Liquid Cool: The Cyberpunk Detective Series (31 page)

"Give over the half then. And forget the bank. We don't do banks."

"We get back, I'll make the call and have one of my sidewalk johnny friends bring up the bag with the other half of the money."

"Mr. Cruz, you know what it feels like to have your ribcage crushed in my Hippo death hug?"

"Is that what Hippo cyborgs do? No, I don't know and don't expect to know what that feels like ever. Make sure to do the job I'm hiring you for or I have a few threats up my sleeve, too."

"You have nothing you can threaten us with."

"Do you want to exchange threats or do you want to do a job and get paid for it."

The Hippo in the passenger seat turned to look back at me.

"Money."

I gave him the bag I had inside my jacket pocket. He didn't even count it but threw it to his feet. The driver started up the hover-van and within moments we were flying up into the sky traffic.

As I sat there sandwiched between the two animal gang members, I realized there was another hole in my new career as a detective--I was going to need muscle. I hated strangers, but I had no choice with this Hippo crew. That didn't mean that after this excursion into Mad Heights I wasn't going to start putting together a list of people I could trust to back me up when needed.

When we flew into Mad Heights airspace, I felt my chest tighten. I had seen it from the air from this angle before on television. There actually was a legitimate reason why it was called Mad Heights besides it now being a madhouse of crime. The neighborhood was old and existed before the building codes were formalized in the city. As a result, it did look like a mad group of builders had put the town together. There were skinny towers next to monolith towers, twenty foot towers next to two hundred foot ones. It all looked...mad. If a construction crew were high on drugs and could do whatever popped into their minds, Mad Heights was what they would have come up with. Adding to the madness were all the neon signs of all sizes and shapes--no standard at all like other towns.

Our hover-car departed from the sky-lane and every second that went by the neon signs got fewer and fewer.

"We're going to set down in a back-alley," the Hippo in the passenger seat said with turning his head back. "You're not afraid to walk in a bit in the rain?"

"I do it all the time," I answered. "That why I wear my hat."

It was not just a back-alley. They chose an alley so secluded I wondered if it was even part of the city. The only light was from a street lamp yards away. The Hippos piled out of their hover-van and I jumped out too, immediately being splashed by muddy water and realizing I had jumped right into a puddle. The Hippos started chuckling.

I wondered when they were going to do so. Two Hippos stood and took off their ridiculous hippo masks. When I saw their ugly faces I almost said out loud for them to pull the masks back on. The fat pudgy faces stared at me with beady little eyes. They'd airbrushed their face from their foreheads to their noses to give that better effect with their masks on. Their hair was a crew cut except for the edges, which were tied and cut in a style to, I guess, look like hippo ears. The hairdo looked stupid, but when you're a criminal who can effortlessly pound someone to death, you can look stupid.

As we walked away, I realized that two of the Hippos were not following, but waited with the hover-van. I was about to protest as I thought I had hired four bodyguards, but stopped myself. Would I leave my vehicle unattended in this place? Why would I expect them to? And Let It Ride Enterprises wasn't sending any of their mobile car security guards anywhere near this armpit of the city.

It was probably part of their gang code too. With masks off guarding me, it meant it wasn't a gang op, but masks on, guarding their vehicle meant if you messed with it, you were messing with the entire Hypernova Hippo gang. The more I thought about it, the more I didn't like what it suggested in terms of their protection of me. I had only 50% of the crew I hired.

The street was dark and flooded. Most of the time I wore clear overboots up to my knees. There were virtually invisible and I was glad that I had them on this time, because the water in the street came up to my calves. The Hippos seemed to enjoy sloshing through the muddy water.

"Turn up there," one of the Hippos said.

When we turned up the street, it was like someone opened a door and we had passed right through a vortex into another world. For the first time in my life, I was walking down the streets of Mad Heights. It was as noisy and flashy as I had expected. Here they didn't have sidewalk johnnies, they had sidewalk hustlers who stood with their backs against the wall in their neon suits and outfits watching everyone who passed by. I knew what they were looking for--someone like me. Newbies, visitor virgins, people who clearly were not from here. I could pretend to be as tough as I wanted to be, but they could smell a mark from miles away.

I tried to envision what were the real differences, from a street viewpoint, between here and working class neighborhoods like my Rabbit City or Woodstock Falls and upscale ones like Peacock Hills or Silicon Dunes. Bad neighborhoods just had more of everything in a gratuitous and venal way. The smell of perfume or cologne in the air was too much and sickly, the clothes worn under their dark slickers were too bright, the tech was too gaudy along with their jewelry, their haircuts were too over-the-top, and the muscle on the men and cleavage on the woman was just too much. Rich neighborhoods were perfect in their presentation. Working neighborhoods were decent in theirs. Mad Heights, and every mean street neighborhood like it, were just outrageous. It was as if this was what crime felt it had to do to stand out in a noisy, 50-million super-city like Metropolis.

The mean streets had its eye on me. I could see one street hustler smile at his partner next to him and their eyes locked on me like a laser-guided missile, even though I had turned my head and was watching them peripherally. One of the Hippos grabbed my shoulder and the three of us stopped. The two Hippos stared at the approaching sidewalk hustlers, who did an immediate about-face and went back the way they came. As I stared at the Hippos' backs, I could see that these cyborgs had massive pile-driver arms. Punch Judy with her cybernetic arms could throw a 300-pound guy through a reinforced window. The arm of one of these Hippos was like six PJ arms--they could throw an entire truck with two 300-pound guys inside through a reinforced window. The Hippo let go of my shoulder--and I was glad he did because his hand felt like it alone weighed 500 pounds. We continued walking.

The only equivalent I could think of was models walking the runway with fans, media, and industry people gawking at them. If I hadn't had a Hippo bodyguard on either side of me, I wouldn't have made it. I knew that now. Everyone was watching me. Did I smell funny? How could all of them know I wasn't a Mad Heights guy? Phishy told me that street people had a sixth sense and could pick out people who didn't belong on the street, and in the bad neighborhoods it was even sharper. I guessed it had to be if your life was about preying on marks for your livelihood, and being able to spot police and rival gangs meant the difference between prison or death.

I also didn't trust the Hippos. It was good I had bodyguards, but what was the point if I was scared they'd mug me and leave me in some alleyway just for the fun of it, despite being paid. Well, something was better than nothing, but I definitely needed my own personal bodyguard service. But again, this was better than nothing.

This was also not the place for
an inherent germophobe. I contr
olled it most of the time and hid it from most people, but certain situations made it flare up. I never went near public bathrooms. I'd rather die. I stayed in my own ordered world. However, this wasn't my world. I stood there staring at the general clinic in front of me, but my foot wouldn't move. There were more dope roaches--drug addicts--around the place than a free drug giveaway in Tijuana. All of them looked like aged zombies, morbidly skinny, scales and sores, bad hair, and bad teeth. The clinic building itself looked like it had been hit by multiple bomb blasts. Then there were the neon signs: "General Clinic," "Free Needles" "Free Exams" "All Medical Accepted" "Cash Only." When I read "One Finger Body Exams" I was about to run right out of there, but a Hippo grabbed me.

"Are you going in?"

They could see the expression on my face and started to chuckle.

"Do you have an extra hippo mask?"

They laughed louder.

"Seventh floor," the Hippo said when he returned. "I'd take the stairs if I were you."

Inside the clinic was nasty! The waiting room was overflowing with zombie-looking walk-in patients. People were leaning against the walls and sprawled out on the dirty floor. My own skin was beginning to crawl. Then I noticed there were water flies buzzing around. I had to stand there for a moment to compose myself and fight my feet from running out of there. It was nasty!

As with everything in the city, there was no such thing as small. The clinic was on the bottom of a tower but it was still at least seven stories. The bottom levels were the intake waiting rooms and clinics. I was going nowhere near the elevators in this place, so I approached the stairs and a door opened and a doctor or nurse, whichever, popped out with one bloody white glove on one hand and one dripping brown white glove on the other. I shut my eyes so tightly there was a chance they would never open. I could not cope with this nastiness. I realized very quickly that no good was going to come from prolonged exposure to this facility. Find my person, question him, and get out.

The Hippos also educated me on the state of Rabbit gangs. There was a coup within the
Riot Gear
Rabbit gang. The leader, White Rabbit, was killed and his number two in command, Blue Pill Rabbit, was sent here--barely alive. There were now two separate Rabbit gangs, and they were at full-scale war with each other. This was not going to be easy.

This was supposed to be a clinic, but I had seen only one medic--unlikely for a facility of this huge size. I felt there was something I was missing and as the outsider, the joke was on me. As I neared the top of the stairs to the seventh floor, there were four of them watching me. Skinny punks with rabbit masks on their heads. Two of them were barefoot and that alone made me want to vomit. Barefoot on this nasty floor?

"Where's Blue Pill?" I asked with authority.

"You part of the Hippo crew?" one asked.

Criminals always had look-outs, even if you never saw them.

"No, I hired them as muscle. I'm not part of any gang. I'm a detective on the outside."

"Why you want Blue Pill then, square?"

"Take me to Blue Pill so I can ask him my questions directly. Tell him I need know everything there is to know about Red, so I can take him down. Blue Pill can take him down here. I can take him down on the outside. Blue Pill and I are going to be temporary comrades because we have a mutual enemy."

"Red Rabbit is dead!" one of them said.

The four rabbit gang members were riling themselves up, repeating the same thing, but even I could tell, without seeing their faces, that they were scared to death of him.

The entire seventh floor was filled with rabbit-masked gang members armed with guns, knives, swords, and rifles. If I got into trouble here, my body would be cold and in pieces long before either of my Hippo bodyguards got to me. They both conveniently told me that they'd wait at the door for me--I had no say in the matter.

The recovery room where the gang leader Blue Pill lay was also overflowing with other rabbit gang members, but these ones had their masks off. Caucasian Rastafarians! That's what the Riot Gear Rabbits were--white guys with dreadlocks.

Blue Pill lay on his bed, dressed in a hospital gown, with tubes and wires attached all over his body. There was also a tube in his mouth and I wasn't a doctor but his arms and legs were burnt horribly.

One of the rabbit gang members who was furthest away pushed through the others to stand about a couple of inches from my face. "You don't look like a Hippo."

"I'm from the outside."

"Everybody knows that. Why are you on the inside, inside here?"

"I need Blue Pill's help."

"Why?"

"Because Red Rabbit is a psycho and needs to be taken down."

"Why? That don't tell us anything. Why do you want to take him down?"

"He orchestrated a friend of mine getting killed by the place. You may have heard of it. That shoot-out on Sweet Street."

"We heard."

"How this Red did it, I'd also like to know, because my friend would never have done it voluntarily? He never even touched a gun before, then he goes gun-crazy and all these weapons magically appear in his hands."

"Maybe Red told him to do it and if he didn't he'd hop over to the guy's family and brutally rabbit-kick them to death. Maybe he used drugs on him. Maybe he used machines. Red seems to have all kinds of Up-Top machines in his possession, besides his lightning rifle. You seem to want everything wrapped up in a nice little bow for you. Sometimes you don't get all the answers and that's life."

"Then, since you don't seem to know, that's another reason to find and take him down. He may make you go gun-crazy against your will and take down your own men or even your boss, Blue Pill, here," I said. "Red Rabbit is our public enemy number one."