Authors: K. W. Jeter
A different shadow moved on the billboard, at the opposite corner; a shadow with human form which Iris knew didn't belong to anything human. As the mists sealed up again, she turned her head and could discern, through the geisha's enveloping smile, the escaped replicant Enesque, spine and hands flattened against the side of the building.
He was less than ten meters from her, and with nowhere left to go. The ledge came to an abrupt, sheared-off end, with nothing beyond it but empty night air. In the distance beyond him, the lights of a police spinner blinked and faded away, as though scared of by a sudden gout of flame.
Maybe the rep wasn't used to heights; maybe it had been only fear that had driven him this far up. Iris could see he was petrified by the greater fear, the emptiness and the falling that lay a couple of inches in front of him. He couldn't even move one hand away from the wall, to reach inside his jacket for his gun. An agonized face turned toward Iris, sweat and rain drawing chalky rivulets through his clown-white stage makeup.
'Don't . . .' The voice that had brayed and cracked jokes inside the subterranean club was now a dry rasp. 'Don't you have to . . . read me my rights? Or something?'
'Get real.' The ledge was plenty wide enough for Iris to turn away from the building's wall and face directly toward Enesque. 'You know that only applies to humans.' She reached inside her own jacket and pulled her gun from its holster, leveling it easy and slow toward the replicant at the end of the ledge. The wet, slickness of the concrete on which they both stood was enough that a too-quick move could have thrown her over and down to the street below. The thought didn't cause her any nervousness, but she knew she had to be careful.
'Or questions?' The escaped replicant was pleading for anything that would give it a few more seconds of life. Iris admired that fierce desire in them – but not enough to let one go. 'You're supposed to . . Enesque's voice rose to a scream, cutting through the blurring mist.
'You're supposed to ask me questions!'
Just one,' said Iris. She stared along her outstretched arm and the barrel of the gun, locking her gaze once again with that of the target. 'How do you want it?'
There were just enough guts left, underneath the replicant's quivering fear, for him to answer the question. The only way left to him.
The artificially generated mist had thickened sufficiently to make the geisha's immense face seem almost ghostly solid, blurring Enesque's outline behind it. So when he leapt toward Iris – hands outstretched for her throat, the rep-enhanced strength of his legs carrying him the entire distance – he seemed to burst Athena-like from the illusory woman's powdered forehead, becoming real and distinct, his own face snarling with the desperate anger of cornered prey.
A smaller birth blossomed from the replicant's brow, a red flower flecked with minute bone shards and bits of pinkish-gray brain tissue. Iris fired another quick pair of rounds, one tearing open Enesque's throat, the other hitting him in one shoulder, so that he spun around as his hurtling body crashed into her.
Enough fierce energy was left in the replicant, so that his hands locked upon Iris, fingers digging hard into her biceps. Blood-spattered, Iris was pinned to the ledge by the weight of Enesque's corpse. His face pressed close to hers, as though in his last moment of dying he had wanted a kiss, perhaps of absolution, rather than mere life.
Sharp, convulsing muscle spasms shook the replicant's body. Iris had to let go of her gun, pinned between her breast and the flailing weight of the body on top of her, and scrabble a hold with her fingertips, into the crevice between the ledge and the building's exterior wall, to keep from toppling over the crumbling edge, locked in the other's embrace.
Enesque's eyelids fluttered open. 'You think ... you're so smart ...' His voice was a weak, fading rasp. 'You don't even know . .
'Know what?'
He didn't seem to hear her. 'You think .. . you've got a choice . . '
Did you say "choice"? Hey—' She turned toward his face, trying to make out the words, as if they mattered. 'Or "chance"? Was that it?'
No answer came from the dead replicant.
Jerk
, thought Iris. She didn't know why she'd bothered. The words had already been dismissed from her memory.
She managed to work her other hand between herself and the corpse, and drag out her police tight-cell unit. It lit up as soon as it was in her grip, already keyed into the LAPD dispatch desk. 'Get me a clean-up crew out here.' She'd let the dispatcher read out the building's address from the tight-cell's built-in satellite tracking and position system. 'I've got somebody who's about ready to take the dive.' A glance over her shoulder, past the concrete edge, showed that a group of gawkers, attracted by the gunfire, had already congregated below, separate from the milling street traffic. 'Get 'em here now.'
The crew showed up, long after she was bored with having a dead body lying on top of her; only a few minutes, in clock time. She heard the sirens down at sidewalk level. She didn't bother to check whether the crew had deared a landing zone; the corpse's grip had loosened enough that one good upward shove was enough to send it toppling below.
Iris pulled herself up into a sitting position, leaning back against the building. 'Damn.' Looking down at herself, she saw that Enesque's blood had not only gotten all over the leatherite jacket – that could be wiped off – but had also seeped onto the subtly monochrome, cactus motif silk cowboy shirt she wore beneath. That meant dry cleaning.
It was one of the few drawbacks to what she did for a living. She didn't even mind the evil, slit-like glance of the head of the clean-up crew when she had made her way down to the street and had registered the details of the kill.
'You get of on this kind of thing?'
Iris looked right back into the bull cop's jowly face, as the rain spattering across the shrouded corpse on the gurney cart had also sluiced the blood from her clothes into a feathering red puddle around her boots.
She smiled at him. 'I
love
this job.'
'Christ, look at this place.' The squad captain shook his head in disgust. 'How could anybody work in conditions like this?'
Iris stood in the doorway of the office, watching her boss — Meyer was head of the LAPD's entire blade runner division — shuffle through the tides of old paper and strata of various crap in the too-small room. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, a darkly beamed and faceted space somewhere above the open-topped walls, like the beginnings, the first tiny specks, of some pollution-grayed snow flurry. The captain's revulsion was evident in the way he hunched his narrow shoulders and kept his arms tight against his ribs, as though he could prevent the contamination of decay and slow withering from touching him.
Hopeless
, thought Iris.
Give it up
.
She spoke aloud. 'You owe me money.' She leaned against the side of the doorway. 'There was a double bounty on that last one.'
Meyer ignored her. A stack of yellowing newspapers, true antiques from vanished days of general literacy, toppled with a kick from his mirror-polished shoe. 'Beats me how Bryant could've put up with it. I mean . . .
look
at this junk.'
It wasn't an order, but Iris did it anyway. She followed her boss into his predecessor's office and its shadowy pools of dim light, away from the greater darkness surrounding it. Meyer's words were still echoing somewhere out there, in the lofty caverns of the empty police station; ratlike pigeons cooed from their droppings-whitened perches, then settled back down like blinking old women in rags.
Iris picked up a lamp, fallen onto its side on the desk. The piece might have been worth something, if anybody still cared about things as old as that. In LA, nobody did; just yesterday was already too old, broken and forgotten. She held the lamp higher, studying the little photographic scenes imprinted on its parchment shade. Hunting scenes, grinning bwanas posing with their massively calibered rifles beside the corpses of real elephants and water buffalo. If there was a real elephant left anywhere in the world, it wouldn't have been on the African plains, but dully anesthetized in some dingy holding cage right here in LA's own animal trading
souk
. Things like that were too valuable to be left wandering around; that was why they were all dead by now.
She reached with her other hand under the shade and found a small button. Low-wattage light seeped out of the bulb, transforming the monochrome pictures as though with the dim sunshine of other days. It wasn't likely that any of the pictures could have been of Bryant himself, even as a young man. Maybe they were family mementos, images of his grandfather or even farther back, a long line of gun-toting men with bad smiles, who had the knack of making wild, escaping things fall down and be dead.
Other, smaller but brighter lights cast their shifting glow around the office, from below Iris's knees. A troop of scanitorial autonoms, little more than lenses and caterpillar treads and tiny, claw-tipped grappling pincers, had filed into the office as well; each one had the insignia of the LAPD's data preservation unit stenciled on its cylindrical power source. One of the scanitors crawled ratlike over the toe of Iris's boot, as it seized an empty, square-sided Scotch bottle and turned its lens upon the faded label; a bright red line swiftly read down the words and a sepia image of some vanished Highland glen, and that data had been transmitted and dumped to some catch-all file in the cellars of the new police station, along with every other scrap of information left behind in the office. None of it meant anything, not now: lists of escaped replicants that had been hunted down long ago, procedural memoranda, junk food wrappers with built-in flash heating elements, blackmail dirt for pressuring 'retired' — meaning burnt-out — cops into picking up the gun again, cryptic notes that Bryant had written to himself, back when he'd been heading the blade runner division . . .
One of those, a sticky-backed yellow square, was stuck to the mouth of the empty bottle. Iris idly reached down and plucked it like a minimalist blossom between her thumb and forefinger; straightening up again, she kicked the little scanitor away. The machine and the bottle flew together and smashed against the nearest wall; from out of the shards of glass, the scanitor crawled, looking for more things to read and file away.
When every murder seems the same, it's time to quit.
Iris looked at the words scrawled on the note, in Bryant's messy, alcohol-loosened hand. She wadded it up and flicked it away. That was something the former head of the blade runner division didn't have to worry about anymore. Or anything else, for that matter: he'd been killed right here in this office, blown away by a gun as big as those carried by the cops who had been under his command. The piece Iris carried was both smaller and deadlier than those hulking cannons; she didn't need to feel like a big man to get her job done. Whoever had taken Bryant out — Iris wasn't sure of the details; she never paid much attention to locker-room gossip — had done just as good a job on the former division captain. Quitting time had been arranged for him, whether he'd really wanted it or not.
That was the main reason the small office smelled the way it did. Like bottled-up death, even though its ceiling was open to the rest of the empty station. The whole building stank like that, of police business and administrative termination orders. The memos and day orders could refer to it as 'retirement' or any other euphemism; it still meant the same thing. And which also meant that the smell of a top cop's death wasn't going to fade away, either.
Or any of the other indicators left behind: another scanitorial unit had cleared away enough paper scraps to expose the spatter of dried blood across the floor — Bryant's blood — and was now busily scanning and recording the dark-brown marks, as though they were the hieroglyph of some forgotten, omen-laden language.
'You said I owe you money?'
Iris looked up when the new division captain spoke. 'That's right.'
'Not me.' Meyer shook his head. 'Payroll takes care of that.' His fine-boned, almost hairless hands pawed through the messy stacks on what had been Bryant's desk. Put in your voucher and wait, like everybody else.' He picked up a single sheet of paper, studied it for a moment, then discarded it with the rest on the floor. 'You got a confirmed kill, you'll get paid.'
Iris felt her eyes narrowing as she watched the man. 'You could front me,' she said quietly but firmly. 'If you wanted to.' He'd done it before, often enough — and not only for her — that it was close to standard procedure for the division.
'Could do all sorts of things.' Meyer poked a finger through a crack-rimmed porcelain sake cup, filled with paper clips. He fished one out and uncurled it into a straight line. 'But I'm not going to.'
'Why not? I've got expenses.'
'We all do, cupcake.' Meyer held the bit of soft metal between both his thumbs and forefingers, looking across it at her. 'It's a rough old world out there, and nobody loves our asses the way we do. Things are happening right now, so it would behoove both you and me to keep our noses clean. Shiny, even..' With one point of the metal, Meyer scratched his chin, deep enough to draw a white line across the skin. 'So I'm not bending any rules for you. And you shouldn't be asking me to. Not if you're smart.'
That worried her. Not much else could, but departmental politics were a jungle to her, darker than any back alley in LA. 'What do you mean? What's going on?'
Meyer regarded her skeptically. 'You haven't heard?'
'Come on. You know I don't listen to this kind of stuff. I got better things to do. Like my job, for one.'
'Yeah, well, your job is what it's about. Your job and mine.' Meyer righted the swivel chair from behind the desk and sat down in it. 'I feel,' he said, 'like I should offer you a drink or something.' He laid his hands flat on the desk blotter, with its overlapping ring marks left by all the glasses that had been sat on it, like the ghost residues of the bottle's brown contents. 'That's what Bryant always did, when he was telling one of his crew some kind of bad news. Just an excuse to have one himself, the poor old lush.'