Slab City Blues - The Collected Stories: All Five Stories in One Volume (23 page)

Chapter 2

Quad Four of
Yang Ten was always a lively district, neon and hol-displays blaring through the steam to advertise a garish cavalcade of girls, boys and everything in between. Some establishments eschewed the signs for the more traditional approach of displaying their goods in the window. A scaly-skinned Splice woman, complete with coiling tail and slit-eyes, leaned close to the glass to blow a kiss at me as I made my way towards the cordon of uniformed Demons. She pouted in mock regret as I replied with a respectful nod and pinned my ID to my raincoat.

I was dismayed to find Redwing at the cordon, long damp hair framing a hawk-nosed face that fully mirrored my regard. “Chief Inspector,” he said in precisely respectful tones.

“Harry.” I glanced over his shoulder at the doorway behind. The sign, rendered in a mix of English and Vietnamese, proclaimed it the ‘Gateway to Eternal Bliss.’ It also offered a fifty percent discount for first-time patrons and a voucher for the all-you-can-eat buffet. “Classy place.”

“She’s waiting inside.” He lifted the tape and I ducked under, following him through the door and into the richly scented interior. Day-old hoisin sauce mixed with synthetic lotus blossom to leave an itch in my nostrils. Employees eyed us from half-open doors as we proceeded towards the stairs, my well-tuned eyes picking out the more common gang tats.
Mid-range Vic affiliate place,
I decided.
Low rent, high profits. Keen to avoid
trouble.

“So what’s the story?” I asked Redwing as we started up the stairs. “Caught another open-and-shut that didn’t turn out to be so shut?”

“Chief Mordecai will explain,” he replied in a curt murmur. Me making Chief Inspector before he did was clearly grating more than a little.

“Or is it the victim?” I went on, keen to dangle the bait a little more. “Someone noteworthy, perhaps? You have managed to ID the victim, right Harry?”

I didn’t like the smirk that accompanied his reply, “Wasn’t difficult.” The smirk told me a lot, principally that dear old Harry was glad to get this one off his hands and into my lap.

We climbed to the top floor and proceeded to a room halfway along the poorly lit corridor, marked as the murder scene by the white-suited techs packing gear outside. They cleared a path as I approached, nodding leave to enter at my questioning glance. I found Sherry and Ricci inside, surrounded by one of the few scenes in my career that genuinely resembled a slaughterhouse. The room was a twelve-by-twelve, windowless cube with a bed and a shower cubicle. It would have been cleaner than usual for an establishment like this but for the blood spattered over every surface. Floor, walls and ceiling all richly decorated in abstract plasma. The victim lay in six parts, head, torso and limbs. From the ragged stumps on the torso it was clear this hadn’t been a slasher’s work.
Torn apart. And
quickly.

“Say ‘pull yourself together’ and you’re fired,” Sherry told me.

“Was gonna go for ‘guess he fell to pieces’,” I said, crouching to peer at the head which lay on its side near the centre of the room. Even the most peaceful demise has a tendency to leech recognition from a human face, and this Jed’s end had been anything but. Just a middle-aged man, Caucasian features, bunched on one side where they met the floor and slack on the other. Despite the mask of blood I could tell he hadn’t shaved in a while but his skin had the too-smooth quality that came from frequent visits to the derm-salon. Despite the blood matting his hair, I noted it had the irregular look that resulted from letting an expensive grooming regimen slip for several weeks.

“Yin-sider type on a slumming safari,” I said, rising and turning to Sherry. “But I’m guessing he’s a sight more important than that, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Craig Rybak,” Redwing said from the doorway, smirk now broadened into a smile.

“The Astravista guy?” I glanced down at the head once more, finding only a dim resemblance to the face I vaguely recalled from the news feeds.

“Co-founder and Head of Operations for Astravista Industries,” Redwing went on. “Principal donor to Chief Arnaud’s election fund, not to mention half the representatives in Central Governance.”

“Where are we on the canvas?” Sherry said, her tone edged sufficiently to banish his smile.

“Half-done. Neighbourhood like this, not many willing to talk.”

“Get back to it. Low key, but make it clear the reward money on this one will be substantial.”

“Right, boss.” Redwing shot me with a parting grin before disappearing from the doorway.

“Can’t you get rid of him?” I asked Sherry. “Hear they’ve got a vacancy on the clean-up squad.”

“He clears cases,” she said. “Just not cases like this.”

I concealed a grunt of annoyance. I had my own priorities and could really have done without being lumbered with such a high-profile mess. But I also knew Sherry would have been fielding update demands from the mayor’s office once Rybak’s name flashed on the pol-net. She’d be much more amenable to my imminent and resource hungry requests if I could put this away in a timely fashion.

“Brute strength, right?” I asked Ricci who was busy running a scanner over the spatter on the ceiling. “No weapon used.”

“That’s right.” He lowered the scanner, checked the readout and fluffed his moustache with a satisfied huff. “Like I thought, adrenaline free.” He gestured at the surrounding carnage. “Also no arterial spray. This was all post-mortem.”

“Cause of death?”

He pointed to the head at my feet. “Preliminary x-ray shows high impact blunt force trauma to the frontal lobe. I’ll need to run a sim based on the fracture pattern to ID the cause but given all this, my guess is whoever did it wouldn’t need more than a fist. Ripping off a man’s head and limbs takes way more physical strength than even the most ‘roided out un-Spliced.”

“Meaning it’s either a Splice or someone with serious augments,” Sherry said. “Rybak’s type always have enemies. Could be a corporate rival hired a freelance hitter and they left us a nice big mess to confuse the scene.”

“There are easier ways of doing that,” I said. “Where’s his security?”

“As far as we know he came here alone. No bodyguards, no personal assistants. We bagged up his clothes, all he had was a billfold holding twenty thousand in green and a cheapo smart preloaded with a million in UA.”

“The contact file on the smart?”

“Empty. Seems he didn’t want to talk to anyone.” She held up her own smart, the screen flickering red and angry. “Unlike his partner, it seems.”

“Othin Vargold,” I remembered. “Him and Rybak started the company together before the war, got rich making weapons for CAOS and even richer in the aftermath thanks to the embargo on Downside tech.” My gaze lingered on Rybak’s dead face. “Jed had more money than every living soul this side of the Axis combined. Makes you wonder what brought him here.”

“What else?” Ricci said. “Came to fuck. Guess he just liked it sleazy. And,” he held up the scanner, “a serious Blues habit according to this. He wasn’t stoned when this went down but the trace amounts indicate heavy use over an extended period.”

“Deal gone bad?” I wondered aloud, knowing it couldn’t be that easy.

“The manager’s on hold downstairs,” Sherry said with a meaningful glance. “Old school Vic type. Been minimally compliant since we got here.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

I moved to the shower, finding the curtain pulled back and the tiles mostly free of blood. “Perp showered off before leaving.”

“Yeah, looks that way,” Ricci said. “Got hair samples from the plughole. Take a while to sort it though. Probably a decade’s worth of pubes down there.”

“And now I can’t eat for a week,” Sherry said. “Thanks Ricci.”

I looked over the rest of the room, concentrating on the corners and finding a very small hole in the join between the ceiling and the wall opposite the bed.
No bigger than a pinprick, but that’s plenty.
“I’ll go see the manager now.”

“He was a regular, wasn’t he?”

The manager conformed mostly to Sherry’s description, black vest to show off the tats on his chest and arms, about forty years old with the beginnings of a paunch, face decorated with the requisite pattern of scars. From the set of his features and paleness of his skin I judged him as third generation Slab-born. Though they tend to cling to their ethnicity with near-religious devotion, the long established Vic gangs have more enlightened ideas when it came to racial purity. He sat at a card table in the small casino at the rear of the establishment, dealing out cards with swift and unconscious rapidity, eyes concentrating on the revealed faces with an intensity that put me in mind of Janet.
Card-counter. Almost a lost art.
If the manager heard my question, he gave no sign.

I moved closer, took hold of the table and hauled it over, scattering cards and chips. The manager dropped his hands into his lap and sat still, refusing to look at me even when I stood close enough to convey sufficient threat and insult to set his face a-quiver.

I said, “Do I really have to introduce myself?”

A small negative jerk of his head.

“Need to hear your voice, Jed.”

He swallowed, spoke in a whispered grunt. “No.”

“Good.” I stepped back. “To state the obvious, I couldn’t care less about you, your business or the fact that, whilst licensed prostitution is entirely legal, unlicensed gambling is not. You understand me,
Dai
Wei
?”

A nod, then a terse, “Yes.”

“The man upstairs, you know who he is, don’t you?”

“I know.”

“I’m guessing he wasn’t alone when this happened. Boy? Girl? Both?”

“Girls. Two.”

“And where are they?”

He got to his feet, wisely keeping his movements slow, then nodded at the dimly lit recesses of the casino. “Won’t talk without me there,” he said.

I nodded assent and he led me to a shadowed alcove where two young women huddled together. I could tell instantly they were Downside born, shorter than the average hab-born with the signature tint of the sun to their skin. They stared up at me with wide, moist eyes, one giving a convulsive shiver which made her companion put an arm around her shoulders. They had the natural attractiveness that didn’t come from remodelling clinics, though their evident shock and fear seemed to drain any sexuality. Just two terrorised youths in a brothel.

“Police,” the manager said, nodding at me. “Tell him.”

The less traumatised of the two blinked up at me whilst her companion continued to shiver. “You’re a cop?” she asked. “A Demon they call it here.” North American accent with the twang of the southern territories. Most likely an economic refugee come up the well in search of riches, or just regular caloric intake.

“Chief Inspector Alex McLeod, miss,” I confirmed, adding, “I don’t need your name,” as she gave the manager a questioning glance. “Tell me what happened upstairs.”

The other girl gave a convulsive shudder, putting her hand to her mouth as she choked down on a retch. “Sorry,” her companion said, “she’s awful upset. Mr Craig, he was nicer’n most.”

“You’d seen him before?”

“Sure, a dozen times over the last coupla’ months. He had… simple tastes, y’know. Sometimes he’d just come to sit and get wasted on Blues.”

“Did he talk much? Tell you his worries, maybe?”

She shook her head. “He’d talk, but it’d be small stuff. Sometimes he’d get to remembering his childhood and such. Said he was born in Sweden, came Upside when he was just a boy, didn’t go back for twenty years but now he owned a house there. A house by a lake.” She gave a very small smile. “Said he was gonna take us both there one day. Buy out our contract and carry us off, he said. Don’t think he was altogether serious ‘bout that.”

“You were there when it happened?”

The other girl started to weep, sobbing into spasming hands.

“Yeah,” her friend said, hugging her closer. “He got here around 1500, like usual. Asked for us, like usual. We keep the afternoons free in case he shows up. Things were different this time though. No fun, no Blues. He just stripped off and sat on the bed, then the door buzzer went off. We knew it meant trouble ‘cause that never happens. Mr Craig said it was OK, told us to answer it and when we did there was this young fella standing there.”

“Splice?” I asked.

“No, sir. Least ways, he didn’t look like it. Just a white guy in his twenties, small. Not much bigger ‘n me, really.”

“He say anything?”

She shook her head. “Mr Craig did though. Told him to come in and us to leave. ‘This will only take a little while, ladies,’ he said. We waited outside in the corridor for like ten minutes, maybe less. Then the young fella came out and went downstairs. Didn’t say nothin’. Noticed his clothes were all soaked through though. Then…” She closed her eyes. “Then we went inside.”

I gave her a moment as she fought down the shakes. “You didn’t hear anything when you were waiting?”

“The rooms are all soundproofed. Obvious reasons.”

I slid a card across the table to her. “Contact details if anything else occurs to you.”

She glanced at the manager then picked it up when he nodded.

“Guess you know Mr Craig was a man of some importance,” I said.

“I watch the news feeds,” she said. “Sometimes.”

“Be better for you both if your involvement remains undisclosed.”

She shrugged. “Got a discretion clause in my contract. Folks who run this place take care of us, legally speaking. I got no complaints.”

I nodded to her weeping friend. “Best get her to a medic. Yourself too.”

“Yes, sir.”

I jerked my head at the manager and moved to the roulette table. I spun the wheel as he stood close by, maintaining his silence as I let the moment string out. “You liked him,” I said eventually, tossing a ball into the wheel and watching it bounce. “Didn’t you?”

“Good customers are to be valued,” he said.

“That why you called it in instead of finding a convenient meat grinder?”

“He would’ve been missed, traced here. This was the least complicated solution.”