city blues 01 - dome city blues (55 page)
Read city blues 01 - dome city blues Online
Authors: jeff edwards
Which brought me around to my dilemma. If I let the cops wire me up to the Inquisitor, I’d be exonerated of Kurt Rieger’s murder, but the secret of the puppet-chip would be out. The only way to refuse the Inquisitor would be to plead guilty to Rieger’s murder up-front, which would lead to certain brain-lock.
I took a slug of scotch. Either
I
was screwed, or the whole world was screwed. A hell of a choice.
I downed the rest of my scotch, and was about to signal for another, when someone set a glass down on the table in front of me. “Buy you a drink, Sailor?”
It took me a second to recognize Lisa. She’d lost some weight, and done a kind of wild lion’s mane thing with her hair. I realized for the first time how pretty she could be when she took care of herself.
Lisa smiled. “Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down?”
“By all means,” I said.
She dropped a short piece of computer hardcopy on the table and sat down.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a present,” Lisa said. “Your reprieve.”
I picked up the printout and looked at it. It was an excerpt from a corporate immigration request. The Gebhardt-Wulkan Informatik logo was printed in the upper left-hand corner, along with a date/time stamp.
I looked up at Lisa. “This says that Kurt Rieger flew back to Germany yesterday afternoon.”
Lisa nodded.
“That’s not possible,” I said. “Rieger is dead. I saw it myself.”
Lisa shrugged. “Gebhardt-Wulkan has decided to cover it up. It appears that the big dogs at GWI were aware of Rieger’s taste for little girls. They are apparently under the impression that he was killed by the father of one of his underage lovers.”
Lisa did the rabbit-scrunch thing with her nose. “I guess somebody claiming to be an irate father posted a few threatening notes to Rieger’s e-mail account at GWI.”
I stared at Lisa.
“Relax,” she said. “I used a public access terminal. I paid cash and kept the video pickup turned off. There’s no way anybody can trace it.” She smiled. “Besides, GWI is too busy covering up and trying to avoid a scandal to investigate too closely.”
“So...”
“So, Rieger’s death officially didn’t happen,” she said.
I let out a breath of air that I’d been holding for two weeks.
Lisa leaned across the table and kissed me. “You taste like scotch.”
“Yeah. I’ve been drinking a little.”
“I’m sorry that she ran out on you,” Lisa said. “I wish I could say I saw that coming, but I didn’t. I really thought there was something between you guys.”
She reached across the table and squeezed the back of my hand.
I picked up the fresh drink, looked at it, and put it down without tasting it. “Guess not.”
Lisa dipped the tip of her index finger in my scotch and traced it around the rim of the glass. “I erased Tony,” she said.
She looked down at her hands for a second and then back up to meet my eyes. “He was a wonderful dream, but I guess a person can’t live on dreams forever.” She raised her hand to her mouth and licked a drop of scotch off her fingertip.
I picked up the glass and took a sip. “That sounds like a good first step. Where do you go from here?”
Something touched my right leg just above the ankle. Lisa’s toes slid under the hem of my pants leg and began to trace circles on the bare flesh above my sock. “Both of us need a fresh start, David. Why can’t we do it together?”
I took another sip of scotch to stall for a second, while I thought of the best way to say it. The silence stretched between us.
Lisa frowned a little and her toes stopped wandering.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “I know that this is the part of the story where the intrepid hero rides off into the sunset with the pretty girl.”
I raised my left hand and touched her cheek. “And you’re certainly pretty enough... But I just can’t do this right now.”
Lisa started to say something, but I put my finger to her lips.
“I wouldn’t be any good for you now. Maybe later, when I get my head back on straight, but not now.”
Lisa’s foot retreated. A few seconds later, she stood up slowly. “I’ll wait,” she said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I will,” she said.
I started to open my mouth, but she pulled my own trick, shushing me with her finger across my lips. She leaned over and kissed me gently, her finger still between our lips. “Don’t be too long,” she whispered. She turned and walked away without looking back.
When the door closed behind her, I set my drink down and tried to pretend that it was the alcohol that was blurring my vision. I closed my eyes and prayed for a Billie Holiday song.
A little while later, I gulped down the rest of my scotch and signaled for another.
Demi set a fresh glass in front of me and nodded toward a woman in the next booth. “Already paid for,” she said. “Your secret admirer...”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I began writing the first draft of
Dome City Blues
in 1992. Needless to say, a lot has changed since then. Global economics and the international political situation are radically different. Technology has taken some interesting turns, and I have somehow managed to grow a couple of decades older.
The world we now live in is a very different place from the one I inhabited when I first sat down to work on this book. In 1992, most people (your faithful author included) had never heard the word ‘
internet
.’ Cellular phones were the size of cinder blocks, and nobody I knew could afford one. The first movie of the
Matrix
trilogy was still seven years in the future. And the date 9/11 had no special significance to the average person on the street.
When I made the decision to release
Dome City Blues
now, nearly twenty years after it was written, I found myself faced with a dilemma. How heavily should the book be edited? Should I tear the entire thing apart word-by-word, or just knock off a few of the rough spots?
I have to admit that I was sorely tempted to go over the entire thing in microscopic detail—polishing the language, refining the story, smoothing out the dialogue, and updating the technology. Ultimately, I resisted that temptation.
With the exception of a few minor tweaks here and there, I’ve left the story pretty much as I originally wrote it. As a result, the book you’ve just finished reading is not the meticulously re-engineered product of a novelist with several award-winning books under his belt. It’s the first attempt of a fledgling writer who’s just gotten up the nerve to try his hand at a piece of novel-length fiction.
The world depicted in this book is not the future I see from where I stand today. It’s the future I saw back
then
, in 1992, when a fictional character named David Stalin first began to speak to me about a darkly dystopian vision of Los Angeles lurking just over the horizon.
— JEFF EDWARDS
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