So far, this all conformed to my hypothesis. I felt a glow of pleasure.
“So I decided,” Barumi continued, “to destroy the Mayor. When I learned there was a Galactic Cop on his way to Belladonna, I picked one of my whores and I brain-moulded her to be my slave. I shaped her aura, so she could lie without being detected. Then I cut off her legs and arms and raped her with a condom smeared with the Mayor’s DNA and sent her to the City Hospital. That was my trap, and you fell for it. She told you she was raped by the Mayor. You were about to arrest him! With the Mayor gone, I could’ve made my play. I could’ve ended up as boss of bosses in Lawless City.”
“You still can,” I said eagerly. “But explain to me: how did you kill the medical students and the paramedics?”
“I didn’t.”
“But you must have done,” I said coaxingly. “The frame won’t work without them. I don’t have jurisdiction for ordinary criminal offences.”
“Someone killed them,” said Barumi sulkily. “You were sent for, and I seized the moment and framed the Mayor. Now, what’s our plan?”
I fumed. The original crime was still not solved.
But I did at least have a full confession from Sandro Barumi.
“Aretha,” I said casually.
“Yeah?”
“Arrest this man.”
There was an awkward silence.
“Huh?” she said.
“His crimes lie outside my jurisdiction,” I told her patiently. “But he’s just admitted to grievous bodily harm, rape, and perverting the course of justice. Those are criminal offences under the Belladonnan penal code. Arrest him.”
“Don’t shit me, man,” laughed Barumi.
“I can’t,” said Aretha.
“Why not?” I asked patiently.
Aretha looked anxious. Her eyes flashed around. We were alone in this tasteless salon; but how alone?
“Because it’s too dangerous for me to – look, the police department is paid a lot of money to—”
“Arrest him, or I’ll arrest you.”
Aretha stared at me.
“You’re the boss,” she said, coldly.
Then she fixed Barumi with a firm glare: “Sandro Barumi, you are under arrest for rape, grievous bodily harm, and perverting the course of justice. Anything you say will be given as evidence. Got that?”
“What happened to our plan?” said Barumi, sadly.
“Come quietly,” said Aretha getting to her feet. She took out her mag-cuffs. “Hands behind your back.”
Barumi obligingly put his hands behind his back. He turned around for her to cuff him.
I stepped forward and clubbed Barumi to the ground with the back of my hand, and drew his gun, and threw it at Aretha, who caught it instinctively.
Barumi fell, then got up and saw Aretha pointing his own gun at him.
“Bitch!” he screamed.
“Back off!” she screamed back.
Barumi reached in his jacket for a second weapon, and she fired an explosive bullet near his head. The wall shattered behind him. Barumi was very still.
Then he whistled.
Aretha stared at him. “Just put your hands—” she said shakily, clearly confused by the bewilderingly fast pace of what had happened. I had moved so swiftly I had been literally invisible. All Aretha knew is that Barumi had fallen to the ground for no apparent reason, and suddenly she had a gun in her hand. Sheer instinct had taken over from there.
“You’re going down, bitch,” whispered Sandro Barumi.
Aretha slowly looked around. More than a dozen bodyguards had appeared in response to Barumi’s whistle, and they were all aiming their plasma pistols and explosive-bullet guns at her. “Help?” she said to me.
“Not my jurisdiction,” I said calmly. “I can’t assist in any way with this arrest; my apologies for that, officer.” And I smiled a heartless smile.
Aretha flicked a switch on the gun and threw it in the air and it exploded in a huge flash. Smoke billowed.
And she ran. She ran past the pillars, beyond the statuary. Bullets rained into her body, and rocked her, but she carried on running. Plasma blasts burned the clothes off her back, and still she ran. She hurtled towards the window and crashed through.
Barumi was laughing, his arms waving widely.
I drew my two plasma pistols in less time than elapses in the flutter of a butterfly’s wing.
“However, the attempted murder of a local law enforcement officer,” I explained, “does come under my jurisdiction.”
Barumi turned and drew his backup gun and aimed it at my temple. “I could—”
I shot him with a plasma bolt to the chest. Barumi flinched and tottered back, and managed to fire an explosive bullet at my head. I dropped one of my pistols, snatched and crushed Barumi’s bullet in my palm, then caught my pistol before it hit the ground.
A hail of bullets and plasma beams rained down on me, but I was moving now. I fired and ducked, fired and ducked. The entire shootout lasted no more than thirty seconds.
When the shooting was over, my clothes were ablaze, and the blood of Barumi’s twelve gunsels flowed over the ornate mosaic floor of the pimp’s palazzo. None remained standing.
Barumi was still alive, blood oozing from his mouth, his third eye staring straight at me, seeing nothing.
I put a bullet through the third eye.
“Suspect killed,” I said calmly, “while resisting arrest.”
Outside the pimp’s palace, Sheriff Heath was supervising a posse of deputised police officers, all armed with plasma rifles. Paramedics were clustered around the burned and battered body of Sergeant Aretha Jones.
“How is she?” I said.
Sheriff Heath shrugged.
“I’ll live, you motherfucker,” said Aretha, over her mobile implant.
She dragged herself on to her feet, bracing herself against the shoulders of the startled paramedics. Her jaw had been blown off by an explosive bullet, one ear was missing, her face was scarred with burns. And most of her clothes had been burned away, revealing hard black body armour beneath.
“You were lucky,” I said.
“You set me up,” said Aretha.
“Yes.”
“You knew they’d try to kill me. You let them try.”
“I got a confession. And when they tried to kill you, that gave me just cause to use maximum force. My aims were achieved.”
“I could have been killed.”
“That was a possibility.”
“You callous fuck.” Aretha wheezed.
“Your body armour—”
“I only wore body armour,” Aretha explained tensely, “because I knew you’d betray me.”
“How could you know that?” I asked, genuinely intrigued.
Aretha stared at me with lidless eyes. “Because it’s what you always do.”
Aretha was strapped into a stretcher by the two paramedics. The pain had kicked in by now; even an anaesthetic squirt wasn’t helping much. Out of curiosity, I surveyed her aura: it was a tormented mass of black snakes. Hate, rage, and a sense of betrayal consumed her.
Then the paramedics carried Aretha away and loaded her into their ambulance.
“That was harsh,” said Sheriff Heath mildly.
“The lying bitch,” I said savagely, “deserved it.”
One by one, and then in twos and threes, Barumi’s gunmen and gunwomen were emerging from the pink palace, carried out on stretchers or sealed in body bags.
The deputies made a fierce force: they were burly, mean-looking, and carried their plasma rifles with authority.
“These guys all work for you?” I asked.
“They belong to the Ninth Canton flybikers’ chapter,” Sheriff Heath said. “I deputised them.”
“Why not use the official deputies?”
“Hell, they’re all as corrupt as I am.”
I nodded.
I realised that I now had to explain the true situation to the Sheriff. For it was evi
dent that my hypothesis had been incorrect. Sandro Barumi had tried to frame the Mayor, but he hadn’t killed the Sheriff’s son, or the other medics. Nor had he been responsible for the murders of Version 43 and Jaynie Hooper.
“Well?” said Sheriff Heath.
“It’s not Barumi.”
“Shit!” Rage washed over the Sheriff’s face. “I went out on a fucking limb for—”
“Wait. Let me explore another hypothesis.”
The Sheriff seethed.
I explored the data.
I reviewed the biogs of all the gang bosses and their followers: nothing new emerged.
I reinvestigated the Mayor, and found no fresh evidence. It was clear that the Mayor was playing an artful game – he was a leader of organised crime in the city, no mere flunky. But there was no reason to suppose he had killed the medics, or Version 43, or Jaynie Hooper.
So then, on a hunch, I accessed the personal files of every citizen in Lawless City, cross-referenced them with funeral services, and cross-referenced those with the files Version 43 had downloaded at the hospital.
An anomaly became apparent. Thousands of people were dying of illness, murder and accidents every month, without ever being treated at the hospital, or autopsied at the morgue.
“It’s a phantom,” I said at length, ending the Sheriff’s irritated wait.
“Come again?”
“A phantom hospital.”
The Sheriff mulled on that. His whiskers twitched. “Makes sense,” he conceded.
“That’s what your son discovered. People are getting ill, they go to hospital, they never get there. Then their limbs and organs are sold off. That’s why Version 43 failed to find evidence of organ theft at the Hospital in his extensive investigation and analysis. Because the criminals were not in fact stealing organs: they were stealing people.”
“Oh – fuck,” said the Sheriff.
It suddenly dawned on me that Sergeant Aretha Jones had gone off by ambulance to hospital. But which hospital?
“Yes, indeed, ‘Fuck,’ ” I said.
While the Sheriff called the City Hospital on his MI, I reviewed all the available data on Sergeant Aretha Jones.
And I discovered, in her most recent files, a memo to her superior office applying for leave from her regular duties to pursue an undercover assignment. I read the memo with dawning horror:
4.12.54. From Sergeant A. Jones, Bompasso PD, to Commissioner D. Hayes
Authorisation requested for undercover sting operation: Codename Viper. Sergeant Aretha Louise Jones working for Galactic Cop X44, posing as a corrupt police officer. The aim of the operation is to discover whether pimp Sandro Barumi is responsible for the murders of Alexander Heath, Andrei Pavlovsky, Jada Brown, Sara Limer, Fliss Hooper, Jaynie Hooper and Galactic Cop X43, employing banned technology. It is anticipated that this will be a high-risk operation, due to the tendency of Galactic cyborg officers to neglect the safety of their human partners.
I was stunned.
Aretha had put this into the system three hours before we had met with Barumi. She’d known I would betray her, and she’d known she was risking her life. But she’d still gone along with my plan.
And she’d lied. She’d lied so absolutely there was not a trace of duplicity in her body aura. She’d made Barumi believe she was corrupt, when she was not. How could she have done all that?
I studied Jones’s biog again, and realised that as a young woman she had studied karate, zen buddhism, and Kirlian meditation – the art of consciously controlling one’s own body aura.
That explained how she’d had the skill to conceal her lies from Barumi’s third eye by, in effect, faking her own essence. She’d backed my play by altering her own electron-photonic glow.
Damn, this woman was good.
I had intended to trick her; instead she had tricked me.
Consequently, I concluded, I had been guilty of a monumental error of judgement. It now seemed to me that Sergeant Aretha Jones was an honourable officer who, for reasons I could not fathom, had a blind and unshakeable loyalty towards me. Oblivious to this fact, I had almost got her killed. Then, to cap it all, I had humiliated and taunted her.
And, finally, I had allowed her to go off in an ambulance which was not officially registered, with paramedics whose badge numbers were fictitious, to a hospital which did not exist.
This was, I concluded, not one of my better days.
I was now certain that Sergeant Jones had been abducted by the same gang of organ-thieves who were responsible for the deaths of the medics.
And so, I presumed, in a matter of days if not hours, her organs and limbs would be stripped from her body to be sold and reused. It was possible, too, that her brain tissue would be extracted a piece at a time to create a cheap form of anti-dementia serum.
And I was to blame. I had failed to read the clues. I had misjudged a key member of my team. I had allowed myself to become obsessed with eliminating a single evil pimp, and had failed to realise that a vast and far more evil conspiracy was in process.
How could I, I asked myself, have been so wrong?
I flew with the Sheriff in his patrol car.
“You think this was a revenge abduction? Sergeant Jones has a lot of enemies,” suggested the Sheriff.
“No,” I said.
“What then?”
“I think this happens a lot. No one ever notices.”
“This is one evil mother-raping cock-sucking city,” the Sheriff conceded.
“Indeed,” I said.
There was a pause.
“I always thought, you see,” said the Sheriff, breaking the silence, in a tone that hinted at contempt, “that you cyborgs were infallible.”
“Nearly so.”
“Not this time.”
“It’s true,” I conceded, “that I was wrong about who killed your son. And why.”
“You had the ‘when’ pretty well nailed,” the Sheriff said tactfully.
“It seemed a compelling hypothesis.”
“You had no fucking clue.”
I considered this evaluation. “That point is a fair one.”
“I’ll tell you what’s a compelling hypothesis,” said the Sheriff. “There was evil going on, and my son found out, and tried to stop it. And that’s why they killed him.”
“That is indeed my current hypothesis.”
“But so fucking what? What good will it do, me helping you? Alex is dead.”
“That’s correct.”
The Sheriff kept his eyes fixed in the air to avoid looking at me, but his thoughts tumbled out slowly like a cliff eroding.
“Alex always thought, you see,” said the Sheriff, “that I was a piece of shit. He called that one right, all right.”
“I decline to comment.”
The cliff-eroding continued, as the Sheriff bared his soul.
“I got thirty-five children, you know,” the Sheriff said, “scattered around the universe. It’s not like I need another – why the hell would I want – oh fuck it. Who do you think is behind it? The phantom hospital?”
“It could be any of the gang bosses, it could be all of them. It could be the Mayor. It doesn’t matter.”
“How doesn’t it matter?”
“According to my data, ten thousand people went missing this month, including Aretha. Many may still be alive. Our mission is to find them, and save them. After that, I will deal with the guilty ones.”
“That kinda makes sense.”
“It is necessary for me to do this.”
“Redemption, huh?”
My thought processes momentarily froze.
A moment later, I was back to normal.
“No,” I explained.
“But you’re angry, ain’t you?” goaded the Sheriff, happy to spread guilt elsewhere. “At yourself. You blame yourself. For screwing up.”
“No.”
“Have it your fucking way, tinbrain.”
The patrol car landed.
“All our ambulances are accounted for,” said Latimer, the auto-mechanic in the ambulance bay. “I can’t help you.”
“It had a City Hospital livery. The paramedics wore City Hospital uniforms, and City Hospital ID badges.”
“Those things ain’t hard to fabricate.”
“We believe there’s a phantom hospital, taking patients.”
“Believe what you like.”
“Do you have any information that can help us?”
“No.”
I assessed Latimer’s demeanour and body language: he was lying.
“He’s lying,” I told Sheriff Heath. The Sheriff took out a pair of gloves and slipped them on. They were metal, and spiked.
“Are you fucking guffing me?” protested Latimer.
“You got any information that can help us?”
Latimer looked into the Sheriff’s blue eyes, and he flinched. The Sheriff’s rage was so intense, it shone like sunlight at high noon.
Even so, Latimer stood firm. The Sheriff threw a powerful fist.
He paused the punch a millimetre from Latimer’s face.
“I could sue you,” mocked Latimer.
I made a guess: Latimer frequented Hari Gilles’s House of Pain on a recreational basis. The threat of beating up such a man was no kind of threat.
“I could,” said the Sheriff slowly, “eat your fucking testicles. Explain that to your girlfriends.” And the Sheriff fixed Latimer with a killer stare.
I wondered if the Sheriff’s threat had been hyperbole, or a literal warning of intent.
“Fuck off!” scoffed Latimer.
But the Sheriff continued to glare. Hate exuded from him. Latimer tried to look away, break his gaze, but he couldn’t.
Latimer was starting to sweat.
I realised that, although Latimer had no fear of pain, he still feared the Sheriff and his wrath.
Moment by excruciating moment, Latimer was losing his sense of who he was. The Sheriff stared and stared, as if he were visualising exactly what he was going to do to this poor fuck. And Latimer could see it too.
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