George Effinger - When Gravity Fails

Chiri glanced upward. “Why? What did you do to them?”

I snorted. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

Chiri cocked her head and looked at me sideways for a moment. “You know,” she said softly, “I did see Nikki today. She came by my place about ten this morning. She said to tell you ‘thank you.’ She didn’t say why, but I suppose you know. Then she went off looking for Yasmin.”

I felt my anger starting to bubble up again. “Did she say where she was going?”

“No.”

I relaxed again. If anyone in the Budayeen knew where Nikki was, it would be Tamiko. I didn’t like the thought of facing that crazy bitch again, but I was sure as hell going to. “You know where I can seize some stuff?”

“What you need, baby?”

“Oh, say, half a dozen sunnies, half a dozen tri-phets, half a dozen beauties.”

“And you say you’re broke, too?” She reached down under the bar again and found her bag. She rummaged through it and came up with a black plastic cylinder. “Take this into the men’s room and pocket what you need. You can owe me. We’ll work something out — maybe I’ll take you home with me tonight.”

That was an exciting though daunting thought. I haven’t been intimidated by many women, changes, debs, or boys in my time; I mean, I’m no superhuman sex machine, but I get along. Chiri, though, was a scary proposition. Those evil, patterned scars and filed teeth … “I’ll be right back,” I said, palming the black cylinder.

“I just got Honey Pílar’s new module,” Chiri called after me. “I’m dying to try it out. You ever want to jam Honey Pílar?”

It was a very tempting suggestion, but I had other business for the next hour or so. After that … with Honey Pílar’s personality module plugged in, Chiri would become Honey Pílar. She’d jam the way Honey had jammed when the module was recorded. You close your eyes and you’re in bed with the most desirable woman in the world, and the only man she wants is you, begging for you …

I took some tabs and caps from Chiri’s caddy and came back out into the club. Chiri looked down along the bar casually as I put the black cylinder in her hand. “Nobody’s making no money tonight,” she said dully. “Another drink?”

“Got to run. Action is action,” I said.

“Business is business,” said Chiri. “Such as it is. It would be if these cheap motherfuckers would spend a little money. Remember what I said about my new moddy, Marîd.”

“Listen, Chiri, if I get finished and you’re still here, we’ll break it in together. Inshallah .”

She gave me that grin of hers that I liked so much. “ Kwa heri . Marîd,” she said.

“ As-salaam alaykum .” I said. Then I hurried out into the warm, drizzling night, taking a deep breath of the sweet scent of some flowering tree.

The tende had lifted my spirits, and I had swallowed a tri-phet and a sunny. I’d be doing all right when I booted my way into Tamiko’s phony geisha rat’s nest. I practically ran the whole way up the Street to Thirteenth, except I discovered I couldn’t. I used to be able to run a lot farther than that. I decided it wasn’t age that had slowed me down, it was the abuse my body had taken that morning. Yeah, that was it. Sure.

Two-thirty, three in the morning, and koto music coming out of Tami’s window. I pounded on her door until my hand started to hurt.

She couldn’t hear me; it was either the loud music or her drugged state. I tried to force the door and found that it was unlocked. I went slowly and quietly up the stairs. Almost everyone around me in the Budayeen is modified somehow, with personality modules and add-ons wired down deep into their brains, giving them skills and talents and inputs of information; or even, as with the Honey Pílar moddy, entirely new personalities. I alone walked among them unaltered, relying on nerve and stealth and savvy. I outhustled the hustlers, pitting my native wits against their computer-boosted awareness.

Right now, my native wits were yelling at me that something was wrong. Tami wouldn’t have left her door open. Unless she did it for Nikki, who’d left her key behind …

At the top of the stairs I saw her, in much the same position I’d seen her in the day before. Tamiko’s face was painted the same stark white with the same gruesome black highlights. She was naked, though, and her unnatural, surgically enhanced body was pale against the hardwood floor. Her skin had a wan, sick pallor to it, except for the dark burn marks and the bruises around her wrists and throat. There was a wide slash from her right carotid artery to the left, and a great pool of blood had formed, into which her white makeup had run off a little. This Black Widow would never sting anyone again.

I sat near her on the cushions and looked at her, trying to understand it. Maybe Tami had just picked up the wrong trick, and he’d pulled his weapon before she could uncap hers. The burn marks and the bruises spelled torture, long, slow, painful torture. Tami had been paid back many times over for what she’d done to me. Qadaa oo Jadar — a judgment of God and fate.

I was about to call Lieutenant Okking’s office when my phone rang on my belt. I was so lost in thought, staring at Tami’s corpse, that the ringing startled me. Sitting in a room with a staring dead woman is scary enough. I answered the phone. “Yeah?” I said.

“Marîd? You’ve got to—” And then I heard the line go dead. I wasn’t even sure whose voice it had been, but I thought I recognized it. It sounded like Nikki’s.

I sat there a little longer, wondering if Nikki had been trying to ask me for something or warn me. I felt cold, unable to move. The drugs took effect, but this time I barely noticed. I took a couple of deep breaths and spoke Okking’s commcode into the phone. No Honey Pílar tonight.

I learned an interesting fact.

It didn’t make up for the particularly foul day I’d had, but it was a fact I could file in my highly regarded cerebrum: police lieutenants are rarely enthusiastic about homicides reported less than half an hour before they’re supposed to go off duty. “Your second cadaver in less than a week,” Okking observed, when he showed up at the Thirteenth Street apartment. “We’re not going to start paying you commissions on these, if that’s what you’re after. On the whole, we try to discourage this sort of thing, if we can.”

I looked at Okking’s tired, florid face and guessed that in the middle of the night, this passed for wry cop humor. I don’t know where Okking was from — one or another dilapidated, bankrupt European country I guess, or one of the North American federations — but he had a genuine gift for getting along with the innumerable squabbling factions residing under his jurisdiction. His Arabic was the worst I’d ever heard — he and I usually held our acerbic conversations in French — yet he was able to handle the several Muslim sects, the devoutly religious and the nonpracticing, Arab and non-Arab, the rich and poor, honest and slightly bent, all with the same elegant touch of humanity and impartiality. Believe me, I hate cops. A lot of people in the Budayeen fear cops or distrust cops or just plain don’t like them. I hate cops. My mother had been forced into prostitution when I was very young, to keep us both fed and sheltered. I remember with painful clarity the games the cops had played with her then. That had been in Algeria a long time ago, but cops were cops to me. Except for Lieutenant Okking.

The medical examiner’s usually stoic expression showed a little distaste when he saw Tamiko. She had been dead about four hours, he said. He could get a general description of the murderer from the handprints on her neck and other clues. The killer had plump, stubby fingers, and mine are long and tapered. I had an alibi, too: I had the receipt from the hospital stamped with the time of my treatment, and the written prescription.