city blues 01 - dome city blues

• Reviews
  
• DOME CITY BLUES
  
• Copyright
  
• Dedication
  
• Epigraph
  
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  
• CHAPTER 1
  
• CHAPTER 2
  
• CHAPTER 3
  
• CHAPTER 4
  
• CHAPTER 5
  
• CHAPTER 6
  
• CHAPTER 7
  
• CHAPTER 8
  
• CHAPTER 9
  
• CHAPTER 10
  
• CHAPTER 11
  
• CHAPTER 12
  
• CHAPTER 13
  
• CHAPTER 14
  
• CHAPTER 15
  
• CHAPTER 16
  
• CHAPTER 17
  
• CHAPTER 18
  
• CHAPTER 19
  
• CHAPTER 20
  
• CHAPTER 21
  
• CHAPTER 22
  
• CHAPTER 23
  
• CHAPTER 24
  
• CHAPTER 25
  
• CHAPTER 26
  
• CHAPTER 27
  
• CHAPTER 28
  
• CHAPTER 29
  
• CHAPTER 30
  
• CHAPTER 31
  
• CHAPTER 32
  
• EPILOGUE
  
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
  
• OTHER BOOKS BY JEFF EDWARDS
  

Los Angeles: 2063

David Stalin was one of the best detectives in the business, running head-to-head with data-jackers, organ thieves, and the tech-enhanced gangs who ruled the shadowy streets of Los Angeles.  He could do no wrong, until what seemed like an easy case got out of control, and left his wife dead among the abandoned ruins of old LA.

After four years of self-imposed retirement, David suddenly finds himself back on the job, struggling to unravel a crime far worse than murder.  This time, he’s not the hunter.  As he’s about to discover, the past isn’t finished with him yet.

“DOME CITY BLUES is a smart, action-packed mystery thriller set in a future reminiscent of Blade Runner. Edwards combines the mind-twisting surrealism of Philip K. Dick with the hard-boiled characters of Elmore Leonard. I can’t wait for the next one!”

—
JAK KOKE,
Bestselling author of
‘
THE TERMINUS EXPERIMENT
,’ and ‘
THE EDGE OF CHAOS
’

“Ex-private detective David Stalin inhabits a world you might not want to live in, but you definitely want to visit. Whether or not you’ll survive the trip is anybody’s guess...  but you won’t stop flipping the pages until you’re done. An impressive achievement!”

—
JEFF MARIOTTE,
Author of ‘
THE BURNING SEASON
,’ and ‘
CITY UNDER THE SAND
’

DOME CITY BLUES

Jeff Edwards

Stealth Books

DOME CITY BLUES

Copyright © 1994, 2011 by Jeff Edwards

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Stealth Books

www.stealthbooks.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-9830085-7-6

Published in the United States of America

To Don Gerrard,

who has been waiting for this book
far
too long.

When you live inside a plastic bubble,

Hidin’ from the sky.

You know that this ain’t livin’,

But you ain’t got sense to die.

The air you breathe comes from machines,

It kills your soul and steals your dreams.

And you think you might be human,

But you can’t remember why.

Rusty Parker —
Dome City Blues

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their brilliant technical guidance in the creation of this book. (Any errors that have crept in were my fault, not theirs.)

Mitchell Pearlman, Forensic Psychologist

A. E. (Art) Crosby, Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Dr. Richard G. Courtney, Neurosurgery Resident

Dr. S. Chawla, Neurologist

Annette J. Grosshans, U.S. Secret Service, Forensic Services Division

Dr. Kevin Gerhart, MD, PhD, Neuroscientist

Lt. Bill Nelson, SWAT Captain, San Diego Police Department

William Reese, Retired U.S. Army Intelligence Officer

I’d also like to acknowledge the contributions of several people whose assistance was of a less technical nature, but every bit as valuable:

Cary Stevens, for his help with
Homo Trovectior
and other matters of cultural anthropology; Michael I. Turner, Commander, USN (Ret.), for his assistance with the geography of future Los Angeles; Brian Morgan, the original model for David Stalin; the Phoenix Arizona Public Library, for providing exceptional research support to a complete stranger who had all manner of crazy questions; Brenda Collins, for helping me drag this story into the twenty-first century; Crystal Larson, for her fantastic painting of the Los Angeles domes, and for allowing us to stage the simulated murder of her daughter; Eyler Larson, for his creative and wonderfully devious enhancements to the realism of the aforementioned mock homicide (and—of course—for allowing us to simulate the death of his daughter); Megan Larson, for lying very still and looking extremely dead whenever the camera was pointed in her direction; Christy Coulter, for allowing her daughter to pose as Simulated Homicide Victim #2; Candice Russel, for volunteering to be our second (and equally convincing) murder victim, and for posing as our figure model for early versions of the cover image; Maria Edwards for her untiring support, her excellent research, and for protecting my writing time so that I could actually write this book; my editor and long-time friend, Don Gerrard, for his endless patience and unfailing optimism; and the staff of San Diego’s finest specialty genre bookstore,
Mysterious Galaxy
, for loving
Dome City Blues
for almost as long as I have.

Finally, I would like to thank the many (many) advance readers, who put their love and time into making this book everything I wanted it to be.

CHAPTER 1

The City Planners called it Los Angeles Urban Environmental Enclosure 12-A.  Those of us who lived there called it the
Zone
.  By either name, it amounted to a geodesic blister of translucent polycarbon fused to the east side of LA Dome #12 like a Siamese twin joined at the hip.  It lacked the graceful sweeping arcs of the domes that covered the rest of the city.  It was ugly, but then it was never designed to be pretty.  It was an afterthought, thrown together after the inhabitants of East LA had made it violently clear that they didn’t appreciate being left outside under a sky that pissed acid rain and streamed dangerous levels of solar ultraviolet.

I leaned against a wall and pried a Marlboro out of a squashed pack.  The lettering on the box said, “crush proof.”  It wasn’t.  The box, like the cigarettes it contained, was a Brazilian knockoff—one of a hundred offshore counterfeit brands that had sprung into existence after the collapse of the American tobacco industry.

I stroked the wrinkled cigarette a few times to straighten it.  It was still pretty rumpled, but it didn’t look too mangled to be useable.  I touched the tip against the black circle of the ignition patch on the bottom of the box.  It took two or three seconds for the catalytic reaction to light the tobacco.  I took a longish drag, and blew a gout of smoke into the air.

The last rays of the sun were starting to crawl up the tops of the buildings.  Night was coming to the Zone.  I watched as it crept over the decaying structures, hiding the sandstone texture of crumbling cement and rusting steel under a humid cloak of shadow.

Holographic facades flickered and appeared across the faces of most of the buildings: glamorous mirages that concealed graffiti-covered walls behind idealized projections of fairy tale palaces and pirate ships under sail.  Here and there, enough sunlight still filtered through to weaken the holograms, leaving patches of drab reality visible through the bright fabric of illusion.  In a few minutes, when the sun dropped a little farther, the holographic facades would become seamless, and the illusion would be perfect.

Above the street, triggered by the failing light, holosigns winked into phantom existence.  Neon colored lasers woke up and began painting nightclub logos on the underside of the dome.

Two meters above the main entrance to Trixie’s, a hologram of a naked woman crackled to life.  The woman writhed suggestively through a ninety-second loop of canned video data.  A glitch in the software caused the dancer’s left leg to vanish in a smear of video static for the last few seconds of the loop.  Lately, the glitch seemed to be spreading to the upper slope of her right breast.

Somebody tried to tell me once that the dancer was Trixie herself, the hologram built up from video footage shot when she was young.  I’ve seen Trixie up close.  I don’t think so.

When half of the cigarette was gone, I ground it into the cracked sidewalk with my shoe and started walking again.

The strip was still mostly deserted, people just beginning to filter in.  Four or five early-bird whores staked out their turf.  A small knot of sailors cruised the bar fronts, waiting for the action to start.  The inevitable sprinkling of tourists wandered around goggle-eyed, too ignorant of street-level protocol to realize that their chances of making it home safely were dropping with the sun.