city blues 01 - dome city blues (19 page)

Sonja took a deep swallow and shoved the bottle toward me.  “What does that make me, an old lady?”

“No,” I said.  “I mean a
lot
younger.”

She made a face.  “You mean little girls?  That’s sick.”

I took a swallow and nodded.  “Can’t argue with that.  Doesn’t matter though.  If Rieger’s attracted to you, his tastes are probably pretty healthy.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of sideways apology?”

I handed her the Cutty and opened the refrigerator.  “What do you want with your pizza?”

She pushed the door of the refrigerator closed in front of my face.  “You do that a lot, don’t you?”

“I do what?”

“You change the subject when somebody asks you a question you don’t like.”

I pushed her arm gently to the side and reopened the refrigerator.  “How about a salad?”

She sighed.  “Sounds wonderful.”

“Good.  Will you toss it?  I need a shower.”

She nodded.

“Everything you need should be in the refrigerator.  If you have trouble finding anything, ask House.”

Sonja nodded absently.  She was staring at me.

“What’s wrong?”

She pointed to my left ear.  “Is that from the laser?”

I touched my ear.  The cauterized edge of the missing crescent of flesh stung like hell when my fingertips brushed it.  “Yeah.”

She turned away quickly.  “Oh David, I’m sorry.  I had no idea it was going to be this dangerous.”

“Well, you can’t expect Aztec to sit quietly and wait for me to track her down.”

“Her?  You think that woman who tried to kill you might have been Aztec?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “There was a woman in the video store when Michael bought his holo-camera.  From her description, she might be the same woman who tried to kill me on the Lev today.”

Sonja looked thoughtful.  “Aztec, a woman?”

I pulled off my jacket and shrugged out of the shoulder holster.  “Of course, even if it was the same woman, we can’t overlook the other possibility.”

“Which is?”

“That the woman is working with Aztec.  And, if there are two of them, there might be five.  This thing could be bigger than we thought.”

CHAPTER 11

Between the pizza, the shower and fresh clothes, when I left my house two hours later, I felt pretty human again.

Sonja decided to wait for me.  I left her curled up on my sofa, exploring an extinct style of music called the Blues.

When I walked out the door, she was trying on John Lee Hooker’s
The Motor City is Burning
.  She was beginning to appreciate the difference between notes strung together by expert software agents, and music written by men and women who felt it in the marrow of their bones.  I envied her contented smile of discovery.

At twenty after nine, the Zone was in high gear.  I worked my way through the street crowd on Santa Fe Avenue, watching the hookers closely, looking for the youngest face that I could find.

“It’s comin’!” a voice screamed.  “The Convergence is comin’, and woe be unto us if we ain’t ready!”

I looked in the direction of the voice.  A scarecrow of a man lurched and staggered up the sidewalk, shaking his bony fists and spraying saliva as he shouted.

I’d seen him before, dozens of times.  He was easily in his seventies.  No one knew his real name, but everyone called him Nostradamus because he predicted death, destruction, and earth-shattering conspiracies on something approaching a three-minute cycle.

Wherever he went, the crowd parted and let him through.  I couldn’t blame them for that.  I’d been close to him before; he reeked of dried urine and sweat.  I watched him wobble up the street, yelling dire prophecies until his manic cries faded into the distance.

The Convergence…  Where had I heard that before?  It took me a couple of seconds to figure it out.  The graffiti on the Lev. 
Prepare for the Convergence.
  Pretty much what Nostradamus had just been shouting.  If he was picking it up, it was probably something weirdly religious.

I turned my attention back to my search for the youngest hooker on the street.

She turned out to be extremely pretty and about sixteen years old, seventeen at the outside.  She flashed me a smile.  Her teeth were perfect.  “Hey Mister, you wanna try something really different?”

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

The top two buttons on her turquoise blouse were open.  Every few seconds, I flicked my eyes down to glance at her cleavage because that’s what she’d expect a potential john to do.

She pulled long honey-colored hair back from her right temple.  There was a platinum alloy jack set flush into the side of her head.

“Neural feedback loop,” she said.  “I can plug you right into my sensorium.  You’ll feel everything I feel.  Ever wonder how good you are in bed?  There’s only one way you can find out for sure.  When I get off, you’re gonna know it.”

Suddenly, I got a really powerful visual: young Ms. Perfect Teeth lying in an alley with a hole carved in her chest where her heart used to be.  She couldn’t be more than a year or two older than Paula Chapel, the oldest known victim.  Two years ago, when the killings had started, she would have been just about the right age to attract the killer’s attention.

I shook my head.  “I like my girls young.”

She cocked her pretty head to one side and pursed her lips in a pout.  “How old do I look?  I’m only sixteen.”

“Sorry,” I said.  “You’re at least two years too ripe for my tastes.”

“I’ve got a friend,” she said.  “Her name is Jenny.  I think you’ll like her.  She’s almost thirteen and she
loves
older men.”

I suppressed a shudder.  It wouldn’t be in character with the slime-ball I was portraying.

Ms. Perfect Teeth was looking over my shoulder, scanning the street for better prospects.  “I can introduce you,” she said absently.  “For a price.”

Again I swallowed my revulsion.  I wondered if Ms. Perfect Teeth thought she was doing her friend Jenny a favor.

“No good,” I said.  “I like variety.  I prefer to pick my girls.”

I pulled out a wad of Euro-marks and slipped her a fifty.  “You know of any clubs or houses that could provide a selection of girls the right age?”

“Not for fifty marks, I don’t.  For another fifty, maybe I know something.”

I slipped her another bill.

She leaned close to my right ear and whispered.  “There’s a place outside.”

“Outside?”

“Yeah.  A club, outside the Domes, a couple of klicks east of South Lock.  It’s called the Poison Apple.  Tell Teddy, the guy at the door, that you’re
hungry for some candy
.  It’s sort of a code-word.”

“Anything else?”

“Are you paying for something else?”

I shook my head.

“Then that’s all.”

She turned and walked away, switching her rump back and forth in an exaggerated fashion intended to make me regret having declined her hired affections.

I hadn’t been outside the domes in so long that I’d gotten out of the habit of carrying protective gear.  I’d have to stop somewhere and pick up supplies.

I walked South on Santa Fe, and turned left at Clarendon.

There was a 24-hour convenience store about two blocks from South Lock.  It was one of those places where they don’t actually let you inside.  I stood in a booth and looked at the merchandise through a bulletproof plastic window.  As I spotted the items I wanted, I read the code numbers off the attached placards and punched them into a menu keypad.  Eye drops, ear drops, nose filters, and a can of solar block.  I thought about contact lenses, but the generic one-size-fits-all type give me a headache after about five seconds.  I decided on a pair of mirrored sunglasses instead.  It might be dark now, but I had no way of knowing how long I was going to be outside.

I punched the
TOTAL
key.  The purple LEDs at the top of the keypad read
€
m
41.67.  I punched the
BUY
key.

An old Vietnamese man appeared from behind a partition and glided around the store, gathering my selected items.  He wore a gray carbon-laminate flak vest over a black silk robe.  A well-used riot shotgun hung barrel-down across his back.  Despite the cumbersome armor and shotgun, he moved with a boneless grace that suggested that gravity and inertia didn’t apply to him.

We traded money for items through one of those bank-style sliding drawers that only open on one end at a time.  The money went through first.

At South Lock, I sprayed the solar block on my exposed skin and squirted protective drops in my ears.  I waited till last to do my eyes.  I hate giving myself eye drops.  I always blink at the wrong time and end up with half the bottle running down my cheeks.  This time was no different.  I stood around wiping eye drops off my face and blinking myopically until my vision cleared up.

South Lock isn’t really an airlock.  It’s more of a pollution trap: three short tunnels strung end-to-end through the concrete skirt of the dome’s foundation, each tunnel beginning and ending with a revolving door.

The graffiti in the first tunnel was built up in layers, like geological strata; the cave paintings of modern culture.

The air in the first tunnel had some bite to it, a hint of things to come.

The graffiti in the second tunnel wasn’t as heavy because the air was worse.

By the third tunnel, graffiti was scarce and the air was harsh enough to make me put in my nose filters.

I stepped through the final door and stood under the naked sky for the first time in years.

Even with the protection of the drops, the air stung my eyes.  I made the mistake of breathing through my mouth.  Once.

From somewhere to my right came the whine of an air filtration station, the high pitched scream of the wind-rams cutting through the theoretically soundproofed enclosures.  Under the blue-white radiance of the dome’s halogen-arc perimeter lights, the turbine enclosures looked like hundreds of huge cement coffins.

The ground vibrated with power as each of the fusion-driven turbines rammed a continuous column of air through five meters of staggered permeable-membranes, forcing filtered air into the dome.