F Paul Wilson - Sims 02 (9 page)

 
          
He turned and headed for the door
where the bouncer waited.

 
          
“Jerry!” Mona called out behind him.
“Something’s not right with this guy.”

 
          
Jerry placed himself between Patrick
and the door.

 
          
“You got a problem, pal?”

 
          
Oh, no, Patrick thought as his gut
clenched. He’s going to beat the shit out of me.

 
          
“Yeah,” Patrick said, pressing one
hand against his stomach and the other over his mouth. “I think I’m going to be
sick.” He retched for effect.

 
          
“Don’t you even fuckin dream of it,
asshole! You puke in
here,
you’re gonna clean it
up—with your tongue!”

 
          
Patrick retched again, louder this
time.
“Oh, God!”
He doubled over.

 
          
“Motherf—”

 
          
He felt the back of his coat bunch as
Jerry grabbed a fistful of fabric, heard the door swing open, and then he was
propelled into the stink of the alley. He stumbled, almost lost his footing,
but managed to stay upright as he skidded to a halt against the brick wall on
the far side.

 
          
Patrick didn’t stop to look back. He
pushed off the wall and hurried from the alley at something just short of a
trot. He found Romy waiting for him on the sidewalk.

 
          
“Well?” she said, raising her
eyebrows.

 
          
“Damn it, Romy!”

 
          
He’d half expected some sort of
ha-ha-the-joke’s-on-you attitude, but she was all business.

 
          
“I take it you ran into a few
sims
.”

 
          
“You know damn well I did!” God, he
was pissed. He felt besmirched, belittled, diminished. If she’d been a guy he’d
be taking a poke at her right now. “Why the hell—?”

 
          
She held up one hand to silence him
and raised the other to her lips. He realized she was holding a PCA.

 
          
“My man inside confirms the
sims
are there. It’s a go.”

 
          
“What’s a go?” Patrick said.

 
          
“A raid,” she said. “Let’s get out of
the way.”

 
          
She led him across the street. The
first blue-and-white NYPD units were screeching to a halt in front of the alley
by the time they reached the opposite curb. Patrick watched fascinated as a
small horde of blue uniforms swarmed toward the dented door.

 
          
Patrick stared at Romy. “You’re a
cop?”

 
          
“No. And this sort of work isn’t
really a kosher part of my OPRR duties, but I’ve made it so. I snoop around. I
talk to people, people talk to me. I’ve been watching this place for some time.
Took me a while to find the rear exit.
Once I had
that, I brought in NYPD.”

 
          
“Then what did you need me for? Why’d
you send me in there?”

 
          
Her gaze was focused on the alley,
her dark eyes hard and bright as she watched the cops knock open the door with
a short steel battering ram.

 
          
“To make sure the
sims
were inside. You never know who’s got a source in a precinct house. If they got
wind of the raid they’d have the
sims
stashed out of
town and I’d have egg on my face and the cops would be less cooperative next
time I came to them.”

 
          
If she thought that was going to
mollify him, she was dead wrong.

 
          
“You could have told me, damn it!
Why’d you send me in there with no idea what I’d be getting into?”

 
          
“Would you have gone in if I had?”

 
          
“Well…” He let the word trail off but
knew the answer would have been a definite no.

 
          
“I didn’t think so. But because you
did, you played a meaningful part in reeling in some single-celled organisms
posing as human beings, things ”—she managed to inject so much contempt into
the word—“who make pond scum look tasty.”
A wry smile.
“Ain’t that cool?”

 
          
Patrick had to admit it was, but he
wasn’t about to say so.

 
          
“What happens to them?”

 
          
“The humans won’t see daylight for a
long, long time. Those
sims
in there have been either
abducted or leased under false pretenses. The charges will range from grand
theft to fraud to pandering to cruelty to animals to operating a criminal
enterprise to promoting bestiality and whatever else the prosecutors can think
of. You’re the lawyer. You can imagine.”

 
          
Patrick nodded, mentally adding a few
more charges.

 
          
Romy kept talking. “And the perps—do
I sound like a cop?—are guaranteed to get slammed with max sentences. SimGen,
as you’ve learned firsthand, is relentless when it comes to anyone messing with
their product. Their contacts in the judicial system, the ones who guarantee
them favorable rulings whenever necessary, also see to it that anyone who
transgresses against them lands lower-lip-deep in doo-doo. And after the
criminal courts are through with the bastards, SimGen chases them down in civil
court and gets dibs on everything they’ve ever owned in their life and
everything they’ll earn till Resurrection Day.”

 
          
“Is that admiration I hear?”

 
          
Romy shook her head. “No. But you’ve
got to respect SimGen’s efficiency. When their ends coincide with mine—as in
rescuing
sims
from these oxygen wasters—I’m only too
happy to take advantage of that efficiency. But we part on
thewhy
:
My reasons are personal and ethical, theirs are purely business and
public relations.”

 
          
“What happens to the sims?” he said,
remembering the tarted-up females.

 
          
“Someone from SimGen will be by to
pick up the poor things and take them to the
Jersey
campus where they’ll rehab the ones they can and retire the ones they can’t.”

 
          
“Doesn’t exactly sound like the Evil
Empire to me.”

 
          
She turned and glared at him. “Oh,
but they are, Patrick Sullivan. That sleazy little operation across the street
couldn’t have existed without SimGen, because SimGen made the
sims
that were mistreated in there.”

 
          
“Hey, Ford makes cars and some people
get drunk and kill people with them or use them to rob banks or rig them with
dynamite.”

 
          
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t see
the difference between a hunk of tin and those creatures you’re representing in
court?”

 
          
“Of course I do. I just—”

 
          
“SimGen created a new species and
enslaved it. Sims feel pain, they feel pleasure, they laugh, they
think ,
damn it! And they’re slaves. A sentient slave
species…you don’t think that’s evil?”

 
          
“Well, when you put it that way…”

 
          
“What other way is there to put it?
They’ve got to be stopped.”

 
          
Patrick laughed. “And who’s going to
do that?
You?”

 
          
She nodded. “Yes.”

 
          
He couldn’t believe this. She
actually seemed serious. “You don’t really think—”

 
          
“Something’s rotten in SimGen,” she
said. “They’re dirty. When I was there I could smell it. And when I find out
what they’re hiding, I’m going to bring them down.”

 
          
“You.”

 
          
She set her jaw.
“Me…with
a little help from some friends.”

 
          
“What friends?”

 
          
“Just…friends.”
She stepped off the curb. “I’m going in to check over those
sims
,
catalogue any injuries or evidence of drugging before the SimGen folks arrive.
Want to come along?”

 
          
Patrick hesitated. He’d already been
inside once and wasn’t keen on going back.

 
          
“I don’t know…I’ve got an early day
tomorrow…”

 
          
“I know. Beacon Ridge has filed some
new motions on the federal appeal.”

 
          
That gave him a mild jolt. “You’re
really staying on top of this, aren’t
you.
”

 
          
“I tend to keep a close eye on my
investments. As a matter of fact, I was planning on coming up to
White
Plains
tomorrow.”

 
          
“What for?”

 
          
“To see you in
action.”

 
          
“Ah, yes.
Your
investment.”
He wasn’t sure if he liked the idea. He wasn’t some trick
pony.

 
          
“If you hang around awhile you could
give me a ride up there.”

 
          
Nowhere was an interesting
development. “Where are you staying?”

 
          
“Don’t know yet. How’s your motel?”

 
          
Whoa! His heart did a pole vault.
“Not fancy, but decent. As a matter of fact, you could save yourself a few
bucks and stay in my room.”

 
          
She laughed from deep in her throat.
God, what a sound.
He could listen to her laugh all night.
Visions of that marvelous tight body began to play in his head…in bed next to
him, straddling him…Pamela had been gone for too long and right now every
Y-chromosome in his body was doing a mating dance.

 
          
“I don’t think so.”

 
          
He raised his hands. “Nothing
salacious here. The room’s got two double beds. You could have the other one.”

 
          
“How generous,” she said with a wry
twist to her smile.

 
          
“And listen, I’ll be a Boy Scout.
Really.
You can have your bed, I’ll have mine, and we’ll
turn the lights out and just lie there and talk.”

 
          
Patrick didn’t quite believe he’d
just said that, but it was true. He’d settle for talk, anything to stay close
to this woman.

 
          
“I appreciate the offer,” Romy said,
“but I’m a private sort of person. But you will drive me?”

 
          
Drive you…aw, lady, don’t say things
like that.

 
          
“Sure.”

 
          
“Great. We’ll have to stop at my
office to pick up my overnight bag.”

 
          
“No problem.”

 
          
And on the way home, lady, I’m going
to do my absolute damnedest to convince you that two rooms is one too many.

 
          
WESTCHESTER
COUNTY
,
NY

 
          
OCTOBER 30

 
          
Romy glanced at the clock numerals
glowing on the dashboard of Patrick’s BMW. Hard to believe it was quarter to
three already.

 
          
Time flies when you’re having fun.

 
          
Well, not fun, exactly. But it had
been a good night. And she felt very good about putting those sim abusers
behind bars.

 
          
She watched Patrick as he maneuvered
along the winding curves of the Saw Mill River Parkway, deserted at this hour
except for the single pair of headlights a couple of hundred yards behind them.
He’d handled himself well tonight. And she’d been heartened by how deeply the
sim bordello had shaken him.

 
          
“Tired?” she said.

 
          
“A little.
How about you?”

 
          
“Not a bit.” She was totally wired.

 
          
“I could perk up,” he said with a
grin. “That is, if you decide to take up my offer on the rooming arrangements.”

 
          
She laughed. “You don’t give up, do
you.
”

 
          
After those splicer slimeballs had
been carted off, and the cops had returned to Manhattan South, and SimGen had
picked up the
sims
, they’d retrieved his car from the
garage, picked up her bag, and headed for the northern suburbs. Patrick had
spent the early part of the trip on the make, pitching his idea of sharing a
room. Finally he seemed to have run out of gas.

 
          
Romy had to admit that a bout of
sweaty, energetic sex would be perfect right now.
Might take
the edge off this persistent adrenaline buzz.
But not
with Patrick Sullivan.
They’d be working too closely over the next few
months. That level of intimacy in their relationship would further complicate
an already complicated situation.

 
          
And her track record with
relationships of any sort was downright miserable. She no sooner got close to
someone than she seemed to scare them away.

 
          
Like Jeff Hogan, a bright, funny
computer game designer who worked for Acclaim out on
Long Island
.
They started going out last spring, grew close, but not close enough that Romy
could tell him about Zero and the organization. He must have sensed she was
keeping something from him—no doubt thought she had another guy—and one night
he went so far as to follow her. Fortunately she spotted him and aborted her
planned meeting with Zero. But that was it for Jeff Hogan.

 
          
“Give up?” Patrick said. “I don’t
know the meaning of the words.”

 
          
She smiled. “If you’re half this
tenacious on behalf of your clients, I don’t think the
sims
can lose.” The smile faded. “Still think all
sims
have
it cushy?”

 
          
“Not those.”

 
          
“Ever hear of a globulin farm?”

 
          
“Never.”

 
          
Romy said, “When you get sick, when a
virus or bacterium invades your body, you fight back through your immune
system. It forms proteins, immune globulins known as antibodies, to kill the
invaders. That’s called active immunity. But let’s say you jab yourself with a
needle that’s infected with, say, hepatitis B or C. You could ward off
infection by either of those viruses through passive immunity—by being injected
with antibodies or immunoglobulins from someone already immune to them.”

 
          
Patrick was getting the picture. A
few months ago he’d have to ask another half dozen questions to fill in the
blanks, but after what he’d seen tonight, he felt up to doing some of the
filling himself.

 
          
“Let me guess: Since
sims
are so close to humans, some slimeball gets the bright
idea of kidnapping or hijacking a bunch and infecting them with viruses and
selling off the immunity of whichever ones survive.”

 
          
“Exactly,” Romy said. “And sometimes
if a sim survives one virus, they infect it with another, and then another,
until they can harvest a multiimmune globulin. The more diseases covered, the
higher the price per dose.”

 
          
“Ain’t science grand,” Patrick said.

 
          
“But it’s not a one-time thing. A sim
will produce those antibodies for as long as it lives. All the farmers have to
do is keep it alive and healthy and they’ve got themselves a cash cow they can
literally milk for years.”

 
          
“Great,” he said in a sour tone.

 
          
“But even they don’t have it a tenth
as bad as some of the cases I’ve seen. Try to imagine a sim tossed into a cage
with three pit bulls.”

 
          
“Aw no.”

 
          
“Or two
sims
shoved into a pit, knives duct-taped into both hands, and bullwhipped until
they fight to the death.”

 
          
“Stop!”

 
          
“And some are simply tied up in a
basement and tortured for days, weeks.”

 
          
“Christ, Romy, please
! ”

 
          
She’d seen too much, too damn much
over the years. Tears welled in her eyes.

 
          
“I don’t know why…maybe it’s because
they’re so unassertive, or because they have no franchise, but
sims
seem to bring out the very worst in the worst of us.
The racists who’re so desperate to feel superior to something, anything, even
if it’s not human; others who think God gave them the animal kingdom as their
playground, to do absolutely anything with that they damn well please; and the
sick souls who want to vent their psychoses on something weak and defenseless.
Serial killers, teenage gangs, they’ve found a new target: Kill a sim for
kicks. Damn them.” She heard her voice break. “Damn them all to hell.”

 
          
“Easy,” Patrick said, reaching
across, finding her hand, squeezing it. “Easy.”

 
          
Romy couldn’t gauge the genuineness
of the gesture, whether he really felt for her or was simply pressing his case
to be roommates, but she didn’t pull away.

 
          
The interior of the car brightened.
Romy glanced in her sideview mirror and saw that the car behind them was closer
now, coming up fast. Patrick noticed it too.

 
          
“Looks like someone wants to pass,”
he said.

 
          
She felt the BMW decelerate as
Patrick eased up on the gas to allow the other car to go by. She looked out her
window at the ravine beyond the guardrail and suddenly had a premonition.

 
          
“Don’t slow down!” she cried.

 
          
“Wha—?”

 
          
“Hit the gas! Don’t let it pass!”

 
          
Too late.
The other car had gained too much momentum. It pulled alongside—Romy could see
now that it was a big, heavy Chevy van—and then cut a hard right into the
Beemer’s flank.

 
          
She screamed as the impact sent a
shock of terror through her chest. Patrick cried out and the car swerved as he
was knocked away from the steering wheel. Metal screeched
,
sparks flew as the steel guardrail ripped along the outside of her door, just
inches away. Patrick grabbed the wheel, trying to regain control, but then the
van hit them again, harder, and this time the Beemer climbed the guardrail,
straddled it for an endless instant, then toppled over.

 
          
Romy’s window exploded inward,
peppering her with safety glass as the car landed on its passenger side—she
heard someone screaming and recognized the voice as her own. She hung upside
down in her seatbelt as the Beemer rolled onto its roof, then over to the
driver side where it slidbounced-rattled the rest of the way down a slope of
softball-size chunks of granite. She felt as if she were trapped in some wild
amusement park ride that had gone horribly wrong. Finally the car hit the
bottom of the ravine and bounced back onto its wheels.

 
          
Battered, shaken, her heart pounding
madly, she shook off the shock and looked at Patrick. He was a shadow slumped
against the wheel—the airbag hadn’t deployed. She heard him groan and thought,
We’re
alive!

 
          
But this was no accident. Someone had
tried to kill them!

 
          
And then she saw forms moving into
the beam of the one remaining headlight, crouching shapes in dark jumpsuits,
looking like commandos.

 
          
Realization stabbed into her brain:
Already down here! Waiting for us! All planned! We were targeted to be knocked
off the road at that point!

 
          
She found the door lock toggle, hit
it. Locks wouldn’t do much good, but Patrick’s window, though cracked, was
still intact. She leaned close to him.

 
          
“Don’t move!” she whispered in his
ear.

 
          
He gave her a
groggy
look. “What?”

 
          
“Keep quiet and play dead!”

 
          
She pushed his head down so it was
resting against the steering wheel, then slumped herself against him and
watched through narrowed lids.

 
          
Three of them,
moving quickly and cautiously, squinting in the light.
Must have been waiting in the dark for a while.
She thought
she spotted a fourth figure hanging back at the edge of the glow.

 
          
She slipped her hand into her
pocketbook, searching for something, anything she might use to protect herself.
Her fingers closed around a metal cylinder, twice the length of a lipstick. Oh,
yes. In the confusion she’d all but forgotten about that.

 
          
“Somebody
kill
those lights!” said the middle figure.

 
          
“Got it.”

 
          
One figure veered toward Patrick’s
side of the car while the other two approached Romy’s. A hand snaked through
her window. She steeled herself as fingers probed her throat.

 
          
“Got a pulse.”

 
          
“Great. Get her arm out here. I’ll
shoot her up. Got that recorder ready?”

 
          
The third man was rattling Patrick’s
door. “Hey, it’s locked. Find the switch over there.”

 
          
A hand fumbled along the inside of
her door. Over the first man’s shoulder she saw the other lift an inoculator.

 
          
No!

 
          
She felt her fear nudging Raging
Romy. Come on!
she
thought. Wake up! Where are you
when I need you?

 
          
As soon as she heard the door locks
trip open, she began spraying. Not a five- or ten-percent capsicum spray, but
a concentrated stream of CS tear
gas. The nearer of the two
caught the full brunt of it. Clawing at his eyes, he cried out and lurched
backward, knocking into his partner; Romy was moving too, pushing open her door
and leaping out, arm extended, giving the inoculator man a faceful. He shouted
and, arms across his
face,
turned and tried to run
blind, but tripped and fell over the first guy.

 
          
Raging Romy was back.

 
          
“What the fuck?” she heard the third
man say from Patrick’s side of the car. She turned and saw him start to move
around toward her.

 
          
“Run, Patrick!” she screamed. “Run
now!”

 
          
Before taking her own advice, she
went to work on the two bastards on the ground, using her boots to hurt them
where they lived, putting all the considerable strength of her legs and much of
her body behind the kicks. Raging Romy wanted to give them more, take the time
to do the job right so it would be a long, long while before they were able to
try something like this again, but the third man had reached the front of the
car and she had to run.