For a moment I looked at the synthetic woman and wondered, but it couldn’t be. Even if he’d somehow managed to slip the charges Kristin Ortega had talked about and got himself re-sleeved, Kadmin was on the inside. He knew who had hired him, and who I was. The faces peering at me from around the biocabin, on their own admission, knew nothing.
Let’s keep it that way.
My gaze crept across to Louise’s battered sleeve. It looked as if they had cut slits in the skin of her thighs and then forced the wounds apart until they tore. Simple, crude and very effective. They would have made her watch while they did it, compounding the pain with terror. It’s a gut-swooping experience seeing that happen to your body. On Sharya, the religious police used it a lot. She’d probably need psychosurgery to get over the trauma.
The blond saw where my eyes had gone and offered me a grim nod, as if I’d been an accomplice to the act.
“Want to know why her head’s still on, huh?”
I looked bleakly across the room at him. “No. You look like a busy man but I guess you’ll get round to it.”
“No need,” he said casually, enjoying his moment. “Old Anenome’s Catholic. Third or fourth generation, the girls tell me. Sworn affidavit on disc, full Vow of Abstention filed with the Vatican. We take on a lot like that. Real convenient sometimes.”
“You talk too much, Jerry,” said the woman.
The blond’s eyes flared whitely at her, but whatever retort he was mustering behind the curl of his lip quietened as two men, presumably Deek and Oktai, pushed into the tiny room on another wave of junk rhythm from the corridor. My eyes measured Deek and placed him in the same category — muscle — as the pipe-wielder, then switched to his companion, who was staring steadily at me. My heart twitched. Oktai was the Mongol.
Jerry jerked his head in my direction.
“This him?” he asked.
Oktai nodded slowly, a savage grin of triumph etched across his broad face. His massive hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides. He was working through an extreme of hate so deep it was choking him. I could see the bump where someone had inexpertly repaired his broken nose with tissue weld, but that didn’t seem like enough to warrant the fury I was watching.
“All right, Ryker.” The blond leaned forward a little. “You want to change your story? You want to tell me why you’re breaking my balls down here?”
He was talking to me.
Deek spat into a corner of the room.
“I don’t know,” I said clearly, “what the fuck you are talking about. You turned my daughter into a prostitute, and then you killed her. And for that, I’m going to kill you.”
“I doubt you’ll get the chance for that,” said Jerry, crouching opposite me and looking at the floor. “Your daughter was a stupid, starstruck little cunt who thought she could put a lock on me and—”
He stopped and shook his head disbelievingly.
“The fuck am I talking to? I see you standing there, and still I’m buying this shit. You’re good, Ryker, I’ll give you that.” He sniffed. “Now, I’m going to ask you one more time, nicely. Maybe see if we can cut a deal. After that I’m going to send you to see some very sophisticated friends of mine. You understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded once, slowly.
“Good. So here it comes, Ryker. What are you doing in Licktown?”
I looked into his face. Small-time punk with delusions of connection. I wasn’t going to learn anything here.
“Who’s Ryker?”
The blond lowered his head again and looked at the floor between my feet. He seemed unhappy about what was going to happen next. Finally he licked his lips, nodded slightly to himself and made a brushing gesture across his knees as he stood up.
“All right, tough guy. But I want you to remember you had the choice.” He turned to the synthetic woman. “Get him out of here. I want no traces. And tell them, he’s n-wired to the eyes, they’ll get nothing out of him in this sleeve.”
The woman nodded and gestured me to my feet with her blaster. She prodded Louise’s corpse with the toe of one boot. “And this?”
“Get rid of it. Milo, Deek, go with her.”
The pipe-wielder shoved his weapon into his waistband and stooped to shoulder the corpse as if it were a bundle of kindling. Deek, close behind, slapped it affectionately on one bruised buttock.
The Mongol made a noise in his throat. Jerry glanced across at him with faint distaste. “No, not you. They’re going places I don’t want you to see. Don’t worry, there’ll be a disc.”
“Sure, man,” said Deek over his shoulder. “We’ll bring it right back across.”
“All right, that’s enough,” said the woman roughly, moving to face me. “Let’s have an understanding here, Ryker. You got neurachem, so do I. And this is a high-impact chassis. Lockheed-Mitoma test pilot specs. You can’t damage me worth a jack. And I’ll be happy to burn your guts out if you even look at me wrong. They don’t care what state you’re in where we’re going. That clear, Ryker?”
“My name’s not Ryker,” I said irritably.
“Right.”
We went through the frosted glass door, into a tiny space that held a make-up table and shower stall, and out onto a corridor parallel to the one at the front of the booths. Here the lighting was unambiguous, there was no music, and the corridor gave onto larger, partially curtained dressing rooms where young men and women slumped smoking or just staring into space like untenanted synthetics. If any of them saw the little procession go past, they gave no indication. Milo went ahead with the corpse. Deek took up position at my back and the synthetic woman brought up the rear, blaster held casually at her side. My last glimpse of Jerry was a proprietorial figure standing with hands on hips in the corridor behind us. Then Deek cuffed me across the side of the head and I turned to face the front again. Louise’s dangling, mutilated legs preceded me out into a gloomy covered parking area, where a pure black lozenge of aircar awaited us.
The synthetic cracked the vehicle’s boot open and waved the blaster at me.
“Plenty of room. Make yourself comfortable.”
I climbed into the boot space and discovered she was right. Then Milo tipped Louise’s corpse in with me and slammed the lid down, leaving the two of us in darkness together. I heard the dull clunk of other doors opening and closing elsewhere, and then the whispering of the car’s engines and the faint bump as we lifted from the ground.
The journey was quick, and smoother than a corresponding surface trip would have been. Jerry’s friends were driving carefully — you don’t want to be pulled down by a bored patrolman for unsignalled lane change when you’ve got passengers in the boot. It might almost have been pleasantly womb-like there in the dark, but for the faint stench of faeces from the corpse. Louise had voided her bowels during the torture.
I spent most of the journey feeling sorry for the girl, and worrying at the Catholic madness like a dog with a bone. This woman’s stack was utterly undamaged. Financial considerations aside, she could be brought back to life on the spin of a disc. On Harlan’s World she’d be temporarily re-sleeved for the court hearing, albeit probably in a synthetic, and once the verdict came down there’d be a Victim Support supplement from the state added to whatever policy her family already held. Nine cases out of ten that was enough money to ensure re-sleeving of some sort. Death, where is thy sting?