city blues 01 - dome city blues (46 page)

My first thought was that the room had been searched, but only the two bookshelves closest to the door had been upended.  There had been a struggle, just inside the door.

I followed the Blackhart into the hall, moving as quietly as I could, listening for any sounds that the intruder was still here.  The scent of blood hung heavy on the air.

The first door on the right led to the bedroom.  The doorframe near the latch was split.  The door had obviously been kicked open, but it was closed now.  I listened for a couple of seconds before easing the door open.  No Sonja; no Lisa; no bad guys.

The smell of blood grew stronger as I moved down the hall.

The second room on the right was the bathroom.  The door was already open.  I peeked around the corner.  Empty.

The only doorway on the left side of the hall led to the last room in the apartment, the kitchen.  I stood in the hallway and listened carefully.  I heard something, just barely louder than my own breathing, a mewling sound.  The cat?  No, it didn’t sound like a cat.

The blood-smell was powerful here.  I didn’t want to look around the corner.  I wasn’t afraid of finding the killer.  I was afraid of finding Lisa, or Sonja, or both.

I tightened my grip on the Blackhart and spun around the corner, swinging the pistol to cover the entire room.

No intruder.

Lisa sat on the floor, her back against the cabinets, face hidden in her hands.  She was weeping softly; her sobs had that low child-like keening that sometimes comes at the end of a prolonged cry, when the person’s energy is just about spent.

A long strip of cellophane tape hung from the circular florescent light above the table.  From the end of the tape dangled a sheet of paper: a note turning slowly in an unseen draft.

The table top under the note was smeared with congealing blood, the stain turning brown against the white lacquered wood.  At the center of the bloody smear lay the twisted corpse of Mr. Shoes.  The cat’s lithe gray body had been sliced from throat to tail, spilling his entrails all over the table.

I knelt down and put my hand on Lisa’s shoulder.  “Lisa...”

She flinched at my touch and nearly screamed.  She snatched her hands away from her face, and for a half-second, her eyes were wide with fear.  Then she recognized me, and she threw her arms around my neck and buried her face in my shoulder.  “Oh David... Oh God...”  She broke down into uncontrollable sobbing.

It took the better part of ten minutes to get Lisa calmed down enough to tell me what had happened.

“I... I didn’t see anyone.  I was... in the bedroom when I heard...”  She broke down again.

I held the Blackhart down and away from her; I didn’t want to holster it until I knew for certain that we were safe.  My left hand cradled Lisa’s head against my chest and stroked her hair.

Finally, she sniffed and tried again.  “The front door opened.  I heard it.  I don’t know if Sonja opened it, or if...  I don’t know; I didn’t see...”

“Okay,” I said.  “You were in your bedroom and you heard the door open.  Then what happened?”

Lisa took a deep breath.  “I heard... I don’t know, a fight.  A struggle.  Things falling over.  Glass breaking.  I... panicked.  I locked my bedroom door.  I was trying to call the police when someone started trying to break my door open.  The latch...  I could see that it wasn’t going to hold.  I ran to the door and tried to keep it shut with my body.  Something hit the door... hard.  I think I screamed... I don’t know.  And then the door flew open.  It knocked me down, and before I could get up, someone had a foot or a knee in the middle of my back.  I tried to roll over, but they stuck something in my neck.  It... burned me...
shocked
me, and I passed out.”

“Who?” I asked.  “Did you get a good look at them?”

“I didn’t see anything,” Lisa said.  “One second, the door was closed, the next I was on the floor and that electrical thing was jammed in my neck.”

Lisa glanced up at the table and began to sob again.  “My baby... My poor little baby...  He never hurt anybody.  He didn’t deserve this.”

I shook her shoulder softly.  “Lisa.  Where is Sonja?”  She didn’t answer.  I shook her a little harder.  “Lisa.  I need to know where Sonja is.”

“Gone...,” Lisa sobbed.  “Gone... and my poor little baby...”

I gently pried Lisa’s arms from around my neck and stood up.  Lisa’s hands came up to cover her face again.  On the left side of her neck were two circular blisters, twins to the ones on my own neck.  She’d been zapped by a police riot wand, way over-charged.

I looked at the body of the cat.  I’d never gotten the chance to get to know him, but the sight of his mangled little carcass added a few more grams to the weight of guilt that hung on my heart.  Maybe he was only an animal, but he was dead because I’d dragged Lisa into the middle of this thing.  Now, Sonja was gone, and a severely endangered species was one step closer to extinction.

I touched the note with the Blackhart to steady it.

AND WHY THE SEA IS BOILING HOT -

AND WHETHER PIGS HAVE WINGS.”

I dug around in my jacket pocket and came up with Bobbie Dean’s trid.  I read the four-line verse on the back, and then looked up at the note suspended from Lisa’s light fixture.  They were part of the same quotation, I was certain of it.  I tried reading the two pieces together, aloud.

“THE TIME HAS COME,” THE WALRUS SAID,

TO TALK OF MANY THINGS:

OF SHOES - AND SHIPS - AND SEALING WAX -

OF CABBAGES - AND KINGS -

AND WHY THE SEA IS BOILING HOT -

AND WHETHER PIGS HAVE WINGS.”

The verse ran over and over again in my mind.  It still sounded like gibberish to me.

I looked down at Mr. Shoes.  Two circles of slightly darker gray marked the fur on the cat’s side.  I leaned closer; the fur was singed here: pencil eraser sized burns.  Mr. Shoes had also felt the bite of the riot stunner.

I couldn’t think of a single reason to shock the poor cat
after
its guts had been ripped out, so I reasoned that it must have happened the other way around.  Mr. Shoes had been stunned, and
then
killed.  Which meant that the cat hadn’t been killed to keep him out of the way; the stunner would have done that.  Mr. Shoes had been slaughtered for the hell of it, or maybe as a message: some kind of sick punctuation mark to the note.

I looked at the dangling sheet of paper again.  The letters were perfectly formed capitals written with a heavy black laundry marker.  No handwriting expert in the world could tell a thing from textbook block letters.  There was no signature, but I had a pretty good idea who had written it.

I found a pair of suitcases in the top of Lisa’s closet.  I grabbed the smaller one and spent a few minutes packing it.  She wasn’t really up to helping, so I tried to guess my way through it.  I stuck to the basics: clothes, underwear, a robe, and most of the toiletries from her vanity and the bathroom counter top.

It took a good fifteen minutes to get Lisa down the stairs to Rieger’s BMW.  I had to wait until she could walk, because she was just too big to carry.

The damaged blower made ominous scraping sounds as I started the turbines.  I ignored the noises, and the flashing red warning tattle-tales on the instrument panel.  I pulled away from the curb and accelerated.  The car only had to hang on for a couple of more hours.

I took turns at random, constantly watching for a tail.  Lisa sobbed quietly in the passenger seat.

The scenario unfolded itself in my mind like a vid.

There is a soft knock at the door.  Sonja answers.  The killer tricks her into opening the door, maybe with a story about me: David’s in some kind of trouble; he needs help.  When the door is open, the killer makes a grab for her.  They struggle, but the stun wand tips the balance.  Sonja is down, and the killer enters the apartment.

He forces his way into Lisa’s bedroom.  The killer takes her down with the stun wand.

At some point, Mr. Shoes enters the fray, and gets zapped for his trouble.  The killer makes a special effort to eviscerate him.

I played the scene out three or four different ways.  Maybe the killer picked the lock and Sonja rushed to the door to jam it closed.  Maybe Mr. Shoes tried to hide instead of fight.  The details didn’t matter much.

In my mind, the killer was still without a face.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make myself see John attacking Lisa or Sonja.

And my mind’s eye refused to form a picture of my friend butchering a helpless animal.  But somebody had done it, just like somebody had carved up Elaine Carerra and Christine Clark, and all those other little girls.  And, like Jackal said, all of the arrows pointed the same way.

After twenty minutes, I was confident that we weren’t being followed.  I pulled into a cheap motel and registered Lisa under the name of Shirley Conrad.

Lisa wasn’t crazy about the idea.  She sniffed and put on a brave face.  “I don’t want to stay here,” she said.

“You can’t go home yet,” I said.  “You’re not safe there.  Not until I get this straightened out.”

“I want to go with you,” Lisa said.

I shook my head.  “Not this time.  Not where I’m going.”

I walked to the door.  “Keep this locked until I come back.”

“What if you... don’t come back?”

“Then wait a couple of days and go home.  The people that did this are only interested in you as a way to get to me.  If I’m out of the picture, they’ll lose interest in you.”

Lisa stared at me as if trying to memorize my face.  “You’ll be okay?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I’ll be fine.”

I winked at her and closed the door.

I drove west to the 405 and then south to the Culver City vehicle lock at the southern end of Dome 13.  The ninety seconds that it took to cycle through the lock gave me a chance to think.  I was reacting again, letting someone else goad me into action before I was ready.

What was I going to do?  Knock on the front door of Neuro-Tech and demand John’s unconditional surrender?  How about the sentry robots, and the installed security systems?  John’s AI made no secret of its ability to deliver an “immediate and lethal response.”

The AI had to be taken out of the equation, but how?  My first thought was to shut down the power to the building, but I didn’t have any idea of how to go about it.  I’d have to locate someone with the right kind of technical skills, and with a price on my head, shopping for new friends seemed like a bad idea.

A virus might do the trick.  But it would have to be a real show-stopper of a virus, one that could kill an AI, or at least shut it down cold for a few hours.

I smiled when it came to me.  If his bragging was anything to go by, Surf might already have something that would do the trick.  According to him, his new virus would ‘crack a hardened AI like a walnut.’

The doors at the far end of the lock slid open.  I drove out of the lock and left the domes behind for the second time that night.