Avenging Angel Read online

  "How about a retainer?"

  Dash gave me a tight little smile and spread his hands in front of him as if I were belaboring the obvious. The gesture bothered me. "We don't know you from Adam, Mr. Strait. You could just take our money and…?" He let the statement hang as a question, as if only I could know what fiendish things I was capable of doing once I got my hands on their check.

  "I see," I said. "Well, I'm going to have to scan you."

  "Is that really necessary?" Dash asked, his tone implying that it really wasn't.

  I spread my hands and gave him back his tight little smile. "Trust works both ways, Mr. Chamberlain. I don't know you, either. You just might be here under false pretenses." I smiled wider and pushed a small desk-model handscanner toward him. He recoiled as if I'd shoved a vicious lizard in his face. "C'mon," I chided, "you must do this at least five times a day."

  He craned his neck back and radiated indignity in waves. I basked in it. With a choking sound he swept his right hand under the scanner head. The scanner beeped, reading the tiny microchip embedded in his hand. It translated the codes into words and numbers and displayed the information on the miniature screen facing me.

  "It's just a first-level scan, correct?" Dash asked.

  "That's right," I lied. "That's all I'm allowed by the laws of the glorious World Party. Dashmeil Horace Chamberlain, identity number 857672332." The screen told me a lot more than that, but that was my little secret. Unauthorized possession of a third-level scanner was a big no-no.

  "That is correct," Dash snapped. I stored the information and looked over at Mrs. Chamberlain.

  "Me too?" she squeaked.

  I nodded somberly. "We can't just do this halfway, now can we?"

  "This is an outrage!" Dash exclaimed, the veins in his neck bulging unattractively.

  "No, it's just the way we do business around here, Mr. Chamberlain. At least when we don't get a retainer."

  They eventually calmed down, and after a consenting nod from Dash, Barbara skittered her hand under the scanner head.

  "Barbara Mildred Chamberlain," I read. I sat back and let them suffer beneath the weight of my cruel grin. I knew their secrets. "It seems to check out," I said in a sinister, triumphant manner, as if now that I knew their full identities I could fully convert them into slaves of the dark forces.

  They started to get up, but I sat them back down with a wave of my hand. "I have a few pertinent questions to ask," I said. "First, how am I supposed to contact you?"

  "Why would you want to contact us?" Dash asked uneasily.

  "Oh, I don't know. Matters concerning the case, or my payment. Maybe Barbara has a sister and we could double-date, a movie or something. You know." I shrugged.

  "All we know about Crawley is to be found on pages three and four of the document. Payment will be handled by the Party Bank."

  "Who put you in contact with me?"

  "Our lawyer, Mr. Mallard," Dash said.

  I nodded curtly as if high-powered shysters were always unloading cases on me.

  "I believe he got your name out of the directory," Dash said, smiling as if he'd just earned a point. I let it go.

  "Why didn't Mr. Mallard call me first?"

  "He tried to, but your answering service said they wouldn't take any more of your calls until you paid your bill." Dash smiled triumphantly. "Three weeks in arrears, they said."

  I was beginning to feel unworthy of the gold-lettered sign on my door. "Why didn't your lawyer deliver these papers? Or the chauffeur? This isn't a safe neighborhood."

  "Because Dashmeil likes doing things himself," Barbara chirped. Dash nodded as if it was an obvious truth.

  "One last question. What exactly is your interest in bringing Mr. Crawley to justice?"

  "Your sign," Dash said, "states that you are a righter of wrongs, an avenger of injustices. Rolland Crawley wronged us."

  "He assaulted our daughter!" Barbara clarified dramatically. She looked ready for a good crying jag. "He's an inhuman beast who preys on Utile girls."

  "How do you know it was Crawley who did it?" I asked.

  "We have our contacts in the City, Mr. Strait," Dash assured.

  "What kind of contacts?"

  "Reputable contacts."

  "How reputable?"

  "Reputable enough to get the SPF to issue a death warrant, quite obviously," he said.

  "All right," I said. "No promises, but I'll see what I can do." I considered adding "If I can find the time," but I didn't think they'd buy it. I reached across the desk and shook hands with Dash. His hand was pliant, and he gave me the politician one-shake.

  Babs stood and smiled shyly, fully recovered from the previous moment's trauma. "It's been a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Strait. Most people think bogeymen are such monsters, but you seem almost human."

  A grimace came to my lips and I packaged it as a smile. "Why, thank you, ma'am."

  She beamed graciously and mewed a little goodbye sound on the way to the door.

  After they left, I went to the window and watched them exit the building. Some nameless instinct made them look up, and I waved, feeling foolish. Mike Hammer would never have done that, I reflected, sighing at yet another image failure.

  Barbara waved back. Dash started to raise his hand but jerked it down at the last moment, apparently thinking it wasn't appropriate to wave in bad neighborhoods. They stiff-legged it to a double-parked luxury cruiser that had undoubtably waited the entire visit.

  I went back to the desk and stared at the twin depressions in the sofa where they'd sat. For all their apparent wealth, the Chamberlains weren't much different from the majority of my clientele as far as their motives went. When I was graced with their presence, those who came to my office usually had the same story: they'd given up on the City's Security and Protection Force ever doling them out any justice, so they turned to private contractors like myself to avenge their grief. If the offended party could provide the judicial branch of the SPF with enough evidence, a warrant would be issued. The plaintiffs then had every legal right to hire a licensed private enforcer like myself to bring their criminal to justice, whether that meant apprehension or execution.

  It wasn't that there weren't enough SPF troopers on the City payroll. It was just that most of them were deployed in the suburbs or guarding perimeters like the Hill to keep the riffraff from getting at the truly upstanding citizens. There were large parts of the City that didn't enjoy the presence of an institutionalized law-enforcement body, except for the odd politically motivated air strike or commando raid. It was a fact of life that most of the City was plainly lawless, and it took proud heroes like myself to extract any semblance of justice. At least that's what I liked to tell myself when I got drunk.

  I wondered how many other private enforcers the Chamberlains had told their well-rehearsed story to. It would explain their reluctance to leave a retainer. Most wealthy clients liked to give me one so I'd feel indebted and servile. Then they felt they had the right to call me up in the black of night and demand why I wasn't out there in the belly of the City, racing down back alleys, tracking down their convict like a rabid ferret.

  I read the five pages three times, then lit a vitacig and leaned back in my chair, letting the raw data soak in. By the looks of things Mr. Crawley was a small-time hustler with a taste for random violence. He pushed whack, crack and squeeze as his main job, with a little pimping and gunrunning on the side. On his days off he apparently liked to indulge in a little rape and murder to pass those lazy afternoons. The psychiatrist who did his profile had him figured as a homicidal psychotic driven by an impulsive need to hurt people. A wholly unsavory character, he had never been confined, but that was the way things were in the City.

  Incredibly enough, Crawley's rap sheet was completely absent of political wants, which was strange because nearly all career criminals ended up stepping on the Party's sensitive toes sooner or later. Crawley must have either made a project out of staying out of the Party's way or he w
as just the kind of guy who had no interest in politics, a rare breed in these times. Crawley's exact whereabouts were a mystery, though he was known to haunt Barridales, a once-quaint slum currently famous for its squeeze production and gangs for hire.

  The SPF reward incentive code was a lousy D-3, denoting Crawley's lack of political offenses. Maybe if he went out and distributed a stack of anti-Party leaflets he'd jump up a letter or two. If I wanted to work just the SPF reward angle, the big money was in the political offenders. I knew of a couple of private pistoleros who made a good living just terminating a code A or a couple of Bs a month. I didn't do political contracts, preferring client work. I wasn't real hot about the Party line myself and I'd feel a little hypocritical gunning down some guy because he organized demonstrations or ran an underground newspaper. Some would call me a romantic.

  "Pretty open and shut," I said to the walls. "I'll just follow a trail of clues to his secret hideaway and deal out some much-deserved justice. Show the SPF my good deed, take the confirmation to the bank, then it's back to regular meals and clean laundry."

  I went to the window and looked out at the crawling humanity. Down there, somewhere, waited a man I had to kill.

  * * *

  I locked up my office, trying to ignore the hand-lettered sign painted on the door. Jake Strait, Private Enforcer, it stated in bold, uncompromising letters. Below in smaller script it read Wrongs Righted, Injustices Avenged. There was a time when I'd believed in what the sign said. Now the lofty ideals that inspired the words seemed remote, vaguely resented strangers, the punch line of a sick joke. I put my back to it and went down to the street.

  The sun had long since collapsed, yet the thick residue of its heat still hung in the air. A torpid breeze pushed up the street, shoving ahead of it the smell of freshly roasted dog from Hayward's scattered army of kabob shops. My stomach declared its poverty, and I stared across the street at St. Christopher's Lounge like a forlorn lover. A fifteen-meter-high likeness of the good saint straddled the entrance of its namesake, hoisting high a frothing stein, his cherubic face managing to appear wholly angelic and horribly drunk at the same time. The wino saint. Whenever solvency and despair bumped into each other, I was known to invest entire afternoons and evenings inside, swilling beer and joking with the whores. 1 missed that more than eating.

  I walked to my car, cutting through the streams of factory workers. They slid me tired, spiteful eyes, unhappy with their lot. The voices of whores rang out, harassing their ragged ranks like jackals nipping at a herd of tired water buffalo. It was always good to see the whores early on, when their makeup was fresh and they carried themselves like starlets on the lam. Later in the night, after their fourth or fifth trick, they wouldn't look so pretty.

  I strolled past porn shops and pawnshops, bars and brothels, liquor stores and drug dens, used-car lots and rundown motels. Hayward was a specialized community, the dirty conscience of a perverted city. At the same time it was one of the few pipelines that brought credit into the surrounding slums, whatever the means. My Cadillac sat in front of a City landmark, Speaker's Corner. The wobbly platform that rose out of the weed-infested lot served as the unofficial platform for all the loons and goons of Hayward, and there were a few.

  Presently the lot swarmed with a congregation of hooting winos, which meant Moses Perry was preaching. Perry was a whiskey evangelist, a special breed of religious wino. He was also a friend of mine. I waved at him as I got behind the wheel, but he was too wrapped up in his sermon to notice. After a coughing fit, the Caddy groaned to life and I steered into traffic.

  I couldn't see the river for all the porn palaces and liquor emporiums, but I could smell it. The river ran parallel to Hayward and they shared similarities. Both were polluted by poison, one by human waste, the other by wasted humans. At the intersection where Hayward met Twelfth, I turned away from the river and headed home.

  3

  I awoke to voices. I shook off the lingering images of dreams about angels attacking the City and stuck my head out the bedroom window. Four stories below, knots of excited youths milled in the early-morning sun. Pipes, Molotov cocktails and other archaic weapons were in evidence, but no guns, suggesting only one thing. I spotted one of the neighbor's kids and shouted down to him. "A little early for a riot, isn't it, Vlad?"

  He shielded his eyes from the sun and looked up. "Justice doesn't wait for the setting of the sun, comrade."

  "What's on the agenda this morning?"

  "We're going to stage an aggressive redistributive protest against the capitalist moneylenders," he said with a slight Russian brogue. Youths around him nodded vigorously, approving of Vlad's eloquent appraisal.

  "You're going to loot some pawnshops," I translated.

  He screwed his face up. "The unsophisticated might color it so. Do you want to come along? Should be a good one."

  I thought for a moment. "Wouldn't you rather loot a food store?"

  He conferred briefly with his companions. After some concerted head-shaking he said, "No, we did that last week. It's time to bring the moneylenders in line with the needs of the people." He waved goodbye as they marched righteously off.

  I stuck my head farther out the window and surveyed my neighborhood. If I had to describe Rood Avenue in one word, I'd say tired. The limestone and brick towers dated from the 1960s, long before the Party came to power. The buildings must have been dignified and lovely then. By the eighties they must have been considered a little seedy but fine for lower-middle-class families. In the turbulent nineties, campy would have described the area. By the turn of the century, Rood was assimilated by slums growing at a cancerous rate, fed by the surge of dirt-poor refugees from Eastern Europe. That was twenty years ago. The times had rubbed Rood's face in the grime, and though it was a slow march to complete decrepitation, it wasn't dallying on the way.

  At least the rent was free. Four years before, the more excitable residents of Colfax, the borough that contained Rood, declared the area a rent-free zone and threatened to kill any landlord on sight. SPF troopers moved in, the barricades went up, and riots flared. It didn't take long for the Party to realize it was easier to slag off a couple dozen slumlords than to risk the riots spreading to the rest of the slums. Now the borough was completely rent free and a SPF no-go area. It made for a brooding, lawless atmosphere I found comfortable, not to mention affordable.

  Bare cupboards could offer no breakfast, so I had a big glass of boiling water perfumed by a bag of tea that had played the game too many times before. It didn't really alter the flavor of the water but it did make for a nice ritual, and one couldn't ignore the psychological comfort of rituals.

  I drove to the borough of Barridales. I wasn't such an optimist that I'd expect to spot Crawley lurking outside a pool hall or topless bar, but I was of the opinion that to properly hunt an animal you must first study its environment.

  Barridales began as a wealthy neighborhood about seventy years ago, and some of the old mansions still stood. They were crowded by unwealthy people now, but if you looked real hard you could still see some of their former elegance. Barridales was also known as Barricades for all the bouts of social unrest that kept the warm summer nights jumping. I cruised down Broughton, the main drag, steering around burned-out cars and the shabby skeletons of barricades, ghosts of riots past. When things got too wild, SPF rotors and jets would shriek in for "suppressive air strikes." Sometimes they dropped tear gas, sometimes harder stuff. The random five-meter-wide craters that pockmarked the area were evidence of the harder stuff.

  I pulled over in front of a neighborhood store I would have mistaken for a fortified bunker if it weren't for the Shahid's Foodshop and Free Fungum signs in the barred window. I went inside.

  The shelves were full, but full of the same things. Soy milk, soy bread, soy burger, algae cake, algae bread, algae breakfast cereal and so on, all in plain black-and-white packaging. It was typical of any Party-supplied food store.

  "Can I help you find s
omething?" a bearded Middle Eastern gentleman asked from behind the counter.

  "Maybe you can. I'm looking for someone." I dropped Crawley's picture on the counter.

  He didn't look at the picture. Instead, he showed me an empty hand, a hand that seemed to want something put in it. I pretended not to see it.

  "I'm from Greenpeace," I said in a low voice.

  He fixed me with distrustful eyes, then picked up the picture. "What do the Greens want with this man?"

  "He's an agent of the Landlord Security Alliance."

  The infamous name shot fear and loathing into his eyes. "He's with LiSA? I thought you Greens wiped out their last death squad years ago."

  "A few of the ringleaders got away. They've reorganized and plan to restart their sinister operation." I gave him a solemn look. "They want to start charging rent again."

  He gasped and stared harder at the picture, his jaw working furiously. He moved the picture forward and back, squinted at it, viewed it from different angles. I knew he wanted to help, desperately so, but desire wasn't enough. After a moment he handed back the picture and shook his head, tears of frustration in his eyes.

  I shrugged consolingly and went outside. I sat on the Caddy's hood and surveyed the street. Members of the local militia had taken up ragged post on a street corner, unshaven youths with hangovers and assault rifles. Several of the more enterprising were trying to set up a makeshift roadblock, while the rest passed a bottle around and cast suspicious looks in my direction. Across the street was a building that might have once been a synagogue. According to the sign, it currently served as the Gay Militant Action Committee headquarters, though the leather boys sitting on the steps outside didn't seem particularly militant or even active.

  Wolf whistles and shouts exploded from the direction of the militiamen as a fallen angel marched through their ranks, hunched against the weight of their howls and obscene demands.

  She dressed in a uniform typical of a streetwalker: yellow spandex blouse, red plastic micro-skirt, fishnet stockings and too much rouge and eyeliner. She teetered down the sidewalk on absurd six-inch heels that didn't conceal her dwarfish stature, looking as if she might tip over at any moment.