No Dogs in Philly (7 page)

She found her nicest clothes in a pile and saw
they were covered in blood. She’d broken the heels of her stilettos
and tossed them in a dumpster on her flight back to the apartment,
then when she’d gotten back she’d torn off her clothes, downed a
bottle of gin, and cried herself to sleep. Sure she’d seen people
dead, seen people killed, maybe even killed one or two herself in
the end (it’s not like she went around checking). But to see a man,
even if he was an elzi, rip himself apart like that, and then her
friend, well, colleague at least—she’d seen him around—strap
himself in like that and then make her snuff him. That wasn’t fair,
Friar. You knew what you were doing. You brought me in because you
didn’t have the guts to do it yourself. You were a brave
sonofabitch, braver than me for sure, but there’s different kinds
of brave and you tripped on that last step.

She found the faux-fox coat she’d bought after
the Favre case; she’d had it less than a week and already it was
covered in blood. A metaphor? A warning? The peacoat was as drab
and dirty as ever and had that bitter all-night-drinking smell that
never seemed to go away, but at least it wasn’t bloody. She found
some clean(?) panties and jeans and then chose the trickiest bra
from her lineup—one with a micro-razor in the strap and a tiny dart
launcher in each tit. The range was shit, six inches maybe, but
enough to conk a lover if it ever got too hot. She wasn’t the
honeypot type and she’d never gotten the chance to use it, but hey,
why not have it just in case?

It was time to get out the lucky shirt, the
pink tank top with the big purple heart in the center. Alright
lucky shirt, do your thing. She couldn’t quite remember why it was
lucky—did she win a scratch-off when she was wearing it? No, that
wasn’t it. It had something to do with Eugene, right? They went and
had champagne at the Borazali after she nailed her first conviction
and they both got a little too friendly. No…she’d dressed up for
that, in that skimpy golden tube that her dad would’ve smacked her
back to Jersey for wearing. Huh. It bothered her she couldn’t
remember why it was lucky. What’s the point of a lucky shirt if you
can’t remember the thing that made it lucky?

Ah, now the real question—the gun. She didn’t
like guns, not because they were guns. The actual shooting and the
ritual of caring for them she found relaxing. But carrying a gun
complicated the justice process. With her trusty prod and a tranq
or two she could apprehend a suspect, deliver justice, pay the levy
at the Po-Stop and be gone. But a gun slowed everything down—why
did she have the gun? Did she use it? Where did she get it? Did she
have a permit? A license? What kind of bullets was she using? The
longer she stayed in jail answering questions the more the risk.
Better to be walking the streets with the elzi and the thugs, where
you could run and fight and had options other than sucking down a
beating and likely something more if you weren’t too ugly to look
at.

But if this charade got all magical her prod
wasn’t going to do much good. She still had that flank-steak smell
of ElilE’s hand roasting at full power, and if these feasters had
any tricks up their sleeves she wanted a few of her own. She
strapped on the pancake holster—nicely concealed by the peacoat—and
did a quick check of her Betty. It was illegal, of course, like
everything fun, for being made of layered composite materials that
nine times out of ten showed up as nothing more than a blip on a
scanner. In her wilder days she’d gotten some back-alley saw jockey
to patch it into her implants because au natural she couldn’t shoot
for shit—apparently aiming took patience and discipline. But with
her add-ons she could circumcise a newborn from fifty feet away
with just a thought. The saw jockey must’ve gotten some nerves
scrambled in the process because every time she used the damn thing
it made her nipples thrill. Bastard probably did it on purpose—you
don’t get kicked out of med school for incompetence.

Alright, all dressed up and no place to go.
Time to put the old brain to work. She grabbed a stick of Chew 20
to get some fuel in her system and then paced the room kicking at
things in an attempt to mimic thinking. The girl is in the fish.
Well, that’s pretty obvious—she’s in the Fish. It was a comforting
thought. The Fish was a labyrinth of hip warrens, the kingdom of
the homeless pseudo-society. It was huge and crowded and had a
shitty network connection so it would be impossible to find her
without more info. But what info did they have? She’d been dozing
for twelve hours and her hunters, rivals, the dicks who were going
to cost her ten million tickets out of Philly were out doing…what,
exactly? How were they getting their information?

The Net of course, hacking security cameras,
hacking private implants, arrest records, viks—what anyone did when
they wanted to drag up dirt on someone or find them and kill ‘em.
But this girl was hard to find—unregistered, probably, no
birthright implants or maybe she’d paid someone to dig ‘em out. She
had a small profile so she was probably hip herself, no real
residence, no money, day-to-day scraping it together—probably never
went to school. So they’d tracked her to the Fish, not a huge
surprise, not a huge concern except…they seemed to have that other
thing, that special sense, ways of knowing the things you lock up
in your head all private from the Net. That was their
advantage.

So how to beat that? Well, not by sitting
around the apartment. Boots on the ground. Experience. Asking
around about a girl with blue eyes—hopeless—and what was the other
thing ElilE had said? Fires. Asking about strange fires. That was
no help either. Fires were every day, all the time. An elzi wanders
into a house and busts up the stove. Fire. An elzi wanders into a
power plant and gets fried. Fire. A woman catches her husband
cheating on her. She shoots him and sets a fire to cover it all up.
Fires all over the friggin’ place.

Alright, that was out. But the eyes…there was
something there. They were strange eyes, pretty eyes. If this girl
was like ElilE said then these eyes were magical, there was more to
them than just the look. That was something you noticed. That was
something that was worth something to a certain type of someone.
And maybe this girl was a saint, but she had to eat, and probably
needed a slap of something or other to shake reality for a spell,
and if she was just regular folk she only had a few options. That
meant pimps—no, too easy. She would have been found on the Net.
That ruled out freelancing then too, she’d leave a footprint.
Auction records too. Huh, was she just street walking? Then she was
dead anyway…no, either she had another way of bringing or, or, or…a
benefactor. A patron. Maybe a once-in-a-while thing when she really
needed a fix or her stomach was caving in.

It was a shitty theory. There were infinite
ways she could be occupying herself or scraping together what
passed for a living. She could have worked in the hippy coop
cleaning or cooking or planting vegetables. That would keep her off
the Net and still give her a life. But she didn’t think so. ElilE
said this girl had a troubled childhood, like hers—bastard, how
dare you dig in
my
shit pile—and if she really did have an
alien following her then that was sure to shake up her brain just a
little. That meant drugs. That meant booze. Maybe it even meant
body modding. All of that was expensive—more than a coop brought at
least. The sell-sex theory was shit in a bag, but it felt
right.

She giggled at the simplicity of it. She
wouldn’t have to tromp around the garbage pits of the Fish at
all—she’d just put a price on the girl’s head. Easy as pie. Whoever
her benefactor was (if he existed) he’d be rich to her but he sure
as hell wouldn’t be downtown real-person rich. What was the price,
ten? No, she’d make it really sweet. A straight twenty grand for a
girl with blue eyes, the bluest they could find, they had to be
really
blue. Get a picture and send it along, no Net, don’t
wanna get the porkies involved. Real pics on real paper. She
clapped her hands together. A plan! A dangerous thin rope to hang
herself on but better than she’d had five minutes ago.

Smokey Lou was at his bar, Smokey Lou’s, as
usual, smoking, as usual. The bar was famous in the Libs district
for, what else? Smoking. And smoking accessories. And girls. The
two worked together in the center stage, some poor skag in a
woman-sized hookah with a thousand little squid dicks running out,
sucked on by fat and for some reason always hairy men. It was quite
a spectacle, Saru had to admit—the naked woman, somehow not puking
out her lungs, swaying inside the swirling smoke, rubbing her bare
tits and ass up against the glass from time to time. Different
girls, different flavors.

“
You’re saying, twenty thousand
for a girl with blue eyes?”

Lou looked shocked, almost offended by this. He
was, like his clientele, fat, hairy, and unpleasant. He was always
sweating and his fancy white shirts and suits always looked like
they’d just come out of the wash. His breath smelled like an
orangutan’s nut sack and every conversation involved her warning
him repeatedly to point his tongue-box somewhere else or she’d give
him a bite of the prod. Now they sat in a booth in the back, side
by side watching the show so he could only glance her. The
plasticky seat was sticky with something and she didn’t want to
know what.

“
No,” she said, crossly—in her
head this had not involved as much work. “I’m paying twenty
thousand for a girl with really, crazy, terrific, out-of-this-world
blue eyes.”

He looked at her shrewdly, which was fair
because he was shrewd. Packed as it was with sweaty men, this
hookah bar was just a place to park his ass while he sucked on
girl-sweat smoke and scanned the Net for prospects.

“
You’re not going to pay,” he
said. He had an accent—Eurokan? Sinomer? What did she know? “It’s a
plot.”

“
It is,” she said. “But I’ll tell
you what—find the girl and keep your ten percent.”

“
That is not so much money
considering the risk.”

“
What risk?”

“
The risk of doing business with
you, Saru.”

She grit her teeth. Tough rap to
beat.

“
Fine, then. What price
is
worth the risk? And remember there’s no netting on this one. I want
honest-to-God human interaction. Send your people out to talk, have
a chat, get to know the trappers.”

“
In that, too, is a
cost.”

“
That’s why I’m saying it. Give it
to me all up front, no surprises.”

“
Ten.”

“
Ten
thousand
?”

“
It is much work.”

“
It’s
one
girl.”

“
That is the point. It is one
girl. You are looking for one girl, a specific girl. This I see. A
girl with very blue eyes. There will be many who want this money,
and many false trails. This is much work. My associates do not work
for free. I do not pay them in smoke.”

“
Fine. Half and half. Get to
work.”

She’d expected that. She handed him the first
five thousand dollars and his eyes rolled a little as he sent out
commands to all his runners. They’d spread out around the Fish
dropping word of the bounty. She’d forgotten to specify that she
wanted the girl intact, but Lou, for all his unpleasantness,
treated his girls right enough. And anyway, that was the second
part of the plan. If any of the catchers happened to die in a fire,
well, then she’d know she was on the right track.

She left the bar and decided to take a stroll;
it made her feel like she was doing something, contributing. Lou’s
was on the border, the crossover area between the real city with
the real people with jobs and incomes and lives, and the Fish. You
could see it—trash everywhere, fenced-in plots of nothing, and then
a restaurant, a dive, a few homes with the lights on and then a
line of crumbling, caved-in brownstones. She didn’t like it, too
much ambiguity. There needed to be clear lines: good city, bad
city; elziland, and hippy coop. None of this blending; it made it
too hard to see where she was going, what was about. This kid on
the corner—what was he waiting for? Was that a gun bulge in his
jacket; was he ready to spray? Or was it a trick, a fold of the
cloth, a banana, a twelve-inch dick?

Condoms on the ground, needles, elzi lying in
heaps of trash, and a dead elzi just lying there, guts all pulled
out, run over and left. Another crawling his way over, easy meal,
easy calories, easy way to keep going. She walked faster for no
reason, moving closer to the Fish, away from the screech of cars
and the angry honks. Not so much going on now. Getting into the
hiplands, with their own rules. It was a safe place, safer than
most, at least, with its rules and customs. Not quick to judge, the
hips; she liked that much about them. Everyone was down for a
reason and more often than not you were born to it. It was quieter
here too; she saw gardens, passed a hip with a shotgun, took his
nod and hustled by.

Something in the corner of her eye—a flicker, a
motion. A tail? She kept on walking, activating the tiny camera on
the back of her earlobe and looking through her implants. Nothing,
just the hip scratching his ass. It happened again, a flicker, her
whole vision now like a screen on the fritz. She switched back to
her eyes. A cold, sick feeling was rolling up in her stomach. She
pushed it down, gritting her teeth and walking faster. Again a
flicker, longer this time. How much time did she lose, a second? A
minute? The cold, sick knot moved up her throat and she recognized
the fear, the dread. The brick wall to the left of her was
swimming, swaying like a liquid but just the wall. A two-second
delay on the right side of her vision, a crow flying past and then
again and again, repeating his journey from telephone pole to
roadkill.