Eye and Talon (7 page)

She'd remembered to bring her ring of swipe cards with her; she needed them to get into the freezer compartment of the wall fridge.
This is going to be a tough one
— that conviction had come over her, even before the surresper had come up blank on the regulation ID process.
Better fortify myself.
When the LEDs of the freezer locks had blinked to green, Iris opened it and took out the unmarked cylinder of black-market coffee. It wasn't the caffeine levels, way above what the UN's health police allowed, that she wanted so much as the reaffirmed knowledge that she had pulled off tough jobs in the past, and had raked in enough bounties that she could afford a pricey, sold-by-thegram luxury like this.

'Can I have some?' The chat perched on the back of the chair, its eyes widened into a hopeful expression. 'Please?'

'Sure.' A thimbleful was all it took to hop the little construct up more than it already was. Any more than that would blow out the tiny teflon-valved heart in its chest. 'You watch it for me, okay?'

At the sink end of the kitchen module's countertop, Iris carefully defurred and sterilized the interior of her favorite yellow mug, an only slightly chipped antique that read BEANS AND MACHINES - SEATTLE around the side. It'd been a while since she had spent any major relaxing time in the apartment; the last two jobs, the Enesque rep and the one before him, had been practically back to back, with no break between. That was her preferred mode of operating, to stay on the hunt as long as possible, pushing the fatigue barrier away with pure strength of will. But it did tend to shoot the crap out of her housekeeping; entropy moved into the place during her extended absences, and silted the corners with gray, ageless dust.

As her hands busied themselves in the sink, Iris looked into the tiny mirror, spattered with minute dots of toothpaste and hazed with steam, that she'd hung there when she'd first moved in. She wiped it dear with her sleeve and leaned closer to her image, studying it as she had the one in the illusory room summoned by the surresper.

'Lookin' good,' Iris whispered to herself. The city hadn't crept under her skin yet, loosening the threadlike sinews that connected her flesh to the bones beneath.
Still young and hard
. She smiled and nodded. Most people in LA looked as if they had been chewed on by invisible teeth, then spat out, more or less in one piece. Even street punks and trench cases, whole tribes younger than her, and the glossy retro strippers down in the clubs — under the subdermal thin-film silicone frosting of both the real females and the artful transies, the rot had nearly always set in; you could see it in their eyes. This town aged people, as though there were an epidemic of Methuselah Syndrome rolling down the streets; it was a wonder that anyone, human or otherwise, had more than a four-year lifespan.

Maybe I'll get out
, thought Iris.
Before I'm that way, too
.

She carried the coffee back into the apartment's front room, and into the illusory chamber that filled it for the time being. 'Results?'

'Process terminated,' replied the surresper's overly calm voice, 'when exact match found. Male subject in view is identified as one Doctor Eldon Tyrell.'

Iris managed to find the arm of the recliner and sat down on it. 'Details?' As she sipped at the cup, the chat wandered from the kitchen module, paws wiping its ration of coffee from the round cheeks of its face.

'Former CEO of Tyrell Corporation. Now deceased.'

She wasn't surprised. 'Mode of death?'

'Homicide.' The word as uninflected by emotion as any other in the surresper's vocabulary. 'Perp conclusively identified as one Roy Batty, escaped replicant. Perp retired.'

Cop talk. Humans were murdered, but replicants were retired. Both were equally dead afterwards. Iris wondered which blade runner had gotten the bounty for this Batty job.
Must've been a tough one
, she figured. If the replicant had managed to penetrate the security systems of a major outfit like the Tyrell Corporation, he would've had to have been smarter — and more dangerous — than the average escapee.
Whoever took him down
, thought Iris,
should've gotten a bonus
. When she got some free time — hardly likely — she'd have to root around in the department records and find out which one of her colleagues it had been.

So the owl had very likely belonged to Dr Tyrell; a personal pet, funded as a corporate write-off, like the high-ceilinged room's other expensive furnishings, no doubt. Typical exec perk. But if the good doctor was dead, then it wasn't him wanting the owl back. Somebody else at the Tyrell Corporation, maybe; they could probably sell off the bird and make enough to meet the company's payroll for a couple of weeks. But it was her understanding that the Tyrell Corporation was as dead as the doctor who had run it. So there wouldn't be anybody left at the company who'd want to get such a valuable asset back into its possession. Which meant that some third party knew about the creature, knew what it was worth, and naturally wanted to grab it. But if they were using official police channels to track the owl down, instead of going through some private operation, they must have some powerful political connections.
Not
, figured Iris,
the kind of people you want to screw around with
.

The job was getting uglier, and more interesting, at the same time. Which must have been why her boss Meyer had given it to her, rather than some lesser-skilled blade runner. The feeling grew larger inside her gut that the missing owl had more importance than just its money value to black-market real animal dealers and collectors. Which also meant that the process of tracking it down might have some deeper and darker risks attached to it; if somebody as protected as the owl's original owner, the late Dr Eldon Tyrell, could get himself iced, then the chances were good that the creature was flying around out there in the night, over some dangerous territory.

Cool
, thought Iris, nodding to herself. Maybe Meyer really was her pal, after all. This wasn't some hoke job that he'd shuffled off onto her; it was starting to smell like something much bigger. Which meant that there'd be all the more bonus points for her, maybe not in the form of hard cash money, but in recognition from both the higher-ups in the department and from the invisible, string-pulling forces that they served —
if
she pulled it off.

'Don't worry.' She turned her thin smile toward the frozen image of the owl sitting on its perch, circular yellow gaze as avid as before. 'I'll find you, all right. You can count on it.'

The chat echoed her self-confidence pump, bobbing itself up and down in a corner of the room. 'Yeah! You can do it! Know you can!'

Iris ignored the chat. 'Resume action,' she instructed the surresper. 'Normal speed.'

Dr Eldon Tyrell's resurrected image, with its unpleasant partial smile, passed by Iris. She watched as the image carried the silver bowl in its hands over to the antique writing desk, and set it dawn. The image looked over its shoulder, still smiling, toward the owl on its perch. For a moment, a tiny spark of something close to recognition passed between the two images, as though each saw in the other's magnified eyes its own reflection.

The man's image spoke aloud. 'Hungry?' The recorded voice struck Iris as being as mockingly cruel as the smile on Tyrell's face.

Iris had a good idea of what was going to happen next. Feeding time.

She wasn't disappointed. An artificial owl could be kept going on all sorts of things, including a fresh set of batteries inserted under some feathered hatch between its wings. But a living one had a predator's appetite, for other, smaller living things. She didn't need the surresper's encyclopedic function to tell her that. It was the way of the world, this one or any other.

She saw the image of the owl rising higher on its perch, spreading its broad wings partway open, then settling them tapelike around itself again. The aroused hunger was apparent.

That's an expensive meal
, thought Iris; she watched as Tyrell's image lifted a white rat by its pink, hairless tail from the silver bowl. The gray and brown vermin that scuttled through the strata of LA's rubbish-filled alleys weren't worth much, but one like that, a real one, could command a good price among the dealers at the souk. The white rat was bent into a soft C shape by its pink feet having been bound together by a tight circle of what looked to be nylon thread. A high-pitched, terrified and terrifying squeal sounded in both the illusory room and Iris's surrounding apartment as the dangling creature wriggled and jerked like a hectic, spring-driven toy.

'Is this what you want? Hm?' Tyrell lifted the struggling white rat higher. The owl on the other side of the paneled room responded by leaning hungrily forward on its perch, a stroke of its outfurled wings maintaining its balance.

I don't need to see this
, thought Iris.

With a snip of a tiny pair of scissors from the writing desk's top drawer, the image of Dr Tyrell cut the circlet of thread around the white rat's feet. Its frantic gyrations turned wilder, almost pulling the hairless tail from Tyrell's grasp.

With a flick of his hand, Tyrell tossed the white rat into the center of the room. The rat's image landed a few inches away from the tips of Iris's boots and froze in place, its bright red beadlike eyes fastened on what it had spotted across the illusory space.

'Run,' Iris spoke aloud, though she knew it would do no good. 'Under the desk.' What she was watching happen had already happened. 'It won't catch you there.' And what had happened couldn't be changed.

She turned her own gaze, hearing the audible displacement of air as the owl's image spread its great wings and leapt from its perch. The owl appeared to fill the center of the room, with no magnification necessary from the surresper that had summoned it into being. Its claws spread apart, into the perfect machinery of capture and death. Beneath the owl's swift shadow, the white rat crouched down, too far into the paralysis of fear to do otherwise.

'Okay, stop.' Iris closed her eyes. 'I mean, freeze. Freeze action.' She didn't open them as she gave more instructions to the surresper. 'Search for other discrete sequences, time separate from current display.'

The apartment was silent for a moment, as the surresper probed the rest of the data she had fed into its soft mouth. 'Found,' it announced at last. 'One sequence. Commence playback?'

'Sure.' Whatever it was, it couldn't be worse than the coldly smiling Dr Eldon Tyrell. 'Commence.'

Another illusory room snapped into perceived existence, laid over the more solid walls of Iris's apartment. It looked just as luxurious, dipped in the Tyrell Corporation's endless well of money. The image of a man stood waiting in the center of the room; younger than Tyrell, as just about anybody living would be. A long, shabby-looking coat, that he'd probably slept in on more than one occasion, dark hair cropped close, almost to a buzz coat, utilitarian and unfussed with; not bad-looking, Iris judged, with a small, faded scar on one side of his chin, and intense, angry eyes. His disgruntled, world-sick expression made him appear harder and more mean-spirited than he really was. Iris smiled to herself, spotting the thinness of the man's tough-guy façade.
Scratch a cynic
, she thought,
and wound a romantic
. She didn't bleed that particular way, herself.

She could see where it would've been a problem for this guy, whoever he was or had been. The image standing in the center of the newly summoned illusory room was obviously a cop; even without spotting the bulge of his high-calibered gun under his coat, Iris had been sure of that much. And a cop with soft notions about the world, about what could and couldn't be expected in it, was already bound hand and foot to the breaking arc of the Wambaugh Curve. This one was already burnt out; even with only the optical sensory data, and no actual physical presence to work from, Iris could just about smell it on him.
Must've reached his limit
. Iris peered closer at the man's image, as though she were a coroner examining a specimen stood upright on a vertical slab.
But kept going, anyway
. She frowned; it usually took a lot of pressure to get some curve casualty like this out on the job again.
Somebody in the department put the screws to him
. Who?

'Freeze image,' Iris instructed the surresper. 'ID male subject in immediate view.'

The answer was in the open-access files, corning back at her within milliseconds. 'Last name of male subject,' the surresper spoke flatly, 'is Deckard. First name, Rick.'

'LAPD?'

'Affirmative. Male subject, Deckard, Rick, last known employment with Los Angeles Police Department.'

Last known?
Something had happened to the poor bastard. Things usually did, when a burnt-out case didn't care what happened to him. 'What division?'

'Male subject, Deckard, Rick — attached to replicant escapee, detection and interception.'

Iris hadn't been expecting that. 'This guy's a blade runner?'

'Slang designate recognized for indicated departmental division.' The surresper's vocabulary parsing functions stepped through the rest of their logic. 'Thus, affirmative.'

Thought I knew them all
. Iris put the tip of her forefinger to her lips, mulling over this revelation. She was familiar with all the currently active blade runners, inasmuch as they represented the competition she needed to stay on top of. And the inactives, the dead or no longer functional — either burn-outs or those who had managed to get themselves safely promoted or transferred out of danger, usually in the form of sticking the barrels of their own guns into their mouths were in her mental database as well. Or so she had thought. But this Deckard person was an unknown, a blank in that record. Which meant that she had either overlooked him somehow — she immediately dismissed that possibility — or something else had happened to him, a data erasure of some kind. And it had happened at the division level, figured Iris, instead of farther up; if the deliberate hole in the data had been created by a departmental action, by the real and spooky powers above her boss Meyer, then they would have taken out this Deckard's regulation profile as well, instead of leaving his name and divisional affiliation behind to ID him with.