Avenging Angel Read online

  Britt's beast didn't live in a cage. It lived behind a thin curtain, a fabric so sheer that if you looked hard enough you could see it pacing restlessly back and forth. I'd seen the beast poke its head out when she warned off the redhead and during the fight. Now, in bed, the beast ripped the curtain down. It was at the controls; the beast had become Britt and Britt was the beast.

  There wasn't a moment of tenderness or an instant of love — those weren't the emotions that fueled the fire. It was a brutal, muscular contest, an act of black passion that lay somewhere between war and orgy. I was stronger, but Britt was quicker and gifted with a powerful sense of leverage, a wolflike feel for weakness. We grappled and sweated and scratched and bit, and crawled to the highest peak of pleasure and plunged into the deepest pit of pain, and the two mixed and fused until I couldn't tell one from the other. I ebbed above and below waves of alcoholic stupor and at one exhausted moment nearly submitted to her terrible will. But the idea of giving in to her terrified something at the very core of my soul. When I looked into those burning black eyes, I instinctively understood that giving in would entail something more than just having to say uncle.

  I realized just how little I knew about her. For all I knew, she was a psychopath with a thing for castration; the City was full of them. I felt like the male black widow spider in the grips of its mate, and it was with a fearful desperation I struggled for dominance.

  I don't know who won — maybe no one was supposed to. But hours into the black act, I slipped under for good.

  9

  I awoke to a pounding at the apartment door. I crawled out of bed, my brain in traction. My equilibrium had deserted me, and I staggered to the door like a cripple who'd lost his crutches.

  I opened the door. It was Crawley, his naked body bloated and lily-white. Two gaping holes left his chest deflated, and his scanhand was missing. Of course it's missing, an inner voice shrieked, I took it from him!

  "I need a hand! Can you give me a hand?" he screeched in my face. "Don't you get it? I need a fucking hand!" He shoved his way past me and shambled into the kitchen. From the door I watched him pulling utensils and ingredients from the cupboards.

  "Guests will be here any minute and I haven't even started on the carbaigne sauce!" he wailed, his bare feet slapping on the tiles. "I'll be the laughingstock of the entire poetry circuit!"

  Blood began dripping from the stump, forming a puddle on the kitchen floor. That'll be hell to clean up, a delirious inner voice pointed out. The trickle became a stream, and the stream a torrent. The rush of thick, hot blood hit me with the intensity of a fire hose, pinning me against the wall. Crawley rolled his eyes back and screamed. Out of respect for the dead I joined him.

  My own voice woke me. I wiped frantically at the sickeningly warm blood on my chest until I realized it was only sweat. I breathed with hoarse gasps, my throat raw with screams.

  "Bad dreams, dear?" The words came from a dark corner near the window and were made ugly by sarcasm. My internal clock told me it was well past noon, but the bedroom was as black as a tomb. The heavy curtains were drawn, and light squeezed in through the tiniest of pinholes. The burning red eye of a cigarette floated at hip level in the corner from which the voice had come, and I could make out the faint outline of a body.

  I felt as though I'd spent the night in the dryer with a rabid alley cat. Bruises and scratches up and down my body competed for sympathy. I propped myself up on one elbow and rubbed my temples with thumb and index finger.

  "Oh, poor baby," said a voice as cold as a pimp's heart. "You don't feel well?"

  I stared at her silhouette. In the hand that wasn't holding the cigarette, she gripped a dim shape that looked big and familiar. "Pretty grouchy before your first cup of kelpee, I see," I said, my tongue tasting like something I wouldn't put in my mouth.

  "Go to hell," she snarled.

  I stared at her form, and a minute dragged its feet to the chopping block. "Be honest with me now, Britt," I said. "You're really the Devil, aren't you?"

  A lethal shape rose in front of her and was caught and defined by the needles of light from the window. Oh, I thought. The big familiar thing is my gyrapistol. Its snout pointed at my head.

  "Afraid I wasn't going to tip?" I asked.

  "I'm not a whore."

  "I know that."

  "And you're not an insurance salesman."

  "I know that, too."

  "You're a murdering thief," she spit out.

  "Am not, you big liar."

  "Tell Rolland Crawley that," she growled.

  "Bring him here and I will."

  "It's a little late for that. I saw you walk out of his apartment with his hand in a bag!" she shouted indictingly.

  Oh-ho, I thought. So she was the one in the lovely head wrap and shades. I had the same trouble with memories as I did with women: getting them was easy, convincing them to hang around was the trick I couldn't figure. "It wasn't a hand," I said. "It was a bag of synthetic carrots I borrowed from Roily. I was making stew for the big shindig."

  "I found him inside on the floor," she screeched, hysterical with incredulity at my dashing defense. "Dead and missing a hand!"

  I bet she thought she had an answer for everything. She was edging me in points, and that was a damn shame since she had the gun. "Dead and handless? Really? I thought he looked a little down."

  She made a low guttural sound. "This is all a big joke to you, isn't it?"

  "Is that a trick question?"

  She yelled at me for a moment, then calmed down enough to demand, "Where's my money?"

  "I thought you said you weren't a whore," I protested.

  "I'm not! I want my quarter of a million creds."

  "Jesus! Isn't that a little steep for one night?"

  "I want the money you stole."

  "You don't have an extraordinarily high opinion of me, do you?" I said. "What money was I supposed to have stolen?"

  "The goddamn money you took from Rolland Crawley's bank account!" She showed her exasperation by shoving the snout of the pistol at me. "The quarter million!"

  "Oh, that money." I folded my arms and set my jaw, the very embodiment of proud defiance. "I won't tell you. And you can't tickle it out of me, though you can try if you want."

  "You'll tell me or I'll shoot you."

  "It's in the living room closet."

  She gestured with the pistol. "Let's go."

  "Let me ask you a question first," I said.

  "What?"

  "Do you know how to use that thing?"

  "I know how to pull a trigger."

  "How do you know there's a round chambered?"

  "Oh, I don't know, you just strike me as the kind of macho jerk who would carry it around with a round chambered."

  She had me figured. "One more question," I said.

  "Is it important?"

  "I think it is," I said somberly.

  "Go ahead."

  "Does this mean we're not going steady anymore?" I asked. She screamed and I felt I could take that either way. "Because I'd hate to blow what could be a beautiful relationship over a silly little misunderstanding like this."

  She didn't say a word, but I could sense her trembling. I could almost hear the hiss of burning fuse.

  "Heck, we'll talk about all that later," I said, getting out of bed. "Let's get you your money, what do you say?"

  She wouldn't let me put my pants on, so I went into the living room in the buff.

  "It's in the vault," I said. The «vault» was a closet with a heavy steel door.

  "Open it," she said flatly.

  "It has a combination lock. It's 36-6-11. Start left, pass the second number twice."

  "Open it," she repeated. She probably thought it was booby-trapped, that I was trying to pull a fast one. I was shocked at how transparent I obviously was.

  "I can't see without the lights," I said. She turned them on, and I took a good look at her. She was fully dressed, and her lipstick and makeup were
perfect. I liked a woman who made an effort to look good all the time, but unfortunately the pistol clashed badly with the outfit, spoiling the overall effect. I thought about telling her, but she didn't seem the type to take criticism gracefully. As I moved to the closet, I asked, "How'd you find me, anyway?"

  'The reclamation crew asked for you when they came to drag Rolland away. I looked you up in the book."

  "Of course."

  "I followed you from your office to that bar," she said. "Since you're an idiot, it was easy."

  "So everything that happened last night was just a big act," I said.

  She stone faced it, but I thought I saw something in her eyes that told me I was wrong. Maybe if I bought her flowers and groveled, she'd take me back.

  "Get on with it," she ordered.

  I crouched in front of the dial. "So what's your connection with Crawley?"

  She didn't say anything.

  "Lovers?"

  She laughed harshly. "Not hardly."

  "You gave him the money, didn't you?"

  "Yes, I did," she said. "It doesn't matter if I tell you. Once I get the money, you won't be telling anyone anything."

  I didn't like the sound of that. It made me feel temporary. "Who'd you steal the money from?" I asked.

  "What makes you think I stole it?"

  "Because you don't make that kind of plastic turning tricks on Hayward. Not even with your act."

  Under her makeup she might have blushed. "I told you, I'm not a whore. I liberated it from my reactionary parents."

  "Oh, I see. And Crawley was the treasurer for the impending revolution."

  "Stop screwing around with the dial and open the door," she said.

  I stopped screwing around with the dial and opened the door. Inside was a file cabinet, the twin of the one in my office. "It's in there," I said, pointing at the cabinet.

  She moved closer but stayed out of arm's reach.

  "How do you open it?"

  "With a key."

  "Where's the key?"

  "In my pants." We went back to the bedroom and got the key. She still wouldn't let me put my pants on.

  Back in the living room, I said, "I'll open it."

  "No," she said, taking the key. "I'll do it." She probably thought I had a gun in there. I did. And that wasn't all. I acted disappointed, mimicking her perpetual pout.

  She made me lie on my belly with my hands on my head. She was no fool. She kept distrustful eyes on me as she inserted the key and turned.

  The spray of tear gas hit her in the face, knocking her out of the closet. I leaped up from the floor like a coiled spring and backhanded the pistol out of her hand. It ricocheted off the wall and scuttled under the furniture.

  Even with a lungful of tear gas she was fast. She swung out a professional roundhouse kick from nowhere that caught me flush on the cheek. The world went fuzzy, but I shook out of it in time to hop away from a vicious front kick aimed at my exposed testicles. She moved into the attack, wiping her teary eyes with one hand. In the other hand she held a six-inch blade.

  "Hey," I said. "Why don't you throw that thing down before you put somebody's eye out."

  She grunted and lunged at my throat with the knife. I leaned left, and the point of the blade shot over my shoulder. I aimed the heel of my hand at the bridge of her nose. She ducked it handily and opened up my right thigh with a low horizontal slash. Warm blood trickled down my leg. I took two steps back and we squared off.

  "Next time I'll cut your dick off!" she promised.

  "You're not a very nice girl, are you?" I shouted, my direst fears realized — a date with a homicidal castrater!

  She screamed and jumped forward, sweeping the blade up in an arc designed to open me up from groin to sternum like a gutted fish. I leaned back, and the tip of the knife tickled my chest hairs. When her knife hand apexed at eye level, I got a wrist lock on it and squeezed. She grunted with pain and tried to drive a knee into my beleaguered groin. I twisted sideways, and the knee numbed my hip. I completed the turn and with one fluid motion twisted her arm behind her back. The knife thunked on the carpet, and she howled, more in anger than pain.

  I put my lips next to her ear and whispered breathlessly, "I never knew a first date could be so much fun!"

  She screamed again and brought a spiked heel down on my instep. I yelped with pain but held on to her wrist. She did it again. I yelped again. She brought her foot up for another go, and I released my grip and shoved her to the carpet. She went down, executed a somersault with the agility of a gymnast and sprang to her feet, ready for round two. I picked the knife up and got into my knife-fighting stance: left foot forward, slight crouch, weight balanced on the balls of my feet, right hand holding the knife back near my thigh, left hand forward, ready to create an opening for the blade.

  She sized me up, then broke for the door. I didn't try to stop her. I reckoned we both needed our space right then. After she worked the bolts she jerked the door open and spun around.

  "You idiot!" she screamed. "They'll kill you and your kind, too! Not just us!"

  I stared at her, uncertain of our mutual feelings or even if our relationship was a viable one. "Well, don't go away mad," I said. "How about dinner tonight? Do you like Chinese? My treat."

  She screamed and was gone.

  After a moment I hobbled to the door and looked outside in case she'd had second thoughts and was pouting down the hall. She wasn't. I slammed the door and cried, "Love is dead!"

  I retrieved my traitorous pistol from beneath the coffee table and opened a window to expel the odor of tear gas. I went to the bedroom and took my wallet from my pants.

  It was about a thousand credits lighter than it had been last night. At least she didn't go away empty-handed. I sat on the edge of the bed and held my head in my hands. What was I doing taking home strange killers? What the hell was I thinking of? Hadn't my mother warned me about girls who wore black lipstick? Had I used a condom? What the hell was wrong with me?

  My offended instep began to throb and swell nicely, so I stuck it in a bucket of ice water while I ate a breakfast of rehydrated egg substitute and chunks of protein shaped like sausages. I put the dishes back in the sink and forced myself to drink eight glasses of water to combat alcohol dehydration. It didn't do much for my headache so I chewed up four aspirin, took a long shower and wrote the day off as an unsalvagable loss.

  I spent the day in bed with my foot elevated on cushions from the couch. I read from the seemingly endless passages of Cervantes's The Adventures of Don Quixote, ate kelp chips, drank vitabeer and contemplated the current state of romance in the world. Looking from the window of Cervantes's old classic, it could be readily seen that romantic love had taken on a decidedly evil slant since Don Quixote's day. Instead of some divine and wondrous ocean lovers were only too happy to drown in, romantic love had become a huge vat of radioactive waste, mutating anyone who came near it. I felt it an obvious truth that over years of exposure, modern love had made an emotional mutant out of me. My romantic motives ranged from sinister to sterile and all vile things between.

  My feelings for Britt represented a perfectly black example of that. I tried to look at the situation rationally, but a brutal gang of masked emotions muscled their way in and strong-armed my powers of reasoning. I knew instinctively it wasn't one of those sickly infatuations that would eventually wither away. The brute was loose in my heart and was out to fix me, but good. If I was to be rid of the beast, I'd have to sneak up behind the big bastard and go at him with a butcher knife. At the moment I didn't have the emotional fortitude or desire to do the job.

  It wasn't just her diabolical beauty, though that had a lot to do with it. It was her toughness, her independence. She was the kind of girl who wouldn't let a heel like me walk all over her, at least not without pulling a knife. It struck me that she could have handled those four barroom bravos by herself. She was evil, primal, a beast. She embodied cold violence, and framed in the fires of a cold and vi
olent world. She was beautiful. I felt I was still on the side of the angels, but I found myself hopelessly in love with the Devil's daughter.

  It was too bad she wanted to rob, castrate and kill me. It didn't seem a promising start to a relationship. Around midnight I swooned myself to sleep.

  10

  Sunday was carnival day on Hayward. Traffic was closed off for ten blocks, and stalls and temporary shops sprouted overnight like toadstools on the street and sidewalks. Everything was for sale: knickknacks, sex, electronics, weapons, drugs, people, produce from the City's thousands of backyard and roof gardens, even some real meat if you had that kind of money, though anybody who bought meat was taking their chances. Usually if you thought you were buying beef or veal you were really getting Labrador or goat or even dressed-up soy.

  Suburbanites came to gawk at the lowlife and buy things you couldn't get legally in the burbs. Every now and then I would even spot someone from the Hill, dressed down and looking for kicks. It was a special day for the Hayward denizens, too. The pimps wore their sharpest outfits, the punks put their hair up, and the ridiculously overproportioned transvestites strutted in self-conscious parody. It reminded me of a circus I'd went to as a kid; it had the same kind of flash and flurry, except on Hayward the ringmasters were pimps, the clowns dressed in drag, and all the animals had only two legs.

  I looked down on the street through the blinds of my office window. I'd been scanning the crowd all morning, hoping to see Britt lurking around. I was enamored with the idea she would take another try at me. With that possibility in mind, I wore an extra pistol and my best cologne.

  An old woman with a produce stand was doing lively trade under the three o'clock shadow of the wino saint. I thought about strolling down and buying some fresh vegetables. It was an expensive idea, but my wallet was fat with a fresh advance from Second Fed, and it had come to the point that I'd forgotten what a real carrot or potato tasted like.

  I went to the coatrack and selected a black leather motorcycle jacket with spikes on the lapels and epaulets. It went well with my black T-shirt, mean jeans and jump boots. I checked my hair in the mirror. It was doing the carefree spiky thing, which was fine for Hayward on Sunday. I locked up the office and moved down to the street.