Both men lifted bloodied faces to hers, and began to shout complaints and accusations.
“Zip it! And you people! Go and find something else to do. Show’s over here. You, cab guy, what’s your story?”
“I’m cruising for a fare.” His voice was musical, a tropical island song that contrasted sharply with the bleeding mouth and swollen eye. “Guy’s hailing half a block down, and I gonna pick him up. And this one, this one, he shoves the cart out in the street. In front of me!”
“Fuck I did! Why’d I wanna do that? Wreck my cart thataway?”
“’Cause you crazy, man!”
Eve pointed at Cab Guy to shut him down.
“Your cart’s in the street, pal.” A scrapper, Eve noted, about half the size of Cab Guy, with New York as pugnacious in his tone and attitude as his bloody nose.
“Yeah, it’s in the ever-fucking street, but I didn’t shove it there. Goddamn kids did. Damn kids, they come along, and one’s ordering a dog and fries so I’m on him, you know? And another one of ’em musta flipped off my brakes. Next I know the bunch of ’em are shoving my cart off the corner. Laughing like hyenas. Look what they done to my cart.” He spread his arms wide as blood dribbled out of his nose. “What they want to do that for? I’m just trying to make a living here.”
“Can you ID them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Look at my cart, wouldja? Look at my stuff.”
“I see these boys!” Cab Guy waved a hand in the air. “I see them go flying across the street. Airboards.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Cart Guy bobbed his head. “They had airboards. Couple of them riding tandem. I didn’t see which way they went. I was trying to grab the cart, get to the brake, but the cab…” He shoved back his hair. “Man. Sorry about your cab.”
“Not your fault. I see the kids. I can help identify.” Cab Guy offered a unifying smile with bloodied teeth. “Sorry about your cart, man.”
Eve turned the situation over to a black-and-white and a couple of beat droids. Cab and Cart Guy were now enjoying solidarity. They’d be neighborhood kids, she assumed. And they’d likely roll another cart or two before the day was done. But damned if she was going to help track them down.
She was ten minutes over the hour already.
It came to a total of twenty minutes behind before she could park, flip her On Duty, and hit the sidewalk. She’d already seen him-her expert consultant, her superior lay. He leaned against the wall of the graffiti-scrawled, post-Urban War rattrap that held Bang She Bang, wearing a dark suit with the thinnest of pinstripes with a spring-weight overcoat billowing a bit as he worked on his handheld.
His wrist unit was likely worth more than the building against which he braced. In this neighborhood with its funky junkies, chemi-heads, grifters, shifters, and spine crackers, a man’s life was at risk for his shoes. From her vantage point, she saw what Tiko would’ve called a suspicious character swagger in Roarke’s direction, his hand in his pocket and his fingers very likely closed over a sticker.
Roarke simply flicked his gaze up, over, locked them on. And suspicious character kept on swaggering by.
“You.” Eve jabbed a finger at one of the grunts loitering in a doorway.
“Fuck you,” he called back, and added his middle finger in case English wasn’t her first language.
Eve flipped out her badge as she crossed the sidewalk. The badge itself didn’t mean much here. It was all about what she put behind it. “That’s Lieutenant, as in: Fuck you, Lieutenant.”
Beside the grunt, his gap-toothed companion sniggered.
“Here’s what I could do,” Eve supposed. “I could slap your head against that wall, while I’m kicking your balls into your belly,” she added to the companion. “And after that, I can have you in restraints while I turn out your pockets. You’re carrying illegals.”
“Fuck you know. You can’t rouse without probable.”
“I see the illegals. I’ve got X-ray vision.”
“No shit?” The companion grinned at her, wide-eyed. “That is frosty, complete.”
“Ain’t it? But I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do runs on both of you, then come around to your flops and turn them upside down and inside out. I’m not going to personally see to it that you spend the next several days in a cage. I’m not going to do that because you’re both going to stand right here until I come back, and you’re going to watch my ride there as if it were your own beloved child. I come out, and my official police vehicle’s exactly where I left it, in exactly the condition I left it, we part friends. Otherwise, I’m going to be paying you a visit later. Got it?”
The first guy shrugged. “I got nothing better to do.”
“That’s handy, because I do. You got ten now,” she said and pulled out the bribe. “You get another when I come back. I bet your name’s John Smith,” she said to the companion.
“Hell, no. Clipper Plink.”
“That’s what I said. You’re Clipper Plink.”
“How do you know this stuff?” He eyed her as if she were the Second Coming. “You got superpowers, bitch?”
“Damn right.”
“Jesus, Clip,” she heard the grunt say as she strode toward Roarke, “can you be any fucking dumber?”
He loved to watch her work, Roarke thought. It never failed to fascinate and entertain him. So he’d done just that, relaxed against the wall while she’d taken aim at the pair of street toughs. Well, one and a half toughs, he supposed was more accurate. They hadn’t stood a chance against her when she’d tossed on the badass cop as she did her coat.
Now she strode to him, the faintest hint of a smile on her face. “How many street thieves, muggers, and spine crackers did you flick off with one ‘Try it, boy-o, and you’ll be pissing blood for some time to come’ stare?”
“I didn’t count. I don’t believe this is a very safe neighborhood. I’m relieved I have a cop nearby.”
“Yeah, like you need one.”
“Only you, darling. Night and day. Boy-o?”
“That particular stare has the boy-o in it. Don’t tell me you came down here in a ride as fancy as the suit?”
“Then I won’t. Why don’t you tell me why we’re heading into this sex dive on an evening that makes me almost believe spring may come again?”
“One of the strippers, LC for club work, also happens to be one of Ava’s mommies. I’ll fill you in on the rest later, figure you can follow along as we go. But I want to take her now. She’s only on about another hour.”
“Let’s not waste time, then.” He pulled open the door.
They walked out of the almost spring evening and into the sharp, bright world of sex for sale.
It smelled of sweat, cum, smoke from a variety of illegal substances, and the cheapest of alcoholic liquids. A great many of those unattractive substances splattered the floor. Men and women with hard eyes, glassy eyes, crazed eyes, bored eyes hunched at tables or squatted at a short, stained bar on backless stools while two servers-one male, one female-carted drinks or empties on trays. Both were naked, unless you counted tats and piercings, their skin pulsing faintly red in the ugly light.
On a small, raised stage, two women-it would be absurd to term them dancers-humped long silver poles while what only the deaf could mistake for music blasted. Each wore a sparkling band at the waist, with a few bills tucked in. Neither, Roarke noted, had pulled in much for this particular number.
He walked to the bar with Eve. The man running the stick had skin so white it nearly glowed. The faint pink around his eyes usually indicated funky-junkie, but Roarke noted the eyes were the palest of blues-water blue-and just as clear.
The albino slapped a short glass of something the color and consistency of coal oil on the bar in front of a customer before moving down to them. “Stand at the bar, you order one drink minimum. Table runs two.”