The Nexus Series: Books 1-3 (6 page)

Corey scooted
forward.  “Let’s get the footage from the time she escaped, then.”

“She couldn’t have
stolen a car.  All these models are too nice.  Too much security.”

“I wouldn’t put
it past her, Diz.  She’s good.”

“Okay. 
We’ll check.”  She went back a couple hours.

“There’s the
elevator,” Corey pointed to one camera view.  “Is that the same elevator...?”

“That she has
access to, yes.  It would be her only way to get into the parking
garage.  I’ll speed it up.”

They watched the
fast-forward footage.

Just after 4:30
p.m. Jill Branch got off the elevator.

Corey smiled to
himself.  “Now we’ve got you,” he whispered.

Jill wore a white
shirt and the prescribed gray prison trousers.  She looked around
furtively and ran from the elevator to the first row of
skycars
. 
Dizzie changed camera angles in order to follow her path.

“What’s she
looking for?” Dizzie asked, watching Jill walk slowly from car to car.

“She’s looking
them over, trying to find the best target.  She knows which ones she’ll be
able to break into and which ones she won’t.”

“There, she’s
going for that dark blue one.”

“A Daemon
Millennium.  Luxurious, but infamous for its weak security.  She’ll
go for the back window.”

Dizzie looked at
him.  “Sounds like you’ve done this a time or two, Mr. Stone.”

“Or three or
four.  There, what did I tell you?  She knows her stuff.”

The camera showed
Jill pressing the left rear window until it made a tiny gap.  She worked
her fingers into the space and began manually sliding the window down slowly.

“It’s got to be
done just right,” said Corey.  “If she pushes the window too far, or works
it down too quickly, the alarm will trigger.  She should be able to give
herself just enough room...”

Eventually she
reached her arm inside the car and touched the unlock button.

“Nice,” said
Corey in admiration.

Dizzie frowned at
him.  “What, are you rooting for her?”

“Starting the
ignition is another story.  If she can do that I’ll be really impressed.”

“I’m
fast-forwarding again.  Let’s see how this ends up.”

Jill was in the
drivers’ seat for some time.  But the car never left.

“She’s giving
up,” said Dizzie.  “Wait, she’s getting into the back seat.”

“Looks like she’s
trying to hitch a ride.  Look, she’s getting down out of sight. 
Quick, Diz, find out whose car that is.”

She punched the
license number into a database on another computer.  “Daniels, Martin P.”

“Is the car there
in the live feed?”

“Let’s
check...Nope, Mr. Daniels isn’t here anymore.”

“When did he
leave?”

Dizzie found the
footage.  “Here we go.”  At 5:11 p.m. a somewhat pudgy bald man
climbed into the blue Daemon Millennium and drove away, oblivious to his extra
passenger.  “That’s only eight minutes ago.  He may still be driving
home, Cor!”

Corey was already
on his way to their department’s garage.

7

A
department skycar roared out of Pete’s Fish Cannery on the east side of the
lake.  The car hovered over the abandoned warehouses and began gliding
over the water.

“In the air,”
Corey said from the wheel.

“Sherlock just
gave me Daniels’ address,” Dizzie’s voice buzzed from the console.  “He
lives in Palm Hills Estates.  That’s half a mile south of the lake.”

Lights flashed
and sirens sang from Corey’s car as it zoomed that direction.  “Does
Sherlock know if he’s home, yet?”

“No.  We
don’t have cameras on the streets in neighborhoods like Palm Hills Estates.”

“I’m not seeing
his car,” Corey said.  “He must be nearly to his house.  What
street?”

“It’s 820
Marigold Lane.  I’m sending it to you now.”

A map to the
address came up on a console on the dashboard.  “Got it.”

Corey flew past
the few civilian
skycars
on the route, and crossed
the shore in moments.  Houses and strip malls passed in a blur thirty feet
below.  The lights were starting to come on in the city as the sun sank to
the right.  To the left Earth glowed from the graying sky.

“Almost there,”
said Corey as manicured lawns of Palm Hills Estates came into view just
ahead.  The skycar dropped to street level, angled into Marigold Lane,
parked on the cobbled drive of the large adobe house marked 820.  Corey
tumbled out, dashed to the porch and pounded on the door until a frazzled
Martin P. Daniels answered.

“Your garage!”
Corey hollered at him, flashing an official-looking GoCom ID.

“M-my what?”

“Open the
garage!”

“Of course, of
course,” sputtered Martin P. Daniels, scrambling to obey.

A dark blue Daemon
Millennium was parked in the garage.  The backseat was empty.  A
window in the side of the garage was open.  For a second Corey thought of
going after her.

Only for a
second.  He knew she was long gone.

The trip back to
HQ was the longest journey of Corey’s life.

FAT
Frank couldn’t sleep.  He had a guilty conscience.  There were a lot
of nights Fat Frank couldn’t sleep, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d
had a guilty conscience.  A man who deliberately rents living space to
criminals and helps sell their services to even bigger criminals doesn’t have
much of a conscience left.

He decided to do
what he often did when he couldn’t sleep: look at his collection.

Fat Frank didn’t
collect stamps or coins or anything as trivial as that.  Fat Frank
collected cars—vintage cars from as early as the twentieth century.  His
collection was in a warehouse past Palm Hills Estates, south of the lake. 
He was on his way there now in an old, rusting hatchback.  He didn’t drive
the cars in his collection.  He didn’t do anything with them but polish
them and look at them admiringly in the middle of the night when he couldn’t
sleep.

The old, rusting
hatchback pulled up to a security gate outside the warehouse.  A guard
stepped out of a booth.  “
Hiya
, Frank.”

“
Wanna
let me in?”

“Sure, Frank.
 Got your ID by chance?”

“You kidding me?”

“Hey, just doing
my job!”

“Your job is to
open the gate for me, kid.  Now move it.”

“You said always
check ID, even if I think it’s you.”

“I also said
you’re fired if you annoy me again.”

“Right, opening
the gate.”

Cameras watched
him as he parked in front of the warehouse.  He key-carded his way into
the foyer, got buzzed into a hallway by another guard, and key-carded into
another hallway.  Then he punched a long code at a keypad to turn off the
interior alarm system.

It cost a lot to
protect his collection.  It was even more expensive to have his collection
in the first place, and sometimes more expensive yet to have pieces of his
collection shipped from Earth to Anterra.  It was an expensive hobby, all
right.  But Fat Frank could afford it since he made a nice living helping
people commit felonies.

Finally he
key-carded through a thick metal door into the central chamber of the
warehouse.  He stood in the dark at the top of a stairway, and hit a
button.  One after another, banks of lights flickered to life and revealed
his precious collectibles parked at random angles on the vast, polished floor
below.  Fat Frank looked down on his twenty-three gleaming beauties.

He felt better
already.

Number
twenty-four would be arriving next week, a Benz roadster from the
mid-twenty-first century.  Only a handful had been manufactured.  As
he walked down the stairs Fat Frank considered where he would park the roadster
when it arrived.  Maybe over there near the yellow Ferrari, he
thought.  He could back the Ferrari up a little, nearer that pillar, and
then—

Fat Frank paused
in mid-step.  He looked at the yellow Ferrari again.  He squinted,
but he couldn’t be sure.  So he ran down the rest of the steps and took a
closer look.

No.  His
eyes hadn’t deceived him.  It wasn’t just a weird reflection in the
windshield.  It was a bullet hole.

So much for
feeling better.

He was shocked at
first.  Then his shock turned into anger.  Eventually rational
thought made its way through the emotions and brought up the question: 
How could a bullet have gone through the Ferrari windshield?

Fat Frank made a
few sharp deductions:  The bullet would have come from a gun.  And
that gun would have been carried by a person.  And a person who could have
fired that gun to put that bullet through the Ferrari windshield would have had
to be standing inside his warehouse at the time.  But no one could get
inside Fat Frank’s warehouse except Fat Frank, and obviously Fat Frank hadn’t
shot his own car, so...

He jumped and
squealed, pig-like, at the sound of gunshot.  Another bullet hole appeared
next to the first.

Fat Frank whirled
around.  “You!”  He was trying to sound menacing.  He sounded
more paranoid.  “I should have known it would be you, Jill Branch!”

“So you know my
real name,” Jill said from the shadows under the stairs.  The gun in her
hand was smoking.  “I didn’t give you my real name when I moved into your
apartments, Frank.  How did you find out who I am?”

“Look what you’ve
done!” he said in a high-pitched whine, gesturing at the twin bullet holes.

“You’re avoiding
my question, Frank.”

“It wasn’t enough
to shoot it once, was it?  You had to go ahead and—!”

Another shot
echoed deafeningly.  This time the windshield exploded into shards.

Fat Frank covered
his head and whimpered.

“Talk to me,
Frank.  I already know what you did.  I just want to hear it from
your own lips, learn a few details.  Like who you’re working for.”

“I have no idea
what you’re talking about!”

This time she put
three holes in the sleek yellow door.

“Stop it!” 
Fat Frank was clenching his fists and jumping up and down as he yelled. 
“What do you think you’re doing?  And how did you get in here, anyway?”

Jill stepped out
of the shadows.  She was still wearing the gray trousers they’d issued her
back at GoCom.  “Let’s just say I’m good at getting in and out of places
I’m not supposed to.  Now talk.  Who hired you to help track me
down?”

“I...I can’t
say,” he stammered.

A bullet whistled
past him and took out the Ferrari’s passenger window.

“Hey, quit
it!  You’re trigger happy, no problem.  Just shoot at something less
valuable, will you?”

She shrugged and
aimed at Fat Frank.

“Whoa! 
Whoa!” he sputtered, cowering.

“Talk.”

“All right, all
right!  I don’t know who they were.  They showed me your picture,
told me your real name.  I said, yeah, you lived here, all right. 
But you’re a tough one to get a hold of.  I suggested bugging your
suit.  That’s how they were
gonna
track you
down.”  He scratched his head.  “By the way, why did they want to
track you down?”

She gestured at
the style-less gray pants.  “You don’t recognize the material? 
Please, Frank, I’m sure you’ve been to jail a time or two.”

“Well, yeah, but
I had to give the pants back when...”  His eyes widened, and he cursed and
shook his head.

“Why did you do
it, Frank?”

“They were
persuasive people!”

“Persuasive like
they offered you a lot of money?”

“Persuasive like
they were
gonna
throw my butt in the slammer if I
didn’t help.”

“The police?”

“I don’t know. 
They didn’t seem like police.”

“No idea at all
who they were?”

Frank shook his
head insistently.  “That’s all I know, I swear!...So why’d they want to
track you down, anyways?”

“No more
questions, Frank.”

“And how’d you
get out of jail?”

The next bullet
took off the driver’s side rear-view mirror.

“Okay, no more
questions!  Sheesh.”

Jill took the
empty clip out of the pistol and pulled out a new one.  “I need a favor.”

“A favor? 
You break into my storage and shoot up my car and you want a favor?”

The new clip
clicked into place.

“Fine.  A
favor.  Go ahead, tell me.”

“First of all,
our relationship as landlord and tenant will have to end.”

“It’s a real
shame.”

“Isn’t it? 
And I’ll need a new ID card.  You know the guy you recommended for my last
ID?”

“Oh, yeah. 
Joey.  Joey’s good.”

“Joey
sucks.  It took forever.  Give me someone else.  I know you know
someone better.”

“Well, sure, I
know plenty of guys.  But I don’t want to give away all my connections,
you know?”

She aimed at the
Ferrari again.

“Fine,
fine!  Look up Matt at the
Northshore
Garage.  He’s the best I know.  Don’t tell him I told you about him,
okay?  He’s used to dealing with high-rollers—no offense meant to you,
obviously.”

“Obviously. 
And another thing.”

“What?”

“My skybike.”

“What about it?”

“I need a new
one.”

“So?”

“So you’re buying
me a new one.”

“Excuse me?”

“I wrecked mine
running from some people—the people you helped find me to throw me in jail,
remember them?  So you can replace my skybike.”

“Look, it’s not
my fault you—”

She aimed at
another car—a burgundy model, one of the original
skycars
.

Fat Frank
growled.  “Okay.  New skybike.  What’s one of those cost these
days?  Like ten thousand credits?”

“Fifteen.”

“I’ll see if I
can dig it up.”

“Start by digging
in your wallet.”

“What, you think
I carry around that kind of cash?”

“I know you carry
around that kind of cash.  Hand it over.”

Fat Frank’s lips
quivered.  A minute later Jill had fifteen one-thousand-credit bills in
her hand.

“And one more
favor,” she said, backing into the shadows again.

He rolled his
eyes.  “What now?”

“I’m not sure
yet.  I’ll let you know when I think of one.”

“Gee, just how
many favors do you think I owe you?”

“Oh, I don’t
know, Frank.  If you don’t want to do them for me I can always come back
here and take a few more potshots at your cars.”

“Great.  So
I’m like your little assistant now.”

“You seemed happy
to be a little assistant for the people who caught me.”

“All right,
whatever.  Listen, as long as I’m doing all these favors, couldn’t you
answer just one more question?”

“Depends on what
it is.”

“How did you get
in here?”

“I told you, I’m
good at that kind of thing.”

“Come on, tell
me!”  Fat Frank managed a wry smile.  “Impress me!”

“I’ll give you a
hint:  I got in the same way I’m about to leave.”

“Which is...?”

“You’ll have to
find out for yourself.”

“So my security
cameras caught you in the act?”

“Why don’t you
check after I’m gone?”

“When will that
be?”

She didn’t
answer.

“Hey,
Jill?”  But he couldn’t make out her shape in the shadows any more.