him for help.
And she really was a former wife, he realized as he hurried along through the foggy night. Jill had been his second wife and he was now living with … either the fourth or fifth one. Sometimes, especially when he hadn’t had enough sleep, he tended to lose track of how many there’d been.
“Muy bonita Jill was,” he recalled. “Also very bright and talented. Ai, if only I’d been able to do something about her fondness for Tek—and for other hombres.”
He slowed when he caught his first glimpse of the tumbledown mansion through the mist.
Leaving the path, he cut across a field that in better days had represented a trench-filled stretch of World War I battlefield.
Crouched low, Gomez moved closer to the looming house.
He approached the place from its left side. There was no light showing, no sound coming from within.
Up close to the white neowood wall, Gomez inched a handheld eavesdropper from his jacket pocket and, gently, touched it to the mansion’s side.
The tiny dials indicated no human inhabitants.
Circling around to the front, he climbed the stairs openly.
The Clark Gable android nodded. “Welcome, sir,” he said. “You look like a true Southern gentleman.�
��
“Sí, but from a little further south than you mean,” replied the detective, crossing the threshold into a shadowy hallway.
In the large drawing room he found a palmphone lying on the threadbare carpet. “This has got to be hers,” he said, not touching it.
From another pocket he extracted a small gadget, this one called a sniffer.
Activating it, Gomez did a slow, careful sweep of the whole room.
After seven minutes the sniffer’s tiny voxbox told him, “A female of about forty years was here within the past hour.”
“Sí— and?”
“One human and a robot entered approximately five minutes later,” continued the reedy metallic voice. “There was a struggle.”
“What sort of a struggle, niño?”
“A brief one. The woman was rendered unconscious—most probably by means of a stungun. Then she was taken from here.”
“Gracias.” Turning off the gadget, Gomez returned it to his pocket and glanced around the room. “Bueno—that means Jill was alive when she left this joint.”
Spotting a chair that was real and not a holographic projection, he sat down, leaned back and let out a long, slow sigh.
“But there’s no way of telling if she’s still alive.” He rubbed his hand over the lower half of his face, shaking his head. “This is a rough one, I’m afraid. Yeah, it smells muy malo to me.”
He fetched out his own palmphone and punched out a number.
“Well, I’m going to have to find her,” he said. “And I’ll need Jake to help me.”
Above the fog that was drifting in across the night Pacific the sky was a sharp, clear black. Jake Cardigan, fifty and good-looking in a been-around sort of way, was piloting the skycar on its return trip from the San Diego Sector of Greater LA.
Bev Kendricks, a pretty blonde woman, was in the passenger seat, leaning back and gazing up through the viewpanel in the cabin ceiling. “What’d you think?” she asked him.
Several seconds later Jake responded. “About the concert?”
“That—or anything else.”
He shrugged his right shoulder. “Technically it was okay, but I guess I prefer live musicians to androids.”
“Be difficult to see Duke Ellington’s orchestra live.”
“True.”
After a silence, Bev said, “I’m going to say something, Jake.”
“Sounds ominous.”
She continued, “We have quite a lot in common. You’ve spent most of your grown-up life in law enforcement and so have I. You’re a damned good private investigator now and so am I.”
“A better private eye than I am,” he told her.
“We’ve been together a lot in the past year or so.” Frowning, he glanced over at her. “This is starting to sound like a farewell address.”
Bev gave a slow sigh. “I like you a hell of a lot, Jake. But …”
“But?”
She moved a hand back and forth in front of her face, as though she were brushing away cobwebs or mist. “I’ve mentioned this before and I don’t mean to nag,” said Bev. “But it hasn’t gotten any better. Fact is, you seem, much too often, to be very depressed.”
“Really? I see myself as being nothing short of jolly lately.”
Bev inhaled slowly before speaking again. “I know how much you loved Beth Kittridge. I understand how hard her death hit you.”
“That’s the trouble, huh? To you it seems I’m still in mourning for her.”
“She was killed quite a while ago by the Teklords and—Christ, Jake, the other night in bed you actually called me Beth.”
“You should have told me then. I’m sorry.”
“You should see somebody, talk about this,” suggested Bev. “I know the Cosmos Detective Agency has a better maxmed plan than even my agency. So you could easily—”
“Nope, no. I have to work this all out on my own.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think you can.”
Looking straight ahead into the dark night, Jake said, “You probably already know this. I’m not trying to hurt you. But in my life so far I’ve only really loved two women.”
“I know, yes. And neither one is me.”
“My wife Kate was the first.” His voice was low, far away. “She was—like nobody I’d even met up until then. Of course, it turned out to be like a Tek dream that I conjured up for myself without needing a chip or a Brainbox.”
“You don’t have to tell me about Kate. I already know about her.” Bev reached over and put her hand on his.
“I talk about it to remind myself how stupid and naïve I used to be,” Jake said. “I never had a single damned doubt about Kate. Shit—and she helped the Sonny Hokori Tek Cartel set me up and she slept with …” He wasn’t able to finish the sentence.
“That’s the past, Jake. It’s gone.”
“No, it’s a place I can visit anytime I want,” he said. “Hell, I even end up there when I don’t want to go.”
The voxbox on the control dash spoke. “Emergency call from Sid Gomez.”
Jake said, “I’ll take it.”
The small rectangular screen came to life and there was Gomez looking uneasy and downcast. “This isn’t agency business, amigo,” he began, “but I need your help.”
“Tell me,” invited Jake.
His partner said, “You remember my second wife, don’t you?”
“Jill Bernardino, sure.”
“Okay, I got a call from her about an hour or so ago,” continued Gomez. “Jill told me she was down here at the Hollywood Starwalk Park and was afraid she was being trailed by some goons.”
“She contacted you instead of the cops?”
“I’ll explain that later,” Gomez said. “Important thing is that Jill’s gone. It looks like she was tagged and abducted.”
“Any idea why?”
Gomez answered, “She’s back writing, working on a vidwall movie about our old Tek chum, the late Sonny Hokori.”
“That bastard,” said Jake. “You figure there’s a Tek angle to her kidnapping?”
“I think, Jake, that in the course of her researches she found out something she wasn’t supposed to find out.”
“But Hokori’s outfit is completely defunct. We took care of most of that.”
“We can speculate at length later,” suggested his partner. “Can you get down here?”
“Within a half hour,” Jake assured him.
3
Jake paced the large drawing room, hands in pockets. “Okay, give me the rest of what you’ve got.”
Gomez was sitting on the edge of an armchair, holding a palm-size e-notebook. “Jill arrived here by way of a skycab,” he told his partner. “It picked her up at an address over in the Laguna Sector of Greater LA. That turns out to be her present home.”
“Robot cabbie?”
“Sí, and the bot claims nobody tailed them and nothing else unusual occurred.”
“What about other cabs that deposited people in the vicinity?”
“Nobody was brought to within a block of this ruin since early this morning,” answered Gomez. “I doubt those two cabrones lurked around here that long.”
Jake stopped pacing and straddled a straight-back chair. “You mentioned she was working on a script about the late, lamented Sonny Hokori.”
“The same Tek entrepreneur who helped frame you into a stay up in the Freezer.” He pointed at the ceiling with his thumb.
“Sonny’s dead and gone, so’s his sister,” said Jake thoughtfully. “But there are still a lot of other Teklords above the ground.”
“I don’t know exactly what Jill found out, but it was sufficient to get her snatched.”
“We ought to be able to gather some facts from one of our informants.”
“You want to handle that angle, amigo?” Gomez stood up, clicked off the e-notebook and slipped it into a side pocket.
“While you?”
“First off I’m going to visit her hacienda and talk
to her current husband,” replied the detective. “He’s a gent named Ernst Reinman.”
“Which husband is this by now?”
Gomez held up four fingers. “Cuatro. I have the distinction of being the first in the series,” he said. “She’s been hooked up with this Reinman for a bit over two years and he’s an executive with a charitable org called the Starvation Center.”
“During her days with you,” mentioned Jake, “she had a tendency to stray now and then. Would there currently be other gentlemen friends in her life?”
“I’ve already got somebody researching that for me,” Gomez said. “But I do know that a gent by the name of Mervyn Illsworth has been providing Jill with some of her background information for the script.”
“I’ll check on him before I contact any informants,” volunteered Jake.
“Illsworth resides at Tube Village in the Long Beach Sector.”
Jake then inquired, “And why didn’t Jill want to bring the police in on this?”
“Mostly, far as I know, because she used to have a rotten reputation with the SoCal law and still likes to avoid them as much as possible,” said Gomez. “During her heyday as an enthusiastic Tek customer—well, she got in several fairly serious tangles with the forces of law and order.”
Jake rose up. “Even so, Sid,” he said, “if we don’t find some trace of her within the next few hours—we have to bring them in.”
“Agreed. Besides, once her hubby finds out she’s among the missing, he’ll more than likely do that himself.”
“What about the Cosmos Agency?”
“I want to talk to our esteemed chief, Walt Bascom, about this whole business mañana,” said Gomez. “If one or more of the big Tek cartels are planning some new deviltry—then our jefe ought to be able to sell that news to some of his many government agency contacts.”
“My thought exactly,” said Jake.
The night fog hung heavy over the two-acre stretch of simulated beach. Most of the sand was real, but the clusters of large black rocks and the scatters of seaweed and driftwood were all holographic projections.
Tek Kill Page 20