Chapter 1
The room had been tossed, the bland Feng Shui of the hotel room turned into a mess of torn fabricand broken glass. Every major object in the room was desecrated down to the gutted chair cushions and disembowled cabinets, laying in their own contents. Even the mini-bar had been attacked despite it hidden as they all were since Congress had passed the Neo-Morality Act. Bottles of smuggled alcohol lay smashed, adding the scent of high end Long Island Iced Teas. Garnish with carpet and serve. The sound of the room’s renter was the worst, though, her shrill sobbing filling the air, gulping and gasping from behind her curled hands as if she’d learned how to panic from watching old movies.
Sam Abrams, the hotel’s House Detective, anchored the scene as its stoic center. He left the cooing and calming of the woman to Dianne, the day manager, and turned slowly as he took in every inch of what he could see. As a ten-year officer with the Chicago PD he’d been nearly promoted to detective, before they’d instituted the mandatory cybernetics for all officers. He knew they were useful, but he’d decided his shield wasn’t worth his humanity. He’d left the force without a pension, but all that time and training came in handy sometimes. Like this.
Dianne looked up at him from over the shaking blonde’s head as if she could glare him into discovering the culprits who had trashed the room. Becca Cranston, the renter, hadn’t managed many words in the last ten minutes, and Sam hadn’t tried to calm her down. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but the absolute opposite. The sound of a sobbing girl always tore at his, and even more so when they’re dressed in a tight black dress that clung to their curves like paint, have big natural blue eyes, and didn’t have a single store-bought inch of beauty. She was the type whose looks proved there’s no way like the American Way. He pushed his hat back on his head to scratch his hairline, finding it a quarter inch further back than where it was when he’d first picked up the habit. He pretended he was scratching his hairline still, hoping that denial could promote hair growth.
Sam tried his hardest to smile a comforting smile as he turned to the crying blonde, nearly pulling it off too. His features were handsome enough in a “seen the world” sort of way, but the mix of her sobbing and him trying to not stare at her tight body gave his expression a bit of confused hesitation that threw the effect off. He even tried to take a step towards her, and heard his boot heel squish in a puddle of what now smelled like vodka. Great.
“Miss, I’m going to need you to stop crying for a moment,” The sharp look that Dianne fired him took him off guard again. Damn crying women. Always put him off his game. Instead of listening to her unspoken words he pushed on through. “Miss Cranston, I really need you to stop with the sobbing for a minute and tell me what the heck happened.” He used a sharper tone, trying to pull her out of the cycle of sob-gasp-sob.
She gave him those pale blue doe eyes again from between her fingers, and her sobs faded to quick breathing so he figured she was out of the woods. When she finally spoke it was in a petite, girl-like voice he figured some guys went in for when they had a hard-on for girls with daddy issues. He ignored the fact that he liked it.
“They came in through the door, knocked and barged in when I opened it. I thought it was...” she looked down and went silent.
“Thought it was who?”
“Room service,” her body language and tone made her lie so obvious she couldn’t have signaled it better with semaphore. He didn’t call her on the lie yet, but he would later if he needed to. “They barged in and pushed me aside, the big one grabbed my throat and held me against the wall. The little man started to pull the room apart, while they asked where my valuables were. I told them where they were, they took all of them.” She gulped again, and her voice took on a bit of a hysterical whine. Sam winced and prepped himself for another burst of crying girl and steeled himself, “They took my necklace, and my... my bracelet from my mother!”
“Alright, alright, and anything else about them you can remember?”
“The big one called the little one Marcos. He... he...” She welled her eyes up, the hands screwed against her lush lips, and Sam sighed, scratching where his hairline used to be; refusing to admit it had retreated. As if the tic was a cue to the little lady, the sobs started on fast forward again.
A fast look over her, and what he saw in the room, was all he needed to know, and a retreat would make it easier to resist that male urge to bundle her up and protect her. Hormones as old as man shouted for him to defend the woman, and let logic be damned.
“Dianne, I’ve got what I need. Get Miss Cranston a drink, on me.” The manager nodded, doing the perfect imitation of the comforting female friend, since it wouldn’t do well to have Miss Becca Cranston angry with the hotel. With the two pretty women behind him, he headed out and towards his office to digest the whole situation.
Sam stared at the holographic screen that hovered in front of him, wishing he could will the softly glowing display into being more helpful. The Grand was a hotel for the very rich, so its guests expected a certain level of privacy. That meant that though the computer could tell him that her room door had been opened from the inside just after breakfast, then a half hour after, there were no cameras in the hallways leading to the rooms. If a guest happened to be... “entertaining” a person or persons not their spouse, or perhaps bringing up a number of bottles of alcohol in violation of the Morality Acts, they liked knowing there wouldn’t be any pesky video to prove it, later. Despite the Acts being passed, outlawing smoking, drinking, prostitution, most meats, and other “degenerative and unhealthy” acts, most people could, if they were rich enough, enjoy them in the privacy of discreet locations. A place like the Grand was one of those locations. If someone got hurt or robbed, though, it meant that went without being seen either, which drove Sam nuts. It’s hard to protect a clientele that insists in complete privacy. Abrams could lecture in a speakeasy with the best of them about the dangers of Big Brother and the need for individual privacy, but from a professional standpoint he’d be happier if every guest was followed by a cameraman for the entire length of their stay. Luckily the entryway was considered fair game, and the cameras caught a pair of men, one built like a side of beef in a cheap suit and the other looking like a greasy weasel in an even cheaper suit, strutting in through the lobby to the elevators up. The weasel he knew from his days walking a beat: Marcos Gonzoles, a scummy little bagman for one of Chicago’s immortal mobs. He was a rodent, vicious but cowardly.
“So you’re going to get her things back, right?” Dianne used that tone she had that could turn a polite question into an order. He figured it was something you got when you were promoted to management, along with the social skill brain implants. Looking over at her as she leaned forward to read his screen, he couldn’t fight the shudder... all those wires and implants in her skull. She was too pretty to have a brain full of metal. “Without the police?”
Sam’s job as House Detective wasn’t to solve crime and punish the guilty. As a police officer he’d been enforcing the law to the letter, and it had been wholly unsatifying in the end. Now what he did as a House Detective was to ensure that the guests were safe, and when things went sour to fix the situation quietly and without the police and papers. Police officers and reporters made people nervous about going to a hotel, especially when they wanted a nice place to go and enjoy themselves under the radar. Whether they were just vacationing in Chicago or entertaining a hooker, wasn’t Sam’s job to care. He just made sure that theft, assault, and whatever else was ‘fixed’ and the guests were safe. It was somehow more “pure” and gave him more freedom in how he dealt with things, which suited Sam just fine; it also didn’t require him replacing parts of himself just to be considered “fit for duty”, which suited him even more.
“I can try, Dianne, but there’s an issue. She’s lying to us.” Sam turned to face the mousy brunette and set his fedora on the smoked glass desktop. Before she could answer he leaned back and put his feet up, uncapping his flask and sipping a slosh of cheap Canadian whiskey in a move calculated to make him look cool, aloof, and like a know it all. Appearance was everything.
Dianne, bless her heart, seemed upset at his implication. “You think she lied to us? We were trying to help her. Why wouldn’t she tell us the entire story?” She wasn’t really that naive, but she’d been a manager long enough that she had been trained to take the guest’s word first. It was Sam’s job to be the cynical bastard. At the very least when someone implied a well paying guest was a liar she had to make the attempt to defend the guest’s honor.
“Look. The story she gives doesn’t jive. She describes a fast toss-job to intimidate her, then they just stole her necklace, purse, and bracelet, right?” He didn’t wait for her to nod like he knew she would. “Well, first off, that wouldn’t account for the damage they did to her room. I know one of the guys, and he’s a sneaky shit, but not as clever as he pretends. He never would have been able to find the mini-bar’s location, let alone crack the code, without someone else’s help, and I doubt that help came from the gorilla he was with. Also, he’s a bagman. He won’t take a shit without a member of the Organization telling him to, so this idea that it’s just a robbery doesn’t jibe. Especially since she didn’t mention the ring she was missing.”
Dianne sighed and rubbed her face in the way she always did when Abrams didn’t just have a nice, easy answer. “She didn’t mention a ring, Sam,” she gave the exact answer he’d hoped so he could pull the Mr Cool act again.
He gave her a cocked grin and sipped from his flask again before capping it. “You’re right, she didn’t. But there was a space on her left ring finger that had a nice red dent on it and a tan line where a ring was until earlier this evening. Meaning the ring is gone in the same timespan as the other robbery. Meaning the girl’s lying. Checkmate.” He frowned, shook his head in irritation. That only worked if he’d used a chess analogy earlier.
Dianne responded by scooping his fedora off his desk and throwing it at him in exasperation. “Then what -are- you going to do, Sam? You have to do something, keep this quiet!”
“Me?” He said innocently, dusting his hat off and donning it as he stood. “I’m going to go find Marcos and have a little chat with him about what he -did- take.” She started to say something else, but closed her mouth with a click when she saw him take the revolver from his desk drawer, and a set of spare reload cylinders.
The arcade was typical of its type after the revolution in displays. Walking down the center of the long, narrow building, each side of him was shining with projected 3-D displays showing various monstrosities and evil soldiers beckoning him to test his heroism against their might. For only a quarter he could duel Atilla the Hun, or refight any number of fictitious battles of World War Three. What a deal. He’d experienced some of the war firsthand as a child, and wasn’t really eager to relive it; the games never showed the nuking of Chicago, or the carpet bombing of New York with Russian viral bombs. Kids and adults played out their fantasies as he passed by them, some using traditional joysticks and others wearing headsets for more immersive games. A couple players even had plugs stuck in behind their ears, the game projecting the action while the player stood slack-jawed and glassy eyed, body checked out while his brain lived a life of its own. The flickering lights and victory music and gunfire gave the entire place a feel of some sort of war-zone red light district, and made his back go up at the sensory overload.
Abrams stuck out in the sea of teens and man-children, but he didn’t mind. He’d been here more than a few times when he’d been a cop, and knew he’d find Marcos here same as always. All the people, all the noise, lots of money moving through, it made a good place for the mob to do its drops and launder its money, and Marcos was one of the regulars stationed in the back office.
When he reached the back of the arcade, he was confronted with his own evil door guardian. The kid couldn’t be older than 20 and the track marks on his left arm were obvious. The kid’s right arm was replaced with a heavy metal enhancement and his right eye had more in common with a camera lens than an eye now. Lots of metal on his face and body completed the picture, none of it actually an enhancement, just replacement for the sake of it. He was a typical Chomepunk, replacing meat and flesh for the pure goal of replacing it. The kid even went as far to have hair dyed a bright “look at me” purple, completing the amateur tough look.
“Employees only, bro.” The kid growled in what Sam figured was supposed to be an intimidating manner. Abrams was amused to hear his eye actually -whirred- as it focused on him, and when the young chromepunk put his hand out you could hear the servos operate. Abrams decided to humor him for a bit, and stepped half a step back.
“Hey, relax. Just here to talk to Marcos, yanno? Just relax, man.” Abrams held his hands out, palms facing the chrome-kid in a placating gesture. The punk sneered, the expression forcing skin into the edges of the metal around his eye that looked downright uncomfortable. Sam became more aware of the creases and lines on his skin, the hallmark of poorly fitted and installed cybernetics.
“No can do, grandpa. Marcos didn’t say he had friends coming, yo. Now take a walk before I fucking hurt you.” Mr. Punk flexed his hands to add emphasis, in a way that would have intimidated the average person. Servos and gears whirring were scary, after all.
Abrams, on the other hand, knew the sound of shoddy Russian engineering when he heard it. The academy had an entire course on Human Augmentation and how to handle them and identify them.
“Its real important, man. Just let me by, I promise, he’s expecting me.” It was a weak line, but he figured it was worth a try. The kid wasn’t buying, though, and pushed his hand against Abrams’ chest.
“Oh yeah? He didn’t tell me nothing about no visitor. What is it he’s waiting for from you?”
There were a lot of things Sam didn’t like. Sharp cheeses, bootleg alcohol that tasted like paint thinner, the White Sox. But the top of his list? Chrome-boys pushing him around. “Well, you see, we were going to discuss which of us fucked your girlfriend harder.” He managed to deliver the words calmly, with a friendly smile, and it took the punk a minute to actually register his words. By the time his natural eye had opened in shock, Sam had grabbed the metal hand around the wrist and was twisting it the way they’d been taught in the academy. The kid shouted and attempted to fight back, but the gears and hydraulics had been turned out of alignment so his angry attempts to get control back only left him making the sound of hysteric and futile buzzing sounds as mechanical parts ground against each other. Abrams added a kick to the side of the kid’s knee, then a knee to the back of his head as he fell over, sandwiching purple-hair’s face between kneecap and door frame. There was a hollow thunk, like a coconut hitting the floor, and the chromeboy slumped into dreams of electric sheep. Sam released the arm then, which was still kicking and whirring as it tried to follow orders from a now sleeping brain.
The games covered the sounds of the altercation, and Abrams took advantage of that, slipping through the employees only door. He felt a pang of guilt at disobeying the sign... after all, it was in gold and should be obeyed... but got over it quickly. Through the door was a long hallway, the sounds of the games turned into a muted background music, with a door labeled exit at the end, and one door midway down on each side. The door on the right was labeled Management Only, and so Abrams violated yet another gold sign’s directives and kicked it open with a good hard -crack- of combat boot heel against particleboard.
Abrams had expected a dramatic entrance, with the door slamming against the wall and him standing in it like an action hero. What he didn’t expect was the door slamming into a seven-foot tall slab of humanity, sending said modern day Goliath to the ground with a shattered nose. He didn’t let his surprise show, naturally, and rolled with it as he locked his eyes on Marcos. The little bagman was in a chair facing the door, his rat-like eyes opened to proportions that made him look more like a lemur than a rat.
Abrams gave the most humorless grin he could. “Marcos, old buddy! Just the fucking wetback I wanted to see.” Even when he said the slur, he felt a little bit guilty for it. Racial insults were, after all, outlawed under the Morality Acts. Sam’d been born and raised before the Acts had been established, in a rough neighborhood, so he had trouble restraining himself when things got heated. Abrams almost wanted to apologize, but was interrupted by Marcos.
“Really? Gonna call me a wetback? Fuck you, you ignorant bastard. That’s just rude, an’ demeaning. So fuck you, I dunno nothing about nothing.” The sneer made him look like cartoon rat, ready to bite.
Abrams sighed as the man took offense, but tried to not feel bad about it. He did, a little, and it made it so his draw was slightly slower than it should have been, an added quarter second to the time needed to pull his .357 from its holster and aim it at Marcos’s face. Another half second and the matte black barrel was inside Marcos’s mouth as an added encouragement to co-operate. Marcos actually flailed his arms.
“Now, Marcos, you took some things from a guest’s room in my hotel, and trashed the place. When you do that, you make us look bad, and me look bad. So what I’m going to do, since we’re such good friends, is ask you nicely to return what you took and add a bit of cash on top to pay for the damages. Fair?”
Marcos responded with what was likely an agreement. Sure, it was garbled around the barrel of the pistol, but most people turn out to be agreeable when their uvula was in contact with a gun barrel so Abrams used contextual clues to figure out what he was saying.
Marcos’s right hand flopped about like a fish until it found a filing cabinet, and pulled the drawer wide to show a pile of wristwatches, jewelry, and other baubles likely extracted from “customers” to the little man’s side job, that of debt collection. He gurgled again, this time with an expression that, in this sort of circumstance, usually means ‘Please take the gun out of my mouth a moment, as it would make my current endeavor somewhat easier’. Sam had some experience in translating “Gun in Mouth-ese”.
“Alright, but don’t fuck with me.” He pulled the gun back with the barrel now wet with terror-spit. He’d have to clean it later. Marcos nodded with eyes wide as dinner plates and dove into the cabinet to retrieve a silver necklace set with stones, and a matching silver bracelet. The stooge pushed them towards Sam after adding in a wad of hundreds.
“Alright, fine, take it! I won’t fuck with your hotel again, I’m sorry!”
“What’s the big idea, you greasy little bastard?” Sam took everything and stuffed it into his suit pocket. “There was a ring missing too, now cough it up.”
Marcos panicked, seeing a future full of holes and trauma coming. “Nuh uh, no way, Sam. I never touched no ring. The chica’s boyfriend owed us six grand and welched. I got a call from above saying they was stayin’ in your hotel, and that she had some jewelry, and to take two things offa her if her boyfriend wasn’t there. So we went in, acted tough, and then took her necklace and bracelet. That’s it, I swear, please God don’t shoot me in the knee!”
Abrams squinted, and nodded. Guys like Marcos were generally pretty honest when threatened with severe trauma; plus Sam hadn’t expected him to have the ring in the first place. He was just being thorough. He’d gotten his sidearm into the holster just in time to hear the chromeboy at the door shout a sound of protest, then a smattering of heavy thuds of flesh and wood.
Marcos screwed his face up in confusion, but Abrams knew what that sound meant and was already diving for the wall next to the door when the front of a snub-nosed SMG stuck into the room and hissed out a spray of bullets. High end silenced weapons didn’t make noises, they just spat venom with a sound like an angry snake, and this one was vicious. Papers, computers, cabinets, and Marcos all scattered their bits and pieces around the room as the heavy hollow-points tore into them. Marcos kicked and danced like frog legs hooked to a battery, letting out a shrill stuttering noise like a bird squawking into a fan before his body sprayed blood in a misty spray. Abrams waited for the firing to stop, then the sound of a magazine being disengaged. The shooter had belted off his entire magazine, so likely a thug and not someone trained. That was good.
The detective grabbed the gun with both hands and twisted it down and away from his body, peeling it out of the shooter’s hands, and then swung it back up into the doorway. The wet sound of an exploding nose and a shout was his reward, and he quickly added bonus points by dropping the SMG and sinking his right fist so far into the man’s gut that he was afraid he’d lose his wristwatch.
Cosmetically altered eyes, red with cat-like slits, stared at him with shock, before his left elbow smashed into the already flattened nose, and the man slammed into the back wall. From the other end of the hallway he heard shouts, voices, and figured if they were with the shooter, or with Marcos, either way he was up shit’s creek... the smart thing was to make a break for it. So he did. Down the hallway as fast as his legs could carry him, the cheap particleboard door at the end splintering to pieces before his lowered shoulder, and he was in the alley behind the arcade.
Bruised, sucking air like it was free, but alive. He paused to catch his breath, then stood up and looked eye to barrel with a pistol whose muzzle could have stabled a horse. Beneath the gaping expanse there hung a glittering red dot, as if anyone could possibly miss with a weapon that Abrams figured must fire city busses. The man behind the gun was far enough back that a grab for it would have been suicide.
“Get in the car, now!,” the man’s tone brooked no argument when paired with his weapon. Abrams sighed and wished, not for the first time, he got overtime pay.
Sam figured that the man in front of him hadn’t just shot him and took this as a good sign, which really summed up how bad the whole situation was. When he heard the voices at the door, he shot a glance at his new captor, and watched him swivel the cannon in his hands towards the door and give Sam a raised eyebrow look.
“Yo, dick, going to help or are you a pacifist?” This made things more complex longterm, but short term? Sam sprinted to the man’s car and put it between him and the oncoming unknown angries. The car itself was a mid-grade ... he sighed, since he had no idea who they even were, just that they were violent and angry.
The first man to pop out through the doorframe had mottled skin like some sort of Star Trek lizard alien, hulkingly huge anddecorated with heavy ridges. The wannabe-Gorn’s jaw opened in a wordless shout and Abrams could see reconstructed fangs too... the guy had spent serious money on getting really high-grade “constructive” surgical work. They were called biosculpts and if you had the money and pain tolerance you could have your body shaped into damn near anything. Made Sam’s skin crawl at the best of times, nevermind when they’re trying to kill him. He never managed to even get his bearings before Sam’s revolver filled the alley in duet with the barking of the other man’s hand cannon. Scaly had skidded to a halt, and when he tried to react to the noise his balance went out and he toppled back with a windmilling of arms. Like most lizard-rebuilds he had a massive upper body, but without a tail he lacked any balance. The fall saved the man’s life, the two bullets taking chunks from the doorframe and wall in little explosions.
“Hey, get in the car and I’ll cover!” Sam was feeling helpful now, emboldened by the sight of a fleeing foe. While Handcannon unlocked the doors and slid inside, Sam jumped into the passenger side after sending two more shots in through the open door as a high velocity warning to Scaly and his pals against charging through. A second later the aerodyne’s engine started up and they shot into the sky with a high-pitched whine and cloud of street debris. The sound of low velocity rounds against metal joined the sounds of takeoff, before ending entirely when the air-car shot off over the rooftops.
As the city whipped by in a plastic and glass blur, Sam let out a breath that he’d been holding since he walked into the arcade. His whole body sagged as the adrenaline drained out of his body and left only the residue of fear and the realization he nearly became a line in the obituary pages.
“Alright, bud, so now you have me in your car. Is this where you threaten me?” Sam spoke with a throat lubricated by a slug of vodka from his flask. Finally getting a good look at the man in the driver’s seat, he found a young man, with a face like a hawk’s and a jaw so square he seemed straight from central casting, labeled “young hero”. Under his fedora he had short-cropped hair that barely reached off the surface of his head with edges that looked like they’d been measured and cut by a laser to be just perfect.
“Easy there, dick. I trailed you from the hotel. I figured you had a line on the folks that robbed and attacked my girlfriend.” His gray eyes slid to watch Abrams for just a moment.
“You’re Miss Cranston’s boyfriend? Don’t this shit get stranger and stranger. Have a name?”
“Just John’ll do. You have something of mine, I believe. I’ll be needing it back now.” He held out a hand that Sam saw was sheathed in a glove with just the index finger left exposed - a shooter’s glove. Abrams took another swig of vodka and looked Just John over slowly.
“You asking after the necklace, or the bracelet, soldier?” The first started John’s head turning to Abrams, the last accelerated the turn to a whipping around.
His eyes widened, “The hell did you know that?” Sam smirked as he scored the first of what he hoped would be a couple of points. He resented that the kid had taken him by surprise, so it was time to put John off-balance.
“Haircut’s either military, police, or a wannabe, but wannabes don’t stay calm under fire. Poseurs also usually can’t afford augmentation, but you could... and police augmentation wouldn’t have allowed you to hold a gun that size steady. So you’re either military, or a mercenary, and I can’t see a mercenary driving a suburban dad car like this. So you’re military, or ex. Guessing active. Now, which is it you want, though I have trouble imagining you pulling off this necklace.” Sam forced a smug smile on his face to try to offset the queasy sense in his stomach. The image of Marcos splattering across the room was stuck in the back of his head, and wasn’t going away anytime soon.
“Neither, smart-ass. I just want the ring they took off her. I gave it to her as an engagement ring, but it has value to me. I need it back, double-time.” The fingers waggled in a gimme gesture, and Sam could now make out the subtle movements of machinery under his skin, like metal worms eating away at the humanity.
That damn ring again. It had been bugging Sam since she didn’t mention it in the hotel room, and things only made it worse. The ring was the only part of this that didn’t make sense, and seemed eager to stay that way. “They didn’t have it. If they had, Marcos woulda given it up.”
“You so sure of that?”
“If you really had just gambling debts, they wouldn’t have risked their lives to collect. Marcos knows me, and knows I only care about what goes down in the hotel, right? They give me back your property and they just try again later not on my turf. Plus I had that little Mexican so scared he woulda given me his sister if I’d asked. So what’s the big deal about this ring?”
John gave him the kind of look that tried to be devoid of answer but his face telegraphed more than a rookie cage fighter. He turned back, fingers tightening around the wheel. Sam noted they didn’t turn white around the knuckles. “It’s just important. That’s all.” The car jerked downward and Abrams leaned back in his seat as it nosed down to drop towards the bustle of the rich and famous out front of the Grand Chicago Hotel.
As it settled on its landing pylons the porters gave the car look as though someone had left something odious on their front stoop like a dead rat or a five dollar tip. Abrams gave John a weary look. “You’re just going to tell me to get out, aren’t you, and leave me in the dark about who just tried to machine gun me.”
John’s smirk was unpleasant, fueled no doubt by the lack of a ring. “I couldn’t tell you who tried to shoot you. As for the rest?” The door’s lock popped and it slid open upwards with a hissing of air, “Get out of my car. This isn’t a place for out of date cops.”
Abrams gave the punk a smirk in return just as a front to cover up the rising blush of anger. When the porters saw the detective’s distinctive black suit and old style fedora they snapped back into action, rushing over to help him out of the car. The House Detective was always a good person to be close with. Hands helped him out of the car, dusted his coat off, and they never even mentioned the revolver that he only now was holstering, having kept it aimed at John’s gut for the entire ride, under his coat.
Passing one of the departed Marcos’s hundreds to the porters with a muttered thank you, he entered through the doors and returned the casual salutes from the actual security guards. He returned it with all the enthusiasm of a politician answering to a scandal. Security guards were supposed to make sure things didn’t happen in the first place, and so he always felt a bit of resentment when he nearly got his ass blown off over their lack of attention.
“Sam! Sam!” Dianne sounded like an out of breath pixie, running towards him across the lobby’s expanse. He rolled his eyes skyward to request help from heaven, but the gilt cherubs on the walls merely looked back with cold indifference. Worthless little fat babies that they were.
“Dianne, I really need to sit down and drink until I’m unable to see straight, please.” Dianne put a hand to her mouth to cover the little O her over-red lips made. The fact that people still drank was an open secret even after the Morality Laws were passed but to say so out loud was shocking to a properly bred young lady like Dianne. To Abrams, who grew up before the laws were passed, talking about getting hammered after a shootout was not only proper, but a legal requirement.
“I... uh... no, you can’t yet. Becca Cranston has insisted on seeing you, she says its a matter of urgency. She... she said if you didn’t she’d tell the home office and police what happened.” The mousy little over made up manager looked at him with her best big round eyes, pleading him to do what was asked rather than damage his liver and his moral standing.
“Fine. Once I’m done, I’ll be in my office, and unless there’s bodies hanging from the fucking rafters, you leave me alone til tomorrow. Got it?” He’d regret snapping at her later, but for the moment it did him good to send her scurrying away.
Sam noticed his hand was shaking slightly as he hit the elevator floor, a faint tremor in his muscles leftover from the fight. One of the augments the force wanted him to get was a stabilizer that they said would allow officers to face all kinds of trouble without negative effect. Even now the idea made Sam cringe. He’d been in a number of shootouts, even shot and killed two men in his time, and he remembered every minute clearly. The fear, and the guilt, and never would have wanted to let it go for a minute. Maybe it was unhealthy, but so was alcohol.
His boots made no sound on the carpet as he walked through the plush hallways. He noticed belatedly he smelled of ozone and gunfire but too late now. At 508 he rapped on the door, knuckles causing the holographic display to flicker as his flesh interfered. He always hated holograms.
The door opened, and there were Becca’s big blue eyes, wearing a robe that was so flimsy it may have been projected on her. She gave him a half-smile, cocky and shy, and Abrams found himself smiling in return as his weak spot took a hard blow to its midsection and his caution folded up.
“Please come in. I think you still have need for me.” She glided across the room and settled on the corner of her bed. Her choice of words made Sam’s caution go up again, but then she uncrossed her legs and it took a hard shot to the jaw, crashing to the ground and leaving him ready to save the poor damsel.
“I do. I know you aren’t being straight with me... what happened to the ring?” He gestured at her hand, crossing his arms and coming fully into the room. To give himself the best appearance he leaned his shoulder against the wall, affecting a lazy in charge pose.
She sighed, and leaned back on her hands. Sam’s hormones thrashed against their chains like Frankenstein’s monster. “Can I maybe convince you to just... forget about the ring? It’s between me and my boyfriend, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Abrams sighed, putting his hand over his face. “I’d love to, you have no idea how much, but ain’t no doing, beautiful. I nearly got machine-gunned over that ring, so I’m more than a little interested in finding out why, and by who. So start talking and maybe I can help you.”
Becca gave him a soft smile that made his heart melt and other parts swell with... pride. “I wish you’d not said that, Sam. You seem real sweet.”
That’s when Abrams heard the rustle inside the closet behind him and the felt the large, flat nose of a silenced, low-vel SMG press into the base of his neck. Becca’s smile got even sadder.
“I really wish you’d not said that.”
Sam Abrams, the hotel’s House Detective, anchored the scene as its stoic center. He left the cooing and calming of the woman to Dianne, the day manager, and turned slowly as he took in every inch of what he could see. As a ten-year officer with the Chicago PD he’d been nearly promoted to detective, before they’d instituted the mandatory cybernetics for all officers. He knew they were useful, but he’d decided his shield wasn’t worth his humanity. He’d left the force without a pension, but all that time and training came in handy sometimes. Like this.
Dianne looked up at him from over the shaking blonde’s head as if she could glare him into discovering the culprits who had trashed the room. Becca Cranston, the renter, hadn’t managed many words in the last ten minutes, and Sam hadn’t tried to calm her down. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but the absolute opposite. The sound of a sobbing girl always tore at his, and even more so when they’re dressed in a tight black dress that clung to their curves like paint, have big natural blue eyes, and didn’t have a single store-bought inch of beauty. She was the type whose looks proved there’s no way like the American Way. He pushed his hat back on his head to scratch his hairline, finding it a quarter inch further back than where it was when he’d first picked up the habit. He pretended he was scratching his hairline still, hoping that denial could promote hair growth.
Sam tried his hardest to smile a comforting smile as he turned to the crying blonde, nearly pulling it off too. His features were handsome enough in a “seen the world” sort of way, but the mix of her sobbing and him trying to not stare at her tight body gave his expression a bit of confused hesitation that threw the effect off. He even tried to take a step towards her, and heard his boot heel squish in a puddle of what now smelled like vodka. Great.
“Miss, I’m going to need you to stop crying for a moment,” The sharp look that Dianne fired him took him off guard again. Damn crying women. Always put him off his game. Instead of listening to her unspoken words he pushed on through. “Miss Cranston, I really need you to stop with the sobbing for a minute and tell me what the heck happened.” He used a sharper tone, trying to pull her out of the cycle of sob-gasp-sob.
She gave him those pale blue doe eyes again from between her fingers, and her sobs faded to quick breathing so he figured she was out of the woods. When she finally spoke it was in a petite, girl-like voice he figured some guys went in for when they had a hard-on for girls with daddy issues. He ignored the fact that he liked it.
“They came in through the door, knocked and barged in when I opened it. I thought it was...” she looked down and went silent.
“Thought it was who?”
“Room service,” her body language and tone made her lie so obvious she couldn’t have signaled it better with semaphore. He didn’t call her on the lie yet, but he would later if he needed to. “They barged in and pushed me aside, the big one grabbed my throat and held me against the wall. The little man started to pull the room apart, while they asked where my valuables were. I told them where they were, they took all of them.” She gulped again, and her voice took on a bit of a hysterical whine. Sam winced and prepped himself for another burst of crying girl and steeled himself, “They took my necklace, and my... my bracelet from my mother!”
“Alright, alright, and anything else about them you can remember?”
“The big one called the little one Marcos. He... he...” She welled her eyes up, the hands screwed against her lush lips, and Sam sighed, scratching where his hairline used to be; refusing to admit it had retreated. As if the tic was a cue to the little lady, the sobs started on fast forward again.
A fast look over her, and what he saw in the room, was all he needed to know, and a retreat would make it easier to resist that male urge to bundle her up and protect her. Hormones as old as man shouted for him to defend the woman, and let logic be damned.
“Dianne, I’ve got what I need. Get Miss Cranston a drink, on me.” The manager nodded, doing the perfect imitation of the comforting female friend, since it wouldn’t do well to have Miss Becca Cranston angry with the hotel. With the two pretty women behind him, he headed out and towards his office to digest the whole situation.
#
Sam stared at the holographic screen that hovered in front of him, wishing he could will the softly glowing display into being more helpful. The Grand was a hotel for the very rich, so its guests expected a certain level of privacy. That meant that though the computer could tell him that her room door had been opened from the inside just after breakfast, then a half hour after, there were no cameras in the hallways leading to the rooms. If a guest happened to be... “entertaining” a person or persons not their spouse, or perhaps bringing up a number of bottles of alcohol in violation of the Morality Acts, they liked knowing there wouldn’t be any pesky video to prove it, later. Despite the Acts being passed, outlawing smoking, drinking, prostitution, most meats, and other “degenerative and unhealthy” acts, most people could, if they were rich enough, enjoy them in the privacy of discreet locations. A place like the Grand was one of those locations. If someone got hurt or robbed, though, it meant that went without being seen either, which drove Sam nuts. It’s hard to protect a clientele that insists in complete privacy. Abrams could lecture in a speakeasy with the best of them about the dangers of Big Brother and the need for individual privacy, but from a professional standpoint he’d be happier if every guest was followed by a cameraman for the entire length of their stay. Luckily the entryway was considered fair game, and the cameras caught a pair of men, one built like a side of beef in a cheap suit and the other looking like a greasy weasel in an even cheaper suit, strutting in through the lobby to the elevators up. The weasel he knew from his days walking a beat: Marcos Gonzoles, a scummy little bagman for one of Chicago’s immortal mobs. He was a rodent, vicious but cowardly.
“So you’re going to get her things back, right?” Dianne used that tone she had that could turn a polite question into an order. He figured it was something you got when you were promoted to management, along with the social skill brain implants. Looking over at her as she leaned forward to read his screen, he couldn’t fight the shudder... all those wires and implants in her skull. She was too pretty to have a brain full of metal. “Without the police?”
Sam’s job as House Detective wasn’t to solve crime and punish the guilty. As a police officer he’d been enforcing the law to the letter, and it had been wholly unsatifying in the end. Now what he did as a House Detective was to ensure that the guests were safe, and when things went sour to fix the situation quietly and without the police and papers. Police officers and reporters made people nervous about going to a hotel, especially when they wanted a nice place to go and enjoy themselves under the radar. Whether they were just vacationing in Chicago or entertaining a hooker, wasn’t Sam’s job to care. He just made sure that theft, assault, and whatever else was ‘fixed’ and the guests were safe. It was somehow more “pure” and gave him more freedom in how he dealt with things, which suited Sam just fine; it also didn’t require him replacing parts of himself just to be considered “fit for duty”, which suited him even more.
“I can try, Dianne, but there’s an issue. She’s lying to us.” Sam turned to face the mousy brunette and set his fedora on the smoked glass desktop. Before she could answer he leaned back and put his feet up, uncapping his flask and sipping a slosh of cheap Canadian whiskey in a move calculated to make him look cool, aloof, and like a know it all. Appearance was everything.
Dianne, bless her heart, seemed upset at his implication. “You think she lied to us? We were trying to help her. Why wouldn’t she tell us the entire story?” She wasn’t really that naive, but she’d been a manager long enough that she had been trained to take the guest’s word first. It was Sam’s job to be the cynical bastard. At the very least when someone implied a well paying guest was a liar she had to make the attempt to defend the guest’s honor.
“Look. The story she gives doesn’t jive. She describes a fast toss-job to intimidate her, then they just stole her necklace, purse, and bracelet, right?” He didn’t wait for her to nod like he knew she would. “Well, first off, that wouldn’t account for the damage they did to her room. I know one of the guys, and he’s a sneaky shit, but not as clever as he pretends. He never would have been able to find the mini-bar’s location, let alone crack the code, without someone else’s help, and I doubt that help came from the gorilla he was with. Also, he’s a bagman. He won’t take a shit without a member of the Organization telling him to, so this idea that it’s just a robbery doesn’t jibe. Especially since she didn’t mention the ring she was missing.”
Dianne sighed and rubbed her face in the way she always did when Abrams didn’t just have a nice, easy answer. “She didn’t mention a ring, Sam,” she gave the exact answer he’d hoped so he could pull the Mr Cool act again.
He gave her a cocked grin and sipped from his flask again before capping it. “You’re right, she didn’t. But there was a space on her left ring finger that had a nice red dent on it and a tan line where a ring was until earlier this evening. Meaning the ring is gone in the same timespan as the other robbery. Meaning the girl’s lying. Checkmate.” He frowned, shook his head in irritation. That only worked if he’d used a chess analogy earlier.
Dianne responded by scooping his fedora off his desk and throwing it at him in exasperation. “Then what -are- you going to do, Sam? You have to do something, keep this quiet!”
“Me?” He said innocently, dusting his hat off and donning it as he stood. “I’m going to go find Marcos and have a little chat with him about what he -did- take.” She started to say something else, but closed her mouth with a click when she saw him take the revolver from his desk drawer, and a set of spare reload cylinders.
#
The arcade was typical of its type after the revolution in displays. Walking down the center of the long, narrow building, each side of him was shining with projected 3-D displays showing various monstrosities and evil soldiers beckoning him to test his heroism against their might. For only a quarter he could duel Atilla the Hun, or refight any number of fictitious battles of World War Three. What a deal. He’d experienced some of the war firsthand as a child, and wasn’t really eager to relive it; the games never showed the nuking of Chicago, or the carpet bombing of New York with Russian viral bombs. Kids and adults played out their fantasies as he passed by them, some using traditional joysticks and others wearing headsets for more immersive games. A couple players even had plugs stuck in behind their ears, the game projecting the action while the player stood slack-jawed and glassy eyed, body checked out while his brain lived a life of its own. The flickering lights and victory music and gunfire gave the entire place a feel of some sort of war-zone red light district, and made his back go up at the sensory overload.
Abrams stuck out in the sea of teens and man-children, but he didn’t mind. He’d been here more than a few times when he’d been a cop, and knew he’d find Marcos here same as always. All the people, all the noise, lots of money moving through, it made a good place for the mob to do its drops and launder its money, and Marcos was one of the regulars stationed in the back office.
When he reached the back of the arcade, he was confronted with his own evil door guardian. The kid couldn’t be older than 20 and the track marks on his left arm were obvious. The kid’s right arm was replaced with a heavy metal enhancement and his right eye had more in common with a camera lens than an eye now. Lots of metal on his face and body completed the picture, none of it actually an enhancement, just replacement for the sake of it. He was a typical Chomepunk, replacing meat and flesh for the pure goal of replacing it. The kid even went as far to have hair dyed a bright “look at me” purple, completing the amateur tough look.
“Employees only, bro.” The kid growled in what Sam figured was supposed to be an intimidating manner. Abrams was amused to hear his eye actually -whirred- as it focused on him, and when the young chromepunk put his hand out you could hear the servos operate. Abrams decided to humor him for a bit, and stepped half a step back.
“Hey, relax. Just here to talk to Marcos, yanno? Just relax, man.” Abrams held his hands out, palms facing the chrome-kid in a placating gesture. The punk sneered, the expression forcing skin into the edges of the metal around his eye that looked downright uncomfortable. Sam became more aware of the creases and lines on his skin, the hallmark of poorly fitted and installed cybernetics.
“No can do, grandpa. Marcos didn’t say he had friends coming, yo. Now take a walk before I fucking hurt you.” Mr. Punk flexed his hands to add emphasis, in a way that would have intimidated the average person. Servos and gears whirring were scary, after all.
Abrams, on the other hand, knew the sound of shoddy Russian engineering when he heard it. The academy had an entire course on Human Augmentation and how to handle them and identify them.
“Its real important, man. Just let me by, I promise, he’s expecting me.” It was a weak line, but he figured it was worth a try. The kid wasn’t buying, though, and pushed his hand against Abrams’ chest.
“Oh yeah? He didn’t tell me nothing about no visitor. What is it he’s waiting for from you?”
There were a lot of things Sam didn’t like. Sharp cheeses, bootleg alcohol that tasted like paint thinner, the White Sox. But the top of his list? Chrome-boys pushing him around. “Well, you see, we were going to discuss which of us fucked your girlfriend harder.” He managed to deliver the words calmly, with a friendly smile, and it took the punk a minute to actually register his words. By the time his natural eye had opened in shock, Sam had grabbed the metal hand around the wrist and was twisting it the way they’d been taught in the academy. The kid shouted and attempted to fight back, but the gears and hydraulics had been turned out of alignment so his angry attempts to get control back only left him making the sound of hysteric and futile buzzing sounds as mechanical parts ground against each other. Abrams added a kick to the side of the kid’s knee, then a knee to the back of his head as he fell over, sandwiching purple-hair’s face between kneecap and door frame. There was a hollow thunk, like a coconut hitting the floor, and the chromeboy slumped into dreams of electric sheep. Sam released the arm then, which was still kicking and whirring as it tried to follow orders from a now sleeping brain.
The games covered the sounds of the altercation, and Abrams took advantage of that, slipping through the employees only door. He felt a pang of guilt at disobeying the sign... after all, it was in gold and should be obeyed... but got over it quickly. Through the door was a long hallway, the sounds of the games turned into a muted background music, with a door labeled exit at the end, and one door midway down on each side. The door on the right was labeled Management Only, and so Abrams violated yet another gold sign’s directives and kicked it open with a good hard -crack- of combat boot heel against particleboard.
Abrams had expected a dramatic entrance, with the door slamming against the wall and him standing in it like an action hero. What he didn’t expect was the door slamming into a seven-foot tall slab of humanity, sending said modern day Goliath to the ground with a shattered nose. He didn’t let his surprise show, naturally, and rolled with it as he locked his eyes on Marcos. The little bagman was in a chair facing the door, his rat-like eyes opened to proportions that made him look more like a lemur than a rat.
Abrams gave the most humorless grin he could. “Marcos, old buddy! Just the fucking wetback I wanted to see.” Even when he said the slur, he felt a little bit guilty for it. Racial insults were, after all, outlawed under the Morality Acts. Sam’d been born and raised before the Acts had been established, in a rough neighborhood, so he had trouble restraining himself when things got heated. Abrams almost wanted to apologize, but was interrupted by Marcos.
“Really? Gonna call me a wetback? Fuck you, you ignorant bastard. That’s just rude, an’ demeaning. So fuck you, I dunno nothing about nothing.” The sneer made him look like cartoon rat, ready to bite.
Abrams sighed as the man took offense, but tried to not feel bad about it. He did, a little, and it made it so his draw was slightly slower than it should have been, an added quarter second to the time needed to pull his .357 from its holster and aim it at Marcos’s face. Another half second and the matte black barrel was inside Marcos’s mouth as an added encouragement to co-operate. Marcos actually flailed his arms.
“Now, Marcos, you took some things from a guest’s room in my hotel, and trashed the place. When you do that, you make us look bad, and me look bad. So what I’m going to do, since we’re such good friends, is ask you nicely to return what you took and add a bit of cash on top to pay for the damages. Fair?”
Marcos responded with what was likely an agreement. Sure, it was garbled around the barrel of the pistol, but most people turn out to be agreeable when their uvula was in contact with a gun barrel so Abrams used contextual clues to figure out what he was saying.
Marcos’s right hand flopped about like a fish until it found a filing cabinet, and pulled the drawer wide to show a pile of wristwatches, jewelry, and other baubles likely extracted from “customers” to the little man’s side job, that of debt collection. He gurgled again, this time with an expression that, in this sort of circumstance, usually means ‘Please take the gun out of my mouth a moment, as it would make my current endeavor somewhat easier’. Sam had some experience in translating “Gun in Mouth-ese”.
“Alright, but don’t fuck with me.” He pulled the gun back with the barrel now wet with terror-spit. He’d have to clean it later. Marcos nodded with eyes wide as dinner plates and dove into the cabinet to retrieve a silver necklace set with stones, and a matching silver bracelet. The stooge pushed them towards Sam after adding in a wad of hundreds.
“Alright, fine, take it! I won’t fuck with your hotel again, I’m sorry!”
“What’s the big idea, you greasy little bastard?” Sam took everything and stuffed it into his suit pocket. “There was a ring missing too, now cough it up.”
Marcos panicked, seeing a future full of holes and trauma coming. “Nuh uh, no way, Sam. I never touched no ring. The chica’s boyfriend owed us six grand and welched. I got a call from above saying they was stayin’ in your hotel, and that she had some jewelry, and to take two things offa her if her boyfriend wasn’t there. So we went in, acted tough, and then took her necklace and bracelet. That’s it, I swear, please God don’t shoot me in the knee!”
Abrams squinted, and nodded. Guys like Marcos were generally pretty honest when threatened with severe trauma; plus Sam hadn’t expected him to have the ring in the first place. He was just being thorough. He’d gotten his sidearm into the holster just in time to hear the chromeboy at the door shout a sound of protest, then a smattering of heavy thuds of flesh and wood.
Marcos screwed his face up in confusion, but Abrams knew what that sound meant and was already diving for the wall next to the door when the front of a snub-nosed SMG stuck into the room and hissed out a spray of bullets. High end silenced weapons didn’t make noises, they just spat venom with a sound like an angry snake, and this one was vicious. Papers, computers, cabinets, and Marcos all scattered their bits and pieces around the room as the heavy hollow-points tore into them. Marcos kicked and danced like frog legs hooked to a battery, letting out a shrill stuttering noise like a bird squawking into a fan before his body sprayed blood in a misty spray. Abrams waited for the firing to stop, then the sound of a magazine being disengaged. The shooter had belted off his entire magazine, so likely a thug and not someone trained. That was good.
The detective grabbed the gun with both hands and twisted it down and away from his body, peeling it out of the shooter’s hands, and then swung it back up into the doorway. The wet sound of an exploding nose and a shout was his reward, and he quickly added bonus points by dropping the SMG and sinking his right fist so far into the man’s gut that he was afraid he’d lose his wristwatch.
Cosmetically altered eyes, red with cat-like slits, stared at him with shock, before his left elbow smashed into the already flattened nose, and the man slammed into the back wall. From the other end of the hallway he heard shouts, voices, and figured if they were with the shooter, or with Marcos, either way he was up shit’s creek... the smart thing was to make a break for it. So he did. Down the hallway as fast as his legs could carry him, the cheap particleboard door at the end splintering to pieces before his lowered shoulder, and he was in the alley behind the arcade.
Bruised, sucking air like it was free, but alive. He paused to catch his breath, then stood up and looked eye to barrel with a pistol whose muzzle could have stabled a horse. Beneath the gaping expanse there hung a glittering red dot, as if anyone could possibly miss with a weapon that Abrams figured must fire city busses. The man behind the gun was far enough back that a grab for it would have been suicide.
“Get in the car, now!,” the man’s tone brooked no argument when paired with his weapon. Abrams sighed and wished, not for the first time, he got overtime pay.
#
Sam figured that the man in front of him hadn’t just shot him and took this as a good sign, which really summed up how bad the whole situation was. When he heard the voices at the door, he shot a glance at his new captor, and watched him swivel the cannon in his hands towards the door and give Sam a raised eyebrow look.
“Yo, dick, going to help or are you a pacifist?” This made things more complex longterm, but short term? Sam sprinted to the man’s car and put it between him and the oncoming unknown angries. The car itself was a mid-grade ... he sighed, since he had no idea who they even were, just that they were violent and angry.
The first man to pop out through the doorframe had mottled skin like some sort of Star Trek lizard alien, hulkingly huge anddecorated with heavy ridges. The wannabe-Gorn’s jaw opened in a wordless shout and Abrams could see reconstructed fangs too... the guy had spent serious money on getting really high-grade “constructive” surgical work. They were called biosculpts and if you had the money and pain tolerance you could have your body shaped into damn near anything. Made Sam’s skin crawl at the best of times, nevermind when they’re trying to kill him. He never managed to even get his bearings before Sam’s revolver filled the alley in duet with the barking of the other man’s hand cannon. Scaly had skidded to a halt, and when he tried to react to the noise his balance went out and he toppled back with a windmilling of arms. Like most lizard-rebuilds he had a massive upper body, but without a tail he lacked any balance. The fall saved the man’s life, the two bullets taking chunks from the doorframe and wall in little explosions.
“Hey, get in the car and I’ll cover!” Sam was feeling helpful now, emboldened by the sight of a fleeing foe. While Handcannon unlocked the doors and slid inside, Sam jumped into the passenger side after sending two more shots in through the open door as a high velocity warning to Scaly and his pals against charging through. A second later the aerodyne’s engine started up and they shot into the sky with a high-pitched whine and cloud of street debris. The sound of low velocity rounds against metal joined the sounds of takeoff, before ending entirely when the air-car shot off over the rooftops.
As the city whipped by in a plastic and glass blur, Sam let out a breath that he’d been holding since he walked into the arcade. His whole body sagged as the adrenaline drained out of his body and left only the residue of fear and the realization he nearly became a line in the obituary pages.
“Alright, bud, so now you have me in your car. Is this where you threaten me?” Sam spoke with a throat lubricated by a slug of vodka from his flask. Finally getting a good look at the man in the driver’s seat, he found a young man, with a face like a hawk’s and a jaw so square he seemed straight from central casting, labeled “young hero”. Under his fedora he had short-cropped hair that barely reached off the surface of his head with edges that looked like they’d been measured and cut by a laser to be just perfect.
“Easy there, dick. I trailed you from the hotel. I figured you had a line on the folks that robbed and attacked my girlfriend.” His gray eyes slid to watch Abrams for just a moment.
“You’re Miss Cranston’s boyfriend? Don’t this shit get stranger and stranger. Have a name?”
“Just John’ll do. You have something of mine, I believe. I’ll be needing it back now.” He held out a hand that Sam saw was sheathed in a glove with just the index finger left exposed - a shooter’s glove. Abrams took another swig of vodka and looked Just John over slowly.
“You asking after the necklace, or the bracelet, soldier?” The first started John’s head turning to Abrams, the last accelerated the turn to a whipping around.
His eyes widened, “The hell did you know that?” Sam smirked as he scored the first of what he hoped would be a couple of points. He resented that the kid had taken him by surprise, so it was time to put John off-balance.
“Haircut’s either military, police, or a wannabe, but wannabes don’t stay calm under fire. Poseurs also usually can’t afford augmentation, but you could... and police augmentation wouldn’t have allowed you to hold a gun that size steady. So you’re either military, or a mercenary, and I can’t see a mercenary driving a suburban dad car like this. So you’re military, or ex. Guessing active. Now, which is it you want, though I have trouble imagining you pulling off this necklace.” Sam forced a smug smile on his face to try to offset the queasy sense in his stomach. The image of Marcos splattering across the room was stuck in the back of his head, and wasn’t going away anytime soon.
“Neither, smart-ass. I just want the ring they took off her. I gave it to her as an engagement ring, but it has value to me. I need it back, double-time.” The fingers waggled in a gimme gesture, and Sam could now make out the subtle movements of machinery under his skin, like metal worms eating away at the humanity.
That damn ring again. It had been bugging Sam since she didn’t mention it in the hotel room, and things only made it worse. The ring was the only part of this that didn’t make sense, and seemed eager to stay that way. “They didn’t have it. If they had, Marcos woulda given it up.”
“You so sure of that?”
“If you really had just gambling debts, they wouldn’t have risked their lives to collect. Marcos knows me, and knows I only care about what goes down in the hotel, right? They give me back your property and they just try again later not on my turf. Plus I had that little Mexican so scared he woulda given me his sister if I’d asked. So what’s the big deal about this ring?”
John gave him the kind of look that tried to be devoid of answer but his face telegraphed more than a rookie cage fighter. He turned back, fingers tightening around the wheel. Sam noted they didn’t turn white around the knuckles. “It’s just important. That’s all.” The car jerked downward and Abrams leaned back in his seat as it nosed down to drop towards the bustle of the rich and famous out front of the Grand Chicago Hotel.
As it settled on its landing pylons the porters gave the car look as though someone had left something odious on their front stoop like a dead rat or a five dollar tip. Abrams gave John a weary look. “You’re just going to tell me to get out, aren’t you, and leave me in the dark about who just tried to machine gun me.”
John’s smirk was unpleasant, fueled no doubt by the lack of a ring. “I couldn’t tell you who tried to shoot you. As for the rest?” The door’s lock popped and it slid open upwards with a hissing of air, “Get out of my car. This isn’t a place for out of date cops.”
Abrams gave the punk a smirk in return just as a front to cover up the rising blush of anger. When the porters saw the detective’s distinctive black suit and old style fedora they snapped back into action, rushing over to help him out of the car. The House Detective was always a good person to be close with. Hands helped him out of the car, dusted his coat off, and they never even mentioned the revolver that he only now was holstering, having kept it aimed at John’s gut for the entire ride, under his coat.
Passing one of the departed Marcos’s hundreds to the porters with a muttered thank you, he entered through the doors and returned the casual salutes from the actual security guards. He returned it with all the enthusiasm of a politician answering to a scandal. Security guards were supposed to make sure things didn’t happen in the first place, and so he always felt a bit of resentment when he nearly got his ass blown off over their lack of attention.
“Sam! Sam!” Dianne sounded like an out of breath pixie, running towards him across the lobby’s expanse. He rolled his eyes skyward to request help from heaven, but the gilt cherubs on the walls merely looked back with cold indifference. Worthless little fat babies that they were.
“Dianne, I really need to sit down and drink until I’m unable to see straight, please.” Dianne put a hand to her mouth to cover the little O her over-red lips made. The fact that people still drank was an open secret even after the Morality Laws were passed but to say so out loud was shocking to a properly bred young lady like Dianne. To Abrams, who grew up before the laws were passed, talking about getting hammered after a shootout was not only proper, but a legal requirement.
“I... uh... no, you can’t yet. Becca Cranston has insisted on seeing you, she says its a matter of urgency. She... she said if you didn’t she’d tell the home office and police what happened.” The mousy little over made up manager looked at him with her best big round eyes, pleading him to do what was asked rather than damage his liver and his moral standing.
“Fine. Once I’m done, I’ll be in my office, and unless there’s bodies hanging from the fucking rafters, you leave me alone til tomorrow. Got it?” He’d regret snapping at her later, but for the moment it did him good to send her scurrying away.
Sam noticed his hand was shaking slightly as he hit the elevator floor, a faint tremor in his muscles leftover from the fight. One of the augments the force wanted him to get was a stabilizer that they said would allow officers to face all kinds of trouble without negative effect. Even now the idea made Sam cringe. He’d been in a number of shootouts, even shot and killed two men in his time, and he remembered every minute clearly. The fear, and the guilt, and never would have wanted to let it go for a minute. Maybe it was unhealthy, but so was alcohol.
His boots made no sound on the carpet as he walked through the plush hallways. He noticed belatedly he smelled of ozone and gunfire but too late now. At 508 he rapped on the door, knuckles causing the holographic display to flicker as his flesh interfered. He always hated holograms.
The door opened, and there were Becca’s big blue eyes, wearing a robe that was so flimsy it may have been projected on her. She gave him a half-smile, cocky and shy, and Abrams found himself smiling in return as his weak spot took a hard blow to its midsection and his caution folded up.
“Please come in. I think you still have need for me.” She glided across the room and settled on the corner of her bed. Her choice of words made Sam’s caution go up again, but then she uncrossed her legs and it took a hard shot to the jaw, crashing to the ground and leaving him ready to save the poor damsel.
“I do. I know you aren’t being straight with me... what happened to the ring?” He gestured at her hand, crossing his arms and coming fully into the room. To give himself the best appearance he leaned his shoulder against the wall, affecting a lazy in charge pose.
She sighed, and leaned back on her hands. Sam’s hormones thrashed against their chains like Frankenstein’s monster. “Can I maybe convince you to just... forget about the ring? It’s between me and my boyfriend, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Abrams sighed, putting his hand over his face. “I’d love to, you have no idea how much, but ain’t no doing, beautiful. I nearly got machine-gunned over that ring, so I’m more than a little interested in finding out why, and by who. So start talking and maybe I can help you.”
Becca gave him a soft smile that made his heart melt and other parts swell with... pride. “I wish you’d not said that, Sam. You seem real sweet.”
That’s when Abrams heard the rustle inside the closet behind him and the felt the large, flat nose of a silenced, low-vel SMG press into the base of his neck. Becca’s smile got even sadder.
“I really wish you’d not said that.”
