He got his hands onto Batty’s wrists, trying to pull them far enough away from his throat to suck in air. A detached fragment of his mind noted that the handcuffs were gone. “Wait . . . wait a minute . . .” He gasped out the words as his feet dangled clear of the hallway’s floor. “I have . . . to talk with you . . .”
“No, you don’t.” Batty pushed him up higher against the wall. “You and I have talked plenty already. I’m so on your pitiful wavelength, I don’t have to talk to you anymore. I knew you were going to come back here, looking for me. Once you figured out that you’re too screwed up to get by on your own.” A shark’s grin floated into Holden’s fuzzed vision. “So you see. I know what you’re going to say before you do.”
A thread of oxygen flowed down his throat. The other man was tiring, not visibly so, but detectable by the slight weakening of his arms, the weight dragging them down. The black spots in front of Holden’s eyes, that had interposed a drifting polka-dotted veil between his face and Batty’s, faded a little.
“Look . . . it’s important . . .” The words scraped through his constricted larynx. “I wouldn’t have come back here . . . if I just needed help . . .”
“Yeah, right.” Batty followed the words with a scornful grunt.
“Really . . . I figured it out . . .” He tugged at the other’s wrists. “i figured out . . . who the sixth replicant is . . .”
Batty tilted his head to one side, studying the pinned figure in front of him. “What’re you talking about?”
“Put me down . . . and I’ll tell you . . .”
Through narrowed eyes, Batty regarded him for a moment longer. “All right.” He lowered Holden to the floor, letting go of the front of his shirt. Batty stood back, arms folded across his chest. “This better be good.”
Holden doubled over, gasping to fill his lungs, head level with his artificial heart to increase the passage of blood between the two organs. Weakly, he straightened back up, balancing himself against the wall with one hand. He stumbled toward the apartment’s living room, with Batty following after.
“It’s simple. Really.” He flopped down into one of Deckard’s overstuffed chairs. With his foot, he nudged aside the toppled piano bench, so he could stretch out his legs. “Once you think about it.” The numbness in his limbs had changed to prickling as his circulation rattled back to normal. Or what passed for that. “The sixth replicant . . . the one that’s still missing. It’s Deckard.”
“You idiot.” Batty looked down at him with contempt. “I’m the one who told you that.”
He sat down heavily on the padded bench, his elbows knocking two atonal chords from the piano as he leaned back against the keyboard. Disgusted, he shook his head. “Jesus Christ. I can’t believe this. If you’ve been worrying about whether that new pump of yours is starving your brain of oxygen—and you should be; I can hear it wheezing all the way over here then you don’t have to worry anymore. Your brain’s obviously gone to mush.”
Unruffled, Holden smoothed his hands out along the rounded arms of the chair. He managed a smile. “Sureyou said something about Deckard being the sixth replicant. But I know how your mind works. You’d never have made it as a blade runner. You’re too sloppy. The whole modus operandi of someone like you is to kill someone else, and then if it turns out to have been the wrong person, do another. Until you finally get it right.” He paused for a moment, to regain his breath. “Blade runners, on the other hand, try to be a little more precise about who we kill.”
“Piss off.”
He knew he’d nailed him. Holden leaned forward, relishing the small measure of control he’d gained, the shift of power between himself and the other man. “There; you see?” It’d been worth coming back here, taking the risk, just to screw with Batty’s mind. In the best way possible, by feeding his own words back to him. But with a difference. “You know I’m right. When you said Deckard was the sixth replicant, that was just an idea you had. You didn’t know for sure. Did you?”
Batty shifted uncomfortably on the piano bench, but made no reply.
“Whereas I can say that Deckard is the sixth replicantand I can prove it.” He leaned back into the deep upholstery. In triumph.
“Go ahead.” Batty had reassembled his own composure. “I’m listening.”
“There’s a safe-house apartment, out in the sideways world-you know, all that toppled-over seismic zone-that Deckard and myself and some of the other guys in the blade runner unit set up. Without any departmental connection; we used it for stakeouts, remote operations, all that sort of thing. That’s where I knew Deckard would go. And I was right.”
Holden forced down a deep breath. “After I took care of you, I went out there and found him, talked to him—”
“You should’ve plugged him. And if you were so friggin’ smart, you wouldn’t have left me where I could get hold of dental floss and a razor blade. Those handcuffs ain’t shit, when you know what you’re doing.”
Holden rolled past the comment. “At any rate, I didn’t get very far with him. I’d figured that between the two of us, he and I could locate the sixth replicant and retire itbut Deckard wouldn’t buy into that plan. Turned me down flat. So I left . . . but I didn’t go away. I kept an eye on the place, from outside. And sure enough, Holden had a visitor. A woman—”
“Oh?” Batty raised an eyebrow. “Young, dark-haired? Expensive-looking?”
“Pretty much.” He nodded. “I figured that it was the one who owns the Tyrell Corporation now—”
“Sarah Tyrell. Good guess.”
“They were both inside the safe-house apartment for a while, then there was a gunshot. Then both Deckard and the woman came out, climbed into a Tyrell Corporation spinner, and flew off. The person who didn’t come out of the apartment was this little weird guy, who was also there. Used to be one of the corporation’s top bio-engineers, name of Sebastian.”
“Yeah, I know about him. Big involvement in the design of the Nexus-6 models. I met him when they were putting together the prototypes for the Roy Batty replicant model.”
“That’s my whole point.” The artificial heart in Holden’s chest revved with excitement.
“Deckard and this Sarah Tyrell iced one of the few people-hell, maybe the only one left-who could identify the Nexus-6 replicants. Why would they do that, unless they wanted to make sure that there wasn’t anybody around who could put the finger on the missing sixth replicant? And who’d be more concerned about that then the sixth replicant itself? So it has to be Deckard. All that stuff about him having run off up north, that was all a ruse, an alibi to make it look like he wasn’t on the scene down here. But he was, and he was busy taking care of anybody who could identify him. Like Bryant. It’s obvious—Deckard killed the one guy who’d seen the original escape report from the off-world authorities, after Bryant had already purged the info on him from the police files. Just goes to show what a thorough bastard Deckard is; he’s not leaving any loose ends.”
Batty musingly stroked his chin. “Why didn’t Deckard kill you? Out at this safe-house apartment.”
“Because I had a gun, and he didn’t-at that time. The Tyrell woman must’ve brought out the one they shot Sebastian with.”
“Huh.” Slowly Batty nodded. “That makes sense, I guess.” He gave a shrug. “Look, I’m glad you’ve come around to my way of thinking about this—”
“ ‘Thinking,’ hell.”
“All right, all right.” Batty held both his palms outward. “I admit I operate more on instinct than reason-so sue me. But what you’ve come up with just confirms what I’d felt was the case about Deckard. So it must be true, right?”