Eye and Talon Read online

  There.

  She'd spotted it, the target she'd been pursuing all the way from the hovel burrows beneath the old Angel's Flight tracks, in the densely humid and compacted core of the city. The troglodyte denizens, pale as cave fish and blinking at even what little sunlight was available during LA's monsoon season, had managed to excavate a dome-like space in the earth beneath the stacked-up office towers, lit it with bootleg current tapped off one of the main trunk lines, and had been selling tickets for an entertainment uniquely attractive to the bodyguarded residents of the fortified Beverly Hills and Brentwood enclaves. Most of the show was the usual tawdrily choreographed sex thing, retro Vegasy glamor from the empty spot in the desert on the city's edge where Vegas used to be, tit spangles mixed with sinister black-leather military kitsch straight out of genetic memories of Fosse-ized Weimar Berlin. But the star of the underground show, the singular sensation, had been something truly, sickly intriguing

  A replicant impersonator.

  That's entertainment, Iris had thought when she'd heard about it, down at the station's plain-clothes briefings. Show biz and flash, a genuine human being imitating an imitation of a human being. The ultimate drag queen, not transformed from one sex to the other, but deeper than that, from real flesh and blood, man born of woman, to synthesized, born of the old Tyrell Corporation's production lines.

  Supposedly Art Enesque's act — that was the rep impersonator's stage name — ran the gamut from a funny interrogation bit, with wink-nudge answers over a prop Voigt-Kampff machine and leering asides to the audience clustered around the tables and their watered drinks, to a hardcore demo, with half the chorine troop as assistants, of how much physically stronger replicants were than humans — in every department. And the finale, where the impersonator took a mock bullet in the head from a cliché blade runner, all dead eyes and grubby trench coat, was supposed to be a stone riot.

  'Let the vice squad shut it down,' had been Iris's answer when she'd been told by the squad's captain to scope the show. 'If it's over the line, they can take care of it.'

  'Nothing's over the line,' the captain had replied. 'Not in LA. Just check it out.'

  So she had, sitting hunched over an unsipped drink that her departmental expense account had paid for, inhaling the sour, mingled sweat odors of the laughing civilians around her. A tour bus full of Cambodian businessmen, face-masked and giddy from their Customs Division full-body searches, had swarmed in behind her; Iris could hear them all through the show's clanking, sax- and gamelan-heavy stroke music, their laughter and gasps like softly muted bells. She had mastered the art of ignoring them by the time the headliner came on.

  None of Enesque's jokes had struck her as particularly funny. Wasting my time here, she'd decided, the glass's sweat chilling her fingertips. Then the interrogation bit had started, and she had realized why she'd been sent there. The prop Voigt-Kampff machine had huge gauges mounted on it, big enough for the audience to see from their tables in the subterranean club; part of Enesque's shtick had been his twitching in synch with the needles on the dials, as the straight man playing the cop had run through the questions. Halfway through the familiar catechism, Iris had felt the fine, dark hair along her neck tighten and rise. It's real, she had thought. It's a real V-K machine. The rest of the audience might have thought it was just a dummy prop, a wheezing accordion bellows and some phony dials and lights, but she had known different. Which had meant . . .

  She had knocked over the glass sitting untouched in front of her, as she had reached inside her leatherite jacket. Even before she had pulled out her gun, Art Enesque's sharp gaze had snapped around from his partner in the act, and had locked onto hers. The classic split-second moment of realization had passed between them, like a bullet or a thrown kiss, in which cop and prey, blade runner and replicant, recognized each other for what they really were.

  It'd been a good disguise, she had to admit. Maybe the best possible: for an escaped replicant on the run, hiding out in the center of the city, what better front to assume than as a human pretending to be a replicant? Too clever, though; his own answers had given him away. Or if he had used a real fake Voigt-Kampff, instead of one he must've stolen from an outlying police station or that had been fenced to him by some former blade runner, burnt-out and on the skids, hard up for money. But to use a real one, and pump up his tiny physiological responses so that the needles jumped from side to side, but with that crucial little lag time, measured in milliseconds, that only a trained V-K operator could spot, and which was a critical factor in IDing replicants.

  That was a mistake. Or sheer bravado, or simple death wish. Which Enesque had compounded by grabbing the gun of his partner in the act, the one playing the cop asking the questions. The gun turned out to be real as well; the club's patrons had realized that as soon as he had started firing. They all hit the floor, tables and chairs overturning, as Iris had been left as the only one standing, arms extended and hands locked on the grip of her own gun, coldly firing off enough rounds to send Enesque running for a backstage exit.

  By the time Iris had emerged from the same upwardly sloping tunnel through which her target had fled, she had slammed another full clip into her gun. The usual milling crowds that filled the streets of LA, like a slow, shuffling sea of nocturnal sunglasses and chanting, saffron-robed millennial cults, had been shoved apart by Enesque's furious onrush, then had closed behind him. Iris had had to scramble on top of a police koban, quickly scanning the throng of heads and faces for any sign of her target. A disturbance in the crowd's flow, something crouched down to remain unseen, but obviously pushing its way past the slower bodies around it, had signaled the replicant's escape route to her. With gun held aloft, she had leapt from the koban, flattening a pair of unfortunate pedestrians to the sidewalk, then kneeing them aside as their pallid hands had clutched at her.

  That had been the real start of the chase, the kind she knew and liked, a scrambling predatory run across any impeding vehicles stalled in the streets, losing sight of the target and then spotting it again. The adrenaline rush in her blood blotted out all sensory input except for the focused, radar-like scan of her vision, locked onto the back of her target like some ancient military heat-seeking missile.

  She would run it through her mind again later, when she was savoring these memories on top of all the ones that had gone before it. Standing on the narrow, crumbling ledge at the corner of the building tower, she focused on the precious moment before her. She and the escaped replicant were in end-game mode; above and below her, the building's maze of retrofitted power conduits and ventilation shafts thrummed hollowly with their own blind, nervous energy, as though in sympathetic motion with the blood pulsing tighter and faster from her heart.

  Maybe on whatever off-world colony from which he'd escaped, Enesque had been some kind of high-steel construction drone, expendable and trained for altitude maneuvers. Maybe it was where he felt safest, that far above the ground; so when the chase had eaten up the last of his rational thought processes, reduced him to a thing of gasping anger and fear, that was where he had naturally scrambled to. Iris had spotted him clambering up the side of this building, using the exterior pipes as hand and footholds, heading for the giant geisha-and-pill ad projected onto the low, artificially generated clouds. At least he can't take a shot at me now. She'd also spotted that the replicant had had to stash his gun inside his jacket, to leave both hands free for climbing. Iris had tucked her own gun away, into the silicone-greased shoulder holster beneath the leatherite, and had started after him.

  Part of the magnified geisha's face blanked out, as Iris took another slow step along the ledge, rounding the building's corner and coming in front of one of the projector units. Each breath was sharp with the distinctive metallic tang of the microscopic water droplets, ion-charged so the pulsing magnetic field could sculpt the mist cloud into a smooth enough surface for the animated image. The pulses made the gun lying so close to Iris's heart seem almost alive, as though it also
had started beating with the chase's excitement.

  Another wind gust split the cloud, so she could see across the empty space above the street to the old, dead billboard from which the geisha had used to smile and beckon. The projector behind her cast Iris's shadow, twenty times larger than life, onto one corner of the flat, gray rectangle; its shadows wavered with the rain sluicing down the deactivated pixels.

  A different shadow moved on the billboard, at the opposite corner; a shadow with human form which Iris knew didn't belong to anything human. As the mists sealed up again, she turned her head and could discern, through the geisha's enveloping smile, the escaped replicant Enesque, spine and hands flattened against the side of the building.

  He was less than ten meters from her, and with nowhere left to go. The ledge came to an abrupt, sheared-off end, with nothing beyond it but empty night air. In the distance beyond him, the lights of a police spinner blinked and faded away, as though scared of by a sudden gout of flame.

  Maybe the rep wasn't used to heights; maybe it had been only fear that had driven him this far up. Iris could see he was petrified by the greater fear, the emptiness and the falling that lay a couple of inches in front of him. He couldn't even move one hand away from the wall, to reach inside his jacket for his gun. An agonized face turned toward Iris, sweat and rain drawing chalky rivulets through his clown-white stage makeup.

  'Don't . . .' The voice that had brayed and cracked jokes inside the subterranean club was now a dry rasp. 'Don't you have to . . . read me my rights? Or something?'

  'Get real.' The ledge was plenty wide enough for Iris to turn away from the building's wall and face directly toward Enesque. 'You know that only applies to humans.' She reached inside her own jacket and pulled her gun from its holster, leveling it easy and slow toward the replicant at the end of the ledge. The wet, slickness of the concrete on which they both stood was enough that a too-quick move could have thrown her over and down to the street below. The thought didn't cause her any nervousness, but she knew she had to be careful.

  'Or questions?' The escaped replicant was pleading for anything that would give it a few more seconds of life. Iris admired that fierce desire in them – but not enough to let one go. 'You're supposed to . . Enesque's voice rose to a scream, cutting through the blurring mist. 'You're supposed to ask me questions!'

  Just one,' said Iris. She stared along her outstretched arm and the barrel of the gun, locking her gaze once again with that of the target. 'How do you want it?'

  There were just enough guts left, underneath the replicant's quivering fear, for him to answer the question. The only way left to him.

  The artificially generated mist had thickened sufficiently to make the geisha's immense face seem almost ghostly solid, blurring Enesque's outline behind it. So when he leapt toward Iris – hands outstretched for her throat, the rep-enhanced strength of his legs carrying him the entire distance – he seemed to burst Athena-like from the illusory woman's powdered forehead, becoming real and distinct, his own face snarling with the desperate anger of cornered prey.

  A smaller birth blossomed from the replicant's brow, a red flower flecked with minute bone shards and bits of pinkish-gray brain tissue. Iris fired another quick pair of rounds, one tearing open Enesque's throat, the other hitting him in one shoulder, so that he spun around as his hurtling body crashed into her.

  Enough fierce energy was left in the replicant, so that his hands locked upon Iris, fingers digging hard into her biceps. Blood-spattered, Iris was pinned to the ledge by the weight of Enesque's corpse. His face pressed close to hers, as though in his last moment of dying he had wanted a kiss, perhaps of absolution, rather than mere life.

  Sharp, convulsing muscle spasms shook the replicant's body. Iris had to let go of her gun, pinned between her breast and the flailing weight of the body on top of her, and scrabble a hold with her fingertips, into the crevice between the ledge and the building's exterior wall, to keep from toppling over the crumbling edge, locked in the other's embrace.

  Enesque's eyelids fluttered open. 'You think ... you're so smart ...' His voice was a weak, fading rasp. 'You don't even know . .

  'Know what?'

  He didn't seem to hear her. 'You think .. . you've got a choice . . '

  Did you say "choice"? Hey—' She turned toward his face, trying to make out the words, as if they mattered. 'Or "chance"? Was that it?'

  No answer came from the dead replicant.

  Jerk, thought Iris. She didn't know why she'd bothered. The words had already been dismissed from her memory.

  She managed to work her other hand between herself and the corpse, and drag out her police tight-cell unit. It lit up as soon as it was in her grip, already keyed into the LAPD dispatch desk. 'Get me a clean-up crew out here.' She'd let the dispatcher read out the building's address from the tight-cell's built-in satellite tracking and position system. 'I've got somebody who's about ready to take the dive.' A glance over her shoulder, past the concrete edge, showed that a group of gawkers, attracted by the gunfire, had already congregated below, separate from the milling street traffic. 'Get 'em here now.'

  The crew showed up, long after she was bored with having a dead body lying on top of her; only a few minutes, in clock time. She heard the sirens down at sidewalk level. She didn't bother to check whether the crew had deared a landing zone; the corpse's grip had loosened enough that one good upward shove was enough to send it toppling below.

  Iris pulled herself up into a sitting position, leaning back against the building. 'Damn.' Looking down at herself, she saw that Enesque's blood had not only gotten all over the leatherite jacket – that could be wiped off – but had also seeped onto the subtly monochrome, cactus motif silk cowboy shirt she wore beneath. That meant dry cleaning.

  It was one of the few drawbacks to what she did for a living. She didn't even mind the evil, slit-like glance of the head of the clean-up crew when she had made her way down to the street and had registered the details of the kill.

  'You get of on this kind of thing?'

  Iris looked right back into the bull cop's jowly face, as the rain spattering across the shrouded corpse on the gurney cart had also sluiced the blood from her clothes into a feathering red puddle around her boots.

  She smiled at him. 'I love this job.'

  2

  'Christ, look at this place.' The squad captain shook his head in disgust. 'How could anybody work in conditions like this?'

  Iris stood in the doorway of the office, watching her boss — Meyer was head of the LAPD's entire blade runner division — shuffle through the tides of old paper and strata of various crap in the too-small room. Dust sifted down from the ceiling, a darkly beamed and faceted space somewhere above the open-topped walls, like the beginnings, the first tiny specks, of some pollution-grayed snow flurry. The captain's revulsion was evident in the way he hunched his narrow shoulders and kept his arms tight against his ribs, as though he could prevent the contamination of decay and slow withering from touching him. Hopeless, thought Iris. Give it up.

  She spoke aloud. 'You owe me money.' She leaned against the side of the doorway. 'There was a double bounty on that last one.'

  Meyer ignored her. A stack of yellowing newspapers, true antiques from vanished days of general literacy, toppled with a kick from his mirror-polished shoe. 'Beats me how Bryant could've put up with it. I mean . . . look at this junk.'

  It wasn't an order, but Iris did it anyway. She followed her boss into his predecessor's office and its shadowy pools of dim light, away from the greater darkness surrounding it. Meyer's words were still echoing somewhere out there, in the lofty caverns of the empty police station; ratlike pigeons cooed from their droppings-whitened perches, then settled back down like blinking old women in rags.

  Iris picked up a lamp, fallen onto its side on the desk. The piece might have been worth something, if anybody still cared about things as old as that. In LA, nobody did; just yesterday was already too old, broken and forgotten
. She held the lamp higher, studying the little photographic scenes imprinted on its parchment shade. Hunting scenes, grinning bwanas posing with their massively calibered rifles beside the corpses of real elephants and water buffalo. If there was a real elephant left anywhere in the world, it wouldn't have been on the African plains, but dully anesthetized in some dingy holding cage right here in LA's own animal trading souk. Things like that were too valuable to be left wandering around; that was why they were all dead by now.

  She reached with her other hand under the shade and found a small button. Low-wattage light seeped out of the bulb, transforming the monochrome pictures as though with the dim sunshine of other days. It wasn't likely that any of the pictures could have been of Bryant himself, even as a young man. Maybe they were family mementos, images of his grandfather or even farther back, a long line of gun-toting men with bad smiles, who had the knack of making wild, escaping things fall down and be dead.

  Other, smaller but brighter lights cast their shifting glow around the office, from below Iris's knees. A troop of scanitorial autonoms, little more than lenses and caterpillar treads and tiny, claw-tipped grappling pincers, had filed into the office as well; each one had the insignia of the LAPD's data preservation unit stenciled on its cylindrical power source. One of the scanitors crawled ratlike over the toe of Iris's boot, as it seized an empty, square-sided Scotch bottle and turned its lens upon the faded label; a bright red line swiftly read down the words and a sepia image of some vanished Highland glen, and that data had been transmitted and dumped to some catch-all file in the cellars of the new police station, along with every other scrap of information left behind in the office. None of it meant anything, not now: lists of escaped replicants that had been hunted down long ago, procedural memoranda, junk food wrappers with built-in flash heating elements, blackmail dirt for pressuring 'retired' — meaning burnt-out — cops into picking up the gun again, cryptic notes that Bryant had written to himself, back when he'd been heading the blade runner division . . .