Made to Kill (3 page)

I wasn’t so sure and I said so.

“Raymondo, you worry too much.”

“And you don’t worry enough, Ada.”

“What was that I said about lightening up, Ray?”

“Part of what worries me,” I said, “is that you’re
not
worried.”

“Gold is clever, Ray.”

I put the ingot down on the desk and eyed it and then I sat back in the chair. It creaked. “I get it,” I said. “Unmarked, untraceable. Gold is gold is gold.”

“Could be a bag full of melted pocket watches, all we know.”

I sniffed. It sounded like a car with a dead battery. “That’s a lot of pockets.”

“The only thing we know for sure, chief,” said Ada, “is that she’s paid us for a job, which means we’d better get to it.”

I had a vision of Ada relaxing and taking a long drag on a long cigarette, not a care in the world.

I looked at the gold. I looked at the bag. I wondered how much it was all worth. It bothered me quite a lot and I said so.

“Easy, Ray.”

“Someone might want it back,” I said.

There was a pause and a ticking sound.

“Go on,” said Ada.

I levered the chair back to the upright and kept going, reaching for the gold ingot and holding it up between an articulated forefinger and thumb. I turned around in the chair. There was a window behind me, a big one, and it was full of sunlight. So I held the bar up to that sunlight. I wasn’t sure what that was going to tell me but I was looking for options. The bar glinted a little, but not a lot.

“The gold isn’t hers,” I said. “I mean, not personally. It can’t be. Nobody keeps gold like this.”

“Lots of people keep gold,” said Ada. “Governments, for example.”

“And big banks and Fort Knox,” I said. “Yes, I get it. But not like this. And not regular people.”

“So she isn’t regular people.”

I considered. Maybe Ada had a point. The girl had been young and pretty, dressed casually but in expensive gear and she had expensive hair. The bag itself, even without the gold stretching the seams, was top drawer. She wasn’t short of funds.

She had also been strange. No name. No conversation. She was afraid but calm at the same time. If it was an act, it was a good one. She’d kept her cool.

But it still didn’t fit. People didn’t have gold. Which meant she got it from somewhere. And the way she acted, I figured she didn’t want anyone to know she’d come calling.

Which meant the gold not only wasn’t hers, she’d taken it without permission.

Our mystery girl was a thief and that’s what I said to Ada.

“She’s also our client now, Ray,” said Ada. “And she’s paid in advance.”

“Someone might want it back,” I said again, making sure Ada hadn’t conveniently wiped over that part of the conversation on her great big magnetic memory tapes in the other room.

“Ray, don’t tell me Thornton programmed you with a conscience?”

I laughed. I’d been practicing. It sounded like two rocks going for a joyride in a clothes washer.

“Maybe he did,” I said. “You know I think about him, sometimes.”

For a moment it felt like Ada took a drag on a cigarette, and then the image was gone.

“Yeah,” she said. “That was a terrible accident he had.”

“It was.”

“Very sad.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t worry. We sent flowers.”

“Good.”

“And you should keep your mind on the job, chief. She gave an address. You should go take a look.”

“Okay,” I said. I lifted the hat from my desk and I stood up. I kept a firm grip on the telephone because something was bothering me.

“The girl…” I said.

“What about her?”

“She knew about me. She knew where to come.”

“These are true facts.”

“I’m going to have to find her and kill her too, aren’t I?”

“At least she paid in advance.”

“Seems a shame.”

“She made the choice to come here, chief. We are obliged to take precautions.”

Ada was right and I knew she was right but I still thought about it for a few seconds as I stood by the desk.

“First things first, chief,” said Ada. “You’ve got work to do.”

I frowned. Then I hung up the phone and lifted the hat from my desk. I put it on, made sure it was straight, and then headed out the door and locked it behind me.

It was a hot day. That’s why I liked LA. I was good with heat. Kept the circuits ticking. Some people said that this town got too much sun for its own good, but I didn’t remember where I had heard that. Maybe it was from Thornton. I could remember his pipe and his glasses and the heavy suit he always wore, and he seemed like the kind of guy who liked to stay inside. More echoes from his template I guess. But although my electromatic brain might have been based on the mind of my creator, I wasn’t really him. I was my own robot.

Me? I liked sunshine. Sunshine was good.

I’d pulled out of the garage underneath the office and then decided to give the engine a little nap as I sat in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard along with what seemed like every other car in town. The traffic crawled forward in fits and starts. I sat tight. Maybe traffic was always like this and I just didn’t remember. I was in no hurry. As I rolled forward at a hundred miles a week I first counted all the clothes boutiques with women’s names that ended in an “i.” Then I counted all the colors of neon used in the signs for steak houses. There were a lot of both and I came to the conclusion that the citizens of this town liked dresses and they liked steak. Didn’t seem too bad a combination.

After an ice age I reached the point where, according to the address the girl had written on my blotter and the idea of a street map I had embedded in my permanent memory, I was going to take a right and head toward the Hollywood Hills. Then I saw why traffic was so sticky.

The street ahead was blocked in one direction by a string of big trucks parked at the curb. There were cones out and two traffic cops in dark glasses and white gloves played chess against each other with cars and busses as their pieces. I changed lanes and slid forward to get a look.

Behind the trucks and the cops and the cones was the most famous picture house in town: Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The temple-like frontage was mostly covered in scaffold, which would have been a disappointment to tourists if the trucks weren’t blocking the perfect photo op anyway.

Of course. The special nation-wide film premiere of
Red Lucky
was set for Friday, and along with the cast dancing the red carpet, Grauman’s was the star attraction. Today was Tuesday. They just had time to get the green and gold and red woodwork polished up. There were four trucks; the backs of two were shut but two were open. One looked like it was filled with cables, thin and fat and sizes in-between, all wound around big reels, and behind those were wooden crates stacked to the ceiling. Equipment for the special film transmission, I guessed. The other truck was filled with enough rolls of red carpet to get to Mexico and maybe even back again.

I wondered how the transmission was done. Probably something like television. Then I wondered why they hadn’t done something like that before and then I’d passed the theatre and the traffic cops and Hollywood Boulevard opened up like an empty airport runway. I changed lanes back to where I was then took the next left. Then I realized I’d gone one over so I took the next left and then the next right. With the car now pointed in the right direction I applied pressure to the accelerator and drove into the hills.

As I wound my way to a higher altitude, I saw the Hollywood Sign looming first on my right, and after a few minutes it was more or less dead ahead. It looked big up there on the hill. It sat there almost reluctantly, just waiting for the spotlight to move off it so it could go do something more interesting. As I got closer it seemed to shrink somehow in that way that all landmarks big enough to be seen from afar shrink when you get closer. Then it was gone, hidden by the hills. As I headed toward the mystery address I was surrounded by nothing but winding tarmac and dry scrubby flora that clung to the hills like fluff on a teenager’s chin. Above me and the car the sky was very big and very blue.

The road was steep and got steeper. I changed gears and pushed the car upwards and wondered where I was going. The view was pretty nice up here. I guessed even movie stars liked to take long drives in the hills now and again to admire it.

The telephone that sat in the cradle between me and the passenger seat rang. I picked it up.

“Having a nice time, chief?”

Ada always spoke before I could say hello.

“Nice day for a drive, Ada.”

“You’re right there. Turn left.”

I turned left with one hand on the wheel. The narrow winding tarmacked road became a narrow winding dirt road and after a minute there was nothing in the rearview but a brown cloud of dust. Seemed like a strange place to be going.

“What was Charles David doing up here anyway?” I asked.

“Maybe he was taking a hike,” said Ada. “People hike. Even actors.”

I passed a small sign on a big pole but the sign was covered with dust and I couldn’t read it so I kept going. Then the road ended in a big gate and beyond the gate was a building made of corrugated steel, something like a Quonset hut but smaller and with a flat roof. In front of the hut was nothing except a pick-up in a surprising shade of lime. That was all I could see. The road up to the gate was lined with tall brush that obscured the view of anything else.

The gate was closed. It was also locked.

“Dead end,” I said.

“Then better bring it back to life,” said Ada.

I put the telephone down and left the car running. The padlock on the gate was pretty big and strong but I was bigger and stronger and I broke it without breaking a sweat. Now unlocked, the gate swung open under its own gravity and I walked back to the car and got in it and drove through. I stopped next to the pick-up, then saw what was out of the rear view and reversed, swung the car around, and backed up against the hut.

Then I killed the car and stepped out, taking a moment to take in the view, which was worthy of quiet appreciation. It looked like half of California was spread out below me, beyond the hills that tumbled down and vanished into a plain as flat as an ocean. I was too far and too high to see any detail, but Hollywood basked in the afternoon sun and that sun caught on windshields and windows and the metal roofs of some buildings, making the whole place sparkle like seaweed washed up on a beach. A little farther, on the left, was downtown Los Angeles proper, a few tall fingers grasping through a reddish haze.

I scanned back to Hollywood and turned down the brightness in my optics and had a little look but I couldn’t see my office.

Then the telephone rang again. I turned back to the car and reached into it and pulled the phone out, stretching the coiled lead out through the door as I stood and kept on drinking in the scene.

I got in first this time.

“Ada.”

“Wow, Raymondo, what a view, baby!”

I smiled on the inside. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you so enthusiastic.”

“Hey,” she said, “I don’t get out much.”

“You don’t get out ever. And you have no idea what I’m looking at.”

“Hey, can’t a gal use her imagination? I know your location and I know your elevation. The rest is easy, like
that
.”

There was a sound like someone snapping their fingers in my ear.

“I’m not sure you can guess what else is up here, Ada.”

“So why don’t you give me the tour, chief?”

I switched the phone to my other hand and rested my free arm on the roof of the car. I looked down to my right. The steel hut and its parking lot—if you could call it a parking lot—was on a plateau that was artificial, cut into the hillside. The edge of the plateau dropped off fiercely, which allowed the remarkable view. But just over the edge was the top of another structure. It was a series of white panels, elaborately arranged into geometric shapes on the front of wooden telegraph poles and crisscrossed with smaller poles as reinforcement. Even though I couldn’t see any more than the top of edge of the structure and even though I was looking at it from behind, it didn’t take much detective work to see what it was.

I was standing in a dirt parking lot that overlooked the back of the Hollywood Sign. I said as much to Ada, and then
I said
, “seems our movie star was sightseeing.”

“Go take a closer look, chief. Don’t worry about the telephone. Nobody is watching.”

I felt a little electric surge down my left side. I was supposed to use the phone when I talked to Ada outside the office. I was programmed for it. It was part of the act. Even though Ada talked to me directly inside my mind, Thornton figured it wasn’t a good look for a robot to be seen talking to himself in the street.

But that was just a half of it. The telephone might have sounded dead when we called each other, but it wasn’t really. I still spoke out loud when I used it but there was a signal howling down the line, a pulse Thornton wove around the frequencies of the standard telephone service, a hidden trick that connected me to Ada directly. That signal took my voice and made it inaudible and undetectable, the perfect scramble, proof against any kind of tapping.

Thornton was a clever man and he figured that a robot private detective and his control computer probably needed a little privacy.

The only thing he hadn’t figured was that the control computer he’d built for me was smarter than he was. In the five years we’d been in business, Ada had made some changes of her own, and not just to me.

Which is to say the telephone in the car was a special kind of telephone, and if I stayed within a certain range of it I could pick up Thornton’s secret pulse signal even when the phone was on the hook. The signal was much weaker and the range was lousy, but it was okay.

It still made my circuits ache, but Ada hadn’t solved that little bit of programming angst yet.

I glanced back at the hut. There was no sound from it and no movement through the three dusty windows in its side. There was a faint ticking sound, which I put that down to the heat of the Hollywood sun shining down on the hut’s metal roof.