Altered Carbon (37 page)

“Appreciated.”
He sipped at the drink and inclined his head. “Not bad. I’d like a
word with you, Kovacs. In private.”

We both
glanced at Curtis. The chauffeur glared back at me with hate-filled eyes, but
the new arrival had defused the confrontation. The cop jerked his head in the
direction of the exit. Curtis went, still clutching his wounded face. The cop
watched him out of sight before he turned back to me.

“You
do that?” he asked casually.

I nodded.
“Provoked. Things got a bit out of hand. He thought he was protecting
someone.”

“Well,
I’m glad he ain’t protecting me.”

“Like
I said, it got a bit out of hand. I overreacted.”

“Hell,
you don’t need to explain yourself to me.” The cop leaned on the
bar and looked around him with frank interest. I recalled his face now. Bay
City storage. The one with the quick-tarnishing badge. “He feels
aggrieved enough, he can press charges and we’ll play back some more of
this place’s memory.”

“Got
your warrant, then?” I put the question with a lightness I didn’t
feel.

“Almost.
Always takes a while with the legal department. Fucking AIs. Look, I wanted to
apologise for Mercer and Davidson, the way they were at the station. They act
like a brace of dickheads sometimes, but they’re fundamentally OK.”

I waved my
glass laterally. “Forget it.”

“Good.
I’m Rodrigo Bautista, detective sergeant. Ortega’s partner most of
the time.” He drained his glass and grinned at me. “
Loosely
attached, I should point out.”

“Noted.”
I signalled the bartender for refills. “Tell me something. You guys all
go to the same hairdresser, or is it some kind of team bonding thing?”

“Same
hairdresser.” Bautista shrugged sorrowfully. “Old guy up on Fulton.
Ex-con. Apparently mohicans were cool back when they threw him in the store.
It’s the only goddamn style he knows, but he’s a nice old guy and
he’s cheap. One of us started going there a few years back, he gave us
discounts. You know how it is.”

“But
not Ortega?”

“Ortega
cuts her own hair.” Bautista made a what-can-you-do gesture. “Got a
little holocast scanner, says it improves her spatial coordination or some such
shit.”

“Different.”

“Yeah,
she is.” Bautista paused reflectively, gaze soaking up the middle
distance. He sipped absently at his freshened drink. “It’s her
I’m here about.”

“Oh-oh.
Is this going to be a friendly warning?”

Bautista
pulled a face. “Well, it’s going to be friendly, whatever you call
it. I ain’t looking for a broken nose.”

I laughed
despite myself. Bautista joined me with a gentle smile.

“Thing
is, it’s tearing her up you walking around with that face on. She and
Ryker were real close. She’s been paying the sleeve mortgage a year now,
and on a lieutenant’s pay that ain’t an easy thing to do. Never
figured on an overbid like that fucker Bancroft pulled. After all, Ryker
ain’t exactly young and he never was a beauty.”

“Got
neurachem,” I pointed out.

“Oh,
sure. Got neurachem.” Bautista waved an arm with largesse. “You
tried it yet?”

“Couple
of times.”

“Like
dancing flamenco in a fishing net, right?”

“It’s
a little rough,” I admitted.

This time
we both laughed. When it cranked down, the cop focused on his glass again. His
face grew serious.

“I
ain’t trying to lean on you. All I’m saying is, go easy. This
ain’t exactly what she needs right now.”

“Me
neither,” I said feelingly. “This isn’t even my nicking
planet.”

Bautista
looked sympathetic, or maybe just slightly drunk. “Harlan’s
World’s a lot different to this, I guess.”

“You
guess right. Look, I don’t mean to be unsubtle, but hasn’t anyone
pointed out to Ortega that Ryker’s as gone for good as it gets without
real death? She’s not looking to wait two hundred years for him, is
she?”

The cop
looked at me through narrowed eyes. “You heard about Ryker, huh?”

“I
know he’s down for the double barrel. I know what he went down
for.”

Bautista
got something in his eyes then that looked like shards of old pain. It
can’t be much fun talking about your corrupt colleagues. For a moment I
regretted what I’d said.

Local
colour. Soak it up
.

“You
want to sit down?” said the cop unhappily, casting around for bar stools
that had evidently been removed at some stage. “Over in the booths,
maybe? This’ll take a while to tell.”

We settled
at one of the clock face tables and Bautista fumbled in his pocket for
cigarettes. I twitched, but when he offered me one I shook my head. Like
Ortega, he looked surprised.

“I
quit.”

“In
that sleeve?” Bautista’s eyebrows lifted respectfully behind a veil
of fragrant blue smoke. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks.
You were going to tell me about Ryker.”

“Ryker,”
the cop jetted smoke out of his nostrils and sat back, “was working with
the Sleeve Theft boys until a couple of years ago. They’re quite a
sophisticated bunch compared to us. It ain’t so easy to steal a whole
sleeve intact and that breeds a smarter class of criminal. There’s some
crossover of jurisdiction with Organic Damage, mostly when they start breaking
down the bodies. Places like the Wei Clinic.”

“Oh?”
I said neutrally.

Bautista
nodded. “Yeah, someone saved us an awful lot of time and effort over
there yesterday. Turned the place into a spare parts sale. But I guess you
wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“Must
have happened as I was walking out the door.”

“Yeah,
well anyway. Back in the winter of ‘09, Ryker was chasing down some
random insurance fraud, you know the stuff, where re-sleeve policy clones turn
out to be empty tanks and no one knows where the bodies went. It split wide
open and turns out the bodies are being used for some dirty little war down
south. High level corruption. It bounced all the way up to UN Praesidium level
and back. A few token heads roll, and Ryker gets to be a hero.”

“Nice.”

‘In
the short term, yeah. The way it works round here, heroes get a very high
profile and they went the whole program for Ryker. Interviews on WorldWeb One,
highly publicised fling with Sandy Kim even. Bylines in the faxes. Before it
all could tail off, Ryker grabbed his chance. Put in for a transfer to OrgDam.
He’d worked with Ortega a couple of times before, like I said we overlap
here and there, so he knew the program. No way could the department turn him
down, especially with some bullshit speech he made about wanting to go where he
could make a difference.”

“And
did he? Make a difference, I mean?”

Bautista
puffed out his cheeks. “He was a good cop. Maybe. A month in you could
have asked Ortega that question, but then the two of them hooked up and her
judgement went all to pieces.”

“You
don’t approve?”

“Hey,
what’s to approve? You feel that way about someone, you go with it. It
just makes it tough to get any objectivity on this thing. When Ryker fucked up,
Ortega was bound to side with him.”

“Did
she?” I took our empty glasses to the bar and got them refilled, still
talking. “I thought she brought him in.”

“Where’d
you hear that?”

“Talk.
Not a massively reputable source. It’s not true, then?”

“Nah.
Some of the street slime like to talk it up that way. I think the idea of us
ratting each other out makes them cream their pants. What happened was,
Internal Affairs took Ryker down in her apartment.”

“Ohhh.”

“Yeah,
ain’t that a laser up the ass.” Bautista looked up at me as I
handed him his new drink. “She never let it show, you know. Just went
right to work against the IAD charges.”

“From
what I heard, they had him cold.”

“Yeah,
your source got that bit right.” The mohican looked into his glass
pensively, as if unsure he should go on. “Ortega’s theory was that
Ryker was set up by some high ranking asshole who took a fall back in
‘09. And it’s true he upset a lot of people.”

“But
you don’t buy it?”

“I’d
like to. Like I said, he was a good cop. But like I also said, Sleeve Theft was
dealing to a smarter class of criminal, and that meant you had to be careful. Smart
criminals have smart lawyers, and you can’t bounce them around whenever
you feel like it. Organic Damage handles everyone, from the scum on up.
Generally we get a bit more leeway. That was what you, sorry, what Ryker wanted
when he transferred. The leeway.” Bautista tipped back his glass and set
it down with a throat-clearing noise. He looked at me steadily. “I think
Ryker got carried away.”

“Blam,
blam, blam?”

“Something
like that. I’ve seen him interrogate before, he’s right on the line
most of the time. One slip.” There was an old terror in Bautista’s
eyes now. The fear he lived with every day. “With some of these turds,
it’s real easy to lose your cool. So easy. I think that’s what
happened.”

“My
source says he RD’d two and left another two with their stacks still
intact. That sounds pretty fucking careless.”

Bautista
jerked his head affirmatively. “What Ortega says. But it won’t
wash. See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle. The two intacts
made it out of the building breathing, grabbed a cruiser and flew. Ryker put a
hundred twenty-four holes in that cruiser when it lifted. Not to mention the
surrounding traffic. The intacts ditched in the Pacific. One of them died at
the controls, the other one in the impact. Sank in a couple of hundred metres
of water. Ryker was out of his jurisdiction, and the Seattle cops ain’t
all that keen on out-of-town badges shooting up the traffic, so the retrieval
teams never let him close to the bodies.

“Everyone
was real surprised when the stacks came up Catholic, and someone at the Seattle
PD wasn’t buying. Dig a little bit deeper and it turns out the
reasons-of-conscience decals are fake. Dipped in by someone real
careless.”

“Or
in a real hurry.”

Bautista
snapped his fingers and pointed a finger across the table at me. He was
definitely a little drunk now. “There you go. The way IAD read it,
Ryker’d screwed up letting the witnesses escape, and his only hope was to
slap a ‘do not disturb’ sign on their stacks. ‘Course, when
they did bring back the intacts, they both swore blind that Ryker had turned up
without a warrant, bluffed and then smashed his way into the clinic, and when
they wouldn’t answer his questions, started playing Who’s Next with
a plasma gun.”

“Was
it true?”

“About
the warrant? Yeah. Ryker had no business being up there in the first place.
About the rest? Who knows?”

“What
did Ryker say?”

“He
said he didn’t do it.”

“Just
that?”

“Nah,
it was a long story. He’d gone up on a tip, bluffed himself inside just
to see how far he could push it and suddenly they were shooting at him. Claims
he might have taken someone out but probably not with a head shot. Claims the
clinic must have brought in two sacrificial employees and torched them before
he arrived. Claims he knows nothing about any Dipping that went on.”
Bautista shrugged blearily. “They found the Dipper, and he said Ryker
paid him to do it. Polygraph-tested. But he also says Ryker called him up,
didn’t do it face to face. Virtual link.”

“Which
can be faked. Easily.”

“Yeah.”
Bautista looked pleased. “But then, this guy says he’s done work
for Ryker before, this time face to face, and he polygraphed out on that too.
Ryker knows him, that’s indisputable. And then, of course, IAD wanted to
know why Ryker didn’t take any backup with him. They got witnesses in the
street who said Ryker was like a maniac, shooting blind, trying to bring the
cruiser down. Seattle PD didn’t take too kindly to that, like I said.
”

“A
hundred and twenty-four holes,” I muttered.

“Yep.
That’s a lot of holes. Ryker wanted to bring those two intacts down
pretty badly.”

“It
could
have been a set-up.”

“Yeah,
it could have been.” Bautista sobered up a little and his voice got
angry. “Could have been a lot of things. But the fact is that you,
shit
,
sorry, the fact is that
Ryker
went too far out, and when the branch
broke there was no one there to catch him.”

“So
Ortega buys the set-up story, stands by Ryker and fights IAD all the way down,
and when they lose…” I nodded to myself. “When they lose, she
picks up the sleeve mortgage to keep Ryker’s body out of the city auction
room. And goes looking for fresh evidence?”

“Got
it in one. She’s already lodged an appeal, but there’s a minimum
two-year elapse from start of sentence before she can get the disc
spinning.” Bautista let go of a gut-deep sigh. “Like I said,
it’s tearing her up.”