city blues 01 - dome city blues (5 page)

The next evening, I left the Zone and rode the westbound Lev to Dome 15, West Hollywood.

Nexus Dreams was a specialty bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, catering to jackers, wannabe’s, and techno-groupies.

The club’s holo-facade was a live video feed of the street outside the front doors, pumped through a processor and rendered in simple polygon graphics.  The result was a cartoonish video-mirror of the street scene in which all people and objects within about fifteen meters of the bar appeared as computer icons.

I watched my own icon grow larger as I approached the front of the club.  My head appeared as a truncated pyramid, my body as two rectangular boxes (a short one for my pelvis, and a taller one for my trunk) and my arms and legs were jointed cylinders.

I walked past my polygon doppelganger, and into the club.  The decor inside was intended to suggest a jacker’s-eye view of the DataNet: matte black floor, walls, and ceiling divided into neat one-meter squares by low intensity florescent blue lasers.  The tables and stools were transparent acryliflex, edge-lit in bright primary colors.  Slash-rock pounded out of hidden speakers, an abrasive, atonal barrage masquerading as music.

At twenty after nine, the club was packed: a shoulder-to-shoulder swarm of human beings that seemed to writhe and pulsate in time to the arrhythmic beat of the music.

I fought my way to the bar and wedged myself into a narrow opening between a muscle-boy with florescent tattoos on his face and an androgynous albino dressed in black wet-look osmotic-neoprene.  The albino’s fingernails were black acrylic, long and pointed like tiny obsidian daggers.  His/her features and complexion were flawless testimonials to the possibilities of elective surgery.

When I finally got the bartender’s attention, I tried to order a Cutty on the rocks, and received a blank stare in return.  I looked at the neon-colored drinks everyone else was having and decided that a beer was my safest bet.

The beer came in a purple octagonal squeeze-tube with raised Chinese characters on the label.  I squirted some into my mouth; it tasted like cold aftershave.

I scanned the room.  I was looking for Zeus, a data-jacker who had hung out here once-upon-a-time, back when Stalin and Stalin Investigations had still been a going concern.  We’d hired Zeus several times, when our need for computer-skullduggery had overreached Maggie’s talents.

Zeus’s real name was Orville Beckley, a fact that he went to great lengths to conceal.  I’d found that out as a result of a bet that Orville had made (and ultimately lost) with Maggie.  He’d boasted of having erased every trace of his real name from the net.  True to his prediction, Maggie hadn’t been able to catch even a sniff of his birth records in the net.  But he hadn’t reckoned with Maggie’s tenacity.  She’d gone on to teach him three simple facts:

#1 Hospitals are bureaucracies.

#2 Bureaucracies are paranoid.

#3 Paranoid bureaucrats keep duplicate records of
everything
... in hardcopy... in file cabinets.

I could still remember the look of stunned disbelief on Zeus’s face when Maggie had whispered the
Orville
word in his ear, the certain knowledge that his secret was not dead after all.  The memory brought me a smile.

I looked around again.  As far as I could tell, Zeus wasn’t in the bar, but I did catch sight of a face I recognized.  I threaded my way through the crowd until I came to her table.  Her handle was Jackal; I didn’t know her real name.

She wore a baggy maroon jumpsuit with a couple of hundred pins and badges stuck to it.  I remembered her as thin.  Now she looked anorexic.

Her hair was a thick black mop that ended suddenly just above the tops of her ears.  It looked as though someone had dropped a bowl on her head and shaved off everything that stuck out.  Her eyebrows were shaven as well.  As she craned her neck, I saw two, no,
three
gold alloy data jacks set flush into the back of her head.  One jack held a program chip.  A thin fiber-optic cable ran from the second jack to a box clipped to her belt.  The box was about two-thirds the size of a pack of cigarettes, molded from charcoal gray plastic, covered with flickering LEDs.  The third jack was empty.

She looked up at me, a bare glimmer of recognition in her eyes.  She knew she had seen me before; she just couldn’t remember where.  She reached into the right breast pocket of her jumpsuit and pulled out a small handful of data chips.  She selected one and plugged it into the empty jack.

Her eyes closed for a second.  When they opened, her expression was totally changed.  She gestured toward a stool.  “Stalin, right?  Long time.”

I took the offered seat and faked a sip of the almost-beer.  “Yeah, it has been a while.  You still calling yourself Jackal?”

“
THE
one,
THE
only,” she said.

She took a swallow from her tall green drink.  “Are you looking for Zeus?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Have you seen him?”

Jackal shook her head.  “Not in a couple of months.  The last I heard, he snooped Ishikawa Audio for some pretty fancy technical specs.  If he fenced them through the Cayman Islands, like he usually does, he’s probably off spending his bankroll in the skin-bars in Bangkok.  We probably won’t see him for at least another six or eight weeks.”

I nodded, and studied Jackal’s face.  As near as I could figure, she must have been about twenty-eight.  She looked forty.

Jackal returned my stare.  “Are you looking for Zeus for social purposes, or are you here on business?”

We had to lean close to hear each other over the crowd and the music.

“Business, actually,” I half-shouted.

“What have you got?  Maybe I can hook you up.”

I thought about it for a second.  I didn’t really know her.  I’d seen her hanging around with Zeus from time to time, but I had no idea whether or not she was any good.

She obviously had the skull modifications, and she knew how to talk-the-talk.  But, when it came time to ride the data grid through somebody else’s security software, could she slip in and out without a trace?  Or would she leave a trail of bread crumbs through the net that some AI could follow?  Or, worse yet, tangle with a neuro-guard subroutine that would reach through the interface and fry her brain?

My gut instinct told me that she could cut it.

I leaned close to her ear.  “I’ve got two jobs, if you’re interested.  The first is a protected database.  Are you up to that?”

“Depends.  Whose?”

“LAPD.  Homicide Division.  I need a complete data pull on a closed murder investigation.  The files are sealed.”

Jackal rummaged through her pocket full of chips and selected one.  She popped a chip out of one of her jacks, and plugged the new chip into the empty slot.

“The Boys in Blue have good security,” she said.  They just upgraded their AI about four months ago.  Not cutting-edge, but real good stuff.”

Her eyes went vacant for a second as the chip continued to download arcane technical data into her brain.  “I can crack that base,” she said.  “Not easy, but I can do it.”  She looked back at me and smiled.  “Also not cheap.”

I nodded.  “I didn’t think it would be.”

She pushed her drink around the table top leaving a smear of condensation on the clear surface.  “You mentioned a second job.”

“A personal database,” I said.  “It probably has fairly standard consumer-grade protection.  Shouldn’t be too difficult to penetrate.”

She smiled again.  “If it’s as easy as all that, I might just throw it in as a bonus.  But if it turns up any surprises, it’s going to cost you.”

We talked for another half-hour: price, time schedule, data format.

I elbowed my way out of the bar and caught a hovercab to the eastern perimeter of Dome 12.  The cab was a beat-up old Chevy with a patched apron and a wobble in the left rear blower that threatened to loosen my teeth.

The driver was an attractive African woman, her proud cheekbones decorated with the inverted chevrons of ritual tribal scars.  Over her shoulder, I could see the tattletales on the taxi’s liquid crystal instrument panel.  Every few seconds, one of the status bars would blink from blue to red.  When it did, she would tap the display with her right index finger until it blinked back to blue.

She dropped me off at the corner of 55th and Fortuna, a couple of blocks short of the barricade.  Nobody’s been dumb enough to drive a cab into the Zone in years.

The MagLev doesn’t run through the Zone anymore either.  People kept stealing the superconductor modules out of the track, maybe for the resale value, maybe for the hell of it.

A few years ago, somebody stole five modules in a row.  Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been a big problem; the computers at LA Transit Authority are smart enough to spot damaged track and stop the train.  Unfortunately, the thief managed to bypass the track sensors and trick the LA-Trans computers into thinking the track was safe.  A Lev derailed, killing twenty-nine people and wiping out a half dozen buildings.

Now, unless you actually have your own car, the only way in or out of the Zone is on foot.

The cops at the barricade let me through with a quick wave of their scanner and a token pat down.  It was a formality.  They don’t much care who or what goes into the Zone. They’re worried about what gets out.

The Fearless Leaders of our fair city like to keep most of their bad eggs in one basket.  Don’t get me wrong, they have crime in the other domes too, but not like we’ve got it in good old Urban Environmental Enclosure 12-A.

I should have moved ages ago.  Just stubborn I guess.

When I got home, I laid down on the couch with my eyes closed and told House to play some blues.  House responded with Blind Willie Johnson’s
Lord, I Just Can’t Keep From Cryin’
.  I tried to lose myself in the music, but even Blind Willie’s gently gruff voice and sensuous slide guitar couldn’t distract my racing brain.

After a few minutes, I stood up and lit a cigarette.  I couldn’t even pretend to relax.

I kept telling myself that there was nothing to get keyed-up about.  I didn’t have to take the case.  I hadn’t promised Sonja anything.

No, that wasn’t true.  I had promised to give her case serious consideration.  But I was doing that, wasn’t I?  Hadn’t I hired Jackal to scope the police files on the case?  When I got access to those files, I would go over them in detail and prove to myself what I already knew: that Michael Winter was guilty.

I would be off the hook.  I could stay snuggled up in my little cocoon, listen to ancient blues, drink scotch, smoke bootleg cigarettes, and weld pieces of metal together in patterns that amused my simple mind.  I could tell Ms. Sonja Winter that her late unlamented brother was a murderous psycho-pervert, who deserved to have his brains blown out.

Except...

I didn’t want to do that.  I didn’t want to tell Sonja that her brother was a killer.  I didn’t want to tell her that she was going to spend the next fifteen years as a corporate sex-toy.

Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t appreciate the difference that would make in her life.  She was a whore, right?  So what if she had to punch a time clock for somebody else instead of set her own hours?  She still made her living flat on her back, right?

The difference was in
control
.  As an independent call girl, Sonja could select her clientele.  She could take a day off if she wanted.  She could say
no
.

It was the difference between freedom and slavery.

Still, none of that was my problem.  I had troubles of my own.  I didn’t need to shoulder someone else’s burden.

I jump-started a second cigarette off the butt of the first and then ground out the butt in an ashtray.

I wanted a drink.  There was a bottle of Cutty hidden somewhere in one of the kitchen cabinets.  I went looking for it.

On the counter next to the refrigerator was Ms. Winter’s little stack of pictures.

I picked them up.  The picture on top was a dog-eared photograph of Michael Winter as a boy, twelve, maybe thirteen.  He was skinny, his hair a much brighter red than it had been in the video.  On his left hand, he wore a baseball glove; a bat was draped across his right shoulder.