No Dogs in Philly (10 page)

They climbed down three stories of dilapidated
stairs and rickety ladders. The building was occupied in the lower
floors, ruined but clean, and with the green vines everywhere with
the white flowers—maybe that was the only thing keeping the
building up. They stopped on the thirtieth floor—fuck that had been
a climb—where a heavy scent of cooking vegetables filled the air.
The smell made her mouth water; all she’d had was that stick of
Chew 20 and half a liter of bourbon. Her stomach growled. Hemu lead
her to a line of scraggly-looking men and women and handed her a
bowl carved of wood. They followed the line to a huge pot,
repurposed from an industrial container of some sort, full of
bubbling stew. They were served by baggy old women and then found a
place alone in a corner by a window. It was dark and hard to see
without night vision, but the hips didn’t seem to have a problem.
There were fires, which seemed like a terrible idea, but they were
careful to contain them in drums and piles of rocks, and the whole
wide floor flickered between light and shadow. Peace. It was
peaceful. There were no city sounds and the people hardly spoke.
There was a moan, some couple having sex in the shadows somewhere.
She sipped at the broth of the stew—not bad, needed salt. Her
poison sniffer said it was fine.

“
You must spend the night,” Hemu
said. “You will be safe here.”

“
Okay,” she said. Strangely she
was in no hurry to leave. Sheltered from the wind it wasn’t too
cold and she still had a fine view of the city. Her brain was
acting funny, all sober now, and she felt she might actually get a
full night of natural sleep.

“
In the morning, we will help
you,” Hemu said. How did he know? Was he the leader? He hadn’t
talked to anyone but her this whole time. But she realized that
didn’t matter. No one talked here, in the Communion Place, but they
communed. The decisions were made in conference with the Slow God.
They were all together here, protected. She could feel it, just a
little, in the corner of her mind. It was a nice feeling, but it
made her sad.

“
When you find the girl, you must
decide. You must bring her to us or bring her to the Sad
Gods.”

“
You were waiting for me,” she
said. Of course. That’s why he was there.

“
Not me. All of us. I found
you.”

“
And the girl, is she one of
you?”

“
She is what you would call hip to
mean she has no home and she relies on others like her. But she
does not follow the Slow God. We are not many.”

“
But you control the
hips?”

“
We give as we can. The Slow God
gives freely to man and we take all we can and give to others. But
our understanding is small.”

She felt very strange. This peace shit was
getting to her. It was…relaxing. She felt all the disconnected
strands of her brain, plugged into all the feeds, all the processes
of checking her back and scanning for threats and searching, always
searching—they all wound together and for what seemed like the
first time she was living as a whole, focused, present, part of a
moment. And the moment was shared. She reached out and held Hemu’s
hand, furious at both her need and her embarrassment. He took her
hand and held it gently, and they stayed that way until she drifted
off to sleep.

Chapter 8

The girl had been bound and gagged, trussed up
like a turkey, no signs of a struggle—she’d probably thought it was
part of the game. They’d slit her throat and then let the blood run
into a trench about four inches deep, two feet wide, and four feet
long. Now the trench was a rectangle of black, crusty, mud, like a
giant chocolate bar. They’d scooped out the girl’s eyes, cleanly,
and then laid her down, spread her legs and arms, and unraveled her
veins to make a blood angel in the dirt. It was the sixth girl in
two weeks, and all Saru could feel—aside from an urge to fill the
trench with vomit—was relief. This wasn’t the girl; this wasn’t her
girl. She knew because of the flower in her hair. This was just a
poor, sad, desperate woman who happened to have unusually bright
blue eyes—she assumed.

Hemu had given her the flower—and a promise
that the hips, or the worshippers of the Slow God would comb the
Fish in search of the girl—plucked it seemingly at random from the
chapel wall and placed it in her hair. She’d tossed it, of course,
and ground it into the pavement with her boot. The memory of the
night made her angry, each step away from the place had made her
angrier and angrier. What were they playing at? What was this? More
smoke and mirrors, more scams, more drugs and ploys to drill inside
her brain and manipulate her. At the time it had felt real,
believable, nice even. But back on the streets, away from the
flowers and silent vagabonds and the city sky all lit up like
stars, it seemed like she had just been played again, given just
enough information to make her look like a sap, hooked, landed, and
flayed.

And the damn flower wouldn’t go away! A tiny
white bell on a thin green stem and every morning it appeared in
her hair again, exactly where Hemu had placed it, lovingly,
reverently almost—had she really considered sleeping with a
homeless man? The thought filled her with disgust and a
self-loathing that was warm and comfortable like an old sweater.
She’d crushed and burned the flower, flushed it down the toilet and
tossed it off a rooftop—scene of a disemboweled schoolgirl—but
always it came back. It was a glitch in her memory—her whole brain,
her whole setup was glitched. There was no flower but for whatever
reason her brain had fixated on it, forgotten to delete the memory
when the flower itself was gone, and so she was haunted by it. That
and other things. Her vision still flickered from time to time,
she’d lose minutes and forget where she was, and sometimes she
heard the laugh, the hyena laugh of Friar’s death. She needed to
find a saw jockey she could trust, someone to go into her brain and
reset everything to factory settings. But she couldn’t afford it
now, couldn’t afford the downtime of having her mind rebooted, the
drooling, the potty training, the learning to walk all over
again.

“
The odd thing is,” someone was
talking. She’d zoned out, let her thoughts take her away. She
brought herself back to the moment, back to the mutilated girl in
front of her, the mounds of reeking garbage—a desperate woman
turning tricks in a junkyard—the obnoxious cackling of crows, and
the spindly man in a saggy gray uniform trying to make sense of it
all. McCully, a vulture, private forensics and body auctioneer.
Made a living as sell-serve to PIs and then selling the corpses
back to the family, if they gave a shit.

“…
is that this girl didn’t suffer.
They cut her throat, and with something sharp, before they took her
apart. The other girls, well, it took them a long time to
die.”

“
What are you thinking?” she said,
mechanically. She didn’t really care; the girl was dead, it wasn’t
her mark, time to move on. There were no clues here, hadn’t been
any clues before, not so much as a hair or a drop of blood or even
a sign of a struggle. The girls had no traces of identifying drugs,
no bullet holes or darts, not even particularly high levels of
stress chemicals considering how they’d died. She’d pulled all
their histories and given them to Jojran to investigate, but she
didn’t have any hope. The only thing that seemed to tie the murders
together was they’d all had their eyes scooped out. One of the
girls had a friend—yes, her eyes had been blue, but that was still
hardly evidence. It was entirely possible these murders were just a
lark for some psychopath—she’d even called Lou and told him to
cancel the chase, just in case—but she didn’t believe it. Too much
coincidence. And there was that damn flower.

Deep in her gut, the part of her really
steering the ship, she could feel it, feel the flower. It was like
a wind chime in a warm breeze. Now it was tinkling, metal pipes
gently knocking against each other as she looked down at the
eyeless corpse with her veins spread out like angel wings. It
touched her just enough to tell her this was important, but it
wasn’t the clanging she’d feel if this were her girl. A dumb game
of Marco Polo. Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo!

“…
I’d say she died late last
night, early morning. Lucky that none of the elzi got at her,
strange even, because this place is crawling with ‘em.” McCully
gestured grandly at the panorama of garbage. “They love this place,
there’re piles of ‘em here—are you listening to me?”

“
Yeah,” she said.

He squinted at her. His face was wrinkly, like
a walnut. “I don’t like this,” he said. “A few more of these and
the cops’ll have to get involved.”

That would be the end of her case, ruined.
They’d storm the slums, kick down doors, round people up, chase
every lead—not that too many were presenting themselves as it
was—into a rat hole and then find some poor foreign schlep to take
the fall and execute him on the evening news.

“
What do I owe you?” she asked,
wearily. At the time a half a million dollars had seemed pretty
close to infinite money, but now having to pay out half the fucking
city for tips and leads, Net tracks, thugs, pimps, vultures,
dudaws, and mercs, she was pissing cash.

“
Two thousand.”

She counted it out. “You gonna take the
body?”

“
Family’s got nothing. I’ll leave
it for the elzi.”

“
Okay. You know, the second you
get word I want you to call me.”

“
You expecting more like
this?”

“
Yeah.”

He glanced around nervously at the piles of
trash. A vulture didn’t spook easy, didn’t go well with poking at
corpses and lugging them around, but McCully seemed downright
nervous, like whoever did the girl was going to pop out and lop off
his dick. Fat chance; he had about the grayest, blandest eyes you
could imagine, grayer than his drab vulture onesie.

“
Walk away,” he said. “Whatever
you’re doing, whatever they’re paying you, walk away.”

“
Can’t.”

“
You’re in over your
head.”

“
Boy don’t I know it.”

He glanced around again, conspiratorially, and
then leaned in close. “Saru, whoever killed these girls knew what
they were doing. I’ve never seen a throat cut like that before.
It’s like they used a machine, straight, measured, even. And the
way they moved her…” He kept glancing around. Who did he think was
listening? But he’d gotten her attention at least. “It, it’s hard
to say just from what we have…but it looks like she moved
herself.”

“
What do you mean?” What did he
mean?

“
I mean, after they cut her throat
and bled her out into the trench, it looks like she stood up and
lay down on her own.”

“
Is that possible?”

“
For an elzi maybe, who knows what
keeps them moving, but they’re clumsy…I don’t know who or what
could do this, but it stinks of Wekba…this isn’t a normal
crime.”

“
Well I know that already,” she
said crossly, and started walking away. “Keep this quiet,” she
yelled over her shoulder. “And let me know when you get the next
one.”

An elzi was lying on the hood of her Cadillac,
basking in the midday haze like a lizard. She pulled a rusty pipe
from a trash pile and used it to pry him off her hood. He fell to
the ground and then crawled away on hands and knees, stopping to
lick a gum wrapper he’d found. The Caddy was a piece of shit and
she hated driving it—stuck in traffic, vulnerable—and paying $400
to fill it up, but cabs wouldn’t run out to the city skirts. Too
many cabbies had been called out to nowhere land only to be tapped
in the back of the head and have their cars chopped up.

She grumbled the car to life and careened down
the dirt path to the exit and onto something resembling a
street—more potholes than anything. Halfway to the city center she
got a call from Jojran. She switched the Caddy to auto and put
Jojran up on the windshield. He used an avatar, an electric blue
tiger-man in some sort of Gyptian-looking space suit. His avatar
sat in a chair like he was commanding a starship and there were
stars flying by in the background. What a fucking joker, but he was
good at what he did.

“
I’ve found something,” he said.
He used his own voice, squeaky, like a ball forgot to drop. It was
ridiculous coming from the ultra-masculine tiger body he’d chosen
for himself.

“
What is it?”

“
Come over and I’ll show you.”
Always trying to get her to come over. Always trying to get in her
pants. Maybe if he came out and said it she’d let him cop a feel
but she couldn’t stand his simpering innuendo, his false-confidence
suave.

“
Just patch me in.”

“
Bad idea, this is heavy shit.
Might hurt.”

“
I can take it.”

“
Come on over, it’ll be
fun.”

She sighed inwardly. If it was anything
interesting it was probably a bad idea to just feed it to her over
the Net. Glitched out as she was it could cause her to blow a
neuron or if she really was being hacked then they could just lift
it off of her. Besides, Jojran always had good booze. She’d raid
his bar and skedaddle.