Finn's Golem Read online

  I thought about it for half a second and then filled the pockets of the light raincoat I was wearing with every piece of notepaper and stray desktop flotsam that I could see, except for the one that said: butter, eggs, cheese. I was pretty sure I could remember that one. Or at least that it wouldn’t kill me to forget it.

  I opened the drawers and saw a QuikSwipe. Fifty credit maximum. I put it in my front pocket and dug around, but couldn’t find the ExchangeStick that should have been there too. Without that main credit code drive, I wouldn’t be carrying much more than pocket change. Was I making too much of this? Was I just mugged? Did that son of a bitch take my ExStick?

  I looked for another minute before I started slapping my pockets in desperation. I found a spare charge rod for the GAT and a small paperback book with a picture of a man in a fedora holding a breathless blonde roughly by the shoulders with a look of harsh disdain on his face. The title was Murder, Sweet Murder. Deeply professional. The cover was dog-eared and the pages were yellowed. I flipped the pages in case it were actually a notebook, or a concealed carrying place for my ExStick. Nada. It was a book all right. I shrugged. If nothing else, at least I wouldn’t remember the ending.

  I tried the last pocket in the coat and came up with a fat wad of cash. Actual bills – paper money. I just stared at it. There had to be ten, maybe fifteen thousand credits worth, and all of it just about useless. I put it back where I found it and tried not to think about it. I had enough problems.

  My hand was on the doorknob when I remembered the nasty open wound on my head. With a hand cannon practically still smoking under my arm, I didn’t need the attention that would bring. I looked around the room for something that I knew had to be there somewhere. The book was a dead giveaway. I spotted it on top of a filing cabinet – a grey felt hat that looked like it fell out of a black and white picture, and was shortly thereafter run over by a truck. I pulled it on my head. It stung where I’d been hit, and the band sat a little tight. I must be gaining weight. Just another reason to love today.

  If I was in the middle of something, it was sink or swim. Maybe this Felco could throw me a line. Only one way to be sure.

  At the last moment I realized I had no idea where my keys were, so I left the place unlocked and called for Della to close up when she went home.

  She said nothing.

  Bitch.

  THREE

  I hit the street and discovered that it was still daylight. The sun hung low over the rooftops of the crumbling walk-ups and faded billboards that sat atop them. The sidewalks had the slow, menacing sort of bustle that one feels when there are a hundred thousand people with nothing to do and only enough doorways for fifty or sixty thousand of them to loiter in at any given time.

  The streets were crowded with peddlers pulling their wares just quickly enough to still be classed as a vehicle in motion, each one barkering to anyone in the doorways who might be inclined to care about the once-in-a-lifetime values to be found within their rolling shops. Rickshaws hustled past in search of a fare. The occasional motorized bicycle zipped by, their cobbled-together spare-parts motors belching out fumes of whatever they’d been able to distill to keep the machine running over the cracked and broken asphalt of the old street surface. Classy.

  I looked up at the street sign and learned that I was at the corner of Coliseum and A-P9. Swell. My office was in the middle of Section 23. I abandoned the hope that I might yet prove to be a wealthy eccentric. Section 23 hadn’t seen a credit’s worth of development since the Blackbird Riots twenty years earlier. The state had seized most of the property from the slumlords after the riots, and then sold it at cut-rate prices to their supporters after the next election. The slumlords had challenged the process in court and the whole thing had been bouncing from judge to judge ever since. Meanwhile, the new owners, whom one may safely refer to as the second batch of slumlords, hadn’t thought fit to send good money after bad on the off chance that they, in turn, might be stripped of their property, so the whole zone had decayed into a near no-man’s land.

  I shook my head a little. Sure, this was common knowledge, but why should I know all this and not my age or shoe size? I looked at my feet. Probably eleven and a half, but that didn’t seem important right now. I had a certain amount of history and geography. I knew how to check the charge meter on the gun. I knew where my ExStick ought to have been and what a colossal pain in the ass it was going to be without it tonight, not to mention how the jar-heads down at ’Frame were going to make me dance to replace it without knowing any of my security questions. It was going to be a DNA scan for me. Good times.

  It was about this time that I noticed there were perhaps a hundred pairs of eyes on me from the doorways across the street. Could it be that Drake Finn, Private Investigator, was somehow less than universally beloved in his own Sector? Or was it just that I was the only guy in eight blocks in any direction that was standing still and looking around like a lost tourist? I thought about letting the shoulder holster flash from under the coat just a little, but dismissed the notion on the off chance that I looked more like a cop than I thought I did, in which case I’d really be screwed. Cops don’t travel in single digits in Section 23.

  The dilemma of my casual egress was solved for me by a long, black Hov that came roaring up the street, eight feet higher than the legal limit, flowing right over the street traffic and blowing hot, ion-charged air straight down in the process. Dust-filled whirlwinds raced in every direction as the Hov set down fifty feet away. There was very little protest from the crowd, and almost no tangible reaction beyond the sudden movement of a dozen local working girls towards the vehicle to drop off the day’s receipts. Who said there was no industry down here?

  There was a sudden murmur through the doorways as people gazed up above the rooftops. A police dirigible floated into view and hung above the street. Like all of my fellow scum, I resisted the impulse to run. The cops weren’t here for me – they were probably keeping a routine eye on the pimps in the Hov. Still, there were at least six good reasons why I ought to move along, which is exactly what I did.

  If there was one thing you could say about keeping an office in Section 23, it was central. Some of the best and the worst parts of Bountiful City were just a short hop from there. Nowhere else could offer that without paying the kind of premium that I couldn’t possibly have afforded.

  The best way to hit the Greyside Gates was to flag a rickshaw to a Hop Station and roll north on Barrington Grid. But since my QuikSwipe carried a fifty credit maximum, and I had no desire to check the balance while haggling with a rickshaw driver, or attract attention to myself by flashing paper money, I took the better, or at least cheaper, part of valor. I turned right on A-P9 and hoofed it towards Synthtown. I’d be hard-pressed to make the Golden Spider Café in an hour, but I’d make it all right.

  The paper money was bothering me. It was bothering me a lot. Sure, it was legal tender, and they still printed it because economists said without it the credit system couldn’t exist, but I didn’t see much logic in that. Almost no one wanted it. It was illegal to refuse, but no one was ever charged with that. In fact, just carrying it was like holding a neon sign that said you were up to something you required untraceable funds for. You could kick up a fuss if someone refused it, but you’d be more likely to be picked up and held on suspicion yourself than to get any satisfaction from your protest.

  I could accept the idea that a private detective would need a certain amount of the stuff for informants, greasing palms, that kind of thing. But the wad of bills in my coat pocket just now was a little beyond the pale. Was it mine? Was I to pay it out for some service on behalf of this Felco? Should I, in fact, have already done so? Too many damn questions. I pulled the brim of my hat down against the wind generated by the fleet of Hovs on the Avenue of Martyrs and walked into Synthtown.

  The place was colorful, you had to give it that. They did a pretty decent job pulling in a tourist crowd, even if they were mostly rube
s and sex tourists looking for the sort of rough service they couldn’t expect from flesh and blood without protest. The buildings were brightly painted, and the main thoroughfares were clean. There were smiles that were polite and warm enough to make you forget that they were generated by complex algorithms. But beneath the surface you could sense a pulse of teeming, purposeless desperation.

  I brushed past the grey skin of former factory workers, the near-human flesh tones of former domestics, the strange, ill-shapen bodies of units created for a single industrial purpose that they would never perform again. The Synthetic Emancipation Act had brought their kind new freedoms, new rights and in the process ended the costly creation of artificial life-forms at a stroke. It was a backhanded triumph for the Labor Guilds. Jobs for men, not for machines, they had always said. Never mind that Artificals weren’t exactly machines – never let the truth get in the way of a good slogan.

  I looked straight ahead. I held my head high. I walked like a cop. No one said a word to me for fourteen blocks. I admit it, they gave me the creeps.

  After I crossed Rockford, I could see the Greyside Gates looming out above the open space of Sobchak Park. The park itself was surrounded by a solid wall of vendors, built up like a loud, aggressive shantytown of retail dreams gone awry, but I skirted them and made my way around. I found the café without too much trouble, wedged between two buildings that both looked like they might have collapsed a generation ago were the Golden Spider not between them to hold them up.

  The interior of the café was more or less exactly what I’d expected. I didn’t know if I’d ever been there before but I sincerely hoped not. There was a funk hanging in the air that was either a decaying raccoon under the floorboards or cabbage soup, which was purportedly the soup of the day. The general condition of the chalkboard on which the words were written suggested that it had been the soup of the day for the last several years. I noticed that none of the seven sad and lonely looking patrons were eating it, or anything else.

  I settled into the booth that struck me as the least grimy, which was almost certainly a trick of the light. I tried hard to block out the blare of the NewsNet that had broken in above the canned music. NewsNet breaks were mandatory and simulcast over every licensed broadcast medium. An informed public was a happy public, the official line read. It would still have read the same even if they had seen the patrons of the Golden Spider, but only because the official line never changed. Ever.

  The perfectly modulated female voice opened with Politics. It always opened with Politics. This was likely because the rules were made by politicians. I sat back and tried not to listen, in spite of the fact that the driving music underscore had been created by teams of psychologists to make it impossible to ignore. So instead I tried to guess which of the other patrons might be Felco. None of them looked like they were waiting for anyone, which is exactly how one ought to look if one was waiting to meet someone in a seedy place like this.

  I told the girl who eventually wandered over that I was there to meet someone and that his name was Felco. There was a momentary flash of panic in her eyes as she pulled me out of the booth I had settled into and led me along a corridor towards the back. We turned into the kitchen briefly and strolled past sights that I ought never to have seen but a public health inspector certainly should have. The NewsNet blared in here too, above the hissing and moaning of the specials and the staff. The reader had moved on to Civic Events. It was always Civic Events next. I found myself wondering if she were any more real than Della.

  My guide darted past a counter of meat that could charitably be described as rancid. I looked away. I tried to focus instead on the girl’s legs but they were scrawny, or her ass but there was nothing much to it to distinguish it from that of a teenaged boy. There were no joys for me in the scenery here. She turned and gave me a stern look as if she knew what I were thinking, but in reality, she was probably just making sure that the clouds of steam from the soup pots hadn’t killed me in my tracks.

  We came to a dark and narrow hallway in the back of the building. The tiles were old and lifting with the perpetual damp. The girl stopped at the door at the extreme end of the hallway and gestured with her hand as if she were a model on a game show, apparently without irony. I thanked her and slipped her a ten credit note. She looked at it as if I had just handed her a dead fish and walked away scowling. I decided to stop trying to make friends.

  I hovered at the doorway for a moment, uncertain. From somewhere in the depths of the kitchen I could hear the pulsing background music of the NewsNet change as it switched to the final act – the Police Report. Everyone in earshot froze and listened out of long habit.

  “Reports are in this hour of a man found dead in an alley in Section 23 with heavy plasma wounds. Police have not released the man’s identity at this time, but are looking for persons who may be able to help them with their inquiries.”

  The bustle of the kitchen returned as everyone in the building except me decided that the Police Report held nothing for them to fear today. I was happy for them, but unless Section 23 had been busy, I was probably carrying a murder weapon around and I still had no idea who our friendly neighborhood corpse was or why I’d shot him, apart from the sparkling glass of brain damage he’d poured me.

  I turned the doorknob and threw it open. It was time to get some answers. I never heard the buzz of the gun’s static charge firing up, but I saw it thrust into my face as soon as the door was clear of the little man at the desk. I was a sitting duck.

  “Don’t move,” he said.

  I didn’t.

  FOUR

  The gun was an ACS Monitor, probably a -26, maybe a -29. They were popular with the personal protection crowd. They were also cheap, plentiful and made entirely of compressed plastic, which helped to get them past routine scans. All of which meant they were also popular with the scumbag crowd. I considered them more of a ladies’ gun. They lacked the “kills you and the four guys behind you” reliability of the GAT series, but there were no plasma generators to burn out on you, and it self-charged from ambient static if you gave it enough time.

  Of course the self-charging feature meant that additional power cells were hard to find, since they suggested that whatever you were using your Monitor for, you needed more than four, maybe five shots every twenty-four hours, which was a lot of burglars no matter what neighborhood you lived in. Once you had them, changing the cells also took a small Phillips-head screwdriver and about five minutes even if you practiced. This made them less than reliable in my book. I could have a fresh twenty shot rod in the GAT in less than four seconds, and I knew it in my bones.

  Having said all that, the Double-Z was in my shoulder holster under my coat and the Monitor was pointed directly at my head, which gave my friend behind the desk the distinct advantage. If it were only a -26, it might throw less than the 6 milliamps that would stop my heart instantly, unless he hit me center mass. If I moved quickly and tried to take it in the shoulder… The pistol twitched, as if the little man had guessed my thoughts. I decided to make nice.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have knocked. I was looking for a friend of mine.”

  “Who are you?” There was fear in the tone, but I could tell it was the same voice that had been stroking Della’s thighs an hour ago.

  I smiled what I hoped was a calming, disarming smile. Emphasis on the disarming.

  “Nice sort of table manners you’ve got, Mister Felco. You point a pistol at all of your guests?” I said.

  “Don’t be cute. Who are you?” he repeated with a new thrust of the weapon.

  “I thought we needed to trust each other completely,” I began.

  The hand stopped trembling momentarily. That was a start.

  “On account of us not being able to trust anyone else.” I smiled again.

  The hand lowered, just a little. It would have been the perfect opportunity to take his gun from him and shove it up his nose, but I decided to wait it out.
/>   “You are Detective Drake Finn?” he said, his eyes narrowed.

  “I’m Finn all right,” I said. “You did extend an invitation.”

  He smiled weakly. “You are not quite what I expected,” he said, relieved, but not yet enough to lower the gun. I had nothing to say to that, so I didn’t. A moment passed, and then because it seemed to be my line, I raised an eyebrow at the Monitor which was still clutched in his sweaty hand. He smiled apologetically.

  “Forgive me. I wish only to make sure that you are not armed.”

  “Of course I’m armed,” I practically spat. “I wouldn’t be much good to you if I went around unarmed, would I?”

  He sucked his teeth a little and considered. There was wisdom in this, but it still made him nervous. “You will please remove your sidearm and set it slowly on the table.”

  “Sure thing,” I said. I calmly pulled the GAT from its home and watched Felco’s eyes get big as dinner plates as he took it in. It was a good looking piece, I had to admit. I stepped slowly towards the table between us and lowered the gun. Felco followed the gun with his eyes. I decided that I’d had about enough so I took the Monitor from him with a smooth motion of my left hand and cracked him across the face with the butt of it. He fell backwards in his chair, more surprised than hurt, though I was prepared to tip the scales for him if need be.

  “You can have this back at the end of the semester,” I said, slipping his gun into the pocket of my coat.

  “How dare you?” he blustered, his eyes welling with the shock. “How dare you?”

  “Stop it,” I said, sitting on the corner of the table and resting the GAT on my knee gently. “That puss of yours has been slapped before, and it’ll be slapped again if you can’t keep your pistol in your pants.”