No Dogs in Philly (11 page)

“
Alright. Be there in a half
hour.”

She kicked it back into manual and revved up to
ninety, flying onto the highway and zipping in between the SUVs and
trucks, Hathaway chem tankers, minivans, motorcycles, and techie
sports cars. Mentally she accessed her account and dropped a few
thousand bucks into her exemption fund, just in case a copper was
lurking somewhere. Half the fucking cars were ASA vehicles in
disguise, and she’d already gone through the hassle once of being
caught and having her Caddy seized. She’d had to drop almost ten
grand in bribes to get it back—she would’ve let it rust if there
hadn’t been about forty grand worth of contraband implants hidden
in the snicker case in the fuel tank. A woman in a beat-up
go-fuck-yourself-mobile flipped her off as she passed, and the
Betty slipped a few centimeters out of its holster. Damn that thing
was twitchy.

First exit to downtown she screeched to a stop
and got out. She told the Caddy to go back to the garage and prayed
it found its way this time. Last week she’d sent it home and it
went exploring instead—a typical GPS fuckup—and wedged itself in an
alley ten blocks away with blood all over the grill. The dash cam
showed an elzi skipping into the highway. Three grand to clean the
damn thing and hammer out the dents. She thought again of plans to
round up all the elzi and put them on a barge on the river and ship
‘em to Jersey. Or just sink the barge.

Jojran lived in a fancy apartment building off
Washington Park. The security guard wouldn’t open the door for
her.

“
Listen,” she said, pressing the
com button and gritting her teeth. “I have an appointment with Alex
Ramirez.” She wasn’t sure if that was Jojran’s real name or just an
identity he’d stolen for the real world, but it was the name he was
using to live in this nice place and she did have every right to be
there, and this guy was pissing her off. She could see him through
the glass, talking to his sneering compatriot, shaking his head. He
wasn’t even responding to her. She knew there was an auto-rifle
pointed at her somewhere, loaded with tranqs or rubber bullets or
hell it could even be lead. It wouldn’t do her any good to throw a
tantrum outside but it might give her some emotional satisfaction.
How strong was that glass? Mentally she rifled through the ammo in
her holster—she had a few Bob’s Big Boys that were closer to cruise
missiles than bullets. Would that do it? She started calculating
what her sentence would be. That was the problem with crimes
against the rich—they could always outbid you. Not if she solved
this case. She could shoot anyone she wanted then. But first she
had to get into this fucking building. She called
Jojran.

“
These fucking pig men won’t let
me in,” she said, wishing she could blame them.

“
I’ll talk to them,” he said,
self-important. She got the strange sense that he had arranged this
in some ill-conceived plot to impress her. She saw the one guard’s
eyes go unfocused for a second, taking a call, and then he reached
down to his console and she heard a buzz as the door unlocked. She
strolled in and flashed them a smile.

“
Thanks,” she said.

“
Sorry for the misunderstanding,”
he said. It was clear he still thought she belonged on the other
side of the glass. The lobby was so clean and bright, and had
abstract paintings on the wall. All the copper was polished and
shiny, the uniforms crisp and clean. The guards themselves looked
like competent men—tall, fit, poised, close-cropped salt-and-pepper
hair and hard eyed—not the pudgy houseplants you normally saw
parked behind a reception desk. The guard’s eyes watched her sign
in; she saw the twitch in his jaw as her thumbprint came up as
Susan Greere, CPA, CFO, Meadow Media. He knew it was fake as a
stripper tit but she was a guest. He walked her to the elevator and
stood glaring at her. She glared right back and resisted the urge
to flip him off just as the doors sucked closed.

Jojran lived in one of the top quarter suites,
an open two-floor affair of dark wood, brushed steel, and
wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows with a breathtaking view of
the city below—away from the filth of humanity it almost looked
nice. The view was a waste as Jojran spent 99 percent of his waking
life on the Net—a self-titled super-user, uber, viking, elite,
professional masturbator, whatever you called it. He greeted her in
a leopard-print silk bathrobe that did little to distract from his
height deficit and surplus fat. She hoped to God there were silk
boxers on underneath—and why was he wearing just socks?

“
Welcome,” he said, dramatically,
squeakily. “To my humble abode.”

“
Lovely,” she said. She pushed
past him and went to the bar, an actual bar in the corner, and
began rummaging for the most expensive thing she could find. Dimly
it occurred to her that if she solved this case then she could
afford to live in a place like this, to stare out the windows at
the little people below and drink vodka swirling with pulverized
diamonds. She poured herself a glass and drank.

“
Can I get you anything?” he
asked, as she finished the first glass and started on a second. He
was following a script, some rehearsed plan of seduction. There was
a twinge of pity for him somewhere in her, but that was about it.
If he wanted sex he could buy a girl or a guy or a mountain goat if
that tickled his fancy. Whatever need made him act this way toward
her was something she couldn’t understand—or entirely afford to
neglect. Certainly he didn’t help her for the money; he made enough
of that stealing IDs and scraping corporate accounts. Nor did she
bring him particularly interesting cases, present case
excepted.

“
I’ll have this,” she said, now
studying a bottle of what looked like potent grain alcohol that had
been drunk by beautiful women and then urinated out and distilled
again. Would there even be any alcohol left? Worth a shot. She took
one. Not bad.

“
Ah, yes. I have the full range of
Virile Vodkas—I’m something of a connoisseur. Might I tempt you
with this?”

He sallied over and found a small bottle of
clear glass in the shape of a penis. He poured out a generous glass
and handed it to her. She took it and sniffed. Her poison detectors
found traces of an aphrodisiac cocktail, a mix of designer chems
meant to make her horny, but nothing malicious. They’d been
tailored to her to increase potency, which she found oddly
touching, and she wondered where he’d gotten a sample of untainted
DNA. She had a viral shedder that sprinkled taints of gobbledygook
throughout her body so genetics were usually useless against her.
Had they failed? Or had he spent the time to go through and extract
what he could to match her somatic profile? That was a little
creepy. The poison sniffer gave her the green; she could
disassemble and neutralize the cocktail. It was simple enough that
she copied it to study later, maybe she could reverse engineer it,
have it secreted from her lips or pheromones and take a stab at
Eugene one day. She sipped.

“
Oh that’s very nice,” she said,
and commanded her face to blush a little. Might as well play along.
She tossed her coat on one of the white leather couches and
adjusted her shirt and bra to maximize her cleavage. He noticed.
Her scanners swept him, saw the quickening pulse, the anticipation,
and the anxiety. For all his skill on the Net he lacked the
sophistication of a person-to-person bout and he was naked before
her. Another twinge of pity. Oh, well, time to get to the
point.

“
So what do you have for me?” she
asked.

“
Huh?” Staring at her tits. “Oh,
right. Yeah. It’s interesting.” She could tell it was. He was torn
between sharing his news and delaying to try…something with
her.

“
Oh?” She flattened her tone.
“Show me.”

“
Okay.”

He sat down on the small couch facing the
floor-to-ceiling windows and patted the seat next to him. She
poured herself a mix of everything at the bar and sat. He clapped
his hands and the room went dark. There was the ozone feel of a Net
wave and she found herself standing in Jojran’s vik, his virtual
kingdom, which appeared to be some sort of spaceship. He sat in the
command chair as the electric blue man-leopard, and she sat at his
side. In front of them was a screen that showed stars flying by.
She’d been in viks before—most people had some form of escape—but
they were usually patchy affairs, phoned-in, cardboard-fake theatre
sets that did little more than disguise the ugliness of a sad-sack
studio apartment. She’d considered building one herself, putting up
some virtual wallpaper or a window or two but she didn’t like the
viks; they made it too hard to snatch truth from
fiction.

Jojran’s vik was especially unsettling. She
knew she was sitting in the dark of his apartment on a too-cozy
couch listening to him wheeze. But it took concentration to keep
herself there. If she relaxed, let herself drift, she was back on
the starship—she could feel the hum of the futuristic engines, the
gentle murmur of the virtual crew and the faint blips and beeping.
She could see the addictive factor, the power of controlling your
reality that made so many poor saps into Net heads, working
dead-end jobs, slogging through life just to get enough to pay the
connection fee and stay logged in. Here, in this fantasy starship,
she could even glimpse the motives that would lead a mind to
explore, to push deeper and deeper into the fantasy, into the dark
place of the Net that promised to make all dreams come true. What
else was an elzi, really, other than a Net head with
conviction?

“
Do you like this setting?” Jojran
asked, anxiously. “If you don’t we can change it. I have a whole
bunch. We could go to a forest or I’ve got some abstracts, and one
where we fly around in a big feather bed.” He seemed to be hoping
for the last one.

“
This is fine,” she said tersely.
Just being here was making her uneasy. She was pretty sure her
hardware was glitched but if it was a hack then sitting in an open
connection like this was dangerous. Of course Jojran had security
measures and he could protect her, but she didn’t know what she was
up against. Even Jojran had never gone farther than peeking through
another person’s implants. He’d never tried seeding thoughts or
mind control.

“
Okay, so I looked up all the
girls you gave me.” Their faces appeared in the view screen—their
real faces, thank God, from varying IDs, not the mutilated ones.
They all had blue eyes. “And it was pretty much a no-go in terms of
connection. Different ages, different backgrounds, though nobody
especially important. The only connector seemed to be the fact that
they had blue eyes.”

“
I know all that.”

“
Right, but then I found
this.”

A sphere appeared on the virtual screen, like a
knot of hundreds of pieces of yarn all tangled together. It was
absolutely meaningless to her.

“
What am I looking at
here?”

“
A program rendered visually, an
AI or bot. People use them to scrub the Net, do searches, machine
tasks, but this, this is wild. Usually these’ll have one or two
strands but this has hundreds, this is a piece of work, like
artistry right here. I’ve been trying to unravel it for days and
it’s had some pretty nasty surprises. It tried to send electrical
feedback at me once and stop my heart, managed to dodge that one.
And half of these are to hide it, to mask its presence. But
everything leaves a trace.”

“
So, what does this have to do
with the girls?”

“
This is the connection,” he said
excitedly. This is the link between them. I found this strange,
let’s call it a presence, whenever I did a search on one of them.
Like I found almost exactly what you would expect to find in a
textbook search—the birth records, school records if they went to
school, taxes, driver’s license registration, job IDs,
advertisements for sexual services, in one case. It was about as
ordinary as you could get. Except I saw that someone else had been
searching for these women, and after some digging I found this bot,
tons of these bots going through, running these searches. And so I
followed…that was a trip. And I found where they were taking this
info. An uber, like me, someone else searching for these
girls.”

He couldn’t contain himself any more. With an
almost audible whoosh the virtual world vanished and they were
sitting back in the living room, squinting in the light. Jojran was
practically bouncing up and down with excitement.

“
He made a list Saru! A list of
these girls. And I found it. I
found
it!”

Chapter 9

There were thirty-seven names on the list—she
could cross out six—thirty-one, and there didn’t seem to be one
thing these girls had in common other than eye color. Whatever
criteria the feasters were using was beyond anything that made
sense to her, which itself made sense. She’d made Jojran print the
list out so she had something to clutch while she paced back and
forth tracking boot marks on his clean kitchen tiles.

“
There has to be a connection,”
she said for the thousandth time.

“
Uh huh,” he said, not listening.
He was doing the actual work of checking up on the women on the
list, prying through their lives, checking to see if they’d gone to
the same school, fucked the same guy, used the same hair dye or
tampon, if they liked the same music, watched the same feeds,
subscribed to the same religion or had any tiny thread that ran
through all of their lives.