city blues 01 - dome city blues (37 page)

Across the street from the entrance to Nexus Dreams was a male strip club called
Tuff Guise
.  The club’s holo-facade showed the harem chambers of some fabulously rich sultan, with an obvious twist on the gender-angle: the sultan’s harem girls were half-naked male body builder types.  Their stern-looking scimitar-wielding guards were (naturally) female.

Every ten or twenty seconds, one or the other of the sultan’s harem boys seemed to find an excuse to lose his breechcloth, or whatever they’re called.  From my perspective, I couldn’t understand why anyone would bother to go inside the club; the show seemed to be out here.

The entrance to the club was the only part of the building’s front not hidden behind the holo-facade.  It was one of those weirdly fluted archways that people associate with Arabic architecture.  It blended into the illusion so well that the club had run arrow-shaped strips of orange bio-florescent tape from the sidewalk to the arch to show that it was the real doorway.

I glanced around to make certain that no one was looking in my direction, then reached my left arm into the hologram.  My fingers found the brick front of the building.  I half expected my touch to somehow disrupt or distort the image, but the laser-projected illusion flowed seamlessly around my arm, hiding it every bit as well as it hid the front of the strip club.  Perfect.

I looked around again.  Nobody was watching me.  I closed my eyes and stepped into the heart of the holo-facade.

Even with my eyes closed, the laser light that created the projection was bright enough to paint shifting blobs of color on the insides of my eyelids.  I knew that a few seconds in here with my eyes open could damage my retinas.

I groped around inside the travel bag until my fingers found the plastic case that held my night goggles.  It seemed to take an eternity of working by touch to get the Night-Stalkers out of their case and settled in place over my forehead.  I felt for the power switch and flicked it on.  The electroptic image amplifiers squealed softly as they powered up.  I flipped the lenses down over my eyes.

Night-Stalkers work by super-amplifying available light, illuminating near total darkness into something approximating daylight.  I didn’t need that right now; it was already too bright inside the holo-facade.  But the Night-Stalkers had a safety feature, an instant-reaction filter-mode that could subtract dangerously bright light sources, leaving only wavelengths and intensities that were safe for human vision.

I almost didn’t open my eyes.  Theoretically, I should be able to see through the holo-facade as if it were not there.  But what if I was wrong?  What if the Night-Stalkers were super-amplifying the already too bright light of the holo-facade?  I hoped that the split second it would take me to check wouldn’t be enough to cause permanent eye damage.

I jerked my eyes open and slammed them shut just as fast, a rapid-fire blink that told me what I needed to know.  The Night-Stalkers were working perfectly.

I opened my eyes.  The view through the lenses was cool, and green, a ghostly soft-focus rendering of the street without the unpleasant glare of the lasers.

I smiled to myself.  This was the perfect vantage point.  I could see the front of Nexus Dreams on the other side of Santa Monica Boulevard, and everything moving on the street.  As long as I stayed within a meter and a half of the front of the building, the Tuff Guise holo-facade would keep me totally hidden.  People strolled by me on the sidewalk just a few meters away, oblivious to my presence.

The brick wall of the club was covered in graffiti.  Among the traditional obscene and gang-related scrawlings was the curved-X symbol I’d seen on the Lev a few days before.  Under the symbol was written ‘
TRUST THE FLESH.  CONTROL THE MACHINE.  WATCH FOR THE CONVERGENCE, YOUR FUTURE HANGS IN THE BALANCE
.’

There was that word again.  Convergence.  It was popping up all over the place, and I still had no idea what it meant.

I leaned against the wall and reached into my pocket in search of cigarettes.  My fingers came across a plump little bundle of fabric: the socks.  I pulled them out of my pocket.  The outer sock was still dry; Ryan’s blood hadn’t soaked through.  I dropped both socks onto the sidewalk and used the toe of my shoe to shove them into the layer of trash that was accumulating against the front of the building.  Just another bit of garbage hidden behind the clean illusion of the hologram.

I went back into my pocket for the cigarettes.  They hadn’t been opened yet; I peeled off the foil wrapper and pried the first one out of the pack.

The smoke triggered a fit of coughing when it hit my lungs.  I stifled it as quickly as I could; disembodied coughs were bound to attract attention.

I read the fine print on the pack: Mexican Marlboros.  Damn.  I should have checked before I bought them.  I hated Mexican tobacco.

I jammed the pack into my pocket and pulled out the trid that I’d strong-armed from Bobbie.  I wanted to read the printing on the back; I expected the three-dimensional image on the front to be distorted or washed out by the combined influences of the holo-facade and my Night-Stalkers.  Instead, the image of my face was somehow reinforced, standing out with a lurid clarity unusual for a trid.  Except for the green skin tones imparted by the night goggles, it was an excellent likeness: a close-up shot on the street through a high-powered lens.  The background was blurry, but I could make out an arched doorway framed in neon.  The pic had been shot in the Zone, on the sidewalk in front of Trixie’s.

I flipped the trid over.  On the back, printed in bold black typeface, were my name, a phone number, and four lines of text.

“THE TIME HAS COME,” THE WALRUS SAID,

TO TALK OF MANY THINGS:

OF SHOES - AND SHIPS - AND SEALING WAX -

OF CABBAGES - AND KINGS -

Maybe it made sense to someone else, but it sounded like gibberish to me.

The phone number didn’t look familiar.  The trid went back in my pocket.

I chain-smoked the harsh Mexican cigarettes, swallowed my cough reflex, and watched Nexus Dreams from my hidden position inside the hologram.  Even at nearly four in the morning, the traffic in and out was reasonably frequent.

Every twenty minutes or so, a police car would cruise by, making its rounds.  I had to fight the urge to jump for cover, reminding myself that the police couldn’t see through the holo-facade any more than the people on the street.

Half a pack of cigarettes later, Jackal walked out of the front door.

As soon as I was sure that she was alone, I stepped out of the hologram and pulled the Night-Stalkers off my forehead.  I had to jog across Santa Monica Boulevard to catch up to her.  When I was two steps behind her, I slowed down to match her pace.  “Jackal.”

She stopped and turned around.  Her eyes were glassy.  She was either drunk, or exhausted, or both.

“Just a minute.”  She pulled a memory chip out of her pocket and plugged it into the back of her head.  Her eyes closed for a second.  When they opened, her expression went wary.  “Stalin?”

“Yeah.  I need to talk to you.”

“You need to talk to
somebody
,” she said.  “The word is out.  You’re slicked, you just don’t know it yet.”

I walked a few steps in the direction she’d been heading and motioned for her to follow.  “It’s better if we keep moving.”

She didn’t follow.  “It’s better if
you
keep moving.  Whichever way you’re heading, I’m going the other way.”

I stopped.  “Come on,” I said.  “I’m serious.  I need to talk to you.”

Jackal shook her head.  “
I’m
serious.  You’re a homicide waiting to happen.  Whenever it goes down, I don’t intend to be around.  What in the hell did you do, anyway?”

I dug through my pocket and pulled out my cigarettes.  “I’ve been investigating a series of murders.  I must be starting to get close, because I’m making someone very uncomfortable.  Whoever it is has put out a street-contract on me.”

“I heard,” Jackal said.  “Fifty K.”

“I need you to sniff around on the net and find out who it is.”

Jackal shook her head again.  “Uh-uh.  I don’t want any part of this.”

I thumped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it.  “I thought you jackers thrived on danger.  Dancing through the net a micro-second ahead of death, and all that.  I’ll make it worth your while.”

Jackal hesitated.  “How much?”

This case was rapidly pricing itself over Sonja’s ability to pay, but it wasn’t about money anymore.  It was about survival, and I couldn’t ask Jackal to risk her life for loose change.  “Fifteen K.”

Jackal shook her head.  “Thirty.”

I sighed.  “Twenty.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty,” I said again.

“Twenty-five,” Jackal repeated.  “Somebody’s willing to pay fifty to get your head on a plate.  It ought to be worth half that to keep it on your shoulders, don’t you think?”

“Okay,” I said.  “Twenty-five thousand.  Now, let’s get moving.  We’ve been standing here too long already.”

Jackal fell into step on my left side.  “Where are we going?”

“I need somewhere to hide for a few hours.  I want to get some sleep and maybe make a couple of phone calls.”

I took a drag off the cigarette and coughed.  “I’m thinking maybe a hotel.  Some place with a phone in the room and no vid cameras in the halls.  Oh, it has to have a rear entrance so you can rent the room, and I can slip in the back way.  You know any places like that?”

Jackal stopped and began to scan the street.  “No hotels.  I’ve got a better idea, but we’ll have to catch a cab.”

“Where to?”

“Dome 16,” Jackal said.  “Ever heard of R.U.R.?”

I shook my head.

“It’s sort of a robot cult,” she said.  “A bunch of chipheads.  They’re pretty whacked, but their little lair is a good place to hide.  It’s also a great place to make a net run from.”

“I’d prefer a hotel,” I said.  “I don’t know your chiphead buddies.  With fifty thousand marks on my head, how can I be sure that they won’t try to collect?”

“They won’t,” Jackal said.  “It’s kind of hard to explain, but that’s not what they’re into.”

“A couple of hours ago, two punks tried to murder me in my sleep.”

Jackal looked at me out of the corner of her eye.  “You did them first?”

“No,” I said.  “But they’re both going to be shopping for new legs.  And I’m not feeling very trusting right now.”

Jackal leaned out into the street and waved at a passing taxi.  “I said my friends were whacked.  I didn’t say they were scum.  Anyway, you don’t have to trust them.  You just have to trust
me
.”

The hovercab slid up to the curb, the blowers swirling dirt and gum wrappers around our feet in an ankle-high maelstrom.

Jackal opened the rear door and got in.  “Come on,” she said.

I slid in beside her and punched the button that closed the door.

Jackal tapped a fingertip on the bulletproof shield.  “LAX.”

That took me by surprise.  “LAX?  Are we flying somewhere?”

“Keep it in your pants,” Jackal said.  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

The driver stuck to the domes for as long as possible, cutting west on Santa Monica Boulevard through Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles, and south on the 405 into Dome 13 and the northern fringes of Culver City.

When we pulled into the vehicle lock at the southern end of Dome 13, he looked over his shoulder at us.  “Make sure your windows is up all the way.  The air’s gone get a little shitty, and the filters ain’t workin’ real good.”

“It’s only about eighteen kilometers to Dome 17,” Jackal said.  “A few carcinogens every now and then are good for you.  Keeps you from getting addicted to oxygen.”

The driver didn’t smile.

We checked our windows, and then sat in silence until the huge steel doors slid open at the far side of the lock.

Unlike the city streets outside the domes, the major highways hadn’t been allowed to atrophy.  LA was, after all, a major city, and major cities require highways to connect them to other major cities; a maxim that has endured since the days of the Roman Empire.