The Big Sheep Read Online Free

my first task as Keane’s employee was to locate the funds for paying my own salary. Keane possessed a bewildering array of bank accounts and investments, the value of which I eventually established at nearly a million new dollars, but for those first few weeks I was basically writing myself checks and holding my breath. Even after spending three years sorting out his accounts, it wasn’t uncommon for us to be two or three months in arrears on our lease. Currently it was closer to four. Hopefully the Case of the Lost Sheep would bring us close to being current, if I could keep Keane from spending the money on a new aircar.
    There was little doubt that Keane needed me, but I never did figure out exactly how I was so “invaluable” to him on the hologram case. I think maybe it helped him to have a sane person around to bounce ideas off. Either that, or he just liked having an audience. When we weren’t on a case, I felt like a babysitter for a manic-depressive eight-year-old. When we were on a case, I alternated between feeling like I was chaperoning a chimpanzee on acid and having flashbacks to Mr. Feldman’s advanced calculus class, where I’d been placed in tenth grade, despite my lack of mathematical aptitude, as a result of a computer error. Life with Erasmus Keane was not a low-stress existence, but on most days it beat the hell out of the boredom of a corporate job.
    â€œWhat do you make of Dr. Takemago?” asked Keane on the way back to the office.
    I took a deep breath. Questions like that were often tests. Keane had come to some conclusion and wanted to know if I’d reached it as well. Not so much to confirm his own hypothesis as to determine how much of it, with my feeble neurotypical brain, I had managed to piece together. “Well,” I said, “she’s clearly hiding something.”
    Keane let out a derisive sigh.
    â€œSomething about the missing sheep,” I tried.
    â€œYes?” Keane said.
    I thought for a moment. “Hang on,” I said, feigning a need to concentrate on my driving. There weren’t many other cars in the air at this time in the afternoon, but we were nearing a notorious bottleneck. Unlike in many areas of the city, where you could make a beeline to your destination, traffic in the downtown area was routed along a few narrowly defined channels. Sometimes when traffic got really bad, I would take a shortcut over the DZ, but we were in no hurry, so there was no point in risking some bored banger taking a potshot at us. I eased the car into the eastbound channel and put it on auto. A light went on, indicating that the car had successfully synced with the city’s traffic routing system, and it settled into a comfortable niche between two other eastbound vehicles. I’d take back control once we were clear of Downtown.
    This channel lined up more or less with the old I-10, which was basically an automotive graveyard at this point. The freeways had gotten so hopelessly snarled with traffic during the Collapse that nobody’d ever been able to unsnarl them. In fact, nobody had even really tried. There seemed to be sort of a general agreement that the Los Angeles freeway system was an experiment that hadn’t really worked out, like nuclear power or rap metal. These days, if you wanted to get somewhere in LA, you had to take the surface streets; pay to drive on one of the privately funded, ultrafast expressways known as Uberbahns, which had been constructed on top of the old highway system; or—if you had the means—take an aircar. Thanks to the occasional deep-pocketed client like Esper, Erasmus Keane had the means, barely. His car was an old Nissan, one of their first aircar models, but it was in reasonably good shape and beat being stuck on the surface streets.
    â€œWhat about the sheep?” asked Keane impatiently. He was sitting, his seat reclined as far as it would go, his feet up on the dash, his eyes