Eye and Talon (12 page)

She had to think. If her boss Meyer had known about this, that the owl wasn't just flapping around the city, scavenging rats out of the alleys in the dark, but was actually in the possession of some heavy-duty organization like this — and how could he have not known? then it opened up all sorts of ugly conjectures. Including the possibility that the whole job he'd given her was actually some kind of set-up. She could have gone on poking her nose into things, letting the word get around that she was looking for this particular real-live owl — there were probably dozens of gossiping dealers at the
souk
who were aware of it by now — and generally making a target out of herself, ready for the thugs on the panel screen to pay their terminal kind of attention to her. Iris glanced up at the image on the panel.
I could've wandered right in there
, she thought.
'Got an owl?' And bang, I would've been sorted out but good
.

'I could've been in big trouble' — Iris glanced over at Vogel — 'if I hadn't run into you.'

'See?' Vogel smiled. 'I knew you'd get to like me. Or at least
appreciate
me.'

'Oh, I do. I even almost regret beating the crap out of you.'

'It's not the best way to get a relationship started.'

Iris returned his thin, humorless smile. 'Depends on who you're seeing. Like they say, some people pay extra for that.'

'I could do without it.'

'I'll try to remember that,' said Iris. 'Because we still haven't worked out all the little kinks between us, have we?'

'Oh?' One of Vogel's eyebrows lifted. 'Like what?'

'Like what the hell it is you exactly want.' Iris's gaze narrowed to slits. 'You know what I want.' She gestured toward the panel screen a few yards away from them. 'I want the owl. But I haven't got the least notion of what you'd be getting out of this.'

'As I said before.' Vogel's smile turned even more amused. 'I want to help you.'

'Your ass; this is LA. Nobody helps anybody else, without a reason.'

'O ye of little faith.' Vogel ruefully shook his head. 'You're really going to have to learn to start trusting people.'

'Not trusting
anything
is what's kept me alive so far. I'm not going to change my operational style just for your sake.'

'You're going to have to,' said Vogel. 'Because you don't have any choice. You already know that you can't get the info you need out of me any other way. You either trust me, or you punt on this job.'

Iris resisted the urge to hit him again. 'Tell me who you're working for. Whose side are you on?'

'You don't need to know that.'

Her words rasped out from between clenched teeth, 'Tell . . . me.'

'Can't.' This time, the shake of Vogel's head was hard and final. 'Not without getting you into even deeper shit than you're already in. There are some things you're better off not knowing. Let's just say that there are certain parties for whom it's as vital as it is for you that you succeed at the assignment you've been given. Parties — people, forces, whatever — that would prefer having this owl some other place than where it is right now.'

'Like in their hands.'

Vogel shrugged. 'Conceivably.'

'And they're using the police to get it for them.'

'That's one possible analysis. If it helps you in some way to believe that, then go ahead.'

'One more question.' Her white-knuckled fists trembled at her sides. 'Why me? If this thing is so important, than it wasn't just Meyer's idea to give me the job. Somebody told him to give it to me. Why?'

His expression became, almost pitying. 'Maybe they've got more confidence in you — that you can do it — than you do yourself.'

Iris turned back toward the screen panel and looked at the image it presented. One of the two men with the high-powered automatic rifles had propped his weapon against the side of the folding chair so he could unwrap a processed food-substitute sandwich packet on his lap and start ingesting the contents. Behind him, the owl shifted on its wooden perch, the bright yellow eyes watching hungrily for its own living food sources.

'All right,' said Iris. 'But I'm going to need a little time. To get things ready.'

'Don't take too long.' Vogel pressed a button on the remote control, and the panel went blank and dead. 'They're not going to wait around for you. They've got plans of their own.'

Iris looked from the candlelit interior of the dead blimp, through the tears in its metallic sheathing, to the night's darkness outside. The rain had stopped, leaving the city streets black and glistening.

She shook her head. It's not their plans I'm worried about.'

'Bad night?'

The chat had greeted her as soon as Iris had walked in the door of her apartment. As the bolts of the automatic door locks snicked into place behind her, she nodded, eyes closed. 'Not the best I've had.'

She dropped her ring of swipe cards on the floor and lay out on the couch, striped by the first pearl-gray light of dawn sliding through the blinds on the barred window. The couch wasn't long enough to stretch out full-length; she had to curl her knees up into a semi-fetal position. Which suited her bleak mood.

'Tea?' The round face of the chat bobbed close to her own. 'Hot and minty-fresh?'

'No thanks.' Right now, she didn't feel like rubbing her hand across the chat's smooth head, either, and leaking a transdermal endorphin buzz into her central nervous system. 'I'm fine.'

The chat wobbled away and returned with a
faux
handstitched comforter, which it managed to tug into place over Iris. She helped it out, pulling the hem up under her chin, though her impulse was to pull it all the way over her head, sealing herself into a soft, dark womb.

'That's great.' She managed a wan smile at the worried-looking autonomic creature. 'Look, I'm okay. Really.'

'Sure?' The chat appeared dubious. It had never seen her like this before. She hadn't gotten the thing yet, when she had been going through the roughest parts of the departmental training and had been afraid she would wash out of the program and wind up back on the streets.

'Yeah,' lied Iris. 'Don't worry about me. Go get in your basket.' She pulled a hand out from beneath the comforter and pointed to the corner of the apartment's front room. 'Sleep and stand-by.' She watched as it reluctantly did as she had ordered. 'That's a good boy.'

She lay for a while longer, head turned so she could gaze unseeingly at the irregular islands and continents of the water- damaged acoustic ceiling tiles. Then she raised her head from the sofa's saggy end-cushion and told the phone on the side table to get Meyer for her.

'Will do.' The phone ran through its security out-protocols, speed-dialed, then extended its headpiece toward Iris. 'Here you go.'

'What's the problem?' Meyer's voice, both harried and sleepy, sounded in Iris's ear. 'It better be good, calling at this hour.'

'Like you don't know.' She let the curved strap dangle loosely from her hand rather than snugging it tight across her skull. 'What the hell have you gotten me into?'

The phone was silent for a few seconds, before Meyer responded. 'Look,' he said, 'just do the job. Or don't. But don't ask any more questions, either.'

'You sonuvabitch.' From the corner of her eye, Iris saw the chat cringe in its basket, alarmed by the anger in its owner's voice. 'This is some kind of weird, deep shit you got me walking through, and if I'm going to get to the other side — with this stupid owl you're so hot on then I'm going to need some help.'

'Like what?'

'Don't worry,' said Iris, her voice bitter in her own ears. 'I won't ask you for information. I've got another source for that. You know what I'm talking about, don't you?'

Meyer was silent again, for longer this time. 'Go with it,' he said finally. 'You can trust the guy.'

'Oh,
that
makes me feel a whole lot better. Coming from a lying sack of shit like you.'

'So this is what you needed?' Meyer's voice sounded more weary than angry over the phone. 'To dump on me? Fine, you got it. Anything else?'

'Yeah, there's something else. Jesus Christ. This job isn't going to be a piece of cake.'

'Didn't think it would be.'

'So I'm going to need a little hardware upgrade,' said Iris. 'Something bigger than I normally carry around with me. I'm going to need you to okay an armory draw.'

'No can do.' The emphatic shake of Meyer's head was almost audible through the phone line's real-time excrypt sequences. 'Look, Iris, we're trying to keep this whole operation on the quiet. If I let you pull out of the station armory the kind of equipment you're going to want — I know you, when it comes to stuff like this — then it's going to be all over the department in no time. That kind of paperwork gets redundantly routed to every division, every level. I can't do that for you.'

'You can't do it
officially
, then fine. I don't give a shit about the requisition forms in triplicate and the rest of the paperwork. Get the stuff out the back door to me. That's all I'm asking.'

'“That's all?”' Meyer exploded, his shout barking out of the phone. 'Are you
insane
? What you're talking about is misappropriation of departmental property —
secured
departmental property. That's an administrative felony, class alpha; sanctions for which include, but are not limited to, rank demotion, forfeiture of accrued retirement benefits and monetary fines.'

'Don't cite the rule book to me, Meyer. I've read it.'

'Then maybe you read the part about what else the internal investigations division could do to me. Which is basically to drag my sorry ass up to the roof of the station, put a bullet through my head I and toss my body over the side. And they'd get a gold star in their own personnel files, for having taken care of the incident in such a neat and expeditious manner.' Meyer's voice simmered down a few degrees. 'You know the department runs a tight ship, Iris. They have to.'

Iris sat up on the couch, letting the comforter slide down onto the floor. 'And what do
you
have to do, huh? Tell me that.'

'What are you talking about?'

'I'll make it plain for you.' The phone sweated in her fist as she talked to her boss. 'Do you want this owl or not? If you do, then you're going to get me what I need, no matter what it takes. If you got a problem with that, then you can find somebody else to go bird-hunting for you.'

Another few seconds of silence, then Meyer spoke again. 'All right,' he said. 'I'll get the stuff out the back door to you. Give me a list.'

She had already been thinking about that. When she had finished telling Meyer her requirements, she held the phone away from her ear, expecting another explosion from -him.

Instead, she got a weary sigh coming from the other end of the line. 'This is nuts,' said Meyer's voice. 'We'll both wind up taking a dive off the top of the station.'

'Don't worry.' Iris kicked the wadded-up comforter away from her feet. 'I'll return everything in good condition.'

'No, you won't.' Meyer sounded resigned and defeated. 'You'll get yourself killed, in as messy a way as possible. And I'll wind up holding the bag for it.'

'Spare me. Self-pity doesn't suit you.' She stood up from the couch and walked into the center of the apartment's front room, the phone trotting beside her so she could keep the tethered headpiece to her ear. 'Giving me this job was your idea, remember.' Standing beside the barred window, she looked out at the first of the day's rains soaking the crowded traffic in the streets below. 'How soon can you have the gear ready for me to pick up?'

'You think I'm handing this kind of stuff over to you in broad daylight? Get real,' said Meyer. 'Tonight — and it won't happen at the station. I'll ring you with a stash-point location. I'll be there when you swing by for it.'

'I'm not expecting anything from you, Meyer. Not anymore.' She killed the connection and the excrypt protocols, and tossed the headpiece to the phone waiting beside her. It climbed onto the side table, settling down and switching itself off

'Play? Quality time?' The chat trotted beside Iris as she headed for the apartment's minuscule bedroom. 'Cuddle?'

'Not now,' said Iris. She had given the window blinds their programmed handsignal, shutting down the whole apartment into darkness. Dark enough by which to get some real sleep. 'Later. I've got to get some rest.' Inaction and fretting had tired her out more than a dead-run chase could have. 'Big job to do tonight.'

She was asleep and dreamless, as soon as her head hit the pillow. Outside, the hard LA sunlight, grayed by its passage through the monsoon clouds, turned the rain to steam against the window glass, but couldn't find her.

'This should be good,' said the remote camera operator. 'She's got all the right toys now.'

The blue-tinged glow of the wall of video monitors turned the operations bunker into a subset of the neon-lit LA streets. Outside, night had consumed the rain-sodden scraps of day, pushing the city once more into its true and most authentic mode of being.

'Could be.' The director roused himself from his deep, meditative silence. 'She always had the right attitude. Smart enough to be scared, but too pissy to let it stop her.'

For the past quarter-hour, the camera operator and the director had been watching an interesting transaction take place, recorded and brought to one of the central monitor screens by a unit hidden in the exposed and cobwebby ceiling rafters of one of the abandoned Traction Avenue warehouses, down by the concrete ditch of the Los Angeles River. The monitor had shown the female blade runner they had been following, her black leatherite jacket glistening from the rain, accepting what looked to be two metal-cornered briefcases from her boss.

Watch out
, the man named Meyer had told her, with a trace of sarcasm.
They're heavy
.

Even on the monitor screen, with the remote camera set to an elevated long angle, the slit-eyed look of disdain she'd given him had been apparent.
They're supposed to be
, she'd replied coldly.

It was as well for the director's purposes that the woman didn't pop open the lids on the fiat cases and check out the lethal gear inside; the camera operator figured that the sequence they'd been able to catch at the police station, where Meyer had surreptitiously extracted the items from the armory lockers, established sufficiently just what weaponry was involved. Anything that the audience wasn't clear on would be made plain when the hard action started.