Cops could be brutal when it came to jokes. It was almost better to get killed in the line of duty than have to face
that
every day.
As I walked, garish neon lights in a thousand different colors announced the pleasures that awaited a customer in any of the clubs along The Lane. Doormen called out to me, trying to lure me into their establishment for the hour of my life. I ignored them. It was easier that way. Most of them were lifelong residents of Easytown; they grew up as swindlers and cheats. You show any interest and they’d swoop in for the kill—sometimes literally.
The Digital Diva was still a couple of blocks away. I didn’t even need to read the sign to remember which one it was. Their doorman stood underneath the building’s oversized awning looking forlornly into the street without shouting at any of the passersby.
Yeah, that’s the place
.
Tiny droplets of water fell from the brim of my fedora as I looked down to watch my footing on the treacherous sidewalk. The streets and sidewalks of Easytown were uneven in most places and downright dangerous for the unobservant. I swear that the city simply poured concrete over whatever had been on the ground without any preparation or leveling of the area. Given how dangerous the side streets were for non-residents, that’s probably what happened.
Once, fifty years ago, maybe more, the whole neighborhood had been underwater. Then, after the war, the weather began to get colder and sea levels receded as the ice packs grew. Lake Borgne dried up and the already overpopulated city scrambled at the opportunity to grab land behind the new seawalls. But supply couldn’t keep up with demand as people fled southward from the deepening cold up north. A dangerous shantytown of clapboard and sheet metal homes sprang up in the reclaimed land overnight. The mayor and city council passed an emergency funding measure to pave a few streets through the mud and then tax the residents for their use.
Voilà!
Easytown was born.
I swung wide to avoid a couple of drunken guys trying to cut a deal with a prostitute; hopefully, I wouldn’t see one or both of them again. The 2090 Census recorded 17,739 full-time residents in the six square miles of Easytown. By modern standards, it was only moderately populated. From a police perspective, what made the district challenging were the entertainment options. Jubilee Lane boasted a wide selection of amenities for visitors.
At last count, there were fifteen sex clubs in Easytown, all of which offered a variety of human and robotic prostitutes depending on the client’s tastes and willingness to catch a disease. There’d been murders in four of them just in the past few weeks. Scattered between the sex clubs were ten thumper clubs, where patrons went to dance long into the night and risked the occasional accidental death or maiming. Visitors had to be careful about which type of establishment they wandered into in their drunken stupor or they could accidentally get charged hundreds of dollars before they realized they were in the wrong place. Buyer beware and all that.
I stepped over a particularly fast moving stream of water running from an alley out to the street, which didn’t have proper drainage. On the corner of the next block was one of the two legal casinos we had. Both were designed to bring in as many customers as possible with street callers, dancing girls in the windows and promises of the chance to win big. Too bad the machines were rigged more than the ones on cruise ships.
In addition to the sex clubs, The Lane had nine strip clubs. They were drastically less expensive than the full treatment establishments and if a client just wanted to watch a dancer and not interact, skin-to-skin, these kinds of places were their best bet. Finally, rounding out the collection of businesses in Easytown, there were seven bars that didn’t qualify as thumpers, three Oriental massage parlors where a happy ending was standard, and the dockyard.
Illicit drugs were everywhere, from the mundane sedatives and stimulants to the more exotic narcotics like synthaine and morphcybin, both of which were as likely to turn the user into a hallucinating, rage-filled killing machine and then stop their heart, as they were to get them high. Overall, Easytown was really a lovely place.
The city barely managed the district. As long as business owners paid their taxes, and people weren’t murdered or robbed in their establishment, they were left alone. Unfortunately, that’s where I came in. All of the homicide detectives in New Orleans were busy, but those of us who were lucky enough to work in Easytown were worked to the bone. Death came quickly to the unsuspecting and unprepared on the streets down here.
A long, vertical rectangle sign clung to the side of the building overhead, announcing that I’d arrived at the Diva. Tiny, light-emitting diodes chased each other around the sign to catch the attention of customers that the doorman didn’t. What caught my eye, though, was the image painted on the only window at street level. It was an original sex bot wearing a schoolgirl uniform kneeling in front of a customer. The nostalgic image was supposed to harken back to the glory days of early sex tourism in the United States, but the idea of those sharp metal angles anywhere near my private parts made me cringe. How people ever thought those things were sexy was beyond me.
“Are you the cop they’re waitin’ for?” the doorman asked.
“That’s me,” I replied, smiling. I tried to keep the department’s social interaction class in the back of my mind. I tended to have a rough demeanor with the residents of Easytown and it landed me in sensitivity training every few months.
“Good. We’ve been losing money every minute the club is closed down,” he growled.
“You’ll be shut down for a few days, kiddo,” I grumbled and pushed past the wannabe tough guy, despite his protests.
As soon as I opened the door, two women stood from where they’d been reclining on a pair of chaise lounges and strutted toward me. I glanced at them and scanned the waiting area quickly. Several men sat looking glum as they waited to be released from the lockdown once they gave their statements to the solitary uniformed officer in the room. A wall of pictures, presumably of the current sex bots, indicated with green or red lighting which droid was currently available. In front of the pictures, an Asian woman with chin-length blue hair sat at the welcome desk.
I tried to make my way over to the attendant, but the two prostitutes blocked my way. On my left, a chocolate-skinned woman smiled and slid her hand around my waist, pulling me against her. “Hey, stranger. I’m ready to make all of your dreams come true. You can do whatever you want to me.”
“Are you…are you a sex bot?” I asked in surprise.
“Yes, I’m a pleasure droid. I’ve been waiting for a stud like you to come in here and show me how a real man takes control.”
I’d seen the latest models in a couple of the other clubs, but had never interacted with one, let alone touched it. The report the department had sent out hadn’t done the realism of these robots justice. These things made the previous model look like rusty metal toasters with a few extra holes drilled into them.
Before I could respond to her, a delicate finger touched the side of my face, pressuring me to look away from the first droid to the next. As I slowly turned my head, all four of her fingers found their way onto my cheek.
How the hell does she feel so real?
I found myself looking into a pair of green eyes that sparkled, offering me a glimpse of what could come—for a price. “Forgive Aisha,” the droid said. “She’s too aggressive for you. I’m more your type.”
“I don’t have a type when it comes to robots,” I countered.
“All men do,” she refuted. “I’m Carly.” She leaned over and her lips brushed along my jawline, sending chills down my spine.
I thought I’d seen it all in Easytown, but these things were on a totally new playing field. It didn’t matter what I said, they’d keep pressing forward to fulfill her programming. “Really, girls,” I said as I peeled myself from their arms. “I ain’t your type.”
“I don’t please you?” Carly inquired, pushing her lower lip out and fluttering her eyelashes at me.
I laughed. “Until you did that, I wasn’t entirely sure that you weren’t just a human prostitute pretending to be a bot. Tell your programmer that women don’t really do that thing you did with your lip.”
It was true. The new models looked so
real
. Their skin didn’t feel rubbery or cold like the older models I’d been around on other cases. These droids blinked like a human. They even inhaled and exhaled softly to simulate breathing. Carly’s breath smelled like strawberries. It was time to let the charade end.
“Alright, get off of me. I’m a police officer.”
Carly stepped back instantly and Aisha dropped her hand from my waist. They both turned and walked back to their couches without a backward glance. “Was it something I said?” I chuckled.
“Yes, Detective. They know of the NOPD’s strict ban on their officers against committing deviant behavior—the so-called Immorality Clauses,” the woman at the desk stated.
“We want our establishment to remain on the city’s authorized pleasure facilities list, so we’ve programmed our girls to respond with assistance of a purely non-sexual manner when they encounter a police officer.”
I looked over at Carly and Aisha. They’d resumed their position on the chaise lounges. “I guess ‘non-sexual’ means ‘ignore the cop’ right?”
The woman shrugged casually. Obviously, it wasn’t her problem.
I walked over to her and said, “I’m Detective Forrest of the New Orleans PD. I received a call from my partner, Sergeant Drake, that there’d been a murder in this establishment.”
“Oh! I thought you were just another asshole cop using the lockdown to get a peek at my girls. Thank you for coming, Detective.” She leaned forward into the light of a desk lamp and my breath caught in my throat. The woman was stunning. She had an elongated oval face, olive skin and gorgeous cornflower-blue eyes—obviously not her natural color. Her hair and lips both matched her blue contacts, adding to the symmetry she possessed naturally and she wore what looked to be a traditional Japanese dress.
“I’m sorry that some of the other officers have done that,” I answered, extending my hand. She glanced at my hand and then back at me. “I’ll, uh, be sure to put it in my report.”
I waited a moment for her to take my hand, but she didn’t, so I dropped it to the desktop. “Can you tell me what happened here, Miss…?”
“Paxton,” she replied, lifting her own hand for a handshake.
What an odd duck
, I thought and gripped her hand lightly. “Paxton. Is that a first or last name?” I asked as I released her hand and flipped open my notebook.
She smiled seductively. “It’s my name, Detective. Simply ‘Paxton,’ no surname required.”
“
Hmpf
,” I grunted. I’d seen a thousand women like her in Easytown. They thought they could bat an eye and sweet-talk me to evade my questions. Wasn’t gonna work. “Cut the act, ma’am. I’ll need your full name for the report and I need to ask you a few preliminary questions.”
The woman seemed taken aback for half a second and then replied, “Paxton Himura.”
“Do you have a middle name, Miss Himura?”
“No. My parents weren’t the traditional Japanese types. They—”
“What’s your position here at The Digital Diva?”
“I’m the House Mistress. I make sure that we match the correct girl to our clients to give them the most pleasurable experience their money can buy. I also interact with the environmental and tech support staff to coordinate sanitation of the rooms and to ensure that my girls are running properly after the clients have left.”
“So, you’re the manager,” I stated flatly.
“Uh, yes. I guess that would be the closest term,” the mistress answered, dropping the charm.
I guess she got the hint that I wasn’t playing around.
“Place of residence?”
“5134 Ableman Way, apartment twenty-two thirteen.”
As I wrote the information down, I searched my memory. Ableman Way sounded familiar, but it wasn’t in the district. “What neighborhood is that located in?”
“Venetian Isles.”
“Must make some pretty good money down here,” I muttered. The Isles had undergone a major transformation in the last fifty years. When I was a kid, it was still a lot of residual suburban lakeside homes, but with the realization that the loss of Lake Borgne was permanent, the small community was developed into one of the nicest and most expensive neighborhoods in New Orleans.
She frowned slightly. “I do alright for myself, Detective.”
That’s fair
. “I must advise you that you are not required to answer any of my questions at this time. If you feel uncomfortable, we can continue the discussion in the presence of your lawyer.”
“
I’m
the one who called the police.”
I held up my hands to placate her. “Ma’am, you’re not under investigation. But, legally, we have to let you know that you aren’t required to answer any questions.”
My explanation seemed to do the trick and she eased back in her seat. “Go ahead, Detective.”
“Okay,” I flipped my notebook back to the page where I’d written a few preliminary questions while the Jeep brought me down here. “You said you called the police; were you the one who found the body?”