name.”
“I’ve got a lot of contacts,” said Urbenton with a wink. “Contacts are important in my line of business. I’m a video director. Producer, too. I do it all
A memory fragment drifted through Sarah’s head. The names, of both the man and his company, sounded vaguely familiar to her. Deckard had said something about them, a long time ago. Before he had left the planet the first time. Something about going to do a job for them. That’s how he knows my name, she thought.
Because of Deckard. She tucked the business card in her neckline. “What’s that got to do with me?”
Urbenton glanced around the narrow, shadowed streets of the emigrant colony, then back to Sarah. “May I come in? So we can talk?”
“We’re talking now.” She folded her arms across her breasts. “As I said-what’s that got to do with me?”
His smile appeared more forced. “Let’s just say . . . that maybe we can do business together. You and me.”
“Oh?” She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Such as?”
“I have good reason to believe, Miss Tyrell, that you’d like to have a certain Rick Deckard taken care of. Murdered, as it were.” The smile disappeared, replaced by a hard glitter in the man’s eyes. “How would you like it if I made that possible for you?”
Sarah regarded the man for a few seconds, then stepped back, clearing the doorway. “Perhaps,” she said, “you’d better come inside.”
“This’ll do. For now.” He steered the child toward an opening beneath words outlined in flickering lightbulbs, half of which had gone permanently dead.
“Let’s go in here.”
Behind the bar, an unshaven figure swabbing out glasses with a dirty towel; he spotted Deckard and the Rachael child as soon as they stepped into the dimly lit interior. “Hey—” The bartender pointed a black-nailed finger toward the little girl. “No minors.”
Deckard left the girl a few steps away from him. With the briefcase dangling from one hand, he leaned an elbow on the bar. “Let me tell you something.” He kept his voice low, face close to the bartender’s. “I was just talking with somebody who claimed that there’s no little girl at all. She’s a hallucination.”
An ugly smirk curdled the other man’s lip. “Yeah, right. Now get her out of here.”
Opening his jacket partway, Deckard displayed the black metal of the gun he’d taken from Sarah. “About that hallucination. Some very influential people think the same way.”
The bartender’s eyes shifted from the gun back up to Deckard’s face. “There’s a real nice booth in the back. Suitable for a party of one.” He tried to smile. “Like yourself.”
“Thanks.” Deckard peeled a bill from the rapidly dimishing roll in his pocket and laid it on the bar. “I really value my privacy.”
The establishment was dark enough, and so sparsely inhabited that he was able to steer the Rachael child to the back with little fear of being spotted. Once away from the bar and its pallid fluorescents behind the ranks of bottles, the only illumination came from the video screens hanging at strategic intervals from the ceiling. A flickering wash of blue tinted the isolated faces gazing up, their hands cradling the carefully nursed drinks that kept the patrons from being eighty-sixed out of the place. None of them looked around at Deckard and the girl slipping into the farthest booth; eyes remained on their stimulus fix from the cable monopoly. He stashed the briefcase beneath the table.
“Won’t he call us in? That guy?” The Rachael child had easily figured out that Deckard was trying to keep them from being spotted by the emigrant colony’s police. The evasive route that he had taken them on this far left little doubt. “You don’t trust him, do you?”
“Of course not.” Deckard didn’t look at her, tucked into the darkest part of the booth and shielded by his own body. Eyes adjusting, he scanned the bar’s interior for any suspicious indicators. He was grateful that Batty, the part of him imbedded in the briefcase, had heeded his warning about staying quiet in public. “But we don’t need to worry just yet. The bartender’ll keep a lid on it for a little while, just on the hope that I’ll feed him some more money.”
“Is a little while all we need?”
The child’s voice was capable of unnerving him; she sounded on occasion like an adult asking questions with a child’s sharpness. Deckard supposed that came from her unusual upbringing, whatever it had been, on the Salander 3. “I just need time to think,” he said, glancing over at her. “If I get that, maybe we have a chance.”
“Oh.” The Rachael child mulled over his words, forehead creasing. “What’re you going to do?”
“I said, time to think. Not talk.”
He was rewarded with silence. Spreading his hands flat on the table, he leaned his head back against the booth’s padded leatherette and closed his eyes.
“Not interested in the show, huh?”
Deckard’s eyes snapped open at hearing, not the child’s voice, but a man’s.
Even before he focussed on the figure that had slid in on the table’s other side, his hand had darted inside his jacket and fastened onto the gun.
He wasn’t quick enough. The other man was quicker, reaching across and seizing Deckard’s wrist, pinning his hand beneath the jacket. “You don’t have to do that.” The other man smiled. “Think of all the commotion it’d make in here.
Nice quiet place like this.” He squeezed the wrist tighter, numbing the fingertips on the gun’s cold metal. “Perfect for a little conversation.”
The Rachael child had shrunk back in the booth, watching the two men to either side of her.
“Yeah. It’s lovely.” The speed of the other man’s movement indicated some kind of professional status; if not cop, then something equally deadly. Deckard nodded slowly. “Very intimate.”
“I knew you’d agree.” The thin smile had remained on the other man’s face.
“Now m going to let go of you, and then we can just sit here politely looking at each other without things getting all ugly between us. I’m going to do that, Deckard, because I know you really do want to talk to me. The bit with the gun lb just chalk that up as a nervous reaction on your part.”
The other’s hand still hadn’t let go of Deckard’s wrist. “I don’t go in much for conversation.”
“You will.” The man loosened his grip slightly. “Because you either talk to me or you can forget about going much farther than this bar. Your ass is in the proverbial sling, Deckard. I can get it out.”
Deckard was silent for a few moments, then nodded. “All right. Let’s talk.”
“You’re a smart man, Deckard.” He let go and sat back in the booth, folding his arms on the table. “Or smart enough.”
“Who is this?” The Rachael child sounded annoyed as she scowled at the broad-shouldered figure.
Deckard didn’t answer her, but looked closer at the other man, letting the angles of the face assemble and connect with one in his memory.
“I know you,” said Deckard. “You were there at the Outer Hollywood station. I remember now—” The whole scene flashed through Deckard’s mind, including the corpse of David Holden, laid out in a reproduction of the interview room at what had been the Tyrell Corporation headquarters in L.A. “You were the one who killed that Kowalski replicant right in front of me.”
“That’s right.” The man looked pleased with himself, as though flattered by Deckard’s recall. “There really wasn’t time for proper introductions. The name’s Marley.” He extended his hand across the table again, as though to shake Deckard’s. “Or at least that’ll do for now.”
Deckard looked at the hand in distaste. “You must be joking.”
“Not about this.” The man shrugged and pulled his hand back. “You’re a tenderhearted soul, aren’t you? It’s not as if you hadn’t ever killed any replicants.”
“I never went around bragging about it.”
“Ah . . . I see. The money was enough for you.” Marley appeared even more amused. “Well, Deckard, you don’t have to like me. You just have to . . . shall we say? . . . do business with me.”
The constant, self-assured smile irritated Deckard. “What kind of business?”
Marley didn’t answer; he looked up to the nearest video screen. “You’re right, you know; this isn’t too interesting.” Some kind of sporting event that involved oxygen masks and a medical triage staff at each end of the playing field was on. “That’s all right, though.” He turned the smile back toward Deckard. “There’s something better
