Nightside CIty (22 page)

Anyway, Mishima had a lot of bucks invested
in me, and it wasn’t because he actually expected me to pay him
back for the eye or anything else—he knew how broke I was. At
least, he said he did, but I suspected he’d underestimated it a
bit. In any case, he knew I couldn’t reimburse him for anything.
No, what he said he really wanted was just to know what the hell
was going on. He said that was worth more to him than the
money.

I could understand that. I wasn’t sure I
believed it of him, and I thought he might be gambling on buying a
share of a lucrative bit of business, but I could understand his
curiosity. Even so, even if it
was
just curiosity and there
wasn’t any admixture of greed, I still wasn’t too sure I really
wanted to tell him everything.

I said so.

I thought he’d be pissed at that, after he’d
gone and told me that whole story, but he wasn’t, or if he was he
didn’t show it. He was calm and reasonable instead.

“Look,” he said, “you’re in trouble, Hsing.
Somebody tried to kill you. The only reason they didn’t manage it
is because I got myself involved. Whoever it was, and whatever you
did to them, if they find out you’re alive they’ll probably try
again. And this time, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I won’t
be there to help.”

“I know that,” I said. I tried not to sound
defensive.

“Do you?” He pantomimed spitting in
disgust—if he’d really spat the hospital would probably have thrown
him out. “Look, I can tell people where you are and leave you to
take care of yourself, or if you play along I can keep my secrets
to myself and even get you some guards. My treat—I won’t put them
on your bill.”

“Generous of you,” I said sarcastically.

He ignored that. “Look, you know,” he said,
“you’ve impressed me. When you caught that grithead at the
Starshine it ticked me off, I admit—I thought you’d been lucky,
cutting in ahead of me, and that you’d been poking in where you had
no business. It didn’t look ethical, where I was already on it. But
it was a good piece of work. And you’ve been surviving out in the
burbs on nothing for years, and that must be damn near impossible.
And now you’ve latched onto something big and you can’t handle it
by yourself.”

He paused there, and I interrupted him. “Who
says I can’t handle it?” I snapped.

“
I
say so,” he snapped right back.
“The guy who found you frying on the dayside. Sure, you’d crawled
halfway back, but you weren’t going to make it, Hsing, and you know
that as well as I do. You were dead if I hadn’t found you.”

He paused for a minute, staring at me, and
then added, “Hell, most people would have been dead already. You’re
tough, I’ll give you that. Your
symbiote
died, for
chrissake! I’ve seen them pump healthy symbiotes out of miners dead
for a week, but you walked yours to its death and you’re still
breathing! Damn!” He shook his head in apparent disbelief. Then he
took a breath and went on, “You got me off the subject, though.
What I was going to say was that I can see where you don’t want to
tell me everything and then let us go on separately. You’d be
worried I’d be screwing you over, and I’d be worried about what you
were doing, too. I don’t want that. Instead I want to offer you a
partnership on this case of yours, whatever it is—the two of us
working it together, instead of competing. We split everything
even, and we forget about the eye and the medical bills. Hell, if
it works out maybe we can keep it going—Mishima and Hsing,
Confidential Investigations. How’s that sound?”

“Like a cheap vid entertainment,” I said, but
I didn’t mean it. The truth is that it sounded pretty good. I was
tired of trying to do everything on my own, all the time, and as
Big Jim’s partner I figured I’d be able to work in the Trap
again.

But then I remembered that unless Nakada’s
scheme worked, there wouldn’t be any work in the Trap in a few
years. There wouldn’t be any
people
in the Trap. It would
all be in daylight.

I’d had enough daylight to last me forever. I
didn’t need any more. I wanted the city to stay on the nightside.
The only chance I had of getting that had nothing to do with
Mishima; it was up to the Ipsy.

And I still didn’t know why Lee and Orchid
and Rigmus had tried to kill me. And I didn’t know whether Nakada’s
stunt had a chance of working.

And I didn’t see any money in the case, no
matter what happened. If I went any further with Mishima I had to
let him know that.

“Hey,” I said, “I’ll let you in on one
secret, anyway. I’ll tell you how much my fee is on this job that’s
nearly gotten me killed and cost you a few dozen kilobucks. Then
you can tell me whether that partnership offer is still good,
whether you want a piece of the action, or whether you’d rather
just dump me back on the dayside.”

“All right,” he said, nodding. “I’ll log on.
What’s the fee?”

“Two hundred and five credits. Flat fee, no
expenses, no contingencies.” I kept my face deadpan.

He stared for a minute, then slowly grinned
at me.

“Charity work, Hsing? For those squatters? Is
that what all that crap about rent collectors was about?”

“You got it,” I said.

“Squatters? God, Hsing, you almost got killed
for a bunch of squatters?” The grin broadened.

“Hey,” I said, “out in the burbs I take what
I can get.” I grinned back.

His grin grew wider, and then he chuckled,
and then he burst out laughing, leaning back, roaring with
laughter, so that the chair had to struggled and squirm to keep him
from falling.

I was glad to see that. I was pleased that he
was taking it that way, as something to laugh at. After all, it was
costing him one hell of a lot of money, for the eye and the rescue
and the medical bills.

So I was glad he was laughing, instead of
threatening to take it all out of me somehow.

For myself, I didn’t laugh. Oh, I saw the
humor in it, certainly, but I was a little too close to laugh at
it. It wasn’t just money for me; somebody had tried to kill me. I
was lying there in a hospital, up to my bald little head in debt,
and I could see the humor, but I wasn’t ready to laugh at anything
yet.

“Oh, Hsing,” he said, “I’m going to enjoy
working with you— if it doesn’t bankrupt me!”

I grinned, and I managed to laugh with him a
little after all, and it was at least partly genuine.

Part of it was relief at Mishima’s reaction.
Part of it was something more.

I thought I would enjoy working with him,
too. I’d worked alone long enough.

I might live longer with a back-up.

We laughed and bantered for a while, but eventually
we got back to business. He still wanted to know what the case was,
and how the hell a two-hundred-buck job had got me stranded on the
dayside.

“Someone was trying to collect rent from all
the squatters in the West End,” I told him. “They wanted me to stop
it, keep them from being evicted.”

“So?” he said. “That’s a simple shakedown.
You call the cops, they take care of it. If they don’t, you hire
muscle. Hsing, you aren’t muscle. You’re tough, I won’t argue that,
but you’re small, and up until now you worked alone. Muscle can’t
work alone; a bullet or a needle can kill anybody. So why’d they
come to you?”

“First off,” I said, “they
did
call
the cops, more or less. They called the City, anyway. The rent
collectors were legit; they really were working for the new
owners.”

Mishima blinked at me. “
What
new
owners?” he demanded. “Dawn’s coming, Hsing; who’d be buying?”

“
That
,” I said, “is what the squatters
hired me to find out. And no, they didn’t try hiring muscle; they
couldn’t afford it. Not when the collectors looked legal. They
might have had to take on the cops. Besides, I was a lot
cheaper.”

He stared at me for a moment. “All right,” he
said. “So that was the job? Find out who the new owners are?”

“Find out, and stop them from charging rents
or evicting the squatters,” I explained.

“All right, then,” he said. “What did you
find out?”

“I found out that somebody—one person, using
fifteen names—had bought up most of the West End. Listen, Mishima,
are you sure you want in on this?”

“Yeah, of course I’m sure,” he said. “Who was
it?”

“Don’t be so sure, damn it,” I told him.
“Remember, this is the case that got me dumped on the dayside.”

“I hadn’t forgotten that, Hsing,” he said. “I
can take care of myself. Now, who the hell was it?”

I hated telling him. It was like giving up a
piece of myself. I owed him, though, and I had to tell him.

“Sayuri Nakada,” I said.

He blinked again. “No shit,” he said, staring
at me. “Nakada’s buying the West End?”

I nodded.

“Why?” he asked.

I called to a service module in the back wall
for a drink of water, which slid out on a floater. I sipped that
down slowly before I answered.

“That’s where it gets tricky,” I said. “I
found an answer, but it may not be right, and it gets messy from
here on. I don’t know everything I’d like to.”

“Go on,” he said.

I was past the worst part, giving up Nakada’s
name. The rest wasn’t that much. I told him, “Nakada has hired a
bunch of the brains—the human ones—at the Ipsy to stop Nightside
City from crossing onto the dayside. She really thinks they can do
it.”

He considered that. “She does?” he asked.

“Yes, she does,” I said.

“Can they?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “Probably
not. I’ll get to that.”

He nodded. “Go on.”

I went on. “Apparently, Paulie Orchid got her
together with them—you know him?”

Mishima nodded again, and said, “I’ve heard
of him.”

I continued, “I don’t know whose idea it was
originally, whether it was Nakada or Orchid or this person Lee at
the Ipsy who came up with the whole thing. I hadn’t gotten that
far. I had talked to Nakada, and gotten the story from her, that
the crew at the Ipsy was going to set off a fusion charge that
would stop Epimetheus right where it is, before it rotated the city
past the terminator. She’d have bought up as much of the city as
possible, at cheap dawn’s-coming prices, and would be running
smooth after the bang, when dawn isn’t coming any more and land
values head for high orbit. Simple enough, right?”

Mishima didn’t answer. I went on, “Then I
went over to the Ipsy to get some details, because the way Nakada
told it, with just one big fusion charge, it not only wouldn’t
work, it
obviously
wouldn’t work, so obviously that nobody
but an idiot like Sayuri Nakada could take it seriously. If they
tried it the way she described it, they’d probably wreck the whole
city, and without even slowing down the sunrise. I figured Nakada
had it wrong. But the people at the Ipsy wouldn’t talk to me—I
don’t mean they took convincing, or that they were hostile, I mean
they wouldn’t talk, they wouldn’t even tell me why they wouldn’t
talk. I mean, even when I waved a gun around and acted dangerous,
they said nothing, absolutely nothing. So after I got tired of the
silent treatment I threatened to put everything I knew on the nets,
which I figured would crash their whole system, or at the very
least cut Nakada’s profits, but they were
still
not talking,
which seemed crazy. Finally, I got an agreement that they’d talk it
over and get back to me in two hours—but instead they horsed me
with a neural interrupt, and Orchid and his buddy Bobo Rigmus paid
me that little visit you saw.”

I shrugged. “And that’s it.”

Mishima considered that for a long minute.
“Either I missed something, or that’s just crazy,” he said. “Why’d
they try to kill you? Hell, why didn’t they just tell you what you
wanted to know? Didn’t they try and buy you off first, or
anything?”

“Nope.” I shook my head emphatically. “Never
offered me a buck.”

“But that’s haywire!”

“I know it is,” I said.

Mishima sat back to think matters over. I lay
back to let him. I was tired; I might be healed, but that didn’t
mean I was healthy. I was horribly aware of the absence of my
symbiote; without it, I could catch diseases, I could be seriously
injured in stupid little accidents, I’d take weeks to heal up if I
damaged myself. And I didn’t have much of a reserve of strength of
my own, any more.

I closed my eyes and rested for a moment.
Then Mishima cleared his throat, and I looked up at him again.

“So you blew my spy-eye down to keep me from
seeing you talk to Nakada?” he asked.

I nodded. I hadn’t mentioned that, but he was
smart enough to work it out for himself. It didn’t seem
important.

“I don’t know about that, Hsing. I mean,
yeah, you were probably smart to try and keep me from finding out
Nakada was involved, but shooting the eye just got me mad.”

I shrugged. “I had a point to make. I don’t
take kindly to that sort of harassment.”

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Yeah, I can see
that. Okay. I still don’t like it, but I see your point.” He went
on considering my story, and I rested a little more.

“So why were you after all the details of
Nakada’s little scheme?” he asked. “I mean, all that stuff at the
Ipsy—what did that have to do with the squatters’ rents?”

“Nothing,” I said, opening my eyes. “But if
somebody’s going to wreck the city, I want to know about it.” It
struck me that he was worrying about all the wrong details. I’d
gotten beyond worrying about the squatters; I was only concerned
with whether Doc Lee and his buddies were going to crash the whole
city.

“The city’s doomed anyway,” Mishima pointed
out.

“Yeah,” I said, getting a little annoyed,
“but if I’m still here when they wreck it I could get killed.”