city blues 01 - dome city blues (18 page)

An image of Michael appeared in the air over the source deck.  He pranced and capered at impossible speed and then blew his brains out and threw himself to the bed in an instant.  At increased speed, the scene felt cartoon-like.

Tommy ejected my chip and handed it back to me.  He pocketed the copy.  “I’ll look at this on my rig in the back.  I’ll give it the works, but it would help if I knew what I was looking for.”

“Start by checking for any indication that the recording has been altered.”

“Do you think it has?”

“I doubt it, but check anyway.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Look for any evidence that someone else was in the room at the time of the suicide.”  I handed him a hundred marks.

He took it with a surprised look on his face.  “What’s this?”

“A retainer.”

“What if I don’t find anything?”

“According to your Dad, if you don’t find anything, there’s nothing to find.”

I thanked them both for their help and left them my name and phone number on a scrap of paper.  I was doing that a lot lately; I really needed to have some business cards printed up.

I caught a cab to the 1600 block of 55th Street, and walked the last hundred meters to the barricade.  The sun was all but gone by then, submerging the Zone in rapidly deepening twilight.

Unlike the rest of the city, where holo-facades were common on houses and businesses, in the Zone most of the holographic glitz was reserved for the bars and massage parlors over on Santa Fe Avenue.

The buildings along 55th Street were old and tired looking, with only the gathering darkness to hide their decaying faces.

An instant after I turned the corner onto Alameda Street, an incredibly bright light hit me in the eyes, half blinding me.

My reflexes kicked in.  I threw myself to the right, and came up in a crouch behind a parked car.  I snatched the Blackhart out of its holster; in the Zone, most surprises are nasty ones.

I tried to peek through the windows of the car.  I had to use my peripheral vision, because afterimages of the light hung in front of my eyes like irregular purple blobs.

“Back off!” a voice said.  It was gravelly and loud, a man’s voice through an amplifier.

I could see a van across the street.  A bank of high-powered flood lamps stretched across the van’s roof, lighting a wide swath of the street to a silver-white intensity.  Tendrils of milky vapor spilled out of the open rear doors of the van.

I realized that I must have turned the corner just as the lights had come on.  Bad timing.  I’d caught them full in the face.

“Back off!” the amplified voice said again.  “Back the fuck off.”

I continued trying to scan the street through the corner of my eye.  There were bodies, four or five of them, sprawled on the street and sidewalk near the van.  Judging from their clothes, they were bangers: gang soldier-boys.

My eyes were beginning to adjust.  I could make out two shapes, men in police-style riot armor; they were throwing a body into the back of the van.  A third man, also in armor, stood between me and the van, silhouetted by the bright light behind him.  His fat combat rifle was leveled at the car that I was hiding behind.  His voice amplifier kicked in again, “Listen up, Dickwad.  We are a registered organ recovery unit and this is an authorized salvage operation.  So why don’t you just get your ass out from behind that car, and get the hell out of here?”

Organ poachers.  Probably not licensed, no matter what they said.  The Zone was a fertile hunting ground for them.  On any given night, the gangs would leave enough meat lying in the gutters to keep an industrious team of freelancers in business.

The two men in the background swung another body into the back of the van.  A cloud of displaced nitrogen vapor gushed out of the doors.

“What’s it going to be, asshole?” the amplified voice asked.  “You can walk away now, no harm, no foul.  But, if you want to try something fancy...”

The implied threat hung in the air.

I didn’t trust him, but I didn’t really have a lot of choice, either.  I couldn’t spend the night hunkered behind that car, and I had no reason to even think about trying to shoot it out with them.

I slid the Blackhart into its holster.  “Okay,” I said.  “I’m walking away.”  I stood up slowly, keeping my hands in view.

His rifle tracked me as I walked back the way I’d come.  Despite his assurances, the muscles in my back didn’t relax until I had safely turned the corner.

I had to circle three blocks out of my way to get back around to Alameda and headed toward home again.

My detour took me close to Wong’s Italian Pizza.  I decided to stop in for dinner.  Wong doesn’t look very Italian, and neither does his pizza.  But looks aside, his pepperoni and mushroom is a work of art.  I ordered a medium.  I could eat half tonight and maybe half for lunch tomorrow.

At one time, Wong’s building had been a soy-burger restaurant, part of a now-defunct fast food chain whose trademark decor emphasized white ceramic tile framed by flamingo pink neon.  A few of the neon tubes buzzed and flickered feebly, making the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling look like tufts of cotton candy.

When the pizza was ready, I tucked the foil vacu-therm pouch under one arm and headed toward home.

I couldn’t help thinking about the dead gang-bangers as I walked, the organ poachers ready to scoop up bodies before they even hit the sidewalk.  Los Angeles was perfectly happy to kill you the second you took your finger off the button.  And if LA didn’t get you, some maniac like Aztec would gladly fill in.

He was out there somewhere, planning the next move in our little game of chess.  That idea scared the hell out of me.  The last move had left Joseph Takamura lying dead on the floor of a Lev, and Harvey Miller laid up in a trauma ward trying to breathe through a tube.  I had no way of knowing for certain if William Holtzclaw’s murder was part of this, but I strongly suspected that it was.

The body count was climbing, and a suspicion churning deep in my gut told me that it was going to get a lot uglier before this case was over.  I shook my head and tried to think of something else.

About a block from home, the feeling hit me.  Someone was following me.

I turned a corner without warning, plastered my back against the wall of a building, and drew the Blackhart.  I set the foil pizza pouch on a windowsill, to free up my left hand.

The footsteps slowed as they approached my position.  They stopped just short of my alley.

I wheeled around the corner and shoved the automatic into the face of my pursuer.

We stood for a second, both frozen.

It was Sonja.

She drew a deep breath and released it slowly.  “It’s generally considered bad luck to shoot the person who signs your paycheck.”

I lowered the gun.  “You haven’t signed any paychecks yet.”

Sonja smiled tentatively.  “You haven’t sent me a bill.”

I slid the Blackhart into the shoulder holster.  “An oversight that I can correct.”

A frown crossed her features for a second.  “Umm... could we go to your place now?  I think I need to change my panties.”

I retrieved my pizza and started walking toward the house.  “What are you doing here?”

She took a couple of quick steps to catch up and fell into step beside me.  “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Why didn’t you just call?”

“You never gave me your phone number.  Besides, I was kind of hoping that you’d cook me dinner.”

There was a hurt tone in her voice.  I stopped walking and turned toward her.  “Listen, I’ve had a really bad day.”

“You’re trembling.”  She stopped and turned to face me.

“What?”

She stepped closer and touched my cheek with the palm of her hand.  “You’re trembling.”

I turned my face away and stared off toward the house.  “Were you not paying attention just now?  I came very close to blowing you away.”

Sonja’s hand touched my chin and guided my face back around toward hers.  “You haven’t carried a gun in years.  Why are you suddenly ready to shoot at your own shadow?”

I broke away and started walking toward the house again.  “Someone on the Lev tried to kill me today.”

“Kill you?”

“A woman tried to drill a hole in my head with a laser.  She missed and killed some poor old man instead.”

I stopped at my front door and waited for House to scan me, a ritual that always reminded me of letting a dog sniff your hand.  Half a second later, satisfied with the results of his ID scan, House opened the door and let us in.

I made a beeline for the kitchen, set the pizza pouch on the counter and started pawing through cabinets.

“In the cupboard over the sink.”  Sonja stood leaning against the sill of the door to the dining room.

“Thanks.”

I opened the cabinet over the sink and retrieved the bottle of Cutty.  It was two-thirds full.  I unscrewed the cap and knocked back a healthy swallow.  The warm scotch burned a furrow of heat down my throat.  I took another swallow.  “House, play some music.”

“What would you like to hear, David?”

“I don’t care.  Pick something.”

House’s answer took the form of the opening strains of Jimmy Reed’s
Bright Lights Big City
.

I started to hit the bottle a third time when I noticed that Sonja was reaching for it.  I handed it to her.  Her swallow was every bit as healthy as mine had been.  She lowered the bottle.  “What are we drinking to?”

“Who is Kurt Rieger?”

She handed me the bottle.  “He’s head of Information Systems Research at Gebhardt-Wulkan Informatik.”

I set the bottle on the counter beside the pizza and lit a cigarette.  “Do you know him?”

“I’ve met him,” she said.

“Did he use his influence to get GWI to accept Michael’s indenture?”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said.  “But I’m going to find out.  You could save me some time by telling me yourself.  Did Rieger influence the decision to accept Michael’s indenture?”

Sonja nodded once.

“Why would he do that?  What was so special about Michael that Kurt Rieger would pull strings for him?”

“I told you, Michael was a topnotch software engineer.  Rieger wanted him.”

“Bullshit,” I said.  “GWI’s Contract Indenture Board was scared of Michael’s brain tumor.  They were avoiding him like poison.”

I drew a lung full of smoke and exhaled loudly.  “Rieger wanted to sleep with you, didn’t he?”

She met my stare.  “What if he did?  I’m a whore, remember?  I sleep with people for money.  In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s what whores do.  And, if I can do it for money, why shouldn’t I do it to save my brother’s life?”

She jerked her gaze away from mine.  “What do you care, anyway?”

Good question.  Why
did
it bother me so much?  She was entitled to screw anybody she wanted.

“So you did go to bed with Rieger?”

“You’re goddamned right I did.  I fucked his brains out.  Are you happy?”

“Well, that blows one theory.”

She picked up the bottle and unscrewed the cap.  There was ice in her voice.  “What theory?”

“One of Michael’s coworkers is convinced that Rieger prefers his girls a little younger.”