3
"Hello? I'm looking for Sonny Blount, please."
"Speaking."
"My name is Rand Huberman. I got your connect-serial from Katherine Monk. I'm having a little bit of a problem, and she told me that I should call you."
"Katherine? That's a name I didn't want to hear. Why did Kate tell you to call me?"
"She said, well.she."
"Don't tell me. She said I was a real scumbag and that I hurt people for money. Didn't she."
"Oh no, it's just she.she.ehhh."
"Well I am and I do. If that's what you want, say it. If not, disconnect right now."
"Fine. Fine. I'll say this: I need you to take care of a personal problem I'm having. It's been bothering me for a long, long time and I need to do something about it or I'll go crazy."
"I'm not a psi-therapist. Get to the point."
"It's my daughter."
"You want me to hurt your daughter."
"No! No! Her boyfriend.I mean.the thing she's been running around with."
"Thing."
"Some godawful creature. A d-bee of some sort, down in the Burbs. I think their relationship has gotten.sexual. It needs to stop."
"What kind of d-bee?"
"I don't know. Big, scary eyes, hairy all over, evil-looking. It's like a nightmare. A d-bee."
"You want to know anything or you just want him out of the picture?"
"Just get rid of him. It, I mean. I don't want to know anything. Just do it."
"Gimmie a figure."
"A figure?"
"Money."
"Oh. Oh. Of course. Five thousand."
"Uh-uh. Gimmie another number. One with at least four zeroes."
"Ten thousand?"
"That's a pathetic offer, but I'll accept it. As long as it's in cash."
"How will I get it to you?"
"You know the Chi-Town offices of Northern Gun?"
"Yes, they're near our research labs."
"Drop the money, the address and the instructions off there. I'll take care of the rest. Make sure you don't put my name on the package. Leave it care of Mr. Vin de Siecle."
"Wonderful. Thank you so much, Mr. Blount. I am really in your debt. I won't forget this."
"I know you won't. Now lose this serial and don't ever call me again."
* * *
Sonny hopped a commercial trans out of the low levels, over to the offices of his sometime employer, Vincent de Siecle, and enjoyed the cross- level culture shock as he traveled out of the dregs and on up to the lofty level that housed Northern Gun's Chi-Town suite. Clothes became cleaner, facial expressions sharper, eyes more focused, haircuts neater, gaits less ambling and aimless. On the upper levels, storefronts were better-tended; the pedways free of litter and the gutters free of urine, the walls were untouched by graffiti. In the upper levels, there were no drug-heads sprawled unconscious in alley corners. There were no drunks vomiting on themselves.
Sonny stopped in the office just long enough to pick up his package, not long enough to speak to any of the secretaries. When he plowed through the offices like he owned the place, a six-foot-eight bulldozer of muscle exuding his own gravity field that kept most sane people beyond arm's length, he knew he scared the hell out of everyone but there was nothing to be done about it. He had tried to sweet talk the girls when he first started working for de Siecle, but whenever he called one of their names, they flinched and got this glazed look in their eyes like they had just been smacked. After a few days, he stopped trying. It wasn't as if he wanted for women. Fuck it.
He hopped another trans to a cheap food court. He grabbed some cheeseburgers, onion rings, half a fried chicken, four bottles of beer. He went home, opened the package, and ate his breakfast.
Inside the package, two visuals: a graduation pic and a telephoto spy-style snapshot. The girl in the graduation shot was pretty. Nothing special, thought Sonny, but pretty. Blonde hair, perfect teeth, blue eyes. She was made almost homely by her perfectly average perfection. There was a name underneath: Alicia Huberman.
The other photo showed a completely changed woman. Gone the blue cap and shapeless grad gown. Gone the simple smile. Smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, wearing painted-on shorts and a halter top so transparent as to be almost imaginary, she was standing within what looked to be an average Burbs alleyway between the tarpaper backs of two shantytown houses. She didn't look so dull in that picture. Her body was pure dynamite, and she looked like she had had some practice using it.
Standing with his arm around her bare shoulders was a fairly unimposing d- bee, a far cry from the monstrous mental picture her shame-ridden father had drawn for him. The creature was barely taller than the girl. Sonny couldn't tell what the hell species it was. Hairy, but not wolfen or dog- boy hairy. It was square-proportioned, like a dwarf, but too tall and too hirsute to be one. It had a massive brow and a distinctly rippled look to its cranium, as if its head were covered in bony ridges. Sonny couldn't tell for sure from the photo. With a loose sweatshirt and baggy pants, the thing could easily have passed for human.
He shouldn't be too tough, Sonny decided.
He committed both photographs to memory. One thing Sonny had had since he was a kid was a perfect memory for faces and people. It had gotten him in trouble before.
The ten-thousand was all there, wrapped in notepaper carrying the location of a house on the Burbs outskirts, in the Trash Town neighborhood. Sonny changed into dirty, threadbare clothing. His regular attire would attract too much attention along the dirt alleys of the Burbs.
He took a lift down to ground level, hassled with paperwork like a good citizen. He tried not to think about the days when he could have badged his way through the guards. Got cleared to enter the Burbs, stepped through the checkpoint airlock.
He walked into the permeating stink of the Burbs and stopped as dead as if he had walked into a brick wall. He knew it wasn't anything you could prepare yourself for, so he hadn't even tried. The ferocity of the stench still took him by surprise, always, every time. It was as if the air itself was a dead, rotting animal that had taken up residence inside his sinuses.
God, he hated the Burbs.
Still, money was tight. Freelance knuckle jobs weren't Sonny's style, but letting himself get kicked out of ISS had cost him a lot of contacts. A lot of money. He'd been useful as a man on the inside. It was worth a lot of money to a lot of people to have an ISS Specter on payroll. Without a badge he was just another thug. Sonny accepted he'd have to break a few kneecaps now and again if he wanted to maintain his lifestyle. He'd been okay for a while, but his savings were thinning out and handmade suits don't grow on trees.
He didn't know why Katherine Monk had given the desperate dad his connect- serial. Not that he minded the work. But he was done fooling with Katherine and he had told her as much the last time they had spoken, which was months ago, right around the time her alcoholic war-hero husband had gotten him dishonorably discharged from ISS and almost imprisoned.
It was typical. Sonny didn't really know Sphere Monk, only by rumor and reputation. But it sounded typical of him. Any real man would have at least tried to give Sonny a few rail-gun rounds in the head. Not sterling Sphere Monk. He found the man who was screwing his wife and had him brought up on charges. And not fake ones, either-these were real charges. It wasn't as if Sphere had framed Sonny for crimes he had never committed. That at least would have taken some balls.
No, Sonny had done everything Sphere accused him of, and a hell of a lot more. It was a weak, stupid move on Sphere's part. All Sonny would have to do was tell the court that he was sleeping with the prosecuting officer's wife and there would have been an immediate and very embarrassing mistrial.
Enter: Vin de Siecle, regional head of operations for Northern Gun. Weapons- merchant, financier, a mover in the Chi-Town underworld, friend to high politicos and Coalition brass. Very connected, very rich. He dropped 95 grand in Sonny's lap and made him an offer: I need a good man. Forget ISS. Come work for me.
Sonny, tired of being a glorified errand boy with a badge. He had seen de Siecle's offer as a golden opportunity. Get out of ISS, get into the power elite of Chi-Town. Goodbye life as a dirty Specter, goodbye fixing other people's messes. Hello political clout, hello life as a rich and powerful businessman. Just like de Siecle.
Sonny had been wrong, all wrong. It hadn't worked out the way he thought it would. Actually, in retrospect, it had been the worst move of his life.
Now he had become, more or less, de Siecle's two-fisted lackey. Some intimidation, some intelligence, some industrial snooping, a lot of violence. Nothing requiring too much brains. He hurt a lot of people, which he was good at, but it bored him.
He maimed people against whom de Siecle had his queer inexplicable vendettas. He pushed de Siecle's phony rebate schemes on pliable customers, he paid off dirty accountants and strong-armed the honest ones, he assaulted any financial investigators who came sniffing around and made it look like ordinary street crime. He vandalized stores not carrying Northern Gun products. He put violent muscle behind de Siecle's plan to force small- time backwater merchants all over the territory to carry Northern Gun armaments at inflated retail prices but with reduced profit margins. All of the additional dividends went right into de Siecle's pocket. That was about it for Sonny Blount these days.
It was trifling shit, and he hated it.
And the money. The money he was getting from de Siecle wasn't cutting it. It was a steady check, but Sonny knew he was being strung along. De Siecle probably thought he was putting a real good one over on poor, dimwitted Sonny Blount. That's what everyone always thought. De Siecle's pay was better than his old ISS salary, a lot better, but he wasn't pulling all the extra perks and kickbacks that you can pull when you're a dirty ISS fixer- for-hire. Which brought Sonny to his present endeavor.
Without too much trouble, Sonny found the house in the Burbs, a shack wood- pulp and plastic, no windows, mottled yellow insulation fluffing out from cracks in the walls. The snow was still lying lightly on the ground, and Sonny didn't want to leave tracks leading up to the front door. At a distance, he circled the place twice but there was no other entrance, the front door the only option. Hell with it, he thought.
The door looked to be blast-reinforced and had about seven locks-odd, he thought, on such a ramshackle building. He guessed it would be pretty difficult to pop it open by force alone. The issue was settled when he tried the handle and found the door unlocked.
The place was quiet. It smelled strongly of sweat, urine and feces. Closing the door, Sonny was enveloped by complete darkness. There was a flashlight concealed in the artificial knuckle of his left index finger; he popped it on. The place was better looking on the inside that its outward appearance would lead one to believe. The walls were thick, sturdy, heavily padded with sheets of expensive foam-core ridge layering.
Soundproof, Sonny guessed. He stopped worrying about having to be quiet.
He was in a small alcove filled with shelf upon shelf of vid equipment: lenses and lights and cables and holo cams and other kinds of expensive electronics. And a small library of discs labeled only with colored decals and serial numbers. Meticulous. Everything clean, everything well-ordered.
Sonny pocketed a handful of the discs. The room beyond the alcove held nothing but a wooden chair and a greasy, beat-up mattress on the floor. Oily waxpaper wrappers-the kind in which most Burbs fast food products were packaged and sold-littered the floor like wild plants. There were what looked and smelled like dog turds in the corner.
No food, no entertainment, no windows, no real furniture. Nothing that indicated habitation. One locked door in the far corner of the room. The only lights were expensive standless spot-lamps for picture-taking, hovering ghostly along the walls. He had been given a bum address. No one lived here.
He gave the place a quick and messy tossing anyway. If he was going to find the girl or the d-bee, he was going to have to come up with some info. A connect serial, an address, something. Wandering the Burbs flashing photographs and asking questions wasn't going to cut it. This whole deal was looking more and more rotten. He had been paid to hurt someone, not perform an investigation. This made things more difficult and it made Sonny angry.
Two minutes told him the main room held nothing of interest. Conspicuously so. It's very rare that, in any given room, there will be absolutely no connections to the outside world. Deliberate? He wondered. Why all the damn secrecy?
He noticed that the dealer's imprint, serial numbers and even brand names had been neatly filed off all the vid equipment. The food wrappers told him that someone had recently gotten takeout from Uberburgers, but that was it.
The place was a holo-movie set of some sort, he knew that much. Porno, probably. The Burbs wasn't the kind of place that produced a lot of educational documentaries. He went to the locked door and tried to kick it off its hinges. Reinforced, it barely budged. He kicked three more times and the hinges ripped out of the doorframe, wrenching the moulding away from the wall and popping nails out of the wood like buckshot. They skittered across the plastic-tiled floor.
Inside was a functional production suite, complete with nonlinear editing computers, multi-frame monitors and wall-unit digital archives. And human body. Sonny felt along the wall for a light switch. He flipped it on.
It looked like the man was dead. He was tied to a chair, blindfolded and gagged, and he was covered in dried blood that had come from two lacerations on the scalp and a long slender crater of flesh on the back of the head, deep enough to expose a tiny triangle of the man's skull. Sonny was leaning over him to go through his pockets when his eye caught the slight movement of lungs lifting. Sonny stood back.
The man was breathing shallowly, but he was breathing. Sonny removed the blindfold and gag.
The man flopped as if he was a rag doll. Sonny stood there for a minute, two minutes, getting more and more pissed. The man sat there limply, not moving a muscle. Sonny grabbed the man's hair and pressed down on one wound with his thumb, digging the edge of his thumbnail into the raw pulpy redness. The man jerked, screamed. Sonny eased the pressure.
"Oww, wait.please, please." said the man, lifting his face. His eyes held desperation and terror. "Please.I don't know what you want, but."
The man was in his early 20's, it seemed. Under all that blood it was hard to tell. Late teens maybe. Just a kid.
"Why were you pretending to be unconscious?" said Sonny.
"What do you want? Listen, there's no money here, but there's drugs.lots of them. Take them, please, just don't kill me."
Sonny's ears perked up. "Where?"
"In that top drawer. Dial 22 77 104 to open it."
Sonny opened the drawer. It wasn't a lot. Probably what the kid thought of as being a lot. Stims, depressos, racers, chasers, hallucinics; there was a decent variety. Sonny mentally calculated their value.
"Who do you think I am?" he said.
The kid closed his eyes tight. "Oh god. I don't know, I don't know. Really. I swear, I'll never remember your face. I didn't mean to look. I didn't get a good look."
Sonny laughed. "No, that's not what I meant. Who did this to you?"
"You didn't.you mean you're not." the kid said, confused. He ventured to open one eye slightly.
"No," said Sonny. A utility blade nicked out of his cybernetic middle finger and he freed the kid from his bonds.
"I don't know what happened," the kid said, holding his head in his hands. He seemed on the verge of tears. "He hit me from behind I think. I didn't see anyone. I didn't hear him come in. I just woke up here. It must have been hours ago." He stood up to go, Sonny put a hand on his shoulder and forced him back into the chair.
"You see anything missing?"
The kid glanced around the suite. "I don't think so. There's not much to steal around here. There's vid equipment and holo-cams out in the."
"It's still there."
The kid, trying to wipe the blood from his face with his shirt. "I don't know then." Trying to get up, hand on the shoulder, sitting back down.
"Think. You look like a smart kid. Someone broke in, beat you up, tied you up, and just left? Without taking anything?"
"I don't know man, I don't know," glaring and removing hand from shoulder. "I've gotta get out of here. Sorry I can't help you." He got up and tried to shoulder his way out, but Sonny's massive frame was blocking the door. "Hey.you mind getting out of my way?"
"Hang on. I need to ask you a few questions."
"Sorry, man. I don't think you understand the headache I got right now and I don't really care about questions. I need to get home. Will you get the hell out of my way now? Please?" Holding his head, he tried to squeeze past Sonny to the door.
With the back of his heavy, shovel-like hand Sonny slapped the kid across the room where he collided with a tower of cardboard boxes filled with blank digital discs that showered down on his bloody head.
"I asked you to look around," said Sonny. "Try a little harder this time."
The kid scanned the room slowly, fresh blood seeping from his gums. His eyes settled on a black cabinet that was slightly ajar. Sonny followed his eyes and walked over to it, opened it. Inside: digital image storage system, a big cavity in the center of it. Central memory unit gone, pulled out of its housing, ripped wires trailing down the scratched panel.
"What's this for?" said Sonny.
"I don't know."
Sonny glared.
"They don't give me the password. Everything's encrypted."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know a hell of a lot, do you?"
"There's a backup," the kid said. "Behind that panel."
Behind a wooden wall panel, in a tiny nook packed with sawdust and newspaper, was a smaller memory unit. Condensed organic-matrix drives. Very expensive, very tiny. Roughly the size of a cigarette lighter. Weight: almost seven pounds.
"That's encrypted too," the kid said.
Sonny disconnected the leads and took the backup. "So what exactly do you do here?"
"They make sex movies."
"I didn't ask what they do, I asked about you."
The kid shrugged. "Systems maintenance. I clean the transfer heads. Re- initialize the drivers in the morning. Make small deliveries. That sort of thing. I do some talent scouting too, but otherwise I'm just a stupid errand boy."
Sonny grimaced.
Sonny said "Who runs this show?"
"I d."
"If you say 'I don't know' again, you're going to lose teeth. Give me some names. Who works here, who visits. Who have you seen hanging around. Who pays your check."
The kid thought a moment, daubed at his oozing gums with the elastic collar of his undershirt. He began to enumerate on his fingers: "Tristan Solido. Milos S something.Milos Sigmund I think. I get my money from Jarrett Jex, but he's just a flunkie like me. He mops jizz. I only come in when no one else is really here. Jarrett talks about 'J.O.' sometimes-I just know his initials. I think he owns the building. Umm.some guy called Harper the Nut comes around once in a while." The kid shook his head. "I don't know. Is that enough?"
That last name struck bells for Sonny, and he refrained from smashing the kid in his mouth for saying "I don't know" again. Harper the Nut. Main muscle for Argive Dimitrios, one of Chi-Town's most influential crime bosses, or was once. Sonny had done lots of business with them back when he had an ISS badge. He hadn't seen them too much recently.
"Any of these guys d-bees? Like dogs?"
"D-bees? Hell no. I mean, they could be psychics or closet sorcerers I suppose. I don't think so though."
"You know this girl?" Sonny showed the kid the picture, the sleazy one.
The kid waved it off, shrugged. "Man, lots of girls come through here. It's tough to tell them apart. Who can remember faces? Sluts, strays and runaways," here the kid grinned widely, "you know? They're just pu-"
Sonny slammed his fist into the kid's stomach. The kid collapsed and curled up on the floor, sucking wind, tears streaming down his face leaving tracks as they washed away the dried blood. Sonny lifted the kid up gingerly and put him back in the chair.
"You know, I don't think you told me your name."
The kid gasped. Holding his stomach, still folded up.
"Muh.Muh." the kid heaved. "Martin."
"Martin what?"
"Martin Cuh.Canis."
"Well, Martin Canis," Sonny held the photo up in front of the kid's contorted face. "You ever see this girl before?"
He looked hard, shook his head. "Nuh.no."
"You sure?"
The kid nodded, gulping air.
Sonny ripped a sheet of paper from the editing computer's timecode log and got a pen out. He put them in front of the kid. The kid looked up at him.
"Write," said Sonny. "Tristan Solido, Milos Sigmund, Jarrett Jex. How I can get in touch with them. Addresses, connect serials, hangouts. Whatever you got."
"Wh.what are you going to do with me?"
"Not a damn thing unless you keep stalling when I tell you to do something. Write."
The kid thought for a minute, then started writing. Sonny stood patiently over the kid's shoulder. Then he remembered the drugs in the drawer, went back and pocketed them. Under the many pearlescent baggies was an unlabeled bottle of some strange pharmaceutical Sonny had never seen before. He took it.
"Um.I'm not sure I know anything about Harper the Nut," said the kid.
Sonny straightened. "Him I already know how to find."
* * *
Harper the Nut didn't get his name because he was insane or because he was a Crazy, although both were certainly true. Sonny didn't really know why he was called Harper, since he always claimed that his first, middle and last names were all Oswald. But he was called "The Nut" because that's what he thought he was.
Very shortly after undergoing M.O.M. conversion, while the flesh around his cranial implants was still throbbing and red, Oswald O. Oswald, known to his friends as Harper, announced to the world that he was no longer a human being, but a sentient cashew.
Sonny didn't particularly like him. He didn't like any Crazies, for that matter. Not as tough as Juicers, but not as predictable either. He couldn't imagine how anyone ever thought that being given supernatural, mind-over-matter strength and speed was worth being driven completely, utterly, irrevocably batshit insane by the process.
Sonny and Harper had had a business relationship when Sonny was doing work and pulling favors for Harper's boss, Argive Dimitrios, back when Dimitrios had been running half of the Burbs. Argive's fortunes had independently taken a downturn around the same time Sonny went to work for Vin de Siecle. Police pressure coupled with a sudden influx of cutthroat gangsters from out of town had been shrinking his influence and territory. Now his sector of the Burbs was less of a thug monopoly and more of a criminal free-for- all. It was every man for himself. Argive Dimitrios still ruled, but he was no longer supreme.
Sonny walked through the front gate of Dimitrios's Burbs "estate." He waved at the enormous Vanguard Brawler bodyguards watching the front door. They waved back. Sonny went around behind the house, to the chicken coop where Harper slept. He was sitting in the slush and wet hay with a three-gallon drum of peanut butter between his legs. He was greedily scooping it into his mouth with his bare hands. It was all over his face.
The only thing Harper ever ate was peanut butter. Not because he loved peanuts, but because he thought that grinding them up and eating them was a patriotic act of genocide against an inferior nut species.
Sonny walked up the path and knocked on the coop's wooden frame.
"Sonny!" squealed Harper.
"Harper. Haven't they given you a real room yet?"
Harper pointed. "I have chicken wire."
"I see that. You know, you've got a little peanut butter on your face."
Hands, face and bald pink scalp slathered with great gobs of the stuff, Harper paused long enough to say, "Where?" He went diligently back to the task of packing the brown goo into his wide-open mouth.
"How you feeling today, Harper? You feel okay? Think you can answer some questions for me?"
Harper shrugged. Without looking up, he shot at Sonny with a plastic water gun.
Because he was a Crazy, Harper was a pretty unreliable source of information. Sonny knew that it was always difficult to separate the facts from his delusions. But he would be less guarded and suspicious than Dimitrios usually was. He wouldn't get anything for free from Dimitrios. Sonny figured Harper was worth a shot.
Sonny reeled off the address of the place to Harper, asked if he knew it.
Harper nodded.
"What's it for?" said Sonny.
Harper made a tight circle with his thumb and forefinger and enthusiastically rammed a peanut-butter-lubricated finger through the hole about thirty-five times before Sonny asked him to stop already.
"Is it one of Argive's places?"
Harper got sulky, turned his back to Sonny. Sonny realized the man was wearing his coat backwards.
"I guess that's a yes."
"I didn't say yes say yes say yes."
Sonny laughed. "Argive's going to put you in the box if you start having trouble keeping secrets again."
Harper the Nut turned his head around at an angle that seemed anatomically impossible and fixed Sonny in a frighteningly sane glare. Sonny heard vertebrae pop.
Sonny took this as a bad sign. Harper the Nut was not a man you wanted to make angry. Still, there was obviously something going on here. Sonny put up his empty hands in a gesture he hoped Harper would interpret as friendliness.
"C'mon, you can tell me, Harper. We're old friends."
A voice boomed out behind Sonny, hoarse and wine-sodden, unmistakable: Argive Dimitrios.
"You don't have friends, Sonny."
Sonny turned and saw that Dimitrios was standing next to him, virtually touching him. The man knew how to move quietly, he'd give him that. They embraced affectionlessly. Sonny caught a whiff of a peculiar odor that he remembered well: the sex musk from Dimitrios's d-bee whores.
"Sonny," Dimitrios waggled a reproving finger, "You're big man now? I don't see you at club, I don't get no visits. You quit police, you disappear. Dimitrios worries."
"I got a new job."
"I know. Vin de Siecle. You run errands." Dimitrios furrowed his brow sympathetically, "Is very boring I think. Not like old days, yes?"
"Not like old days, no."
"What is you come visit now, Sonny, eh? You need money? Gash? A gun? You say, Dimitrios does."
Sonny flashed the address to Argive.
"One of yours?"
Argive laughed and held up his hands. "Sonny you sound like more cop than when you were cop. How come?"
"I'm looking for someone."
"Looking?" Argive grimaced doubtful. "Finding is okay. Looking not so smart. Who is it?"
"A girl who's been playing around with some." remembering Argive's predilection for nonhuman playmates, "someone she shouldn't be. I'd like to talk to them both. I got this address, but it's shit. Is it yours?"
"Not really. No. No. It is not mine."
"What's Harper doing hanging around there?" Sonny felt the spray of a water gun hit his neck.
"What is Harper doing anywhere?" Dimitrios spun his finger by his temple. "Fucking crazy."
"You protect your turf and it's on your turf. They're making fuck vids it looks like. You make fuck vids. It's not you, you're telling me. Who's is it?"
"Nobody important. It is.you shouldn't. Let's not talk like this. It is nothing, Sonny. And you make Dimitrios uncomfortable. Is it very important."
"Not really. No."
"But worth money to you?"
"Yes."
"Well, Sonny, since me and you go very far way back I will maybe trade with you. Do me a favor, I would not be so uncomfortable. A favor the boys cannot do. We could talk again about that place me and you Sonny."
"One of the old kind of favors?"
"One of the old kind."
"Sorry, Dimitrios. Not interested."
"You're older now, it's different. You are not my Sonny any more. I understand. I respect that. Things must change. If you change your mind, Sonny, the offer is all open."
"Thanks. But I won't need it. I think I'm just going to give up this thing I'm doing now. Keep the money. I don't need to fool around with this shit. What the fuck could he do to me anyway."
"You skip out on job?" Dimitrios's eyebrow arched sharply. "Man skip out on me, I do plenty."
Sonny knew what Dimitrios would do all right.
"Man skip out on me I have Harper rip his head off. Eat his eyeballs. Shit in his pockets."
Harper hummed to himself. "Done it before done it done it done it before before before," and patted himself three times on each shoulder.
* * *
Sonny and Dimitrios went way back together. It was Dimitrios who had used his connections to get Sonny citizenship, and then a badge. It had kept Sonny in his debt for a long time.
Before that, he had given Sonny his first real job when he was still a teenager, doing collections from Dimitrios's various businesses and loanshark customers. Sonny was very good at it. By that point in his life he felt reassured by the sound of bones breaking, of cartilage ripping and tendons snapping like overstressed bowstrings. These things had become almost musical to him, and the work therefore suited his temperament.
Even as a young man, he had been huge, iron-muscled, and a very good hand with a vibro-blade. He also had a very bad reputation. He took pride in the fact that there were even juicers who were afraid of him. Him, a punk kid, unaugmented; no drugs, no implants, no cybernetics. Just meanness. Sonny could always collect.
He had first come to Dimitrios's attention when the boss man had seen him fighting at fourteen, maybe fifteen years of age-it was hard to tell exactly, since Sonny didn't know for sure when he had been born. In that fight, Sonny won the Burbs under-sixteen bare-knuckle championship-again-by shattering his opponent's jaw so completely with one blow, crumpling it like dry kindling, that the boy's seconds had carried him straightaway to the cyber-doc's for an immediate replacement.
Dimitrios bought Sonny from his handlers and immediately put him to work.
Several months later, while Sonny was out on a collection, the boy from the championship ambushed Sonny from behind a burned-out Coalition riot barricade. The kid now had a cybernetically armored cranium and a jaw like a steel bear-trap. His neck was reinforced and steel-plated, and looked as if it could withstand antitank ordnance. The death-red eyes blinked PAYBACK.
After realizing the boy had only taken the trouble to armor his head, Sonny pounded the boy's torso until his cracked collarbone broke loose from his chest and through his skin, the bloody, marrowed edges cutting deep gashes in Sonny's knuckles.
Both the boy's lungs collapsed and he suffocated there among the ashes and empty soft-drink containers. He was the eighteenth human being Sonny had beaten to death with his bare hands. Or nineteenth. He had already lost count. Later on that day, when he had to think hard to remember where the cuts on his knuckles had come from, Sonny realized he couldn't recall the details of the confrontation. He had killed the man out of reflex. For the first time in many years, Sonny was afraid, although of what he couldn't say.
Before Dimitrios had found him, Sonny spent his early teenage days sleeping with prostitutes and his nights fighting for money in the "arenas" of the Burbs and other nearby tramp towns and squatter settlements. Without any desire or means to mark the passage of days, he knew that it had already been a few years since he had come to Chi-town, seeking refuge from the uncivilized wastes. And years before that that he had been orphaned.
When he had first arrived, Sonny, a ragged beggar child, was picked up because of his size and his temper-which had been filed down to a hair trigger by loneliness and a steady diet of street garbage-and placed by his "rescuers" into a back-alley school for young street urchins. He did not have the quickness to be a thief, nor the looks to be a prostitute, and he was placed in a camp for fighters.
The trainers taught him and other children like him to fight with their fists, with clubs, with knives, razors, hatchets, hammers, icepicks. They strung them up and whipped them and burned them so that they would become accustomed to pain and would not fear it. When Sonny bullied other children, he was rewarded with candy and a little pocket money. When he displayed an unnatural ferocity or brutality, he was given liquor and video games, and praised like a hero.
Sonny was the most prodigious student they had ever seen.
It worked like this: trainers from opposing schools pitted their charges against one another in makeshift arenas throughout the Burbs. In the dusty innards of crumbling buildings, in weed-strangled lots, in dank cellars, in freshly dug pits, in sewer tunnels, these lost children of the Burbs met one another with every kind of weapon imaginable while around them hundreds of adults screamed for blood and clutched betting slips to their hearts in feverish ecstasy.
From all over, people flocked to the matches. It got so big they couldn't hide the crowds from the Coalition any more and had to start paying the Burbs ISS Specters for protection. There were no raids, no investigations. Not as long as the Specters-drunken ex-Chi-Town nobodies-got their cash.
The gambling on the fights was intense. That was how the trainers made their money; they were also bookies.
It was a cash cow. There was very little overhead. Children had nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to eat. They were desperate, and therefore a lot cheaper to maintain than adult fighters, who needed things like room and board and a salary.
Children were also more vicious than adults, which the crowd loved. It took a special kind of coldness for an adult to kill another human being in cold blood, in the middle of a public arena. Children could do it with very little prodding. Sonny had killed five boys and one girl before he reached puberty.
Sonny remembered clearly the first person he had ever killed. The boy had shaggy, unwashed red hair, and his back and shoulders were covered in what looked like freckles, although certain swellings and discolorations gave it away for what it was: pre-cancerous melanoma.
It was Sonny's first death match. Eleventh for the redhead. Sonny was a 12-to-3 underdog. The venue was a collapsed building that could once have been a high school gymnasium: bleachers and warped wood floors with obscure circles and markings painted on them. Only one wall was still standing. It was mid-spring and the night was cool and breezy; the packed crowd reeked of sweat and alcohol. The scene was lit by oil drums burning garbage.
After two minutes of grappling, biting and gouging, dodging and blocking, Sonny managed to fit his icepick between the boy's ribs and into his heart. The boy's eyes went wide in shock. Sonny pulled the pick out. A pulsing stream of blood twice shot out of the tiny wound, like a water-gun, and trinkled across Sonny's face.
The boy looked into Sonny's eyes and his freckled lips began to tremble. He slowly sat down in the sand and, never taking his eyes off Sonny, fell onto his back. The hole in his chest squirted blood into the air like a little geyser with each remaining beat of his heart. Sonny thought the boy was about to start crying, but his eyes glassed over before they could shed any tears and then he died.
Sonny's handlers were extremely pleased with the outcome of the match.
"Congratulations, my boy. Congratulations," said Magister Loody, the head of the stable that owned Sonny. "We cleaned up so well on that last one, we all thought to give you your first taste of a special treat. You're ten years old now."
"I am?"
"Well, probably. You look it, at least. Maybe you're only nine. At any rate, you're a big boy now, and we thought it was time you started getting big boy privileges. If we could give you one thing that you always wanted, what would it be?"
"I want to go find my sister." No hesitation.
"Hnh. We were thinking more along the lines of this." Magister Loody held up a bottle filled with a glaucous, hallucinogenic syrup. He smiled and gave it a little shake. The label was emblazoned with a popular video-game character, sheets of blue lightning flying off his impossibly rippling musculature and unnaturally angular hairdo.
"It's what all the older ones get after a good fight," said Loody, clearly nonplussed at Sonny's lack of enthusiasm. The other boys and girls in the Loody stable were willing to move heaven and earth to get a taste of the stuff.
"I want to go find my sister."
Loody frowned, tossing the bottle back in his desk and slamming the drawer. "Sister. Where? Out there? Son," he said, indicating the wasteland, "Forget it. Forget about ever seeing her again. She's gone."
"How do you know?"
"Because out there isn't a place where human beings last very long. The Burbs might be bad, but believe me.we've got it easy compared to those doomed losers out there."
"Have you ever been to the wasteland?"
Magister Loody glared icily. He snapped his fingers, sat down and started calculating the odds on the next spate of matches happening along the trade trails leading to Quebec. This was the signal indicating that Sonny was dismissed. Sonny did not move.
Loody looked up, surprised that Sonny was still there, defiant. He shook his head, not unkindly. He sighed theatrically.
"C'mon. Where would you even start looking?"
That was a question that had not occurred to Sonny. He didn't have an answer, and he felt embarrassed.
"Time goes forward, kid, not back. You better start living here, in the present. Only thing in the past is memories and dead people."
Sonny didn't move, but his resolve was visibly weakening.
"Keep your mind on that, always, always now. You don't, one day you'll look down and see someone's put a blade between your ribs because you weren't paying attention. Just remember that you're alive."
That stopped him. He'd heard it before. Different voice, different face: his sister. He hardly even remembered her name. Bonnie? Betty? Bessie?
"Remember you're alive." She held close to his arm as they walked from the stinking, dust-choked hut of scrap and debris. Inside, on a filth-stiff floormat, their mother. Dead since the night before. Sonny's sister pulled him back for another look, another goodbye.
A dysenteric plague had swept through the camp. All of the adults had caught it. By the time they figured out it was something in the camp's booze, most of them were already dead. Sonny's mother had for days been delirious, unable to move, unable to speak, laugh, cry. Convulsed by unpredictable jets of thin bloody vomit and rice-like diarrhea. First her hair fell out, then her teeth. Her skin turned a mottled olive, dried up and became gritty, but tore bloodlessly like old soggy paper. Sometimes she moaned for hours, eyes wide and glassy. Sometimes she banged her head against the ground, and then against her children when they tried to keep her still. Then she died. "Remember you're alive, Sonny. You still have me. I'm not sick. We have to go."
Sonny had no problems leaving, although he knew his sister wanted to stay. Sonny was glad it was over. His sister was saying the same thing over and over.
She had wrapped up their mother's teeth in Sonny's old dogskin bib and tied it with a thin string of braided hair, Sonny's first wispy baby hairs. They were going to be taking a trip; Sonny became excited. He took the house book: the first half of a coverless Oliver Twist, ripped down the center of the spine by the woman, their neighbor, who had originally found the archaeological treasure, and in whose possession was the other half. She and her husband and her one-year-old daughter, whose teething gums they would soothe with some of the liquor from the camp still, were all engaged in the process of dying.
Sonny and his sister left the hut for good, taking nothing else with them. There was nothing else to take: spoiled food, junk. Every container and absorbent material had been used to carry away or sop up their mother's dying expulsions. They left the hut behind and began to walk toward the morning sun, past rows and rows of half-clothed children sitting around looking dazed and lost. Sonny and his sister walked to the perimeter, squirreled under the scrap-iron barricades, then out of the camp forever.
* * *
After talking to Dimitrios, Sonny didn't particularly feel like wasting any more time in the Burbs. He flipped back over to the big gate: ID, questions, pat-down, weapon and contraband scan. He was greenstamped to return to Chi-Town. He bought a roast chicken and a twelve-pack of flavored synthetic ethanol on the way home.
When he returned to his apartment a texty from de Siecle was waiting. He wanted Sonny to pay a surprise visit to the ex-boyfriend of one of his crushes. Sonny put the food down and started towards the door, started back into his apartment, started for the door, stopped. He visualized his apartment, his building, the whole city blown to pieces, every brick and screw, nail and bolt, flying, arms and legs falling like rain. He visualized it all falling down and burying him in a cold and quiet black tomb forever and his heart kept bursting in and out, in and out, exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding like a broken machine.
He looked up. The building, the apartment was still there. The texty was still there. He was still there. He was stiff all over. His thoughts went cold furnace. He changed clothes and went back out again.
"Hello? I'm looking for Sonny Blount, please."
"Speaking."
"My name is Rand Huberman. I got your connect-serial from Katherine Monk. I'm having a little bit of a problem, and she told me that I should call you."
"Katherine? That's a name I didn't want to hear. Why did Kate tell you to call me?"
"She said, well.she."
"Don't tell me. She said I was a real scumbag and that I hurt people for money. Didn't she."
"Oh no, it's just she.she.ehhh."
"Well I am and I do. If that's what you want, say it. If not, disconnect right now."
"Fine. Fine. I'll say this: I need you to take care of a personal problem I'm having. It's been bothering me for a long, long time and I need to do something about it or I'll go crazy."
"I'm not a psi-therapist. Get to the point."
"It's my daughter."
"You want me to hurt your daughter."
"No! No! Her boyfriend.I mean.the thing she's been running around with."
"Thing."
"Some godawful creature. A d-bee of some sort, down in the Burbs. I think their relationship has gotten.sexual. It needs to stop."
"What kind of d-bee?"
"I don't know. Big, scary eyes, hairy all over, evil-looking. It's like a nightmare. A d-bee."
"You want to know anything or you just want him out of the picture?"
"Just get rid of him. It, I mean. I don't want to know anything. Just do it."
"Gimmie a figure."
"A figure?"
"Money."
"Oh. Oh. Of course. Five thousand."
"Uh-uh. Gimmie another number. One with at least four zeroes."
"Ten thousand?"
"That's a pathetic offer, but I'll accept it. As long as it's in cash."
"How will I get it to you?"
"You know the Chi-Town offices of Northern Gun?"
"Yes, they're near our research labs."
"Drop the money, the address and the instructions off there. I'll take care of the rest. Make sure you don't put my name on the package. Leave it care of Mr. Vin de Siecle."
"Wonderful. Thank you so much, Mr. Blount. I am really in your debt. I won't forget this."
"I know you won't. Now lose this serial and don't ever call me again."
* * *
Sonny hopped a commercial trans out of the low levels, over to the offices of his sometime employer, Vincent de Siecle, and enjoyed the cross- level culture shock as he traveled out of the dregs and on up to the lofty level that housed Northern Gun's Chi-Town suite. Clothes became cleaner, facial expressions sharper, eyes more focused, haircuts neater, gaits less ambling and aimless. On the upper levels, storefronts were better-tended; the pedways free of litter and the gutters free of urine, the walls were untouched by graffiti. In the upper levels, there were no drug-heads sprawled unconscious in alley corners. There were no drunks vomiting on themselves.
Sonny stopped in the office just long enough to pick up his package, not long enough to speak to any of the secretaries. When he plowed through the offices like he owned the place, a six-foot-eight bulldozer of muscle exuding his own gravity field that kept most sane people beyond arm's length, he knew he scared the hell out of everyone but there was nothing to be done about it. He had tried to sweet talk the girls when he first started working for de Siecle, but whenever he called one of their names, they flinched and got this glazed look in their eyes like they had just been smacked. After a few days, he stopped trying. It wasn't as if he wanted for women. Fuck it.
He hopped another trans to a cheap food court. He grabbed some cheeseburgers, onion rings, half a fried chicken, four bottles of beer. He went home, opened the package, and ate his breakfast.
Inside the package, two visuals: a graduation pic and a telephoto spy-style snapshot. The girl in the graduation shot was pretty. Nothing special, thought Sonny, but pretty. Blonde hair, perfect teeth, blue eyes. She was made almost homely by her perfectly average perfection. There was a name underneath: Alicia Huberman.
The other photo showed a completely changed woman. Gone the blue cap and shapeless grad gown. Gone the simple smile. Smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, wearing painted-on shorts and a halter top so transparent as to be almost imaginary, she was standing within what looked to be an average Burbs alleyway between the tarpaper backs of two shantytown houses. She didn't look so dull in that picture. Her body was pure dynamite, and she looked like she had had some practice using it.
Standing with his arm around her bare shoulders was a fairly unimposing d- bee, a far cry from the monstrous mental picture her shame-ridden father had drawn for him. The creature was barely taller than the girl. Sonny couldn't tell what the hell species it was. Hairy, but not wolfen or dog- boy hairy. It was square-proportioned, like a dwarf, but too tall and too hirsute to be one. It had a massive brow and a distinctly rippled look to its cranium, as if its head were covered in bony ridges. Sonny couldn't tell for sure from the photo. With a loose sweatshirt and baggy pants, the thing could easily have passed for human.
He shouldn't be too tough, Sonny decided.
He committed both photographs to memory. One thing Sonny had had since he was a kid was a perfect memory for faces and people. It had gotten him in trouble before.
The ten-thousand was all there, wrapped in notepaper carrying the location of a house on the Burbs outskirts, in the Trash Town neighborhood. Sonny changed into dirty, threadbare clothing. His regular attire would attract too much attention along the dirt alleys of the Burbs.
He took a lift down to ground level, hassled with paperwork like a good citizen. He tried not to think about the days when he could have badged his way through the guards. Got cleared to enter the Burbs, stepped through the checkpoint airlock.
He walked into the permeating stink of the Burbs and stopped as dead as if he had walked into a brick wall. He knew it wasn't anything you could prepare yourself for, so he hadn't even tried. The ferocity of the stench still took him by surprise, always, every time. It was as if the air itself was a dead, rotting animal that had taken up residence inside his sinuses.
God, he hated the Burbs.
Still, money was tight. Freelance knuckle jobs weren't Sonny's style, but letting himself get kicked out of ISS had cost him a lot of contacts. A lot of money. He'd been useful as a man on the inside. It was worth a lot of money to a lot of people to have an ISS Specter on payroll. Without a badge he was just another thug. Sonny accepted he'd have to break a few kneecaps now and again if he wanted to maintain his lifestyle. He'd been okay for a while, but his savings were thinning out and handmade suits don't grow on trees.
He didn't know why Katherine Monk had given the desperate dad his connect- serial. Not that he minded the work. But he was done fooling with Katherine and he had told her as much the last time they had spoken, which was months ago, right around the time her alcoholic war-hero husband had gotten him dishonorably discharged from ISS and almost imprisoned.
It was typical. Sonny didn't really know Sphere Monk, only by rumor and reputation. But it sounded typical of him. Any real man would have at least tried to give Sonny a few rail-gun rounds in the head. Not sterling Sphere Monk. He found the man who was screwing his wife and had him brought up on charges. And not fake ones, either-these were real charges. It wasn't as if Sphere had framed Sonny for crimes he had never committed. That at least would have taken some balls.
No, Sonny had done everything Sphere accused him of, and a hell of a lot more. It was a weak, stupid move on Sphere's part. All Sonny would have to do was tell the court that he was sleeping with the prosecuting officer's wife and there would have been an immediate and very embarrassing mistrial.
Enter: Vin de Siecle, regional head of operations for Northern Gun. Weapons- merchant, financier, a mover in the Chi-Town underworld, friend to high politicos and Coalition brass. Very connected, very rich. He dropped 95 grand in Sonny's lap and made him an offer: I need a good man. Forget ISS. Come work for me.
Sonny, tired of being a glorified errand boy with a badge. He had seen de Siecle's offer as a golden opportunity. Get out of ISS, get into the power elite of Chi-Town. Goodbye life as a dirty Specter, goodbye fixing other people's messes. Hello political clout, hello life as a rich and powerful businessman. Just like de Siecle.
Sonny had been wrong, all wrong. It hadn't worked out the way he thought it would. Actually, in retrospect, it had been the worst move of his life.
Now he had become, more or less, de Siecle's two-fisted lackey. Some intimidation, some intelligence, some industrial snooping, a lot of violence. Nothing requiring too much brains. He hurt a lot of people, which he was good at, but it bored him.
He maimed people against whom de Siecle had his queer inexplicable vendettas. He pushed de Siecle's phony rebate schemes on pliable customers, he paid off dirty accountants and strong-armed the honest ones, he assaulted any financial investigators who came sniffing around and made it look like ordinary street crime. He vandalized stores not carrying Northern Gun products. He put violent muscle behind de Siecle's plan to force small- time backwater merchants all over the territory to carry Northern Gun armaments at inflated retail prices but with reduced profit margins. All of the additional dividends went right into de Siecle's pocket. That was about it for Sonny Blount these days.
It was trifling shit, and he hated it.
And the money. The money he was getting from de Siecle wasn't cutting it. It was a steady check, but Sonny knew he was being strung along. De Siecle probably thought he was putting a real good one over on poor, dimwitted Sonny Blount. That's what everyone always thought. De Siecle's pay was better than his old ISS salary, a lot better, but he wasn't pulling all the extra perks and kickbacks that you can pull when you're a dirty ISS fixer- for-hire. Which brought Sonny to his present endeavor.
Without too much trouble, Sonny found the house in the Burbs, a shack wood- pulp and plastic, no windows, mottled yellow insulation fluffing out from cracks in the walls. The snow was still lying lightly on the ground, and Sonny didn't want to leave tracks leading up to the front door. At a distance, he circled the place twice but there was no other entrance, the front door the only option. Hell with it, he thought.
The door looked to be blast-reinforced and had about seven locks-odd, he thought, on such a ramshackle building. He guessed it would be pretty difficult to pop it open by force alone. The issue was settled when he tried the handle and found the door unlocked.
The place was quiet. It smelled strongly of sweat, urine and feces. Closing the door, Sonny was enveloped by complete darkness. There was a flashlight concealed in the artificial knuckle of his left index finger; he popped it on. The place was better looking on the inside that its outward appearance would lead one to believe. The walls were thick, sturdy, heavily padded with sheets of expensive foam-core ridge layering.
Soundproof, Sonny guessed. He stopped worrying about having to be quiet.
He was in a small alcove filled with shelf upon shelf of vid equipment: lenses and lights and cables and holo cams and other kinds of expensive electronics. And a small library of discs labeled only with colored decals and serial numbers. Meticulous. Everything clean, everything well-ordered.
Sonny pocketed a handful of the discs. The room beyond the alcove held nothing but a wooden chair and a greasy, beat-up mattress on the floor. Oily waxpaper wrappers-the kind in which most Burbs fast food products were packaged and sold-littered the floor like wild plants. There were what looked and smelled like dog turds in the corner.
No food, no entertainment, no windows, no real furniture. Nothing that indicated habitation. One locked door in the far corner of the room. The only lights were expensive standless spot-lamps for picture-taking, hovering ghostly along the walls. He had been given a bum address. No one lived here.
He gave the place a quick and messy tossing anyway. If he was going to find the girl or the d-bee, he was going to have to come up with some info. A connect serial, an address, something. Wandering the Burbs flashing photographs and asking questions wasn't going to cut it. This whole deal was looking more and more rotten. He had been paid to hurt someone, not perform an investigation. This made things more difficult and it made Sonny angry.
Two minutes told him the main room held nothing of interest. Conspicuously so. It's very rare that, in any given room, there will be absolutely no connections to the outside world. Deliberate? He wondered. Why all the damn secrecy?
He noticed that the dealer's imprint, serial numbers and even brand names had been neatly filed off all the vid equipment. The food wrappers told him that someone had recently gotten takeout from Uberburgers, but that was it.
The place was a holo-movie set of some sort, he knew that much. Porno, probably. The Burbs wasn't the kind of place that produced a lot of educational documentaries. He went to the locked door and tried to kick it off its hinges. Reinforced, it barely budged. He kicked three more times and the hinges ripped out of the doorframe, wrenching the moulding away from the wall and popping nails out of the wood like buckshot. They skittered across the plastic-tiled floor.
Inside was a functional production suite, complete with nonlinear editing computers, multi-frame monitors and wall-unit digital archives. And human body. Sonny felt along the wall for a light switch. He flipped it on.
It looked like the man was dead. He was tied to a chair, blindfolded and gagged, and he was covered in dried blood that had come from two lacerations on the scalp and a long slender crater of flesh on the back of the head, deep enough to expose a tiny triangle of the man's skull. Sonny was leaning over him to go through his pockets when his eye caught the slight movement of lungs lifting. Sonny stood back.
The man was breathing shallowly, but he was breathing. Sonny removed the blindfold and gag.
The man flopped as if he was a rag doll. Sonny stood there for a minute, two minutes, getting more and more pissed. The man sat there limply, not moving a muscle. Sonny grabbed the man's hair and pressed down on one wound with his thumb, digging the edge of his thumbnail into the raw pulpy redness. The man jerked, screamed. Sonny eased the pressure.
"Oww, wait.please, please." said the man, lifting his face. His eyes held desperation and terror. "Please.I don't know what you want, but."
The man was in his early 20's, it seemed. Under all that blood it was hard to tell. Late teens maybe. Just a kid.
"Why were you pretending to be unconscious?" said Sonny.
"What do you want? Listen, there's no money here, but there's drugs.lots of them. Take them, please, just don't kill me."
Sonny's ears perked up. "Where?"
"In that top drawer. Dial 22 77 104 to open it."
Sonny opened the drawer. It wasn't a lot. Probably what the kid thought of as being a lot. Stims, depressos, racers, chasers, hallucinics; there was a decent variety. Sonny mentally calculated their value.
"Who do you think I am?" he said.
The kid closed his eyes tight. "Oh god. I don't know, I don't know. Really. I swear, I'll never remember your face. I didn't mean to look. I didn't get a good look."
Sonny laughed. "No, that's not what I meant. Who did this to you?"
"You didn't.you mean you're not." the kid said, confused. He ventured to open one eye slightly.
"No," said Sonny. A utility blade nicked out of his cybernetic middle finger and he freed the kid from his bonds.
"I don't know what happened," the kid said, holding his head in his hands. He seemed on the verge of tears. "He hit me from behind I think. I didn't see anyone. I didn't hear him come in. I just woke up here. It must have been hours ago." He stood up to go, Sonny put a hand on his shoulder and forced him back into the chair.
"You see anything missing?"
The kid glanced around the suite. "I don't think so. There's not much to steal around here. There's vid equipment and holo-cams out in the."
"It's still there."
The kid, trying to wipe the blood from his face with his shirt. "I don't know then." Trying to get up, hand on the shoulder, sitting back down.
"Think. You look like a smart kid. Someone broke in, beat you up, tied you up, and just left? Without taking anything?"
"I don't know man, I don't know," glaring and removing hand from shoulder. "I've gotta get out of here. Sorry I can't help you." He got up and tried to shoulder his way out, but Sonny's massive frame was blocking the door. "Hey.you mind getting out of my way?"
"Hang on. I need to ask you a few questions."
"Sorry, man. I don't think you understand the headache I got right now and I don't really care about questions. I need to get home. Will you get the hell out of my way now? Please?" Holding his head, he tried to squeeze past Sonny to the door.
With the back of his heavy, shovel-like hand Sonny slapped the kid across the room where he collided with a tower of cardboard boxes filled with blank digital discs that showered down on his bloody head.
"I asked you to look around," said Sonny. "Try a little harder this time."
The kid scanned the room slowly, fresh blood seeping from his gums. His eyes settled on a black cabinet that was slightly ajar. Sonny followed his eyes and walked over to it, opened it. Inside: digital image storage system, a big cavity in the center of it. Central memory unit gone, pulled out of its housing, ripped wires trailing down the scratched panel.
"What's this for?" said Sonny.
"I don't know."
Sonny glared.
"They don't give me the password. Everything's encrypted."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know a hell of a lot, do you?"
"There's a backup," the kid said. "Behind that panel."
Behind a wooden wall panel, in a tiny nook packed with sawdust and newspaper, was a smaller memory unit. Condensed organic-matrix drives. Very expensive, very tiny. Roughly the size of a cigarette lighter. Weight: almost seven pounds.
"That's encrypted too," the kid said.
Sonny disconnected the leads and took the backup. "So what exactly do you do here?"
"They make sex movies."
"I didn't ask what they do, I asked about you."
The kid shrugged. "Systems maintenance. I clean the transfer heads. Re- initialize the drivers in the morning. Make small deliveries. That sort of thing. I do some talent scouting too, but otherwise I'm just a stupid errand boy."
Sonny grimaced.
Sonny said "Who runs this show?"
"I d."
"If you say 'I don't know' again, you're going to lose teeth. Give me some names. Who works here, who visits. Who have you seen hanging around. Who pays your check."
The kid thought a moment, daubed at his oozing gums with the elastic collar of his undershirt. He began to enumerate on his fingers: "Tristan Solido. Milos S something.Milos Sigmund I think. I get my money from Jarrett Jex, but he's just a flunkie like me. He mops jizz. I only come in when no one else is really here. Jarrett talks about 'J.O.' sometimes-I just know his initials. I think he owns the building. Umm.some guy called Harper the Nut comes around once in a while." The kid shook his head. "I don't know. Is that enough?"
That last name struck bells for Sonny, and he refrained from smashing the kid in his mouth for saying "I don't know" again. Harper the Nut. Main muscle for Argive Dimitrios, one of Chi-Town's most influential crime bosses, or was once. Sonny had done lots of business with them back when he had an ISS badge. He hadn't seen them too much recently.
"Any of these guys d-bees? Like dogs?"
"D-bees? Hell no. I mean, they could be psychics or closet sorcerers I suppose. I don't think so though."
"You know this girl?" Sonny showed the kid the picture, the sleazy one.
The kid waved it off, shrugged. "Man, lots of girls come through here. It's tough to tell them apart. Who can remember faces? Sluts, strays and runaways," here the kid grinned widely, "you know? They're just pu-"
Sonny slammed his fist into the kid's stomach. The kid collapsed and curled up on the floor, sucking wind, tears streaming down his face leaving tracks as they washed away the dried blood. Sonny lifted the kid up gingerly and put him back in the chair.
"You know, I don't think you told me your name."
The kid gasped. Holding his stomach, still folded up.
"Muh.Muh." the kid heaved. "Martin."
"Martin what?"
"Martin Cuh.Canis."
"Well, Martin Canis," Sonny held the photo up in front of the kid's contorted face. "You ever see this girl before?"
He looked hard, shook his head. "Nuh.no."
"You sure?"
The kid nodded, gulping air.
Sonny ripped a sheet of paper from the editing computer's timecode log and got a pen out. He put them in front of the kid. The kid looked up at him.
"Write," said Sonny. "Tristan Solido, Milos Sigmund, Jarrett Jex. How I can get in touch with them. Addresses, connect serials, hangouts. Whatever you got."
"Wh.what are you going to do with me?"
"Not a damn thing unless you keep stalling when I tell you to do something. Write."
The kid thought for a minute, then started writing. Sonny stood patiently over the kid's shoulder. Then he remembered the drugs in the drawer, went back and pocketed them. Under the many pearlescent baggies was an unlabeled bottle of some strange pharmaceutical Sonny had never seen before. He took it.
"Um.I'm not sure I know anything about Harper the Nut," said the kid.
Sonny straightened. "Him I already know how to find."
* * *
Harper the Nut didn't get his name because he was insane or because he was a Crazy, although both were certainly true. Sonny didn't really know why he was called Harper, since he always claimed that his first, middle and last names were all Oswald. But he was called "The Nut" because that's what he thought he was.
Very shortly after undergoing M.O.M. conversion, while the flesh around his cranial implants was still throbbing and red, Oswald O. Oswald, known to his friends as Harper, announced to the world that he was no longer a human being, but a sentient cashew.
Sonny didn't particularly like him. He didn't like any Crazies, for that matter. Not as tough as Juicers, but not as predictable either. He couldn't imagine how anyone ever thought that being given supernatural, mind-over-matter strength and speed was worth being driven completely, utterly, irrevocably batshit insane by the process.
Sonny and Harper had had a business relationship when Sonny was doing work and pulling favors for Harper's boss, Argive Dimitrios, back when Dimitrios had been running half of the Burbs. Argive's fortunes had independently taken a downturn around the same time Sonny went to work for Vin de Siecle. Police pressure coupled with a sudden influx of cutthroat gangsters from out of town had been shrinking his influence and territory. Now his sector of the Burbs was less of a thug monopoly and more of a criminal free-for- all. It was every man for himself. Argive Dimitrios still ruled, but he was no longer supreme.
Sonny walked through the front gate of Dimitrios's Burbs "estate." He waved at the enormous Vanguard Brawler bodyguards watching the front door. They waved back. Sonny went around behind the house, to the chicken coop where Harper slept. He was sitting in the slush and wet hay with a three-gallon drum of peanut butter between his legs. He was greedily scooping it into his mouth with his bare hands. It was all over his face.
The only thing Harper ever ate was peanut butter. Not because he loved peanuts, but because he thought that grinding them up and eating them was a patriotic act of genocide against an inferior nut species.
Sonny walked up the path and knocked on the coop's wooden frame.
"Sonny!" squealed Harper.
"Harper. Haven't they given you a real room yet?"
Harper pointed. "I have chicken wire."
"I see that. You know, you've got a little peanut butter on your face."
Hands, face and bald pink scalp slathered with great gobs of the stuff, Harper paused long enough to say, "Where?" He went diligently back to the task of packing the brown goo into his wide-open mouth.
"How you feeling today, Harper? You feel okay? Think you can answer some questions for me?"
Harper shrugged. Without looking up, he shot at Sonny with a plastic water gun.
Because he was a Crazy, Harper was a pretty unreliable source of information. Sonny knew that it was always difficult to separate the facts from his delusions. But he would be less guarded and suspicious than Dimitrios usually was. He wouldn't get anything for free from Dimitrios. Sonny figured Harper was worth a shot.
Sonny reeled off the address of the place to Harper, asked if he knew it.
Harper nodded.
"What's it for?" said Sonny.
Harper made a tight circle with his thumb and forefinger and enthusiastically rammed a peanut-butter-lubricated finger through the hole about thirty-five times before Sonny asked him to stop already.
"Is it one of Argive's places?"
Harper got sulky, turned his back to Sonny. Sonny realized the man was wearing his coat backwards.
"I guess that's a yes."
"I didn't say yes say yes say yes."
Sonny laughed. "Argive's going to put you in the box if you start having trouble keeping secrets again."
Harper the Nut turned his head around at an angle that seemed anatomically impossible and fixed Sonny in a frighteningly sane glare. Sonny heard vertebrae pop.
Sonny took this as a bad sign. Harper the Nut was not a man you wanted to make angry. Still, there was obviously something going on here. Sonny put up his empty hands in a gesture he hoped Harper would interpret as friendliness.
"C'mon, you can tell me, Harper. We're old friends."
A voice boomed out behind Sonny, hoarse and wine-sodden, unmistakable: Argive Dimitrios.
"You don't have friends, Sonny."
Sonny turned and saw that Dimitrios was standing next to him, virtually touching him. The man knew how to move quietly, he'd give him that. They embraced affectionlessly. Sonny caught a whiff of a peculiar odor that he remembered well: the sex musk from Dimitrios's d-bee whores.
"Sonny," Dimitrios waggled a reproving finger, "You're big man now? I don't see you at club, I don't get no visits. You quit police, you disappear. Dimitrios worries."
"I got a new job."
"I know. Vin de Siecle. You run errands." Dimitrios furrowed his brow sympathetically, "Is very boring I think. Not like old days, yes?"
"Not like old days, no."
"What is you come visit now, Sonny, eh? You need money? Gash? A gun? You say, Dimitrios does."
Sonny flashed the address to Argive.
"One of yours?"
Argive laughed and held up his hands. "Sonny you sound like more cop than when you were cop. How come?"
"I'm looking for someone."
"Looking?" Argive grimaced doubtful. "Finding is okay. Looking not so smart. Who is it?"
"A girl who's been playing around with some." remembering Argive's predilection for nonhuman playmates, "someone she shouldn't be. I'd like to talk to them both. I got this address, but it's shit. Is it yours?"
"Not really. No. No. It is not mine."
"What's Harper doing hanging around there?" Sonny felt the spray of a water gun hit his neck.
"What is Harper doing anywhere?" Dimitrios spun his finger by his temple. "Fucking crazy."
"You protect your turf and it's on your turf. They're making fuck vids it looks like. You make fuck vids. It's not you, you're telling me. Who's is it?"
"Nobody important. It is.you shouldn't. Let's not talk like this. It is nothing, Sonny. And you make Dimitrios uncomfortable. Is it very important."
"Not really. No."
"But worth money to you?"
"Yes."
"Well, Sonny, since me and you go very far way back I will maybe trade with you. Do me a favor, I would not be so uncomfortable. A favor the boys cannot do. We could talk again about that place me and you Sonny."
"One of the old kind of favors?"
"One of the old kind."
"Sorry, Dimitrios. Not interested."
"You're older now, it's different. You are not my Sonny any more. I understand. I respect that. Things must change. If you change your mind, Sonny, the offer is all open."
"Thanks. But I won't need it. I think I'm just going to give up this thing I'm doing now. Keep the money. I don't need to fool around with this shit. What the fuck could he do to me anyway."
"You skip out on job?" Dimitrios's eyebrow arched sharply. "Man skip out on me, I do plenty."
Sonny knew what Dimitrios would do all right.
"Man skip out on me I have Harper rip his head off. Eat his eyeballs. Shit in his pockets."
Harper hummed to himself. "Done it before done it done it done it before before before," and patted himself three times on each shoulder.
* * *
Sonny and Dimitrios went way back together. It was Dimitrios who had used his connections to get Sonny citizenship, and then a badge. It had kept Sonny in his debt for a long time.
Before that, he had given Sonny his first real job when he was still a teenager, doing collections from Dimitrios's various businesses and loanshark customers. Sonny was very good at it. By that point in his life he felt reassured by the sound of bones breaking, of cartilage ripping and tendons snapping like overstressed bowstrings. These things had become almost musical to him, and the work therefore suited his temperament.
Even as a young man, he had been huge, iron-muscled, and a very good hand with a vibro-blade. He also had a very bad reputation. He took pride in the fact that there were even juicers who were afraid of him. Him, a punk kid, unaugmented; no drugs, no implants, no cybernetics. Just meanness. Sonny could always collect.
He had first come to Dimitrios's attention when the boss man had seen him fighting at fourteen, maybe fifteen years of age-it was hard to tell exactly, since Sonny didn't know for sure when he had been born. In that fight, Sonny won the Burbs under-sixteen bare-knuckle championship-again-by shattering his opponent's jaw so completely with one blow, crumpling it like dry kindling, that the boy's seconds had carried him straightaway to the cyber-doc's for an immediate replacement.
Dimitrios bought Sonny from his handlers and immediately put him to work.
Several months later, while Sonny was out on a collection, the boy from the championship ambushed Sonny from behind a burned-out Coalition riot barricade. The kid now had a cybernetically armored cranium and a jaw like a steel bear-trap. His neck was reinforced and steel-plated, and looked as if it could withstand antitank ordnance. The death-red eyes blinked PAYBACK.
After realizing the boy had only taken the trouble to armor his head, Sonny pounded the boy's torso until his cracked collarbone broke loose from his chest and through his skin, the bloody, marrowed edges cutting deep gashes in Sonny's knuckles.
Both the boy's lungs collapsed and he suffocated there among the ashes and empty soft-drink containers. He was the eighteenth human being Sonny had beaten to death with his bare hands. Or nineteenth. He had already lost count. Later on that day, when he had to think hard to remember where the cuts on his knuckles had come from, Sonny realized he couldn't recall the details of the confrontation. He had killed the man out of reflex. For the first time in many years, Sonny was afraid, although of what he couldn't say.
Before Dimitrios had found him, Sonny spent his early teenage days sleeping with prostitutes and his nights fighting for money in the "arenas" of the Burbs and other nearby tramp towns and squatter settlements. Without any desire or means to mark the passage of days, he knew that it had already been a few years since he had come to Chi-town, seeking refuge from the uncivilized wastes. And years before that that he had been orphaned.
When he had first arrived, Sonny, a ragged beggar child, was picked up because of his size and his temper-which had been filed down to a hair trigger by loneliness and a steady diet of street garbage-and placed by his "rescuers" into a back-alley school for young street urchins. He did not have the quickness to be a thief, nor the looks to be a prostitute, and he was placed in a camp for fighters.
The trainers taught him and other children like him to fight with their fists, with clubs, with knives, razors, hatchets, hammers, icepicks. They strung them up and whipped them and burned them so that they would become accustomed to pain and would not fear it. When Sonny bullied other children, he was rewarded with candy and a little pocket money. When he displayed an unnatural ferocity or brutality, he was given liquor and video games, and praised like a hero.
Sonny was the most prodigious student they had ever seen.
It worked like this: trainers from opposing schools pitted their charges against one another in makeshift arenas throughout the Burbs. In the dusty innards of crumbling buildings, in weed-strangled lots, in dank cellars, in freshly dug pits, in sewer tunnels, these lost children of the Burbs met one another with every kind of weapon imaginable while around them hundreds of adults screamed for blood and clutched betting slips to their hearts in feverish ecstasy.
From all over, people flocked to the matches. It got so big they couldn't hide the crowds from the Coalition any more and had to start paying the Burbs ISS Specters for protection. There were no raids, no investigations. Not as long as the Specters-drunken ex-Chi-Town nobodies-got their cash.
The gambling on the fights was intense. That was how the trainers made their money; they were also bookies.
It was a cash cow. There was very little overhead. Children had nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to eat. They were desperate, and therefore a lot cheaper to maintain than adult fighters, who needed things like room and board and a salary.
Children were also more vicious than adults, which the crowd loved. It took a special kind of coldness for an adult to kill another human being in cold blood, in the middle of a public arena. Children could do it with very little prodding. Sonny had killed five boys and one girl before he reached puberty.
Sonny remembered clearly the first person he had ever killed. The boy had shaggy, unwashed red hair, and his back and shoulders were covered in what looked like freckles, although certain swellings and discolorations gave it away for what it was: pre-cancerous melanoma.
It was Sonny's first death match. Eleventh for the redhead. Sonny was a 12-to-3 underdog. The venue was a collapsed building that could once have been a high school gymnasium: bleachers and warped wood floors with obscure circles and markings painted on them. Only one wall was still standing. It was mid-spring and the night was cool and breezy; the packed crowd reeked of sweat and alcohol. The scene was lit by oil drums burning garbage.
After two minutes of grappling, biting and gouging, dodging and blocking, Sonny managed to fit his icepick between the boy's ribs and into his heart. The boy's eyes went wide in shock. Sonny pulled the pick out. A pulsing stream of blood twice shot out of the tiny wound, like a water-gun, and trinkled across Sonny's face.
The boy looked into Sonny's eyes and his freckled lips began to tremble. He slowly sat down in the sand and, never taking his eyes off Sonny, fell onto his back. The hole in his chest squirted blood into the air like a little geyser with each remaining beat of his heart. Sonny thought the boy was about to start crying, but his eyes glassed over before they could shed any tears and then he died.
Sonny's handlers were extremely pleased with the outcome of the match.
"Congratulations, my boy. Congratulations," said Magister Loody, the head of the stable that owned Sonny. "We cleaned up so well on that last one, we all thought to give you your first taste of a special treat. You're ten years old now."
"I am?"
"Well, probably. You look it, at least. Maybe you're only nine. At any rate, you're a big boy now, and we thought it was time you started getting big boy privileges. If we could give you one thing that you always wanted, what would it be?"
"I want to go find my sister." No hesitation.
"Hnh. We were thinking more along the lines of this." Magister Loody held up a bottle filled with a glaucous, hallucinogenic syrup. He smiled and gave it a little shake. The label was emblazoned with a popular video-game character, sheets of blue lightning flying off his impossibly rippling musculature and unnaturally angular hairdo.
"It's what all the older ones get after a good fight," said Loody, clearly nonplussed at Sonny's lack of enthusiasm. The other boys and girls in the Loody stable were willing to move heaven and earth to get a taste of the stuff.
"I want to go find my sister."
Loody frowned, tossing the bottle back in his desk and slamming the drawer. "Sister. Where? Out there? Son," he said, indicating the wasteland, "Forget it. Forget about ever seeing her again. She's gone."
"How do you know?"
"Because out there isn't a place where human beings last very long. The Burbs might be bad, but believe me.we've got it easy compared to those doomed losers out there."
"Have you ever been to the wasteland?"
Magister Loody glared icily. He snapped his fingers, sat down and started calculating the odds on the next spate of matches happening along the trade trails leading to Quebec. This was the signal indicating that Sonny was dismissed. Sonny did not move.
Loody looked up, surprised that Sonny was still there, defiant. He shook his head, not unkindly. He sighed theatrically.
"C'mon. Where would you even start looking?"
That was a question that had not occurred to Sonny. He didn't have an answer, and he felt embarrassed.
"Time goes forward, kid, not back. You better start living here, in the present. Only thing in the past is memories and dead people."
Sonny didn't move, but his resolve was visibly weakening.
"Keep your mind on that, always, always now. You don't, one day you'll look down and see someone's put a blade between your ribs because you weren't paying attention. Just remember that you're alive."
That stopped him. He'd heard it before. Different voice, different face: his sister. He hardly even remembered her name. Bonnie? Betty? Bessie?
"Remember you're alive." She held close to his arm as they walked from the stinking, dust-choked hut of scrap and debris. Inside, on a filth-stiff floormat, their mother. Dead since the night before. Sonny's sister pulled him back for another look, another goodbye.
A dysenteric plague had swept through the camp. All of the adults had caught it. By the time they figured out it was something in the camp's booze, most of them were already dead. Sonny's mother had for days been delirious, unable to move, unable to speak, laugh, cry. Convulsed by unpredictable jets of thin bloody vomit and rice-like diarrhea. First her hair fell out, then her teeth. Her skin turned a mottled olive, dried up and became gritty, but tore bloodlessly like old soggy paper. Sometimes she moaned for hours, eyes wide and glassy. Sometimes she banged her head against the ground, and then against her children when they tried to keep her still. Then she died. "Remember you're alive, Sonny. You still have me. I'm not sick. We have to go."
Sonny had no problems leaving, although he knew his sister wanted to stay. Sonny was glad it was over. His sister was saying the same thing over and over.
She had wrapped up their mother's teeth in Sonny's old dogskin bib and tied it with a thin string of braided hair, Sonny's first wispy baby hairs. They were going to be taking a trip; Sonny became excited. He took the house book: the first half of a coverless Oliver Twist, ripped down the center of the spine by the woman, their neighbor, who had originally found the archaeological treasure, and in whose possession was the other half. She and her husband and her one-year-old daughter, whose teething gums they would soothe with some of the liquor from the camp still, were all engaged in the process of dying.
Sonny and his sister left the hut for good, taking nothing else with them. There was nothing else to take: spoiled food, junk. Every container and absorbent material had been used to carry away or sop up their mother's dying expulsions. They left the hut behind and began to walk toward the morning sun, past rows and rows of half-clothed children sitting around looking dazed and lost. Sonny and his sister walked to the perimeter, squirreled under the scrap-iron barricades, then out of the camp forever.
* * *
After talking to Dimitrios, Sonny didn't particularly feel like wasting any more time in the Burbs. He flipped back over to the big gate: ID, questions, pat-down, weapon and contraband scan. He was greenstamped to return to Chi-Town. He bought a roast chicken and a twelve-pack of flavored synthetic ethanol on the way home.
When he returned to his apartment a texty from de Siecle was waiting. He wanted Sonny to pay a surprise visit to the ex-boyfriend of one of his crushes. Sonny put the food down and started towards the door, started back into his apartment, started for the door, stopped. He visualized his apartment, his building, the whole city blown to pieces, every brick and screw, nail and bolt, flying, arms and legs falling like rain. He visualized it all falling down and burying him in a cold and quiet black tomb forever and his heart kept bursting in and out, in and out, exploding, exploding, exploding, exploding like a broken machine.
He looked up. The building, the apartment was still there. The texty was still there. He was still there. He was stiff all over. His thoughts went cold furnace. He changed clothes and went back out again.