by B. K. Bass
Comparing the employee records from Dreamworks with the city’s residential files, I found out Evie lived somewhere in the limbo between the two. Not exactly on the beach, but not that far from it to be in the slums. The neighborhood known as Catawba Village was a sprawl of apartment buildings on the north side of the Jarupa Hills.
It was amazing the low, stony mounds had survived the big quake, considering how close they were to the San Andreas Rift. Now, they offered a magnificent view of the ocean, and some of the most expensive homes in the state of California sat on top of them. All of this, naturally, blocked any sort of view from Catawba Village, rendering that real-estate less than appealing. But it served as a buffer zone between the filthy rich and the just plain filthy, so it was a decent place to hole up.
I threaded the car around the evening crowds as I made my way through the seedier parts of Fontane to reach the hills. Towers of glass and steel gave way to sprawls of concrete monstrosities half as tall and ten times as wide. Stone monuments to efficiency in residential engineering stamped the neighborhood. The flashy signs and neon lights gave way to darkened streets and darker shadows. Flickering lights on the buildings and lampposts barely shed illumination on the inky blackness.
As the dark hills loomed before me, the claustrophobic press of artificiality gave way to smaller buildings circled with low security walls and neatly cropped hedges. Despite the arid soil, somebody in the city had gone to the expense to plant something here. It almost looked like the old vids; what the smaller towns around the city looked like before rampant development and overpopulation gobbled them up. There were also small shops here and there. Compared to my own digs in Sanrita, Catawba Village was more than charming—as long as you didn’t consider it was only a block away from concrete cubes full of destitution.
Finding the building I was looking for; I pulled the car into the surface-level parking lot. Ostensibly, this was a luxurious use of valuable land. In reality, it was just one more way to provide a buffer between the rich in the hills and the poor in the rest of Fontana. There were a few cars in the lot, none of them standing out as either fancy or junk. I drove around the building, looking for the car registered to Evie. I didn’t find it, so whomever dumped her body probably dumped the car as well. There could be a lot of clues in there, so finding it was another priority, but not one I was going to spend time on myself.
After I parked, I tapped a few commands on the computer in the car, sending out an order for the beat cops to keep an eye out for it while on patrol. Even with that sort of manpower, it was a needle in a stack of needles, so I wasn’t holding out any hope we would find it soon.
That done, I got out and took a better look at Evie’s digs. The building had external stairs and catwalks leading to entrances for each apartment. It looked like an old twentieth-century motel stretching six stories tall. Luckily, Evie’s place was on the third floor, so I didn’t have too far to climb. I puffed on a cigarette as I plodded up the stairs, keeping my ears open to get a feel for the place. As I walked down the catwalk on the third floor, I heard a few muffled conversations through apartment windows. There was nothing out of the ordinary other than the lack of shouting. I didn’t get to neighborhoods like this very often, and the quiet was unnerving.
The lock on Evie’s door was broken, and somebody had wedged the door shut to hide the damage. I gave it a good shove, and it opened with a screech. The lights that still worked detected my movement and turned on of their own accord. Those recessed behind ceiling panels were fine, but a table lamp lay shattered next to a sofa. There was also a broken table in front of the couch. More concerning than the mess was the blood. The carpet bore a massive stain under the broken table, there was smaller stain nearby, and blood spatter covered the broken lamp, the sofa, and the wall above it.
I pulled a small flashlight from my pocket and examined the wall of the living room. There was a hole in the plaster above the broken lamp. It ran a couple of inches deep. Using a pocketknife, I dug away at the plaster to reveal a small, lead slug. I pried it loose and dropped it into an evidence bag. the impact with the concrete firewall separating this apartment from the next flattened the bullet, but I could tell it was probably a nine-millimeter round. That wasn’t relatively small, so it was most likely from a handgun.
I walked across the living room, placing the broken table and blood between me and the newly widened hole in the wall. I was standing inside the front door just far enough to have shut it behind myself. I flipped the switch on the flashlight and a thin beam of green light glowed in the smoke from my cigarette as it wafted through the empty room. I held it just above my waist, with my forearm parallel to the floor. The green light hovered right over the hole in the wall.
Evie was definitely our victim. Somebody bashed the door in. She was probably sitting on the couch and stood up in reaction. Maybe she even lunged at the intruder. He fired the gun from the hip, not needing to take careful aim at such close quarters. The bullet passed through her belly, shattered the lamp, and lodged itself in the wall. She fell on the table, breaking it, and bled out on the floor. A wound like that wouldn’t kill you right away, so the process had likely taken some time. She didn’t move from the spot on her own, which is strange. Also, he cut her ID tattoo off right here while there was still blood in the body; I could tell that from the second stain on the carpet.
Had she been too afraid to struggle, or otherwise incapacitated? There were no bottles of booze or drug paraphernalia in the living room. I couldn’t image the shooter cleaning up something like that and not cleaning up the blood or retrieving the bullet. For all the care to hide her identity and dump the body, the perp left the crime scene itself untouched. This didn’t fit the M.O. of how carefully the body was disposed of—unless somebody else was coming to clean up the mess.
Just as I thought about it, a car door slammed closed in the parking lot below. I stepped to the door, cracked it open, and peered through the gap. I couldn’t see any movement, but from this height I would have to go outside to see directly below the catwalks.
I drew my sidearm and walked outside. Sure enough, there was a black van that hadn’t been there before. A man emerged from the rear, holding a bucket full of bottles and other cleaning implements, then closed the door. I watched as he headed towards the nearby stairwell.
So, this was the cleaner. If I could find out who hired him, I might nail the lid on this case. On the other hand, it might just open another can of worms. Either way, he was my only living connection to Evie’s murderer, so I needed to take him in.
I crept back inside and nudged the door closed. Hiding in the darkened bedroom, I waited. The front door opened with the same protestations it had made for me, and heavy footfalls sounded in the debris on the floor. After checking my pistol to make sure a round was chambered, I took a deep breath and rounded the corner.
“Move and there’ll be another mess for somebody to clean up.”
The man didn’t waste any time responding. He threw the bottle of bleach he’d been opening at my head. I ducked it, but some of the contents washed over me. Now I was pissed; that suit wasn’t cheap.
While I ducked the thrown projectile, the burly cleaner drew his own weapon and opened fire. I dove into the nearby kitchen as bullets peppered the plaster wall where I’d been standing moments before.
I was behind some cabinets beneath a breakfast bar, so I rose like a demon from the pit and returned fire, squeezing the trigger twice. A spray of crimson also erupted from the man’s shoulder, and the front window of the apartment shattered from the second round. The impact spun the cleaner around, but he kept his feet below him.
I ducked as he fired back. By the time I raised my head, he had left the apartment. I ran out onto the catwalk and followed the trail of red drops from the cleaner’s wound, which showed him heading to the stairwell—presumably trying to escape to his van. I leaned over the guardrail and waited.
As expected, he ran out towards the van. I fi
red twice more, and one bullet went through his knee. Screaming in pain this time, the big guy fell and rolled on the ground, just inches away from his vehicle. Blood oozed from his shoulder and knee.
I took my time going down the stairs. He would not bleed out anytime soon. Once I caught up with him, I asked, “Who hired you?”
“Go to hell,” he said through gritted teeth.
“No doubt about that,” I said. “But not before I solve my case. I’ve got all night to ask you questions, but time is a luxury you don’t have.”
He looked up as his eyes grew wide with shock. “You won’t let me bleed out.”
I bent close and smiled. “Wanna bet?”
The cleaner squealed, and not long after was shackled to a gurney and loaded into an ambulance for a one-way trip to the prison hospital. He would get a trial via holovid conference while there, but there wasn’t much of an argument he could make for his innocence.
Meanwhile, I was on my way back to my apartment to get a little sleep. In the morning, I would pick up Frank. Then we had the unenviable task of driving out to Lucerne Valley. There were snakes out in the desert, and we had to talk to one who went by the name Fixer Vic.
Chapter Seven
The alarm went off at the crack of dawn, blaring some of that newfangled Jazztek I couldn’t stand. A chaos of synthesizers played out what some called harmonic discord. To me, it sounded more like a cat scratching the inside of a piano that was burning in a warehouse fire. The electronic bass was so deep you could feel it, but not hear it. There was a saxophone lost among the noise; the faint wail of the brass was the only thing that remotely sounded like music.
That I hated this crap was why I’d set it for my alarm. If I tried to wake up to music I enjoyed, I would probably just lay there and... enjoy it. This made me want to get up and shut it off. How kids these days listened to this crap, let alone danced to it, was beyond me. But it motivated me to get off my ass, for no other reason than to end the suffering of listening to it.
I performed the morning routine and put on a fresh suit. This one was older and made of a more durable fabric. The tan color wouldn’t seem too out of place in the desert, and it breathed enough to stay cool. I skipped on the tie, instead leaving the top two buttons undone on the plain white dress shirt. Complete with wire-rimmed shades, I looked more like I was going on a date than to work. The illusion faded once I clipped my badge and sidearm onto my belt, along with a couple of extra clips in a small leather pouch that matched the gun’s holster. I didn’t expect to need them, but out in Lucerne Valley it paid to be prepared.
Speaking of which, I grabbed a few bottles of water from the fridge and chucked them into a canvas bag. I’m sure Frank would have a drink on him, but gin wasn’t the best option for staving off dehydration if you end up stuck in the desert. In the case of a flat tire or dead battery, a couple bottles of water and some extra ammo could mean the difference between life and death while waiting for the city to send a recovery vehicle.
I made my way outside and stopped by to see Rosie and get some coffee from a robot with a personality for a change. She seemed surprised to see me out and about in the morning.
“Business,” I explained.
Caffeine in hand and a cigarette burning in my mouth, I climbed into the car and made my way towards Frank’s place. I dialed him along the way to make sure he was up. It was a good thing I did, because he wasn’t there. His bitch of a wife screamed at me so loud a driver in the car next to me at an intersection gave me a sympathetic shrug.
I rang his personal phone and found out he was still at the office. I doubted he stayed to work overtime on researching Dreamworks’s accounting. Most likely, he passed out on a couch in the breakroom so he wouldn’t have to go home to that wailing banshee. I didn’t blame him.
He met me in the garage, still wearing the same rumpled suit. I think sleeping in it got out some of the wrinkles, if that was possible. He scowled at the single cup of coffee in the holder as he added his own cup of swill from the machine in the office. Some detectives drank the coffee from upstairs, others used it to clean their sidearms. Either way, it would eat through anything it touched and leave the taste of regret in your mouth.
“Find out anything useful?” I asked.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Frank grumbled. “Looks like our victim only had fifty paid clients the night she died. The VR system hooked her up to a dozen at a time. That’s a lot of names to shake down.”
“Anybody high profile?” I asked.
“Like Kristoff? Not that lucky. There were a few dead ends. A few leads through fake identifications and shell accounts.”
I perked up at this. “And that’s our ‘maybe’?”
Frank beamed with pride. “Yep. One was a phony real-estate firm. Outgoing payments only to DreamWorks, incoming payments only from Talbot Construction.”
“The mayor’s brother?” James Talbot was ostensibly the second most powerful person in New Angeles. With the first being the mayor, and she his sister, it was more likely he topped the list. Talbot Industries had regional monopolies on both construction and logistics. If something was being torn down, built, renovated, or even painted, Talbot had his fingers in the pie. If something was being moved into or out of the city, it was on one of Talbot’s trucks, trains, or ships.
“One and the same,” Frank said. “Regular payments, too. Either it’s Talbot himself, or he’s funding somebody’s habit.”
“Like his nephew,” I murmured. It made sense. Kristoff likely had ties to the underworld. A kid in his position didn’t use some street-corner pusher. Many said James Talbot had similar connections. Without a son of his own, he might have been grooming Kristoff to take over the black-market side of his business empire. But how did Evie fit into all of this?
I muddled over the question while we drove out west, past the mountains. The highway followed the same lines for over a hundred years. It was obvious where the current roadwork laid over what was left after the big quake, as concrete rubble lined both sides of the highway. Traffic was thinner out here, especially after we turned north into Lucerne Valley.
If New Angeles was the picture of an overpopulated, destitute megalopolis, the Valley was what the same problem looked like if you crammed it into trailers and cargo containers.
As far as the eye could see, improvised housing was crammed together. In some places, trailers were stacked atop cargo containers. Many of the containers had doorways and windows cut into them, turning them into small homes. There were even what looked like small apartment buildings made of piled-up shanties lined with makeshift stairs and ladders. Between these were thin footpaths, while a few dirt roads snaked through the haphazard arrangement. The main highway itself was like a scar that cut through the center of the whole mess. Despite a thousand different colors on the trailers, cars, buildings, and cargo containers in the valley, everything was covered in a layer of tan sand.
I looked over at Frank, wondering why he hadn’t asked where we were going. He was slumped against the window, fast asleep. I guess he did burn some of the midnight oil before hitting the couch. I reached over and gave him a shake.
He jerked upright and looked around at the sandy terrain, distant mountains, and enveloping piles of trailers and metal crates. “What the fuck, Jacobson? Why are we in the Valley?”
“We have somebody to talk to,” I said as I turned off onto one of the narrow, winding dirt roads. It wove in a series of sharp turns around haphazardly placed metal boxes and mobile homes. They didn’t follow any kind of road system or urban planning. Rather, the roads and trails fit through wherever there were gaps. The car bounced over the rough, rutted road. A cloud of dust grew behind us, completely obscuring our back-trail.
“Who the hell lives out here that we want to talk to?” he asked.
“Vic the Fixer,” I replied.
“Oh shit, Harold. What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?”
“Not sure, but someone definitely murd
ered Evie at her place. A cleaner showed up while I was there. I... persuaded him to tell me who hired him.”
“Persuaded as in had a friendly chat?” Frank asked. “Or as in we’re going to get our asses chewed off again?”
“Guess.”
“Shit.”
“Anyway,” I continued, “Fixer Vic hired the cleaner, so we’re here to ask who gave him the order.”
“You know he’s not just going to sit down over a cup of tea, right?”
“I know.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
I shrugged. “We walk up to his shack and persuade him to tell us.”
“Another ass chewing?” Frank pressed a palm against his temple.
“Probably.”
The car lurched as I rounded another hairpin turn a little too fast. I slowed down as the curves grew more frequent and the stacks of fiberglass and steel more oppressive.
Frank looked around, craning his neck to get a view of the trailer tops. “So, how do you think Evie and Kristoff tie together?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe he broke the rules, and she was going to go canary on him?”
“I doubt that was it.” Frank shook his head. “He could pay Sergei off for any trouble. Considering the amount his uncle was funneling into Dreamworks, he was probably paying up-front as insurance against just that.”
“Hmm...”
“I hate it when you do that,” Frank said.
“Why?”
“Because you do that, then you have some clever idea. The only catch is, you don’t tell me the clever idea, and I end up being the bait or the distraction.”
“You’re good at your job,” I said.
“Suck my dick.”
“Well, I guess somebody has to,” I laughed.
It was quiet for a few minutes. The road was so narrow I could barely drive faster than a casual walk without ending up in somebody’s bedroom.
“This is a bad idea without backup,” Frank said as he drew his gun and checked the clip.