Eye and Talon (15 page)

In the room's stillness, the owl had settled down on its perch; the movements of its head, wide golden eyes staring, were still hectic and jerky. 'Take it easy,' crooned Iris softly, as she stepped over the bodies littering the floor. She drew on a pair of heavily padded gauntlets that extended past her elbows. 'We'll be going to a nicer place now . . .'

The owl tried to escape from her as she reached for it, but the chain and leg-band kept it within reach. Averting her face to avoid the blows of its powerful wings. Iris managed to get both her gloved hands upon its body; bringing it against her chest to pinion its desperate exertions, she got it under control.

Or at least for a moment. 'Give me a hand,' she snapped at Vogel. The sense of a living creature, straining to escape and survive, was palpable even through the padding that encased her hands and forearms. She could even feel its tiny heart racing, the quivering of the terrified predator whose shadow had terrified even smaller creatures. The scything claws raked dangerously close to her stomach, the razor point of one almost snagging the cloth of her cowboyshirt. 'Hurry up—'

With his automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, Vogel stepped up with a wide, elastic restraining band. The two of them struggled for a few moments with the animal, then at last managed to secure it, the band pressing its wings to its body. Iris slipped an oxygen-permeable bag over the owl, drawing its opening tight over the feet, rendering the claws safe for transportation.

'Let's go.' With one hand still in the heavy leather gauntlet, and the owl tucked in the cradle of her forearm, Iris nodded toward the door. 'Before whoever's left gets organized.'

Vogel preceded her, automatic rifle poised. He posted against the wall beside the doorway, peering cautiously out into the corridor. 'Clear.' He gestured with a tilt of his head. 'Go for the elevator shaft, and I'll be right behind you.'

Her rifle's shoulder strap was long enough that Iris could keep it at her hip as she carried the bound owl with her other hand and forearm. Emerging from the room, she ducked down and sprinted straight for the open elevator doorway, a couple of meters farther down and opposite.

Before she reached it, a brace of rifle-shots crackled from the far end of the corridor. She didn't take time to see what door might have popped open, and how many opponents were behind it; she launched herself toward the darkness of the elevator shaft, rolling her shoulder under her so that she would land on her back.

The exposed metal protrusions on the top of the elevator car dug painfully into her spine, but with both arms wrapped protectively over the owl, she managed to keep it clutched safely against her chest. As she scrambled onto her knees, Iris heard more gunfire coming from both directions in the corridor outside the elevator doors.

From well back in the open doorway, Iris peered out and saw Vogel with his back flattened against the opposite wall, pinned down by and returning the fire from the doorway at the end of the corridor. He saw her and gestured with a nod of his head.

'Over there!' Vogel indicated the doorway from which the remaining men were firing. 'You got a better angle. Push 'em back and I'll be able to make it to the elevator.' A few more shots dug into the floor near him. 'Then we'll be out of here.'

'Got a better idea,' Iris called to him. 'Thanks for the help, but I've got a job to finish.' She reached behind and hit the DOWN button on the elevator's control box. She heard more gunfire, and Vogel shouting something after her, as the elevator started down the shaft, leaving the open doorway above.

The projectionist was still asleep in his booth when Iris climbed down with the bagged owl from the top of the elevator. So many cheap action flicks had played in the theater that the continuing sound of gunfire, barely muffled from the floor above, had merely seeped into his muddled dreams.

Which was also the case with the audience in the movie theater, when Iris reached the bottom of the service stairs and stepped out into the crowded lobby. No one was alarmed by the sounds, fainter here, coming from above. That kind of thing was as common in the real LA as it ever had been in the illusory film world.

Then she was out in the street, with the merchandise tucked against her chest, away from the night rain. Iris quickened her steps, heading for her own apartment, rather than the police station.

Two owls perched in the living room of her apartment, regarding her with their preternaturally golden eyes.

'Cross-check items in view.' Iris, spoke to the surresper, giving the machine its next commands. She had already ordered up its data-stored, three-dimensional image of the owl, from when it had been recorded in the late Dr Eldon Tyrell's office suite. Another few quick words had sized and placed the image next to the real, living owl, its claws wrapped around a perch that Iris had improvised from a broom handle and the backs of a couple of chairs. 'Match for specific identity.'

The living owl, extracted less than an hour ago from the room above the downtown movie theater, hooted in mild alarm and ruffled its speckly brown feathers as the surresper played a shifting grid of bright green lines across its form. Iris watched the dance of the lines, waiting for the machine's verdict. She was alone in the room, except for the two owls, the real and the illusory; the real one had frightened the chat even more than its previous re-creation had, sending the small, prey-resembling artificial creature scuttling into the safety of the apartment's bedroom.

'Check completed,' announced the surresper. The grid of lines, starting an inch or so apart then narrowing down to map finer details, had disappeared from the living owl. 'Specific identity confirmed; recorded and physically present items are same creature. Chronological back-displacement estimated at one year, probability estimate in plus-ninety percentage range. Identifying tally marks are as follows: texture-read and mapped analysis of feather pattern, striation of organic beak base-material, impact stress marks at edge and point of beak, fibrous ocular patterning—'

'Skip all that.'

'Idiosyncratic heart and respiratory at-rest impulses—'

'I said, skip it.'

The surresper fell silent. Iris regarded the two identity-matched owls, one framed by a small section of the opulently wood-paneled Tyrell Corporation headquarters, the other by the bare walls and window frame of her own apartment. 'End re-creation display,' said Iris. The illusory owl vanished, along with its summoned-up surroundings. She was left alone with just the living creature in front of her.

'
Now
what do I do,' muttered Iris aloud. She turned and walked into the kitchen module, ignoring the chat cringing under the table, and poured herself a glass of water at the sink. The tap continued to run as she drained the glass in one gulp, head thrown back; then she leaned forward, face lowered to the thin stream of water, and splashed it into her face. There were streaks of pinkish red swirling toward the drain when she took her hands away; not her own blood, but that of the men in the room above the movie theater. Face still wet, she turned from the sink and regarded her leatherite jacket which she had tossed across the kitchen's fold-down table when she had made her way back here to home.

'That's bad enough.' Iris spoke to no one else as she picked up the jacket by its collar and regarded the damage the bullets had done to it. 'Christ,' she said in disgust as she poked the fingers of her other hand through the rips and tatters underneath one sleeve and along the corresponding side-seam. The jacket was a signature piece for her, as much as the collection of repro cowboyshirts she'd always worn underneath it. She would have felt naked out on the streets of LA without it.

Even worse, the cheap-ass LAPD didn't reimburse for in-field losses and damages like this. The only way Iris would have gotten any money out of the department, she knew from experience, would've been if the bullets had been an inch or two lower and closer to the center, and had left her flesh in bone-splintered tatters as well. She had never been able to figure out exactly how much of a morale-booster for the troops it was supposed to be, that the department was so willing - even eager - to splash out on funeral services, but not on incidental expenses along the way. Just irritating, she'd always considered the practice.

She threw the jacket across the table again and leaned back against the sink, arms folded across her chest. The money thing irritated her to what she knew was an irrational extent; the jacket wasn't so much of a loss - she could always get another, but not one that had been so nicely broken-in as this veteran, almost a second skin to her – except that she was also aware of how much she was in the hole on this job, already.

The extraction operation at the movie theater had gone well enough, in that both she and the owl had gotten out intact; and losing that weird Vogel character, whatever his personal agenda had been, was a bonus as well. But the material cost, all the expensive gear she had promised to return to Meyer, had been high: to really keep him clear with the departmental armory, she would've had to have retrieved the casing for the expended glare grenade, as well as the automatic rifle she'd laid on Vogel. Now, she couldn't even call in one of the department's regular clean-up crews, who would normally have taken care of the messy details like that; the gear had come out of the LAPD armory's back door, via Meyer, and hadn't been authorized to be in her possession to begin with. The only way to have kept in the clear would've been to sneak the stuff back into the armory the way it'd come out, without anyone knowing about its little excursion. She and Meyer both were in the deep shit. Meyer might be able to pull them out, with his usual string-pulling expertise inside the department, but she would then be even further beholden to him than she had been before — and that was a situation definitely not to her liking.

Which was why, she knew now, she had brought the owl here to her own place, rather than immediately getting it off her hands by taking it to Meyer at his office, either in the shiny, new police station or the old, abandoned one where he had given her this funky bird-hunting job. She hadn't planned on doing that, either before she had gone to the theater hiding-place with Vogel, or immediately after, when she had been on her own again. Some instinct or half-formed rationale inside her head had turned her steps toward home, rather than going ahead and finishing the job — the easiest part of it — no matter how much she had thought she'd wanted to.

She refilled the glass from the tap and carried it out to the apartment's living room, where she sourly regarded the owl on its improvised perch.

'You cost me, sucker.' Iris took a sip, then stepped over and refilled the dish she had put within reach of the owl. There had been enough left of the chain attached to the metal band on its foot that she had been able to secure the creature in place. The chat was already terrified of the intruder merely being in the apartment; if it'd been free to swoop around, with predatory intent toward anything smaller than itself and reasonably alive-seeming, the chat would probably have blown its circuits out of sheer panic. 'I don't know how yet,' said Iris, 'but I know you did.'

The owl maintained its dignified silence, gazing back at her with its round, golden eyes.

Iris looked down at the
pinyin
newspapers she had spread beneath the owl's perch. The papers were soaked wet around the base of the dish, blurring the vertical columns of Chinese ideograms; when she hadn't been watching, while she had been in the kitchen, the owl must have slaked its thirst. She wondered exactly how owls did that; could they lap water up, the way real cats supposedly did? It raised another question, which had already been nagging at the back of her mind, about keeping the animal alive. 'I suppose you gotta eat,' said Iris. The owl blinked its golden eyes, but otherwise made no comment.

She didn't have a fresh — and real — white rat to give to the creature.
Little out of my budget
, thought Iris. She was in the hole as it was, with this job. Did owls eat only live kill, or was that snakes? A vague memory played through her mind, something she'd read, that real frogs and toads had eyes or circuits in their brains that could only recognize moving, buzzing-around insects; a frog could be surrounded by mountains of tasty, nutritious dead flies and bugs, and starve to death because it couldn't tell they were there.

This thing should've come with a manual
, groused Iris to herself Either that, or she should have asked some questions of a more practical nature when she had been down at the animal traders' souk. Or kept one of the men in the room above the movie theater alive long enough to have found out what they had been feeding the thing.

'Let me see what I can find you.' The owl blinked back at her.

Iris left the apartment's front door open, as she was only going to the end of the hallway. By the trash chute opening, the building's management had set out an array of traps for the scurrying brown mice that were a constant feature of life in LA — another survivor species, like the pigeons that fouled the ledges and roofs of the older buildings.

Underneath a bare lightbulb swaying at the end of a frayed cord, Iris poked the toe of her boot through the traps, sorting out three that appeared to have been sprung recently. The blood spattered from the tiny corpses was still wet and shiny. Wrinkling her nose in distaste, she knelt down and pried open the traps, gingerly extracting the dead mice, their eyes like tiny black beads. She realized that she hadn't brought anything from the apartment to carry them with; when she stood up, she had a palmful of soft, dampish-feeling fur objects, their bare tails "trailing over the side of her hand.

'Try these,' said Iris. She deposited the tiny corpses on the newspaper in front of the owl. As she turned away to re-lock the front door, she heard the powerful whap of the owl's wings against the air, and the scrape of its claws across the paper. She looked back and saw the owl disassembling one of the dead mice, the hook of its beak tearing through the flesh beneath the soft grayish-brown fur.