Avenging Angel Read online

  I twisted my face into a full-scale leer and leaned forward until mere inches separated our faces. "How about a little smooch then, baby?" I whispered heavily, and planted a big wet kiss on the glass.

  I fled before her howl and hunchbacked it to the car. I revved the engine and screeched out of the lot, laughing maniacally out the window.

  I put five kilometers of asphalt behind me before I felt safe enough to pull over. I wheeled into an automated snack bar and scanhanded three soy-beef sandwiches, a carton of soy milk, a large bag of potato-flavored algae chips and a chocolate-flavored kelp cake for dessert. I parked behind the snack bar, ogling the snacks in the passenger seat. Before I began my first meal in three days, I pulled up my right sleeve and unwrapped the tape securing Crawley's hand to my wrist. I put the hand back in its bag, and the feast began.

  The milk had never been near a cow, the chips contained no potatoes, the cake no chocolate, the sandwiches no beef. I wasn't even sure how much soy the sandwiches contained, what with all those reclamation rumors limping around. My mouth and stomach weren't concerned. I knew I shouldn't eat so much after a week of abstention but I plainly couldn't help myself. I ate until my shrunken stomach was full, then ate some more to please my mouth. I'd feel sick and maybe puke later, but I was a big believer in living for the moment.

  By the time I started on the cake, my mind turned to a question lurking rudely in the back of my mind. Why did a small-time, albeit industrious, hood like Crawley have two bank accounts? And why Second Federal? Second Fed was an executive's bank, one of the few that had survived the nationalizations when the Party made the big grab. I'd pulled the taped-hand stunt before in equally desperate times, but I'd never come across two accounts. Usually they didn't have an account at all. The vast majority of banks belonged to the Party, and most career criminals didn't tend to put a lot of faith in the Party.

  Between swigs of milk and mouthfuls of cake I decided I'd have to get to the bottom of the riddle. It had been so long since I'd had a case that my professional curiosity was eager to brawl with any mystery that ambled by.

  I drove to an isolated Party Bank autoteller, cleared the handscan and closed the account, withdrawing 46.10 creds. I put the thin plastic squares into my empty wallet and drove uptown.

  Finding the Party Bank machine had been easy. The Party Bank was the financial organ of the Party, the agglomeration of all the banks that the Party had nationalized, and they were everywhere. It took me two hours to find a Second Fed machine. It was set into the base of a shopping tower in the City's commercial district where you usually found the sidewalks rife with men and women in one-piece executive suits tight-assing it around like robots. But the sun had set two hours before, and now the streets were nearly deserted, with only a few lights burning in the long skyscrapers. I parked across the street. There wasn't anyone near the machine so I didn't bother with the tape. I left the engine running and walked across the street.

  After I passed the scan, the machine politely asked for a six-digit code number. I pushed the Cancel button and walked back to the car.

  I sat in the Caddy and glared at the arrogant appliance. There wasn't a lot of traffic. Late-working execs tight-assed by at about five-minute intervals. I figured I could roll down a window and empty a 30-round magazine of gyrajets into the evil machine and be home in bed before the authorities arrived.

  A less dramatic idea shouldered its way in. I turned on the interior light, pulled Crawley's wallet from my jacket pocket and emptied its contents onto my lap. Crawley struck me as the kind of person insecure enough to write down his access number in case he forgot. Poets and numbers weren't natural friends.

  The bank card was the obvious suspect, but its surface was free of any writing. I checked the business cards. Three of the cards had a name and phone number written on the back. A Joseph, a B.C. and a Fred II. Something pricked my subconscious, and I stared at the last one. Fred n. Fred the Second. The Second Fred. Second Fed. I chuckled, nodding to the hand sitting on the passenger seat. The cryptic devil.

  The phone number was one digit too many, so I dropped the first digit. The machine rejected me. I tried again, this time leaving off the last digit. The screen read, "Thank you, Mr. Crawley," and I was in. First I checked the balance. Then I opened a new account using my own scanhand, wrote down the code number, transferred Crawley's credit to the new account, withdrew the maximum allowed amount, closed the old account and shuffled back to the Caddy.

  I drove ten blocks and parked in front of an all-night supermarket. I sat behind the wheel for five minutes doing deep-breathing exercises. This is really happening, I told myself again and again, but I couldn't shake the dreamlike feeling.

  Unless I was locked into some serious hallucinations, the wallet in my pocket was home to one thousand creds plus the 46.10 from the earlier withdrawal. In the electronic belly of the infallible Second Federal Bank were 253,756 credits that belonged to yours truly.

  I went in the supermarket and bought enough food to last an extended winter, then rushed home to fill the fridge and cupboards to maximum capacity. I fried up a thick texturized-protein steak, microwaved potato-flavored paste into pliable submission, tossed a kelp salad and sat down to a late-night dinner invigorated by a bottle of cold ripple. After gorging myself, I retired to the living room with a six-pack of vitabeer and a mind full of trepidation.

  I didn't feel guilty about taking the creds. Since Crawley was dead and the data sheet spoke of no known relatives, the money didn't belong to anybody, and one couldn't rightfully be accused of stealing something that didn't belong to anybody. It was merely a windfall of my job, a karmic reward for my good ways and clean living. And if I didn't take it, the bank eventually would, and the good Lord knew they had enough.

  With that safely rationalized, I turned my high-powered logic to what really bothered me. I was torn between living quietly on my newfound wealth for as long as I could stretch it, or blowing it all in a year-long spree of booze, high living and adventure.

  The idea about applying for a moving permit and fleeing the City wasn't exactly an ignored wallflower, either. I felt exposed in the City, a marked man. Crawley didn't get that kind of credit through wise investment, and whoever he took it from would want it back. I thought that my trail was covered, but with the handscan system you could never tell, and there could be a big electronic finger pointing right at me.

  I decided to sleep on it. I finished the six-pack, double-checked the apartment's security system and passed out on my bed.

  6

  I awoke with the terrible knowledge that the events of the previous night were all a dream. I fell out of the sheets in a panic and grabbed my wallet from the top of the dresser. I emptied its contents onto the bed and jumped into the pile of plastic. I closed my eyes and laughed. It had been too long between bouts of solvency.

  I took a quick shower, got dressed and had a soy-steak sandwich and a glass of soy milk for breakfast. Instead of switching back to the lighter 9 mm Browning I usually carried when not working a contract, I stuck to the bulkier gyrapistol. My newfound wealth brought with it the bastard child of insecurity. I could sense the black ravens of paranoia circling above me, haunting my every move.

  It was a twenty-minute drive to the City's SPF headquarters, and I drove with the windows down. At nine in the morning it was already muggy enough to drive the bag ladies into the shade. It got hotter every year, the ever-thickening layer of global smog sealing in the sun's heat like a gray blanket. I could almost hear the ice caps melting. Doom, I thought, doom.

  The bag with Crawley's hand sat on the passenger seat, thawing out after a night spent in the freezer. I almost hated turning the guy in. He wasn't much for conversation, but he was generous to a fault. But then, five thousand creds was five thousand creds, and it would give me something to point at if someone noticed a sudden change in my spending habits.

  SPF HQ was on the other side of the river, so close to the old Travis Penal Institut
ion that it sat in the prison's shadow until noon. The prison was nearly a hundred years old and resembled the kind of medieval castle an evil warlock would be comfortable in. During the corporate years it was said to have been a mercenary training center. When the Party first took power, they put it to use as a reeducation camp. I wasn't sure what was going on inside those stone walls at the moment, and I really didn't care to know.

  I wheeled into the parking lot and parked in the space reserved for the chief of militia control. I took the bagged hand, and the warrant, and left my gun under the seat.

  Though it was six stories high and painted bright white, the SPF HQ building still managed to look squat and ominous. It was all concrete and steel, with narrow windows and good fields of fire, ready to withstand a determined siege. All SPF stations gave that impression. I muscled open the heavy bulletproof door and walked to the security station just inside.

  One of the two guards behind the counter scowled at my private-enforcer license with exaggerated disgust. "What's your business here?"

  "You must be new. My wife works here and she forgot her lunch so I thought I'd drop it by." I shook the hand bag under his nose. He recoiled, making the connection between my license and the bag.

  "You're abominable."

  "Spell that," I demanded. I must have stumped him because he came around the desk and gave me a rough frisk. They didn't like smart guys at SPF headquarters. He seemed disappointed he didn't find anything illegal, so he made me walk through the weapon detector twice. I'd visited SPF headquarters maybe fifty times in the past five years and they still had the same act playing.

  I knew my way to warrant collection by heart. It was a long walk down a quarter kilometer of hallway, and I passed a lot of people on the way. The SPF troopers who noticed the bag labored mightily to show me their contempt, while the civilians and secretaries viewed me with a sort of revulsed awe. I'd dated a SPF secretary once. I'd had her believing I was a bank security guard until she rifled through some of my personal things.

  She found some old contracts and figured the rest out for herself. She never told me exactly why she left, but we both knew the story. I could still recall her last words before she lifted her bags and marched out the door: "How can anyone be so vile and base?"

  All I could do was smile and shrug as if to say, "It ain't no great effort, baby." I still missed the way she had of making soy steak taste like the real thing.

  I reveled in the hard stares and repugnant looks, swinging my bag like a schoolboy. I could have hid it inside my jacket, but that wouldn't have been nearly as entertaining. It was like being the village gravedigger. I was nearly seduced by the desire to hunch a shoulder, squint an eye, drag a leg and start raving about the bells.

  But that wouldn't look good. I had to win their approval and respect through dedication to duty and a professional attitude. With this in mind, I strode professionally into the warrant collection office and slapped the bag on the unmanned counter.

  "Let's have some service here," I demanded. "A professional needs some goddamn service!"

  A bloodless, skeletal-thin man with close-cropped graying hair appeared from an open door behind the counter. "Oh, it's you, Strait. I was afraid it was someone important."

  "Respect, damn it!" I snarled. "Respect and approval is what I crave. Nothing less will do."

  Assistant Inspector Degas clasped bony hands and closed his eyes. "Please Lord, drop a ten-thousand-pound shit-hammer on this man. I pledge ten thousand Ave Marias if you kill him now. Haven't we suffered enough?"

  "You savage bastard!" I accused. "The mighty avenger Jake Strait brings yet another sinister archfiend to justice, and this is what I get? I demand the full accolades I so richly deserve!"

  Degas shook his head sadly, lifting the bag from the counter. He removed the hand from the bag with a pair of tongs and laid it under an industrial-size scanner. "Who's your five-fingered friend?"

  "Rolland D. Crawley. Murderer. Rapist. Pimp. Pusher. Purveyor of bad poetry."

  "Do tell." Degas sat behind a keyboard and monitor cabled to the scanner. His fingers danced over the keyboard with practiced ease, his eyes focused on the screen.

  "It's true," I said. "It took all my considerable skill and daring to overcome his huge arsenal and vicious nature."

  Degas stopped keying the board and squinted at the monitor, frowning, no doubt awed at how dangerous Crawley's record revealed him to be. I yawned and tried to appear modest.

  "You're right about the poetry part, bad or otherwise," Degas said, then looked up. "I didn't think you did political contracts."

  I couldn't immediately comprehend what Degas was saying. It was as if he'd suddenly started jabbering at me in some strange tongue. "I don't do political kills," I said. "You know that. This guy is a violent criminal. He has a rap sheet a kilometer long."

  "As far as our information goes, the only violence Crawley committed was symbolic." His eyes returned to the monitor. "He has two wants on him, both political. He penned some poems of questionable political content for an underground newspaper, and he was photographed taking part in an illegal demonstration protesting the conversion of a library into a reclamation depot. It was an apprehension warrant, not an execution. You sure you didn't get your contracts mixed up?"

  I stood dumfounded. I wanted Degas to tell me it was just a big joke, but I knew he wasn't the kind to screw around. I'd never even seen him crack a smile. His dead gray eyes looked up from the monitor, and he said, "He must have tried to attack you during apprehension."

  "Yeah, that's right," I said, but my words held no conviction. They just slipped out on their own. An instinctual sense of self-preservation took over while my brain scrambled to get back on line. "He pulled a knife. I had no choice."

  "Bullshit!" Inspector Blake stormed into the room so fast he had to put one hand on his hat so it wouldn't fly off. He leaned over Degas's shoulder and stared into the face of the monitor. "You murdered some goddamn poet on an apprehension warrant! You stupid asshole!"

  I'd met Inspector Blake a few times before. I despised him from the start and liked him less every time he opened his mouth.

  "I guess all those years in sap school weren't wasted, were they?" he continued. Sharklike, he smelled blood and was intent on getting as much of my ass as he could. He gestured extravagantly to the hand resting under the scanner. "Well, at least you apprehended part of him."

  I clawed Crawley's warrant out of my breast pocket and slammed it down on the counter. "I have a death warrant right here, Blake."

  The inspector snatched the warrant off the counter. He glanced at it without really looking and said, "Don't bring your forgeries in here, Strait."

  "That's a certified copy!" I hollered.

  "This is certified shit." He crumpled the paper into a ball, and it disappeared into a pocket of his raincoat. He turned to Degas. "What does a Class D-3 apprehension warrant pay? It's been so long since anyone brought one of those in I can hardly remember. Twenty credits, isn't it? Give the hero twenty credits, Degas."

  Without looking up, Degas opened the cash drawer and counted out twenty credits. He laid them on the counter.

  "Go on, handchopper," the inspector said. "Take your 'fooking' pennies and get your stinking ass out of here."

  I hated the inspector. I hated his face. I hated the dirty snap-brim fedora and black rubber raincoat he always wore. I hated the way he mispronounced his obscenities. I hated his soul. We would never be chums.

  "Up yours, Inspector," I said, too wound up to be original. I picked up the creds and threw them at him. "Go buy yourself a new hat, screw."

  His voice caught up with me at the door. "We might just pull your license for this, Strait! If we don't press murder charges!"

  I slammed the door as I went out, but that didn't seem enough. The hallway felt as hot as an oven and too narrow for my hulking shape, each step an off-balance, self-conscious lurch as sweat trickled down my back.

  It was even hotter
outside, but instead of walking straight to my car I detoured through the staff parking area. A huge black late-model, all-terrain pickup with whip antennae and a row of lights on the chrome roll bar squatted in the space reserved for Inspector Blake. Figures, I thought, taking my keys out of my pocket. Casually, I walked down one length of the truck then the other, whistling as I went to cover the high-pitched squeal of scraping paint. I ambled over to the Caddy, my heart many times lighter, hoping Blake would realize who did it.

  I drove to the nearest branch of the Party Bank, located in the bowels of a sprawling bubble mall, a dinosaur from the corporate heyday, crammed full of people from the burbs and security cops.

  I got good eye contact with a pretty brunette teller while waiting in her line and realized it had been nearly three months since I'd had a date. When it was my turn, she brought out a beautiful smile shackled to an appraising stare.

  "Hello, Teresa," I said, reading her name tag. "Haven't we met?"

  "No, I don't think so," she said.

  "Well, it's time we did." I held out both my hands. "I'm Jake."

  She held out her hands, and I checked for a ring. There wasn't one. I hung on to her left hand and turned it over.

  "Lord God!"

  "What? What's wrong?" she said, staring at her palm.

  "Why, that's the deepest love line I've ever seen. Are you a romantic, Teresa?"

  "Well," she said, calming down. "I do like candlelight dinners and walks in the rain."

  I sighed as if the great search were finally over. "You know when you're walking in the park in the autumn," I murmured, "and the leaves are all down, and it just stopped raining, and you can smell the leaves, the grass, the rain?"

  "Yes," she whispered. "I know."

  "Then a lonely bird starts to sing, and you cast your eyes to the misty skies and you feel as if at that unique moment, all the eyes of all the angels in Heaven are upon you and you fall in love with the whole world. Have you ever felt that way, Teresa?"