city blues 02 - angel city blues Read Online Free Page B
Author: jeff edwards
actually. First: when this case was over, Bruhn would still be a cop. And second: Vivien Forsyth’s umbrella of money and power would not cover me forever.
I plugged the key chip into its slot on the control yoke. The instrument panel flickered green as the plasma display flared to life. The computer beeped and gronked as it ran automatic diagnostics and sequenced the car’s various systems on line. Then there was the wail of the turbines spinning up. They seemed overly-loud after the well-heeled silence of Vivien’s showboat.
Bruhn’s ticket hung at the upper edge of my vision. I could handle him. I could handle this case. Money, power, and bullshit aside, it was a simple missing person job. How hard could it be?
I punched a music chip into the stereo slot: a collection of Blues tunes that I had transferred onto microchip myself, from a forty-year old compact disk. As near as I could determine, I was one of about nine people left who still listened to the Blues. There’s not enough of a market for anyone to turn a profit by re-mastering the likes of Lonny Johnson, Rusty Parker, or Billie Holiday. So, the few copies that are left are all amateur re-recordings made by dinosaurs like me.
I pressed the play button, and the whine of the turbines got lost in the buttery-sandpaper voice of John Lee Hooker, singing about cheap whiskey and love-gone-wrong. I fished out a cigarette to finish setting the mood.
There are people in this business who swear that they can smell trouble coming. Who knows? It might even be true. Perhaps the twenty-first century edition of Homo sapiens has clawed its way far enough up the natural selection curve to evolve a really useful pro-survival trait, like a hyper-acute intuition for danger. A tight little bundle of neural receptors somewhere deep in the medial forebrain, calibrated to the twin carrier frequencies of adrenaline and bad news. Or, perhaps it’s something more ancient, some primal remnant of the animal hindbrain that can snuffle out stray whiffs of disaster like an olfactronic sensor vacuuming up the air and straining it for microscopic traces of explosives or drugs. Or maybe it’s all just wishful thinking, a natural human resistance to the idea that we are frail creatures clinging to existence in a universe that can blindside any one of us without warning.
Whatever its origin, if such a thing as the mysterious danger-sense even existed, I obviously didn’t possess it. If I had, I would have driven away right then... Away from Vivien Forsyth—away from her daughter—away from the entire case, and everything that was coming with it.
I punched the button that kicked in the blowers. The Pontiac rose softly as the apron inflated. I backed slowly out of Leanda Forsyth’s parking stall, and drove into the night.
CHAPTER 2
I cruised down Santa Monica Boulevard through the heart of the city, passing out of Dome #7 and the gleaming chrome and glass of Beverly Hills¾through Domes 8 and 10, and the frenetic glitz of West Hollywood¾into that squalid little haven called Dome #12: East Los Angeles.
I parked at the corner of 55th and Fortuna, and walked the two blocks to the barricade. I don’t live in Dome #12; I live in its neighboring enclave, the Zone.
Its official title was Los Angeles Urban Environmental Enclosure 12-A, but the name itself was the fanciest thing about the place. It wasn’t even a dome in its own right, just a huge geodesic blister of translucent polycarbon grafted onto the eastern flank of Dome #12. It was an ugly thing, as much like the soaring arcs of the other domes as a remora is like the shark that it clings to. But it kept out the acid rain, and cut the solar ultraviolet down to something that the human body could tolerate, so those of us who lived there didn’t complain. Or rather, if we did complain, nobody listened.
I certainly don’t have any room to complain, myself. Unlike most of the other Zoners, I could afford to live somewhere
I plugged the key chip into its slot on the control yoke. The instrument panel flickered green as the plasma display flared to life. The computer beeped and gronked as it ran automatic diagnostics and sequenced the car’s various systems on line. Then there was the wail of the turbines spinning up. They seemed overly-loud after the well-heeled silence of Vivien’s showboat.
Bruhn’s ticket hung at the upper edge of my vision. I could handle him. I could handle this case. Money, power, and bullshit aside, it was a simple missing person job. How hard could it be?
I punched a music chip into the stereo slot: a collection of Blues tunes that I had transferred onto microchip myself, from a forty-year old compact disk. As near as I could determine, I was one of about nine people left who still listened to the Blues. There’s not enough of a market for anyone to turn a profit by re-mastering the likes of Lonny Johnson, Rusty Parker, or Billie Holiday. So, the few copies that are left are all amateur re-recordings made by dinosaurs like me.
I pressed the play button, and the whine of the turbines got lost in the buttery-sandpaper voice of John Lee Hooker, singing about cheap whiskey and love-gone-wrong. I fished out a cigarette to finish setting the mood.
There are people in this business who swear that they can smell trouble coming. Who knows? It might even be true. Perhaps the twenty-first century edition of Homo sapiens has clawed its way far enough up the natural selection curve to evolve a really useful pro-survival trait, like a hyper-acute intuition for danger. A tight little bundle of neural receptors somewhere deep in the medial forebrain, calibrated to the twin carrier frequencies of adrenaline and bad news. Or, perhaps it’s something more ancient, some primal remnant of the animal hindbrain that can snuffle out stray whiffs of disaster like an olfactronic sensor vacuuming up the air and straining it for microscopic traces of explosives or drugs. Or maybe it’s all just wishful thinking, a natural human resistance to the idea that we are frail creatures clinging to existence in a universe that can blindside any one of us without warning.
Whatever its origin, if such a thing as the mysterious danger-sense even existed, I obviously didn’t possess it. If I had, I would have driven away right then... Away from Vivien Forsyth—away from her daughter—away from the entire case, and everything that was coming with it.
I punched the button that kicked in the blowers. The Pontiac rose softly as the apron inflated. I backed slowly out of Leanda Forsyth’s parking stall, and drove into the night.
CHAPTER 2
I cruised down Santa Monica Boulevard through the heart of the city, passing out of Dome #7 and the gleaming chrome and glass of Beverly Hills¾through Domes 8 and 10, and the frenetic glitz of West Hollywood¾into that squalid little haven called Dome #12: East Los Angeles.
I parked at the corner of 55th and Fortuna, and walked the two blocks to the barricade. I don’t live in Dome #12; I live in its neighboring enclave, the Zone.
Its official title was Los Angeles Urban Environmental Enclosure 12-A, but the name itself was the fanciest thing about the place. It wasn’t even a dome in its own right, just a huge geodesic blister of translucent polycarbon grafted onto the eastern flank of Dome #12. It was an ugly thing, as much like the soaring arcs of the other domes as a remora is like the shark that it clings to. But it kept out the acid rain, and cut the solar ultraviolet down to something that the human body could tolerate, so those of us who lived there didn’t complain. Or rather, if we did complain, nobody listened.
I certainly don’t have any room to complain, myself. Unlike most of the other Zoners, I could afford to live somewhere
Readers choose
Richard North Patterson
Liz Schulte
Diane Michele Crawford
Jackie French
J.L. Beck
C. D. Breadner
John Lawrence Reynolds
Avery Williams
Evelyn Adams