city blues 02 - angel city blues Read Online Free Page A

actually fortuitous that he decided to be difficult early-on. It made his education quick and relatively painless. Better for all of us. He’ll be petulant for a while—his ego demands it—but I believe you’ll find him cooperative.”
    I nodded. “And how will you handle me, when I become difficult?”
    “I have no intention of handling you,” she said. “As long as you’re working to get my daughter back, you can prance around in women’s underwear and act like a flaming son of a bitch. I don’t care in the slightest. And, I frankly don’t care whose throats you have to cut along the way.”
    I climbed out of the car and stood up. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
    I took a step back and watched while the door closed and the apron inflated. Vivien’s limo glided away from the curb.

    My own car was a six-year old Pontiac Shockwave with fading metallic blue paint. It was a good car, not quite the opposite end of the spectrum from Vivien’s limousine, but a pretty far cry nonetheless. The alarm system emitted a warning bleep to notify me that I was entering the car’s sensor perimeter. I pulled out the key chip and let my car scan it, so the poor dumb machine would know that Daddy was home. It bleeped again, a friendly welcoming tone this time, and then it buzzed once to tell me that someone had been close enough to my car to make physical contact. I waited, but there were no more of the ominous buzzes, telling me that my unknown visitor hadn’t actually attempted to enter the vehicle, or open any of its maintenance accesses.
    I looked the car over carefully. My visitor had plastered a bright orange decal to the upper edge of the windshield. It was a traffic ticket, citing me for parking in the Residents-Only section of the lot. (I was parked in Leanda Forsyth’s spot, on the theory that she wouldn’t be using it any time soon.) The signature block at the bottom of the decal was signed by Officer L. V. Bruhn. Under it, he had written ‘Just practicing for my new career.’
    I knew better than to mess with the decal. It would only yield to a tailored molecular solvent that was jealously guarded by the police. Any other sort of tampering would release an electro-chemical reaction which would permanently etch the LAPD logo into the glass, rendering the car undriveable. In addition, the orange pigment in the decal was a chemical taggant that would indelibly dye the fingers of anyone stupid enough to meddle with it, making them easily identifiable to the police. Supposedly, the chemical taggant was so microscopically fine that it could penetrate the pores of just about any gloves made. I didn’t know if that last part was true, but the rumor was usually enough to keep casual vandals from messing with the decals on other people’s cars with the intent of ruining their windshields.
    A small rectangle in the upper right hand corner of the decal was a photo-active matrix, showing the date and time— November 10, 2065 / 7:51 p.m. —followed by a string of changing digits that advised me of the number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds remaining until this citation expired. If the decal wasn’t removed before the counter reached zero, in thirty days (minus a few minutes), the electro-chemical reaction would self-activate, melting the accusatory LAPD logo into my windshield.
    I slipped the key chip through the lock sensor. Unlike Vivien’s obedient gull-wings, my door did not fawn all over itself getting out of my way. But it did unlock itself, which was close enough for me. I opened the door and climbed in.
    Seen from inside the car, the decal was located high enough above my line of sight not to present an obstruction to my driving, but it did keep drawing my eyes back to it, the way that a sore tooth attracts your tongue no matter how hard you try to ignore it. I’d pay it. I had no choice, as Bruhn very well knew. It was hardly a crippling shot, but his message was clear enough. Two messages,