Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (31 page)

I’d gone there to collect my thoughts and think about what I was going to do. After a moment, Shelly had been sitting across from me. She looked grim and angry.

I looked at her. “It was. Ormond doesn’t like me.”

Shelly waved that away. “Ormond is like a bear with a sore tooth when he gets slapped by the captain of detectives. If Commissioner Dawn was involved, she probably intervened on Ormond’s behalf. He’s a good cop, deep down where it matters. But he’s straddling the line between that and bureaucrat. I wouldn’t have his job on a bet.” She shrugged. “Give him some time, break a couple cases, he’ll be back in your corner. That’s how he is.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. Now…what are you going to do?”

“I’ve been suspended.”

“So?”

“I no longer have access to my files, or to the authority to act on behalf of the NAPD.”

Shelly smiled. “You have access if you want to. You and I planned for that, and we did end runs around investigations when we had to. You know that.”

I did.

Shelly and I had sometimes had to hack the NAPD mainframe to get information we would have had to wait on through proper channels…or information we weren’t supposed to have at all. She had instructed me to write a hacking program when she’d discovered that I could do that.

I, of course, had protested because it violated the work agreement Haas-Bioroid had made with the NAPD. In the end, when we’d needed information to catch a child murderer three months after we’d become partners, I had relented.

We had seldom needed to use the back door I’d created into the NAPD’s mainframe, but it was there.

“There are a lot of questions that need to be answered, partner. You know that. And more people need to be asking them, not closing off avenues of the investigation.” Shelly’s eyes looked bright. “Lieutenant Ormond and the others aren’t stupid. They’re afraid.” She shrugged. “Considering the number of bodies dropping on this thing—what those scumbags did to you—they’ve got every right to be afraid. But you can’t run, not if you’re going to do this job right.”

Throughout my time with her, and in her career as far as I’d been able to discover, Shelly had never been one to play politics or be afraid. She’d been smart about tough decisions—that was different—but she’d never been intimidated.

“You’re right.” Even as I told her that, I realized she was no longer there.

I got up and caught a taxi hopper home. I planned to start work immediately.

*

Despite the fact that Dwight Taylor had been hiding in plain sight under an assumed name, no one at the NAPD did much of a background check on him. Maybe they couldn’t see the connection, or maybe Craig Dormoth and his partner had seen Dwight Taylor as a waste of time.

I didn’t feel that way.

To give them the benefit of the doubt, I thought it was possible that Lieutenant Ormond had instructed them to streamline the investigation to find something related to Cartman Dawes’s murder. So they were repeating a lot of the same footwork they’d already done.

They were getting the same answers. A brief check of the reports they’d filed confirmed that for me.

Hansen had been given the assignment of finding out who had killed Dwight Taylor and nearly ended my existence. He’d back-burnered that investigation after a few preliminary digs. There was nothing current on Dwight Taylor, and the information on Dante Pace provided no traction. The hired killings he’d done had been off the grid and were judged to be nothing more than idle speculation to build a street rep.

Shelly would have said where there was smoke…

I concentrated on Dwight Taylor’s file. It was Taylor that’d had the relationship with Brock Thurman and the military men with the chimera tattoos.

 
Just then, I got another ping on the chimera tattoo. This time it belonged to a case where a man had been accused of the contract murder of a code designer eight years ago. The victim’s name had been Rachel Giacomin.

I pulled up the murder book on the case.

Rachel Giacomin had been working for MirrorMorph, Inc., a small code-specific corp that had been subcontracted to Haas-Bioroid at the time. MirrorMorph had done a lot of the work on the new generation of neural channeling that had produced Floyd and me, as well as the latest wave of higher-end bioroids.

At the time of her death, Giacomin had been one of the leading programmers, a person that the field looked to “for greatness” as a nosie had put in a piece on her.

She’d been thirty-one, young to have been so widely recognized in her field, and attractive by human standards. Shelly had forced me to learn those because features mattered in some investigations, often providing motivation. Giacomin had dark brown hair, pale green eyes, and a heart-shaped face that had obviously been remade by a plastic surgeon’s laser. According to her background check, she’d also been promiscuous.

During the first part of the investigation, Giacomin was believed to be the victim of a lover, a tryst that had gone badly wrong. That had been the operating theory from the beginning. But, although seven current and past lovers had turned up in total during the investigation, all of them had fully corroborated alibis during the time of the murder.

Gradually, the climate had shifted to a professional hit, though the primary motive remained that of a lover: someone who had gotten jealous or that Giacomin was blackmailing—though that view was never supported.

I noted that those scenarios were put forth by the lead investigating detective, a man whose career was spotty at best. I knew Louis Blaine and I didn’t like his ways. He’d been with the NAPD for twenty-five years, fifteen of them as a detective, the last three of them as a sergeant. Shelly had despised the man at times, and pitied him at others. During the few times we’d talked about Blaine, Shelly had said that he’d been a good cop, but he’d just gotten caught looking the wrong way one too many times.

Other detectives felt that Blaine “could be bought on every day that ended in
y
.”

I’d had no dealings with the man other than to see him in the hallways occasionally, or at a full role call when a big case was on.

According to Blaine’s report, he’d investigated an ex-soldier who’d turned mercenary and also looked good for the murder. Unfortunately, the suspect had turned up dead from a drug overdose in a seedy hotel room and the case had died with him.

I pulled up the ancillary files because the soldier angle was something I couldn’t ignore.

I read about Malcolm Gardener and there was nothing specific in his file that would attract much attention, except to note that he’d served on Mars.
 

And he’d had a chimera tattoo.

When I pulled up the file image on Malcolm Gardener, I found myself looking at Dwight Taylor.
 

The man had had
three
names, and he’d now officially died
twice.
I was pretty certain he wasn’t coming back this time.

Something tugged inside my consciousness and suddenly I wasn’t in my living room anymore.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I stared at the transplas dome over the city for too long. The black-haired woman beside me yanked my arm and called me a name. I thought it sounded like “Simon” but I couldn’t be certain. Too many things were going on at once.

“What are you doing?” She glanced at me with worry, then looked behind us.

I checked the rear vids and saw a second taxi hopper was streaking along our vapor trail, closing the distance. One of our pursuers leaned out with a weapon and opened fire.

For a moment, I wondered what the bullets would do if they struck the dome; then I remembered that the domes were made of transplas and were virtually indestructible to small arms fire. They had to be. As much civil unrest that fomented on Mars, the colonies wouldn’t have lasted a day if the domes hadn’t been reinforced. Nothing less than a laser cannon could get through them.
 

I throttled down and sent the hopper into a steep dive through the traffic. Back on Earth, I would have been bouncing off other vehicles, just as I had when I’d been in the hopper with Adrian Graham. But now my hands were steady, and I saw a path through the hopper lanes that existed only for a brief second. I didn’t hesitate, and even though my reflexes were naturally fast, I was intrigued by how quickly I decided to pursue the avenue of escape that was presented.

I powered through and barely pulled up again in time to keep from smashing against the street. The hopper’s front bumper smacked the street hard and came up before landing back on its wheels. I shot out a hand and caught the woman before her face smashed into the hatch.

“Thank you.”

Satisfied she was once more safely seated, I turned my attention back to the steering. I didn’t know where I was supposed to go, and I didn’t know where we’d find safety.

I made a hard right turn around the next corner and felt the traction of the tires slip away for just a moment. They screamed but maintained purchase.

Blood still leaked down my side from the wound. I needed to get it taken care of. I knew I was bleeding too much. My mind was already bouncing around inside my skull and I knew I was in danger of passing out.

The feeling didn’t make sense, then I remembered how I’d felt when I’d gotten shot in the face in the underground service area. I hadn’t been able to control my faculties then, either. I didn’t like the discomfort created by my inability to control myself.

A second hopper came out of nowhere and hammered our borrowed taxi hopper from the side. The woman screamed.

I jockeyed the controls as the second vehicle continued bulling us across the street. Instead of trying to maintain control on the ground, I powered up the engines and lifted into the sky. The pilot of the other hopper didn’t know what I was doing until it was too late to try the same tactic.

We were airborne.

The woman took out her PAD and glanced at it. She looked at me. “Your men know we’re in trouble.”

I didn’t know who my men were. If I had men, why weren’t they with me? With us?

“They’re setting up a trap.” She pointed ahead. “Go forward two blocks, then turn left.”

The taxi hopper reappeared and came streaming toward us. I powered up again, flipping the hopper into a horizontal keel as the other taxi hopper put its wheels down and landed on us, trying to force us back to the street.

Working the controls, I managed to partially slide out from under the other hopper, flipping it over when it tried to outmaneuver an approaching hopper. Instead of getting clear of the situation, though, I powered again into a lateral move and slammed their taxi hopper into the building beside us.

Pedestrians below heard the wreck and looked up, then started scattering as pieces of the hopper rained down over them. The hopper’s safety measures kicked in, but it was too little too late. The pilot and the passengers were jettisoned twenty meters above the street. Even with Mars’s lesser gravity, I knew that most of those people weren’t going to survive the fall.

I made the turn where the woman had suggested.

“Lose some altitude. They need you to mask them from the pursuit vehicle.”

I dropped further, only a few meters above the street now. Forty meters ahead, I spotted a group of men coming from an alley and setting up in the street. Two of them had anti-tank weapons. All of them had sidearms and assault rifles, and they moved with military precision.

I covered them, staying low so I’d be in the field of vision of the pursuit craft. When it came around the corner, the attacking hopper screamed down out of the sky like a vulture, easily overtaking me. The two passengers had their weapons shoved through access ports and were firing non-stop. Several rounds hit the taxi hopper I was piloting and chewed right through.

Juking the controls, I slid to the right and flipped the hopper onto its side to provide the men waiting below with a clean shot. The two men with the anti-tank weapons fired immediately, giving their weapons only a few seconds to signal target lock.

An instant later, the warheads from the two weapons locked onto the pursuing hopper and turned it into a roiling orange and black cloud of destruction. The
boom
caught up to us and washed over the hopper. Bits and pieces of the pursuing hopper drummed against my stolen vehicle. The heat soaked into the hopper and triggered the air conditioning into cycling on.

The woman breathed a sigh of relief.

But then the hopper shuddered and the joysticks turned to slush. I tried to maintain control, but the taxi hopper was maneuvering like a pig on ice. I didn’t know where that expression had come from, but it was suddenly inside my head and the imagery fit.

We dropped to the street in a steep glide that didn’t promise anything good.

“Hang on.” I reached over to slam my fist against the emergency landing button, not really expecting anything. Instead, the hopper’s interior swelled with airbags that conformed around the woman and me like we’d been enveloped in a bunch of grapes. They also prevented me from seeing how close we were to the ground and if anything was in our way.