Crooked Halos

by Charlie Cottrell

  “That is the ten-million-dollar question,” I mused. It was strange seeing Maya get worked up about something, given her usual indifference to the outside world, and even stranger that the something that upset her so much was a someone. “Maybe she’s wearing some sort of scrambler or blurring device? Those aren’t unheard of.”

  “Guess it becomes about old-fashioned legwork,” Miss Typewell said. “You’ll have to ask around, show folks her picture, see if anyone recognizes her.”

  “Yup. Feet down, pounding pavement,” I agreed, rubbing my chin. As was usual, my hand rasped against several days’ worth of stubble. Shaving was something that happened to other, less-preoccupied people. “It’s a long shot, but we need all the info on her we can get. I’ll take care of that. Ellen, how’d reaching out to O’Mally go?”

  “He’s got nothing for us at the moment,” she replied soberly. “Chief Esperanza is cracking down on wasted resources and outside interference in police business, so he can’t be seen giving us any sort of direct assistance.”

  I sighed heavily. “Fine. Maya, guess that means you get to hack some national and international databases for us.”

  Ellen gave me a quizzical look. “You think this Carmen—whoever she is—is some sort of government operative?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe she’s not anymore, but I’d bet she used to be. That knife she pulled on me was military-issue, not the sort of thing you see most folks carry around. And she was very comfortable handling it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was in some covert-ops program of some kind.”

  “And now she hires herself out as a mercenary?” Ellen asked.

  I nodded. “Makes sense to me.” I gave Maya a smile of encouragement. “See what you can dig up, but don’t be surprised if you’re still kind of chasing shadows.”

  “You don’t think I’ll find anything?” Maya asked.

  “Let’s just say that if you don’t, it still confirms my suspicions,” I replied. “I think we’re dealing with a government-trained assassin.”

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  I spent the next several days wandering through Old Town, visiting every disreputable bar, pool hall, drug den, and thug hangout I could think of. No one was ever very happy to see me, and even fewer of them wanted to talk to me. I can be very persuasive when I want to be, though. Especially with Kimiko and her ninja backing me. So folks usually talked. Eventually.

  Not that it helped any. No one knew anything about Crowder, Carmen, or Genevieve Pratt. It was like two ghosts and the shambling, all-American zombie corpse of my past had arrived out of thin air to torment me exclusively.

  At first, Carmen’s elusive nature was fascinating, and simply proof of my theory that she was some government spook. But while that sounded good in theory, in practice it just proved frustrating. “Doesn’t she have aliases? False identities? Have we tried looking for her with a fake nose and glasses?” I asked in frustration, crashed out on the couch in my office, a full ashtray overflowing onto the floor beside me. Miss Typewell shrugged.

  “None that we’ve been able to find, Eddie,” she said. “Carmen’s a ghost, someone who doesn’t officially exist in any database or system on earth.”

  “And nothing turned up in your hack, Maya?” I asked. The computer geek was sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating ramen noodles out of a Styrofoam container. She looked up, a long noodle dangling from her lips.

  “Um, nophf,” she mumbled around her mouthful of food. She chewed quickly and swallowed. “Sorry, um, no, Eddie,” she tried again. “Even digging through secured, heavily-encrypted stuff, I couldn’t find any mention or record of her.”

  “And no one’s ever even heard of her here in town,” I said, flicking cigarette ash into the ashtray and sighing heavily. “Damn! This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe we’re thinking about this too hard,” Miss Typewell said.

  “How can we be thinking about a woman who doesn’t seem to officially exist too hard?” I asked.

  “Well, for one thing, concentrating on her has distracted you from your real objective,” she shot back.

  “Crowder,” I said, simply. She nodded. Yoshi was still keeping an eye on my former partner, but he didn’t seem to be doing much at the moment. According to every report, he was mostly staying in his hotel room, or visiting the complementary gym in the hotel’s basement, or eating at a nearby diner. He didn’t seem to go anywhere else, speak to anyone other than Carmen or his little goon squad, or do anything that hinted he was about to commit premeditated murder. He was being very inconsiderate of my needs, really.

  “Eddie?” Miss Typewell said, bringing me back from my thoughts. “You’re internal monologing again, huh?”

  “Maybe,” I said defensively.

  “Just remember the rest of us can’t hear your thoughts, so if you had any sort of big revelation there, you’ll need to share it.”

  “Nope. I got nothing,” I replied with a heavy sigh. I stood up, smoothing down the front of my shirt and straightening my tie. “I think it’s time for me to do some more of that leg work.”

  IX.

  Another day, another stake out. They were becoming entirely too-common in this case. I’d made a career of taking cases that didn’t involve me sitting in front of a building for hours on end. I preferred the ones that could be handled quickly, usually just an hour or two to find the right window and then take a few compromising photos. This was interminable.

  When Crowder finally emerged from the Zimmerman Hotel and hailed a taxi, I was ready to follow him.

  I will say this: stake outs are far easier than tailing a suspect. Tailing someone is like walking a high wire above a vat of acid without a safety net while having a rabid ferret stuffed down your pants. It’s a nerve-wracking balancing act, poised between maintaining a safe distance and keeping close enough that you don’t lose your quarry. You have to be just the right distance away to keep an eye on them but remain inconspicuous.

  In this metaphor, traffic is the ferret.

  Tailing a taxi is easier than tailing an experienced cop or underworld driver. Cabbies aren’t used to the idea of someone following them, and thus won’t look for a tail. Admittedly, cabbies don’t tend to look at anyone else on the road regardless, which—in addition to the financial collapse of the city’s subway system a couple of decades ago—explains why so many people in Arcadia still own and drive their own cars despite the crippling traffic congestion. The person in the backseat of a cab may know what to look for, but they lack things like mirrors and the right position to effectively look for a tail. A smart suspect will never take a taxi if they think they’re being tailed.

  Which either made Crowder an idiot—which seemed doubtful—or extremely confident that having a tail didn’t really matter. I noticed he was also alone, with neither his goon squad nor Carmen accompanying him. I exchanged a quick message with Kimiko to make sure she had some of her ninja on the sidekicks, then pulled out into traffic a few cars behind Crowder’s taxi.

  The taxi wove through traffic at a breakneck pace; this is common practice for cabbies, who assume the rules of the road were designed for other, less capable, drivers. This particular driver worked his way across Old Town to Nixon’s Deli, on Lewis Avenue between 45th and Everly. Crowder climbed from the cab with a smooth, assured step; whoever’d done his cybernetic implant surgery had been top-notch, and Crowder had obviously undergone extensive physical therapy to recover from his injury and reconstruction.

  Crowder entered the deli and took a seat at the counter as I pulled into a parallel parking spot across the street and shut the car off. My vehicle had seen its share of rough outings—the Kirkpatrick case in particular had involved my jalopy getting shot so full of holes it seemed like it was made of them—and it coughed and rattled as I turned the key in the ignition. The car was older than many of the clients I’d served in the past ten years or so, but wore its age as something of a badge of honor. I’d had the entire engine rebuilt
after the Kirkpatrick incident, but the parts the mechanic had assured me were brand new were, in fact, not so new. Used, rather. They were used parts, well-used. What others might consider worn out. But they worked, most of the time, and my car continued to carry me from Point A to Point B without too much fuss or hassle. I’d continue to drive the thing until the wheels fell off, and then probably carry on for at least another mile or two until I found a convenient place to let the thing go on to its final rest.

  I pulled up a vid window, trained it on the deli, and set it to record video. Crowder sat there looking at a menu for several minutes before ordering from the waitress, who bustled off and stuck a ticket in the rotating rack for the line cook, who looked even greasier than the food.

  I sat and watched Crowder have lunch. He ate a Reuben and a pickle. It was exactly as exciting as it sounds.

  He left the deli and hailed another taxi, then seemed to drive aimlessly for the next hour before winding up at a car rental lot. He stepped inside the sales office for ten minutes, eventually emerging with the clerk to take possession of a late-model sedan. I hung back as he pulled out of the lot and drove off. I swung into position three cars back, but when he slipped through a yellow light and the car ahead of me decided to stop, I lost him.

  “Damn,” I muttered, slamming on the breaks. So much for that, then.

  I took the next right, intending to head back to the office to regroup. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I wasn’t paying much attention, which is probably why the thugs managed to surround my car and run me up onto the sidewalk with no apparent effort.

  I slammed on the breaks and managed to come to a screeching halt a few inches from a fire hydrant. The cars ahead and behind me came to a stop, and the one to my left swung back around and parked across the street in a parallel spot. The driver of each car emerged; it was the same three guys I’d seen in Crowder’s hotel room a few days earlier. I wasn’t sure how they’d escaped Kimiko’s net of ninja observers, or why she hadn’t informed me they’d snuck out, but I figured I’d deal with that situation if I survived this one. With a sense of unavoidable dread, I popped the door of my own car open and stepped out, smiling broadly to display a confidence I did not feel inside. “Gentlemen,” I said, radiating the sincerest pleasure ever emitted by a living, breathing person, “is there something I can help you with?”

  “Stop following Mr. Crowder,” the thug on my right said. His hand was tucked inside his jacket, clearly grasping a pistol grip in what he probably thought was a nonchalant way.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I lied, maintaining the grin. “I was just out for a leisurely Sunday drive.”

  “It’s Thursday,” the thug on my left said.

  “Oh. That probably explains why it wasn’t so leisurely, either,” I said, stuffing my hands deep into my coat pockets and rocking on the balls of my feet in what I calculated was a relaxed, infuriating sort of way.

  “Better listen to reason, pal,” the third thug said, coming across the street and getting right up in my face. “If we catch you following him again, Detective Hazzard, you will end up with some broken limbs.” He sneered, his lips twisting in a cruel imitation of a smile. “I’ll leave it to you which limbs they are, though.”

  “Really nice of you, honestly. I can’t remember someone being so polite about the threat of bodily harm,” I remarked, reaching out and patting him on the shoulder. I turned the gesture into a headlock. I started punching him in the face, the brass knuckles I’d slipped onto my hand flashing in the sunlight as they connected once, twice, three times with the guy’s nose. I released the headlock and he went down, clutching at his broken nose and screaming in nasal agony. I dove back into my car while the two thugs on either side of me pulled their guns and tried to draw a bead on me. But I was already back in the driver’s seat, throwing the heap into reverse and backing up so fast I caught the guy behind me off guard. He crumpled under the rear bumper, skidding across pavement with a yelp. I threw the car into drive and floored the accelerator, causing the guy ahead of me to jump out of the way rather than take his shot. I whipped around the first corner I came to, putting some solid bricks between myself and the thugs’ guns, then threw in a few random twists and turns over the course of the next few blocks. Of course, if they wanted to do anything to me, they knew who I was and probably where I was going. I’d probably just done something tremendously stupid.

  No, I’d definitely done something tremendously stupid.

  I pulled up a vid window and called Miss Typewell. Her image popped up and I pushed the vid window to the side, giving me a clear view of the road through my windshield. “I might’ve just done something monumentally stupid,” I said grimly.

  “Oh, what is it, a day ending in ‘y’ again already?” Miss Typewell said in mock surprise. “Seriously though, Eddie, ‘monumentally stupid’ describes basically everything you’ve done except for hiring me.”

  “Point,” I said, taking a squealing turn on two wheels, “but I just pissed off the goons protecting Crowder, and they know who I am and probably where the office is.”

  Miss Typewell stared at me, her mouth hanging slightly open, for a moment. Then her mouth snapped shut into a firm line. “That was monumentally stupid, Eddie,” she said.

  “Thanks for the moral support,” I shot back, hitting the accelerator to slip through a yellow light. “Good news is, one of ‘em’s got a broken nose, and I ran over another one, so there’s really only one goon who’s in fighting trim at this exact moment in time. But the point is, don’t open the door to anyone who isn’t me or Kimiko until I get this cleared up. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” she replied, hitting a button on her desk that would send the office into lockdown. “Be careful, boss,” she added as I flicked the vid window shut. I flinched at the title but didn’t have a chance to reply. Besides, I hadn’t caught the hint of a capital “B” in there, so it was probably an innocent remark on her part. Probably.

  The next order of business was to call Kimiko and find out what had gone wrong. There was no way those three idiots should have been able to get the drop on me, not with her ninja keeping an eye on things. I pulled up a new vid window and dialed her number. It rang twice, then made an audio-only connection with the leader of my ninja warriors.

  “Yes, Detective Hazzard?” she asked. She sounded otherwise-occupied.

  “Any reason I was just accosted by Crowder’s goon squad? I thought your guys were on them.”

  “Mistakes were made, Detective. I apologize most profusely. All of my men are currently engaged attempting to track Carmen.”

  “What do you mean, ‘attempting to track’? Are you saying you don’t have eyes on her, either?

  “I’m afraid not, sir,” Kimiko replied. “She is very elusive. Under different circumstances, I feel there would be much we could learn from one another.”

  “Well, don’t set up any meet-and-greets,” I snapped. “She’s the enemy and would very much like to kill me.”

  “Of course, Detective,” Kimiko responded.

  I sat for a second before finally asking, “Kimiko, what are you doing right now?”

  There was the briefest pause before Kimiko said, “Pursuing Carmen, sir.”

  “Does this happen to involve that climbing around on rooftops and tumbling over low-level obstacles thing?”

  “You mean parkour? Yes, Detective. I believe I know where she is, or at least where she is going. I am attempting to establish eyes on the target.”

  “Where are the rest of the ninja?” I asked.

  “Otherwise…indisposed,” Kimiko said. There was the barest hint of embarrassment in her tone.

  “What happened?”

  “We were…surprised in an ambush. Many of my comrades were injured. The rest are administering first aid. I am the only one able to pursue the target at the moment.”

  That was odd. It was very difficult to catch the ninja off-guard. Virtually impossible, I’d have said. And yet, C
armen and Crowder had pulled it off.

  “Well, be careful. I don’t want to have to hire a new ninja clan head,” I said. Kimiko acknowledge in her usual dry, professional manner and disconnected the call.

  X.

  Rather than head back to the office and risk Miss Typewell and Miss Janovich getting caught up in any sort of crossfire, I decided to hole up in a diner over on Harrison Street. It was a greasy spoon where the coffee was black and thick as sludge, the fryer oil had never been changed and carried with it a hint of every meal that’d ever been cooked in it, and the short order cook didn’t do substitutions. You got the food you were given, and just had to hope for the best. After a leaden meal of coffee and corned beef hash, I sat in my booth and catalogued my available resources.

  The ninja were out of things for now, it seemed. All I really had was whatever was on my person: my computer, car keys, a wallet containing my driving and private investigator’s licenses and a handful of small bills, the popgun, a personal force field generator (because I have a terrible habit of getting shot at), the brass knuckles, and…that was about it, really. A couple of scraps of paper, a pen I’d stolen from a service station, and a couple of credit chips that were probably emptier than I’d care to think about rounded things out.

  I could do with some support. Some muscle. But my cash flow was an issue. No one would work for free, and even the most considerate enforcer wanted at least some cash up front. Even a mook like Vinny the Pooh had brains enough to ask for a down payment, and he was literally a gorilla in a suit.

  Then the decision was taken out of my hands. A large, rough-knuckled hand landed on my shoulder with a heavy thud.