city blues 01 - dome city blues (2 page)

A nocturnal creature, the Zone hibernated during the day and came to life when the sun went down.  After sunset, even LAPD Tactical didn’t venture through in less than squad strength.

I passed a pair of muscle-punks leaning against the carcass of a vandalized police car.  They were decked out in the severely retro fashion popular in the Zone: black jeans, Gestapo boots, and synthleather jackets with too many zippers.

Both had peroxide white hair shaved close on the sides, left long on the top, and combed into crests like exotic birds.  Their well-used leathers reeked of old blood and chemical reflex boosters.  They watched me closely as I walked by, predatory eyes sizing up my potential as a target.  Some signal passed between them and they decided to leave me alone.

I crossed Santa Fe Avenue, and walked in the front door of Falcon’s Nest.  I waited a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim illumination, and then scanned the room.  I was looking for John Hershell, a friend I was supposed to be meeting for drinks.

John and I were technically cousins on my mother’s side, through some geometry that had been explained to me once and then promptly forgotten.  We had been buddies right up through our teens.  We’d even ended up in the Army together.

John wouldn’t be hard to spot.  He was strapped into a powered exoskeleton, compliments of a perimeter defense laser that our squad had tangled with in Argentina.  The laser had sliced through his spinal cord, leaving his body pretty much null and void from the chest down.  Turns out, he was one of those lucky one-in-a-million people who are allergic to the DNA modifying retrovirus that stimulates growth of spinal ganglia.

John wasn’t here yet.

Unfortunately, Preacher
was
here, sitting at the bar, and he was in full cry.  I slid into the booth farthest from his stool and signaled for my usual: Cutty Sark on the rocks.

Preacher’s real name was Robert Treach, and he was an expert on everything.  As usual, he was talking loudly to everyone within earshot.

“Natural selection,” he was saying.  “You can’t wipe out disease.  You just can’t do it.  They tried it in the Twentieth Century, right?  Antibiotics, vaccines, miracle drugs, all that.  Wiped out polio, smallpox, measles, and a bunch of other diseases.”

Someone in his general area must have asked the obvious question.

Preacher squeezed a swallow from his tube of beer and shook his head.  “Hell no it didn’t work.  It
can’t
work.  Not in the long run.  Nature always figures out a way to restore the balance.  When the population gets too high, natural selection kicks in and a new disease shows up, usually something real ugly.  Where do you think AIDS came from?  And then AIDS II, and AIDS III?  Too many people bumping into each other, that’s where.  It’s not healthy.  Nature had to cull the herd.  Worked too, didn’t it?  Culled the hell out of the human race.”

I ran his words around in my head for a second: “
Culled the hell out of the human race.
”  Only Preacher would choose such a banal phrase to describe the disease that had ultimately wiped out a third of humanity.

“It’ll happen again too,” Preacher said.  “Nature will keep on weeding out our weak bloodlines until we wise up enough to do it ourselves.”

He downed another squirt of beer and nodded in response to something I couldn’t hear.  “That’s what I’m telling you,” he said.  “Compassion is not a pro-survival characteristic.”

I tuned him out just as he was spouting some nonsense about Darwin.

Falcon’s Nest was a dark and cozy little blues bar.  As far as I knew, it was the last one left in Los Angeles, maybe even the world.  It was an anachronism, with its exposed beam ceilings, dark Portsmouth paneling, and worn leather upholstery.  The owner, Rico Martinez, had kept it as true to the traditions of his grandfather as possible.  It remained an island of quiet sanity in a sea of designer drinks, psycho-rock, and holo-neon.

When Rico finished pouring my drink, he shooed the waitress away and brought it to me himself.  Watching him hobble across the room made me wish I’d sat at the bar.

His round face split into a huge grin as he slid the drink across the mahogany table.  “You’ve finished a piece, haven’t you?”

I pushed an ice cube around the top of my scotch.  “What makes you say that?”

Rico’s grin got wider.  “You
bastard
, you
have
, haven’t you?”

It was my turn to grin.

He slapped the table.  “I knew it!  When do I get to see?”

I took a sip of scotch.  “I’ll probably shoot a couple of holos tomorrow.  I’ll drop you a copy in a day or two.”

“Is this piece as good as the last one?”

I shrugged.  “You’ll have to be the judge of that.”

Demi, the latest in a long line of temporary waitresses, slipped up behind Rico and whispered something in his ear.

He glanced back toward the bar and nodded.  “Duty calls, Amigo.  I have thirsty customers and the booze must flow.”

I lifted my glass and toasted him silently as he limped back to the bar.

Rico doesn’t talk about it, but rumor says—when he was a kid—his mother sold the musculature in his left leg to a black market organ clinic.  I don’t know if that’s true, but I’ve seen the leg.  From the knee down, it’s not much more than skin stretched over tendon and bone.

I asked him once why he’s never gotten a muscle graft to replace the missing tissue.  But Rico had given me a sad smile, shaken his head, and told me that you never can be sure whether organ donors are volunteers, or victims.

Lonnie Johnson’s
Low Down Saint Louis Blues
found its way out of the speakers.  I took another sip of the scotch and settled down into listening mode.

“Getting started without me, Sarge?”

I looked up into John’s grinning face.

“You’re late,” I said.  “There is scotch to be drunk, Johnny Boy, and you are not carrying your end of the load.”

John eased himself into the booth; the servomotors that drove his exoskeleton bleated softly as they bent his unresponsive lower body into a sitting position.

“A problem that can be quickly remedied,” he said.  He waved Demi over and ordered a drink.

John wore dark colors as usual, slate gray pants and a pleated black jacket with flyaway shoulders.  The dark color scheme was supposed to hide the narrow gray ribbing of the exoskeleton.  Under the dim lights of the bar, it almost worked; the exoskeleton was nearly invisible.

“What’s the big news?” I asked.

“My R&D team is getting close to a breakthrough on the neural shunt,” he said.

The neural shunt was one of a hundred crazy schemes that John had cooked up in his drive to free himself from the exoskeleton.  I didn’t understand most of the technical details, but the shunt was basically an attempt to wire around the damage to John’s spine, sort of like jumpering around a bad circuit.

It consisted of a custom-designed microchip implanted in his frontal lobe.  The chip was supposed to interpret synaptic firings from John’s brain, and transmit the signals through a fiber optic strand that ran down his spine to a second chip implanted below the injury.  It had been an ugly piece of surgery, and it hadn’t really done the trick.

“You’re going to try that crap again?”

“Of course I’m going to try it again.  That’s why I built Neuro-Tech in the first place.  Owning a medical R&D team isn’t exactly my life-long dream.  If anybody else would work on the problem for me, I’d sell the company in a nanosecond.  Until that happens, I’m going to have to keep trying myself.”

I took a swallow of scotch and tried not to frown.  “I thought the neural shunt was a dead-end.”

John shook his head.  “So did I, but my engineers have worked up a new angle on it.”

“John, you told me yourself, every time you power up that chip, you go into a full-blown seizure.  You’ve got to stop screwing around with your brain.”

John tapped a fingernail on the carbon laminate ribbing of his exoskeleton.  “I’ve got news for you, Sarge.  My brain is about all I’ve got left to screw around with.”

I set my glass down a little too hard.  “Damn it, John.  You know what I’m talking about.”

John nodded.  “I know,” he said.  “And I appreciate your concern.  I honestly do.  But I’m going to be okay, Sarge. 
Really
.  This is going to work.”

I bit back the obvious comment.  When it came to getting his legs back, John’s weird projects were always ‘going to work.’

It was his quest, his single-minded obsession.  In an age where medical technology could cure cancer, transplant organs, and rewrite DNA, John was just about the only crippled person left.  He wanted out of that exoskeleton, and he didn’t care how many fortunes he had to spend to get there.

“What about the seizures?” I asked.

“We’re getting a handle on that,” John said.

I gulped down the rest of my scotch and signaled Demi for another.

When it came, she waved away my money and jerked her head toward a woman in the next booth.  “Already paid for,” she said.  “Your secret admirer.”  Her nasal accent made it sound like
saykrit admoyra
.

I glanced at the woman for a second and then felt my eyes drawn to her again.  She definitely had the goods.  She was also definitely a hooker.

Her hair was a tousled auburn mane falling well past her shoulders.  She had opaline green eyes with improbably long lashes.  Her lips were a deep glossy red, with a swollen bee-stung look that suggested she had just climbed out of bed.  The soft prominence of her cheekbones tapered to a pointed chin.

A skintight bodysuit of dark green synlon clung to her as if sprayed on.  The fabric was photo-active, oval cells of the material cycling to transparency, revealing her white skin in sharp contrast to the dark green synthetic cloth.

Tiny windows of nudity drifted slowly across her body like clouds being chased by the wind.  I tried not to stare as one of the transparent patches flowed diagonally across her rib cage and up around the curve of her breast, revealing the cinnamon-toast brown of her nipple.

Cinched tight around her waist was a broad black belt with leaves of ivy embroidered in metallic green thread.  Her shoes were those impossibly high stiletto pumps that street kids call
fuck-me shoes
.

She was beautiful; as beautiful as surgical boutiques and DNA-modifying viral cultures could make her.

Beautiful.  Perfect.  Artificial.

“Wow,” John said softly.  He tipped his drink slightly in the woman’s direction and then took a sip.

A second later, the woman stood beside our table.  She looked at John.  “Are you David Stalin?”

John hooked a thumb in my direction.  “There’s your man...”

The woman turned toward me and held out one of my old business cards.  “I called your office,” she said, “but the number is out of service.  I tried the address on your card, but it looks like they’ve turned that whole building into a pump shop for commercial steroids.  If you’ll tell me where you’ve moved your office, I’ll be glad to drop by during business hours.”

Her perfume was delicate, but overtly sensual.  It must have been packed with pheromones, because it was down-loading sexual imperatives to my reproductive system on a frequency that I barely managed to ignore.

“I didn’t move my office,” I said.  “I closed it.”

I took another sip of scotch, and paused while it ran down my throat.  “I’m out of the business.”

John watched me, nodding his head slightly as if encouraging me to somehow take advantage of the situation.

The woman’s shoulders slumped a little.  She stared down at the table top.  “I need your help Mr. Stalin.”

“I’m sorry, Ms...”

She glanced up.  “Winter,” she said.  “Sonja Winter.”

“I’m sorry Ms. Winter, but I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

Her eyes were glassy, as though a tear might find its way down those long lashes any second.  “I need your help,” she said again.  “I’ve run out of options.  You’re the last hope I’ve got.”

As I stared into her eyes, I realized that her eye shadow and lipstick were not makeup.  They were tattooed on.

I cleared my throat softly.  “I’m not anybody’s last hope.  There are a thousand private detectives out there that are as good as, or better than I ever was.  All you have to do to find one is walk to the nearest public terminal and access the business directory.”

The entire situation was right out of an old Mike Hammer vid, but even the bizarrely cliché quality of our conversation didn’t stop me from feeling like a totally heartless bastard as the first tear rolled down her cheek.

“If you’ll let me tell you…”  Her voice trailed off.  “If you’ll please just... reconsider…”

“Cut her some slack,” John said.  “It might do both of you some good.”

“There’s nothing to reconsider,” I said.  “I’m out of the business, and I’m not going back.”

The woman closed her eyes for a long second.  The first tear was joined by a second, then a third.

She swallowed heavily.  “It’s my brother,” she said.  “He’s been... he was murdered.”

“Then you’ve definitely got the wrong guy for the job,” I said.  “You need to call the police.”