city blues 02 - angel city blues (17 page)

He reached out and hit the
play
tab.

Instantaneous shift…

My body is male this time. Again, I just know it, without being able to say why.

I’m strapped to a table, and my head is locked into some sort of clamp that holds it perfectly still. My jaw is free to move, but the rest of my skull is utterly immobilized.

Despite the restraints, my body is trembling. Sobs and senseless whimpers slip past my quivering lips.

Some kind of machine hangs just above my face, not more than a centimeter or two from the tip of my nose. A tapered ceramic ring extends below the machine, to center over my left eye, uncomfortably close to my cornea. At the core of the ring is a hollow metallic cylinder, encircling a disc of translucent glass or crystal.

It’s some kind of nozzle. No… Something optical. Some sort of lens.

I try to close my eyes, but my eyelids are held open by something I can’t see. I strain against my bonds, my pulse racing, my muscles cramping with futile exertion. I’m not going anywhere. Whatever is about to happen to me, I cannot escape. I can’t even shut my eyes to block out the sight.

Something clicks inside the machine, and I hear the faint whine of charging capacitors. I know what this is now. It’s a laser. Not a low-intensity pointing device, or an optical alignment tool. This is the real thing.

The output won’t be a few milliwatts. It will be something in the kilowatt or megawatt range.

The reek of ammonia fills the air as I feel my bladder cut loose. I have pissed myself. Soiled myself like an infant, but I don’t care, because the laser’s diode flares to life.

The beam that stabs into my eye is so brilliant that it defies description. No sun is this bright. No nuclear flash could ever be this searingly intense.

My head is flooded with impossibly powerful green light, and the pain is more nauseatingly brutal than anything I have ever imagined. It is beyond anguish. Beyond agony.

I feel the burning away of my outer cornea, hear the sizzling rumble as the liquids in my eyeball begin to boil. Perhaps I feel the bulge as the tender orb expands, or perhaps it is my imagination. But I hear it when it ruptures. Feel it when my eye bursts from its tortured socket and explodes into pink mist and darkness.

My shrieks are so loud that I can actually feel them damaging my larynx. My back is arched off the table in the rigor of uncontrollable muscular contraction. The tension against my pinioned feet is so extreme that I feel the ligaments tear, and the bones of my ankles begin to separate.

All control of my sphincters is gone. I am shitting myself like an animal. Thrashing within the limits of my restraints with bone-breaking frenzy, and the intensity of the pain in my ruined eye has only begun to climb toward its zenith.

But this is not over. The laser is moving to the right. Centering itself over my remaining eye.

There is no time to prepare. No
way
to prepare. The laser fires again, and my agony is multiplied by some exponential factor that far exceeds the laws of algebraic increase.

The world is total blackness, shot through with illusory flashes of surreal colors as my brain tries vainly to cope with the loss of both optical sensors.

I am screeching, crying, surging wildly against the restraints, and then I am choking on my own vomit. I cannot breathe, cannot turn away to clear my throat, cannot even scream as the scalding contents of my stomach are aspirated down my windpipe and into my lungs.

And then there is the tiniest blip, like the discontinuity of a badly spliced piece of video.

I’m back where I started a few minutes ago, strapped to the table, with the laser lens hovering above my left cornea.

It is all happening again, and it’s not better the second time around. It’s worse.

And the third time is somehow worse again.

I lose count of the repetitions. Each time it is real. Each time it is me. Each time it is more excruciating and humiliating than anything I’ve ever imagined.

And each time—with the tiny blip of discontinuity—it starts again, and I find myself sliding into a deeper layer of Hell.

My right eyeball explodes for the fifteenth time. Or is it the fiftieth?

Shift…

I was back in the chair in Leanda Forsyth’s apartment, with Nine-fingers standing a few meters away.

“Just so you know,” he said, “that little clip you just experienced is
not
as ugly as this can get. In fact, it’s not even close.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t even sure that I could still talk.

Nine-fingers retracted his hand from the faceplate of the SCAPE deck. “You believe me, don’t you?”

I tried to find my voice. I had no idea where it had gone.

He patted his jacket pocket. “We can move on to something nastier, if you need more convincing.”

The first sound out of my throat was a muffled croak. I swallowed and tried again. “Nnn…”

Nine-fingers showed me his best grin. “What was that? I didn’t quite catch it.”

“Nnnn… Nnnnn… Noooo…”

“See?” said Nine-fingers. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

I didn’t respond.

“Now that we’ve got some calibration, we can get back to my original question,” he said. “How much are you being paid, Mr. Stalin?”

My brain was still reeling. I searched it for an answer, and blurted out the first thing that popped into my mind. “Two hundred and fifty K…”

That number wasn’t right, and Nine-fingers seemed to know it immediately. “A quarter of a mill? For a missing persons case? That seems a bit high to me...”

It wasn’t a bit high. It was ridiculously high, even for a client with Vivien Forsyth’s means.

Nine-fingers reached for his pocket, and I tried frantically to remember the correct figure.

Before I could speak, he keyed something into his phone. “I’m not going to quibble over details,” he said. “If you say you’re getting a quarter of a mill, I’ll double it. Five hundred K.”

“For what?”

Nine-fingers looked annoyed for the first time. “What do you
think
, shithead? For swimming naked with the fucking dolphins? I’m talking about a half a million to go home and forget this case. Let the cops handle it.”

I couldn’t help myself. It slipped out before I could stop it. “Or
what
?”

Nine-fingers rolled his eyes. “Don’t be stupid, okay? You know what the ‘
or-what
’ is… First, you spend a couple of days examining the nastier parts of my private SCAPE collection. And then, when your brain has been reduced to jibbering mush, you get to take a walk out of a high window. Or you get minced by a runaway hover-car. Or maybe go for a swim in a bathtub. Without dolphins.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I kept my mouth shut.

“I think we should just off you,” he said. “And I still can, if you make me do it. But my orders are to try simple bribery first.”

Nine-fingers looked at his watch. “In about three hours, a messenger is going to knock on your door with a package. A half mill, in non-sequential bills of medium denomination. If you accept the package, then you accept our deal. You call your client and say you’re off the case. Give her any excuse you want. Tell her you’ve come down with terminal hangnails, or you’ve been abducted by aliens from fucking outer space. I don’t give a shit. But you stay the fuck away from Leanda Forsyth and anything related to her case, and everything will be fine.”

“If you don’t answer your door, and the messenger comes back with his package, we’ll know you’ve rejected our deal. If that happens, you’re fucked. The same goes if you take our money, and don’t keep your end of the bargain. Either way, we’ll be coming after you. And this little dance tonight is
nothing
compared to what we’ll do then. Understand?”

I nodded.

“Good,” Nine-fingers said.

He reached toward the faceplate of the SCAPE deck. “Tell you what… This clip has got about ten minutes left to play. That’s four or five repetitions of the laser eye treatment you’ve just experienced. I’m going to let it run now. By the time it’s done, we’ll be long gone.”

I shook my head. “Just a second…”

“Too late,” he said. “Time to go…”

He hit the
play
tab.

The world dissolved into darkness and pain.

CHAPTER 13

I was still in Leanda’s chair when the SCAPE recording reached its end and my consciousness snapped back to reality. I huddled with my arms clasped around myself, shuddering and twitching as my brain gradually came to grips with the fact that my precious flesh was intact.

Nine-fingers and his arm-twisting buddy were gone. In other circumstances, on other nights, I would have wanted to chase them down—pay them back for what they had done to me. But not tonight. For now, it was simply enough to know that they were somewhere else.

It took a while to regain enough strength to get to my feet. The only marks on my body were the irregular cuffs of reddened skin around my wrists, where the second thug had gripped my arms.

The Blackhart was still in my shoulder holster. The assholes had been so confident in their ability to work me over that they hadn’t even bothered to disarm me. Like it or not, their arrogance had been justified. I’d never had a chance to go for my gun.

I made a careful circuit of the apartment, checking doors and windows. No signs of forced entry. They might have spoofed the front door lock, but somehow I didn’t think so. For no reason I could name, I was sure that they had a key chip, just like mine.

I made my way to the bathroom, where I spent several minutes in front of the mirror, peeling nano-pore tape out of my hair until I could finally get the SCAPE rig off of my head. I put the headset back on the shelf where I’d found it, and shoved the wad of tape into my pocket. I ejected the torture chip from the SCAPE deck, and slid the chip into a different pocket.

One last look around the place, and I headed home, turning the lights out as I went.

When I reached the lobby, I pulled out my phone and called Vivien Forsyth. She answered on the fourth ring, audio only.

Her voice was a muffled half-yawn. “Insomnia, Mr. Stalin? Or are you trying to impress me with your diligence?”

“Neither,” I said. “I need a little help.”

I could almost hear her mind ratchet up to full alert. “What can I do for you?”

I pushed through the outer doors and into the semi darkness of the pre-dawn morning.

“I’m leaving Leanda’s building. I need a pull from the lobby security cameras, from midnight until about ten minutes ago. I could try to go through Bruhn, but he’ll drag his feet if he can. And sooner is better.”

“I understand,” Vivien said. “I’ll get on it immediately.”

“Thanks. Because there’s a good chance that someone will try to delete the recordings, if they haven’t done it already.”

“What’s going on?”

“Later,” I said. “Get the security video first. Then we’ll talk.”

“Alright,” Vivien said. “I’ll call you when I’ve got something.”

She hung up just as I was reaching my parking spot.

My car emitted a bleep when I entered its sensor perimeter. I let the computer scan my key chip, and it bleeped again. There were no warning tones, so I was theoretically safe from car bombs, backseat intruders, and all the other wonderful things that can happen in vehicles. It appeared that Nine-fingers and Arm-twister hadn’t stopped to visit my car on their way out.

I climbed in and fired up the turbines. No explosions. No shadowy figures crouched in the rear floorboards. So far, so good.

I pulled out of the parking space.