One of the cops steps forward reluctantly, presses his thumb to the lock, and starts the ignition.
“You’re going to take that other bike and ride as far and as fast as you can.” I motion with my gun. “That way. You got it?” They only glare at me in anger, so I say it louder. “You got it?” They both nod weakly. “Good. Go. Hurry.”
I fire a shot at the ground, and it cracks and zips off the asphalt. They mount the other bike in a hurry and cruise off.
Knowing I won’t have much time until they contact the station and get this vehicle shut off remotely, I crank the engine hard, speeding away from the scene of my crimes. I toss my gun, knowing it can be tracked, then take a couple of turns into the city, trying to lose myself. I don’t hear any sirens pursuing.
When I get to the Dust Pit, I get off and crash the quickbike into one of those big piles of trash that tend to form in neighborhoods like this. Someone will probably be stripping it for parts within minutes. I set off running again, taking a few turns and putting some distance between myself and the bike and its tracking beacon, searching for a passable place to lay low. After seven or eight blocks I’m winded, but I’ve made it to a denser part of the neighborhood with rows of vertical shale brick tenements packed close together, their shadows sheltering groups of homeless people with patchy, purple-blotched skin from the harsh red burn of the sun. There is a pattern of gouges in the street and scuff marks on a utility panel mark where scrappers tried to steal the underground utilities and fiber optics. A few obvious criminals eye me with hatred, recognizing that I don’t belong. People here don’t cooperate with the authorities, and even though I’m still wearing Brady’s loose-fitting jacket, my Collections uniform is visible underneath it.
I make my way around to the front of a beat-up apartment tower with a crumbling facade. Most of the windows are boarded up, and the glass window of the lobby is smashed and open, telltale bricks missing where someone removed the security bars to sell the metal for scrap. These places all look pretty much alike, but I know this one.
As I survey the building for a way in, a stringy, pockmarked, hypocalcemic junky with thin, ratty hair and a wispy little mustache is swaggering up toward me. His clothes are dirty and stained and riddled with holes but have the triangular seams and tapered shape that were in fashion a few years ago. He’s sick but not in the process of dying right now; probably the king of this neighborhood, probably a drug dealer. “What’chu doin’ here, lady?”
“Get lost.”
“What you lookin’ for?” he asks, apparently not worried by the Collections Agent uniform. “I got it.”
“Get lost.”
He says nothing further but stares me down with glazed yet cold eyes as he comes at me, determined. I don’t have time for this, but I can’t afford to ignore him, either, so I stand my ground.
As he gets up in my face, before he can even lift an arm up, I jam the edge of my hand hard into his throat. He clutches at it, choking. Concerned that he might recover and come after me, I grab his right hand, almost gently, and bend the first two fingers backward until I hear a twin pair of snaps. He tries to scream, but the breath’s not there. With a hard shove I put him to the ground, then walk away.
The broken front window of the tenement building is easy enough to climb through after I clear some of the glass shards away. The lobby is a small room with a floor of peeling plastic lining and a rack of mostly broken mailboxes on one of the cracked, chewed-through walls. The elevator shaft sits open and empty, but beside it is an open door into the stairwell. I go in and climb up to the seventh of thirty floors where I enter the hallway, which is even more run-down than the lobby, with torn carpets and mold stains all over the walls, all lit under a sickly blue hi-efficiency LED tube light running along the ceiling.
I go to one of the doors and knock. To my surprise, a thin, tired-looking woman answers, holding a sleeping baby swaddled in cheap cloth.
“Hi… ” She sees my uniform and is frightened.
Do I have the right place? “I’m looking for Ali.”
Before she can answer, Ali Silva peeks into the doorway. He’s surprised to see me. “Agent Dare.”
“Let me in,” I tell him, pushing into the apartment and pulling the door quietly shut behind me. The place is a single room, furnished only with a mattress, a crib, and a small viewscreen on the wall. It’s clean enough, except for the dings and dents and wear and tear scuffing the walls and the kitchen block. “I need a favor.”
“What kind of favor?” Silva asks.
“I need to lay low here for a few hours.”
Anyone can see that my sidearm is not in its holster. I’m relying on trust here, on gratitude. Outside, sirens are moving at some indeterminate distance, sweeping the city. The manhunt is on. Silva and his mother or older girlfriend or whatever she is look scared and confused, but after a moment weighing his options, he responds, “Whatever you need.”
15
After several tense hours, I can no longer hear the sirens. Silva has said little. He told me he didn’t end up getting fired from the restaurant, that he had to pay everything he had to his buyer, but that he hoped to be able to get out from his debt and back on his feet. I told him that the buyer’s days are numbered, which I hope is true. As for the woman, she has said nothing. Silva says she’s his mother. I’ve watched her struggle to bottle-feed the baby a few times. It just keeps crying.
But the busboy has held up his end of the deal. Neither he nor his mom have made any move to rat me out. I’ve even borrowed some clothing––a pair of checkered leggings, a faded blue long-sleeved v-cut shirt, and a gray cap with an extendable rim. I feel like my appearance is different enough that someone would have to look closely to recognize me.
I’ve been thinking hard about where to go and what to do, and I have no good answers. I am a fugitive from the law with nowhere to run. I’ve heard of criminals fleeing the city, stripping tracking devices from cars and driving out into the expanse, crossing the mountains on foot into the bleak, jagged wilderness beyond society’s current reach, but I doubt anyone who has done that has survived more than a few days. Water and edible food are scarce, and the weather and native wildlife can be deadly. I’ve heard of hermits living on houseboats, roaming the Great Sea, but that’s on the other side of the planet, and I don’t know where I’d get a boat. I’d be easy enough to track down on the open water anyway.
All of this is probably beside the point. I may have killed some people back at SCAPE Bank, and I’m not sure they deserved it. I acted on impulse, on instinct, on suspicion, but I don’t think I can justify my actions if I give up now. I’ve been hunted down. Someone has expended significant resources trying to kill me or frame me because of what I might find.
In the dim, dark misery of this one-room slum apartment, I rise to my feet, my legs sore and stiff. I rifle through the hip pouches on my Collections uniform, remove my test kit and a set of plastic slap-cuffs, and pack them under the extendable rim of my cap, just in case I need them. I’m as ready as I’m going to get.
“I owe you one, Ali.”
“You’re not going to tell me what’s going on?” he asks, his voice hushed.
“You’re better off not knowing.” It’s the truth. “Take care.”
He seems to buy that. I exit through the door, into the dim, narrow hallway, and I can see his eyes watching me as he closes the door. The lock clicks faintly. The kid has plenty of problems, but I won’t be one of them anymore.