The fierce quiet in the other’s voice had pushed him back into his chair. “Postmortem,” he said finally. “Bone marrow analysis. Takes a while—”
“I know how long it tuh-takes. And it’s also how I know you screwed up. Because I’ve seen the postmortem bone marrow results. There was one replicant you retired . . . who wasn’t a replicant. And killing a human isn’t called retirement, Deckard. It’s called murder.”
“Bullshit.” He returned the other’s glare, but felt a molecule-thick layer of moisture form between his palms and the chair’s arms. “Which one are you talking about?”
“Not which one, Deckard. But who. Wuh-we’re talking about human buh-beings here; get your language straight. The girl who called herself Pris. Remember her? Blond, athletic . . . probably a little kuh-ruh-crazy.” Isidore nodded slowly, stroking the mechanical cat. “She had her problems, guh-guh-God knows. But she was human. Really human. The bone marrow analysis proved it. Of course, that was after you’d already kuh-killed her.”
“That’s impossible.” Deckard gripped the sweating chair arms harder. “She had to be a replicant. I didn’t need to run an empathy test on her. She . . .” For a moment his thoughts scurried away from his grasp, his pulse ticking upward in his throat. “She matched the ID that I was given. And she was . . . strong. Like replicants are. You didn’t see that. She nearly killed me.”
“Strong, huh?” The other man gave a quick, sharp laugh. “You mean stronger than you. Some woman kicks your ass, so she must not be human. And you kill her. Ruh-really, Deckard. How do you think that’s going to sound in court?”
“But the ID . . . the video I was shown . . .”
“A puh-picture.” Isidore’s voice went soft and sad. “You killed her because of a picture. Isn’t that why you were issued a Voigt-Kampff machine? Told to run empathy tests? So you wuh-wouldn’t be just running wild out there on the streets, shooting anyone that looked like a replicant to you. So you’d be sure who was human and what wasn’t.” He watched his own hand rubbing the round metal ball of the cat’s skull. “That is, of course, if you’re inclined to making that little distinction.”
Silence. He couldn’t make any reply. Deckard knew, in the pit of his gut, that the man on the other side of the battered desk was telling the truth. About the bone marrow analysis, about human or not . . . about everything.
“Who . . .” He knew now that that was the right word. And not what. “Who was she?”
“Like I said, duh-Deckard. She was a human. Beyond the blood marrow results, there isn’t much more that I’ve been able to find out about her. Name really was Pris. That much was true. Born off-world, probably in one of the U.N.’s Martian colonies. They don’t like to talk about it, but there’s a fairly huh-high rate of muh-muh-mental breakdown out in those warrens. It’s a good place to go nuts. And plenty of them do. There are others, the same as poor Pris was. They don’t wuh-wuh-want to be human anymore. They’re wanna-bes. They cross the line; they start hanging out with replicants, they act like them . . . and then they cross another line. In their heads. Instead of replicants who think, who believe, who know they’re human . . . people like poor dead Pris, they’re humans who’ve come to think, to know that they’re replicants. A psychotic break. With full-blown somatic conversions—they even take on the physical attributes of replicants. Increased strength, duh-damage resistance, the whole bit. They make a game out of picking up red-hot metal bare-handed, without getting hurt. That’s how far their cracked minds can go to prove they’re replicants and not human. The process is completed when, like Pris, they escape from the off-world colonies and come to Earth. Where they’ll be killed. By people like you.” Isidore closed his eyes for a moment, the mechanical cat doing the same. “Then they’re not wanna-bes anymore. Then they’re wanna-dies.”
Now he knew the exact reason for the sweat. What he had to be worried about. “But . . . she tried to kill me first . . .”
“Self-defense. She’s going about her own business here in L.A., some flipped-out cop shows up with a gun, starts tearing the place up . . . hey, she was just trying to pruh-protect herself. Humans have the right to do that.”
The thoughts in his head squirmed, trying to find a way out. “Yeah, but . . . she was already guilty of murder. The escape from off-world . . . people died in that . . .”
Isidore shrugged. “There’s no evidence that Pris did any of the kuh-kuh-killing. And even if she had, it doesn’t chuh-change things for you. Cops—even blade runners—are supposed to arrest people—humans—and bring ’em in. Not blow ’em away before they get a trial. What, you’re going to stand up in court and say you had a right to execute suspects before they’re found guilty? Good luck on that one. Judges really huh-hate out-of-control cops. They won’t even take you out of the courtroom; the judge’ll just hike up his black robe and stand on your thuh-ruh-throat until you stop moving.”
“You’re wrong.” The smug tone in the other man’s voice infuriated him. “The LAPD looks out for its own. There are ways. The department will cover for me. They do the investigating, remember? They can take whatever evidence they’ve got, make it look any way they want. Or they can lose it, bury it down in Internal Affairs, so deep it’ll never come back up.” The fury tinged his own voice. “I was doing my job—yeah, that’s no excuse. But there’s no way the department’s going to let a fellow cop take a rap . . . like that . . .” Fury drained, his words faded. He’d just remembered something.
“You got it, Deckard.” Triumph and pity. “You fell into your old mind-set, didn’t you? Just enough to forget that you quit the department. You’re not a cop anymore. You turned your back on the department and walked away. Ran all the way up north, to that little hiding place you found. The LAPD doesn’t owe you a thing now. I know enough about how their heads work. Not only are they not going to cover for you—they’ll throw you to the courts just to make themselves look good. That’s how it goes, Deckard. When they find out you’re back here in the city, the cops are going to hunt you down like wolves on a rabbit. Even if you don’t wind up executed—either out on the street or from the court—you won’t be heading up north again. Not anytime soon, that is. You’ll be in a max lockup for a long, long while.”
The sweat had turned to ice under his hands. He looked down at them, seeing them as if they belonged to someone else, someone already dead. “Do they know?” He looked back up at Isidore. “That I’m in the city?”
“I didn’t tell the police about you. But they know. Somebody else tuh-told them.”
“Who? It must’ve been her . . . Sarah Tyrell.”
Isidore shook his head. “No—she had you buh-brought here so I could warn you. Not to juh-just go waltzing out onto the streets and get yourself blown away.”
It didn’t matter. The only thing that did matter was far away from here. “Now what happens?”
“I don’t know. That’s up to you, Deckard. Duh-dying seems to be your likeliest option.”
“You could help me get away.”
A thin smile and a shake of the head. “I don’t know any thing about how to do that. It’s not exactly my area of expertise. Someone leaves here, I don’t have any way of helping them after that.”
He glanced around the small room’s walls. “But the police don’t know I’m here. In your pet hospital. Or they would’ve found me already.” Like wolves on a rabbit—his former associates in the department wouldn’t waste any time. “You could let me hide out here. Until I figure out what to do.”