Tek Kill (11 page)

“That'll be fine. I have the Banx chits right here.” Molly reached into her pocket and produced a handful of money.

“Just toss 'em on the floor and head through the door yonder. You're in Crib 14. Enjoy.”

“Thank you, sir.”

A door in the opposite wall rattled open.

Hand in hand, Molly and Dan entered the corridor. As the door grated shut behind them, a young woman screamed behind one of the crib doors.

“That's Susan,” said Molly, starting to run.

18

THERE was a pain all across his upper chest—a sharp, needling pain.

Jake made a groaning noise, rubbing his palm across his chest.

The pain kept on.

Very slowly, as he became aware of other pains in other parts of his body, Jake started moving toward full consciousness.

He was, he now realized, sprawled flat on his back on something fairly soft.

He opened his eyes very gingerly and was assaulted by pinkish light and images of rose petals and twining leaves and vines.

Wincing, he shut his eyes again for protection.

New pain started gripping at his stomach and he felt dizzy.

“Stungun,” he recalled. And he was experiencing the usual aftereffects.

Carefully, cautiously, Jake risked opening his eyes a second time.

The walls were indeed decorated with a pattern of flowering rosebushes.

There was also a delicate rosebud scent lingering in the air.

Aloud, in a dry, rusty voice, Jake speculated, “What the hell sort of jail is this?”

After keeping his eyes open for a couple of minutes, Jake decided he might attempt to sit up.

He'd awakened on a wide oval bed, one that was covered with a soft, pale pink thermoquilt.

He noticed now that, although fully clothed, his boots were missing.

Concentrating, working to keep all the assorted pains from overwhelming him, Jake succeeded in sitting up.

Next, groaning and muttering, he swung his bare feet over the side of the bed.

For a while he felt very wobbly and the roses started chasing each other around the walls.

Gradually, though, Jake regained control of himself.

This was definitely a bedroom he'd awakened into. In his limited experience with the police of the NewTown Sector he'd never actually been in one of their jail cells. But he didn't think any of them were furnished like this.

Confidence returning, he placed both feet on the thick red carpeting and stood.

His left leg refused to function. Jake went falling to the floor with a thud.

“Why the heck didn't you call me if you wanted to try this?”

Coming through the doorway, wearing a rose-colored slaxsuit, was Kacey Bascom. She hurried to him, offered her hand.

“Begone, shoo,” he suggested, waving off any assistance from her.

“What, then—are you planning to sit there on your stubborn backside for the rest of the night?”

“Eventually I intend to rise,” Jake informed her. “Entirely unaided. Why, by the way, am I in your damned bedroom, Kacey?”

“Lot better than a cell, wouldn't you say?”

“Remains to be seen. Are you affiliated with the NewTown cops?”

“That's a nasty thing to accuse anybody of.” She stood, studying him. “If you'd take my hand, I'll get you upright again and put you in a chair in my living room so we—”

“Explain first where I am and exactly why.”

“Obviously this is my house in the Westwood Sector.”

“And why didn't I wake up in the clutches of the NewTown vigilance committee?”

“It took a lot of arranging, but I finally got the NewTown Sector board of supervisors to—”

“Backtrack.” By using the bed and ignoring his collection of pains, Jake was able to pull himself to a standing position eventually. “Go ahead, explain.”

“Oh, sorry. I got fascinated watching you display your intense stubbornness,” Kacey said, smiling faintly. “Once you were arrested, I set about to finagle you out of jail. That's all, simple.”

“Where's that chair you were touting?”

She reached for him. “Next room. Here, I'll help you to—”

“Just indicate the location. I feel in the mood to sit a spell.”

Shrugging in resignation, she returned to the living room and left him to follow her. “You have a choice of seating arrangements.”

He settled for the nearest one, a plump yellow armchair. “Where are my boots, Kacey?”

“Right behind you, next to the bedroom door.”

Jake managed, without falling seriously out of the yellow chair, to retrieve the boots and start tugging them back on. “Explain how you knew I was in the NewTown jug.”

“Well, I'd followed you from your condo to the NewTown Sector, and when the local cops—”

“Nope, no,” he interrupted. “Nobody followed me. Nary a soul.”

Kacey perched on the arm of the white sofa. “Okay, I was tipped off. Because of my political connections, I have people in the NewTown establishment who—”

“What's my current status? Am I out on bail or—”

“You are as free as a bird, that's your status. Thanks to me, all charges were dropped.”

He watched her for a moment. “You didn't have anything to do with that raid, did you?”

“I told you I'm not affiliated with the NewTown cops. They're a shade too conservative even for me,” Kacey assured him.

“Would the Burdons be among the folks you know in the NewTown Sector?”

“I know who they are, but we're not friends. I do have a few friends who're executives with NewTown Pharmaceuticals, though.”

Nodding, Jake asked her, “What about Hopkins?”

“Who?”

“Sam Hopkins. He was in that apartment with me when the cops busted in.”

Kacey's brow furrowed. “The police report claims you were arrested for operating a skycar while under the influence of stimulants.”

Jake said, “Damn, what did they do with the guy?”

“Maybe I can find out. See, I never heard of him until just now,” she said. “Tell me something about him.”

“Hopkins works for NewTown Pharmaceuticals in the Publicity wing,” said Jake. “Forty or thereabouts, on the slim side. He's black and—”

“Then they might've taken him to the Colored Holding Facility.”

“I haven't heard of that.”

“The Pure California Coalition is very strong in NewTown and they got that through last year. Actually, it's a very comfortable sort of—”

“Yeah, I'm sure. Can you find out about him? If Hopkins is still above the sod, I want to have another talk with him.”

“Why do you suspect he's not alive?”

“Dwight Grossman's defunct, so is Hermione Earnshaw,” Jake explained. “Hopkins is the lad who prompted them to investigate certain activities. That got them killed.”

Leaving the sofa, she crossed to stand over him. “This all ties in with my father, then—with why he was framed?”

“All a part of the same package, yeah,” he said. “Where did my skycar end up?”

“It was towed here. You'll find it out in the landing area.”

Standing up in a wobbly, swaying way, Jake told her, “I think I'll head for home, Kacey.”

“Not yet.” She pushed him, gently, and he sat again. “You're still too shaky for solo flying. More important, you're going to have to tell me everything you learned from this Hopkins guy.”

“If you know much more, Kacey, they'll put you on the shit list, too.”

“Don't be a ninny, I've probably been on it from the start. Walt Bascom is my father, remember?” she said. “Besides, we made a deal to work together, which means sharing information.”

“Okay,” agreed Jake. “Sit yourself, don't interrupt, and I'll fill you in.”

19

SPRINTING ahead of Molly, Dan reached the door to Crib 11 before her.

He took hold of the handle, turning it. When the door started to open, Dan booted it.

As the door went flapping inward, Dan, yanking out his academy stungun, hunched down.

Inside the cozy crib, Susan Grossman cried out again in pain.

Ducked low, Dan lunged into the room.

The large hairless man, giving a high-pitched grunt, lifted Susan high and hurled her into the oncoming young man.

She hit him hard, shoulder digging into his chest, right hand slapping across his face, just as he was about to aim his stungun.

Both she and Dan went falling back through the doorway and into the shadowy corridor.

Now from his shoulder holster the hairless man ripped out his lazgun. Snarling, he took three steps forward. “You little bastards are going to cease to be,” he promised in his piping voice.

His right arm stretched out rigid, the barrel of the gun pointed right at the tangled Dan.

But then Molly jumped into view, her stungun held in both hands. “Not just yet,” she informed him as she fired.

His empty eyebrows climbed, his eyes went rolling backward into his head. The gun hand snapped up and, his trigger finger spasmodically flexing and unflexing, the lazgun fired twice. Its sizzling beam ate two smoking jagged holes in the low crib ceiling.

An alarm started hooting in the corridor.

Staggering backward, arms flapping, the hairless man sat on the bed, tottered, rocked back and forth, then dropped over onto the floor, out cold.

Molly dashed into the crib, bent over the sprawled man, and did a quick frisk. “No ID at all,” she said disappointedly, moving up and away.

Dan, on his feet, was helping Susan to stand.

She said, “We've got to get out of here. That alarm'll bring all sorts of nasty folks onto the scene.” She pointed at the far end of the passway. “There's a back way out of here. Let's, please, hurry.”

“We'll retreat,” agreed Dan, catching hold of Molly's hand.

The three of them went running.

HIS SKYCAR SET on an automatic homeward course, Jake was leaning back in the pilot seat. The aftereffects of having been stungunned were, not quite as rapidly as he might have wished, leaving him. By morning he ought to feel fit again.

“As fit as a weather-beaten codger has any right to feel,” he said.

The phonescreen spoke to him. “Call from your son.”

“Let's have it.”

Dan, looking excited, appeared on the small rectangular screen in the dash. “Can you get over here right away, Dad?”

After taking in the details of the room Dan was phoning from, Jake said, “Looks like you're at Molly's.”

“I am,” confirmed his son. “I haven't had a chance to talk to you since this morning, but we've come across something damned important. It has to do with the case you're working on, with the murder Bascom's accused of.”

“Listen, Dan—at least one Tek cartel is tied in with this,” he told him. “You and Molly have to be damned cautious about poking into—”

“Can we, maybe, Dad, have the paternal lecture
after
I tell you what we know. We may be working against a deadline here.”

Grinning, making a go-ahead gesture toward the screen, Jake invited, “Proceed.”

“Some of this stuff is going to sound very strange to you. It did to me,” began Dan. “I'll fill in that background when you get here to the Beverly Hills Sector. The important thing is that Molly's a pretty good friend of Susan Grossman and—”

“You're talking about Dwight Grossman's sister?”

“That Susan Grossman, yes,” said Dan, impatient. “She's here at Molly's with us. She saw the killing and can identify the two men who killed her brother. Fact, we already got a make on one of them, but he's dead. The other one, a big guy with no hair to speak of, we ran into tonight when we pulled Susan out of a Tek parlor.”

“The hairless lout I've met myself,” said Jake, nodding. He punched out an alternate course on the control panel. “Was Susan Grossman there when they shot her brother?”

“Not exactly. That's one of the odd things about this,” said Dan. “Are you coming over?”

“You've aroused my curiosity,” Jake told him. “See you in about ten minutes.”

THE HOUSE WAS nearly two hundred years old and had been built to resemble a Spanish villa. The large living room had a beamed ceiling of real wood and the floor was of real tile.

Jake was pacing across the yellow and blue tiles, passing close to the arched windows that looked out on an immense illuminated swimming pool that was ringed by several dozen real palm trees. “I suppose,” he said slowly, “it's possible.”

“You saw the pictures Rex got for us,” said Dan. “They match her descriptions.”

“That they do,” admitted Jake. “And the lout with the absence of hair looks pretty much like the guy I tangled with at Thelwell.” He returned to the low oaken coffee table on which had been spread the pictures Molly and Dan had acquired from Rex/ GK-30. “I've heard of the redhead before. Leroy Salten. Yeah, a freelance gunman who'd work for just about anybody.”

Susan was sitting alone, very still, on the sofa. “I don't know why I developed this … knack,” she said softly. “Some people call this sort of ability a gift. I don't, though, look at it that way.”

Picking up one photo of each man, Jake moved closer to her. “You never saw either of these guys before?”

“Never, no, Mr. Cardigan. Not until I had the vision of their killing my brother last night.”

“We sure all saw the bald guy tonight,” put in Molly as she went over to sit beside her forlorn friend. “He was trying to kill Sue.”

Susan shook her head. “I'm not really certain of that,” she said in her faraway voice. “From the little he said before you two came to help me, I think he was planning to take me somewhere.”

“He didn't say where?” asked Jake.

“No, I'm sorry.”

Dan said, “How did they know Susan was going to be at the Eternity Depot tonight?”