Avenging Angel Page 8

  It was a warm summer afternoon, but you could feel that junky autumn lurking around the corner. I bought two carrots and an apple at the produce stand for fifty creds each. She gave me a discount because I was a local. I bought a quart bottle of warm homemade beer from another stall, then sauntered around, checking out the action. I eventually retired to the steps of what used to be a church but now was Pinky's Porno Emporium. I shared the steps with a gang of neopunks. They were young and drunk, flaunting pierced noses, tall mohawks and bad attitudes. I ate my apple and drank my yeasty beer, watching the crowd go by, thinking about my next move.

  I wanted to get out of the City. There was a lot of negative energy floating around, and sooner or later it would be knocking at my door. The problem with running away was that there wasn't anywhere to go. Even if I somehow got my hands on a relocation permit from the Party, I couldn't go anywhere except another city. The suburbs had laws to keep people like me out, the farmlands were garrisoned fortresses, and what was left of the countryside was supposed to be still living in anarchy, unrecovered since the corporate collapse. Not to mention being contaminated with nuclear and chemical waste.

  One of the punks, a cute girl of about eighteen with matching blue eyes and hair, sent over what one of us imagined to be a seductive look. I met it head-on and she smiled. I smiled back and was beginning to feel flattered when her eyes dropped purposefully to my bottle. I went back to watching the crowd.

  Eventually the punks moved on to wherever punks went on warm Sunday afternoons. I wanted to go with them, forget everything and just worry about getting drunk and finding a girl to spend the long night with. A simple, irresponsible life, uncomplicated with moral dilemmas and ugly emotions, each passing day a bridge ashed behind me. A half-dozen chetniks claimed the steps, bare chested and sweating in their fake-fur trousers. They talked about the girls going by in gutter Russian and passed a bottle of whoosh around, taking sniffs and laughing, marching their youth to impatient graves.

  Since I couldn't run from my troubles, I'd have to confront and destroy them. That was one of those essential lessons I picked up since I'd become a bogeyman, one of the reasons I was still alive in a perilous profession. If I waited until my troubles caught up with me, they would. I had to root them out and squash them before the worm turned and they came to squash me. That meant I'd have to get down to some serious detecting.

  I got up and slipped into the crowd, letting the human current carry me down the sidewalk, eating my carrots as I went. They tasted like dirt.

  A fistfight raged in front of the St. Chris. Two shaggy-haired winos, one young, one old, hammered away at each other, heads down, swinging blindly. Some of the crowd around them shouted encouragements, though they probably didn't know either one. The young one got a handful of gray hair and started arcing crude uppercuts into the old guy's face. The funny thing was they were probably drinking buddies at other times.

  A middle-aged burb woman bulging out of a grotesque flower-print dress turned to me and said, "Why don't you do something? If that was you out there, wouldn't you want someone to do something?"

  "Depends if I was winning or not," I said, and she shot me a look that matched her dress. She looked at the fight with utter distaste, yet didn't seem able to turn away. I looked at the faces of the other spectators. The burbs stared with a fearful fascination, relieved that they weren't involved, afraid that somehow they might be. The City people were either dead eyed with apathy or rabid with excitement.

  The old wino was on the ground, and the young wino kicked him in the head until he got tired. A tall pimp came out of the crowd with a big chrome revolver and broke it up like a sheriff in an old Western. He was just trying to be symbolic, though. The fight was already over. The victor waved his hands over his head and whooped it up through bloody lips. The crowd turned their backs on him and moved on, looking for new excitement. He was interesting when he was kicking someone's head in, but now he was just another bleeding wino. I looked up at the wino saint. From street level his cherubic smile looked sinister.

  I walked inside the St. Chris, where it was cool and quiet. The big ceiling fans rotated lazily over mostly empty tables, churning cigarette smoke to haze, and a solemnness hung in the air. A handful of patrons shared the emptiness, mostly off-duty streetwalkers smoking joints and full-time rummies getting an early start on the evening. If you wanted fun and excitement you went outside. You came in here to contemplate, consider your losses and brood.

  The same redhead sat at one end of the bar. When she looked over and saw who it was, she made a point of looking the other way.

  I took a stool at the other end of the bar. Amal idled at the redhead's end and tried hard to pretend I wasn't there. I suspected my popularity wasn't at an all-time high. After a lot of innocent smiles and heavy gesturing on my part, he walked over as if he'd strapped on fifty-pound weights instead of sandals that morning.

  "You shouldn't come around here, Jake. There are people who want to hurt you."

  "You don't know the half of it," I said. "I came in here for information, not trouble."

  He looked at me as if I was setting him up for a particularly cruel prank.

  "You remember the girl I was with Friday?" I asked.

  "Your woman."

  I grimaced. "Yeah, that one. Remember when she got that call?"

  He nodded.

  "If you never saw her before that night, how did you know it was for her?"

  He rolled his eyes back as though he was trying to see into his brain and said, "I asked him to describe her."

  "Did he ask for her by name first?"

  "Yeah, he did."

  I breathed a sigh of thanks to a usually hostile god. "And what was that name?"

  He told me. I dropped twenty creds on the bar and walked over to the redhead. She heard me coming but wouldn't look my way until I stood beside her. When she did look, she squinched her nose up as if I'd been paddling around in the sewer all morning.

  "Buy you a drink?" I asked.

  "No, thanks, I ain't thirsty."

  "How about a pack of joints, then?"

  She shot her chin toward a pack on the bar. "I got plenty."

  I stared at her and she blew smoke in my face.

  "Maybe you'll answer a question for me, then," I said. She didn't say no so I asked. "I was with a girl the other night. Do you remember her?"

  "Do I? How could I forget? She gave me the creeps." She squinched up her nose and slid me a look. "No offense if she's yours."

  "None taken and she's not. Have you seen her anywhere before or since Friday?"

  "No, never."

  "Are you sure? A lot of girls come and go."

  "I'm sure. I'd remember that one." She squinched up her nose again.

  "Keep doing that and it'll stay that way," I warned.

  "Huh?"

  "Nothing. Thanks." I made to leave, but she caught my arm and presented me with a smile that would appear a lush oasis to a lonely drunk.

  "Say," she said. "I'll take that drink now."

  I smiled, bought her a double and went back to my office.

  Sitting down at the desk, I pulled the handscanner in front of me. After it warmed up, I went to the name file and retrieved the Chamberlains's scan data.

  I hadn't paid too much attention to the data during the scans. I was taking too much pleasure in toying around with Dash. I pulled a notepad close to the scanner and picked up a pen. I noted first that the Chamberlains lived at 1206 Stag Hill, Hillsdale. The Hill. I'd guessed that much. The second thing I noted was their classified credit rating. That meant one or both of them worked in the upper echelon of the Party. The last item I noted paired up with a hunch of mine and made me lean back in my chair and release a long low whistle. The Chamberlains had one daughter, adopted. By her birth date she was twenty years old. Her name was Britt Bernice Chamberlain. The caller at the St. Chris had asked for a Ms. Chamberlain. It was either a king-hell coincidence or I'd discovered a big godd
amn clue. A whole new outlook on the tangle walked in, stared me in the face and dared me to do something about it.

  11

  I drove to City University. C.U. sprawled throughout the borough of Riverside, ten klicks down the river from my office. It was the part of town that had poetry bars with tags like L'Expression de Vie! and posters announcing the Impending Marxist Victory. In the lot where I parked, a dozen young underfed students with fervent eyes and rampant acne listened to a similar type in a red beret declaiming and gesturing wildly from a tiny podium. He barked nervously into a microphone that fed back every time he tried to raise his voice, and the banner draped across the front of the podium said he was addressing the evils of Creeping Neocapitalism In Our City. Though the lad's rap was impassioned and trembling with conviction, my friend Moses Perry would have harangued him into the asphalt. When I got out of the Caddy, the audience, without doubt all buddies of the speaker, fixed me with ravenous eyes. Had I come to join their cause? Would I be fervent and self-righteous with them?

  I smiled and headed for the art building. I wanted to hang around and crack a few nuts of wisdom with them but I was there on business.

  The receptionist's desk for the art department's offices lay abandoned, so I moved directly to the hall beyond. I walked past a bank of doors until I came to one labeled Dr. Joseph Drake, Professor of Art Studies. I barged in without knocking. An anemic-looking man with a receding hairline, scraggly mustache and thick glasses hunched over a small steel tray, rolling a joint.

  "I told you I wasn't to be disturbed while I'm on my afternoon break, Ms. Rossalini," he said without looking up.

  I sat on a folding chair in front of his desk, and eventually he looked up. His face broke into a grin, and he stood up halfway, stretching a hand over the desk. "Hey, killer, how's death?"

  I shook his hand and said, "Not bad, Joe, how's the hairline?"

  "Like your intelligence, Jake, receding every day." He whinnied and sat back down.

  Joe and I had served together in the army, back when there was an army. I was a wild-eyed young Ranger, and he was a manic-depressive draftee serving as a chopper pilot. The Party drafted him during his graduate studies, ran him through flight school, then shipped him to a Ranger fire base in the Colorado Rockies. The World Party had clawed to the top only six years before but was still consolidating its power base, especially in areas where a world government was still being violently resisted, like in the area that had once been called the Western U.S. Joe had piloted many of the missions I'd participated in, including the last one, and we'd become instant friends when we'd discovered we were both from the City.

  We'd drink in the base club together, a perfect pair: he bought the beers with his warrant officer pay and I'd drink them. He'd whine maniacally and I'd pretend to listen. He'd get his frustrations out and I'd get drunk. Perfect.

  "I need a favor, Joe," I said, pulling up my chair.

  "I bet you do." He leaned back on the spring of his swivel chair and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "What is it this time? Need your living room painted?"

  "Nope. It's a lot easier than that."

  "Oh, really?" His freshly rolled cigarette disappeared into his mouth then came back out coated with saliva. He lit it. The earthy smell of hashish snaked from its tip.

  "Sure. You get invited to a lot of art parties on the Hill, don't you?"

  "You know I do. The beef eaters like to have a few scholarly artiste types on hand to lend a quiet humility to the affair. We nod our heads and make vague remarks about the 'emotional quotient' of some horrible junk that some exec's wife spent two hours' work and a lifetime of feelings on. Then we take our fee and go home."

  "Sounds like a fun evening," I observed.

  "It's a load of shit. But the food is real and it's a free drunk, so what the hell."

  "How do you get on the Hill? Past the security, I mean."

  "Certified invitation and a handscan at the gate to make sure you're the same person the invite says you are."

  "When's the next party?" I asked.

  "Well, let's see." He put an index finger to the bridge of his glasses. His thinking position. "The Petersons are showing their retarded son's impressionist works on Tuesday."

  "He's really retarded?"

  "No, he just paints like he is."

  "I want to go," I said.

  Joe eyed me suspiciously. "Since when do you have an interest in the Hill art scene?"

  "I don't. It's business. I need to see someone on the Hill and I can't think of any other way to get past all the armed patrols, mine fields and electrified fences."

  "Why don't you ask this person to send you a visitor's permit?" Joe asked.

  "I want it to be a surprise visit."

  "Oh," he said, and got back into his thinking position. After two minutes of that I was ready for some heavy wisdom to come down. "I could probably call the Petersons and tell them you're a visiting impressionist expert. From France. That'd do it."

  "Great."

  He gave me that suspicious look again. "You're not going to cause any trouble, are you?"

  "Shucks, no," I said. "I'll even bone up on my high school French. You'll see."

  "Okay, I'll trust you." He smiled shrewdly from behind a veil of exhaled smoke. "It's going to cost you, though."

  I was expecting it. Ever since Joe had developed the habit of smoking a half gram of hash a day he was always short of cash. "How much?"

  "Three hundred."

  "Jesus. Okay."

  Joe looked surprised. I knew he'd expected me to haggle with him but I wasn't in the mood.

  "Business that good, Jake?" he asked.

  "A cred here, a cred there. Plus all the aluminum cans I save up."

  "You know," Joe said, his eyes getting distant, "sometimes I wish I was still in the action. The gunplay, the glamour, the girls."

  "Yeah," I said dryly, "especially the girls. What time does this shindig go down?"

  "The showing starts at nine. But we want to get there early to load up on drinks before we have to look at that shit. Be here at seven and we'll take my ride."

  "Great. I'll bring the creds." We stood up and shook hands again.

  "Yeah, just like old times," Joe said, his eyes getting misty again. "Me transporting you into the shit."

  "I hope it works out better than last time," I said.

  His dreamy smile mutated into a grimace. "Couldn't be much worse."

  I walked out to my car. The rally was still going strong, but my mind was elsewhere. I started my car and pointed it home.

  The last time Joe had transported me into the "shit," he'd dropped me off in the middle of what the history books called the Houston Insurrection. It was supposed to have been a quick in-and-out raid on the rebel command-and-control area. We'd execute the rebel leadership, then be airlifted out before the troops could react. Their command structure was scattered over a square mile of downtown Houston, so the entire Second Ranger Battalion was mobilized.

  It was obvious from the moment we touched down that the mission had been compromised: they were waiting for us. The rebel militia wasn't a highly trained unit but they were fanatics: they knew the pogrom that would follow if they lost. The Party would execute anyone even slightly involved, so the rebels literally had nothing to lose.

  We accomplished the mission, but with incredible casualty rates. During two days of the most vicious street fighting since Stalingrad in 1942 or the Denver Rebellion in 2011, we successfully liquidated the rebel leadership and a fair percentage of the militia. What was left of the battalion assembled on a high school football field and radioed for extraction. We were sitting at about fifty percent casualties, dead, missing or wounded. Whole platoons had disappeared, all of Bravo Company had vanished, surrounded and wiped out in a bus depot.

  I remembered lying in the darkness, surrounded by the smell of cordite and grass, thinking about all the friends I'd lost. Word came around that since the mission had taken so
long to accomplish, transportation was currently unavailable. For three hours we lay exposed in the field, getting hammered by rebel mortar and rocket fire, waiting for helicopters that never arrived. The battalion commander finally decided to disobey orders and shift to a more defendable position until we got positive word on the time of extraction.

  We took our wounded and fought our way into the adjoining high school complex. Most of us made it. We stacked desks and crates of textbooks in the windows and waited for the blessed angel of extraction. The rebels knew what we were waiting for and came at us in desperate swarms. We beat back wave after wave through the infinite night and into the next day. The bodies stacked up and our munitions dwindled. We called in a resupply drop, and they promised we'd get it. We didn't. The rebels did. Instead of landing on the roof of the high school, the parachuted crates of weapons, ammunition and explosives drifted into the hands of the rebels surrounding us. With these new resources they redoubled the attack.

  When the bloodred sun crept behind the burning skyline, we were down to fifty men from the original eight hundred. The acting battalion commander, by then a first lieutenant, declared that extraction was a wet dream, shot the radio that told us to be patient and wait and decided we'd stage a breakout. We picked the weakest point in the closing ring and poured every bullet and grenade we had into it. We punched a hole just large enough to squeeze through, broke into our predesignated three-man escape-and-evasion teams and headed for the suburbs.

  We ran like hunted jackals, chased by blood-hungry rebels. I was teamed with a big blond sergeant named Booker and a PFC with a belly wound named Garcia. Garcia had family in Houston and wanted to hole up with them. Sergeant Booker nixed the idea because he was a California surf boy and we weren't going to stop until we got to Venice Beach. Picking up weapons as we went, we fought a brutal running battle through the burning streets of Houston, killing anyone who got in our way.