Authors: Alan Dean Foster
The surgeons plastered Cardenas’s face back together. The drooping mustache regrew in sections. When he was recovered enough
to comprehend what had happened to him they gave him Charliebo, a one-year-old intense-trained shepherd, the best guide dog
the school had. For six years Charliebo had been Cardenas’s eyes.
Then the biosurges figured out a way to transplant optic nerves as well as just the eyeballs and they’d coaxed him back into
the hospital. When he was discharged four months later he was seeing through the bright perfect blue eyes of a dead teenager
named Anise Dorleac whose boyfriend had turned him and her both to ground chuck while drag racing a Lotusette at a hundred
ninety on Interstate Forty up near Flag. Not much salvageable out of either of them except her eyes. They’d given them to
Cardenas.
After that Charliebo didn’t have to be his eyes anymore. Six years, though, an animal becomes something more than
a pet and less than a person. Despite the entreaties of the guide dog school Cardenas wouldn’t give him up. Couldn’t. He’d
never married, no kids, and Charliebo was all the family he’d ever had. You didn’t give up family.
The police association stood by him. The school directors grumbled but didn’t press the matter. Besides, it was pretty funny,
wasn’t it? What could be more outré than a short, aging, blue-eyed Tex-Mex cop who worked his terminal with a dog guarding
his wastepaper basket? So they left him alone. More important, they left him Charliebo.
He didn’t pause outside the one-way plastic door. Pangborn had told him to come right in. He thumbed a contact switch and
stepped through as the plastic slid aside.
The chief didn’t even glance at Charliebo. The shepherd was an appendage of the sergeant, a canine extrusion of Cardenas’s
personality. Cardenas wouldn’t have looked right without the dog to balance him. Without having to be told, the shepherd lay
down silently at the foot of Cardenas’s chair, resting his angular gray head on his forepaws.
“Como se
happening, Nick?”
The chief smiled thinly.
“De nada,
Angel. You?”
“Same old this and that. I think we wormed a line on the chopshop down in Nayarit.”
“Forget it. I’m taking you off that.”
Cardenas’s hand fell to stroke Charliebo’s neck. The dog didn’t move but his eyes closed in pleasure. “I got eighteen months
before mandatory retirement. You pasturing me early?”
“Not a chance.” Pangborn understood. The chief had five years left before they’d kick him out. “Got some funny stuff going
on over in Agua Pri. Lieutenant there, Danny Mendez, is an old friend of mine. They’re oiled and it’s getting uncomfortable.
Some real specific gravity on their backs. So he called for help. I told him I’d loan over the best Intuit in the Southwest.
We both know who that is.”
Cardenas turned and made an exaggerated search of the duty room outside. Pangborn smiled.
“Why not send one of the young hotshots? Why me?”
“Because you’re still the best, you old fart. You know why.”
Sure, he knew why. Because he’d gone six years without eyes and in that time he’d developed the use of his other senses to
the opto. Involuntary training but unsurpassingly effective. Then they’d given him back his sight. Of course he was the best.
But he still liked to hear it. At his age compliments of any kind were few and far between, scattered widely among the ocean
of jokes.
Under his caressing fingers Charliebo stretched delightedly. “So what’s skewed in Agua Pri?”
“Two Designers. Wallace Crescent and a Vladimir Noschek. First one they called Wondrous Wallace. I dunno what they called
the other guy, except irreplaceable. Crescent was the number one mainline man for GenDyne. Noschek worked for Parabas S.A.”
“Also mainline design?” Pangborn nodded. “
Que
about them?”
“Crescent two weeks ago. Noschek right afterward. Each of them wiped clean as a kid’s Etch-A-Sketch. Hollow, vacuumed right
back through childhood. Both of them lying on an office couch, relaxed, Crescent with a drink half finished, Noschek noshing
on a bowl of pistachios. Like they’d been working easy, normal, then suddenly they ain’t at home anymore. That was weird enough.”
“Something was weirder?”
Pangborn looked uneasy. That was unusual. It took a lot of specific gravity to upset the chief. He’d been a sparkler buster
down Guyamas way. Everybody knew about the Tampolobampo massacre. Late night and the runners had buffooned into an ambush
laid by local spitters trying to pull a ripoff. By the time the cops arrived from halfway across Sonora and Sinaloa the beach
was covered with guts the waves washed in and out like spawning grunion. Through it all Pangborn hadn’t blinked, not even
when older cops were heaving their insides all over the Golfo California. He’d just
gone along the waterline kicking pieces of bodies aside looking for evidence to implicate the few survivors. It was an old
story that never got old. Decaders liked to lay it on rookies to see how green they’d get.
But there was no record of Pangborn looking uneasy.
“Nobody can figure out how they died, Angel. Parabas flew their own specialists up from Sao Paulo. Elpaso Juarez coroner’s
office still won’t acknowledge the certification because they can’t list COD. Both bodies were clean as the inside of both
brains. No juice, no soft intrusions, no toxins, nothing. Bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. Inviolate, the reports said.
Hell, how do you kill somebody without intruding? Even ultrasound leaves a signature. But according to Mendez there wasn’t
a damn thing wrong with either man except nobody was home.”
“Motives?”
Pangborn grunted. “Tired of small talk? Working already?”
“Aren’t I?”
The chief scrolled crunch on his desk screen, muting the audio. “Money, schematics, razzmatazz, who knows? Parabas and GenDyne
Internal Security immediately went over homes, friends, and work stations with good suction. Nothing missing, everything in
place. Both men were straight right up and down the lifeline. No alley-oops. GenDyne’s frizzing the whole Southwest Enforcement
Region. They want to know how as much as why. They also want to know if anybody’s going to be next. Bad for morale, bad for
business.” He scratched at his prosthetic left ear. The real one had been chewed off by a ninloco ten years ago and the replacement
never seemed to quite fit.
Cardenas was quiet for a long moment. “What do you think?”
Pangborn shrugged. “Somebody vacuums two mainline Designers after penetrating state-of-the-art corporate security but doesn’t
steal anything insofar as anybody can tell. Both work files were checked. Both are regularly monitored and everything was
solid. So nobody did it to steal crunch. Just
a whim, but I think maybe it was somehow personal. Not corporate at all. You can’t tell that to GenDyne or Parabas. They don’t
like to hear that kind of stuff.”
“You’d expect them to go paranoid. Any connections between the two men?”
“Not that Mendez and his people have been able to find. Didn’t eat at the same restaurants, moved in different circles entirely.
Crescent was married, one wife, family. Noschek was younger, a loner. Separate orbits, separate obits. Me, I think maybe they
were flooded with a new kind of juice. Maybe involuntarily.”
“No evidence for that, and it still doesn’t give us a motive.”
Pangborn stared at him. “Find one.”
Cardenas was at home in the Strip, a solid string of high-tech that ran all the way from LaLa to East Elpaso Juarez. It followed
the old and frayed USA-Mehico border with less regard for actual national boundaries than the Rio Grande. Every multinational
that wanted a piece of the Namerica market had plants there and most had several. In between were kilometers of upstarts,
some true independents, others entrepreneurs spun off by the electronic gargantuas. Down amid the frenzy of innovation, where
bright new developments could be outdated before they could be brought to market, fortunes were risked and lost. If you were
a machinist, a mask sculptor, a programmer, you could make six figures a year. If you were a peon from Zacatecas or Tamulipas,
a dirt farmer made extinct by new tech, or a refugee from the infinite slums of Mexico City, you could always find work on
the assembly lines. Someday if you worked hard and didn’t lose your eyesight to overstrain they might give you a white lab
coat and hat and promote you to a clean room. Kids, women, anybody who could control their fingers and their eyes, could make
hard currency in the Montezuma Strip, where First World technology locked hands with Third World cheap labor.
Spinoffs from the Strip extended north to Phoenix, south to Guyamas. Money brought in subcultures, undercultures,
anticultures. Some of the sociologists who delved into the underpinnings of the Strip didn’t come out. The engineers and technocrats
forced to live in proximity to their labor and produce lived in fortified suburbs and traveled to work in armored transports.
Cops in transit didn’t rate private vehicles.
Cardenas squeezed into a crowded induction shuttle bound for Agua Prieta. The plastic car stank of sweat, disinfectant, Tex-Mex
fast food. Other passengers grudgingly made way for Charliebo but not for his owner. The dog wouldn’t take up a seat.
Cardenas found one anyway, settled in for the hour-long rock-and-ride. Advertising bubbled from the overhead speakers, behind
spider steel grates. A ninloco tried to usurp Cardenas’s seat. He wore his hair long and slick. The Aztec snake tattooed on
his right cheek twitched its coils when he grinned. Cardenas saw him coming but didn’t meet his eyes, hoping he’d just bounce
on past. The other commuters gave the crazyboy plenty of room. He came straight up to Cardenas.
“No spitting, Tio. Just evaporate,
bien
?”
Cardenas glanced up at him. “Waft, child.”
The ninloco’s gaze narrowed. When Cardenas tensed, Charliebo came up off the floor and growled. He was an old dog and he had
big teeth. The ninloco backed a step and reached toward a pocket.
“Leave it, leave you.” Cardenas shook his head warningly, holding up his right arm so the sleeve slid back. The ninloco’s
eyes flicked over the bright blue bracelet with its gleaming LEDs.
“Federale. Hey, I didn’t know,
compadre.
I’ll jojobar.”
“You do that.” Cardenas lowered his hand. The crazyboy vanished back into the crowd. Charliebo grunted and settled down on
his haunches.
Surprised at the tightness in his gut, Cardenas leaned back against the curved plastic and went through a series of relaxation
breathing exercises. This ninloco wasn’t the one who’d flayed him years ago. He was a newer, younger clone, no better and
no worse. A member of one of the hundreds of
gangs that broke apart and coalesced as they drifted through the length of the Strip like sargassum weed in the mid-Atlantic.
The ninlocos hated citizens, but they despised each other.
Across the aisle two teenage girls, one anglo, the other spanglo, continued to stare at him. Only they weren’t seeing him,
he knew, but rather the vits playing across the interior lenses of the oversized glasses they wore. The arms of each set of
lenses curved down behind their ears to drive the music home by direct transduction, straight to the inner ear. Cardenas didn’t
mind the music, but the vibrations were something else.
By the time the induction car pulled into Agua Pri station he’d completely forgotten the confrontation with the ninloco.
The flashman at GenDyne would’ve taken him through the whole damn plant if Cardenas hadn’t finally insisted on being shown
Crescent’s office. It wasn’t his escort’s fault. A flashman just naturally tried to promote and show off his company at every
opportunity. Wasn’t that what sales-pr was all about? Even the police departments engaged flashmen. If you didn’t have a professional
to intercede for you with the media, they’d eat you alive.
That didn’t mean you had to like them, and most people didn’t. Cardenas thought they were one with the lizards that still
scuttled across the rocks north and south of the Strip.
The GenDyne think tank was built like a fortress. In point of fact it was a fortress, the architecture inspired by Assyrian
fortifications unearthed in Mesopotamia. Only instead of stone it rose from the desert whose sand it crowded onto on foundations
of reinforced concrete. Its walls were bronze glass set in casements of white high-construct plastic. It was built on the
southern edge of this part of the Strip, so the south-facing alcoves and offices all had views of once-hostile terrain. Expensive
real estate. This was a place for a multinational’s pets, its most privileged people. Designers and engineers, who conjured
money out of nothing.
Crescent had been important enough to rate a top-floor work station, right up there with the modem mongers who swapped info
and crunch with the home office in LaLa.
Through the window that dominated one wall could be seen the smog-shrouded heights of the Sierra de la Madera. Like a python
dressed for Christmas the arc of the Strip curved around toward Laguna de Guzman and the new arcomplex of Ciudad Pershing-Villa.
The office itself had been furnished professionally. Thick, comforting chairs, a cabinet containing ice maker and drink dispenser,
indirect lighting, everything designed to produce a work environment conducive to the sort of brainstorms that added fractions
to a multinat’s listing on the International Exchange. An expensive colorcrawl by an artist Cardenas didn’t recognize lit
the wall behind the couch, two square meters of half-sentient neon gone berserk. The pale orange and brown earthtone carpet
underfoot was thicker than the upholstery on his furniture back in Nogales. It smelled of new mown hay and damp sandstone,
having been sense recharged not more than a week ago. To cover the smell of death? But Crescent’s passing had been neat. As
the flashman spieled on, Cardenas studied the couch where the body had been found, calm and unstressed.
The desk was a sweep of replicant mesquite, complete to the detailed grain. The east wall was, of course, all screen. It was
just a flat beige surface now, powered down.