Inescapable (29 page)

‘Oh yeah,’ Fox
replied. The man who had followed her was sitting at the other end
of the bar looking uncomfortable. Just to be safe, Fox had had one
of the cambots follow him as he followed Marie. He was not Overt,
who was still watching the, now empty, house in Hell’s Kitchen. ‘We
had him pegged as soon as he left the building. So they’re keeping
an eye on you, but it doesn’t look like they’re worried about Sam.
Maybe they’ll try something at the house tonight and this guy’s
making sure you’re away while they do.’

‘Well,
shouldn’t you be watching–’

‘We’ve got the
place under surveillance. This lot can’t make a move without us
knowing what they’re up to.’

~~~

David Brownlow was
nervous. That was partially because he was conducting business
which was not exactly legal inside the bounds of his own precinct.
Well, no, the business he was conducting was not
at all
legal when it came down to it. Why kid himself? He was blackmailing
someone. He was blackmailing a murderer. The fact that the payoff
had been arranged to take place not that far from the site of the
murder was… an irritation. Brownlow would have preferred to be
somewhere where no one would know who he was.

He turned at
the sound of footsteps. It was Friday night, but everything was
pretty quiet. The people who were out were already in clubs or
restaurants. Everyone else was locked away in their homes.
Footsteps were easily heard over the relative silence, and these
ones had something of an odd tempo. The guy was limping. Not very
noticeably, but Brownlow was not an entirely useless detective. He
spotted the limping man, saw a heavily built individual in a large,
black coat, and knew that at least one part of the arrangement had
been ignored.

‘August is
supposed to be here,’ Brownlow snapped as the man stopped.

‘Mister August
doesn’t deal with matters like this personally. I am Mister
Constance.’ Constance held up his hand, waving a slim, plastic card
between index finger and thumb. ‘Assuming you have not broken our
deal, this is what you asked for.’

‘And that
is?’

‘Two million
dollars. Coded, escrow transfer.’ Constance held the card still. ‘I
assume you have verification software on your implant to check the
details.’

Brownlow
sneered and really wished he had thought of that. He was going to
have to assume that, since August had assumed it, the card was
genuine. He would need to take the card to a bank to get the money
out; there were federal laws about the handling of large amounts of
money and Brownlow planned to break them by cashing the card
outside of American territory. He reached for the card and
Constance pulled it away. With a grunt, Brownlow took a plastic
data stick from his pocket. ‘Everything I’ve got on the Kenan case.
The call logs and recordings regarding my deal with August,
verification of the data deletions.’

‘Very well.’
There was a tense exchange as neither man really wanted to part
with what he had. Constance slipped the stick into a pocket. ‘You’d
be advised, Detective, to forget you ever saw me or heard of Mister
August.’

‘Oh, don’t you
worry. I plan to make sure no one involved in this
ever
sees
me again.’

Constance’s
lips shifted into something like a smile. ‘It’s weird. When Mister
August said you were blackmailing him, I said you had to be a total
moron. I said you would double-cross Mister August, keep something
back. He said you would not be that stupid.’

‘Yeah, well,
thanks for that, shit for brains.’

‘It turns out
that the data on your stick verifies so you didn’t hold anything
back. Which still makes you a moron.’

Brownlow opened
his mouth just in time for Constance to pull a pistol from his
pocket and fire it, twice. The pistol was dropped beside the body
before it had hit the ground. Constance had to work quickly,
retrieving the money card from Brownlow’s pocket and replacing it
with a business card.

Constance
glanced around. No one had, as yet, emerged from any of the nearby
buildings. Turning on his heel, the big man walked away, still
limping from the wound in his leg.

~~~

‘You okay?’ Marie asked
as Fox grimaced.

Fox was
watching the video stream from the cambot which was following
Constance and was not exactly okay with what she was seeing, but
telling Marie that was probably not going to help anything. ‘I just
got informed of something which… probably isn’t good. However, it’s
nothing to concern you.’

‘What do we do
about it?’ Kit asked inside Fox’s head.

‘Operations
have called it in to NAPA?’

‘Yes, Fox.’

‘Then we wait
and find out what they do about it. Get the video copied to a data
stick so that we can hand it over to them. Make sure operations
have it recorded and tagged as evidence.’ Smiling at Marie, Fox
said aloud, ‘How are you doing?’

‘Uh, bit tipsy,
and the memetics are getting to me again, but I’m good.’

‘I meant
generally. How’s the coaching going?’

‘Good! I’m
really enjoying it and I think it’s working. I mean, I think it’s
building my confidence a little.’

Fox scanned
over the translucent, rose-pink tube top and the more opaque, but
very small, lime-green micro-skirt Marie was wearing. ‘Yeah, you
seem more confident than last time we were here. I think you have
more than a couple of admirers.’

‘I do?’

‘One or two,’
Fox replied as Marie looked around, trying to spot who Fox meant
and ignoring the most obvious one who was sitting right beside
her.

‘Should I
assume two for breakfast?’ Kit asked.

Fox stopped
herself sighing. ‘No. I have a feeling that I’m going to have a
disturbed night thanks to NAPA. No point in taking her home if I’m
not going to get to appreciate it.’

Oblivious to
the conversation, Marie turned back, sipping her wine and grinning.
‘Not sure who you mean, but I guess you’re more observant than I
am.’

Fox decided
that laughing was probably not a good idea. ‘Maybe I am, yeah.’

15
^th
May.

Groaning, Fox turned
over and lay with her eyes closed as video streamed across the
inside of her eyelids. ‘That’s Cant,’ she grumbled.

‘Yes, Fox.
Inspector Cant and another detective have just entered the
building.’

‘It’s two in
the fucking morning. That prick never works nights. He’s going to
say something about it being because it’s a cop that was killed. I
know he is.’

‘Do you think
he’s coming here?’

‘That would be
my guess.’ Throwing the sheets aside, Fox grabbed the shirt she had
worn to 27Lex and then pulled on some jeans. ‘Is that data stick
ready?’

‘It’s in one of
the ports on my server.’ There was a pause which gave Fox time to
grab her trainers. Then Kit continued. ‘Javen has just sent through
notification that Inspector Cant is at Sam’s door.’

Fox dropped the
trainers and walked through into the lounge. She grabbed the data
stick from Kit’s server and then headed for the door. She walked
out of her apartment in time to hear Cant speaking.

‘Samuel Peter
Clarion, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of David
George Brownlow, Detective. You have the right to remain silent.
Anything you–’

‘What the fuck
are you doing, Cant?’ Fox interrupted as she padded down the
corridor on bare feet.

‘You’re not
getting him out of this one, Meridian,’ Cant said. He turned,
glaring at her with eyes which were far too bright and pleased to
see her. ‘We found his business card on the victim, and the gun
beside the body is ID tagged to him.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Fox
lifted the data stick, waving it and smiling. ‘I have video of the
entire crime, and I can give you an ID on the man who shot
Brownlow. His name is Philip Constance. We’ve had him under
surveillance for several days. Who do you think called in the
shooting? When you arrived in the building, I thought you were
coming to wake
me
up at two am to get this.’

Cant’s face
fell. The light went out of his eyes very quickly. ‘You have it all
on video.’

‘With some very
interesting audio. It would seem that someone is trying to frame
Sam for murdering a cop. Someone who is named on this recording.’
She held the stick out to Cant. ‘Please direct enquiries regarding
this to Palladium Security Services. If you plan to continue to
harass our client, Mister Clarion, tonight, I will accompany him to
precinct nineteen’s HQ where we will be met by a lawyer who will
eat you alive. I’m willing to bet the ID records on the gun you
have have been faked and ten minutes of checking would have
uncovered that. I’ve got video of Constance planting the card.’

Cant glared at
Fox, and Fox stared back. His eyes flashed, but hers remained flat,
impassive. He broke first. ‘We’ll be enacting travel restrictions
until we’ve verified this video and the status of the firearm.’ Fox
said nothing in reply and, without another word, Cant turned,
marching off with his bemused-looking companion in tow.

Fox waved Sam
into his apartment, waiting until the door closed behind her before
speaking. ‘I was a little surprised you were back.’

‘My new client
was a pleasant woman who seemed oddly nervous. She did not look
like she had
any
need to hire a companion for the evening,
but she fed me a story about it being her birthday and her wanting
a
really
good night. She did relax with a little wine, and
me, in her, but she did not want me to stay the night. She was
nervous again when she sent me on my way. And now I believe I know
why.’

‘Give me her
name. Or have Javen give Kit her name. We’ll run her and see what
pops up. It seems like Brownlow was getting a payoff from August.
Maybe blackmail. He got two bullets in the head instead. If your
client was part of it, they must have decided to kill two birds
with one stone. They just didn’t know I had their assassin on
constant watch.’

‘Lucky for me.’
Reaching out, Sam put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Thanks. You’re
really
coming through for me on this one.’

Fox gave a
little shrug. ‘What are friends for? If NAPA take this seriously,
we’ll have August by the short and curlies this time, Sam.’

‘I don’t
believe I’ll count my chickens yet, but if it works, we can set up
the house.’

‘Uh-huh.’ She
looked at him, dressed only in a pair of loose sweats, hair tousled
from bed. ‘It’s going to be a terrible burden seeing you like that
more often. I don’t know how I’ll be able to cope.’

He gave a
shrug, muscles rippling under his tanned skin, and turned, heading
for his drinks cabinet. Sleeping straight away was going to be hard
after that kind of interruption. ‘The way you wander around your
apartment half-dressed, I don’t think it’s going to be easy for me
either.’

Fox giggled.
‘Marie is going to have a fit.’

Sam winced,
waving a whiskey bottle at her in mute question. ‘Maybe we need
some sort of alert to be sure we’re dressed before she comes up the
stairs.’

Nodding in
assent to the drink, Fox walked over to sit down on one of the
large, comfortable sofas which formed an entertainment area in
Sam’s lounge. ‘I think she should suffer. It builds character and
she’ll need it if she’s going to be a professional actor.’

‘Your evil’s
showing again, Meridian.’

‘I got dragged
out of bed at two in the morning by a dickhead from my old
precinct. I’m allowed to have some mean showing.’

~~~

‘Javen did the usual
checks Sam has performed on new clients,’ Kit explained as Fox
looked up at an empty house in the southern MCD. ‘The name checked
out with public sources, but is no longer there. I’m having the
data returns Javen obtained run through analysis at
Technologies.’

‘Okay, and this
building?’

‘Unoccupied,
obviously. Ownership goes back to Mister August and there is no
listing for anyone in residence for the last month.’

‘He seems to
have a lot of unoccupied property. Get a request out to NAPA for
any camera footage of this area in the time period Sam was meeting
his client. Run the memory image over APS’s known staff. I doubt
August went outside his business to get his femme fatale.’

‘Considering
Sam’s description of her, I don’t believe “femme fatale” is a
fitting description. She was unsure of herself, perhaps worried.
She will have no professional experience in the sex industry or
espionage. I would be looking for someone in a clerical role, not
well paid, possibly a temporary worker.’

Fox smiled.
‘You’re profiling. Cool. Run the lists anyway, but you may be right
and we won’t find her.’

‘I’ll look.
This was a fairly elaborate plan, but it seems like it was set up
in a hurry. I believe Mister August will have made mistakes.’

‘Oh, he made a
big one. He used Constance for the killing. If he’d taken the time
to get a new body in on this, we wouldn’t have known it was a
frame-up.’

Turning, Fox
set off along the sidewalk at a rapid jog. The trip out to see the
building Sam’s assignation had taken place in was dual-purpose:
look at the area and also get a feel for the part of the city she
was probably going to be calling home soon. The place was less than
a kilometre east of Sam’s house, a small, single unit set amid a
number of theatres, or what had been theatres. There were still a
few legitimate theatres along Broadway, but the numbers had thinned
as virtual productions became cheaper to produce and more people
preferred to stay in their homes. Here in the MCD, going to a
theatre was still considered the kind of cultural event one could
be snobbish about, but even here they could not support the huge
range of productions which had once filled the area.