city blues 02 - angel city blues (13 page)

The man behind the broad oak desk is fiftyish. His suit is immaculately tailored, but his tie is loosened and the collar of his shirt is open.

He bolts to his feet as we make eye contact. He doesn’t seem to have registered the presence of the gun in my hand.

His voice is loud, but his tone conveys annoyance rather than fear. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the little man,” I hear myself say. I speak with a trace of an accent that I can’t quite place. “Just an average worker, who’s tired of busting his balls like a slave, and getting the shitty end of the stick in return.”

The man behind the desk has seen the gun now, but he’s still trying to play it strong. “How did you get in here? I’m calling Security.”

He reaches for his phone, and I feel myself squeeze the trigger.

The automatic bucks in my hand, and a thumb-sized crater appears in the man’s face, just above the bridge of his nose. As his head snaps back, a spray of brain matter splatters the painting on the wall behind his desk, and I’m squeezing the trigger again. And again.

I am shouting over the roar of the shots. “How does it feel, Boss Man? Still think you can fuck over the little guy? Still think you’re Big King Shit, and the rest of us are only here to kiss your ass?”

I’m laughing with a wild exultation as I pull the trigger four more times.

Then, I wheel around and start trotting back through the outer office area, ignoring screams and snapping off a shot at anyone who strays into my field of vision.

I pump three rounds into the chest of a man who is too stunned to move. I’m still moving as he crumples.

One of my bullets catches a woman in the spine while she is diving for cover. She hits the carpet like a sack of bricks, her suddenly-limp body tumbling spasmodically.

The world is made of blood, and screams, and the rhythmic rise and fall of my laughter.

I’m nearly to the outer doors when I spot the security guard.

Shift…

I snatched the cranial rig off of my head. It dropped out of my fingers to clatter across the floor. My stomach clenched reflexively, and I found myself fighting down the urge to vomit.

Tommy was at my side in a flash. “You okay?”

I nodded, breathing through my nose, and trying to throttle my heart rate back into a range that the human body can tolerate.

I had shot those people. I had gunned them down, and then laughed about it. Killed them, for no reason at all, or at least for none that I could make sense of.

It wasn’t the first time that I’d pulled the trigger. Not even the first time that I had found it necessary to shoot another person. But I had never fired at anyone who hadn’t tried to kill me first. I’d never done it without reason, and I had certainly never enjoyed it.

But I
had
enjoyed it this time. Reveled in it. Gotten an almost sexual thrill out of it.

No…

Not me…

The POV subject had done it. The nine-fingered man.
He
had pulled the trigger, and it was
his
laughter that I could still hear echoing in my head.

Tommy laid a hand on my shoulder. “You’re spooking me, Dave. Are you alright?”

I forced myself to nod. “Yeah. I’m… okay.”

“Was it that bad?”

I was opening my mouth to answer, when the natural corollary of his question occurred to me. This was obviously a snuff recording. A kill-the-boss scenario, tailored for sick-minded people who wanted to experience the thrill of slaughtering their supervisor and coworkers, without the attendant danger and criminal consequences.

This recording was bad enough in and of itself, but its very existence suggested even darker possibilities. There would be other SCAPE recordings. Rape. Pedophilia. Kidnapping. Torture. Acts of sabotage, destruction, and terror. I had no doubt that there was a market for all manner of nastiness.

The world had always been afflicted with its share of closet maniacs. Fortunately, few of them were bold enough to translate their twisted little daydreams into action. They walked around with murder and mayhem in their hearts, but they lacked the courage to get their hands bloody.

SCAPE could bring their most demented fantasies to life. Give them a chance to live and re-live every revolting second.

The notion was so repugnant that a simple multiple homicide seemed almost wholesome by comparison.

I realized that Tommy was still staring at me.

“It’s a snuff recording,” I said. “An office shooting. Not pretty. At least three victims.”

Tommy almost looked relieved, as if his own suspicions—like mine—had gone to even darker places.

“Did you get what you needed?” he asked. “For your case?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “If there’s a connection, I haven’t spotted it yet.”

Tommy bent down and retrieved the cranial rig. “Do you want to check out the rest of the recording?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I probably should.”

“Do you need a minute?”

“Let’s get it over with,” I said.

As soon as the cranial rig was back in place on my head, Tommy hit the play tab again.

Shift…

The security guard’s stunner swings up to cover me, but he’s a half-second too slow. I snap off a shot that hits him in the throat. He goes down with a gurgling sound that’s probably the closest thing to a scream that his mangled larynx can manage.

I’m shoving my way through the glass doors when I catch sight of shape crouching behind a desk. I can’t tell if it’s a man or woman, and I don’t stop to check. I punch several rounds straight through the desk. The lightweight composite materials of the office furniture do nothing to stop my bullets.

The crouching form jerks under multiple impacts. I’m out the door and into the hallway, still unsure of the sex of my most recent victim.

I stop near the paint-stick markings I left on the silvery wall paneling.

FANTASCAPE 389

Dream Snatcher Presents

THE BOSS

I aim the muzzle of my automatic at the center of the ‘O’ in ‘BOSS.’ I squeeze the trigger, and a bullet hole appears in the laminate, turning the ‘O’ into something that resembles the bull’s-eye of a target.

“That’s all, motherfuckers,” I say in my strangely-accented voice. “Dream Snatcher is out of here. See you next time, on FANTASCAPE three-eighty-nine…”

The hallway freeze-frames, and a white rectangular text window appears at the center of my field of view.

This is apparently the scorecard for the shooting spree I’ve just experienced. After about ten seconds, there’s an almost subliminal flicker of something resembling video static, and then another one of those instantaneous shifts.

It’s over…

I pulled the cranial set off of my head. I still had no idea what the connection might be between this recording and Leanda Forsyth’s disappearance. Had she been investigating the office shooting? Or trying to track down this FANTASCAPE 389 thing? Or the Dream Snatcher? Or was there no connection at all?

In all likelihood, the cops had cued on the SCAPE chip because: (A) it depicted a crime, and (B) it had been found in Leanda’s apartment. Neither of those facts were automatic proof of a link to her vanishing act.

I set the cranial rig on Tommy’s workbench. I’d pull the thread on FANTASCAPE 389 and the shooting in Chicago. It might turn out that everything associated with the SCAPE chip was a blind alley, but at least it was a place to start.

CHAPTER 8

When I got home, I had House check the news feeds for stories about an office shooting in Chicago on April twenty-third. It took him about a millisecond to confirm that the events depicted in the snuff SCAPE had been real. An unknown perpetrator had walked into the offices of AVX Analytics on North LaSalle, whipped out a handgun, and gunned down the senior onsite vice president, three mid-level managers, and a security guard. Four dead, one critically wounded.

I watched six or seven vid updates, and they were all pretty much the same. The lone shooter was still unidentified. The police were following up on promising leads, but no arrests had been made.

I lit a cigarette and made my way to the desk comp in my den. The chip containing Leanda Forsyth’s missing person files was still plugged into the data slot near the right end of the desk top.

I tapped the desk to wake up the holographic keyboard, and paged past the ultrachrome logo of LAPD’s West Hollywood Division. I had been through about fifty of the ninety-two files on the chip.

I ran a search for the terms ‘
FANTASCAPE 389
’ and ‘
Dream Snatcher
.’ The computer highlighted three of the unread files.

The first was a brief description of the commercial SCAPE market, presumably to provide context for those (like myself) who were new to the technology. There were two emerging players in the SCAPE industry:
IMAGISCAPE
, which was rapidly moving toward market dominance; and
VIRTUSCAPE
, which was losing customer base—due to some undefined but recognizably-artificial quality in its recorded media. FANTASCAPE 389 was not a registered commercial trade name. It was a black market brand, dedicated to the production and distribution of criminal experiences.

No surprises there. I closed the file, and moved on to the next one.

It was physical analysis of the SCAPE chip itself. Not the copy I’d gotten from Bruhn, but the original chip that the crime scene team had discovered in Leanda Forsyth’s apartment. I didn’t understand most of technical language, but I did come away with a few nuggets of information.

One: the internal circuitry of every SCAPE chip was legally required to contain something called a ‘
non-repudiation cell
,’ a feature that was missing from the chip in Leanda’s apartment. I had no idea what a non-repudiation cell might be, but the lack of one made the chip unlawful to manufacture or possess, regardless of what was actually recorded on it.

Two: the words ‘FANTASCAPE 389’ had been embossed into the carbon strata of the chip. The lettering hadn’t been stamped, or etched, or engraved into the surface. The chip had been built that way. The markings were an integral part of the chip’s design. In other words, the chip had been specifically manufactured for FANTASCAPE 389’s black market customers.

Three: a microscopic examination of the circuit layering showed a level of perfection that could only be achieved in microgravity. Which meant that chip had been created at one of the orbital fabrication facilities.

I made a mental note to follow up on this last point. There were a limited number of microgravity production sites. With a bit of nosing around, I might be able to trace the chip back to its original source.

LAPD’s jurisdiction did not extend to any of the orbital stations, but I wasn’t operating under any such limitations. I had a very powerful client and an unlimited expense account. I could afford to indulge in some orbit-hopping, if the case happened to lead me in that direction.