Dead Man's Hand Read Online Free Page A

have
any idea how much money you could get for tracing Lester Rincon’s
keystrokes?”
    I shook my head. “Kind of hard to trace now,
though, aren’t they?”
    “ Not necessarily.” She sat
down again, a little closer to me this time, and caressed the edge
of the bag. “Muscle memory. You know? When I’ve been doing almost
nothing but programming, I’ve been told I punch code in my
sleep.”
    By whom? I wanted to ask, but kept my mouth
shut.
    “ Lester Rincon wouldn’t
have been any different,” she went on.
    “ I still don’t get it,” I
said, and I didn’t mind sounding like an idiot now.
    “ Or where you fit
in.”
    “ Right.”
    She shrugged casually. “It’s simple, really.
I need a re-animator. If I can wake that hand up and put it on my
keyboard, it’ll start punching code that I can retrace.”
    “ To trade with Clancy
Grommet in exchange for your father’s debt.”
    “ Exactly.”
    “ You think he’ll
bite?”
    “ He’ll bite. If for no
other reason than to find out what Yancy had Rincon working on
before Pete got to him.”
    I looked at the hand for a moment. I wasn’t
an expert on such things, but it did still look viable. I’d seen
things far more decayed brought into use by skilled
re-animators.
    “ But you’ll only have
half,” I said. “One hand, half the code. Where’d Pete put the rest
of the body?”
    “ He just said it was gone.
I didn’t want to know. Just having one hand’s not a problem,
though. I’ll run a program that can detect the gaps, the split
seconds that this right hand waits for the left to do its part.
Once I get enough fragments and see where the gaps are, it won’t be
much of a problem to fill in what’s missing. There’ll only be so
many possibilities, after all. I can run all the possibles, discard
what’s not viable code.”
    “ Brilliant,” I said.
“You’ve got two more problems, though.”
    I could tell she didn’t like the sound of
that, so I let her sit with it for a second before saying
anything.
    “ One, you don’t know for
sure it’s Lester Rincon’s hand. It didn’t strike you as odd that
Clancy Grommet would let a trophy like that walk back out the door
with Pete? He’d want to rub Yancy’s nose in it, don’t you
think?”
    “ Pete said Clancy never
keeps the trophies he brings. Squeamish, if you can believe it.
Plus, he said it’ll mess with Yancy more if he doesn’t know what
happened to Rincon. He may find a way to make him think Rincon’s
gone over to the other side. Tough to do if Yancy knows Rincon’s
dead.”
    “ Or only has one
hand.”
    She nodded, a satisfied smile on her lips.
She’d thought that one through all right, but how about the
rest?
    So I went on. “Two, I don’t see why you need
me to get a re-animator. Once they know what you’re doing, there’s
plenty that would take the job even if you don’t have the money up
front.”
    “ Yes, but not any of the
good ones,” she said. “Anybody with a decent reputation is bound to
pass on this unless I can offer them a hell of a lot more cash than
I’ve got right now. And the idea isn’t to get money out of this
deal but to buy back my dad’s debt. I don’t need a cut-rate
re-animator for this. It’s top shelf or it won’t work. I’ve got no
pull with people like that, but you do.”
    “ How do you
know?”
    “ I know a lot, Ace. That
shouldn’t surprise you.”
    It didn’t. Still, I needed to make sure she
wasn’t bluffing.
    “ Okay, I’ll bite. Just what
is it you think you know?”
    Her smile turned sly now, like a cat’s would
be if cats could smile. “You pulled Bascom Quibble’s ass out of the
fire not two months ago. He’s who I want.”
    I nodded. It made sense. Bascom Quibble was
the best re-animator in the city, the most in demand. He could name
his price. Most of his product went to his uncle’s toy factory. A
lot of people would be bothered to know that all the Quibble brand
dolls and puzzles and race cars they bought