Eye and Talon Read online

  One of those, a sticky-backed yellow square, was stuck to the mouth of the empty bottle. Iris idly reached down and plucked it like a minimalist blossom between her thumb and forefinger; straightening up again, she kicked the little scanitor away. The machine and the bottle flew together and smashed against the nearest wall; from out of the shards of glass, the scanitor crawled, looking for more things to read and file away.

  When every murder seems the same, it's time to quit.

  Iris looked at the words scrawled on the note, in Bryant's messy, alcohol-loosened hand. She wadded it up and flicked it away. That was something the former head of the blade runner division didn't have to worry about anymore. Or anything else, for that matter: he'd been killed right here in this office, blown away by a gun as big as those carried by the cops who had been under his command. The piece Iris carried was both smaller and deadlier than those hulking cannons; she didn't need to feel like a big man to get her job done. Whoever had taken Bryant out — Iris wasn't sure of the details; she never paid much attention to locker-room gossip — had done just as good a job on the former division captain. Quitting time had been arranged for him, whether he'd really wanted it or not.

  That was the main reason the small office smelled the way it did. Like bottled-up death, even though its ceiling was open to the rest of the empty station. The whole building stank like that, of police business and administrative termination orders. The memos and day orders could refer to it as 'retirement' or any other euphemism; it still meant the same thing. And which also meant that the smell of a top cop's death wasn't going to fade away, either.

  Or any of the other indicators left behind: another scanitorial unit had cleared away enough paper scraps to expose the spatter of dried blood across the floor — Bryant's blood — and was now busily scanning and recording the dark-brown marks, as though they were the hieroglyph of some forgotten, omen-laden language.

  'You said I owe you money?'

  Iris looked up when the new division captain spoke. 'That's right.'

  'Not me.' Meyer shook his head. 'Payroll takes care of that.' His fine-boned, almost hairless hands pawed through the messy stacks on what had been Bryant's desk. Put in your voucher and wait, like everybody else.' He picked up a single sheet of paper, studied it for a moment, then discarded it with the rest on the floor. 'You got a confirmed kill, you'll get paid.'

  Iris felt her eyes narrowing as she watched the man. 'You could front me,' she said quietly but firmly. 'If you wanted to.' He'd done it before, often enough — and not only for her — that it was close to standard procedure for the division.

  'Could do all sorts of things.' Meyer poked a finger through a crack-rimmed porcelain sake cup, filled with paper clips. He fished one out and uncurled it into a straight line. 'But I'm not going to.'

  'Why not? I've got expenses.'

  'We all do, cupcake.' Meyer held the bit of soft metal between both his thumbs and forefingers, looking across it at her. 'It's a rough old world out there, and nobody loves our asses the way we do. Things are happening right now, so it would behoove both you and me to keep our noses clean. Shiny, even..' With one point of the metal, Meyer scratched his chin, deep enough to draw a white line across the skin. 'So I'm not bending any rules for you. And you shouldn't be asking me to. Not if you're smart.'

  That worried her. Not much else could, but departmental politics were a jungle to her, darker than any back alley in LA. 'What do you mean? What's going on?'

  Meyer regarded her skeptically. 'You haven't heard?'

  'Come on. You know I don't listen to this kind of stuff. I got better things to do. Like my job, for one.'

  'Yeah, well, your job is what it's about. Your job and mine.' Meyer righted the swivel chair from behind the desk and sat down in it. 'I feel,' he said, 'like I should offer you a drink or something.' He laid his hands flat on the desk blotter, with its overlapping ring marks left by all the glasses that had been sat on it, like the ghost residues of the bottle's brown contents. 'That's what Bryant always did, when he was telling one of his crew some kind of bad news. Just an excuse to have one himself, the poor old lush.'

  'Screw Bryant.' The dead didn't interest her; not if they weren't one of her income sources. 'Something's going on with the division, right? What is it?'

  'Big reorganization coming down,' said Meyer. 'All through the department. Not just our little blade runner division, but top to bottom, through the entire LAPD.' He leaned back in Bryant's old chair, hands folded across the vest buttons of his Brooks Bros suit. 'Think ants in a jar. Then think about somebody picking up that jar and shaking it. Shaking it good. So when the jar gets set back down, the ants are tearing at each other.' Meyer nodded slowly. 'That's what it's going to be like, all over the new headquarters.'

  She'd seen ants; they were one of the survivor species, like rats and cockroaches and pigeons, that went on living and crawling around, no matter how bad conditions got. And like human beings.

  'What brought this on?'

  'Who knows?' Meyer shrugged. 'For this town, money problems are like the rain: they come in and kick your ass on a regular basis. And if you spend too much time looking up and wondering where it's coming from, you'll drown. Probably the last revenue bond issue tanked; let's face it, there are twenty different languages spoken in LA, and half the population are monoglots — they don't speak to anyone else. You're going to get those people to vote for more money for the police? Fat chance.'

  For a moment, Iris felt as though she were standing out in the edges of the ocean, the one she remembered from when she was a child, and the tide was sucking at her skinny-kid legs as it receded and exposed the sharp rocks hiding below the waves. Then she realized it was the scanitor units going about their business, the tiny machines scurrying about and dragging out of the office the paper they had already recorded and filed away. A bigger deaning module would come by later, and sweep up and incinerate the hard-copy pieces of the late Captain Bryant's existence. In the meantime, the edges of the battered furniture and the corners of the room were gradually becoming visible.

  'What about the UN?' Iris tilted her head, indicating the world outside the empty building. 'I thought we got some kind of peacekeeping grant from them. This being the front line and all.' She didn't have to say what the front was up against, what war was going on. The whole reason that the LAPD even had a blade runner division was because this was where the escaped replicants came. Their birthplace. 'Isn't that worth something to them?'

  'Yeah, it's worth something. It's worth taking over, that's what it's worth. Pure power-grab time.' The expression on Meyer's boyish face turned sour and cynical, making him look like a life-embittered old man. 'What I hear — and I've got pretty good sources, right into the Secretary-General's office — is that the UN's emigration program is majorly screwed. They're not getting the outgo exit numbers they need; emigrant recruitment's creeping along at the one to two percent level. Doesn't mean bupkis against the birth-rate escalation, even in a toxic dump like this town. Still enough live births to jack up the population versus food-source ratio. If things don't improve, you and me are both going to be standing on the streets in full urban-combat gear, along with the regular bull cops, trying to keep the carbohydrate riots down to a low roar.' A corner of his mouth twisted into an ugly partial smile. 'And we won't be succeeding, either.'

  Iris gave a single nod of agreement. In LA, things could get ugly or uglier — in a matter of seconds, especially where food distribution was concerned. If the city's lid came off, there wouldn't be enough private security forces to keep the fortified enclaves from the torch.

  'All of which makes a perfect opportunity,' continued Meyer, 'for the UN's Pacific Rim Tactical Command to raise its profile just a little, especially with the local Chamber of Commerce and the various non-guilded industrial councils. They'll sell out the city government in a heartbeat rather than see their factories and primomaquiladores go up in smoke. If the UN's military wing takes over, they're
not going to need a police department anymore; this place will be under direct martial-law administration. Tanks in the streets, curfews and no-go zones, insurrection pre-profiling sweeps . . . the works.' Meyer gave a noncommittal shrug. 'Of course, that could be a good thing for the city, at least in terms of deaning this mess up. But a little hard on people like you and me.'

  No shit, thought Iris. The fear that she didn't feel when chasing escaped replicants now assaulted her, right down in the sinews in the backs of her knees. She and Meyer, and the rest of the LAPD's brass and uniformed and non-uniformed grunts alike, would be more than out of their jobs. They'd be dead. Anybody doing police work in a pressure cooker like Los Angeles inevitably wound up with a list of grievances against him, grudges carried by his opposite numbers, crooks and other scum, who would feel they had died and gone to heaven, to have their shots at former cops without departmental protection to keep them alive.

  'Yeah,' said Meyer, 'that'd be one way of going.' He'd read her thoughts, visible right on the page of her face. 'But not the only one.

  United Nation military types don't like to leave a lot of dangling loose ends around when they set up shop in a new territory. Too much coup potential, if you know what I mean; disgruntled former public employees with weapons experience can be a little volatile. They try to keep it out of the media, but death-squad mode is the usual agenda. And those blue-capped sonsabitches can be real efficient. Peacekeepers, right?'

  'Check.' And who didn't know that the dead were the most peaceful of all? It came with the cop territory. Iris sat down on the corner of the desk, feeling cold.

  'Hey — don't worry about it.' At the edge of her vision, Meyer's sickly smile floated. 'You'll be okay. You and me both.' He leaned forward and patted her with deserved familiarity on the thinly padded jut of her hip. 'Trust me on this one.'

  'How do you figure?' Neither his words or his touch had made her feel any better, so far.

  'As I said.' Meyer's hand lingered a moment before drawing away. 'Reorganization. The whole LAPD is going to get leaner and meaner. Do more with less. What we'll lack in funding, we'll make up with sheer orneriness.' The unintended rhyme seemed to inspire him. 'Violence works wonders, when properly applied. The department will clamp down on this city so hard, somebody pees against a wall, he'll be dancing on the end of a monadnack.' Meyer moved his loosely clenched fists through parallel small arcs, miming the motion of the standard-issue, double-handled nightstick coming into contact with a human — or non-human — face. 'The mayor's office and the city council will be happy to let us do whatever we need to, rather than have the UN come in and boot them out the door. It'll be pure rock-'n'-roll, believe me.'

  A thin ray of hope penetrated the gloom inside Iris's thoughts. 'Really?'

  Meyer nodded. 'Trust me on this one. I know how city hall works. The police department's already the heavies for most of this town's population; it's not like we've got a lot of positive PR to lose. So the powers that be will let us off our leashes. Finally. Better that than having the whole dog-dish taken away, for everybody.'

  'Solid on that.' Iris echoed her boss's nod. 'So our division is going to get thinner, too. Thinner and tougher.'

  'You got it.' Rolling the swivel chair back, Meyer swung his feet up onto his dead predecessor's desk. 'You know some of the clowns you've been working with, the old slow ones? The burnt-out cases, all the way down to the far end of the Wambaugh Curve, drawing their pay but doing jack for it?' This time, it was a hard, sharp shake of his head. 'They're not going to make the cut. They're history. They can retire early, on half-pension. We won't need 'em.'

  Half a cop's pension, Iris knew, without bonuses or bounties, didn't buy much in this town. 'What if they don't want to retire?'

  'They can retire . . .' Meyer's voice went soft and ominous. 'Or they can be retired. Comprende?'

  She understood. The slang term for killing replicants could be stretched to cover humans as well. Especially the ones who were supposed to be the killers, if they still had the guts for their job.

  'Who decides . . .' Her words came out slowly. 'Who makes the cut . . . and who doesn't?'

  'That's up to you.'

  'What?'

  'You and every other blade runner in this division.' Meyer reached forward and knocked a speck of dust from his glossily polished shoes. 'Let's just call it . . . performance review. Okay? Meaning that you're going to be watched pretty damn close — just during this little reorganization period.'

  'What the hell for?' Iris's temper flared, extinguishing whatever was left of the apprehension she'd felt earlier. 'You know what kind of work I do. What I can do, that the others can't even come close to. I'm the best you've got in this division.'

  'Sweetheart. I know that; you know that.' Meyer spoke with elaborate patience. 'But they don't know that. The ones up above me. I'm hanging from the same chain of command that you are, if maybe a couple links higher. That only means I've got farther to fall. The brass want to make sure I'm not cutting you any special favors.' He smiled, eyes half-lidded. 'Which of course I'd be otherwise inclined to do, just to keep you around. For old times' sake.'

  'Thanks a lot.' For this, I slept with the putz? 'And what happens if I don't make the cut? Anybody can screw up, at least once.'

  Meyer wasn't smiling now. 'Then you go down with the rest. Whether you want to or not.'

  'I see.'

  'You should. I've got my own ass to save. If I can save yours, too, I will. But if you are going down, I'm not going with you.'

  Iris nodded again. A certain kind of peace came over her, a darkly grim one, that resulted from knowing what the score was.

  A little see of resolution crystalized in her heart. One of these days, thought Iris, I'll have his job. And he'll be asking me to do him a favor. Who would go down then — him or her — was something pleasant to contemplate.

  But later. 'So what do I have to do?'

  'What I tell you to,' said Meyer. 'That's all.'

  'I did that before. And look where it got me.'

  'No, I just mean take the assignments.' Meyer put his feet back down on the floor. 'Take them and do them — you know how, right? — and make yourself look good. And no bitching about 'em, okay?'

  Her turn to smile. 'That'll be the hard part.'

  'You're telling me. Because good assignments are scarce right now.' He shook his head in disgust. 'What a stupid business. Working a crew of blade runners is for idiots. If they're no good, they get killed on the job, and if they know what they're doing — like you — then they're constantly drying up the market.'

  'Which means?'

  'Not a lot of action right now.' Meyer's shoulders lifted in a fatalistic shrug. 'What can I tell you? We're not getting a lot of escaped replicants showing up around here.'

  Iris frowned. 'Where are they going, if not LA?'

  'Nowhere, that I've heard of. Maybe the word's finally gotten to them, out in the far colonies. See Earth and die. You can't go home again. Something like that. Let's face it, their lifespans are short enough already. I mean, if you only had four years or so to kick around in, would you blow a big portion of what you got by coming to LA and getting sniped off by some blade runner who needs to pay his rent? I wouldn't.'

  'But don't they . . . ?' Her words faded; she felt herself groping in the dark. Iris didn't often wonder about what went on inside the heads of her targets — it was a waste of time — but every once in a while, when she woke up in the middle of the night, sleep would elude her as she wondered about whatever drove them toward a rendezvous with her and a bullet. 'Don't they have some special reason for corning here?'

  'Who knows? Who cares? Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be a good enough reason right now.'

  'Something they want.' She puzzled further over it. 'Something they need to know.'

  'They should read a book next time. All the answers you'd ever need, right there. And you don't have to die for them.'

  Iris shook her head. The feeling
, that something intangible had started to become solid enough for her to wrap her fist around it, had already faded away. 'Maybe,' she said, 'they did find the answers. The ones they were looking for.'

  'Mazel tov,' said Meyer bluntly. 'I'm happy for them. But whatever the reason, what it boils down to is that just when we need them the most, to come here and show off their happy little faces so we can strut our stuff and kill them, that's when they decide not to come around.'

  'Not at all? Like none?'

  'Maybe not that bad,' admitted Meyer. 'There's still a few showing up. We haven't managed to totally work our way out of our jobs yet. But that Enesque character you bagged — he was the first really good one in a long time, an escaped replicant that'd gotten past our perimeter defenses and gone into deep cover. That was why I steered you on to him. One, I knew you could do the business with him, and two, I wanted you to get the kill credit.'

  'I appreciate it.' Her heart warmed a couple of degrees; the division's boss might be a sonuvabitch, but he had a few redeeming qualities. 'That was kind of a fun one.' It would be even more fun when she got paid for the job, but she decided not to press that point.

  'Yeah. Too bad we don't have a couple dozen more — hell, a couple hundred — going down like that. We could use 'em, if we're going to make a case for keeping our departmental funding up to a decent level. Plus, you know the way the universe works.' A brooding resentment showed in Meyer's narrow face, as though he'd seen God personally kill his puppy. 'We go through a dry spell and our budget gets slashed to the bone, I'll be trying to run this division out of my hat and with my best runners gone — and that's when the reps will start showing up. I swear they will; it'd be just like the bastards.'