Tek Money Read online

  Jake was on his feet now. “I have to be able to work in any way I think is—”

  “Let’s make a list of chores for today, gang.” Gomez stood up. “Me, I’ll find out which Tek parlor Traynor visited and, hopefully, who slipped him the sizzler and why. You want to follow up on the Flanders business first, Jake?”

  After a few seconds his partner replied, “I’ll start with that, yeah.”

  “Bueno. Later in the day I’ll check with you and we’ll compare notes on what fun we’ve had thus far,” said Gomez. “What about the folks at Gunsmiths, Ltd.? Do we waltz right in or do we use an oblique approach?”

  Bascom answered, “By now, they probably know we’re on the case. So, initially anyway, walk right in on the bastards and start asking questions.”

  “Dennis Barragray is the first one to talk to,” said Jake. “He was Traynor’s boss and a friend of his. He’s also a friend of our client, so you ought to be able to see him without too much trouble.”

  “I’ll grill him,” offered Gomez. “My first inquiry will be—‘Did you slip Pedro a sizzler because he had the goods on you?’ That ought to start the ball rolling, don’t you think?”

  “Be just a wee bit subtler,” advised his chief.

  Jake moved to the door. “I’ll be in touch, Sid.” He left the big office.

  Bascom frowned as the door hissed shut. “Jake seems to be pissed off at me,” he observed.

  “Terrific deduction, jefe.” Gomez headed for the way out. “We’ll be able to make a detective of you yet.”

  8

  THE SIMULATED CANALS down at this end of the Venice Sector of Greater LA were not, as usual, in especially good shape. The water was a cloudy yellow and reeked of decay and worse. As Gomez walked along the ground-level pedramp, he noted a dead calico cat and a partly burned toyboat go floating, sluggishly, by. “Scenic wonders abound,” he murmured, increasing his pace.

  Farther up the bedraggled block a rusty, dented robot was sitting crouched in the doorway of a shutdown wineshop. Taped to the rattletrap mechanical man’s pocked copper chest was a hand-lettered sign—My friends, I was once the valet of a prominent vid superstar. Ill fortune and failing ratings ruined his career and, thus, mine. I lost my position and, after a pathetic series of humiliating failures, ended up in this slew of despond that you find me in at present. However, an expensive tune-up will put me on my feet again. God bless you for whatever you see your way clear to contributing.

  “You misspelled slough,” mentioned Gomez in passing.

  The seated bot eyed him with dingy plazeyes. “You making a contribution, sir?”

  “No, merely a correction in your pitch.”

  “Then go blurp yourself.”

  “Blurp?”

  “I was a very proper gentleman’s gentleman, programmed to use no seriously vulgar language, sir. You walleyed poop.”

  Smiling, the detective moved onward.

  At the corner he found the establishment he was seeking. Lettered in gloletters across the dusty, narrow shop window was Fragrant Illusions and below that The BEST in Holographic Flowers. Gomez, frowning, noticed that all the dozen or so brick-red flowerpots on display in the window were devoid of flowers, holographic or otherwise.

  Cautiously, he entered the shop. “What happened to your blooms?” he asked the handsome blond android clerk who stood behind the narrow counter.

  The andy made no reply. He remained standing stiffly, arms at his sides, eyes staring.

  “Cuidado,” Gomez warned himself as he drew out his stungun from its shoulder holster beneath his jacket.

  After a moment, he moved across the room and stopped in front of the rear door. The door was a few inches open.

  He listened for several seconds, then booted the door all the way open and hopped to one side.

  “Come on in, Gomez,” invited a voice from the next room.

  The fight didn’t start until Jake had been there for nearly ten minutes. Bev’s offices were in the Santa Monica Sector, in a tall, mostly plastiglass building that was built out over the Pacific. At midmorning there was still a thin white mist hanging over the quiet blue water. Gulls were diving into the white blur, disappearing and reappearing.

  “There’s nobody we’ve turned up in the Flanders case who fits the description of this Janine Traynor,” Bev was saying from behind her desk.

  Jake turned his back to the window. “Then she was connected in some other way,” he said. “Have you connected Flanders with Traynor yet?”

  “I’m following up on that,” the blonde detective said. “So far this killing looked to me like a typical Tek assassination. But we can’t come up with any reason for the Teklords to want to eliminate Flanders. He didn’t seem that important till now.”

  “I’d like to go over your files on Flanders,” he said. “Unless that violates agency policy.”

  “It’s my agency, Jake,” she reminded him.

  “To my way of thinking, both killings must have something to do with what’s going on wrong out at Gunsmiths.” Jake sat in a metallic chair that faced her desk. “But some of the Tek cartels have to be tied in, too. Both of them were killed with traditional Tek methods.”

  “Could also be a copycat.”

  He shook his head negatively. “Nope, feels to me like there has to be a Tek angle someplace.”

  Bev smiled. “Hunches don’t always stand up.”

  “Even so.” He leaned forward in his chair. “If you’re going to dig into the links between Flanders and Traynor, I’ll concentrate on some of the other aspects of this mess. Then later we can compare—”

  The door to Beth’s private office came hissing open and a large, wide man of thirty five or so came barging in. His face was flushed with anger, both big fists were clutched. “What the hell is this bastard doing here? Damn it now, Bev, you can’t—”

  “What I can or can’t do is no business of yours, Jabb,” she said evenly. “If you want to see me, wait until—”

  “What I have to talk about,” said Jabb Marx, pointing angrily at Jake, “is this asshole here. It’s bad enough you see him socially, for Christ sake, but now you’re sharing confidential agency files with him.”

  “How do you know I’m sharing anything with him?”

  “It’s obvious that’s why he’s here—to pump you about the Wes Flanders case.”

  Jake had risen to his feet. “Marx,” he said quietly, “get out of here now.”

  “You just keep the hell quiet, Cardigan,” the detective shouted at him. “I tell you something, asshole—you got one good woman killed so far in your career, but I’m damned if I’m going to let the same thing happen to Bev.”

  Jake didn’t say anything. He was just all at once next to Marx. He hit him, hard, in the midsection.

  Marx gasped, doubled, tried to swing at Jake.

  Jake kicked him, his booted foot connecting with his ribs.

  Marx jerked back, clutching at his side, groaning.

  Jake moved in, hitting him again and again in the face with each fist in turn.

  His face bloody, his jacket and shirt splotched with red, Marx dropped to his knees.

  Jake kicked him again, in the chest this time.

  “Jake!” cried Bev.

  The woman may have cried out before, but Jake hadn’t been hearing anything for a while there.

  “Jake.” She ran over to him, caught him by an arm and pulled him back. “That’s enough—more than enough.”

  Jake shook himself, as though he’d just stepped out of the chill ocean. “Sorry,” he managed to croak. His voice was raw, raspy.

  Pushing him aside, she knelt next to the unconscious operative. “His nose is broken, lord knows what else is wrong.” She reached up and flipped a switch on the voxbox on her desk. “Emmy Lou, get the medibots up here—quick!”

  “He was right,” Jake said, his voice still not his own. “It’s my fault that Beth died.”

  She stood up, spun and glared at him. “I don’t g
ive a good goddamn who’s right and who’s wrong,” she said, angry. “You don’t have the right to do things like this.”

  “Maybe not.” He shook his head once, left to right, before walking out of there.

  Detective Lieutenant Drexler said, “Too, late, Gomez.”

  “So I notice.” He walked over to where the large, fat corpse was sprawled in front of the entrance to one of the Tek parlor cribs. “Sí, this is the proprietor, Lorenzo Printz, sure enough.”

  “The boss himself.”

  “I note they used a lazgun on the cabrón.” There was a large sooty hole in the back of the sinsilk floral robe that was twisted around the huge puffy dead man. “Rather than a sizzler.”

  “Lorenzo, like most Tek joint operators, never touched the stuff.” The black cop was sitting on the edge of a wooden chair. “How’d you find your way here, by the way?”

  “Came in to buy a bunch of holo roses for my sweet old grandmother on her graduation from robotics night school,” Gomez told him. “Much to my surprise, I found that somebody had used a stunner on the handsome clerk. Curious, I—”

  “C’mon, don’t make me treat you the way I treat that partner of yours. Tell me the truth—or at least part of it.”

  “Okay, we’re working on the Traynor case.” Gomez left the vicinity of the body.

  “That I heard earlier in the day. How’d you end up at Lorenzo’s Tek parlor here?”

  “It’s the one Traynor visited on his last night out. I was planning to persuade Lorenzo to confide in me.”

  “Who tipped you that this was the place Traynor’d been coming lately?”

  Gomez smiled, settling into a chair near the policeman’s. “I hope this won’t change the warm feelings you have for me, Drexler, but I don’t ever give out the names of my sources of information.”

  Drexler watched him for a moment. “And I suppose you don’t know anything about who ordered Lorenzo to slip Traynor a sizzler?”

  “Would I be here if I did? This was my first stop on the road to enlightenment,” he said. “Any notions of your own?”

  Drexler laughed. “I’ll write up everything I know and send it to you.”

  “Everything okay back there?” called a female voice from out front.

  “The forensic bots here, Cathleen?”

  “They came with me, yes.” A plump blonde young woman, uniformed, stepped into the Tek parlor. She wrinkled her nose upon sighting Gomez. “You going to haul Gomez off to the pokey, lieutenant?”

  “Chiquita, after all we’ve meant to each other—how can you think I’d commit any sort of illegal act?” He left the chair.

  “I’d toss him in a cell,” she advised Drexler.

  “No, no,” he said. “Gomez has promised to cooperate with us. Every single clue he unearths, he’s going to turn over to the SoCal police.”

  “Oh, sí.” He crossed to the doorway. “I’ll even have them giftwrapped.” He stepped across the threshold. “Adiós, colleagues.”

  Outside, he went striding toward the lot where he’d left the agency skycar.

  9

  WHEN THE VIDPHONE on the dash of his skycar buzzed, Jake hit the auto/answer key.

  A mechanical version of his voice said, “Please leave your message now.”

  Bev appeared on the small rectangular screen. She was seated at her desk, face pale, hands folded. “Jake, Jabb Marx will be spending the day at the Santa Monica Emergency Center,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve persuaded him not to take any legal action against you for assault. For now—well, I think you ought to stay away from me and the office. We’ll be better off working separately on this Flanders-Traynor business for a while. I’ll … I’ll probably get in touch with you again in a couple of days.” Then her image was gone from the screen.

  After a moment Jake said aloud, “I’m not getting off to a very impressive start on this case.”

  “Beg pardon, sir?” inquired the voice of the car computer.

  “Nothing. Talking to myself.”

  “Would you care to have me patch you through to one of the agency therapists?”

  “Not just yet.”

  The computer said, “You have been, if I may mention it, unusually tense of late, sir. Is there anything I can do?”

  “I appreciate your interest,” said Jake. “But I don’t think I’m far enough around the bend to need advice from my car. But thanks.”

  “As you wish, sir.” The computer fell silent.

  Jake punched out a flight pattern that would take him to the Palm Springs Sector.

  Gomez took a careful step backward, made a go-away motion with both hands. “I don’t want to take a card.”

  The magician doll was nearly three feet high, dressed in a glittery tuxsuit and top hat. He had a perpetual grin under his slick, dark moustache. “Don’t be a schmuck,” he urged, fanning out six bright playing cards. “Take one, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Hey, simp,” said a fuzzy teddybear, jumping off his low perch, “ignore that four-flusher. Buy me. I’m the cutest darn toy in this whole darn Wondersmith’s toyshop.”

  “You do have an awfully cute lisp,” the detective admitted. “But I came to consult with your boss.”

  The bear, who was slightly shorter than the magician, came up closer to Gomez. “I remember you now, palsy walsy,” he said accusingly. “Sure, you’ve been here before and you didn’t buy a single toy then either.”

  “That’s enough, guys. Get back on your pedestals.” A large, fat woman with bright silvery hair came lumbering in from the office of the toyshop. “Hiya, Gomez, honey. Excuse these lovable little darlings.”

  “Lovable ain’t one of the words, I’d apply, Corky.”

  “Up your nose,” muttered the bear while climbing back onto his perch.

  Corky Keepnews said, “Language, language. C’mon in, honey.” She was clad in a sinsilk slaxsuit of a floral pattern similar to the one he’d recently seen on the dead man’s robe.

  Her toyshop office was in the Westwood Sector, up on the seventeenth level. From her one narrow viewindow you could see part of University of SoCal Campus #26, where either a riot or a rally was in progress in the glade.

  “Found out anything yet?” he asked, watching Corky sink down into an immense armchair.

  “Honey, am I not one of the best sources of information in the entire state?”

  “I’ll award you the title after you tell me something.” He gingerly lifted a goldenhaired babydoll off a chair and sat.

  “Watch who you’re grabbing, kiddo,” warned the doll in a small, piping voice.

  He dropped her on the floor. “Well, Corky?”

  “This, it turns out, is a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar job, hon.”

  “What’s the extra two-fifty for?”

  She turned away from him, watching the sun-bright campus far below. “What the hell are you messed up with this time, sweetie?”

  “You tell me. That’s what this outrageous fee is for.”

  “After you phoned me to tell me that poor Lorenzo had shuffled off,” began the silverhaired informant, “I commenced making some discreet inquiries for you. And it’s a damn good thing I am so discreet. Otherwise, I’d be on somebody’s shitlist myself.”

  “This buildup is very exciting, bonita, yet singularly uninformative.”

  “Putz,” muttered the sprawled babydoll.

  Gomez rested the sole of his boot on the back of the doll. “Continue, Corky.”

  “Okay, I wasn’t able to find out who hired Lorenzo—rest his soul—to slip your boy Traynor that sizzler,” the fat woman told him. “However, I did find out more than enough to scare the puckey out of me.”

  Gomez made an impatient noise.

  Corky went on. “I do have a pretty good notion who hired the heavies to get rid of Lorenzo. The guys who did the job are local, honey, but the fee, a hefty one, came from Europe.”

  “Caramba.” Gomez nodded. “That’s an unexpected angle. Can you pin it down any, C
ork? Europe, last time I dropped in, was a big place.”

  She looked away from him. “Spain,” she said quietly.

  “Ah, I see why you’re uneasy.” He narrowed his left eye, watching her. “We’re talking about the Zabicas Cartel, aren’t we, Corky?”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  “All right, so what’s Carlos Zabicas’s interest, way over there in Madrid, in a local like Peter Traynor?”

  “Nobody’s saying a damn thing about your pal Traynor,” said Corky, shifting uneasily in her big chair. “All I know is, the Spanish were the ones who hired Lorenzo done in. Could be, Gomez honey, it doesn’t have anything to do with this Traynor.”

  “You rarely encounter coincidences in this dodge, Cork,” he pointed out. “Lorenzo apparently slips Traynor a lethal dose of Tek. The very next day he’s dispatched to glory, too. Naw, whoever had him bumped off, also is behind the Traynor knock-off. And that person is, for reasons yet to be determined, none other than Carlos Zabicas.”

  “I’m thinking of taking a little vacation jaunt up to NorCal, honey,” she informed him. “Can I have my seven-fifty right now on the spot?”

  “There’ll be an equal amount if you get me more on what Zabicas is up to.”

  She shook her head. “Nope, no,” she said, continuing to shake her head. “There are some mean and nasty Teklords in these parts, Gomez, but compared to Zabicas they’re as sweet as that goldenhaired babydoll under your foot. No, I am not going to risk having him hear about me.”

  Gomez said, “One thousand dollars.”

  “I can’t, hon, just can’t. I’ll be vacationing for at least the next two weeks.”

  Gomez accidentally stepped down on the doll when he got up. “Bueno, Corky,” he said. “For now—”

  “Watch where you park the gunboats,” complained the doll.

  “Sorry, chiquita.” He fished $750 in Banx chits out of an inside jacket pocket. “Contact me if you have a change of mind.”

  She grabbed the money. “That won’t happen,” she assured him.

  10

  FROM OUT OF the voxbox on the skycar dash came Gomez’s voice. “Hey, amigo,” he said, “I know that vehicle of yours isn’t flying around up there all by itself. Answer me, por favor.”