by Jeff Edwards
I looked the car over carefully. My visitor had plastered a bright orange decal to the upper edge of the windshield. It was a traffic ticket, citing me for parking in the Residents-Only section of the lot. (I was parked in Leanda Forsyth’s spot, on the theory that she wouldn’t be using it any time soon.) The signature block at the bottom of the decal was signed by Officer L. V. Bruhn. Under it, he had written ‘Just practicing for my new career.’
I knew better than to mess with the decal. It would only yield to a tailored molecular solvent that was jealously guarded by the police. Any other sort of tampering would release an electro-chemical reaction which would permanently etch the LAPD logo into the glass, rendering the car undriveable. In addition, the orange pigment in the decal was a chemical taggant that would indelibly dye the fingers of anyone stupid enough to meddle with it, making them easily identifiable to the police. Supposedly, the chemical taggant was so microscopically fine that it could penetrate the pores of just about any gloves made. I didn’t know if that last part was true, but the rumor was usually enough to keep casual vandals from messing with the decals on other people’s cars with the intent of ruining their windshields.
A small rectangle in the upper right hand corner of the decal was a photo-active matrix, showing the date and time—November 10, 2065 / 7:51 p.m.—followed by a string of changing digits that advised me of the number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds remaining until this citation expired. If the decal wasn’t removed before the counter reached zero, in thirty days (minus a few minutes), the electro-chemical reaction would self-activate, melting the accusatory LAPD logo into my windshield.
I slipped the key chip through the lock sensor. Unlike Vivien’s obedient gull-wings, my door did not fawn all over itself getting out of my way. But it did unlock itself, which was close enough for me. I opened the door and climbed in.
Seen from inside the car, the decal was located high enough above my line of sight not to present an obstruction to my driving, but it did keep drawing my eyes back to it, the way that a sore tooth attracts your tongue no matter how hard you try to ignore it. I’d pay it. I had no choice, as Bruhn very well knew. It was hardly a crippling shot, but his message was clear enough. Two messages, actually. First: when this case was over, Bruhn would still be a cop. And second: Vivien Forsyth’s umbrella of money and power would not cover me forever.
I plugged the key chip into its slot on the control yoke. The instrument panel flickered green as the plasma display flared to life. The computer beeped and gronked as it ran automatic diagnostics and sequenced the car’s various systems on line. Then there was the wail of the turbines spinning up. They seemed overly-loud after the well-heeled silence of Vivien’s showboat.
Bruhn’s ticket hung at the upper edge of my vision. I could handle him. I could handle this case. Money, power, and bullshit aside, it was a simple missing person job. How hard could it be?
I punched a music chip into the stereo slot: a collection of Blues tunes that I had transferred onto microchip myself, from a forty-year old compact disk. As near as I could determine, I was one of about nine people left who still listened to the Blues. There’s not enough of a market for anyone to turn a profit by re-mastering the likes of Lonny Johnson, Rusty Parker, or Billie Holiday. So, the few copies that are left are all amateur re-recordings made by dinosaurs like me.
I pressed the play button, and the whine of the turbines got lost in the buttery-sandpaper voice of John Lee Hooker, singing about cheap whiskey and love-gone-wrong. I fished out a cigarette to finish setting the mood.
There are people in this business who swear that they can smell trouble coming. Who knows? It might even be true. Perhaps the twenty-first century edition of Homo sapiens has clawed its way far enough up the natural selection curve to evolve a really useful pro-survival trait, like a hyper-acute intuition for danger. A tight little bundle of neural receptors somewhere deep in the medial forebrain, calibrated to the twin carrier frequencies of adrenaline and bad news. Or, perhaps it’s something more ancient, some primal remnant of the animal hindbrain that can snuffle out stray whiffs of disaster like an olfactronic sensor vacuuming up the air and straining it for microscopic traces of explosives or drugs. Or maybe it’s all just wishful thinking, a natural human resistance to the idea that we are frail creatures clinging to existence in a universe that can blindside any one of us without warning.
Whatever its origin, if such a thing as the mysterious danger-sense even existed, I obviously didn’t possess it. If I had, I would have driven away right then... Away from Vivien Forsyth—away from her daughter—away from the entire case, and everything that was coming with it.
I punched the button that kicked in the blowers. The Pontiac rose softly as the apron inflated. I backed slowly out of Leanda Forsyth’s parking stall, and drove into the night.
CHAPTER 2
I cruised down Santa Monica Boulevard through the heart of the city, passing out of Dome #7 and the gleaming chrome and glass of Beverly Hills¾through Domes 8 and 10, and the frenetic glitz of West Hollywood¾into that squalid little haven called Dome #12: East Los Angeles.
I parked at the corner of 55th and Fortuna, and walked the two blocks to the barricade. I don’t live in Dome #12; I live in its neighboring enclave, the Zone.
Its official title was Los Angeles Urban Environmental Enclosure 12-A, but the name itself was the fanciest thing about the place. It wasn’t even a dome in its own right, just a huge geodesic blister of translucent polycarbon grafted onto the eastern flank of Dome #12. It was an ugly thing, as much like the soaring arcs of the other domes as a remora is like the shark that it clings to. But it kept out the acid rain, and cut the solar ultraviolet down to something that the human body could tolerate, so those of us who lived there didn’t complain. Or rather, if we did complain, nobody listened.
I certainly don’t have any room to complain, myself. Unlike most of the other Zoners, I could afford to live somewhere else. Not in Vivien Forsyth’s neighborhood certainly, but some place nicer than the Zone. I liked my house, though. It was my home, and had been for years before the neighborhood had gone to the street gangs. Chalk it up to my stubborn streak. I wasn’t planning to move.
Plus, I’d been secretly hoping that the city would get around to cleaning up the Zone. Now it didn’t look like that was ever going to happen. With their usual flair for brilliance, the City Planners had decided to build a new dome on the other side of the city—lots of parks and shiny new buildings—while East LA continued its slide into the cesspool.
I declared my Blackhart at the barricade, and produced my ID chip, coded with my concealed-carry license and the mandatory ballistic map of my gun barrel. The cops waved a sensor wand over me anyway, for no reason that I could determine; I had already shown them that I was carrying a military grade 12mm. Were they afraid that I might try to smuggle in a pen knife?
After this useless ritual was complete, they opened the barricade and waved me through.
As always, I entered the Zone on foot. Very few people are stupid enough to drive their cars into the Zone any more, and there hasn’t been a cab within a block of the barricade in years. The MagLev trains don’t run through the Zone anymore either. LA-Trans had discovered the hard way that sending a Lev into the Zone did not necessarily equate to getting it back out again.
Fifty-fifth Street was poorly lit, the majority of the carbon-vapor streetlights having fallen prey to vandals. I scanned the shadows carefully as I walked. I’d never had to pull my Blackhart in this particular stretch of the Zone, but I’ve always felt that the three blocks leading to Alameda Street were an ambush waiting to happen.
In other parts of the city, two out of three buildings sported holo-facades: brightly-colored holographic projections that hid graffiti-mottled walls behind illusions of emerald cities, or waterfalls, or idealized jungle tree-houses—anything but the dismal face of reality. It was a typical Los Angeles response; it was much cheaper to disguise a run-down building
than to repair one.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, of course. Bright light weakened the holograms, washed out their bright colors, destroying the illusion. When the sun was up, the buildings stood naked and ugly, stripped of their dazzling mirages. But, for the darkened half of the planet’s rotation, everything could be beautiful. Rouge over rot. What my grandfather used to call ‘masking tape over a hole in the wall.’
There were no holo-facades on 55th Street though, not on this side of the barricade. The old buildings had only the darkness to hide their tired faces. In the Zone, the holographic hocus pocus was mostly reserved for the bars and massage parlors over on Santa Fe Avenue.
I turned right onto Alameda. In the distance, I heard three gunshots. There was a pause, and then a brief burst of shots from an automatic weapon. The sounds had come from behind me, and to my left—the direction of 52nd and Imperial. Probably the VC butting heads with the Aryan Fist again.
There wouldn’t be any sirens. LAPD Tactical rarely ventured into the Zone after sundown, and when they did, it was always in squad-strength or better. The bodies, if there were any, would lay on the sidewalk until the cops swept them up in the morning. Or more likely, they’d be snatched off the street and shoved into a liquid nitrogen freezer by one of the teams of organ poachers that prowled the Zone at night. Spare body parts were a lucrative business, especially to poachers who could take their pick of the meat that the street gangs left lying around.
I turned right onto Gage. Kerri Hampton sat on the hood of the graffiti-covered Mercury sedan that marked the edge of her turf. It was an old-style wheeled car, but the tires were long gone, along with the windows, and the seats, and everything else that could be pried or broken loose from the car’s moldering carcass.
Kerri bounced to her feet when she saw me coming, and stood there, waiting for me to get closer. She flexed her knees constantly, one after the other, like a speeded-up version of the half-dance that a little boy does when he has to pee. Her ghost-white hands were vibrating at the frequency of the drugs pulsing through the veins of her skinny arms. She flashed me a come-hither smile that she’d probably stolen off some assembly-line perfect fashion model in one of the slick European magazines. “Stalin, you want a blowjob?”
I shook my head. “Not tonight, Kerri.”
She made a pouty face from the same magazine. “You always say that.”
I walked past her and said over my shoulder. “Then why do you keep asking?”
She took three quick steps to catch up with me. “I need food. A girl’s gotta eat. Just a couple of E-M, so I can get a sandwich later on.” She snatched at the sleeve of my windbreaker. “Okay?”
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll make you a sandwich.”
She slapped at my arm. “That’s not funny!”
“I’m not joking,” I said. “If you’re hungry, I’ll make you something to eat. I will not give you money so that you can support your Jag habit.”
“I don’t do Jag,” she said.
“Whatever it is you’re doing,” I said. “I’m serious about the sandwich. That’s my best offer.”
Kerri stopped. “I want to go home, okay? I just need a little money for a ticket.”
I stopped and turned to face her. “Where’s home?”
“Bristol, North Dakota,” she said.
I pulled out my cigarettes and thumped one out of the pack. “There’s no such place.”
“Yes there is,” Kerri said in a wheedling voice. “It’s a small town. My Daddy used to own a farm there before the rain got so polluted that it couldn’t support the crops. Now he drives a truck for the nitrate refinery.”
I lit up, sucked a lung-full and exhaled. “You’re bullshitting me, Kerri.”
“No I’m not,” she said. “I just want to go home.” She made a visible effort to still the drug-induced tremors running through her body.
“How much is a ticket back to Bristol?”
“Five hundred Euro-marks.”
I stared at her.
“Okay! Okay! It’s four twenty-five, but I need a little food money for the trip.”
I took another hit off my cigarette. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll buy you a ticket myself, one-way, non-refundable. But I’m going to have it coded for you only, so you can’t sell it or trade it for whatever your drug-of-the-week is. I’ll even make you a big bag of sandwiches for the ride. How does that sound?”
“You don’t have to go through all that. Just give me the money,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”
I shook my head. “Not a chance.”
She shoved me. “Fuck you, Stalin!”
I started walking again. “Not tonight, Kerri.”
From behind me, she yelled, “You some kind of freak? Can’t get it up for girls? Is that why you never want anything?”
I smiled. “If I say ‘yes,’ will you stop asking me?”
“Fuck you!” she said again.
It was apparently her best parting-shot.
My house used to be the local LA-Trans office, before the city transit authority decided to pull the MagLev trains out of the Zone.
When I got to my front door, I paused while House scanned me. The ID scan took less than a second, and then House opened the door and let me in.
“Good evening, David.”
I peeled off my windbreaker and started unbuckling my shoulder rig. “Good evening, House.”
I walked into the kitchen and dropped weapon, holster, and jacket in a little bundle on the counter.
“You have two messages from a Ms. Dancer,” House said. “Shall I play them back?”
Dancer was a cop, an LAPD Homicide Detective. I’d had run-ins with her in the past. She was the body-builder type, and she made little secret of the fact that she’d like to go a couple of rounds with me in an alley some time. I consider myself a fair brawler, but—if I ever tangled with Dancer—I would cheat. Even then, I’d probably come away with a few broken bones.
I opened the cabinet over the sink and pulled down a half-full bottle of Cutty Sark. It was getting hard to find it in bottles anymore, and I refused to buy scotch in those silly squeeze-tubes.
I poured three fingers of Cutty into an empty coffee mug and took a swallow. The scotch was warm and good going down.
“Okay, House” I said. “Play the messages. Audio only, please.”
A second later, Dancer’s voice poured out of hidden speakers in the ceiling. “Stalin? This is Dancer. I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.” She rattled off a phone number with a Southwest LA area code. That was her division, Southwest. The second message was a carbon-copy of the first, except that she stressed the urgency of my return call a little more.
“Would you like for me to call her back?” House asked.
“No thanks,” I said. I was pretty sure I knew what she wanted. The last time Dancer had needed to speak to me urgently, she and her partner (an older guy named Delaney) had rousted me out of bed to accuse me of a murder that I hadn’t committed. I’d done a thing or two since to even up the score, and she was probably calling now to throw her weight in with good old Detective Bruhn. Another oblique shot from his end of the court. Vivien Forsyth could clamp down on him, but she couldn’t lean on every Los Angeles cop at the same time.
I took another swallow of scotch and exhaled through my nose. “Let’s just assume that I’ve been sufficiently threatened by LA’s Finest, and leave it at that.”
I drained the cup with one last gulp and looked at the bottle for a few seconds. No. One was enough for now. I expected to be working as soon as Vivien’s courier showed up with the files. I put the bottle back into the cabinet and closed the door. It wasn’t going anywhere.
Contrary to the apparent opinion of the LAPD AI’s, I did not have an alcohol problem. Or, if I did, I was so far into denial that I couldn’t see it. I didn’t drive when I drank, and I didn’t tie one on more than a few times a year. On the other hand, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone
all day without at least a couple of fingers of Cutty.
Any one of the West Side clinics could have cured me of my taste for scotch. I had a fleeting vision of some little dweeb in a lab coat poking around in my DNA until I couldn’t even stand the smell of alcohol. The idea appealed to me about as much as letting them cure my cravings for nicotine. Hell, why not go the distance? Maybe there was a gene they could tweak to make me stop listening to the Blues... and another that could help me stop dreaming about all the things that might have been.
I went to the door of my workshop, opened it and stood at the threshold for the fiftieth time without going in. My tools were right where I’d left them. The laser cutter and arc welder waited patiently for me to walk in, grab an interesting scrap of metal from the bin in the corner and start to work on a new piece.
The pedestal at the center of the room was empty. It had been since I’d moved my last piece of sculpture, No Resurrection, up to the loft nearly eighteen months before.
Don’t think, I said to myself. Just do it. Walk in, put on the leather apron, and go to work. Do it, you stupid bastard. Do it!
I stood for perhaps another thirty seconds before I closed the door.
I walked to the den and settled into my favorite chair, an overstuffed brown wingback that’s older than I am.
I reached for my cigarettes and then realized I’d left them in the pocket of my jacket.
I sighed. “House?”
“Yes, David?”
“Bring me a pack of cigarettes, will you?”
“Of course, David.”
A few seconds later, one of House’s service drones glided into the room on its fat yellow neoprene wheels. It was Rube-Goldberg looking contraption that bore no resemblance to the humanoid robots in adventure vids. It was built like a gantry crane, about three-quarters my height, with twin vid cameras mounted on top. Its tubular alloy arms were long and multi-jointed. It rolled silently to a stop about a half-meter from my chair. It held out a pack of Marlboros in one of its three-fingered manipulators.