Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

He had downloaded the information of all ten Seekers while talking to Spellman, but absorbing that information into his brain took time. It was especially hard because the men had lived such boring lives. Everyone but Mingus, the black Backgrounder, was completely unremarkable.

After an hour he went back into the apartment. The entertainment room’s lasers were on. A 3D image of a shifting moonscape was being projected. The usual noise dampeners that this image used to simulate the silence of space weren’t engaged, or Folio wouldn’t have heard her from the bedroom. At first he thought that she’d gotten tired of waiting and was masturbating to take the edge off the vig she’d taken.

He peeked around the corner of the door to see if she wanted him to join in.

The man in the skin-tight glossy emerald one-piece had his hands around her throat. Tana was struggling but weakly. The detective had his knife out in a heartbeat. The targeting system of the eye was instantaneous, and so the hurtling blade severed the assassin’s spine in less than a second after Folio had seen him.

The Ethiopian’s eyes were bloodred but she was breathing and semiconscious. The dead man was white, with long, micro-braided eyebrows. Folio quickly stripped off the assassin’s suit, leaving the corpse nude. The man was bald, with no tattoos, ID jewelry, marks, scars, or defects. Other than his exceptionally well-conditioned physique there was nothing to distinguish him except for his hands — they had six fingers each.

“Assassin synthy,” Tana wheezed over Folio’s shoulder.

“German issue,” he agreed.

“I thought they weren’t allowed in the U.S.”

“I guess they are — sometimes.”

New York’s last private detective turned his attention to the blond Ethiopian’s neck.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, yeah. I had rougher make-out sessions when I was fifteen.”

“You don’t look much older’n that now.”

“I’m twenty-four and I been on my own since I was sixteen,” the woman said. “And this ain’t the first dead man I’ve seen.”

“You weren’t his first either,” Johnson said.

“There’s nobody who hates me that bad,” Tana said. “And even if there was he wouldn’t have the millions it’d take to buy a test-tube assassin.”

“No. They were after the dude lives here.”

“I thought this was your place.”

“It’s time for you to go home, girl,” he said.

“The fuck I am,” she replied. “I have to know why that man tried to kill me before I can sleep.”

“Okay. We’ll talk for a minute, but not here.”

Folio went to the bathroom and got a fiber swab. He dipped the swab in the assassin’s wound and then wrapped it up in tissues.

Then he looked up at the ecstasy girl and said, “Let’s go.”

Tana Lynn lived in a commune deep in Harlem. It was called the Mau-Mau and proclaimed the ethics of the Third and Fourth Black Radical Congresses. On the way there, Folio stopped at a communications booth and notified the police that there was a dead man in Charles Spellman’s apartment.

“Why you wanna do that?” Tana asked.

“Just chummin’ the water a little. Later on I might wanna catch me a fish.”

Tana’s apartment was on the fifth floor of the huge building, midway between Lower and Middle Adam Clayton Powell Drive. The view out of her picture window was eternally night and limited to the featureless walls of the Harlem jail just across the street. Her apartment was a single large room with a thirteen-foot ceiling. She had a bed in one corner and a tiled shower with no curtain or door in the other.

“Pretty spare,” Folio said.

“Good for the soul,” she said.

She kissed him hard then and he leaned away from her, a little perplexed.

“What’s that?”

“You killed that man the second you saw him,” she said with a smile. Her eyes got large, as if she was looking at something transform before her. “You didn’t hesitate, or I’d be dead now.”

“Li’l somethin’ I picked up in the Ukraine. You got a desk?”

Tana Lynn went to a door at the midpoint of one wall and opened it. An oak board a meter square fell out, landing against a prop that held it parallel to the floor. From under her bed she drew a metal folding chair.

“This is my chair,” she said proudly. “My own property. Not leased or rented or anything. Axel Alpha made it for me in his shop downstairs.”

Folio seated himself at the desk and took out the swab of blood. He held the sample five centimeters from his electric eye. It took a full three minutes to map the DNA patterns and another six to find and access the database that held the pod number to which the chromes were related.

“What is that?” Tana asked when he looked up.

“What?”

“That eye.”

“It was a gift from a grateful client.”

“What’s it do?”

“Watches out for trouble and then dives right in.”

Folio could see the thrill that went through the young ex — sex slave. Her pulse quickened, and his did too.

“No, baby,” he said.

“No, what?”

“I got to get to work on this job I got.”

“What job?”

“I’m looking for a reason and maybe looking for a man that has that reason.”

“Can I come?”

Folio’s eye counted nine hundred forty-two stairs from the eternal night of the lower avenues to the sunlit streets of the upper levels. The buildings that loomed over the busy business streets were clean and gleaming, while the lower and middle avenue walls were filled with graffiti and garish electric signs. Manhattan had been trisected into separate strata thirty years earlier with the architectural masterpiece of the middle, upper, and lower streets. The reason for this separation was to achieve an aboveground approximation of Common Ground. There were many New Yorkers riding the labor cycles who could not afford the high prices of Manhattan’s rents and leases but who were still necessary for commerce. It was the brainchild of Brandon Brown, a City College graduate, to extend the city even further into the sky, leaving the lower levels for those who could not afford the sunlight but who still worked for a living.

“I love it up here,” Tana said to her new friend. “When I was a kid I used to come up and run around until the Social Police would grab me and try to say I was White Noise. But Jim’d always come to the station and get me. He never got mad or nuthin’. Just tell me to come on and we’d go out for Macsands and maybe a vid.”

“Sounds like a good guy, this Jim.”

“Unless you was under his sights,” Tana said. “Where we goin’?”

“Grand Central Develator.”

“Cops?” For the first time Tana looked worried.

Folio nodded and smiled. “You scared?”

“I’ve been to Police Central before. They thought I was moving Pulse illegally. I seen what they did to the real dealer.” The look in her eyes made the detective want to laugh, but he held it in.

“I won’t let ’em hurt you, little girl.”

The last stop of Grand Central’s Develator, like all Develators around the world, was Common Ground. But this particular mass conveyance device made an intermediate stop one thousand feet belowground at Police Central, the hub of all law enforcement for the Twelve Fiefs of New York. This one massive center was connected, through underground trams, to all police stations in the city. This allowed for speedy deployment of officers on a military scale.

Folio and Tana rode the great flatbed with hundreds of others. At Police Central they debarked into a long hallway filled with people seeking entrée to the Law.

Tana stayed close to Folio’s side, holding on to his sinewy forearm. The mob moved slowly, funneling down from a mob to a single-file line.