city blues 02 - angel city blues (47 page)

“Then I invite you to resume your duties here,” Akimura said. “We seem to have forgotten our honor in the name of expediency. I ask you to stay, and help us regain it.”

“I don’t know anything about honor,” Dancer said.

This time, Akimura let the elusive expression show through. It was a smile. Grim and understated, but quite definitely a smile. “If you do what comes naturally to you,
that
will be enough.”

“What about your son?” Vivien blurted.

It was clear that she regretted the outburst immediately, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from continuing. “You know what happened to Jiro? You know what we did?”

“
I
know,” Akimura said. “But the passing of my son was like the passing of your husband. The tragedy was not in their deaths. They lived without compassion or integrity. It hurts me to say such things about my son, but he was an animal in the guise of a man. And I believe that your husband was as well. The deeper tragedy is that both of them lived for so long before justice was done.”

I stared into the virtual face of Akimura Hideaki. “So why do you have a dozen security goons outside the door?”

“They now report to Dancer-san,” Akimura said. “Perhaps you should ask
her
what she will do with them.”

He smiled again. “I suspect that her first order to them will be to act as your honor guard.”

And that was exactly what happened.

When the preflight checks were complete, Vivien and I launched out of the lounge doorway toward the entrance to the shuttle lock, floating between two rows of uniformed men standing at port arms.

I got a bad push off and drifted too far to the right. One of the security men nudged me back onto the correct trajectory as I passed. Everyone pretended not to notice.

Ten minutes later, Vivien and I were belting ourselves into side-by-side acceleration cradles in the passenger bay of the charter shuttle. It was smaller and far more luxurious than the bird I had flown up here on.

As the shuttle pushed back from the colony, I leaned back into the glove leather upholstery of the cradle.

I didn’t bother to watch the separation maneuver on the flight cameras. I was already nodding off.

I slept as much as possible through the free-fall leg of the flight. For all of our easy companionship up to that point, Vivien and I suddenly found very little to talk about. She’d killed a man, seen her husband torn to atoms, and learned that her daughter was dead. Enough emotional trauma for an entire lifetime, thoughtfully crammed into a few hours by fate and some very nasty characters.

Vivien’s playful wildcat personality had gone into hiding—perhaps forever—leaving behind a taciturn woman who wore the aura of late middle-age despite the youthful beauty of her carefully-sculpted face. She clearly wanted time to think and be alone, so I gave her as much distance as the passenger compartment would allow.

I was dozing again when we started reentry. The vibration of the airframe woke me as the shuttle contacted the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The vibration grew to a throb, and then to a turbulent shudder as the thickening air absorbed the shuttle’s excess velocity. My acceleration capsule’s hydraulic cradle and pneumatic cushions absorbed the worst of it, but we occasionally bucked hard enough to jar my teeth.

After several minutes of this, the shuttle’s speed and angle of descent passed some critical threshold, and the vibrations vanished, dropping us into a smooth glide path for the final part of the trip.

My view from the ventral camera was nearly black: darkened California coast rising to meet us, sliding beneath the belly of the shuttle.

The outlying lights of Los Angeles scrolled into view, a handful of white pinpoints that almost mirrored the stars.

With a series of mechanical whinings and thumps, the shuttle’s landing gear extended and locked.

The lights of LA grew denser as we dropped out of the night sky, resolving themselves into buildings, streetlights, and cars behind the transparent curves of the domes.

Two rows of yellow sodium-arc lamps slid into view: the runway lights for LAX. We dropped into the slot of darkness that ran between them.

For a couple of seconds, we seemed to hang half a meter above the runway, twin rows of yellow lamps flitting past on either side of us. The shuttle drifted toward the ground a centimeter at a time, until the landing gear touched down with the bark of rubber on concrete.

We were down.

EPILOGUE

A refrigerated truck passed me on the last block of South Alameda. It was a makeshift thing, with bolt-on armor plates and those honeycomb cell carbon matrix tires that can lose sixty-percent of their structural compartments and keep rolling at freeway speeds.

Roof vents in the rear cargo module leaked tendrils of vapor into the night air of the Zone. Nitrogen freezers. Organ poachers, cruising the darkened streets for body parts.

The poachers left me alone. I returned the favor.

It was good to be back. My fellow Zoners might be crazy and dangerous, but it was
my
kind of crazy, and
my
kind of dangerous. I understood them, and I understood the rules and protocols that they lived and died by.

I made a right onto Gage, and paused when I spotted the abandoned Mercury that marked the border of Kerri Hampton’s stomping ground.

I walked a couple of steps closer. Kerri was snoring gently in the back. She’d made a nest of cardboard and thermal packing foil in the empty place where the car’s rear seat had once been.

The wan yellow glow of the dying street lamp fell across her face. She looked thinner than I remembered, and younger. Her features were relaxed, stress lines temporarily erased by sleep, and I realized that I’d been overestimating her age by at least five years. She was a tough kid, but a kid nonetheless.

How many times had I walked past her without a second look? How many times had I mentally treated her like a routine feature of my strange neighborhood? No more noteworthy than a stretch of sidewalk or a light pole?

The mighty David Stalin could go gallivanting across the solar system in search of the lost daughter of millionaires, but he didn’t have time to help a homeless girl right in his own backyard. And Kerri
was
lost. No doubt about that. Not missing.
Lost
. She’d fallen through the cracks in our society, and the streets had swallowed her up so thoroughly that she was all but invisible.

Maybe it was my failure to bring Leanda Forsyth home to her mother. Or maybe it that I had recently rediscovered what it was like to be at the mercy of forces beyond my understanding and control. Or maybe I just had a rotten taste in my mouth, from all the things I’d seen and been a part of.

For whatever reason, I couldn’t make myself walk past this time. I could no longer close my eyes.

Maybe there was nothing I could do to help Kerri. Possibly, she would resist or resent any attempt I might make. But I was never going to find out if I didn’t try.

I cleared my throat softly.

She didn’t stir, so I tried again, a little louder this time.

Kerri came awake instantly, a beat up neural stun wand in her right hand. She pointed the wand in my direction, and blinked at me through sleep-bleared eyes, the hard edges coming back into her face with the return of consciousness.

“Who the fuck are
you
?”

The question confused me for a second, until I remembered that I was still wearing someone else’s face. I made a mental note to get that fixed as soon as possible.

I was careful not to smile. “It’s Stalin,” I said. “I had to get a face job for the case I was working on.”

“Damn,” Kerri said. “Hard to get used to your voice coming out of that face. You should get your money back. This is
not
a good look for you.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” I said.

She yawned. “If you want to fuck, can it wait until tomorrow? I’m wiped out.”

I shook my head. “That’s not why I woke you up…”

She eyed me without saying anything.

“Remember what we talked about a couple of weeks ago?” I asked. “Your dad’s farm?”

She nodded. “Bristol, North Dakota. He drives a truck for the nitrate refinery since the crops went to shit.”

I returned her nod. “Do you really want to go home? I mean… If I try to help you, is that what you want?”

She broke eye contact. “I’ve got a Jag habit a kilometer wide. No way my family will take me back like this.”

“We can do something about that,” I said. “Gene therapy, or splicing, or whatever. There’s a protein, or a codon or something that drives chemical addiction. It can be turned off.”

“That’s expensive,” Kerri said. “More than I’m worth.”

I shook my head. “It’s
not
more than you’re worth. And I don’t care if it’s expensive. The question is: do you
want
to?”

She nodded slowly.

I extended a hand. “You don’t need to sleep on the street any more. If you’re okay with it, you can stay at my place until you’re ready to go home.”

Her eyes turned suspicious. “How do I know you won’t try something freaky when you get me in your house?”

“You can bring your stun wand,” I said. “Or, you can sleep right here in the Mercury Motel, if you think that’s safer.”

She thought about it for a minute or so, and then climbed out through the glassless window and tried to straighten her clothes. She ran fingers through her hair and wet her lips with her tongue. “I look pretty nice when I’m cleaned up. And I’m
real
good at saying thank you. If you don’t hurt me, that is.”

“No,” I said. It wasn’t quite a shout, but it came out louder than I’d intended.

“This is not a trade.”

She was clearly puzzled.

“Let’s just say it’s my attempt at basic human decency.”

“I don’t have much experience with that kind of thing,” she said.

“I don’t either,” I said. “Let’s see if we can change that.”

There were tears in her eyes as she took my hand.

I led her down the street, toward the place I call home.