Author's Note: This is not a crossover but I envisioned the narrator to look and sound like Samuel Jackson from The Avengers movie…so I gave him that name. …but this has nothing to do with the marvel universe. It just picks up just a little after Deckard leaves the police force.
A Kiss for the Dying
You don't get a second chance to make a learners mistake when Bladerunning. It's an unforgiving profession.
It was December in the city. The warm dirty rains of summer had long given way to the cooler dirty rains of winter. It was night.
I lowered the wheels and prepared to settle the unmarked police spinner down on the street. The auto radar wouldn't let me touch down until a hole opened up in the traffic below large enough for me to land…and that didn't look like that was going to happen soon.
I nixed the idea of a blast of lights and siren to clear the way. This was no time to scare the prey. I sipped gently at a mug of joe and honked the horn. A red light turned green in the cockpit. The aircar touched down silently on the pavement.
I limped along with the rest of the wheeled and foot traffic. Sometimes the pedestrians went along faster. I looked out of side windows streaked with hard rain. Through the drops I saw her. I turned down the next alley.
With the spinner parked on it's side I emerged from the alley into the tight throngs of people. When I got to a lurid red and green neon sign that flashed the words 'Hotel Paradise' and stylized coconut tree. I pushed in through the doors. She had come out of here. I strode through the lobby like I owned the place.
A flash of my badge and a exchange of cash got me voice key access. The clerk knew from my description which room I wanted. The woman was quiet, but she was also quietly unforgettable.
On the 24th floor I stood outside her door and cocked my Bulldog pistol. Two small led lights along the barrel went from red to green telling me that I had a full load of bullets and that the safety was off. I took a deep breath.
"Unlock. Open." I said.
The door swung open on motorized hinges and I slipped inside pointing my gun in every direction. The door auto-closed behind me.
No one was there. I began snooping. It was a nice apartment.
The accumulations of a past life were all there. The room looked hardly used. A lot of the usual mish-mash that replicants seem to acquire. She was looking like the one.
The phone chirped.
"Phone," I addressed the small flat screen propped up at an angle. "Off hook."
A screen on the night stand lit-up with the worried face of the clerk.
"Sir…She's back."
Great.
"She's there?"
"She's just went up the elevator."
"Phone, hang-up."
There was a stylish looking hat on the bed. I picked it up and took out my badge just as the door opened.
"You forgot your hat."
She let out a scream. Another hotel room door opened along the hallway. I raised my walletted badge to her and the inquisitive hotel patron. The guest got the picture and closed his door.
"Nora?" I asked. I gave her my most disarming smile which some said passed nicely for an impression of a shark showing its teeth before a feeding frenzy.
I hoped people who said such things about me were joking.
She could barely speak. She nodded as she gulped.
"My name is police detective Fury. I am conducting an investigation. I apologize for the fright I just gave you…but I didn't expect you back."
"I…I…" she tried to understand.
Well, it was now or never…as good a time as ever. Might as see how much she knows…if she knows anything at all.
I wanted to test her officially, but I had left the VK iris-response testing machine in the car. Maybe I could still get her…if she really was a replicant.
"I see you are headed out to a party" I began slyly. "Maybe I can question you tomorrow morning…if you are not too tired out. Ha-ha."
She gave the return laugh of a desperate woman trying to find a glimmer of hope. My offer of reprieve seemed to strike her like a very good idea. The same kind of good idea as a life jacket offered to a drowning woman. I breathed-in a breath of satisfaction.
"Ha-ha. Yes," she said eagerly. "Tomorrow. Yes."
"Where's the fun going to be?" I asked casually
"Uhhh….Taffy Lewis's club downtown." She gradually offered. "… maybe later a few other different places."
"Taffy's? That's right ritzy." I commented generously. "Ya know…I am getting off shift. Maybe I could go with you there..as your guest? Just to check it out. I really don't get out enough."
She paused for a second, but then in an unexpected shift...she assented.
"Okay! That would be great!" her beaming smile seemed genuine. She looked me over. She seemed to relax a little. I became more unsure.
"Are you sure? Your friends might not want an uninvited cop crashing there party."
"No…no one would guess you are the fuzz. You would be just another person having fun like the rest of us. They would like you."
"Well…you're never fully off duty in this job. If one of your friends was a not who he was supposed to be…it could get kind of awkward."
She tensed up. I leaned against the far wall.
"Did you see my badge, ma'am?" I held my ID up for her, but she never really looked at it. The shiny metal shield had badge number 'B3147' engraved on it and my 3-D photo ID on the other side had my unsmiling picture with 'Detective Fury, Nick Bladerunner Division.
She didn't say anything for awhile but eventually her smile returned. She tried to blow it off.
"I guess…we better get going." She tried to hurry me politely.
"Don't you even want to know why I am here?"
"I assume to find a replicant," she said cleverly.
"That's right," I pointed my finger at her like a pretend gun and pulled the 'trigger'. "A replicant named Nora. By the way are you sure I am dressed appropriately for a party at Taffy's? Haha…I think I'll look like riff-raff next to your hoi-poloi friends. How long have you known them?"
"Oh…not long," she confessed breezily. With sudden smoothness she removed her rain soaked fur coat. "I'm not wearing anything too fancy."
She had on a ruffled blouse that concealed a large chest and she wore a cream colored pencil skirt that showed off her well curved buttocks…if you like that sort of thing…and I did. Simple, and yet effective.
"You see I am looking for a nuclear worker from Zeti – Alpha prime. One day she went crazy and trapped her supervisor in the exhaust shaft of a new reactor core. There wasn't much left. She was next detected on Earth by a plastic surgeon who noticed that some of the bits and pieces he had nipped off of her had experienced suspiciously artificial accelerated decay. That's about where I got brought into the picture…"
Nora tried to make herself calm. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Her chest heaved. With her eyes still closed she said:
"It was an accident."
"I know," I said calmly. "But you shouldn't have come back here."
She opened her eyes.
"I have a request…"
"No," I had to cut this off before it began
"Why not?" she said in exasperation. "What difference will it make? I have so little time."
"I can't let you go."
"No. I wasn't going to ask that."
I didn't say anything.
"Just give me one more day?" she asked. Her electric blue eyes were beginning to water.
She began to approach me. I drew the Bulldog.
"Gun…safety off." I commanded. A faint whine hit our ears. Little red lights turned green.
She raised her hands in a placating gesture but still approached.
"I've never deliberately hurt ANY body" she said. She began to let down her gold blonde hair.
"I know," I admitted. "But you will. When the time gets close. You will want to live. It's understandable…"
I pointed the gun directly at her as she inched closer slowly.
"…in THAT way, actually" I explained. "You are truly human." She smiled brightly
I pushed the end of barrel right next to her heart, under her left arm, as she reached up to pull my bald head down to her face.
"That's the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me," she whispered.
Lieutenant Bryant, chief of detctives, knocked on the spinner door. My blue and red emergency lights lit up his face alternately. I was finishing up the report. I digitally signed the digital document and handed the electronic pad to him.
The coroner's crew wheeled a sheeted form past.
"You're not as good as Deckard was."
I nodded uncommittedly. Whatever. He was letting rain into the aircar.
"You let her get close to you, didn't you?" he wasn't really asking. "Deckard would never have let her get close to him."
"Where's Deckard now?" I asked with the knowledge in my head.
"He quit," Bryant said, probably missing the irony. "You take a few off…then you get back to work. He left a lot of cases open."
"Yeah…I think I understand." I closed the door, and got clearance to lift above the city traffic. The spinner rumbled. A purge of steam plumed out as the car and I rose to a level amidst all the advertising lights and signs. We hovered there bathed in the electric rainbow of the city night.
I searched the phone book memory, picked a number, and let the phone in the center console dial it.
A face that was in many ways opposite to Nora's filled the screen. She looked particularly warm.
"Ahhhh…Doreen. How've you been?" I tried to sound upbeat. "I know it's been a long time but, do you have plans for tonight? Whatever you want to do. Whatever."
Slender fingers twisted locks of shiny black curls.
"Nick. Wow…long time, no see. No. I wouldn't be good company right now." Her code for being on her period.
I laughed.
"I don't care. I just want to see you…alive"
"What a crazy thing to say…"
Knowing eyes squinted.
"Had a hard day?" She thought she knew what she was asking. She probably still thought of me as 'Homocide Detective'. She wouldn't know that I had changed Divisions. That I no longer tried to solve murders by bringing people in…back to trials by their peers and justice. She wouldn't know that for more than 2 months now, I hunted without hopes of a peaceful arrest. For me, now, a murder ended every successful case.
I leaned back and pressed my back into the seat. I looked forward down the bright lights of the city pathways that led through the tall buildings. Traffic zoomed above me and crawled below me through those paths. The route that we all followed.
"Ya know…I know a spot that has gambling downstairs." She gossiped, "You forget you're a cop and put yourself in my hands…"
That was fine by me.