“Yeah, this is the third of her haunts we’ve come looking for her at. Nobody’s hurt her so far?”
“No, she’s in okay shape, no bumps or bruises,” said Salinas. “C’mon, I’ll take you to her.”
The Pirates’ Den resembled a cave. Piled up against one wall were treasure chests spilling over with glittering loot, golden coins, strings of fat pearls, silver broaches encrusted with rubies and emeralds. At a thick oaken table at the cavern’s center five husky pirates sat stiffly and silently, their gruff bewhiskered faces illuminated by a flickering candle thrust in a dusty rum bottle.
The sixth chair was occupied by a thin black girl.
She jumped to her feet as Salinas crossed the simulated stone threshold. “What’s wrong?” she asked, backing in the direction of the treasure chests.
“Nothing, Jim, everything’s fine,” he assured her. “Doc Moreno’s looking for you, is all.”
She saw Moreno and came hurrying over to him. She caught hold of both his hands. “Harry,” she said very softly, “I think I’m in some new, really serious trouble.”
“I think so, too, Jimalla.” He put a big arm around her narrow shoulders and, gently, turned her to face Dan and Molly. “But these two, I’m pretty sure, are going to be able to help you.”
“Well, if you’ll allow me to give you my honest opinion,” said Natalie, “he certainly doesn’t look especially comfortable.”
“Nat, the pendejo is still unconscious. Comfort isn’t a concern.”
“Well, I happen to feel that there’s a code of conduct concerning these things, similar, I imagine, to how you’re supposed to treat prisoners of war. What I mean is, you shouldn’t throw them on the floor of your shuttle cabin like a sack of old potatoes.”
“You’re the one, chica, who suggested stuffing Shel in that plastisack in the first place.”
“It would be much better, and more humane as well, it seems to me, if you’d at least put a pillow under his head.”
“Carumba,” observed Gomez, unbuckling himself from the passenger seat.
The official Newz, Inc. shuttle had departed the New Hollywood satellite nine minutes earlier and, with Natalie at the controls, was now en route for the Greater Los Angeles Spaceport.
Muttering, Gomez skirted the sack on the floor and took a cushion off one of the other passenger seats. He genuflected and arranged it under one end of the green sack that held the stun-gunned Sheldon Gates. “That ought to make him sufficiently comfy.”
“Wrong end.”
“Que?”
“You stuck the cushion under his feet.”
“No, that’s his head.”
“Don’t think I’m being critical of your judgment, though it’s not all that good under the best of circumstances, but you can see his ears poking at the sacking down there at the opposite end.”
Grunting, Gomez squatted and poked at the sacked fugitive. “Seems you’re right, Nat. His nose does seem to be down here.” Shifting the cushion, he plumped it and returned to his chair.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll contact the head office of Newz and tell those dimwits about this enormous scoop that I’ve come up with. They’re going to—”
“Momentito, Nat,” put in the detective. “The fact that Alicia Bower is missing hasn’t been made public yet.”
“That’s precisely why it makes such a terrific—”
“If you reveal that fact, along with the news that Jake and I are involved, it could screw up our chances of finding her.”
“How?”
“In numerous ways.”
“That is, which even you ought to be able to see, not a very persuasive—”
“It’s standard procedure in a kidnapping, chica, to keep the news quiet for as long as possible.”
“Is that what this is? Do you guys have evidence that she was abducted?”
“Not solid evidence, no. But we’re convinced the lady didn’t disappear of her own free will.”
“Do you have any idea who snatched her then?”
“There are a lot of angles to this. Right now it’s just not a good idea to broadcast the—”
“Hey, of course!” She snapped her fingers. “I’ve been hearing rumors for over a year about a possible link between Mechanix International and some sneaky government intelligence agencies.” She watched Gomez’s face as she continued. “Obviously those rumors are true, of course, and this hapless heiress somehow got caught up in some dangerous spillover from that. You may as well, you know, provide me with all the details, since I’m bound to—”
“Attend to me, amiguita,” he said. “There are several possible governmental trickeries tied in with this one. And, if you’ll play along with me, I will, you have my solemn word, tell you everything just as soon as—”
“Your word, solemn or otherwise, usually isn’t worth, if you’ll pardon the vulgarism, diddly, Gomez.”
“Cross my heart,” he vowed, crossing his heart. “Give us a couple days before you break the Alicia angle. If we haven’t found her by then, you—”
“And what am I supposed to do with Sheldon Gates in the meantime? Leave him in the sack?”
“You can turn him over to the SoCal cops,” he told her. “Shel’s wanted in connection with the murder of Ford Jaspers. The law doesn’t know that has anything to do with Alicia.”
“But, based on what I was able to overhear of your conversation with him, the acting CEO of Mechanix is the actual killer. Once Sheldon talks and links her to the killing, everything is likely to come out.”
“Shel is a very evasive lad. It’ll take a couple days at least for the cops to persuade him to tell them much of anything at all.”
Natalie was thoughtful for a moment. “Okay, I guess apprehending a murder suspect is a big enough story to impress my tyrannical bosses,” she decided. “Then, when I spring the Alicia Bower angle on them, it’ll knock them on their collective fannies.”
“Without a doubt,” he agreed.
“If only,” she said, glancing at him once again, “I could get over the idea that you’re still conning me.”
32
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT and there was relatively little traffic to be seen outside the windows of Walt Bascom’s tower office at the Cosmos building, mostly cruising brightlit skycabs. The agency chief was sitting on the edge of the desk, one leg slowly swinging, idly fingering the keys of his saxophone and watching Jimalla.
She sat, very straight, hands folded in her narrow lap, in a red plastiglass chair a few feet from him. “I’m still,” she was telling him, “sort of afraid.”
“We can put you up someplace safe for awhile,” Bascom assured her. “We’ll let your parents know that we’ll—”
“I don’t have much in the way of parents,” she said, glancing toward Dr. Moreno, who was gazing out a window across the office. “Just my dad and he doesn’t much give a darn where I am.”
“We’ll notify him anyway. But he won’t know exactly where you are. Okay?”
“Yeah, that’d be fine, sure.”
“Soon as she told us what she knew, I figured you ought to know,” said Dan. “Well, no, actually, I thought I should tell my dad, but I don’t know how to contact him, so I settled for you, Mr. Bascom. He’s okay, isn’t he?”
“At last report.”
“But he hasn’t found Alicia Bower yet?”
“No, not so far as we know.”
Molly leaned over in her chair to tap Jimalla on the arm. “You can tell him what you told us.”
“Guess I might as well.” She lifted her hands off her lap, rubbed at her knees, refolded her hands. “I got to know most of the people in our therapy group. Not exactly as friends, but I know them.”
Dr. Moreno turned his back to the window and gave the girl an encouraging nod.
Jimalla continued, “I never much liked Guy Woodruff, but—”
“Guy Woodruff, huh?” Bascom tapped the side of his saxophone with his forefinger. “We know him by another name, but g
o ahead.”
“Well, I used to run into him around Venice pretty often. This one night I was at Kaminsky’s Kafe—you know the place, Harry.”
“A dump,” supplied Moreno.
“Yeah, it is, sort of. I was in a booth with a friend and I heard somebody talking in the next booth to ours. Couldn’t see them, but I recognized Guy’s voice. He was talking with an old man, somebody sixty or so. Except this man kept calling him Sheldon and not Guy—well, that fits in with what you just said, doesn’t it? Anyway, this old man was saying that somebody named Myra wasn’t pleased with Sheldon’s reports. Did he think they were paying him for a lot of drivel and no facts? He said that Sheldon had to put down every damn word that Alicia said in the sessions. ‘You put it down word for word, Sheldon, and let us do the editing.’ Something like that, is what the old man told him.” Jimalla unfolded her hands, flexed her thin fingers and rubbed at her knees again. “I got, you know, curious. So I took a careful walk to the bathroom. They didn’t get a look at me, but I saw them both. It was Guy for certain, sitting there with a thin, welldressed man who didn’t look too healthy.”
“You didn’t hear the other man’s name?” asked Bascom.
She gave a negative shake of her head. “And I just forgot all about it for awhile. But then Alicia disappeared and I got to wondering,” she told him. “When Guy, or whoever he is, went missing, too, I knew something was going on wrong. Then I ... well, I guess this was stupid, considering. I told a few people what I knew, even though I’m not exactly sure what it is I really do know. Next day, when I was about to go into the place I was staying, a couple of guys tried to grab me and drag me into their landcar. I kneed one and got away from them both, but I was really scared. I told my friend, Norm Porter, about all of it.” She glanced at Molly. “Molly told me that some guys worked Norm over to get him to tell them where they could find me. That’s even scarier.”
Dan said, “I figured you could use the ID Simulator, Mr. Bascom. Then you could use Jimalla’s description of that older man to maybe get an identification of him.”
“Yep, we ought to be able to do that.” The agency head moved closer to her and held out his hand. “Come on over to the gadget, child, and we’ll give it a try.”
33
THE MENTOR PSYCH CENTRE loomed up across the Staff Landing Area, a multistoried, blankfaced building standing grey in the grey morning.
“His electropass got us onto the lot,” observed Georgia as her skycar set down on the grey surface of the lot. “So the other stuff Dr. Winter lent you ought to work, too.”
Unbuckling, Jake said, “Getting inside is not going to be our major problem.”
“No guards outside the Staff Entrance, just like Winter said.” She left the car.
“But considerable awaiting inside.”
They walked confidently across the early morning ground level landing area. At the opaque plastiglass door to the Staff Wing Jake inserted the electrokey that the psychiatrist had given him.
Fifteen seconds passed.
Then, with a faint hissing sound, the door slid aside.
The initial length of grey corridor was blank, without a single door or window. Just before they reached its end, they halted.
Jake picked up Georgia and carried her in his arms. After one small laugh, she shut her eyes and feigned unconsciousness.
Around the bend in the corridor was a wide door labeled control/monitoring #1. Stationed directly in front of it, arms folded across his massive chest, stood a large grey guardbot. He turned his head toward the pair, asking, “What are you doing in this area, please?”
“Look—where’s Dr. Cohen’s office?” asked Jake in a very agitated voice.
“This section of the Centre is restricted to staff only, sir.”
“I know, but Cohen’s on staff, isn’t he?” Jake moved up closer to the robot.
“If you wish to see Dr. Cohen—which Dr. Cohen is that, by the way? We have two on staff and—”
“Stanley,” said Jake. “Listen, the medication he gave my wife—some kind of new stuff and if you ask me he shouldn’t be handing out anything that dangerous to people—Well, I found her on the bathroom floor this morning. It’s Dr. Cohen’s—that’s Dr. Stanley Cohen’s—fault and we—”
“Sir, you should have called MedAlert and not—awk.”
Georgia had swung up her left hand and slapped a tiny parasite control disc to the preoccupied guardbot’s side. “Okay, you can put me on my feet now, Jake.”
He did that, telling the controlled robot, “You’ll let us into the Control Room. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Far as you’re concerned, everything is just fine. Nothing out of the ordinary is going on.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door slid open.
She had, she was fairly certain, lost some weight lately. It was hard to be sure because the plain grey dress they had given her to wear was several sizes too large anyway. She was still, too, having problems with her memory and she found she couldn’t always keep track, when she tried to think back, of what she’d done during the day. Probably she’d missed some meals. Actually, she was nearly certain, she’d been losing weight even before she came here.
She wasn’t even exactly sure how long she’d been here. A week probably, something around a week. Several days anyway. She knew where she was, though, she knew that much.
“And I know my name—it’s Alicia Bower.”
When she said her name, sitting there in the grey armchair, she felt a sharp pain in her side. That was something that had happened before and she had better ask Dr. Spearman about it.
Except, and she had no precise notion as to why, she didn’t especially trust him. Didn’t particularly like the man, even though he treated her cordially. Whenever the treatments that she needed were painful, he apologized and then explained that she’d had a serious breakdown. One that, unfortunately, sometimes required painful remedies. She’d be as good as new soon, that he guaranteed her.
The trouble was, Alicia wasn’t at all sure how she’d felt when she was new or completely healthy.
She got up, very slowly and carefully, from the chair and took a few steps across the grey carpet. The grey slippers they’d given her didn’t fit especially well either.
Yes, definitely she was thinner. She felt different when she walked, lighter and, somehow, much more vulnerable.
“I’ll be like Slimjim soon,” she said to herself.
That was odd, wasn’t it?
She didn’t actually know anyone by that name. Yet when she said that name to herself, very briefly, just for a few seconds, she had an image of a very thin black teenage girl.
If she trusted Dr. Spearman a little more than she did, maybe she’d ask him about things like that. Names and images that popped into her head. Names and images that, so far as she could tell, had no connection with anyone she knew or anything that had ever happened to her.
“Slimjim,” she said again. “Jimalla.”
Another image of the same girl and, for some reason, the ocean.
Yes, the Pacific at twilight. She was walking alongside Jimalla and they stopped to watch a robot, all trimmed in bright neon, juggling, his metal body framed by the glare of the setting sun.
Maybe when she was better, she’d be clearer about things.
The grey door in the grey wall slid open with that whispering sound it always made.
“Having a little exercise, Alicia?” It was Dr. Spearman, smiling in that way that was supposed to be friendly. He had the dark, thin medical kit tucked up under his arm.
“I want to ask you something.”
The psychiatrist seated himself in one of the chairs at the round grey table near the center of the room. “Why, of course.”
“How much did I weigh when I arrived here?”
“Are you worrying about that?”
“Not exactly worrying, but curious.”
Spearman, smiling, stroked his b
lond beard with plump fingers. After placing the kit on the table, he took his phone out of a pocket of his medical jacket. He placed it a few inches from the kit, reached into another pocket. “We can certainly tell you that,” he told her. He produced his handheld computer terminal. “According to our charts on you—119 pounds.”
“And what do I weigh now?”
“Let’s see—yesterday it was 115.” He made a clucking noise, shaking his head. “I’m glad you pointed this out, Alicia. We’ll, yes, have to do something about this.”
“Not tubes,” she said softly. “Please, I don’t want to be fed with tubes again.”
“We haven’t done that, my dear.”
“Not this time.”
He set the computer aside, rested an elbow on the table. “You remember your earlier stay with us?”
“Some of it, yes. That was early last year.”
Dr. Spearman nodded. “Well, I don’t believe you’ll have to do anything more than eat a little more at each meal,” he said. “The nurse tells me that—”
“Was she my nurse when I had to stay at the Centre before?”
“She’s a robot, my dear. They all look very much—”
“It’s only that I have the feeling that there’s something familiar about—”
“What have I been telling you about your habit of interrupting, Alicia? It’s not an admirable habit.”
She returned to the grey armchair and sat down. “I’m sorry.”
“Come, sit over here at the table.”
Sighing, the young woman got up again. She crossed to the table and took the chair the farthest from Dr. Spearman.
He said, “You also have to work at masking your negative feelings somewhat better. I know you don’t like some of our therapy techniques, but there’s no need to scowl and make faces. Those are a little girl’s way of—”
“Was I here before?”
“You’re interrupting again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We were just now discussing your last visit. Don’t you remember that we were doing that, Alicia?”
“Of course, yes,” she said. “I mean before that time. Years ago.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, you’ve only been here twice.”
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