Sins of the Father (11 page)

"That ain't the point, Lenny." For a second, it looked like Freddie was about to start shouting. Then, regaining his temper, he leaned closer and gazed at Leonard like he was explaining something to child. "Listen, the stuff we do here, it's illegal. You understand that, right?"

"Oh sure, Freddie," Leonard nodded his head. "I understand that. Right."

"Good. Now, because of that, we can't go taking any dumb chances, Lenny. It ain't just the Judges we've got to be worried about - though, Grud knows, they're bad enough. There's also the people we work for. We got a sweet gig going here, and they wouldn't be happy if something happened to ruin it. And we don't want to get them angry. You understand me, Lenny? You get any more headaches, it's better if you just take five and wait until it goes away. Don't go walking off on your own. Okay? Are we clear on that?"

"Sure, we're clear, Freddie." Leonard nodded his head more vigorously. "I won't go walking off no more. If I get a headache, I'll just wait until it goes away."

"All right, then," Freddie said, drawing in a deep breath in relief. Abruptly, his face softened. "Listen, the reason I was looking for you is we're ready to make a shipment. Go up to the cutting room and haul the product from there down to the loading bay. Jensen will tell you what needs to come downstairs. You got that, Lenny?"

"I got it, Freddie."

"Good. And no more walks, Lenny. This is the Big Meg. Walk into the wrong place here, and a body could get killed."

Really, when Leonard thought about it, it was strange that Freddie never seemed to notice Daniel. It was the same with most other people as well. Daniel followed Leonard everywhere, hanging around with him and keeping him company, but it was like Leonard was the only one who saw him. Freddie, the other mutants, the warehouse guards: none of them ever spoke to the boy, or even glanced in his direction. Not that the fact of it particularly bothered Leonard. If he had a special friend that only he could see, then so much the better. At least this way, he didn't have to worry about anybody trying to take Daniel away from him. While the boy travelled beside him, he always had someone to talk with and someone to make his decisions for him. As for Daniel himself, it did not seem to worry the boy in any way that no one seemed able to see him. Far from it, if Daniel even registered the fact at all, he gave no sign of it.

Still, it was strange. Leonard had pondered the whole thing, off and on, ever since he had first met the boy two months ago. That had been in another warehouse: another one of Freddie Binns's jobs. Daniel had simply walked up to Leonard while he was carrying stuff from one place to another, and said "hello". At first, Leonard had figured the boy must be lost to be out alone so late at night. Then, he had figured the boy must be blind, to walk up to someone as ugly as Leonard without running and screaming when he saw what he looked like. Finally, he had figured the boy must be as lonely as he was. Why else come up to him at all? It had suited Leonard, though, to talk to the boy. The fact of it was, he and Daniel had both been equally as lonely.

It wasn't easy being a mutant in Mega-City One. By law, mutants were banned from the city. If the Judges found them, they rounded them up and sent them back outside to the wastelands of the Cursed Earth. The Judges' eyes were everywhere: they had spy cameras, and flying surveillance robots. Mutants like Leonard had to stay out of sight, only coming out at night, always wary in case some citizen saw them and reported them to the Judges. Yet, no matter what the laws said, Leonard knew there were plenty of mutants inside Mega-City One. They hid out in City Bottom, or in the ruined Undercity deep beneath the earth. They worked in illegal warehouses and factories for charge-bosses like Freddie Binns. They were the city's invisible people. No one wanted to admit they existed, but they live in the city all the same.

Invisible people. The more Leonard thought about it, the more he realised that maybe him and Daniel were not so different.

The cutting room was up on level four. One entire wall at the front of the room took the form of a transparent plasteen screen designed to allow the guards outside to keep watch on the cutters while they worked. Inside the room, a dozen cutters sat around a long table. They were naked. Using scales and measures, they weighed out minute portions of powdered coffee, mixing them with larger portions of synthi-caf and synthetic gravy browning, before pouring the resulting mixture into small plasteen envelopes. The first time Leonard had seen the cutting room he had wondered what was going on, but Freddie had explained it all to him.

Real coffee was illegal in Mega-City One, Freddie had told him. "The damn Judges have banned it, the same way they've banned almost everything else," Freddie had said. "But, of course, that doesn't stop people from wanting it. That's what we do here, Lenny. We give people what they want. We smuggle in real coffee, cut it with cheaper stuff to keep up the profit, then ship it out all over the city. There's a whole lot of caffeine junkies in the Big Meg, Lenny. And, you wouldn't believe what they pay for a taste of mellow roasted."

The cutters worked in the nude to make it harder for them to steal the coffee, Freddie had explained. One time, the guards had caught one of the mutant cutters trying to smuggle a half-kilo of real Colombian in a skin-pouch on his belly. They had beaten the mutant to death, hanging him up by his arms and hitting him with metal pipes while they made the warehouse's other workers watch. "The price of doing business in the Big Meg," Freddie had called it.

Now, as Leonard approached the cutting room, a hard-faced man peeled away from the group of guards milling around outside and strode towards him.

"Freddie send you up?" Jensen asked. He looked Leonard up and down for a moment, his mouth pursed in a frown as though he didn't like what he saw. "The load is over there." He used the sawn-off stump gun in his hands to gesture towards a stack of crates outside the cutting room. "We already counted the baggies inside 'em. The count comes up short at the other end, it'll be you that pays for it." He tapped his gun menacingly on one of the crates. "You understand that, mutie?"

"I understand," Leonard said.

He lifted one of the crates, feeling the contents settle as the thousands of plasteen envelopes inside it shifted with the sudden movement. While Jensen still glowered at him, he began to walk the crate towards the stairs.

He shouldn't talk to people that way
, Daniel said from beside him.
You see the way he kept showing off the gun? It was like he was threatening you, Leonard
.

He was threatening me
, Leonard told the boy.
That's his job, Daniel. He's my boss, same as Freddie is. And, in the city, it's Okay if your boss threatens you. That's how it works
.

It felt weird for him to be the one explaining things to Daniel, but at times it was as though the little boy didn't really understand the way the world worked at all. Leonard understood it, though. Thanks to how he looked, people assumed he was stupid and thought they could talk to him any way they wanted. What was more, there was nothing he could do about it. Sure, if he made up his mind to do it, he could have taken Jensen's gun off him and wrapped it around the man's throat. But then, where would he be? He would lose his job, and the place where he lived. He would have to go back to scavenging for rats and garbage on City Bottom. Mega-City One wasn't like the Cursed Earth: you couldn't kill people just because you didn't like them. Living in the city meant sometimes you had to put up with people being mean, or unkind, or harsh. It was like Freddie had told him. It was the price of doing business.

Still, it's not right
, Daniel said.
He shouldn't be so mean and nasty, Leonard. He's like the bad men. The men who hurt me. And bad men should be punished
.

Listening closely, Leonard realised a new tone had entered the boy's voice inside his head. It was a restless, uneasy sound that sat strangely with the high-pitched childish lilt of Daniel's voice. It was a sound Leonard knew of old, same as he knew what its coming meant. It had been only a few hours since they had killed the man in the office on the two-hundredth floor, but already Daniel's mind was turning once more to thoughts of vengeance. Soon, he would remind Leonard of the promise he had made. Soon, he would send Leonard out on another errand halfway across the city.

Soon, they would kill again.

SIX

DIFFERENCES OF OPINION

"Let me see if I'm hearing this right." Tolsen's expression was aghast, his words uttered in a rising tone of disbelief. "You're saying the killer was a child?"

"No," Anderson shook her head. "I'm only telling you what the victim saw. James Nales saw his killer's face, and it belonged to a little boy about seven or eight years old."

"But that's impossible," Tolsen said. He shrugged in annoyance. "Look, I'm not trying to tell you your business. This is your investigation, Anderson. You're the Psi-Judge here, not me. But what you've just said contradicts every piece of physical evidence we've managed to collect. The killer was over two metres tall, for Grud's sake! And he strangled the victim with his bare hands. There's no way a child could do that."

They were in the outer office; Anderson and Tolsen thrashing out the results of the psi-scan between them while Lang stood a short distance away watching them in silence. The rookie Psi-Judge had not said a word since Anderson had dropped her bombshell, but from the look on her face the words "I told you so" were currently uppermost in her thoughts.

"I'll admit it sounds crazy," Anderson said to Tolsen. "But you're not listening to what I'm saying. I'm just telling you what I saw in the psi-scan. As far as James Nales was concerned, his killer was a little boy. That doesn't mean he actually was a little boy. It simply means that's what Nales believed him to be. He could have been wrong, or mistaken - I don't know. But that's exactly what he saw."

"But of course it's wrong," Tolsen snorted loudly in growing anger. "What about the handholds in the elevator shaft and the broken vertebrae? There's no way a child could have that kind of strength. And what about the differences in height between a child and an adult? Nales stood at one-metre-drokking-eighty. Are you telling me the kid stood on a chair to be able to reach his throat?"

"No, I'm not saying anything of the kind." Biting her lip, Anderson tried to control her own temper. "Again, all I'm saying is that James Nales believed his killer was a child. Maybe he was hallucinating. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe the killer was using a portable holo-emitter to disguise himself. Whatever the case, we can't just dismiss the results of the scan out of hand. Sure, we take it with a pinch of salt. But, right now, Nales's lingering memories are the only thing we have that even comes close to an eyewitness account of the crime."

"Actually, they're not the only thing," Lang spoke at last, stepping forward to interrupt their conversation. Lang's mouth was set in a tight, stony line: Anderson got the impression her fellow Psi-Judge regarded both her and Tolsen with equal disdain. "We've got another witness. If not quite an eyewitness, then at least he's the next best thing." She looked at Anderson. "That's what I was doing when you arrived on the scene - looking for evidence to support the results of my psi-scan." Her expression grew darker. "Anyway, like I say, I found a witness. And I think you'll both be interested in what he has to say."

A middle-aged man in a grubby set of overalls stood waiting outside in the hallway. Lang led the others down the hall and nodded towards him.

"This is Dwayne Hemmings. He works for the company who handle the cleaning contract at Franz Kafka. He's the one who called in the murder." She turned to face the man. "Tell the other Judges what you told me, Dwayne."

"Uh, well actually, we use robots to do the cleaning," Hemmings said. Uncomfortable at finding himself on the receiving end of an interrogation by three Judges, his fingers fidgeted nervously at the sleeve of his overalls. "It's my job to supervise them, and contact the maintenance team if any of the robots go on the fritz. That's what I was doing up here on the two-hundredth. Cleaning Unit Twelve had a malfunction and started trying to apply floor varnish to the carpets. Made a hell of a mess. I've been telling Maintenance for two weeks now that Twelve's been acting hinky, but they don't lis-"

"The murder, Dwayne," Lang prompted him, impatiently. "Tell them what you heard."

"Oh, yeah. Well, I was in the office over there." He pointed two doors down the hallway. "I'd just removed Twelve's control panel and I was trying to get its systems to reboot, when I heard what sounded like voices. At first, I didn't think too much of it - I mean, people work late in these offices all the time. Then, I heard a kid's voice talking and I thought that was kind of strange. You know, seeing as it was so late and all."

"You heard a child's voice?" Anderson asked him. "You're sure of that?"

"Oh sure," Hemmings nodded. "A little boy, it sounded like. I mean, I got a couple of kids myself. Well, they're really juves now, I suppose, seeing as they're both in their teens. But, anyway, I know what a kid sounds like. And one of them was definitely a little boy's voice. I'm certain of it."

"One of them? There was more than one voice?"

"Yeah. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but there was two of them all right. One was the kid's voice, like I said. The other was deeper. A man's voice. A big guy, from the sound of it. Anyway, after a while, the talking stopped. Then, later, after I'd finished with Twelve, I came out into the hallway and saw the door to the office there was open. I went over to see if anybody was inside so I could ask 'em whether they minded me sending a robot in to do the cleaning. That's when I saw him. The dead guy, I mean." He shuddered at the memory. "He was lying there, with them words carved into his chest and his tongue all swollen and purple. Grud, I tell you, it almost made me hurl. 'Course, when I saw that, I got out of there as quick as possible. That's when I went to one of the other offices and used the vid-phone to call the Judges."