'Just take this thing down. You'll see.'
The locks on Deckard's front door had been punched through, the tempered steel beneath the numbers 9732 dented and wrenched back. Took Batty a few minutes to fiddle the police seal without triggering an alarm signal to LAPD headquarters. He shoved the door open, and he and Holden stepped inside from the unlit, silent corridor.
'What'd I tell you?' Batty scanned across the search wreckage that lapped up against the replicas of Frank Lloyd Wright's original faux Mayan wall panels. 'There's nobody here. If there had been, the cops would've tweezed him out a long time ago.'
Holden said nothing, but walked farther into the apartment. He knew his way around; he'd been here a couple of times before, from a period predating his and Deckard's mutual agreement that two blade runners sitting and drinking in the same room was a bad idea.
The piano bench had been knocked over by the cops who'd ransacked the place. Old brown-edged sheet music lay scattered across the floor, along with the photographs, framed and unframed, from that distant world of the past. Sweet-faced women gazed up with somber understanding from the black-and-white depths.
He found what he'd figured would still be there, what Deckard had shown him once, fastened to the underside of the bench with a strip of wide packing tape. He pulled it free and gripped it tight in his fist.
'Whattya got there?' Batty had had his back turned, but had heard the ripping sound.
'Hey-what's that?'
Holden ignored him. He walked toward the bathroom at the rear of the apartment. 'I'll show you in a minute.'
'You'll show me right now.'
He could hear Batty following him. Without switching on the light, he knelt down and snapped one end of the object, Deckard's spare set of handcuffs, onto the metal pipe behind the toilet. He stood back up as Batty appeared in the doorway. 'Look right here,' said Holden, pointing.
Batty stepped past him, bending down and peering to see. In one quick move Holden stepped back and grabbed the other man's head with both hands. He brought his knee up sharp into Batty's face, knocking him back with a spray of blood from the nose. Dazed, Batty lolled back-without resistance as Holden lifted him upright by the padded collar of his jacket. A hard punch to the stomach dropped Batty to the floor.
He found himself panting and dizzy, the bio-mechanical heart in his chest racing from the sudden flurry of exertion, the new lungs laboring for breath. Taking a step back, out of Batty's reach, he watched as the other man groggily shook his head, blood streaming to his chin. As though a switch had been thrown in his brain, from impaired to full functioning, Batty suddenly snapped into motion, springing from the bathroom floor and instantly being jerked back by the handcuffs fastened to his wrist and the toilet pipe.
'You sonuvabitch!' Kneeling, his face reddening with fury, Batty clawed his free hand a few inches short of where Holden stood. 'Get these things off me! Right now!'
'Sorry…' Holden retreated to the hallway of Deckard's apartment. 'Can't do that. I've got a private appointment to get to.' He turned away, striding toward the front of the apartment and the door out to the building's corridor.
'Holden!' Behind him, Batty thrashed and shouted, voice echoing in the bathroom's tiled confines. 'I'll fix your ass-'
He could still hear the other man screaming violent curses as he slammed the front door shut. Despite the pounding of the machines inside himself, he broke into a quick trot for the elevator. He didn't know how long the cuffs would hold Batty; the man had looked enraged enough to pull the pipe right out of the wall. Holden punched the ground-floor button and leaned against the elevator's inside wall, a squadron of black spots swarming in front of his eyes.
A couple of minutes later he was aloft in the freight spinner, banking it in a tight curve, then accelerating in a straight line. To where Deckard would actually have gone to hole up.
As the spinner climbed above the city, Holden could see a flash of hot sunlight reflected from the ocean off to the west. At the horizon, a dark mass of clouds had begun to form.
They heard the door being broken in. The teddy bear raised its head as though sniffing the air for the source of the commotion; the spike-helmeted soldier moved in front of Sebastian, a defensive barrier against whatever might come through the kitchen doorway.
From instinct, Deckard reached for a weapon at his hip-and found nothing. Turning, he pulled open one of the counter drawers and extracted from it a paring knife with a cracked handle.
The sounds of someone moving through the front part of the apartment, a passage made more difficult by the rooms being tilted onto their sides-a figure appeared at the doorway, bending down to look in on them.
'Holden…' Surprised, Deckard nearly dropped the knife he held. 'What're you doing here?'
'You mean, why aren't I stuck in a hospital somewhere, with tubes running in and out of me.' The other man ducked his head past the door frame and dropped into the kitchen space. He glanced at the knife in Deckard's hand. 'Nice to see you, too.' His gaze swept across the figures in the room. 'Christ, what a welcoming committee.'
'They're a family.' Deckard set the knife down on the up-ended section of the counter. 'We should be so lucky.'
The Pris-thing fastened its red-eyed glare on Holden, then hissed, spine arching catlike. Sebastian's single hand stroked the thing's shoulder. 'Now, Pris, there's no call for that. This gentleman's not gonna hurt you-'
'What the hell-' Loathing wonder was visible on Holden's face.
'Don't sweat it,' said Deckard. 'She's his old girlfriend. One of the escaped replicants. She's been… recycled. Sort of.' He nodded toward the figure on the back of the teddy bear. 'Sebastian's clever that way.'
'Pris! Wait! You don't have to-' The voice from the amputated torso rose into a wail as the corpse of his love darted away from him, disappearing into the dark recesses of the safe-house apartment. Sebastian's arm reached futilely for the skeletonized figure, already gone from sight.
'Nice going, Dave.' Deckard peered closer at the figure in front of him. 'You know… I figured you'd probably be dead by now. Or something.'
'Yeah, well, that was the plan. But I got a new lease on life.' With the flat of his hand, he thumped his chest, turned pale, then recovered. 'Feel like a new man. Part of me, at least. No thanks to that pile-of-shit Bryant.' Holden's expression darkened to a scowl. 'Bastard set me up. I'm going to make sure he goes into major payback mode.'
'Wait a minute.' He didn't know what exactly his ex-partner was talking about, but one thing was clear. 'You don't know, do you? Bryant's dead.'
The info rocked Holden back against the wall. Deckard could almost see the gears spinning in the other's head as he tried to incorporate the new datum into his thinking.
'He's dead…' Holden lifted his hand, as though there were a veil before him that he had to part in order to see clearly. 'Did he just pop off from a heart attack, something like that? The fat pig was overdue for one.'
'There was blood all over his office. Or there had been-I saw the stain on the floor. However he went, it didn't look like it'd been an easy process. Or pleasant.'
'Jeez…' Holden shook his head. 'That kind of puts everything in a different light. Because if Bryant got blown away, then…' He lifted his gaze, then took a step closer to Deckard. 'Look, I realize these people-or whatever they are-might be your friends and all.' He kept his voice softened. 'But you and I have got some heavy stuff to talk over.'
'Hey, you don't have to worry about us.' From the other side of the kitchen, Sebastian called over to them. He looked sullen and teary-eyed. 'We know when we're not wanted. Come on, fellas. Let's go see what Pris is doing.'
'Didn't that guy used to work for Tyrell?' Holden craned his neck to watch as the animated teddy bear, with Sebastian in the papoose carrier, clambered toward the rear of the apartment. The spike-helmeted soldier gave a dirty look over his shoulder, then disappeared with his companions. 'You shouldn't be hanging around with people like that-not unless you got them thoroughly checked out. What're they doing here, anyway?' Holden gestured around the tilted walls. 'Did you let 'em in here? This place was supposed to be just for blade runner operations-'
'Simmer down.' Deckard leaned against the end of the counter. The knife was close at hand; his old partner was starting to sound deranged, and looked agitated enough to flip out. 'They're harmless.'
''Harmless' — that's a good one.' Holden's gaze narrowed. 'Nothing's harmless in this universe. That's one
