“That’s enough,” I snapped, a little unsteadily. The sleeve’s neurachem wiring was a rougher piece of work than the Corps systems I’d used in the past and in overdrive the overwhelming impression was of being slung around in a subcutaneous bag of chicken wire.
I looked down at Elliott.
His eyes were a hand’s breadth from mine, and despite the grip I had on his throat they were still burning with rage. Breath whistled in his teeth as he clawed after the strength to break my grip and damage me.
I yanked him off the rail and propped him away from me with a cautionary arm.
“Listen, I’m passing no judgements here. I just want to know. What makes you think she has any connection to Bancroft?”
“Because she told me, motherfucker.” The sentence hissed out of him. “She told me what he’d done.”
“And what was that?”
He blinked rapidly, the undischarged rage condensing into tears. “Dirty tilings,” he said. “She said he needed them. Badly enough to come back. Badly enough to pay.”
Meal ticket. Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy back. Easy enough mistake to make when you’re young. But nothing comes that easy.
“You think that’s why she died?”
He turned his head and looked at me as if I was a particularly poisonous species of spider on his kitchen floor.
“She didn’t die, mister. Someone killed her. Someone took a razor and cut her up.”
“Trial transcript says it was a client. Not Bancroft.”
“How would they know?” he said dully. “They name a body, who knows who’s inside it. Who’s paying for it all.”
“They find him yet?”
“Biocabin whore’s killer? What do you think? It ain’t exactly like she worked for the Houses, right?”
“That’s not what I meant, Elliott. You say she turned Bancroft in Jerry’s, I’ll believe you. But you’ve got to admit it doesn’t sound like Bancroft’s style. I’ve met the man, and slumming?” I shook my head. “He doesn’t read that way to me.”
Elliott turned away.
“Flesh,” he said. “What you going to read in a Meth’s flesh?”
It was nearly full dark. Out across the water on the sloping deck of the warship, the performance had started. We both stared at the lights for a while, heard the bright snatches of music, like transmissions from a world that we were forever locked out of.
“Elizabeth’s still on stack,” I said quietly.
“Yeah, so what? Re-sleeving policy lapsed four years ago, when we sank all the money we had into some lawyer said he could crack Irene’s case.” He gestured back at the dimly lit frontage of his offices. “I look like the kind of guy’s going to come into some money real soon?”
There was nothing to say after that. I left him watching the lights and walked back to the car. He was still there when I drove back past him on the way out of the little town. He didn’t look round.
PART 2: REACTION
(INTRUSION CONFLICT)
CHAPTER NINE
I called Prescott from the car. Her face looked mildly irritated as it scribbled into focus on the dusty little screen set into the dashboard.
“Kovacs. Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Still don’t really know what I’m looking for,” I said cheerfully. “You think Bancroft ever does the biocabins?”
She pulled a face. “Oh, please.”
“All right, here’s another one. Did Leila Begin ever work biocabin joints?”
“I really have no idea, Kovacs.”
“Well, look it up then. I’ll hold.” My voice came out stony. Prescott’s well-bred distaste wasn’t sitting too well beside Victor Elliott’s anguish for his daughter.
I drummed my fingers on the wheel while the lawyer went off-screen and found myself muttering a Millsport fisherman’s rap to the rhythm. Outside the coast slid by in the night, but the scents and sounds of the sea were suddenly all wrong. Too muted, not a trace of belaweed on the wind.
“Here we are.” Prescott settled herself back within range of the phone scanner, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Begin’s Oakland records show two stints in biocabins, before she got tenure in one of the San Diego Houses. She must have had an entrée, unless it was a talent scout that spotted her.”
Bancroft would have been quite an entrée to anywhere. I resisted the temptation to say it.
“You got an image there?”
“Of Begin?” Prescott shrugged. “Only a two-d. You want me to send it.”
“Please.”
The ancient earphone fizzled a bit as it adjusted to the change of incoming signal, and then Leila Begin’s features emerged from the static. I leaned closer, scanning them for the truth. It took a moment or two to find, but it was there.
“Right. Now can you get me the address of that place Elizabeth Elliott worked. Jerry’s Closed Quarters. It’s on a street called Mariposa.”
“Mariposa and San Bruno,” Prescott’s disembodied voice came back from behind Leila Begin’s full service pout. “Jesus, it’s right under the old expressway. That’s got to be a safety violation.”
“Can you send me a map, route marked through from the bridge?”
“You’re going there? Tonight?”
“Prescott, these places don’t do a lot of business during the day,” I said patiently. “Of course I’m going there tonight.”
There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line.
“It’s not a recommended area, Kovacs. You need to be careful.”
This time I couldn’t be bothered to stifle the snort of amusement. It was like listening to someone tell a surgeon to be careful and not get his hands bloody. She must have heard me.
“I’m sending the map,” she said stiffly.
Leila Begin’s face blinked out and a tracery of grid-patterned streets inked themselves into the place she had been. I didn’t need her any more. Her hair had been iridescent crimson, her throat choked with a steel collar and her eyes made up with startle lines, but it was the lines of the face below it all that stayed with me. The same lines faintly emergent in Victor Elliott’s Kodakristal of his daughter. The understated but undeniable similarity.
Miriam Bancroft.
There was rain in the air when I got back to the city, a fine drizzle sifting down from the darkened sky. Parked across the street from Jerry’s, I watched the blinking neon club sign through the streaks and beads of water on the windscreen of the ground car. Somewhere in the gloom below the concrete bones of the expressway a holo of a woman danced in a cocktail glass, but there was a fault in the ‘caster and the image kept fizzling out.
I’d been worried about the ground car drawing attention, but it seemed that I’d come to the right part of town with it. Most of the vehicles around Jerry’s were flightless; the only exceptions to the rule were the autocabs that occasionally spiralled down to disgorge or collect passengers and then sprang back up into the aerial traffic flow with inhuman accuracy and speed. With their arrays of red, blue and white navigation lights they seemed like jewelled visitors from another world, barely touching the cracked and litter-strewn paving while their charges alighted or climbed aboard.
I watched for an hour. The club did brisk business, varied clientele but mostly male. They were checked at the door by a security robot that resembled nothing so much as a concertina’d octopus strung from the lintel of the main entrance. Some had to divest themselves of concealed items, presumably weapons, and one or two were turned away. There were no protests—you can’t argue with a robot. Outside, people parked, climbed in and out of cars and did deals with merchandise too small to make out at this distance. Once, two men started a knife fight in the shadows between two of the expressway’s support pillars, but it didn’t come to much. One combatant limped off, clutching a slashed arm, and the other returned to the club’s interior as if he’d done no more than go out to relieve himself.