Women of the Mean Streets

by J. M. Redmann

  There were arguing voices echoing across the thirty-five-metre diameter, which made it hard to pinpoint their exact location but, as one, Zan and I pointed to the same spot.

  “Why did you camouflage, if that’s the right word, yourself as Milo Decker?” I whispered.

  “So you would give a damn about what happened to him.”

  “What made you think I wouldn’t care about these Spacers?”

  And, yes, I am offended.

  Zan smiled at me. “You haven’t cared about anything much for a decade, Jane.” She headed clockwise through the annulus, the walkway between the concentric walls of the gallery levels, with me right behind her.

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  She turned and raised an eyebrow.

  “Okay. So what? You’re right. I don’t give a shit about anything much.”

  “Are you worried about Milo now?”

  I squinted at her. “Maybe. It depends how much of that performance you gave was even him.”

  “Oh, it was him,” Zan said. “That’s the gift of the Beninzay. With basic information, we can camouflage as anyone. If we’ve met them, it’s even easier. I was as much Milo Decker as he is. It’s not sustainable, of course, and it is only a superficial personality reproduction.”

  The argument we’d been approaching stopped suddenly—as if the two men had perhaps heard us. It was a momentary hiatus, followed by the sound of smashing furniture.

  Captain Black and I drew our weapons and covered the remaining distance at speed; she ran the eighty metres or so around the annulus, I dropped over the nearest balcony and hovered across the gap. We entered what turned out to be the scene of the crime at the same moment.

  Two men were having a full-on fist fight; pushing, shoving, and smacking each other senseless. Another bloke was watching them go at it. No one paid us any attention.

  The man spectating was Belbo Armitage.

  To the right was a row of maybe forty hospital beds, each with people hooked up to the most basic life-support equipment. To the left, tied by the waist to a chair but drinking a beer, was Aunt Juno.

  One of the fighters sent the other sliding face-first across the floor. He came to an unconscious stop at Zan’s feet.

  “Shit, where’d you two come from?” Armitage fumbled around the table next to him.

  “Move again and I will shoot you,” I said.

  Zan crossed the room, grabbed and threw his semi-auto against the wall, and punched him in face.

  “Jane darling, how nice of you to come rescue me.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know I even had to do that until half an hour ago, Juno.” I hovered over, took a laserknife from Aggie’s toolkit, and cut her free.

  When I turned back Zan was going patient to patient, looking for her Spacers. No, it was more than that: she was looking for a certain Spacer.

  “Juno, what the hell is this really about? I mean apart from the produce collection that’s going on.”

  Aunt Juno held my hand as we walked the line of hospital beds. “All of these men number among the four thousand,” she said.

  “That much we figured.”

  “Judging by their ages, most are original Earthers resistant to the Mj21 Virus,” Juno said.

  That made sense. The first twenty beds, according to info scrawled on the wall behind, held men aged from sixty-two to eighty. They were all so emaciated, though, it was hard to tell. None looked half as good as Bruce May and the comatose Dreamers I’d seen at the Liebestraum, only thirteen of whom were resistant.

  “They’re not gonna survive this, whatever it is, are they, Juno?” I said.

  “No, my dear. Maintaining their lives was unimportant to that villainous excuse for a scientist over there.” She pointed at the bleeding Belbo Armitage. “Not even the younger ones further down the room will recover enough for their lives to have meaning. This procedure is killing, has, effectively killed them.”

  “But…why?” I asked.

  “DaerinCorp have been trying for decades to find a cure for the Mantaray retrovirus. Armitage, who I may well execute before we leave this room, worked in our labs until six months ago. He thought he could get Jimmy to break into the Daerin banks to steal the latest breakthroughs to use in his own cloning research.

  “Jimmy tried once, because he believed Belbo would assassinate me if he didn’t, but realised it was beyond him. So he came to me and we set about finding out exactly what Belbo was up to. It’s just terrible that it got Jimmy killed.”

  I squeezed Juno’s hand, but the wash of sorrow that suddenly flooded my senses came not from her, but from Zan at the far end of the room. I went straight to her.

  Milo Decker, or what was left of him, was holding Zan’s hand. She wiped at the tears trickling down his sunken cheeks, and he opened his eyes.

  Again I felt an anguish and heartache that—this time—also brought to mind a day long gone. The day, now real to me, that Zan left me in that field hospital. Left me to the care of others, to return home to the troubles brewing on her own world.

  I knew she wouldn’t leave this young man. But I also knew he was not going to live to know that.

  Are you sure?

  The question my mind heard, was for Decker. He blinked, licked his lips, and blinked again.

  Zan glanced at me. “Yes, that’s her,” she said aloud.

  Decker smiled, barely.

  Zan leant forward, kissed his forehead and—before I could do anything to stop her—put her gun to Decker’s head and pulled the trigger.

  “What the frak?” I dragged her away from the bedside. She let me do it and then crumpled to the floor.

  For the second time today I set Aggie down on the floor and threw myself out.

  Zan allowed me to hold her and we sat rocking for a moment.

  “I really don’t understand,” I whispered. “Why camouflage as him and then do that?”

  Zan held me at arm’s length as her blue-green-blue eyes searched mine. “Do you care that he’s dead?”

  Stupid question! “Yes, Zan. I liked him; you, him a lot. I really do care.”

  “I needed to reach you. Make you care again.” She smiled wanly. “He was my grandfather.”

  “Oh dear,” said Juno.

  Zan glanced at her then back at me. “It was three years ago, for him, on that Probe Ship; fifty-eight years ago for my grandmother. Milo Decker and Zanzi Aru were famous in the history of everything as the first Benin-Human coupling.

  “I came back to Earth for him. And for you,” she said.

  Zan got to her feet, then bent and lifted me back into Aggie. And I let her, which was something I’d never allowed anyone else to do.

  Contributors

  Diane Anderson-Minshall is an author, journalist, magazine editor, celebrity skirt chaser, media personality, and one hell of a good lay. She’s author of an award-winning detective series (Blind Faith, Blind Curves, and Blind Leap) as well as the Lambda-shortlisted thriller Punishment With Kisses. She’s appeared in several anthologies including Bitchfest and Body Outlaws as well as numerous media outlets(from Femme Fatale to NPR, The New York Times and the TV series Secret Lives of Women), and as the longtime editor in chief of Curve magazine she inspired a fictional character on The L Word’s fourth season.

  Victoria A. Brownworth is the Lambda Award–winning author and editor of nearly thirty books. She was the book critic for the Baltimore Sun for seventeen years and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice, Chicago Sun-Times, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, PW, the Advocate, OUT, and Curve, among others. She has been an editor for several major publishing houses. She teaches writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. In 2010 she founded Tiny Satchel Press, an independent publisher of young adult books geared toward multicultural and LGBTQ-inclusive writing.

  Lindy Cameron writes both crime fact and fiction, and is a co-convenor of Sisters in Crime Australia. She is author of the Kit O’Mall
ey lesbian PI trilogy (Blood Guilt, Bleeding Hearts, and Thicker than Water, all Bywater Books, USA) and the archaeological adventure Golden Relic. Her latest book, Redback (Clan Destine Press), is the first in a new adventure series featuring Commander Bryn Gideon and her team of Australian retrieval agents. Lindy is co-author with her sister Fin J. Ross of the true crime Killer in the Family, and with her friend Ruth Wykes of Women Who Kill. www.clandestinepress.com.au.

  Jeane Harris is Professor of English at Arkansas State University. She is author of the novels Delia Ironfoot, A Grave Opening, The Magnolia Conspiracy, and Black Iris.

  Award-winning author Clifford Henderson lives and plays in Santa Cruz, California, where she and her partner of nineteen years run The Fun Institute, a school of improv and solo performance. In their classes and workshops, people learn to access and express the myriad of characters itching to get out. She is the author of novels The Middle of Somewhere, Spanking New, and Maye’s Request. Her other passions include gardening and twisting herself into weird yoga poses. Contact Clifford at www.cliffordhenderson.net.

  Miranda Kent writes short stories and novels for young adults. She is the author of the Madison McKenna mystery series, including Solitary Confinement. Kent mentors children in the inner city and does writing classes with middle school kids. “Some Kind of Killing” is excerpted from her upcoming novel, The Things Inside.

  Lori L. Lake is the author of eight novels and two books of short stories and the editor of two anthologies. She is a 2007 recipient of the Alice B. Reader Appreciation Award, a 2005 Lambda Literary finalist in the anthology category, and winner of the 2007 Ann Bannon Award and a Golden Crown “Goldie” for Snow Moon Rising. Lori lived in Minnesota for twenty-six years, but recently relocated to Portland, Oregon. When she’s not writing, she’s at the local movie house or curled up in a chair reading. She’s currently working on the fourth novel in the Gun series. For more information, see her website at www.lorillake.com.

  Anne Laughlin is the author of Veritas, which won a 2010 Goldie award in the mystery category. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies from Cleis Press, Alyson Books, Bold Strokes Books, and others. In 2008 Anne was named an Emerging Writer Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation, and in 2009 she was accepted into a writing residency at the Ragdale Foundation. Anne is currently working on her next mystery / suspense novel for BSB. She lives in Chicago with her partner, Linda.

  Laura Lippman is the author of ten Tess Monaghan novels, including Baltimore Blues, The Sugar House, and Another Thing to Fall; five stand-alone novels, including Every Secret Thing, To the Power of Three, What the Dead Know, and Life Sentences; and one short story collection, Hardly Knew Her. She is also the editor of another short story collection, Baltimore Noir. Lippman has won numerous awards for her work, including the Edgar, Quill, Anthony, Nero Wolfe, Agatha, Gumshoe, Barry, and Macavity. Her most recent stand-alone, I’d Know You Anywhere, is a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Mystery of 2010, and her most recent Tess Monaghan novel, The Girl in the Green Raincoat, is a New York Times bestseller.

  J.M. Redmann has published six novels featuring New Orleans PI Micky Knight. Her latest is Water Mark. Two of her books, The Intersection of Law & Desire and Death of a Dying Man, have won Lambda Literary Awards; all but her first book have been shortlisted. Law & Desire was an Editor’s Choice of the San Francisco Chronicle and a recommended holiday book by Maureen Corrigan of NPR’s Fresh Air. Redmann currently lives in New Orleans, at the edge of the area that flooded. Her website is jmredmann.com.

  Kendra Sennett prefers short stories, but spends most of her time at a day job writing grants and reports. Her stories have been published in anthologies such as Hot Ticket, Uniform Sex, and Electric. Currently she is working on a novel, which she hopes to have out in 2012. She is not a social worker, just in case you were wondering, and wishes to thank her cat Stalker for having so far not yet tripped her on the stairs.

  Carsen Taite works by day (and sometimes night) as a criminal defense attorney in Dallas, Texas. Though her day job is often stranger than fiction, she can’t seem to get enough and spends much of her free time plotting stories. She is the author of five novels: truelesbianlove.com, It Should be a Crime (a 2010 Lambda Literary Award finalist), Do Not Disturb, Nothing but the Truth, and The Best Defense, all published by Bold Strokes Books. Learn more at www.carsentaite.com.

  Ali Vali is the author of the Devil series, which includes The Devil Inside, The Devil Unleashed, Deal With the Devil, and the recently released The Devil Be Damned. Her stand-alone novels are Carly’s Sound, Second Season, the Lambda Literary Award finalist Calling the Dead, and Blue Skies. Ali has also contributed to numerous anthologies, with her latest short story appearing in Bold Strokes’ Breathless: Tales of Celebration. Ali is originally from Cuba and now lives outside New Orleans with her partner of twenty-six years. When she isn’t writing, she works in the nonprofit sector. Ali is one of the 2011 Alice B. Readers Appreciation Award winners.

  About the Editors

  J.M. Redmann has written six novels, all featuring New Orleans private detective Michele “Micky” Knight. The fourth, Lost Daughters, was originally published by W.W. Norton. Her third book, The Intersection Of Law & Desire, won a Lambda Literary Award, as well as being an Editor’s Choice of the San Francisco Chronicle and featured on NPR’s Fresh Air. Lost Daughters and Deaths Of Jocasta were also nominated for Lambda Literary Awards. Her books have been translated into German, Spanish, Dutch, and Norwegian. She currently lives in New Orleans, just at the edge of the flooded area.

  Greg Herren is a New Orleans–based author and editor. Former editor of Lambda Book Report, he is also a co-founder of the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, which takes place in New Orleans every May. He is the author of ten novels, including the Lambda Literary Award–winning Murder in the Rue Chartres, called by the New Orleans Times-Picayune “the most honest depiction of life in post-Katrina New Orleans published thus far.” He co-edited Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections on New Orleans, which also won the Lambda Literary Award. He has published over fifty short stories in markets as varied as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to the critically acclaimed anthology New Orleans Noir to various websites, literary magazines, and anthologies. His erotica anthology FRATSEX is the all-time bestselling title for Insightoutbooks. Under his pseudonym Todd Gregory, he published the bestselling erotic novel Every Frat Boy Wants It and the erotic anthologies His Underwear and Rough Trade.

  A longtime resident of New Orleans, Greg was a fitness columnist and book reviewer for Window Media for over four years, publishing in the LGBT newspapers IMPACT News, Southern Voice, and Houston Voice. He served a term on the Board of Directors for the National Stonewall Democrats and served on the founding committee of the Louisiana Stonewall Democrats. He is currently employed as a public health researcher for the NO / AIDS Task Force.

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