city blues 01 - dome city blues (32 page)

My brain registered it as a flicker of motion at the very edge of my peripheral vision: someone stepping out of a darkened doorway to my right, almost behind me.

Instinct took over.  I spun left, away from the threat, and jammed my right hand into my windbreaker in search of the Blackhart.  Good moves, both of them.  They probably would have worked if I had been a hair faster.

The stranger’s hand came up in a blur and jabbed the stainless steel horns of a police riot wand into the side of my neck.  The zapper must have been heavily overcharged, because its electrodes fried the flesh of my neck where they made contact.

I fell, still turning as inertia attempted to carry me through the spin that my body had started.  I caught a glimpse of my attacker’s legs before the back of my head collided with the sidewalk.  Boots.  Black leather boots.  Women’s boots.

Darkness.  Featureless.  Borderless.  Infinite.

No... not featureless.

Shades of darkness.  Pools of velvet shadow.  Phantom rivers of burnt black oil.

I cracked one eye.  Big mistake.  A brilliant bolt of light slammed through the tiny slit between my eyelids and blew a hole through the back of my head.

I jammed the eye shut.

Too late.  Pain jack hammered its way into my brain.  Pulsing, throbbing pain that carried a wrenching nausea on its shoulders.

I clamped my jaw shut and willed myself not to vomit.  It seemed to work.  A little.

Closing my eyes didn’t make the pain go away, so I opened them just enough to squint through slitted lids.

I lay there, staring at a stretch of rich burgundy carpet.  As my eyes adjusted to the light, I realized that it wasn’t bright at all.

I became aware of sensations other than light and pain.

My left arm was asleep, trapped under my chest with the weight of my body on it.

The carpet against my cheek was plush, damp with the spreading stain of my saliva.

There was something in my right hand.  From the heft and feel of it, I knew it was the Blackhart.

Somewhere, classical music played softly.  I didn’t recognize the piece, but it sounded like Mozart.

Smell.  Something familiar, acrid.  Gunpowder.

Another smell, again familiar.  A flat metallic scent that reminded me of wet copper.  I could almost place it.

I began to muster my energy for the Herculean task of rolling over.  Ready... ready... and NOW.

The ceiling was more interesting than the floor had been.  The plaster was sculpted in bas-relief.

I flexed the fingers of my left hand experimentally.  They burned with the curious fire of returning circulation.

Arms next.  Nothing radical, just flex the muscles.  Everything still attached?  Nothing broken?

Legs.  Same game-plan.

After some careful psyching, I levered myself to a sitting position.

It turned out that Pain had a big brother named
Mister
Pain.

Mr. Pain was kind enough to stomp an entire ballet across the insides of my eyelids.

I stayed put and waited for Mr. Pain to fade to the point where he was merely unbearable.  In the meantime, I let my eyes tour the room.

Floor to ceiling drapes covered what appeared to be French doors.  The drapes looked expensive.

To the left of the drapes hung a painting.  It might have been an authentic Renoir.

To the right of the drapes was an overstuffed chair.  Obviously an antique, the chair had wine-colored upholstery and heavy walnut arms and legs.  It made me think of those exclusive men’s clubs that you see in old vids.  Clubs with names like
The Gibraltar
and
The Academy
.

Sitting in the chair was a man.  Mid thirties.  Blonde razor-cut hair.  Carefully masculine surgical-boutique face.  Flawless gunmetal gray Italian suit.

I’d never seen him before, but I’d have bet even money that his name was Kurt Rieger.

Mr. Rieger, if that was his name, had been carefully strapped to the chair with nano-pore tape, and (equally carefully) shot through the middle of the forehead.

The source of the wet copper smell clicked in my mind: blood.  A lot of it.

An entrance wound that size could only have come from a large caliber bullet.

Suddenly, I became conscious of the Blackhart clenched in my right fist.  I raised the barrel to my nose and sniffed.  Burnt gunpowder.

I ejected the magazine and cycled the slide to empty the chamber.  One round was missing.  I slid the magazine back into the grip reservoir, and shoved it home with the heel of my left hand until it clicked into place.

There wasn’t much doubt where the bullet in Rieger’s head had come from.  Jesus.

I managed to get my legs under me and stumble to my feet.  A tidal wave of pain and nausea crashed into me and sent me reeling around the room in a desperate struggle to keep my footing.

I banged my left knee sharply against a wooden end table before my gyros caught and stabilized.  A love seat cut from the same mold as the chair beckoned to me from across the room.  No.  Bad idea.  If I sat down, I might not make it back up.

After a minute or two on my feet, my knees got a little steadier.  I wouldn’t want to try to run, but I thought that I could handle walking, if I didn’t push too hard.

What were my options?

No, it was too early for that.  I knew my ass was wedged in a crack, but until I had some idea of how badly, there wasn’t a lot of sense in making plans.

Start over.

Step one: find out how ugly the picture was. 
Then
move on to step two: Damage Control.

Okay, where was I?  A cliché question perhaps, but a crucial piece of data that I happened to be lacking.

I walked unsteadily to the drapes and pulled one end away from the wall enough to peek out.  The drapes did indeed cover a set of French doors.  The doors led to a large balcony.  In the distance past the railing, the Gebhardt-Wulkan Informatik pyramid floated in the air.  I was in Dome 11.

From the angle of my view, the room I was in was pretty high up.  I let the drape fall back into place and moved away from the window.

I checked my watch.  It was almost five p.m.  I’d been out a little over three hours.

I made a quick search of the apartment, or suite, or whatever.  It was huge, fourteen rooms.  Living room, den, dining room, full kitchen, breakfast nook, study and four bedrooms, each with an attached bathroom.

No one was home except for me and the tentatively identified Mr. Rieger.

I used the mirror in the master bathroom to examine myself.  There were two uniform blisters the size of pencil erasers just below my right ear, where the stun wand had fried me.  The skin surrounding them had been heavily bruised by the high-volt/low-amp discharge.  Four shallow scratches ran diagonally across my left cheek, apparently the mark of gouging fingernails.  The right side of my face was still covered in strawberry wrinkles from my unceremonious nap on the carpet.

I looked for a hand mirror; I wanted to see the back of my head.  I couldn’t find one, so I settled for exploring the damage by touch.  There was some swelling, a lot of tender flesh, and a little blood, but I could find no signs of skull fracture.

I looked at my pupils in the mirror.  Was the left one a hair larger than the right?  I couldn’t be sure.  Did I have a concussion?  I didn’t know enough to be certain.

I decided to say no.  My body would let me know pretty soon if my diagnosis was wrong.

I snapped off the bathroom light and walked back to the living room.

My legs were getting steadier.

If I had looked hard enough, I could have probably come up with a pair of gloves, but it didn’t seem to make much difference whether or not I left fingerprints.  If a crime team went over the place, they were going to find my fibers and hairs and about a thousand other things linking me to the murder scene.

I didn’t even know where my spent shell casing had gone.  It was probably under the couch or buried in the carpet.  The way my head felt, if I got down on my hands and knees to look, I’d probably pass out.  But I had no doubt that the police would find it in about twenty seconds.  One of the more obvious reasons that most criminal-types favor caseless ammo.

There was a pool of my saliva soaked into the carpet.  I had certainly left more than enough for an easy DNA comparison.

None of that mattered anyway; my Blackhart was registered.  The State Police had a ballistics map for it in their computers.  Even if I threw the gun away, or destroyed it, they could run a database search and trace any bullets that it had fired back to me.

I stood for a minute, breathing slowly and steeling myself for my least favorite part of this.  I gritted my teeth and began a systematic search of the body.

His skin and muscles were still pliable and reasonably warm.  Rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet.  He hadn’t been dead very long.

On a hunch, I examined his hands.  His manicure was immaculate.  There were traces of skin and blood under the fingernails of his right hand.  I touched the scratches on my left cheek.  Someone had given this frame a lot of thought.

I moved the little wooden end table to a handy position and emptied the contents of his pockets onto the top.  A key ring with five key chips, one of them embossed with the BMW logo.  A cigarette lighter machined from European surgical steel.  A matching cigarette case, half full of expensive German cigarettes—
not
Ernte 23’s.  A silk handkerchief.  A postcard, folded in quarters, with a launch pad shot of a Euro-Space orbital shuttle on one side and German writing on the other.  A wallet containing three credit chips, an ID chip, seven business cards and
€
m
4,200 in cash.  The credit chips all had gold stripes.

There was a phone across the room.  I used it to read the ID chip.  The holo it projected was definitely the dead man.  My first guess had been right.  It was Kurt Rieger.

I helped myself to a smoke from the cigarette case, and lit it with the surgical steel lighter.

I snapped the BMW chip off the key ring and stuck it in my pocket.  I wanted to search Rieger’s car.  If everything went okay, the key chip could be put back later.  If not, it would go down a storm drain somewhere.  As long as the car itself wasn’t stolen, the cops probably wouldn’t make too big a deal over the key.

Everything else went back in his pockets.

I stood for a minute and smoked.

I couldn’t see a man like Kurt Rieger keeping track of his own socks.  The apartment had to be equipped with an AI.

Could that be my alibi?  If the AI had recorded the murder, the playback would prove that I hadn’t killed Rieger.  In fact, it would show who
had
murdered him.

Who was I kidding?  Anyone smart enough to plan a setup like this wouldn’t overlook something that obvious.

Still, I had to check.  I was reasonably certain that the AI had been shut down or wiped, but you don’t let a doctor amputate your leg without getting a second opinion.

It took me ten minutes to track down the AI’s maintenance board.  It was in the study, hidden behind an access plate that blended into the dark burl-wood wall paneling almost perfectly.

I popped the plate open.  The hardware was nice, a Braun 6000 series.  It was turned off.

I punched a few buttons and sequenced the system on-line.  Something bleeped and a small flat-screen monitor lit up with a flashing message:

>>>>> ERROR CODE: 2A011FE0003 <<<<<

[ PROGRAM NOT FOUND ]

>>>>> SOFTWARE RELOAD REQUIRED <<<<<

Slicked.  Damn.

I shut the system down and closed the access panel.  It had been too much to hope for.

I stopped by the master bathroom, took a final drag off my cigarette, and flushed it down the toilet.

I walked back to the living room, exhaling smoke slowly as I went.

Now
it was time to consider choices.

Option #1: I could call Dancer and trust to luck that LAPD Homicide was clever enough to see through this elaborate frame up.  Not a really good idea, considering the strength of the evidence against me.  If the cops ran a Magic Mirror on me, it was going to point its electronic finger straight at me.  I’d seen things that (theoretically), no one but the killer should have seen.  My brainwaves would contain recognition patterns for the body, the crime scene, and the murder weapon.  Hell, the murder weapon was
registered
to me.  Not to mention the fact that the police forensics team would find traces of my blood and skin under Rieger’s fingernails.