city blues 01 - dome city blues (17 page)

Two grunts from LAPD Tactical found the bottom of the alley after about ten minutes.  One was female, one male.  Both were decked out in riot armor, carbon-glass helmets with full HUDs and enough firepower to depopulate a small town.

I left the Blackhart about five steps below us and kept my movements carefully non-threatening.  When they got close enough to hear me, I pointed up the stairs.  “The Bad Guy went that way.”

They ignored me.  Tarzan covered me with a mini-gun the size of a small refrigerator while Tarzana recovered my automatic.

They obviously weren’t going to chase the nice lady with the laser.  I tried Plan B.  “Listen, you’d better call for medical assistance.  This man is dying.”

Twenty-five minutes later, I sat in an interview room at Southwest District Headquarters.

A thoughtful police sergeant brought me coffee in one of those plastic bulbs that come from vending machines.

I twisted the button-shaped top off and felt the bulb start warming in my hand as soon as the air hit the thermo-chem coating on the inner layer of plastic.  The coffee smelled like charcoal.  I drank it anyway.

I thought about a cigarette, but someone had taken them, along with everything else in my pockets.  A plastic sign reminded me that smoking was forbidden in Municipal buildings.  There were about forty cigarette burns in the sign and a hundred more on the top of the only table in the room.

Just as I was settling in for a long wait, the door opened and my good friends Dancer and Delaney walked in.

Delaney sat in a chair across the table.  This time he didn’t ask my permission before he started his recorder.

Dancer tossed my cigarettes on the table.

I pointed to the sign and raised an eyebrow.

Dancer glanced at the sign.  “Screw em’.”

I lit up.

Dancer scratched the side of her nose.  “Holy shit, Stalin.  Two bodies in three days.  People are just dropping dead all around you.  If that asshole who fell down the stairs happens to flatline, you might be three-for-three.”

“I didn’t kill any of them.”

“I know that,” Dancer said.  “If we thought for a second that you
had
, we’d have been up your ass with a microscope by now.”

I took a hit off the cigarette and waited.

She leaned forward and rested her hands on the table.  “We also know that the Jap on the Lev...”  She snapped her fingers several times.

“Takamura,” Delaney said.  “Joseph Takamura.”

“Right.  Takamura was zapped by a Caucasian female perpetrator armed with a military surplus hand-laser.  Harvey Miller, the guy you danced with on the stairs, managed to talk for a little while before USC Medical sedated him.  He claims the perp walked up to him out of nowhere and offered to get naked and horizontal.”

Dancer rolled her eyes.  “I guess this woman is supposed to be nice looking, and Miller is kind of a zero.  Naturally, the stupid bastard went for it.  They were supposed to be riding the train to her apartment, when she whipped out a laser and started frying shit.  Miller tried to hide behind a seat like everybody else.  The perp found him and grabbed him for a hostage.  You know the rest.”

I nodded.  “How is he?”

Dancer shrugged.  “Last I heard, he was pretty fucked up, but the Trauma Unit said he was probably going to make it.  Frankly, he’s not my problem until he flatlines.”

I took another drag off the cigarette.

Dancer straightened up and stretched.  “Are you going to tell us what in the hell is going on here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play stupid.  We’ve talked to seven or eight people who were on that Lev.  They all say the woman was shooting at you, and
only
you.  The witnesses also said that, when you got off the Lev, she followed you.

“We got a preliminary readout from LA-Trans; looks like their mainframe was crashed by a virus, just in time to stop the Lev and let our female perpetrator get off.  The virus also slicked the vid recordings from every security camera on the Lev.  No other Levs were affected, just
that
one.  Hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?  That was an attempted hit, Stalin.  You know it, and I know it.”

My turn to shrug.

Her face clouded.  “Don’t try to hand me that strong silent shit!  You’ve got somebody pissed off at you, Stalin.  Somebody bad enough to pull a whole lot of heavy kink down on your ass.  I don’t want any more fucking bodies!  I want some fucking answers!  What in the hell are you messing around with?”

I followed the grand tradition and ground out my cigarette on the table top.  “Can I have my gun back now?”

Delaney said, “obstructing an investigation is a crime, Mr. Stalin.  We could charge you...”

Dancer snorted.  “Don’t try to play the badass, Rick.  You’re not equipped for it.  Okay Stalin, you can pick up your gun at the Property Desk.  I think you’re a goddamned idiot, but that’s not against the law.  I promise you, though: if you turn up any more corpses, I’ll shoot you myself.”

I stood up and walked to the door.  I stopped and turned.  “Dancer, what was in the old man’s package?”

“The one with the fancy Jap paper?  It was some sort of Kabuki doll.  I guess it’s his granddaughter’s birthday.”

I searched Dancer’s eyes and wondered what it had taken to create the streamlined shell that armored her against feelings and compassion.  How much time spent staring into the ugly guts of human nature had it taken her to transform an elderly and dignified gentleman like Joseph Takamura into a
dead old Jap with fancy Jap paper
?

Dancer returned my stare, something glinting like ice behind her eyes.  I started to say something, and then changed my mind.  I turned and stepped through the door.

I heard it slide shut behind me.

CHAPTER 10

Dancer had a squad car drop me off at the barricade.  It wasn’t even four-thirty yet.  I still had time to take care of an errand I’d been wanting to run.

I stopped by my house just long enough to grab the vid chip with Michael Winter’s suicide recording, and to print out a copy of his credit reports from the LAPD case-files.

According to the records, Michael had made three credit transactions on April 14, 2063, the day of his death.  One had been the room rent at the Velvet Clam; the other two were purchases made from Alphatronics, a retail electronics outlet on Hudson Avenue, at the southern end of Dome 14.

When the hard copies were finished printing, I walked to the barricade and caught a cab to Hudson Avenue.

Luckily, Alphatronics turned out to be a small, family business.  If it had been part of a big chain, my chances of talking to the right person would have been slim.

The owner was a hulking Samoan named Henry Mailo.

I introduced myself and told him what I wanted.

He glanced at my hardcopy of the credit transaction and stuck his head through a curtain covering a doorway behind the counter.  “Hey Tommy, get up here.”

A few seconds later, a slightly scaled-down copy of Henry powered through the curtain like a tank.  Tommy looked about seventeen and already he had the classic Samoan walk, that utterly self-confident swagger that suggests that even walls would do well to get out of the way.  “Yeah, Pop.  What’s up?”

Henry showed him the printout.  “Did you sell this camera?”

Tommy furrowed his brow.  “Pop, that was four months ago.  How am I supposed to remember?”

Henry looked at the printout again.  “A Hitachi 1250.  We don’t move a lot of those.  Are you sure you don’t remember?”

“Oh, the H-1250.  Yeah…  I remember, now.  That was the guy who made me swap the recording chip.”

I leaned on the counter.  “What do you mean?”

“The H-1250 comes with a blank recording chip in the box,” Tommy said.  “All the good holo-cameras do.  The 1250 comes with an ultra-high grade Hitachi Platinum series.  That’s a five-hour chip.  But, this guy didn’t want the Platinum.  He wanted to swap it for a twenty-minute chip.  I tried to tell him that he was losing money on the deal, but he didn’t care.  He wanted the twenty.”

“Did he buy anything else?”

“Yeah.  A camera tripod.”

I nodded.  “Do you remember what the man looked like?”

“Yeah, now that I think about it.  He was slender, about your height, kind of muscular.  Red hair.  A pretty-boy.”

I showed him a trid of Michael.

“That’s the guy, alright.”

“Was there anyone with him?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Were there any other customers in the store?”

“There was a woman in the shop too.  Dark hair, kind of pretty, I think.  I didn’t pay her a lot of attention.”

I wished I had a holo of the woman on the Lev.  Could it be the same woman?

I looked around for security cameras; there were four, one in each corner.  “Do you keep recordings from your security cameras?”

“Sorry.  We only hold the chips for seventy-two hours.  After that, we reuse them.”

Damn.

“The dark haired woman and the man who bought the camera, did it look like they were together?”

Tommy shrugged.  “Hard to say.  I’m pretty sure they didn’t talk to each other or anything.  On the other hand, she didn’t buy anything and I think she left about the same time he did.”

“Did the man act funny?  Could the woman have been holding a gun on him?”

Tommy shook his head.  “I don’t think so.  The guy didn’t seem nervous.  He seemed distant, disconnected.  Like maybe he was scattered.”

“Scattered?”

“Yeah, scattered.  You know, fragged.  On drugs.”

I nodded slowly.  “Thank you very much, Tommy.  You’ve been a great help.”

I turned back to his father.  “Henry, who’s the best video-jockey you know?”

“Tommy.”  He said it without hesitation.

I motioned for Henry to step closer and lowered my voice.  “I’ve got a video clip that I need to have picked apart, frame-by-frame.  It’s a recording of a suicide.  It’s not pretty.  I don’t think you want Tommy to see it.”

Henry pointed toward the entrance to the shop.  “I got a lot of nice equipment in here.  Every once in a while, somebody wants to take some of it home.  Last summer, two punks came in waving guns.  I was on the wrong side of the counter and couldn’t get to my 10 millimeter.  Tommy stood behind the curtain and blew both of them away with a pump shotgun.  It wasn’t pretty.  You grow up fast around here, Mr. Stalin.”

“David.”

“Okay, David.  If you want somebody to look at your chip, Tommy’s your man.”

I nodded.

Henry called Tommy over and explained the situation.

I showed him the chip.  “Can you duplicate this and analyze the copy?  I’m going to need mine back.”

Tommy took the chip.  “Not a problem.”

He loaded the chip in a holo-deck, plugged a blank chip into a second deck, and connected the two units with optic cable.  His finger paused above the play button.  “So this is serious stuff, huh?”

“It’s pretty ugly.”

He punched a code into both of the decks.  “I’m going to dub this at high speed: ten to one.  It’ll be done in two minutes.  Less chance of scaring away a customer, if one happens to walk in.”

He pressed
play
on one deck and
record
on the other.