city blues 02 - angel city blues

by Jeff Edwards

  “Okay, what the hell is that? And why do you know how to pronounce it?”

  “I’m plugged into your phone,” Dancer said. “Got the net at my fingertips, remember?”

  “You don’t have any fingertips,” I said.

  “Eat me, Stalin.”

  “You haven’t got the equipment for that either.”

  Her voice was suddenly about ten degrees cooler. “And it’s so fucking nice of you to remind me.”

  I reached in my pocket and groped for cigarettes. “Sorry. I didn’t realize we were doing nice.”

  “I guess we’re not,” she said in the same frosty tone.

  I thumped a cigarette out of the pack and held the tip against the ignition patch. I inhaled smoke as it lit, and then exhaled slowly. “I’m sorry. I’m not playing nice. I apologize.”

  She didn’t say anything, so I took a long hit off my cigarette and gave her a few seconds.

  Nothing. I was still getting the silent treatment.

  “Look,” I said, “I meant it about being sorry. You were giving me a hard time about Vivien, so I tried to turn some of it back on you. I was going for a laugh. I didn’t mean to cross the line.”

  Another few seconds of silence. And then she said, “Isothiocyanate comes from horseradish, mustard, and wasabi. Any vegetable with hot fumes that go up your nose. Which means that hydraulic knuckles is a weak-ass version of pepper spray.”

  I took another drag at my cigarette. “In other words, I’m officially authorized to carry any weapon that would be allowed in a pillow fight?”

  Dancer chuckled. “Yeah. If you stick with legal sources, that’s about the size of it.”

  “Do you have any not-so legal sources up here? Because I sure as hell don’t.”

  “Give me a minute on that,” Dancer said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  So I concentrated on walking and finishing up my cigarette. Then I spotted what I was looking for, and slowed my pace. It was an unimposing bamboo hut, set well back from the main footpath. A fabric banner hung from the eaves over the door: dusty blue, with a white kanji character and the silhouette of a running horse enclosed in a brush-stroke circle.

  The kanji symbol was pronounced ‘uma,’ according to Vivien. It was the word for ‘horse.’ I imagined that the accompanying silhouette was for gaijins like myself, who couldn’t read kanji.

  This was the entrance to the colony’s transportation system, tucked carefully out of sight to avoid clashing with the pre-industrial motif of the Edo environment.

  I ambled over and loitered outside the hut while I took the last few hits off my smoke. Then I stubbed out the butt on the sole of my shoe, made sure it was well and truly extinguished, and then tucked the dead soldier back into the pack. I couldn’t see any trash receptacles, and I didn’t want to live down to the tourist stereotype by tossing my litter on the ground.

  As I waited for Dancer to finish whatever she was doing, the door of the hut opened. Two very gaijin women came strolling out, dressed in silk kimonos that looked faintly incongruous against their white-blonde hair and their pale Caucasian features. They were chattering away in French, and from the intonation and speed of their words, they seemed happily excited. Apparently, Edo was agreeing with them.

  The nearer woman gave me a quick once-over with her eyes, and instantly dismissed me from her universe, her stream of patter never pausing. Either I failed to meet her standards for basic human acknowledgement, or my lack of period-appropriate clothing was a distraction from her attempted emersion in feudal Japan.

  Despite the woman’s summary dismissal of my existence, I found myself turning to look at her backside as she walked away. Smooth curves moving sinuously under thin silk.

  Then Dancer’s voice was in my ear. “Jesus, Stalin... You spend all night humping Super Orgasm Girl, and you’re already shopping for your next playmate?”

  I stifled a sigh. “The only thing I’m shopping for is a gun.”

  “Well she’s certainly packing something under that Jap-wrap,” Dancer said. “I think you ought to frisk her, to find out what it is.”

  I tore my eyes away from the receding women, turned toward the hut and walked inside. The transition was just as abrupt as the one I’d encountered exiting the passenger concourse. I was leaving ancient Japan behind, and re-entering the realm of steel alloys and carbon polymers.

  The hut concealed a ramp leading down to a terminal area for the colony’s ring tram. It looked a lot like one of the smaller Lev depots back in LA. The thought brought the tiniest pang of homesickness. I wasn’t just off my turf. I was off my entire planet.

  The platform was empty, so I felt safe in continuing my conversation with Dancer.

  “Mea culpa,” I said. “You caught me. I looked at a woman’s ass. Can we get back to the topic of discussion?”

  “I thought that was the topic,” Dancer said.

  “The other topic,” I said. “Guns. And not as a euphemism for whatever you were just hinting at. Real guns. With bullets.”

  “Then we’re talking about the Glass Planet.”

  Before I could react to this apparent non sequitur, Dancer continued. “It’s a nightclub in the Roppongi district. We’ll be looking for a waiter named Sato.”

  The platform began to vibrate softly under my feet. The tram was approaching.

  “How do you find all this stuff out? And don’t tell me you looked it up on the net.”

  Dancer laughed. “I did a quick pull from the local PD’s suspect database. Our buddy, Sato, is the presumptive perp in five or six illegal weapons sales. The locals will take him down, eventually, but he’s too small a fish for them to put serious effort into it. No heavy weapons, and nothing in quantity. Onesies and twosies… A handgun here, a flechette pistol there. Nothing capable of full automatic, and nothing that could pierce the hull of the habitat shell.”

  The tram slid up to the platform. A long cigar-shaped profile, hovering five or ten centimeters above the magnetic rail.

  The door whooshed open and I stepped inside. There were six other passengers, so I took a seat at the rear of the car. I had a nasty incident on a Lev once, so I prefer not to have people behind me when I’m riding public transportation.

  I settled into my seat. “You hacked into the police database?”

  “Are you kidding? Cruising the net doesn’t make me a jacker. I couldn’t hack into a vending machine, much less a hardened police database. I asked for the information.”

  “And they gave it to you?”

  “Well, I did say please.”

  The tram began to accelerate, whisking us into a semi-darkened tube illuminated only by the interior lights of the car and periodically-spaced glow strips. A pale green holo-map hung in the air near the ceiling of the car, showing the three major districts of the colony, along with a real-time depiction of our movement around the perimeter of the torus. According to the map, there were five tram terminals in the Edo district, five more in the Roppongi district, and seven in the Osaka district, where the commercial and industrial sector was housed. In the air beside each terminal icon was a self-updating time index, indicating the car’s estimated arrival time at that particular location.

  I noted that the icons for two of the Osaka terminals were dark, and neither of them displayed an accompanying time index. Likely, those were private terminals, reserved for the use of the colony’s elite.

  “I just figured out how to make everybody on this tram fart at the same time,” Dancer said. “But I’m gonna need a roll of nano-pore tape and a couple of dozen plastic bags.”

  I looked away from the holo-map. “What?”

  “Just seeing if you were paying attention,” she said. “You were off in your own little world for a minute there.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “I was just thinking.”

  “I know,” Dancer said. “I could smell the burning insulation.”

  “You were telling me how the local cops let you into their suspect database becau
se you said ‘pretty please with sugar on top.’”

  “It was just please. And that’s not quite how it happened. Actually, I did a routine inter-agency data request, from LAPD to the local cop shop. The info I asked for was unclassified and low-priority, so their mainframe coughed it up.”

  “You can still do that?”

  “Looks like. Turns out that my access credentials and passwords haven’t been zeroed-out yet. Probably because I’m not officially dead, and I was still attached to LAPD when they zapped my gray matter. The tech-nerds will catch it the next time they run an account purge. But for now, I can still log into the system. At least as long as I stick to low-priority shit that doesn’t set off any alarms.”

  “That could be useful.”

  “It already has been,” she pointed out.

  I looked back up toward the holo-map. We had crossed out of Edo, and the car was starting to decelerate for the first terminal in Roppongi. “Where do we get off?”

  “Two stops after this one.”

  “You know how to find this place? The Glass Planet?”

  “I think so,” she said. “But I’m curious… What was your Plan-B? If I hadn’t run down the name of this Sato guy, where would we be going right now?”

  “Roppongi,” I said.

  “Just Roppongi in general? No particular destination in mind?”

  The car came to a stop and the doors slid open. All six of the other passengers exited; apparently they were a group. No one got on.

  I shook my head as the doors closed again. “They never open the light shutters in Roppongi. It’s always nighttime there, and the place is famous for its around-the-clock nightlife. When the hardcore partiers go looking for fun that’s not on the regular menu, somebody’s going to be there to meet the demand.”

  “Got it. Basically, you were planning to scope out the local lowlifes, and find somebody to sell you some heat.”

  The car began to move again, accelerating rapidly as it re-entered the tube.

  “It sounds kind of stupid when you say it that way. But yeah, that was kind of what I had in mind.”

  Dancer thought about it for a few seconds. “I’d be doing the same thing, I guess—if I couldn’t draw on cop resources. Not exactly elegant strategic planning, but it beats waiting around for the Gun Fairy to leave an assault cannon under your pillow.”

  I nodded. “That’s about how I figured it.”

  Glow strips flitted past the windows at rapid intervals. On the holo-map, the car zipped toward the next terminal.

  “Tell me about Rhiarra,” I said.

  It was meant as casual conversation, but I could almost hear Dancer’s defenses going up. “What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever you feel like telling me,” I said. “What kind of music did she like? What was her favorite ice cream? Who got control of the remote when you were watching the vid together?”

  “Are we playing twenty questions? Or is this buddy bonding time?”

  “I didn’t write out an agenda,” I said. “I just figured it might be good to get to know each other.”

  “It’s too late to get in my panties, Stalin. I’m past that now, as you have so kindly reminded me.”

  I got a mental image of the muscular and badass Detective Dancer wearing frilly girly-girl panties, and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “I used to steal all the covers,” I said. “About five minutes after I fell asleep, I’d have eighty-percent of the blankets. Maggie would get even by putting her freezing cold feet against the small of my back.”

  “Rhiarra was a hardcore blanket hog,” Dancer said. “And she had the coldest goddamned feet I’ve ever touched.”

  “Worst of both worlds,” I said.

  “No,” Dancer said in a wistful voice. “The best of both worlds. The best thing in any world.”

  I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant. If I could somehow relive my days with Maggie, I’d go back there in a heartbeat. Even knowing about the nightmare that would come later.”

  “Rhiarra used to put rose petals in my shoes,” Dancer said. “I don’t know why. I told her to stop, but she kept on doing it. She knew that I liked it, even when I was bitching about it.”

  I nodded, remembering all the times that Maggie had confiscated packs of cigarettes from the pockets of my windbreaker, and replaced them with hand wrapped goodies. I’d reach for a Marlboro, and come up with a homemade shortbread cookie. They were always tasty, but they didn’t go very well with the image of a tough-guy private investigator. It’s hard to look intimidating with a mouth full of snicker doodle.

  The tram started to decelerate. We were pulling into our terminal.

  I got to my feet as the car slid to a stop. The doors whisked open, and I stepped out onto another empty platform. Evidently it was still too early in the day for most of the tourist crowd to be up and around.

  I was halfway to up the ramp to the exit when I spotted two people coming the other way, ambling down toward the terminal at an unhurried pace. The first was an unfamiliar Asian man with the refined features and mannerisms of one who is born to money and power. The second was my old pal, Arm-twister—his bullet-shaped head partially obscured by gel-pack bandages—looking decidedly worse for wear after our tussle in the men’s room at LAX.

  The two of them, Arm-twister and his aristocratic friend, were walking right toward me.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Turn around,” Dancer said in my ear. “Do it now!”

  I pivoted on my heel and began walking back down the ramp, forcing myself not to break into a run.

  Had Arm-twister recognized me? Maybe not. He’d been looking toward his urbane companion during my brief glimpse of his face. Possibly I had gotten lucky, at least for a few seconds. There were no shouts from the direction of the two men, and no sounds of their footsteps pounding down the ramp in pursuit.

  The tram car was just disappearing into the tube as I reached the platform.

  There was nowhere to go, except back up the ramp and into the face of my enemies. I was cornered, outnumbered, and unarmed. I didn’t kid myself that Arm-twister and his unidentified comrade would be walking around without weapons. In a few seconds, I was going to up against blades, guns, or whatever party favors these guys happened to be packing. This was not going to end well.

  “Into the tube,” Dancer said.

  “What?”

  “No time!” she snapped. “Into the tube. Now!”

  I took the half-meter step down from the passenger platform to the track bed of the tram.

  “Turn right,” Dancer said. “Go!”

  I did as she said, trotting into the cylindrical tunnel in the trail of the receding tram car.

  “Run,” Dancer said.

  I shook my head. “That’s crazy! I can’t outrun a maglev tram. The next car will be along in about forty-five seconds, and it’s going to swat me like a bug.”

  “Just run,” Dancer said. “Trust me…”

  So I ran: rushing deeper into the semi-darkness of the tube, my feet pounding on the meter-wide poly-laminate insulator strip separating the twin rows of superconductors that formed the tram’s electromagnetic rails. Sprinting at first, and then dropping into a more sustainable pace as my muscles burned off that initial surge of blood sugar.

  My words were punctuated by breaths as my body adjusted to the unexpected exercise. “I can’t… outrun… a fucking… maglev… tram.”

  “I know,” Dancer said. “We’re not trying to outrun the tram. We’re looking for a maintenance hatch.”

  “What… if… we… don’t… find… one?”

  “We will,” she said. “Stop worrying.”

  That was easy for her to say. She was already dead. Or pretty damned close to it, anyway.

  I passed glow strips at regular intervals, but they weren’t shooting by the way they did on the tram. I started to imagine the sound of the next car rushing up behind me. There wasn’t enough room for me to tuck myself out of the way and
let it pass. When the tram came, I was going to become a splatter of unpleasant fluids on the walls of the tube.

  “This… is… not… a… good… idea…”

  “Shut up,” Dancer said. “Save your breath, and keep running.”

  I did.

  Another glow strip passed. Still no sign of a maintenance hatch, or any cranny large enough to crawl into.

  “There!” Dancer said. “Left wall, about ten meters ahead.”

  I looked and saw a rectangular metal door plate—a little less than a meter wide and nearly twice that tall—covering a shallow box set into the wall of the tube.

  I sprinted to it, popped the release catches, and pulled the door plate aside, expecting to see a crawl space or a maintenance alcove. Instead, I was staring into an electrical junction box, only about thirty centimeters deep and packed with circuitry. Maybe an anorexic mouse could fit in there, but I sure as hell couldn’t.

  “Keep it!” Dancer said. “Keep the door plate.”

  “For what?”

  Her voice was nearly a growl. “Jesus, Stalin, will you stop second-guessing me? I know what I’m doing.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. Lay the doorplate lengthwise between the magnet rails.”

  I did as she ordered.

  “Now, lay down on it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Lay down on it. Get your fingers under the lip of the leading edge. You can let your feet dangle off the end.”

  Again, I followed her instructions. Was I supposed to lie flat, and let the tram pass over my head? If that was her plan, I was about to be squashed flat. The track clearance was only about ten centimeters.

  “What the hell are we doing?”

  Dancer laughed. “Lev surfing.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve seen it,” she said. “Kids using steel plates to ride the electromagnetic bow waves that run in front of Lev trains.”

  Oh shit! That was her plan?

  “I’ve seen it alright. It looks insanely dangerous.”

  I could feel the vibration of the approaching tram now. Not good… This was very very not good…