No Dogs in Philly, page 10
She was bent over a railing on a bridge in the Fish. He’d hurt her, hit her too hard, brought up a bruise or two. It hurt having her stomach pressed against the railing, hurt when he wrapped his lumberjack hands around her neck and squeezed too hard, hurt when he pulled her hair. She remembered the pain, focused on it, gritting her teeth. It seemed to last forever. And when he was done he’d thrown her to the ground, let her head clack against the pavement and then sprinkled the bills around her, laughing. She focused on that, capturing all the details, bringing up the pain, the disgust, the self-pity. This was a good memory, she knew, she was proud of this one, this was Hollywood quality right here. She’d even remembered the aftermath, dragging herself up from the pavement, the ache as she bent to pull on her panties and dress herself, and the limp away. She’d thought maybe he was going to snuff her that night.
“Very good, exquisitely done,” Dr. Alloche said. He was watching the scene, mesmerized, a connoisseur, the perfect audience for her work.
“Thanks, Doc,” she tried to say, but of course she was just her memory self and could say nothing.
“Now what’s this…this is very interesting here…”
She sat in front of a trash fire in the abandoned subway station. The others sat there too, but they were puppets, faceless, motionless bodies. She’d tried to blank them out, didn’t want to think about their fates. She didn’t want to be here, didn’t want him going into this memory, but of course he would find it, so recent, so terrifying, so thrilling, so many chemicals released—it was just what he wanted. Dr. Alloche stood in the shadows next to her, face illuminated by the flickering fire.
“What’s this…?” he said. “So much fear here…what is this? A rape?”
She tried to speak again, tried to tell him to get away, to skip this memory. She was afraid now, afraid that he wouldn’t believe it—who would?—and that he would think it was fake or tainted by sky bliss and then he would think her other memories were fake too and she wouldn’t get anything for them. The quality of this memory was all off…the dog hadn’t been sitting next to her, he’d been standing out on the platform, hovering like a ghost. Could the doctor even see the dog in her memory? Had he seen it lurking in the shadows when she was beaten on the bridge? What would show if he went far back, back years and years to when the dog had burned that john alive? Would it just show her in the car, would it look like she had killed him? Would that be worth anything?
There was a tremor, a shower of bricks and the dog looked at her. She got the odd sense that this was not the memory dog, that the dog couldn’t exist in a memory like this, that it could only exist in the Now and this was her dog, acting in the Now within her memory. The dummies, the fake hips she’d tried so hard to forget shuffled to their feet and ran down the corridor. She was almost certain they had died now, because that’s what she believed and so had tried to forget them. Another tremor.
“How curious,” Dr. Alloche said.
It was curious, what would happen? What would the memory show without the dog making her invisible? And then she heard it, the slithering vinyl sound, the whimpering of men and women and then the creature, the ball of human flesh and the long centipede body of twisted metal legs scrabbling into the floor and walls and ceiling and then rearing up onto the platform. She heard a gasp and saw the doctor step back. The look on his face was of sheer terror, like he’d forgotten he was in a memory. And then she felt it too, her own terror, reaching up and playing the fiddle with her nerves, making the hair on her skin poke up. It’s not real; it’s a memory. It can’t hurt me.
The head drew closer and closer, the whimpering as real as it had been, the eyes all closed, and the hands and fingers with the naked bone fluttering out, probing like the antennae on a cockroach. And then she saw, amidst the bodies, the nameless unknown dead, four faces that she recognized, vaguely, from a chance meeting—a young girl, an androgynous woman, an old man with a beard and no teeth, and his friend, their clothing hanging in scraps, arms out fluttering with the rest, eyes closed, moaning, she could hear their voices! And then the eyes all shot open at once and fixated on her, and the mouths twisted open, whispering in their dead-leaf voices: “Come…come…come…come…come…”
Footsteps, and the doctor walked past her, jerking like a puppet tugged by strings, reaching out his arms to embrace his loved ones, and then his finger touched theirs and the arms reached and clamped around him, the mouths now screeching in glee, baring their teeth, dragging him in and ripping at his flesh, licking his blood and devouring him. A scream, his own scream, loud and cutting through the sounds of tearing flesh, loud, overwhelming everything, her vision blurring and swimming back into focus, the light of the operating room glaring in her eyes, the sweet, sterile smell, and still the scream and claws on her skin, the doctor grabbing at her, and blood pouring from his mouth and ears and nose and the two black holes where his eyes had been.
Chapter 11
Saru watched the rec again, watched the woman open the door, saw the figure standing in the doorway, the figure without a face, just a swirling black where his head should have been. There were viz jammers available, bitchy things that didn’t work half the time and drained calories like a motherfucker—that’s why she didn’t bother—but they always left a mark. The sophisticated ones could give you a whole new face, even someone else’s face so you could stroll into a bank and shoot the place up as your boss or your neighbor. The dollar store variety just turned you into a bunch of pixels or a blur. None of them did this; nothing she knew turned your face into a tiny black hole. Even with the recording paused it seemed to move. Maybe it was a custom job.
“Do you remember what he looked like?” she asked the woman now sitting across from her on the tatty (like everything else in this rat-hole apartment) sofa just visible in the recording. Her name was Terry and she should have bought a lottery ticket because she was the luckiest woman in the world right now. Her ex was a jealous psycho twat, hence the cameras, the reinforced door, and the tiny six-shooter she was massaging on her lap. He’d decided to come pay her a visit the same time as this mysterious gentleman and had forced a confrontation. He was in the hospital with a throat zipped open like a suitcase, but he’d managed to shoot a few holes into the stranger before he bolted. McCully was shifting around the doorway collecting samples.
“Yeah,” Terry said. “And no. No, It’s hard to say. He was good looking, that I remember, had skin like, well…” she flushed. “He was very attractive.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“No. Well yeah, actually. I don’t think he really said it. But he opened the door and he was kind of talking to me.”
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“No he didn’t say anything.”
You can’t have it both ways lady, make up your mind. “You mean you can’t remember.”
“No, I remember,” Terry said crossly. “Well, not everything. I mean, I heard the doorbell, and I thought it was Henry because we had plans, you know, to go see the Black Jaws tonight—they’re in town—but he was early. So I went and I looked through the camera first, because Josh right, my ex, but it wasn’t Josh or Henry, it was this man. And when I looked at him through the screen I couldn’t see his face—you can see it on the screen, all blacked out—but I felt like…well, I opened the door and it seemed to take a long time, you know? Like hours to open the door, and it felt like I was looking at him for hours but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. And then Josh showed up and started yelling and pushed the guy and then the next thing I know the bastard was shooting—coulda hit me, I was right there—shooting with one hand and grabbing his neck with the other and there was all this blood…”
This woman was no help. A handsome man shows up at her door and she lets him in and gets rescued by her shitty past. Because it was a rescue. There was no doubt, none—every instinct Saru had earned from every hard knock and fuckup on the job told her this was the guy, or one of the guys. That alone was valuable. They didn’t have infinite resources; they were splitting up, working alone. They could be hurt and chased away—of course she knew that, anything could die with the right incentive, but it was refreshing to get a reminder. This whole case was spiraling into the hopeless, like these clowns were a step ahead of her in every way, shapeless supernatural beings with freaky powers. But this proved what she’d known all along—they were men, assholes, and they were just as vulnerable to a trigger-happy ex as the next guy. Bullets, the great indiscriminate equalizer.
“You’re gonna catch this guy, right?” Terry said.
“Huh? Oh, no. I’m not a cop.”
“What? But—”
“No, I’m private justice.” Saru stood up. The whole place smelled like a litter box and she wanted to be scarce.
“But when I called…”
“Yeah, I know. It’s confusing. You called the cops and they called me.” Of course they’d called her. Any dispatch officer who wanted a bit of nice in his life made a side business selling cases to the PIs. Saru had put out a standing order of $1,000 for any calls from names on that fabulous list Jojran had discovered. Terry Hatcher, domestic disturbance, 4:47 p.m., 1137 Christian Street.
“You see your case falls into what we call ‘the gap’ in the justice system. Don’t feel too special; it’s a pretty large gap. Most people fall into ‘the gap.’ You don’t make enough to afford private justice, me, and you’re not dealing with people who have anything worth seizing—drugs, money, illegal hardware, guns—so the cops don’t really care. You can make a stink about it or take out a justice loan, but here’s a free piece of advice—forget about it.”
“But what if he comes back?”
“Doubtful. Here, watch the recording.” She unpaused it and the scene played out more or less as Terry had described it—Josh, her ex, a big man, balding, hustling his lard up the stairs, pushing the tall figure and not moving him an inch. Terry screaming and trying to smack at Josh with a baseball bat, swinging around the figure. The gun appearing in Josh’s meaty hand, the knife—was it a knife?—a blur from the figure and then the white flares of gunshots overloading the camera sensors and Josh tumbling down the stairs clutching his throat. For two seconds the stranger and Terry stood alone on the top of the stoop. He could have turned her into a sieve in those two seconds but he didn’t. He just stood there, staring at her maybe? Talking about the weather? Then he left, walking almost casually down the steps and out of view, leaving a wonderful clue-filled trail of blood, Hallelujah.
“See, right there, he could have killed you but he didn’t. I think you’re fine.”
“But he came to my house; he knows where I live!” Terry was freaking out now, and in the whiniest way possible. Saru couldn’t stand whiners.
“Yes, but he’s not after you. He wants to kill someone else but he’s not sure who it is so he’s just killing everyone that looks like it could be her. Here, take this.” She poked Terry in the forehead and through the contact plates in her finger she transferred a standard victim kit into Terry’s address-book program—not even protected. Come on Terry; smarten up.
“That has the names and numbers for your friendly neighborhood cops, as well as information on some good mercenary services I recommend, and a nifty pamphlet on keeping your home safe.”
Saru’s head buzzed. McCully had finished taking his samples. She patted Terry on the head and left before she had the chance to voice any more fears. Out in the open air she took a breath and exhaled. God that place stank. McCully studied the vial of blood he’d collected in the gray light of day. She wasn’t an expert but it seemed oddly black and thick.
“That was cold,” McCully said, pocketing the vial. “You could reassure the poor woman.”
“I did,” Saru said, nonchalant. What more did he expect? The Gaespora were paying her ten million bucks to find a girl, not hunt down psychopaths. What did Terry have to offer? Microwave lasagna? Sixty bucks out of her monthly assistance check? A carton of smokes? Get real.
“Do you really think she’s safe in there? Shouldn’t she move?”
“You saw the tape. The man could have killed her but he didn’t. If he didn’t kill her then, why would he come back and kill her later?” QED.
“Do you want my opinion?”
“No.” She started walking to the Caddy. McCully shuffled after her, breaking into a half-skip jog to keep up.
“I was there, there for all six bodies. I looked them over. That took time to do what they did. These guys don’t kill casually.”
“What about the ex? Cut him up without a thought.”
“He wasn’t a target; he was just in the way. I’m saying that woman, back there—they came for her and they’re going to try again.”
“Who’s the detective here?”
“Neither of us right now.”
He jumped in front of her and blocked her path, glaring through his nutty wrinkles. How old was he? Had he never heard of moisturizer?
“I’m not going to analyze this sample until—”
Saru punched him in the gut, hard, and threw him to the ground. He landed with an oomph and then she crouched over him with a knee in his chest that she could drop to crush his sternum. She rifled through his coat until she found the vial and then pocketed it. He stared up at her wild-eyed. His fear felt good.
“Don’t ever tell me how to do my job,” she hissed, and then got up and walked away.
She hated herself a little, back in the Caddy, stuck still in rush-hour traffic, with nowhere to go except her own head. That was a mistake—why couldn’t she control herself? McCully was her lead on this case, had been her go-to vulture for three years now, and finding a quality vulture wasn’t a lark—the profession was cluttered with creeps and freaks, people who liked being around the dead, got off on horror, could soak up the misery and eat it with relish. She’d never wondered what got McCully into the business, never thought to ask him, but looking back on today it seemed likely he was that rare man, a sympathetic man—not to the dead, he’d tossed his share of bodies to the elzi—but to the living. He believed in his supposed mission, really thought he was helping to solve crimes, that each body he found meant one less body he’d have to find in the future. Fuck.
She slammed on the horn, beat it like a bongo, and told the Caddy to go on without her. She hopped out and then wove her way through the frozen river of vehicles, clamored over a few hoods, and shot every lewd sign and expletive she knew until she made it to the sidewalk. The first bar she came to was a basement dive with puke on the stairs—perfect. Three shots and a lager later she started to feel better. She’d find McCully, apologize, blame it on the period she couldn’t get any more, or a hangover, or maybe a bad dose of sky. A few crisp Reagans would smooth it all over and he’d analyze the sample for her and get a match. Jojran would work his magic and then she’d have a perp. Beautiful.
It wasn’t her fault, really, that she was twitchy, but she couldn’t tell him the real reason, tell him about the flickering, the glitches, the lost time and the hallucinations of her dead colleague and alien worlds. She hadn’t been back to that place, thank God, but she could still hear that song, whenever she wasn’t expecting it, that droning, noteless, toneless melody that seemed to be woven into her consciousness. How did it go again…?
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She grabbed the bartender by the arm, a burly man with muttonchops.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, jerking his arm free. He nodded at the jukebox, a shiny, colorful relic, not even networked. “If you don’t like it you can change it.”
She froze, listening intently to the song, some rockabilly tune about a cheating lover. No…she was imagining things. She relaxed. A new song came on, some techno Elvis revival, and she ordered another shot.
Take me down to the river, I don’t wanna do this shit anymore
You sing it brother.
I got forty-two dollars in checking, and I’m looking for a dollar whore
She’s got taste and class and a body, but her mind ain’t what it should be
She thinks everything comes on a platter, and life is so cheap it’s freeeeeeeeaaaaaauuuuaaaaauaaauauauauauauaua
The note held long, impossibly long, and time slowed. She could see it, see the sound, a rich golden thread, woven of smaller colored threads. It was beautiful. She flew around the thread, a bird, zooming in close, cresting the note as if it were a wave and looking down at the ocean, the sea of notes and colors, a dark shape below the surface, a whale, no, larger, a submarine, a squid, a leviathan. There was danger there, she was flying too close, too close to the wave and the dark shape rising, filling the sea, suffocating the light within its body, no beginning and no end, swallowing her. And there it was, of course, it had always been there, in the song, before it was written even, the greater song in the back of every living creature’s mind, the fear song, the song of melting atoms: uausuausuausuausuausuau…
“Hey, wake up!”
Someone was jostling her.
“Wake up! You can’t sleep here.”
His arm shot out and she heard a satisfying yelp as her fingers clamped around flesh and her steel-reinforced fingernails bit down. Then she lurched upright and let go.
