Necropolis (14 page)

They burst into laughter. “.25
caliber
?” The driver cackled. “Man, you’re slow, even for a stiff.”

Armitage aimed the weapon out the window. The muzzle flashed. A passing trash can became a molten heap of aluminum, just like that. I gaped.

“Try 25 terrahertz.” He handed the gun back to me. I examined it, stunned.
 

“Seven round chamber,” explained Armitage.

“Rounds? Rounds of what?” I racked the slide and ejected the shell. A lozenge dropped into my hand, containing some kind of churning amber fire inside.

“Plasma,” the man said. “Ionized from a photonic hydrogen cell in the core.”
 

It looked like an antique. I squeezed the casing of the “bullet” and felt my fingers tingle. I was so far out of my element that I wanted to scream. A dead
sotto
capo
I could handle. Guns that fired plasma bullets… “I really need to study that dickenjane,” I murmured.
 

“Instead of chasing after missing geneticists?”

So that was it.
Thanks, Bart. This gig has put me on every dance card in town
.

“You keep tabs on all reebs this close?” I asked. “Or just ones that used to be cops?”

“You always answer a question with a question?”

I smiled. “Does that bother you?”

Armitage grunted, maybe in amusement, maybe irritation. “The only reebs I tail are ones who stick their noses where they don’t belong.”

I groaned. “Priceless! ‘Stick their noses where they don’t belong.’ It’s like I died and went to B-movie purgatory. ‘They Cliché By Night.’ I suppose you’re gonna tell me to never show my face in town again or I’ll wind up sleeping with the fishes in a pair of cement overshoes, right?”

“Just tell me what you got on Crandall, smartass.”

“If I don’t?”

Armitage’s crags reassembled into a grin. “The cement’s in the trunk.”

15

GIORDI

G
iordi Lyatsky downed the shot in a single gulp. He scowled at the saggy-titted waitress for another.

He’d been counting on the booze to lift his spirits, but he’d slipped into a grumpy rehash of his life instead. Every fucked-up thing that had ever happened to him rose as a specter.

Starting with how he got here. Talk about bad luck. When the Shift had hit, he’d been nineteen and living in Brooklyn for only a few weeks, sleeping on the floor of his buddy Vitali’s Little Odessa apartment. Vitali was a former cellmate from the Novoulyanovsk high security labor camp. They’d been released together and decided there was less risk—and less hard time—boosting cars in the West. So they’d crossed into the U.S. disguised as fertilizer, then spent their days on the boardwalk, drinking, whoring and planning their next score.
 

Then came the Dark Eighteen. Giordi was trapped here, probably forever. Unbelievable. He’d come from the Ukraine looking for the fabled American freedom and ended up in a gulag more inescapable than anything Stalin could have ever dreamed up.

Fuck it. No use crying over spoiled borscht
.
 

Now, forty years later, he’d made a nice little rep for himself among the Brighton Beach
mafiya
. Okay, he was a little fish, but he had juice on the street. Nobody screwed with him. Things weren’t any better back in the EU anyway. He’d heard stories about cannibalism. And with the thick roll of bills in his pocket, he’d finally started to feel like maybe Necropolis wasn’t so bad after all.

Lately, though, things had gotten tough. The NPD and Surazal were brutal. Their raids on his smuggling had gotten devastatingly effective. Giordi had lost three shipments in the past couple months alone, and he was feeling the heat from upstairs. His bosses had no idea how difficult it was to get contraband into this godforsaken place. The forged documents, the Blister-point payoffs, the search inhibitor fields. It’d be easier to fly to the moon. But all they wanted were results, and results were getting more and more difficult to deliver.
 

He knew the
organizatsya
’s method of firing disappointing employees. A week ago, he’d started sleeping with a loaded trey-eight under his pillow.
 

Today, he’d lost another cargo container to the police. Fourteen thousand pairs of sneakers, gone. It was a disaster. So right now all he wanted to do was sit at his table in this Coney Island Avenue bar, drink Stoli, nibble at a fried
pirozhki
, and forget everything. Because tomorrow, he was going to have to report the loss, and he dreaded it to his marrow.

When he noticed the woman staring at him from the bar, he assumed it was a mistake. Maybe she’d mistaken him for somebody she knew. But she kept staring, direct enough to dispel that theory.
 

It couldn’t be his looks. He was a bulldog, squat and pug-nosed. His head was shaved and he had the usual proliferation of prison tats—no ladies man. He got snatch on a regular basis, but it was through fear and respect of his position, not charm. Or usually, he thought morosely, through payment.

But she kept staring at him. She was blatant. And pretty. Small, dark hair, big headlights. She was packed into some kind of expensive skin-tight dress, with a leather jacket over top. A designer jacket, he noticed. That was out of place. He’d heard about rich chickadees who cruised dives like this, looking for rough trade. Maybe this was one of them.

A minute later she came over with her drink. “Join you?” she said simply.

He grunted and swept a calloused hand to the other chair. She settled in next to him, smiling with moist plum lips. He realized that she was no older than fifteen. A reeb. Jackpot! There was nothing better than forty years of expertise crammed into a fresh teen body.
 

“You’re Russian?” she asked, twirling her swizzle stick.

“Ukrainian,” he replied. “Giordi.”

“Loretta,” she said, and offered her hand. He took it. She slipped her other palm over his, rubbing his coarse skin. It was like touching an oak tree. “Worker’s hands.” There was a glint of excitement in her eyes. He didn’t know how to reply, so he simply shrugged again. She released him, and he downed his vodka.
 

“This place stinks,” she said.

He laughed. Laughing didn’t look natural on him. His lips curled awkwardly around his teeth like snarling. But she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she looked delighted. She returned his smile.
 

It put him off balance, and suddenly he was darkly angry. He was being played like some street rat. Somebody she thought she could manipulate into her lower-class fantasy. He took a deep breath.
So she’s slumming. So what? You can play along.
 

“You’ve had a hard life,” she said.

“Not like you,” he replied.
 

The woman winked. “There are different kinds of hard.” Then he felt her hand under the table, between his legs. “Mmmm,” she said. She fumbled briefly with his fly. He gasped as her cool, dry fingers curled around him.
 

She leaned in to his ear. “I’ve got a flivver outside.”

He nodded, not trusting his voice to work properly.

16

DONNER

T
he Rolls tooled slowly along the East River docks. The area was a conglomeration of shops, bars and warehouses. We moved past Peck Slip, past ancient warehouses with gambreled roofs and dormer windows. The activity here was subdued, hidden. On the water, scows were filled with refuse. Dock-side, trucks were being loaded with merchandise and machine-shops whirred and clanked. I could smell fresh-cut wood from a lumberyard. The slip’s steel pylons were covered in neon graffiti: “Re-kill the re-born!” and the ubiquitous “Maury lives!” Beyond the chipped cement barriers, gray water burbled sluggishly. Fishing was again a major industry, as anyone with a pole could tell you. Reborn fish were as tasty as normal ones. The bizarre fact that some of the carp currently in the East River might’ve watched battleships set off for Nazi-occupied France didn’t slow the hungry poor down one little bit.

Then we were in a darker area, where the moon was a dim blue hope and the street was lit by garbage fires. The flames danced unevenly along the piers, and more often than not the huddled bundles of rags turned out to be human-shaped. Their shadowed faces all contained the same expression. Waiting to be hurt. It could have been 1854 instead of 2054. Except these weren’t immigrants, and the gangs that roamed these streets weren’t the Bowery Boys.

In the car, I smoked and ignored my captors’ glares. The trouble I’d given them constituted unfinished business. They weren’t likely to forgive and forget.
 

Armitage was shaking his head at my brief briefing. “You haven’t turned up squat.”

“I just started this morning,” I replied. “Kidnap me again a couple days from now.”

“Maybe we will,” was the reply from next to me.

“Maybe I’ll break your nose again.”

“Mother
fucker
!”
 

The muscles in Broken Nose’s arms quivered, barely restrained. Armitage stared at me a moment, trying to make up his mind about something. Then he nodded to Jelly Legs, who mumbled a couple colorful curses and pulled a leather valise from the floorboard.

Inside were all kinds of toys. Armitage pointed to each one as it was displayed. “This is a digital keycode generator for standard PIN key codes and access panels. Also a hackencrack program to crash the building’s AI. The proximity alert, you strap on your thigh. A grapple pistol. Some other odds and ends. A flashlight, even a good, old-fashioned crowbar. Everything the modern cat burglar needs.”

“And it ain’t even my birthday,” I quipped, but now I was really feeling trapped.
 

I’d assumed this crew had something to do with Crandall’s disappearance. The street snatch was to keep me from digging any deeper. But these tools… What the hell was going on?

“You want to get into that lab, right?” said Armitage.

Shit.
 

“You’re saying you don’t?” he pressed. “It’s the last place Crandall was seen. Gavin didn’t tell you shit. If it was me, I’d want to check the place out.”

“The cops already did.”

Armitage chuckled. “The cops. Right.”

“You sure seem to know a lot about this.”

“We keep up with current events,” deadpanned the Weasel.

I looked thoughtful. “So what happened? You leave behind a mess when you snatched Crandall? Something you need me to clean up?”

“Us? Grab the doc?” Nose chortled. “I thought this guy was supposed to be smart.”

It was Armitage’s turn to be quiet. I tried again. “Oh, I get it. You want in on the action! A couple good recipes for genetic soup.”

“We’re just concerned citizens.”

“Yeah,” sneered Jelly Legs. “We just wanna help.”

“Didn’t know I had friends in high places,” I said quietly.

“You don’t, deadhead. You don’t have a choice, either.”

“How’s that, once I’m out of this car?” I grinned at Broken Nose. “Beautiful here gonna be my chaperone?”

Armitage exhaled long and slow. He ran a hand down his wrinkled tie. “Bartholomew Hennessey. Your old partner.”

It took both Nose and Jelly Legs to hold me back. “You fucking touch one hair on that old man’s head and I’ll send you straight to—”

Another tap from the neuralizer. I drooled on myself for about ten seconds, then I could move enough to moan.
 

“You’re a tough guy,” said Armitage. “I appreciate that. But this town ain’t yours anymore. You don’t know the landmarks, you can’t spot the moves, you got no backup. I would’ve had more trouble snatching a preschooler than you gave me. So shut the fuck up and listen. You’re going into that lab for us. I don’t need to give you a fucking reason. All you need to know is that if you don’t do it soon, people are going to start dying.”

“Do I look like a B&E man to you? I’ll set off every alarm in town.”

“There’s a spot in the courtyard, southwest corner. Approach it from 23rd. At twelve-fourteen AM every night, the morphinium shell will move to a point where a two meter space contracts inside the range of the digital eyes. It’s a blind spot, an oversight. But it only lasts a couple minutes. That’s your way in. You hear me? Twelve-fourteen.”

The car pulled to a stop. I went to move out, but Armitage put a hand on my shoulder. When I turned to look at him, his face maybe softened a fraction. “Look. Our interests converge. We both have questions need answered. Do this, and maybe we both come out ahead.”

“Who the hell are you, Armitage? What’s going on?”

The Nose shoved opened the door. I didn’t need to be asked twice. I stepped onto the curb, genuinely shocked to still be in one piece. Armitage leaned out his window. He looked me up and down one more time, but the verdict was a mystery.

“I like the wisecracks,” he said. “Very Raymond Chandler—”
 

“You should talk.”

“—But it’ll take a lot more next time to impress me.”

He disappeared back into front seat gloom. The three goons flipped me off in unison and slid away on a cushion of electric air.