them inside.
It was a simple matter to throw the gym bag up through the hole in the ceiling, chin myself on a piece of jagged concrete, and crawl out onto the floor.
I stood to see that a middle-aged woman had been tied to her chair. Rope ran around her like in the cartoons. Adhesive tape covered her mouth, and her eyes bulged with pent-up emotion.
I smiled pleasantly, nodded, and grabbed the gym bag. The door opened smoothly, I stepped out into the foot traffic, and headed up-corridor. A contract is a contract. I’d find Sasha or die trying.
3
“We pay cash for used body parts.”
From the sign in front of Arturo’s Pawn Shop, Sub-Level 26, Sea-Tac Residential-Industrial Urboplex
It took the Zeebs about thirty minutes to summon the meat wagon, ask my neighbors stupid questions, and toss my apartment. Then, having assured themselves that I had nothing worth taking, they left a microbot to keep an eye out for me and headed for the nearest doughnut shop.
Had I been one of the wealthier freelancers, or an honest-to-god lifer, things would have been different. That’s because the Zebras work for a company called Pubcor, which makes most of its money providing security to other corporations. I mean, who would you worry about? The people who pay you millions each year? Or the great unwashed horde who ante up six bucks a month? Right. Me too.
So, having left the lady’s door open so someone would discover her predicament, I joined the crowd on Level 37. It isn’t easy for me to blend into a crowd, but I did the best I could. Membership in the great unwashed horde is based on more than appearance. It’s a matter of attitude. And to have the right attitude, you need to live the kind of hand-to-mouth existence freelancers do.
It wasn’t always that way, I hear. There was a time when companies offered their workers what amounted to lifetime employment. But that ended back around the turn of the century when the last of the communist governments collapsed and capitalism reigned supreme.
After all, why pay employees during periods when you don’t need them, especially when the population continues to increase? And automation drives the total number of jobs downwards? So that’s how nearly everyone wound up as “freelancers,” working when companies wanted them, and waiting when they didn’t.
Knowing that, I imitated the slump-shouldered shuffle of a work-starved freelancer, avoided eye contact with oncoming traffic, and moved at the same pace as the rest of the crowd. Sameness. That’s the key. People who act differently stand out from the crowd and are easy to remember.
The further underground you go, the worse the conditions get. My particular complex includes fifty sub-levels altogether so 37 is pretty bad. God only knows what 45 or 50 is like. I’ve never been there. The corpies who run the place save money by leaving every other lighting fixture empty. The substandard plumbing that the original contractor installed bursts on a regular basis, causing unexpected waterfalls that slide down walls or pour through broken ceiling tiles. Additional cable, not included in the original bid, hangs suspended beneath the overhead. Trash, including used condoms, drug injectors, stripped droids, food cartons, soiled clothing, and other stuff too gross to mention piles up fast. The robo-cleaners come through every night, but by noon the next day everything is just the same.
And the human debris is almost as bad. Addicts of every description laying unconscious in the filth, beggars who sold arms, legs, eyes, and god knows what else for a few credits, and street children, wise beyond their years, selling, stealing, and scamming their way through another day. I hate to say it, but Earth is a toilet world, ready to flush.
My first stop was a hallway hotel where I could rent a seven-by-four-foot sleeping compartment. It cost five bucks for twenty-four hours. I slid inside, checked to make sure that it was reasonably clean, and closed the door behind me. Like most sleep slots, this one boasted graffiti-covered walls, a mattress with a patched cover, and a beat-up vid set.
It took ten minutes to disassemble the.38, wipe it down, install a new barrel, and change the firing pin. Something I could do blindfolded if I had to. The change-out isn’t foolproof, but it does serve to slow the Zeebs down and weakens their case. Assuming they made a case, which was damned unlikely. Snatchers are far from popular, and without a lifer goading them on, the Zebras could give a shit. Still, you need a license to carry heat, and the Zeebs would like nothing more than to jerk my ticket. So why tempt the bastards?
Yeah, I might have turned myself in and claimed self-defense, but that would have consumed one, maybe two days, and lessened my chances of finding Sasha.
I left the bag in the sleeping compartment, dumped the incriminating parts down a recycling chute, and headed for the escalators. People swirled around me, and an interactive wall ad tried to engage me in conversation. It had a high-resolution flat screen with pinpoint sound. The electronic pitchman had black hair combed straight back, a biosculpted face, and fervor-filled eyes. They followed me as I moved.
“Hey, mister! You look like a guy that has jock itch. Let me show you the Elexar 9000 Groin Grooming System and I’ll…”
I never found out what he’d do, because the foot traffic narrowed as we approached the escalator and sucked me along with it. The crowd was typical, low-end day workers mostly, wearing beepers that rarely beeped, hoping for the five or six days’ worth of work necessary to pay that month’s rent. And there were predators too, scammers, zonies, and bangers, all looking for easy prey. And why not? They were self-employed, worked when they felt like it, and didn’t kiss ass.
A banger, big in leather and lace, shifted his hockey stick from one shoulder to the other and moved my way. A buddy followed.
I made eye contact, grinned invitingly, and blew him a kiss. I like to shoot bangers, and it must have showed. He said something to his companion and they turned away.
The crowd poured off the escalator and headed down-corridor. I followed. Tracking someone through a major urboplex isn’t as hard as you might think. Yeah, the halls are packed with people, but the trick is to see through them. Look for the things that stand still. Like the expresso stand that occupies the same spot every day, the kids who throw pennies against the wall, and the blind man who isn’t so blind.
I don’t know why Marvin runs the scam he does, but he’s been at it a long time, and knows Level 39 like the back of his hand. I bought an Americano at the expresso stand and drifted his way. Marvin has black skin, wraparound electro-shades, and hair that looks as if it’s exploding off his head.
“Shoeshine? Shoeshine to help the po’ blind man?”
I stepped onto his stand, sat on the red vinyl seat, and put my boots on a well-worn foot rest. “Poor, my ass. What do you rake in from this racket, anyway? Twenty? Thirty a year?”
Had I been a corpie, just passing through, Marvin would’ve asked me what color my boots were. But I wasn’t, so he let it slide. Carefully manicured hands, stained dark by constant exposure to the polish, slid over my boots. The movement had started as part of the act and evolved into a habit.
“More money than some dumb-assed white-bread shield, that’s for damned sure,” Marvin replied. “Shit, Maxon, they took the bitch right out from under your god-damned nose and left you looking like a chump. My mother could’ve done a better job.”
Mysterious are the ways of a Marvin, so I didn’t bother to ask how he knew about the girl or the fact that I had lost her. “Yes,” I agreed sagely, “your mother could have done a better job, as any mirror will attest.”
Marvin smeared brown polish on my boots and gave a snort of disgust. “Chrome-headed motherfucker.”
“Not so,” I replied solemnly. “It’s true that I have a chrome-plated head…but my relationship with Mom was strictly platonic. Or so I assume.”
Marvin laughed. “So what’s up? You goin’ after her? Or gettin’ ready for a date?”
I sipped my coffee, watched an androgynous hall ho strut by, and looked down at the top of his head. A number of tiny silver bells had been woven into his hair. They tinkled as he moved.
“I’m going after her. Got any idea who they were? Or where they went?”
Marvin grabbed a pair of brushes and buffed my boots. “Shit. If you know who they are…then you know where they went. Everybody knows that.”
