city blues 02 - angel city blues (5 page)

“No I’m not,” she said. “I just want to go home.” She made a visible effort to still the drug-induced tremors running through her body.

“How much is a ticket back to Bristol?”

“Five hundred
Euro-marks
.”

I stared at her.

“Okay! Okay! It’s four twenty-five, but I need a little food money for the trip.”

I took another hit off my cigarette. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll buy you a ticket myself, one-way, non-refundable. But I’m going to have it coded for you only, so you can’t sell it or trade it for whatever your drug-of-the-week is. I’ll even make you a big bag of sandwiches for the ride. How does that sound?”

“You don’t have to go through all that. Just give me the money,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

I shook my head. “Not a chance.”

She shoved me. “Fuck you, Stalin!”

I started walking again. “Not tonight, Kerri.”

From behind me, she yelled, “You some kind of freak? Can’t get it up for girls? Is that why you never want anything?”

I smiled. “If I say ‘yes,’ will you stop asking me?”

“Fuck you!” she said again.

It was apparently her best parting-shot.

My house used to be the local LA-Trans office, before the city transit authority decided to pull the MagLev trains out of the Zone.

When I got to my front door, I paused while House scanned me. The ID scan took less than a second, and then House opened the door and let me in.

“Good evening, David.”

I peeled off my windbreaker and started unbuckling my shoulder rig. “Good evening, House.”

I walked into the kitchen and dropped weapon, holster, and jacket in a little bundle on the counter.

“You have two messages from a Ms. Dancer,” House said. “Shall I play them back?”

Dancer was a cop, an LAPD Homicide Detective. I’d had run-ins with her in the past. She was the body-builder type, and she made little secret of the fact that she’d like to go a couple of rounds with me in an alley some time. I consider myself a fair brawler, but—if I ever tangled with Dancer—I would cheat. Even then, I’d probably come away with a few broken bones.

I opened the cabinet over the sink and pulled down a half-full bottle of Cutty Sark. It was getting hard to find it in bottles anymore, and I refused to buy scotch in those silly squeeze-tubes.

I poured three fingers of Cutty into an empty coffee mug and took a swallow. The scotch was warm and good going down.

“Okay, House” I said. “Play the messages. Audio only, please.”

A second later, Dancer’s voice poured out of hidden speakers in the ceiling. “Stalin? This is Dancer. I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.” She rattled off a phone number with a Southwest LA area code. That was her division, Southwest. The second message was a carbon-copy of the first, except that she stressed the urgency of my return call a little more.

“Would you like for me to call her back?” House asked.

“No thanks,” I said. I was pretty sure I knew what she wanted. The last time Dancer had needed to speak to me urgently, she and her partner (an older guy named Delaney) had rousted me out of bed to accuse me of a murder that I hadn’t committed. I’d done a thing or two since to even up the score, and she was probably calling now to throw her weight in with good old Detective Bruhn. Another oblique shot from his end of the court. Vivien Forsyth could clamp down on him, but she couldn’t lean on every Los Angeles cop at the same time.

I took another swallow of scotch and exhaled through my nose. “Let’s just assume that I’ve been sufficiently threatened by LA’s Finest, and leave it at that.”

I drained the cup with one last gulp and looked at the bottle for a few seconds. No. One was enough for now. I expected to be working as soon as Vivien’s courier showed up with the files. I put the bottle back into the cabinet and closed the door. It wasn’t going anywhere.

Contrary to the apparent opinion of the LAPD AI’s, I did not have an alcohol problem. Or, if I did, I was so far into denial that I couldn’t see it. I didn’t drive when I drank, and I didn’t tie one on more than a few times a year. On the other hand, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone all day without at least a couple of fingers of Cutty.

Any one of the West Side clinics could have cured me of my taste for scotch. I had a fleeting vision of some little dweeb in a lab coat poking around in my DNA until I couldn’t even stand the smell of alcohol. The idea appealed to me about as much as letting them cure my cravings for nicotine. Hell, why not go the distance? Maybe there was a gene they could tweak to make me stop listening to the Blues... and another that could help me stop dreaming about all the things that might have been.

I went to the door of my workshop, opened it and stood at the threshold for the fiftieth time without going in. My tools were right where I’d left them. The laser cutter and arc welder waited patiently for me to walk in, grab an interesting scrap of metal from the bin in the corner and start to work on a new piece.

The pedestal at the center of the room was empty. It had been since I’d moved my last piece of sculpture,
No Resurrection
, up to the loft nearly eighteen months before.

Don’t think, I said to myself. Just do it. Walk in, put on the leather apron, and go to work. Do it, you stupid bastard.
Do it!

I stood for perhaps another thirty seconds before I closed the door.

I walked to the den and settled into my favorite chair, an overstuffed brown wingback that’s older than I am.

I reached for my cigarettes and then realized I’d left them in the pocket of my jacket.

I sighed. “House?”

“Yes, David?”

“Bring me a pack of cigarettes, will you?”

“Of course, David.”

A few seconds later, one of House’s service drones glided into the room on its fat yellow neoprene wheels. It was Rube-Goldberg looking contraption that bore no resemblance to the humanoid robots in adventure vids. It was built like a gantry crane, about three-quarters my height, with twin vid cameras mounted on top. Its tubular alloy arms were long and multi-jointed. It rolled silently to a stop about a half-meter from my chair. It held out a pack of Marlboros in one of its three-fingered manipulators.

I took the cigarettes. “Thanks, House.”

“You’re welcome, David.” The drone did an about-face and rolled out of the room.

I broke the seal on the pack and thumped out a cigarette. When it was lit, I slouched back into my chair and went over what little I knew about Leanda Forsyth in my mind.

Item #1:
She was an investigative reporter. As I’d pointed out to Vivien, that raised the possibility that she had dropped out of sight on purpose, in search of some juicy undercover story—in which case, she probably wouldn’t want to be found. I hadn’t pointed out the natural corollary to that thought: Maybe she had poked her nose into the wrong people’s business, and gotten it chopped off.

Item #2:
She was the daughter of the wealthy and powerful Senator Elden Forsyth, and his equally wealthy and powerful wife, Vivien. This made her a potential target for kidnappers—a theory that I didn’t favor in view of the fact that she’d been missing for nearly two months without any sign of a ransom demand. On the other hand, what if it was a politically-motivated kidnapping? According to his reputation, Senator Forsyth’s political orientation was somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. Was it possible that his political enemies were holding Leanda hostage to ensure his cooperation on some major issue? A bit drastic for run-of-the-mill political maneuverings, but what if it was something really big?

Item #3:
Leanda Forsyth was an attractive woman. Unfortunately, that could be enough to make her a target for abduction all by itself.

I took a drag off my cigarette and exhaled. I knew next to nothing about the woman and already I could think of several reasons that she might have gone missing—and that was without even taking into account jilted lovers, long-term enemies, accidents, or random acts of violence.

Lots of possibilities meant lots of potential leads. This case was either going to be a piece of cake, or a goddamned nightmare, and it was too early to even guess which.

I stood up and headed for the stairs. I had a little time to kill before Vivien’s courier was due to arrive, so I decided to take a shower.

The courier was late. I was just about ready to give him up for the night when he showed up at my door, escorted by two walking mounds of steroid-fueled muscle who were obviously hired-guns.

The courier was an athletic looking Latin kid, early twenties maybe, with the sort of generic good-looks that the lower-end surgical boutiques tend to pump out—a carefully non-specific synthesis of the top ten or so leading vid stars. If his escorts had ever been under the knife, the surgical robots had been programmed for industrial-strength ugly. They looked at me just long enough to ensure that I wasn’t going to eat the courier, and then turned their attention to the street. They didn’t like the look of my neighborhood, and I couldn’t really blame them.

“Nobody will bother you as long as you’re close to my house,” I said. “My anti-intrusion system is pretty extensive. The neighborhood bad-asses have pretty much gotten the message.”

The courier used a pocket comp to scan my left thumb print and my right retina before he released his package to me.

Vivien was undoubtedly paying him well, but I over-tipped him anyway. It took guts to come into the Zone at night, even with a pair of trained gargoyles at your heels.

As soon as he was gone, I let the door slide shut and ripped open the seal on the little package. Three microchips fell into my hand. I frowned. I’d only been expecting two: a copy of Leanda Forsyth’s missing persons files, and the key chip to her apartment. The third chip was a strange triangular affair, a format I’d never seen before.

I pocketed the key chip and the weird triangular job. The data chip, I carried to the desk comp in my den.

I plugged the chip into a hidden slot near the right edge of the mahogany desk top. A holographic display field unfolded in the air above the desk, a translucent blue rectangle—empty, except for a slowly flashing cursor.

The keyboard was a hologram as well, projected over a matrix of infrared sensors that read the position of my fingers in relation to the virtual keys.

The cursor disappeared after a few seconds, replaced by a bright red legend—
WARNING: THIS DATA REPRODUCED AT LOS ANGELES CITY TAXPAYER’S EXPENSE
. The holographic words circled in the air above my computer, orbiting the streamlined ultrachrome logo of LAPD’s West Hollywood Division.

I called up a menu. There were ninety-two files.
Ninety-two?
For a missing persons case that was less than eight weeks old? And that wasn’t even counting whatever data was recorded on the triangular chip in my pocket. LAPD must be working overtime on this one. The long arm of wealth and power again.

I couldn’t help but wonder how many files the case would have generated if the missing woman’s parents hadn’t been Senator and Ms. Blueblood. A third as many? A quarter? I thought about Kerri Hampton living in an abandoned car down the street from my house. How much time did LAPD expend when somebody like Kerri vanished? They would never even know she was gone until her body turned up in a trash dumpster somewhere, minus whatever parts that the organ poachers could salvage.