No Dogs in Philly (2 page)

And now her brand-new player was broken—not her
fault—and her office building had been bought by the Gaespora.
That’s what it was. They were using her. She was the star of the
moment, good looking, she reasoned (hoped?), for a law bitch—she
still had all her teeth, at least, and only one fair scar down her
cheek—and they wanted to bring media attention to some bullshit
issue or other. It was that bastard Whitlow trying to polish his
dick with star power so people would forget what an awful job he
was doing. To be fair, she didn’t know any cities that had
succeeded in scrubbing the streets of the elzi, but at least they’d
spent less money failing. A third-plus of her winnings each year
went to city taxes, and they sure hadn’t fixed any fucking potholes
yet.

She finished her coffee and then her flask and
walked out into the rain. A homeless man was offering umbrella
service and after a quick negotiation she paid him eight bucks to
walk her as many blocks south. He grabbed the bills and took off;
she clubbed him in the back of the knee with the prod (off) and
took his umbrella, throwing the eight Ws down into the wet filth of
the sidewalk. Bastard, it’s more than you deserve. She walked down
Pine Street to an old brownstone mansion with a fancy copper sign
on the gate that read: “Eugene Gercer-han Bernstein, Attorney at
Law.” She opened the gate and, ignoring the buzzer, pounded on the
heavy oak door.

Sissy, his secretary, opened the door. Petite
woman, mid thirties, dressed in the latest fashion—a dress of brown
bands that wrapped around her body and left visible just a hint of
black panties and bra. It went well with the leather gun belt
around her waist.

“
How many times have I told you to
use the buzzer?” she said, annoyed.

Saru shoved past her into the antechamber,
tracking mud onto the rug and draping her purple peacoat over the
chair by the fireplace. She felt a hand on her shoulder, a
surprisingly strong grip. She tensed.

“
You’re not special,” Sissy
hissed. “You’re not different.”

Saru took a deep breath. She felt the rage of
the unwanted, unasked-for touch, her blood quickening, body
warming.

“
I’m going to break your wrist,”
she said.

The grip didn’t waver; Saru wondered what was
going through the other woman’s mind. What would happen if they
fought? What would Sissy’s move be? To jerk down and slip a tranq
dart in her neck, most likely. She’d wake up in the gutter like an
elzi, wallet gone, piss on her face, maybe some freak would steal
her clothes and feel her up. Of course she’d get a good, hard zap
at Sissy’s thighs before she dropped, give the cunt some action,
and what a pretty picture that would be, the two of them passed out
in Eugene’s fancy-ass foyer.

The fingers let go. Stiffly, Sissy dropped her
arms to her sides.

“
He’s with another client,” she
spat. “You’ll have to wait.”

“
No thank you.”

Saru stomped down the hallway, making her
presence good and known, scuffing up the wood floor with her boots,
trailing a hand along the wood-paneled wall and skewing all the
paintings along the way. She half expected to feel the needle prick
of a dart in her back, but Sissy contented herself with sucking in
a breath sharp enough to cut. There was no reason to antagonize
Sissy, other than it was easy. Whatever stick was up her ass would
have to be carved out.

She got to the office door and prepared to
bang, but it swung open and a short, portly, balding man in a tweed
jacket stood in the doorway, her fist in rap position a centimeter
from his face. He didn’t blink. Friar.

“
Hello, Saru,” he said.
“Congratulations on the Favre case. Excellent work.”

“
Thank you,” she said. Somehow
Friar always managed to disarm her with his politeness. If she was
the pudding cup of detectives, Morgan Friar was tiramisu. His
specialty was UausuaU crimes, and there weren’t too many out there
with the stomach to poke at those. He went way beyond your typical
elzi disappearance case, investigating the darker crimes, crimes
that most people considered nothing more than rumor—feasters and
queens, the people that supposedly looked at the UausuaU and didn’t
go mad, or they went mad but kept their ability to think and plan
and take action.

“
So nice to run into you like
this,” he said. “Seeing your face always brings me cheer. You’re
too pretty for this line of work.”

“
And you’re too fat.”

He chuckled. “True, true. I’m too busy to
exercise and too cheap to buy a better body. Besides,” his voice
changed; it was warm still in character, but she could feel the
chill below, “it would only get ruined anyway.”

She stood to the side and watched his fat rump
shuffle down the hallway. How did he do it? Even if he hired mercs
to do the dirty work, there were too many everyday near-death sits
for a PI to have the body of a pastry chef. Any scum worth talking
to would doodle a wound in his paunch and tap dance away with his
wallet. She filed an idea: follow him, see what he does, how he
operates.

She went into the office and offered her
customary sneer at the opulence. The PIs of the private justice
system did the work and the lawyers saw the rewards. Shiny wood
floors, fancy rugs from foreign zones, paintings of his family
everywhere—was that a new chandelier?

“
Jesus Christ, what’s next? A
golden throne?” she said aloud.

Eugene gave a snort and stood to offer her his
hand. He was tall, taller even than she was, and stupidly handsome.
She had thought a few times of pumping him full of drink and
running her hands through that curly black hair, but she’d probably
get an invoice in the mail for it. She slapped his hand away and
collapsed into the overly plush seat before his
altar-desk.

“
The Gaespora want me for
something,” she said. “What is it?”

“
Saru, I appreciate your
patronage, but you can’t just barge in here like this. I was in a
meeting with Mr. Friar, which he kindly—let me stress
that—
kindly
, agreed to postpone because I didn’t want you
kicking down my door again.”

“
They were calling me all night,
outbid my call blocking, custom summon tone, a sonata that made me
almost cry and a picture of my parents’ farm.”

“
Are you listening to
me?”

“
They bought my building
today.”

“
What?”

“
They bought the whole office
building. Thirteen Oh Six Walnut. Shut it down. I’m guessing by
this point they’ve found where I live and they got that too. What’s
going on?”

“
I don’t know. This is
unusual.”

“
I want to get a case together.
Start putting together some sort of action, something aggressive,
to put them on the defensive. Money’s no object; I’m flush from the
Favre case. They can’t get away with this.”

Eugene stared at her flatly and then burst out
laughing—God he was pretty when he laughed. He went to his liquor
cabinet and poured them each a tumbler of bourbon—his on the rocks
and hers a straight fistful. He handed her her glass and then sat,
swirling the bourbon, serious.

“
I’m flattered, really, that you
think I’m up for this, but what you’re proposing is ridiculous.
Launch a case against the Gaespora? On what grounds?”

“
I don’t know,” she said, hotly.
“You’re the lawyer, make something up, reckless intimidation,
intent to violate American freedom, do
something
.”

“
What do you think I can do here?
What judge do you think would even hear the case? Their salaries,
their mistresses, their kids’ medicines and their wives’ fake tits
all come from the Gaespora. I’d be laughed out of court and if I
didn’t shut up you’d find me dying of diphtheria.”

“
So you believe that
bullshit.”

“
I don’t believe—I know. They
bought your office building for crissakes.”

“
So what am I supposed to do, get
on my knees and suck their alien dicks?”

“
You could talk to them—maybe not
hang up and ignore their phone calls. Jesus, most people would give
their right arm to have a sit-down with the Gaespora and you’re
ignoring their phone calls. I don’t believe you
sometimes.”

“
I don’t enjoy being pushed
around.”

“
This isn’t the playground; you
can’t beat up every other kid and call yourself king shit of the
turd pile. There are rules.”

They glared at each other. Eugene looked away,
out the window. The rain was coming harder now, coming up to be a
good ol’ spring thunderstorm. Saru downed her bourbon and held the
glass out for a refill. Eugene filled her glass. He squinted his
eyes shut and Saru guessed he was shooting out a command to Sissy
to cancel his next meeting. Wordlessly he packed a long, curving
vape with some hash and a few stimulants. They smoked and stared
out at the storm. An elzi had gotten stuck on one of the barbs on
the iron fence around the building. They watched him jerk himself
free, leaving his hand and most of the forearm behind. He stumbled
down the street, causing pedestrians to scuttle to the other side.
A cop came over and herded him into a paddy wagon.

“
Shit,” Saru said. “There’s no way
out of this, is there?”

Almost as soon as she said it, there was a
knock on the door, soft, polite, Sissy.

“
Come in,” Eugene said. The door
opened and she stepped in. She looked ruffled,
uncomfortable—uncharacteristic. Even before she spoke Saru knew
what she would say:

“
Mr. Gercer-han Bernstein? There
are two gentlemen here to see you. They say they belong to the
Gaespora.”

Chapter 2

What they didn’t understand was the
simplicity—it was killing him. He’d been operating on three to
seven layers of consciousness since he was sixteen years old and
now that was gone. They had hacked away all his distractions, all
his facets—his virtual kingdoms, virtual sex, his mischief, news
feeds, criminal enterprises, and voyeurism. He’d been flitting from
implant to implant, seeing life through other people’s eyes and
tongues and cocks and skin for so long that now, trapped in his own
fat body, he was disgusted with himself. Is this what he was? A
blob of flesh in a ratty armchair with a catheter and a feeding
tube—when had he even put that in? Had it been a good idea at the
time? Now without the freedom to eat the meals of others he was
stuck sucking down the phlegmy white goo that sustained him. He
shouldn’t have been fat—he hadn’t even bothered to measure the
input. He’d just jammed it in and swum back to the Net. God, would
he have swollen up like a balloon, would he have burst eventually?
Or would the fat have squeezed against his veins until they clamped
shut and his brain went dead?

Now his whole existence was focused on the
search, the girl, the streets of Philadelphia, the homeless
shelters, the crack dens, the whorehouses and strip clubs, the
private sex clubs, and the orphanages. How old was she? They didn’t
know. What did she look like? Blue eyes, eyes so blue they hurt.
Was that it? Yes. He was starting to despair. He twitched his eyes
to the left, the bucket with his toes. What would they take next? A
new day was dawning. It occurred to him that traveling up from his
feet they would eventually reach his cock, and then he thrust
himself back into the search, records, records, records. Blue-eyed
girls, and one other clue—the arson. She had killed a man
apparently, allegedly, burned him to ash. A friend of theirs?
Maybe. How did they know? They just knew.

He found himself cursing the police for their
incompetence, cursing the media for their neglect—couldn’t they
even note a building burning down? Wasn’t that worth a footnote in
the paper? If it even was a building. It could have been a car or
an outhouse or a submarine for all he knew, vaporized by a girl
with blue, blue eyes. He was going to die, he realized. He was
going to be chopped apart piece by piece by piece. The creepiest
part was the way they watched him. All four of them—maybe there was
a fifth standing guard upstairs—they sat, eyes closed but pointed
at him. They were still, perfectly still like statues, and silent.
The only sound was the hum of his computer and the squeak of the
chair or a fart from his fleshy prison.

They were feasters, they had to be; it was the
only explanation. They weren’t thugs or robbers; he’d been in
enough of them to understand their way. They weren’t twitchy or
angry or greedy or even cruel. In ten toes he hadn’t seen them move
or eat. Only the leader spoke. They carried no weapons but knives,
and he didn’t know a lot about knives but he knew these were sharp.
The leader’s knife had gone through his toe like it was nothing,
not even butter, just a quick flick and the toe slid off. There was
no pain—they had injected him with drugs, mind-focusers,
analgesics, and their own blood. This last fact convinced him of
their nature. The feasters were blood worshippers; they believed if
you ate a man you gained his strength. And he suspected that would
be the fate of this girl. They believed she had some power and they
meant to eat her.

The leader’s eyes flickered open. He stood and
withdrew a syringe from his jacket. He calmly slid the needlepoint
into his neck and sucked out about a juice-box full of blood. The
leader walked over and jammed the needle into his neck. He felt
nothing with the needle but oddly the blood entering his body
burned. He could feel it spreading out through him, warm like piss
in a pool but not diluting, just filling his body with heat. He
wondered what diseases were coming along for the ride—a fancy new
hepatitis perhaps?