Code Noir Page 3

  ‘Changed’ meant altered by the parasite. Like Jamon and Io Lang. Lang had shape-shifted right here at Hein’s in front of a room full of punters after I’d put a bullet in his adrenals. Since then word had spread through Tert Town. People knew something was wrong, that evil had been set loose.

  The myth of shape-shifting had been around for as long as people had told stories. Now, though, it had become real, caused by the Eskaalim parasite. Nothing at all to do with vampires and werewolves.

  I eased a Luger from its holster and fingered its worn familiarity. Comfortable was good, but when I got hold of Minoj, my favourite arms dealer, I was going to get him to manufacture me something special.

  I propped my elbows on the bar, cocking the pistol at Larry’s prize magnum of genuine malt whisky. No one that came here could afford to drink the contents, nor did he want them to. He wiped the glass religiously to keep the label immaculate, and sniffed the shot valve when he was depressed.

  ‘Do I look changed, Larry?’

  He smiled like rigor mortis. ‘Same old Parrish,’ he managed.

  ‘Just needed some thinking time. I’m moving into Jamon’s old rooms. Mention it around. Things are going to change. Are you still with me?’

  He considered for the time it took him to pour me a tequila. With an exaggerated sigh he gave me his answer. ‘Always a pleasure to work for a lady.’

  Chapter Four

  I holstered my pistol, knocked the tequila back and put on my most innocent, amicable face.

  He poured me another. ‘Terms.’

  ‘I’ll clear what I owe you to date, and add some fat as soon as I get Jamon’s place sorted. On top of that you get the usual percentage to act as my broker on most things. And Hein’s gets free protection. I’ll even throw in a damages bonus. In the meantime I need something done pronto.’

  His nostrils quivered with caution and interest. Larry knew I was good for intrigue so I pushed on while I had his attention, leaning across the bar, bringing my lips close against his ear.

  ‘Use every snitch you’ve got. And everybody else’s. A couple of Cabal shamans have disappeared. I need anything you can find about it. Anything. This is important, Larry. For all of us.’

  He tensed at the weight of my tone, only relaxing when I eased back on to the stool.

  With what could have been a prayer flicked in the direction of the whisky magnum, he nodded and moved away to serve.

  Relieved, I stepped outside the bar. Link and the ferals appeared around me.

  I’d forgotten them.

  ‘We were watching, Oya. But we didn’t want to interfere. It was good that you talk with Larry alone.’ Link nodded wisely.

  Amusement tugged, but I pushed it away. I would never laugh at Link or his ferals. They had survived when many hadn’t. And they had helped turn the war against Jamon.

  Still, such pronouncements from a child were curious.

  Maybe I was the naive one?

  ‘Thanks, Link.’ I stared around at them. Thin, solemn faces, masks slung around their necks like bizarre masquerade adornments. ‘Go and prepare to move. I’ll send word when the barracks are ready.’

  It was Link’s turn to suppress a smile. ‘Yes, Oya, as you say.’

  In one accord they turned away as if they were wired together for movement.

  I stared after them suspiciously. Was Link laughing at me?

  As I hiked it up the stairs near Jamon’s rooms a ’goboy - canine incisors, dreads and too much body hair - jumped me from the shadows. Thankfully my olfaugs were amped up and his dirty-dog stench gave me a warning.

  I whipped a garrotting wire down across his snout. It sliced enough layers to make a flap open. He yelped and loped away around the corner.

  I drew a Luger and crept towards the corner, scrying for his pal.’Goboys didn’t like to fight alone.

  It turned out to be someone I’d met before.

  Riko. I’d sliced his hand mostly off when he’d tried to jump my salvage claim, which meant Riko and I weren’t exactly close.

  The two of them came at me from opposite sides. I kicked the first one in the soft part of the throat. He gurgled and collapsed.

  Riko, slathering with fury, leapt for me. I shot him in the leg, but not before he raked me with his preternatural toenail. Yeeuch! Tert myth said they grafted them off dead bodies - gave a whole new meaning to false nails.

  I aimed the pistol steadily at his head. ‘You should know better’n to do that, Riko,’ I drawled with calm pretence. ‘Who sent you?’

  Beads of saliva matted his chest hair. ‘I wouldn’t sleep if I was you, bitch. There’s decent cred out on you,’ he panted.

  I shrugged. ‘What’s new? ‘

  He gave me a wild, animal look. ‘Dead would be so much easier,’ he spat and dragged himself away.

  I should have put a bullet in the back of his head, but I couldn’t bring myself to - at this moment regret seemed a better option than murder.

  I stood in the corridor, pistol raised, feeling the weight of my own peculiar morality, and the significance of his words.

  Dead would be so much easier.

  Someone wanted me badly - alive.

  Down the corridor, the door to Jamon’s rooms was unlocked. As I stepped through the air wrapped around me like a dirty sheet. Someone had removed his body and had been living there. Riko maybe?

  lnside the place was a shambles of food cartons, hair-balls and dust.

  I surveyed the squalor and suddenly felt at a loss.

  There was so much to sort. This place. The barracks. The business.

  And yet I couldn’t begin the thing that would award me the time to do it all.

  The indiscriminate desire to run off searching in villa attics for the Cabal’s stolen shaman rose like a flood inside me. I paced a few steps, pinching my forearms with my fingernails trying to settle it, trying to make myself form a plan.

  I couldn’t move on the Cabal shaman until I had some word from Larry. In the meantime I could get some things in order - like this place.

  I commed my newly appointed, lurex-coutured broker.

  ‘Larry, send your cleaners over now.’

  His smile was pencil thin, sparing. ‘Already on their way, Parrish . . . and no . . . nothing yet.’

  I bit on my impatience. ‘Directly. Understand?’

  He humphed and cut the link.

  I picked through the debris towards the san unit. It looked relatively unused. Whoever had been living here hadn’t bothered to wash.

  I threw my clothes into the launder slot and set the shower to full throttle. A few minutes and they would be as clean and dry as me.

  When my skin felt set to blister I got out, re-donned my clothes and stamped into the living room.

  Four bots were scurrying around, sucking up piles of dirt and hair and spreading cleaning agents liberally over all the surfaces. One of them worked on the bloodstains in the middle of the main room. It rattled its body stiffly, as if apologising.

  I patted its display so it repeated the same instructions. ‘Do what you can,’ I told it. ‘What’s left will remind me.’

  Of what, Parrish? How to spear a man to death?

  But Jamon had already ceased to be a man when the Cabal had done that. He’d been possessed - a flesh host to the Eskaalim.

  Although I had no idea where they’d come from, I knew they fed on our adrenalin. They kept some of their prey as a nutritional life source; others - like Jamon had been about to become, like Lang had become - they transformed totally into an energy creature with a flesh exterior. A creature that could shape-change, or heal quickly, or perform conscienceless deeds.

  Which one was I?

  How much time? How much?

  Not enough!

  The voice thrummed through my body like a plucked string. It was the Angel - my own manifestation of the Eskaalim within - laughing at me.

  Maybe it was right.

  Following the derisive voice washed a flood of desire
.

  Until now Teece had been around to dampen the waves that came and went. He would be here soon, I told myself.

  Hurry, Teece.

  Focus.

  I sat down in the middle of the room, ignoring the bots as they scrubbed away the last of the debris, and let myself drift into a meditative world of passionless calm. I was beginning to recognise a pattern in myself. Shortly after a surge of adrenalin, I was either overwhelmed by a vision or the need for energy release.

  The method of release was down to me. It certainly wasn’t paired with any need for emotional intimacy.

  Teece had laughed at first. The reality was different.

  Teece didn’t like being on tap. He wanted to be revered. He wanted to be the only one. After a short time, the regularity of my faceless desire got to him.

  ‘What would happen if I wasn’t here? Would you take anyone?’ he had asked.

  ‘Maybe.’ I couldn’t lie to him.

  But if I didn’t indulge the desire, it turned to anger. The anger made me less and less human. I’d slept with people for kicks before but never to assuage a violent compulsion. My lack of control sickened me.

  His face had become sullen with hurt. Wariness visited and stayed in his faded blue eyes. ‘What about if you were with Loyl? Would he be enough?’

  ‘I’m not with him, Teece,’ I’d said with stretched patience. ‘I made my choices. So did you.’

  He’d stared at me, unsure whether to be satisfied by my answer.

  I couldn’t help him any more than that.

  Uncurling from my meditation, I instructed the bots to remove every single thing from Jamon’s rooms - furniture, clothes - and take them away. Everything, except the mahogany table. Jamon like to dress it in candles and silver and pretend to be civilised.

  I wanted a reminder of his deceit.

  Just being in his apartments would take some getting used to - but I was enough of a pragmatist not to miss the opportunity for something half decent. Unlike the microchip-sized doss I’d been living in for three years.

  Which reminded me. I needed to retrieve Merry 3# - my holo-comm-diary - from my old room. She didn’t do a lot, but I was kinda fond of her. The tekboy in Plastique who made her built an exact representation of me, without the crooked nose and cheekbone. Looking at Merry 3# was a vanity really. Parrish without the scars, blemishes and bad humour.

  When I was satisfied that enough traces of Jamon were removed, I sent the bots back to Larry Hein. Then I did something I’d been putting off.

  I entered Jamon’s comm room. He’d run his side of the war from here. He’d also shape-changed before my eyes.

  Slipping a tiny, shell-shaped hard drive from my kit bag I slotted the grooves into the wall mount. I’d taken the drive and its precious information with me to Teece’s. Until now I hadn’t been able to bring myself to look at it.

  Torley’s, Plastique and parts of Mueno-ville ran off on reasonably reliable pirated electricity. Blackouts were common but not lasting. Brownouts were common and damaging. Teece paid a fortune to a private supplier in Viva for a steady supply to his comm cache. I’d have to look into Jamon’s arrangements in that matter before someone pulled the plug on me.

  I began to search his files. His virtual lock was simple enough to pick. I guess he’d figured as it wasn’t networked it was unlikely to be hacked directly from his own machine.

  I was no financier, but his bookkeeping icon - a set of overblown lips floating above a tastelessly naked torso - seemed happy enough to recite a clear account of his incomings, and a very short list of outgoings.

  The litany of profits made clear whom he provided protection for in Torley’s, Shadoville, The Stretch and some areas to the west. They paid him well and he pocketed everything but what it cost him to pay for the pirated power, his lifestyle and to keep the ’goboys fed and watered. They didn’t get a wage. They wouldn’t know what to do with it.

  One file-tree had coded names with amounts listed in a column next to them. It had to be drugs, but whether they were buyers or sellers and what the drugs were I could only guess.

  The lips-and-torso refused to tell me without a password and I didn’t have time or the stomach to delve into Jamon’s dead psyche to unearth it.

  I flicked on to another tree that contained profiles of people all in a tidy spreadsheet. Women mainly, but not only. Some I knew.

  My hand trembled as I tapped through until I found my name.

  Parrish Plessis. I skimmed through the physical description and on to family history . . . No living relations apart from a mother (addicted to NE) and a sister, Katriona, a pro-ball athlete on the Eurasian circuit.

  Known associates: Teece Davey.

  Remarks: dangerously impulsive.

  I flicked on to some of the others. We all had one thing in common. No strong family ties.

  The last section shook me the most - pages of details on my movements and habits. I’d always know that Jamon had me watched but the intimate detail of whom I talked to, slept with, where I ate . . .

  I shivered and reminded myself that Jamon was a bloodstain on the floor.

  I moved my finger to delete the lot, but somehow couldn’t. So much information on so many people, it was stupid to lose it. Maybe I could turn Jamon’s obsessive sadism into something useful.

  Did that make me as bad as him? I wondered.

  My finger hovered over the screen’s pad. Yes? No?

  In the end I erased only the segment about me and kept the rest. I told myself there were rough times ahead; it was sensible. Information meant survival.

  I built a new lock on the system, a way that Teece had taught me, and tried to ignore the guilt that crawled along my shoulders and up into my conscience.

  To make it go away I cracked Jamon’s Tert depository cache. The larger businesses in The Tert ran their own electronic banking arrangements through illegal software managed by a numbers freak called Gigi. The rest lived off barter and kwik-ident accounts.

  I transferred a wallop of credit into Larry Hein’s Chained Dog business icon and confirmed the transaction.

  Then I commed him again. ‘Larry.’

  He was pouring quick, successive disposable shot cups without spilling a drop on his lurex. ‘So soon, boss?’

  I hated to admit it but I kinda liked the tag. ‘Just moved some credit over to your Tert account.’

  His surly face brightened.

  My next call was to Teece.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

  The tight lines around his mouth told me he’d been worried. ‘Jamon’s. My new rooms. Come see.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘What about the ’goboys that are living there?’

  ‘You knew about them? You didn’t mention it.’

  ‘Would it have stopped you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what would have been the point?’

  ‘Forewarning would have been nice.’

  Teece shook his long hair unhappily. ‘Thought it might help change your mind. I don’t think you should be there, Parrish. Every jerk with an itch is gonna want to take it away from you. You won’t be able to turn your back on anyone.’

  It was my turn to bristle. ‘So what then, Teece? I just hide out at your place and wait until I turn into—’ I stopped abruptly, fearing the line was bugged.

  I had enough enemies, there was no point in giving any of them information for free. With effort I softened my tone and made my play. ‘Please come and help me with this, Teece. I need your smarts and your common sense.’

  ‘Yeah, well at least I can’t complain about your honesty. ’ His laugh had a familiar tinge of bitterness.

  ‘No. You can’t.’

  We were silent for a moment.

  ‘Teece?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Come soon? I need you.’ My voice was throaty and loaded with meaning.

  He flushed. ‘Lock yourself in. I’ll be there.’

  I took his advice and tried to make
sure no one could get in - but after my uninvited visit from the Cabal, it was token. Jamon hadn’t had much security anywhere but his den; the result of too many bodyguards. I locked off the outer apartment doors and made a quick call to my favourite weapons supplier, Raul Minoj.

  When he realised it was me he switched from a fake, generated image to the real thing. The latter wasn’t an appealing sight. Rotten teeth and a smile greasier than a Tert shawarma. Even my onset of indiscriminate lusting failed to encompass Raul Minoj.

  In biz though, he was sharp.

  ‘Oya, little thing. Where have you been?’

  I bristled. Both those terms pissed me off. Oya was some name the Muenos had resurrected from their bastardised voodoo mythology and given to me. I didn’t know exactly what it meant but it seemed to come with a load of responsibility and other weird stuff. ‘Little thing’, on the other hand, was sarcasm, plain and simple.

  If there was one thing I would never be it was a little thing.

  ‘As if you didn’t know, Minoj.’

  His spy network was probably the best in The Tert outside Larry Hein’s, but his information came highly priced. He’d warned me once, for free, about Jamon. Maybe underneath it all he had a soft spot for me. He’d also agreed to support my salvage claim. Reckoned he could manipulate me.

  He grinned. ‘I thought perhaps you’d found a nest.’

  My face got hot with more annoyance. He was referring to Teece and I.

  ‘I’ve moved into Jamon’s old apartment. I want some decent security on the place.’

  He nodded, tonguing the gaps in his teeth. ‘I have some trinkets that will impress you. For a price.’

  ‘The price isn’t an issue but there’s a condition.’

  He raised a slick eyebrow.

  ‘You oversee the fitting. I don’t want some half-baked job.’

  Minoj never left his compound on The Tert’s southside any more. I was asking a lot.

  He was already shaking his head. ‘I don’t—’

  ‘You’re getting my business exclusively, Minoj. I gotta a lot of people to protect now. Not just Torley’s, but the ferals and the Muenos.’