Hammered (5 page)

I turn my back on him and pick up my own jacket from the edge of the sink, shrugging into it before turning my attention to the buckles. Despite the weapon on my own leg, I have an itch between my shoulder blades. Some people get used to guns, with practice. I never did. Guess I’ve been on both ends of them too many times. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

I glance back as his smile turns grim. “A bunch of dead people.”

“We get a lot of those around here.” I tighten the last buckle on my jacket, well-beloved leather creaking. The coat is on its third lining, and I stopped replacing the zippers long ago. I got it in … Rio? I think. The cities all blur together, after a while. It was my present to myself after surviving my second helicopter crash.

There hasn’t been a third one. Small mercies. I turn back and take three limping steps to fuss with the coffeepot. Damn knee hurts again, no doubt from the storm. What’s worse is when my arm hurts. Metal can’t ache, but you could sure fool me.

“These dead people might worry you some.”

“Why’s that?” I pull my gloves from my pocket and yank them on. Driving gloves. The metal hand slips on the wheel, without. It’s an excuse not to look him in the eye as I ever-so-carefully adjust black leather over rain-cold steel.

“Because you know something about the Hammer, Maker. From when you ‘weren’t’ in the army. Special forces, was it? Nobody else gets that stuff.”

In the silence that follows, the coffeepot burbles its last and I jump, fingers of my right hand twitching toward the piece strapped to my thigh before I stop them. Wisely, Mitch does not laugh. Jenny Casey’s law of cops: there are three kinds—5 percent are good, 10 percent are bad, and the rest are just cops. The good ones want to help somebody. The bad ones want power. The rest want to ride around in a car with a light that lights up on the top.

I tolerate Mitch because he’s one of the 5 percent. Snotass attitude and all.

He gets up off the counter and reaches for the coffeepot, turning his back to me.

“What makes you think I was army?”

“Where’d you get the scars?” He hands me a cup of coffee before pouring one for himself.

I take it in my right hand, savoring the heat of the mug. “Playing with matches.”

He laughs again, and again it does not sound forced. Stares at my tits, laughs at my jokes, the boy knows the way to an old woman’s heart. “Did Razor ever find that dealer?”

I don’t wonder how he knows. “Any bodies turn up in the river?” The broad, blue Connecticut. Lake Ontario, it isn’t. But hell, it’s a decent-sized river—and every time they drag it, they find a couple of people they didn’t know were missing.

Mitch sets his cup aside and pins the floor between his lace-up boots with a glare. He’s wearing brown corduroy trousers, ten years out of style.

I wonder if I’m still drunk. The glass on the floor annoys me, and I turn away to get the broom and dustpan. Stooping over, I look up at Mitch. He’s stuffed his hands into his pockets, and he leans back against the table to watch while I sweep the concrete. I have to drop down to hands and knees to get the shards that scattered under the chair, and I wince and groan out loud when I do it. Something that feels like shattered pottery grinds in my knee and hip when I straighten.

Mitch chews his lip. “Getting old, Maker.”

“Still kick your boyish bottom from here to Boston, Detective.” I carry my loaded dustpan over to the trash.

“Where the hell does that name come from, anyway? Maker. Radio handle? You guys used those, didn’t you?”

I shrug, setting the cleaning tools aside. “Maybe it’s my real name.”

A tube of toothpicks squats among the clutter on my table. He opens it and selects a red one, working it into his
teeth with the vigor of a man who is trying to quit smoking. “Yeah. A body turned up in the river.” He hesitates.

I award him the round. “Whose body was it, Mitch?”

He sweeps a chair over and throws himself into it with all the grace of youth. For a moment, I am insanely jealous, and then I make myself smile.
If you’d died at twenty-four, Jenny, you never would have found out how much fun it is to get old.

But Mitch is talking, head down on his hands and words stumbling out in a rush. “So we’ve got this floater, right? Turns up three miles downriver, snagged on a boat anchor, just like the opening scene of a detective holo. A woman. About thirty. A cop.” His voice trails off, and he pulls the toothpick out of his mouth and flicks it away, littering my clean-swept floor, but he does not raise his head.

“Is that important?”

“You tell me.” He looks up finally and digs in his jacket pocket for a minute before lighting a nicotine stick. The red light of the flame remakes his face into death’s-head angles and the rich, hot scent reminds me that you can’t quit smoking, any more than you can quit any of the other addictions of which I’ve had my share. He holds the smoke in for a long minute and then breathes out like a self-satisfied dragon, relishing every moment of sensation and effect.

He wants me to ask, and I don’t want to give him another round, and so we hold an impromptu duel. He has a cigarette: something to do with his hands. I have years of practice waiting. I could pick up my mug, but I don’t. Instead, I lean my head back and watch the unpleasant old movies inside my skull.

He finishes his cigarette and clears his throat. “She was a detective sergeant. Were you a sergeant, Maker? When you weren’t in the army?”

“I was admiral of the Seventh Space Fleet, eh? What
was her name?”
How much about me does he know? Or worse, think he knows?
I open my eyes and raise my head, catching him staring at me.

He waits again and again I do not ask.
He needs to learn who to play games with. It’s not me.

I grunt. My fingers—the metal ones—itch for a cigarette, and I get up and pour myself a bourbon instead, washing down a handful of aspirin with it. I turn around to face him and study the water stains on the wall behind his head. More every year.

“You wanna avenge a dead cop, Mitch, I’m not who you’re looking for. Get a ronin. I hear Bobbi Yee is good.”
Why is he coming to me for this? Why is he off the investigation?

She must have been a partner. A friend. Or even dirtier than the general run, and they’re covering it up.
I’d like to say that sort of thing never went on back home in Kahnawá:ke, but I’d be lying.
Warrior ethos. Whatever.

For some reason, a great and sudden guilt washes over me. My long-dead little sister, Nell, gave me something priceless when I went into the army, and I haven’t been taking care of it. Maybe I’ll burn some tobacco after Mitch leaves.
As if he wasn’t burning enough already.

“Don’t need a hit. I need information.”

“So tell me your girl’s name, Kozlowski.”

He laughs bitterly. “Mashaya Duclose. West Indian. You heard of her? She was a good cop, Maker.”

I haven’t heard of her, but I don’t know everybody.
Sure. They’re all good cops when they’re dead.

Mitch continues. “She’d been supposed to meet up with your boy Razorface the night she vanished. Something about him having witnessed one of the kids who got hammered, and some question about whether his organization might be involved. You know about the OD’s?”

“I’ve heard stuff.”

He spreads his hands wide, helplessly, and the look that breaks through his veneer chills me. You get to know that expression, after a while. You see it on the ones who’ve adopted goals other than survival. Dead men walking.

“Look, Maker. I’ve got a dead detective. I’ve got Razorface maybe linked to a murder. And not one of his little cleanup killings. I don’t give a damn about those. A dead cop. A dead cop is not good for you and it is not good for me and it is not good for your gangster boyfriend. And a street full of dead kids poisoned by Canadian special forces combat drugs—that’s not good for you either, since I know how much you like people poking into your history. No?”

Mitch’s eyes flicker around my shop in that way he has, recording everything. I’m damned glad I took that little plastic twist elsewhere.
Which reminds me, I need to call Simon. He’s had four days to get that stuff checked out.

I shrug. Our eyes meet: I see him in living color on the right side, and in high-resolution black and white complete with thermal readings and a heads-up array on the left. The bulge of his gun glimmers red on the threat display. Distracting. “It isn’t about that, Mitch.”

“Good. Then are you going to help me or not?”

A cold wind swirled the tall stranger’s coat around his boots as he pushed open the door of the saloon and stepped inside. Just for a moment the resolution flickered; then the illusion sealed itself around his presence, whole.

He paused for a moment inside the door, scanning the hodgepodge of cyborgs, Beautiful People, and aliens that populated the seediest bar in the seediest spaceport in Avatar Gamespace—each more improbably constructed than the last. A thin smile bent his lips and thoughtful eyes squinted under a thatch of wavy silver hair; the extreme body-modification crowd got even more extreme, in VR. A holstered equation hung at his hip, and his pockets were heavy with binary. His eyes lighted as they fastened on the bartender, and he came up against the brass rail like a knife against a butcher’s steel while patrons turned to look, and just as quickly turned away.

“Gunslinger?” the weathered bartender asked, sliding a shot of whiskey across the scarred mahogany surface.

A translucent blue rill of light followed the vector of the glass, and the stranger pursed his lips in approval as he lifted it. “Physicist,” he replied. “Nice effect. You’re a player-character, aren’t you? Not an extra?”

The bartender nodded. “Glad you like it.” He blew on his fingertips, and sparks fluttered from them—blue, shifting green and golden as they showered the floor. “Tolbert equations.”

The stranger stepped on one. It squeaked slightly in protest under his boot before it died. “I know,” he said, and—turning—leaned back against the gouged brass railing. “You’re a mathematician in real life?”

“Physician. Neurologist.”

The stranger laughed lightly, as if some assumption had been satisfied. “Math is a hobby?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too.” Most of the saloon’s patrons affected a selfconsciously reserved demeanor, but the stranger seemed incapable of standing still. He finished his drink quickly
and glanced over his shoulder at the bartender. “Do you ever get pilots in this bar?”

The bartender shrugged. “Isn’t everybody in here a pilot? Or wants to be? With a couple of exceptions.” He tapped the tip of his own nose.

The stranger’s long, narrow fingers drummed the countertop. “Why are you playing the bartender?”

“Because I like to role-play, and I don’t like to fight. Even virtually.” The bartender shrugged. “I’m not trying to win, I’m just here for the scenery and the conversation.” He wiped his right hand on his apron and stuck it out. “It picks up about now—most of the kids are in bed. My handle’s ‘Simple Simon.’ Pleased to make the acquaintance of somebody who doesn’t take all this too seriously.”

The stranger nodded and took the hand. “Dick Feynman.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Why?”

“There used to be a physicist by that name back in the 1950s or ‘60s.”

The stranger shrugged. The corners of his mouth slanted up, complicating the web of lines decorating his lean face. “I know.” A pause. “I’m a descendant.”

“Ah.” He polished the bar. “What’s a physicist doing hanging out in cyberspace with a bunch of teenagers?”

“Same thing a neurologist is. And as you pointed out, most of the kids are in bed by now.” A trail of imperfect pixilation followed Feynman’s head as he cocked it to the side like a curious bird. “I don’t so much come for the game either, although it’s fun to watch. I bet I could beat it if I thought about it long enough.”

The bartender hung his rag behind the bar. “Probably. Want another drink?”

“Sure.” Feynman slid another chit across the counter, and the bartender shook his head and pushed the chit back.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m really not trying to win. I’m thirty-seven, chubby, and divorced. Even make-believe pilot-training isn’t really my thing.”

The physicist chuckled and gestured to the wiry white-haired icon of the bartender. “I take it that’s not your real face, then? Most people don’t choose icons that much older than themselves. It’s usually bigger muscles, prettier faces.”

“Not even a little does it look like me. I’m playing to the archetype. You’d be amazed how many people assume I’m an extra. And the things they’ll tell a computer. Like they don’t realize everything that happens in here is logged in some data array.” He scratched the receding line of his hair. “But you know, everybody wants to talk to the bartender.”

“I would think neurology would be more interesting than this.” Feynman took his drink and rolled the glass between virtual fingers. He raised it up to the light, as if examining the color.

“Neurology
is
this, these days. Okay, not precisely true—but you know about the latest work in VR, yes? Direct cortical stimulation? Big help with severely impaired patients.”

“I’ve heard something,” Feynman answered. “Are you using a gloves-and-goggles setup now?”

The bartender shook his head. “Suit. I have the good stuff for my work. I’m not quite ready to get hardwired, though—I’m old enough to think you’d have to be pretty desperate to get a neural tap put in. Although the nano stuff is a lot better than what we were doing even five, ten years ago.”

Feynman stared hard at his glass. It changed in his hand, turned into a tall, fizzing cola. “Now
that
is why I come here,” he said happily, sipping the drink.

The bartender smiled. “But we’ve got some test subjects who actually
are
manipulating the VR environment with—literally—nothing more than thought.”