Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1) (32 page)

In all respects the corpse mirrored its virtual image in the Net, but as usual Perusquia discovered himself somehow less moved by the physical reality of violent death than he had been by its digital counterpart.

“What about the woman?” Hennessy asked.

She was seated beside the dead man but, luckily, facing in the other direction. Even as Hennessy spoke, her eyes fluttered open. Perusquia muttered, “Get EMS here.” Through the phone he said aloud: “Ma’am, this is Lieutenant Alphonse Perusquia of the NYVPD. Please remain in your chair. Do not get up.”

“What? What’s going on?”

“There has been a situation, which is now under control. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, yes, of course I understand you—Where’s Harry? Harry?”

Ignoring instructions, she craned her neck around. Perusquia switched off the audio as she began screaming and plugged himself into the medicine chest, discovering a commonplace assortment of household sedatives. He instructed the pharmaceutical dispenser to release a stiff jolt of commercial heroin derivative, and then acquired control of the domestic handyman, a small stupid thing with a good assortment of attachments. Perusquia directed the machine to the bathroom, grasped the hypodermic in its mandibles, returned the machine to the woman, and injected her in the thigh.

“You handle this,” Perusquia instructed Hennessy. “I’ll be at the precinct.”

“Sure, Loo.”

Perusquia took three giant steps, which carried him to the station house on West Tenth. He went directly to the interrogation room. Flo Salisbury was taking a statement from the lanOp who had discovered the body. Although Flo had been on the force almost as long as Perusquia, she usually chose to look much younger. Today her eyes were a luminous indigo with pupils shaped like stars.

The lanOp, a Series XII AI, had the virtual appearance of a tall thin bald man with too many decorative scars and far too much rouge on its angular cheeks. It was picking its fingernails nervously and complaining in a shrill voice:

“It’s not my fault, I tell you. Really, it isn’t.”

“No one is saying that it is, Mister Shakespeare.”

“I mean, I’m a good op. I take my job seriously, I do. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you straight.”

“Yes, Mister Shakespeare. Now for the record, will you please give us your full name and ID number?”

“I’ve told you, haven’t I? Raphael Shakespeare. A Series XII, and proud of it. Version 3.3. 075-50-6905.”

“Thank you. Now please state your occupation.”

“LanOp, of course. Local area Net operator licensed by VNY Community Board Twenty-one. Fourteenth to Canal; Sixth Avenue to the river. Look here—” Reaching into its head, Shakespeare downloaded some data and threw them onto the table, where they expanded into a scale image of the VVillage. “From there,” it said, pointing, “to there. That’s my neighborhood, it is. Keep the files clean. Collect the access fees. You have a problem, you go to Ralph Shakespeare. Everyone knows it.”

“How did you come to discover the body, Mister Shakespeare?”

“How? How? One moment I’m going about my business, officer, and the next, well, the damned bloody thing’s sprawled in that alley on Christopher. I’ll show you.”

Shakespeare fiddled with the data on the table, superimposing a calendar and clock on the map.

“This is a direct memory feed from noon today. There were 2,679 visitors to the block between Seventh Avenue and Hudson. Not one person entered the alley. And yet, at ten minutes and eleven seconds past midnight.” The clock froze and a tiny icon appeared. “No one went in,” Shakespeare repeated. “No one went out. You tell me how.”

Perusquia shrugged, understanding all too well what had happened. Aloud he told Salisbury: “Briefing in half an hour.”

“Right, Loo.”

The Serial Incident Investigation Unit, more commonly known as the Silver Bullet Squad, was forced by budget restraints to operate out of the Sixth Precinct’s detective offices. It was an arrangement that pleased no one. Perusquia preempted a wall, ignoring the protests that arose when he minimized the data already there to display a situation report of his own.

Salisbury was first to arrive, followed in short order by the rest of the unit—Navas, Diakite, Hennessy, Brown, Rashid, and Grevenberg.

Perusquia waved a hand at the five luminescent points that indicated where the attacks had occurred. “Our friend’s still at it,” he observed. “Same general area, same ferocity, same SQ. Flo?”

“It’s
lobo
, all right. I ran a quick analysis on the lanOp’s memory. Take a look.”

She reached into her purse, pulled out a visual, and pasted the pixels on the wall. Using a finger as an extensible pointer, she singled out a plump man from the crowd milling around the bar. “That’s Harry Wilcox, the victim,” she remarked. “Harry logged in to the Quick Fix Café just before ten. He had his usual, talked with a few people, left at three minutes and twenty-eight seconds until twelve.”

The visual followed Wilcox as he drained his glass, said his good-byes, and pushed through the throng to the door. There the viewpoint shifted, facing the entrance from the outside. For an instant Wilcox was visible, but as he stepped forward across the threshold, his image flickered out.

“
Lobo
tagged him at the frontier,” Salisbury observed, referring to the demarcation separating the information universe of the café from that of the street; like most predators, wolves hunted
edges
. “His body wasn’t discovered until ten past. Even without taking into account the time
Lobo
lay in wait, we’re looking at a stealth quotient in the high three hundreds, which is consistent with the other four incidents.”

“Three eighty-nine, to be exact,” Perusquia said, looking slowly to each member of his squad. “This
lobo
has the second highest SQ on record. Hennessy—the highest?”

“Israel—no, Ishmael Bernstein,” Hennessy quickly corrected himself with a nervous smile. “SQ Four twenty-five, that right, Loo? Took out fifteen people in Brooklyn eleven years ago.”

“Including,” Perusquia said, “two members of the SIIU. Friends of mine. Before your time,
hijo
. Good men. But they were careless. They forgot what a stealth quotient that high meant. So let me run it down for you once more. This
lobo
interfaces with the Net with a degree of control close to four times greater than that of your average citizen. He can evade detection by automatic sensors and intelligence engines through the pure effort of
will
for close to half an hour—he’s invisible. Once you’re within his sphere of influence,
his
reality becomes
your
reality. Rashid—”

Today Edgar Rashid resembled Humphrey Bogart, an early actor he admired, and was dressed in a period double-breasted suit with wide lapels. Tilting back his gray fedora, he asked, “Yes, Loo?”

“Identify a pattern for us.”

“Well, Loo, the attacks occurred on average six days, five hours, and twelve minutes apart, with a variance of two hours, thirteen minutes. We should hear from our friend again next Tuesday between eight and midnight.”

“Diakite—another?”

The albino detective extruded a finger to tap the five glowing points on the situation report, causing a circle to appear. “
Lobo
is displaying characteristic territorial behavior,” he said. “All the incidents took place within this radius, with a distribution of nine virtual blocks.” He stroked the data again, bringing into relief a section of Mercer Street. “Series theory predicts the next episode will take place—
here
.”

“Grevenberg? Anything else?”

Art Grevenberg, an avid reader of graphic novels, had bright green skin and muscles articulated like iron and a propensity for wearing tight athletic outfits. “All the victims displayed the same general appearance: that of a male Caucasian about thirty-five years old, weighing eighty-five kilos, standing one-point-nine meters tall, with blond hair and brown eyes.” As he spoke, Grevenberg plucked visuals from a pocket, balled them up in his massive hands, and generated a scale three-dimensional mannequin, which he stood in the center of the room. “The next one should look something like this.”

“Good,” Perusquia said. “So now we know
when
the wolf will hunt,
where
he’ll do it, and
whom
he’ll go after. Correct, gentlemen?”

The seven detectives nodded soberly. Perusquia knew he had to wake them up.

“We know
nothing
, nothing at all,” he roared. “We have guesses—and not very good ones, either.
Lobo
here is insane but he’s not ignorant. He understands behavior and structure theory better than any of us here. Bernstein did. He eluded us for seventeen months by inconsistently breaking pattern. That’s how Jefferson and Diego bought it—they grew complacent. They thought they understood what
lobo
would do next. They were
wrong
. They became
prey
. The wolf
ate
them.”

With effort Perusquia put the memory of his friends away.

Turning to the situation report, he sketched a circle twice the size of the one that Diakite had drawn. Perusquia pointed at Sid Navas and Fred Brown. These two had been partners for so long that they usually displayed themselves as mirror images of one another. Today they both wore handlebar mustaches and wire-rimmed spectacles, although Navas was a dark ebony in color and Brown was almost as white as Diakite.

“Navas, Brown—”

The two detectives straightened in their seats.

“—starting tonight I want complete tracking of every log-in and log-out from Twenty-third Street to Canal. I want real-time comparisons of the populations of every adjacent universe within this area—
lobo
’s using frontiers to enter stealth mode. If there’s a single variance anywhere, I want an emergency alert. Flo, you and Hennessy coordinate an undercover squad with appearances within twenty-one percent of Grevenberg’s composite. Work in teams. Issue silver bullets to all members. Understand me?”

“Yes, Lieutenant!”

“I hope so. For all our sakes.”

Perusquia took six giant steps back to his apartment and jacked out, becoming flesh again all too suddenly, aware once more of his weight and age. He slept fitfully, waking only three hours later, just after dawn. He had a cup of espresso without sugar and a piece of dry toast in the automated diner downstairs, then wandered without direction through the nearly empty streets of the Village, marveling at the ghostly variances to their digital counterparts. Perusquia was old enough to remember a time when there had been crowds, when most people experienced living directly instead of logging-in to the Net. Had it been better back then? Worse? He couldn’t decide. At the very least there hadn’t been wolves. Serial killers, yes—stranglers, rippers, cannibals, loners, diseased perverts of all sorts. But it had taken the advancement of technology to truly unleash the animal lurking within the depths of the human soul.

Eventually Perusquia found himself in the lane leading off Christopher Street, beside the real-world twin of the café where Harry Wilcox had bought his last latte before meeting the wolf. There was, of course, no evidence of the violence that had taken place the night before in the Net—couldn’t be—but old habits compelled him to see for himself.

When he looked up from the sidewalk, someone was watching him from the entrance of the alley.

Perusquia stopped walking, and the stranger eased deeper into the shadows.

“You,” Perusquia called. He pulled out his badge. “Yeah, you. Get over here.”

The person took off running. Perusquia lumbered after him, out of the alley and onto Christopher, then right onto Hudson. His breath came in ragged gulps after the first fifty steps, blood hammering in his ears and throat. Sweat glazed his skin in the cool morning air, and his shoes hit the pavement with leaden inertia, moving as slowly as in a bad dream.
Madre de Dios
. He was too old for this. Too fat. Out of shape and soft as suet. And there the
puta
went, heels flying, so far ahead that Perusquia couldn’t tell the color of the pants or the kind of jacket the person was wearing, much less build, age, race, or gender. Not a damn thing.

Three blocks later Perusquia was alone again. He leaned against a wall and did nothing for a while except breathe deeply and try not to pass out.

Then he limped home and jacked in.

Five giant steps brought him directly to the precinct. He went straight to the squad room. “We’ve got a possible, Loo,” Salisbury said without taking her eyes from the accumulation of icons on her desk. “Brown and Navas are handling it. Want a look?”

“Sure.”

This morning Salisbury had almond skin and black teeth and cobalt hair and seemed thirty even though Perusquia knew she was near his own age. Pushing the data aside, she turned toward him. “Jesus, Loo. That you in real life?”

Glancing at himself, Perusquia realized that he had forgotten to change. “Unfortunately, yes,” he replied.

“If you don’t mind me saying so, Loo. maybe you should go on a diet.”

“I’m on one. It isn’t working.”

Perusquia double clicked his fingers and replaced his jeans and polo shirt with the gray pin-stripe of his usual business attire, deleting his weight down to eighty kilos at the same time. Salisbury opened a window onto the interrogation room. She tugged at the frame, resizing it until they had a full view of the interior.

Both detectives still wore yesterday’s handlebar mustaches and wire-rimmed glasses. Navas was seated across from the suspect, who had the virtual appearance of a black man with blond hair and green eyes and iridescent silver horns spiraling from his forehead. Brown was lounging against the wall, idly twisting the waxed points of his handlebar, preparing to play the bad cop; Navas, his head lit from behind by the merest suggestion of a halo, was, of course, in the role of the good cop. “Now we could get you an attorney, Mr. Stevens,” he was saying. “All you have to do is tell me that you want legal representation. But that would make this a formal situation. Right now I have leeway. I can listen to what you have to say and make up my own mind. But with a lawyer here—well, that would change things. We would have to follow procedure.”