Necropolis Read Online Free Page B

work yet?”
    “Must be a fresh one,” Shorter opined.
    I kept trying. “I used to be—”
    I was thrown against the brick wall. As skin tore and flesh abraded, I realized the sensation was strangely comforting. Pain was the only old friend who’d stuck around.
    “I was on the job,” I managed to croak.
    “Right,” replied Shorter. “And I’m Martin Luther King.”
    He jabbed his baton into my diaphragm. Stars flashed. I dropped to my knees again, not even able to gasp.
    “You know what I like about you freaks?” asked Taller. “You can take twice the beating a norm can, and you won’t die. You just—” A fist to my kidneys. “—won’t—” A sap to the solar plexus. “—die.” A baton across my face.  
    Darkness screamed at me. My mouth worked, a fish out of water. Shorty laughed. “He’s still trying to talk.” He yanked my head back by my white hair.
    “What’s that, freak?”
    “I didn’t… touch… that woman…”
    Grins. “Good for you.”
    They descended on me with fists and batons.

5
    KOVACS/LORETTA
    K ovacs sat in the Desoto, waiting for the whore. She was a new girl out of Yousef’s stable. Thought she was hot shit. Thought that she didn’t have to play by the rules. It was Kovac’s job to show her how wrong she was.
    It was a standard piece of freelance muscle work. Nothing unusual, but Kovacs was unsettled anyway, for two reasons. First, it was odd that Yousef wasn’t dealing with Loretta himself. That was a pimp’s number one job: keep the bitches in line. You handled all problems personally, because in the end all you had was your street cred.  
    Secondly, Yousef had sounded nervous on the phone. Yousef never sounded nervous. In the ten or so gigs Kovacs had performed for him, Yousef had been dependably brutal and indifferent to risk.  
    Kovacs thought about the platinum-blonde chippy he had stashed away in his Hell’s Kitchen efficiency. Okay, she wasn’t much. She was way past prime, but that made her desperate, which was good. She rubbed his ugly feet, brought him whiskey, did anything he wanted, as long as he paid the gas bill and kept her in hooch. He was lord and master. What more could you ask for? He wanted to be there right now, in the peeling bedroom, with the radiator ticking and bathing the room in oppressive heat. With his girl tending to his every need. That’d be a whole lot better than this mess.
    Next to him in the passenger seat, Drone scanned the fog in a variety of surveillance modes. Kovacs didn’t see why he should expect any trouble from this cooze, but it never hurt to be careful.
    Because Yousef had been nervous.
    “What time is it?”
    “Twelve fifteen thirty-three,” said Drone. Its tone belied its discomfort with the current operation.
    “Look, this ain’t payola,” said Kovacs for the third time. “It ain’t cream. This is sideline stuff, okay? Hired muscle.”
    “Your body fat percentage is 37.”
    “It’s seman—a figure of speech, dickhead!” Kovacs ground his jaw. This fucking contraption got under his skin faster than anything alive or dead—and that included three ex-wives.
    “You won’t hurt her?”
    “We’re gonna put the fear a’ God in her, that’s all.”
    “What if we, I don’t know… traumatize her?”
    Kovac’s belly laugh threatened the continued existence of the steering column. “She’s a junkie whore! Her dad was rod man for the Hartley crew. She was born traumatized.”
    Drone clicked and fidgeted, but said nothing more.
    The Department’s Virtual Person liasion had once told Kovacs something interesting about his morphinium partner. Drone had chosen its own generic name and shape. Although it could, within limits, shapeshift into anything it desired, it opted to emulated the robot stereotypes of the 1930s. Hence the functionless lights on its chest, the inverted triangle of a head (complete with camera-lens eyes and speaker-grill mouth), the accordion arms—all mounted on a cylindrical body.