“If it’d been up to me, you wouldn’t have.”
“That attitude’s not winning any points with me. You want us to be friends again, then you should start acting friendly. Then maybe I’d feel like helping you out.” Bryant reached off camera, his hand returning with a bottle and an empty glass. “Let’s be friends.” He poured out a shot. “Come on, you know I’ve got some of the good stuff there. And I hate to drink alone.”
He felt his brow dampening with sweat, the chair arms slick under his palms. Jerking me around, thought Deckard, anger stifled to a heated rock in his chest. Exactly the kind of little games Bryant had always liked to play. He didn’t have any choice but to go along. Sitting on the corner of the desk was another bottle, the duplicate of the one Bryant had in his quarantine chamber, and a pair of glasses. One was still clean; he poured a brown finger and knocked back half of it. “There. Satisfied?” The alcohol burned along his throat. Bryant’s notion of the good stuff was anything you could set a match to.
“All right, all right; jeez. Prickly bastard.” Bryant set his own empty glass down, his face heavy and brooding. “With the kind of enemies you got, you should cultivate your friends more. You could use ’em.” He poured another shot, swirled it around in the glass, watching.
“Fact of the matter is, I don’t have a clue as to why anybody would want to haul your sorry ass back here. I sure didn’t have anything to do with it.” He took a sip. “And why the Tyrell Corporation’s got such an interest in you . . . I mean, after your having screwed up and letting Eldon Tyrell get killed . . . it beats me. I’ve given up trying to figure out those people.”
Another. “Now the way I see it—”
“For Christ’s sake, Bryant!” Deckard’s nerve and his voice cracked. “I don’t have time for this. Now, are you going to help me out? Or are you just going to sit there in whatever plastic bubble they got you in, getting soused and mumbling to yourself?” His anger rose, even while he kept his voice down to a tense whisper. “Because I’m not going to stick around here, listening to your bullshit. Not while every cop in the city is parading by your office door.”
“Simmer down.” Bryant knocked back the dregs. “I’ll help you. I always have. Not that you ever seemed to appreciate it.”
“I didn’t appreciate getting jerked around by you. Back when I came to work for you again. What’s all this about there being one more escaped replicant on the loose? A sixth one.”
Bryant displayed his ugly smile. “Is that what the Tyrell Corporation’s got you hunting for?”
“So it’s true, then.” Deckard leaned forward. “There is another one. And you didn’t want me to know about it. What was that all about?”
“Look, uh . . . that’s not important.” On the monitor screen, Bryant’s image shifted uncomfortably. “Like you said, you don’t have time for screwing around. Why don’t we just say that back then . . . I miscounted, or something. Things didn’t work out quite the way I wanted them to.”
“All right—Deckard could hear the tension and anger in his own voice. “Whatever the game was that you were playing, I don’t need to hear about it. Right now, I need something from you. You either get me a spinner, fueled and with all clearances, so I can get the hell out of L.A..”
“Can’t do it, pal.” Bryant’s image shook its head. “I can’t put in a transport requisition from where I’m sitting.”
“Fine. Then you call up the data that you purged out of the files—the stuff about that other escaped replicant. ID scan, name, description, the works.”
“That’s kinda hard, too. I put all that in a secured file sector. Got some tight locks on it.”
“But it’s there, right?” Deckard managed to keep his voice low. “So you can get it out. And that’s what I need from you. Give me the data on the sixth replicant, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
Another shake of the image’s head. “Hunting it down won’t be a picnic. Not with the whole LAPD on your case.”
“Let me worry about that. All I have to do is turn its carcass over to the Tyrell Corporation, and then I’ll be long gone. Again. The police won’t even see my dust.”
“You trust Tyrell?”
“I don’t have any choice.” He slumped down in the chair, splaying the glossy jackboots out in front of himself. Letting some of the anger drain away-he lifted the shot he’d poured out and finished it off. “They’re the only chance I have.” In the office’s stillness, he heard the faint rumble of the rep train rolling through its dark tunnels beneath the station. The poor bastards aboard it had already found their way out. The noise faded away, like a minor seismic echo.
An old, recognizable feeling crawled across his skin, the same one he’d felt whenever he’d been in Bryant’s office before, and that sub-audible note had whispered at the edge of his perception. Evoking the same thought as before: At least i always killed them one at a time.
His only source of moral justification. . . .
Deckard shook off the creepy meditation. He didn’t have time for that, not now. “So what’s going to be? Do I get the info?”
“It’ll take a while,” said Bryant’s image on the monitor screen.
“How long?”
The image shrugged. “Maybe half an hour. Maybe a little less. Especially if we don’t have anybody noticing that I’m pulling the file back up. Once I’ve got it accessed, though, I can send it straight to where you’re at right now. So the best thing for you to do . . .” The brown-toothed smile again. “Would be to just hang tight and wait for the pretty pictures to show up on the screen.”
Deckard glanced at the office’s door. He’d heard footsteps go by, then silence. , The voice from the monitor continued. “Like you said, pal, every cop in the city is walking by your elbow right now. None of them are likely to come waltzing into my office anytime soon. Keep your head down, and you should be able to hang out there until the crowd thins out a bitmaybe when the sun comes up and they all scurry to their little holes. Then you should be able to sneak back out.” The image shrugged. “After that, it’ll all be up to you. Just like you wanted.”
The muscles along Deckard’s shoulders eased. He could handle that. He’d gotten in here; he could get out again. And after that? He’d worry about it later.
“All right.” He nodded. “The sun comes up, and I’m out of here.” He swallowed the remainder in his glass. “You’re the one who’s going to have to take the heat, though. If it gets found out that you helped me.”
“Let me worry about that.” Bryant’s image sneered. “These pussies in the department have been on my case for years. What’re they going to do, fire me? Bring me up on charges? They can’t—I’m the only one who’ll do this rotten job for them, and they know it. Besides, I’ve got a file up here—” On the monitor screen the jowly, unshaven image tapped the side of its head. “With a list of where all the bodies are buried. There’s a bunch the brass around here wouldn’t like to see dug up. If anybody over at Internal Affairs or the police chief’s office want to dick around with me, I can guarantee ’em it won’t be just my funeral they’ll be getting ready for.”
The scotch radiated a feeble glow in Deckard’s stomach. “It won’t be just the department brass you’ll have to worry about. Those enemies of mine that you were talking about-they won’t be friends of yours.”
“Yeah, like I’m so scared, pal. The fact that they were able to get you into hot water doesn’t make ’em God. I’ve been covering my fat white butt for a long time now. Since I’m still alive, you might guess that I’ve gotten pretty good at it. And you’d be right. Like I said, let me worry about it.”