5
KOVACS/LORETTA
Kovacs sat in the Desoto, waiting for the whore. She was a new girl out of Yousef’s stable. Thought she was hot shit. Thought that she didn’t have to play by the rules. It was Kovac’s job to show her how wrong she was.
It was a standard piece of freelance muscle work. Nothing unusual, but Kovacs was unsettled anyway, for two reasons. First, it was odd that Yousef wasn’t dealing with Loretta himself. That was a pimp’s number one job: keep the bitches in line. You handled all problems personally, because in the end all you had was your street cred.
Secondly, Yousef had sounded nervous on the phone. Yousef never sounded nervous. In the ten or so gigs Kovacs had performed for him, Yousef had been dependably brutal and indifferent to risk.
Kovacs thought about the platinum-blonde chippy he had stashed away in his Hell’s Kitchen efficiency. Okay, she wasn’t much. She was way past prime, but that made her desperate, which was good. She rubbed his ugly feet, brought him whiskey, did anything he wanted, as long as he paid the gas bill and kept her in hooch. He was lord and master. What more could you ask for? He wanted to be there right now, in the peeling bedroom, with the radiator ticking and bathing the room in oppressive heat. With his girl tending to his every need. That’d be a whole lot better than this mess.
Next to him in the passenger seat, Drone scanned the fog in a variety of surveillance modes. Kovacs didn’t see why he should expect any trouble from this cooze, but it never hurt to be careful.
Because Yousef had been nervous.
“What time is it?”
“Twelve fifteen thirty-three,” said Drone. Its tone belied its discomfort with the current operation.
“Look, this ain’t payola,” said Kovacs for the third time. “It ain’t cream. This is sideline stuff, okay? Hired muscle.”
“Your body fat percentage is 37.”
“It’s seman—a figure of speech, dickhead!” Kovacs ground his jaw. This fucking contraption got under his skin faster than anything alive or dead—and that included three ex-wives.
“You won’t hurt her?”
“We’re gonna put the fear a’ God in her, that’s all.”
“What if we, I don’t know… traumatize her?”
Kovac’s belly laugh threatened the continued existence of the steering column. “She’s a junkie whore! Her dad was rod man for the Hartley crew. She was born traumatized.”
Drone clicked and fidgeted, but said nothing more.
The Department’s Virtual Person liasion had once told Kovacs something interesting about his morphinium partner. Drone had chosen its own generic name and shape. Although it could, within limits, shapeshift into anything it desired, it opted to emulated the robot stereotypes of the 1930s. Hence the functionless lights on its chest, the inverted triangle of a head (complete with camera-lens eyes and speaker-grill mouth), the accordion arms—all mounted on a cylindrical body.
Smarties that were into the retrowave style approved; those that weren’t reacted with disgust and dismay. To them, it was the equivalent of a black man running around dressed like a lawn jockey and acting like Stepin Fetchit.
Kovacs just wished there was an off switch.
Kovacs heard the click-clack of heels on pavement. He peered into the gloom. There never used to be fog, before the Blister. It made him feel like he was on a stakeout for Jack the Ripper.
A form materialized. At first, he could only make out that she was small, around five-one. She moved with the confident strut of a professional. Then she got closer, and the blood leeched from Kovacs’ face.
A reeb. A fucking reeb.
Yousef hadn’t told him. Probably because he knew Kovacs would’ve nixed the gig. It went deeper than the sight of a whore who looked seventeen but could be fifty. No, what got to him were the dull eyes, the jaded patina of world-weariness from years under the fist of hard drugs. Nothing in the world was more dangerous than someone with nothing to lose.
Drone humped over the armrest into the backseat. She slid into the car, tiny on the wide seat. She pulled the door shut.
“You Kovacs?”
He snorted. “You better hope, now that you’re in my car.”
“You’re him. Yousef said you’d be a fat cop in a Desoto.”
Drone twittered. Kovacs ground his teeth.
“I’m Loretta,” the whore said. “So what’s the rumpus? I’m supposed to throw you a freebie or what?” She looked at Drone. “I won’t do him, though.”
It took Kovacs a moment to realize that she was kidding.
“I have a message from Yousef,” he said.
Her blithe smile faltered. Kovacs cringed inside. She looked so fucking young!
“You didn’t frisk her,” said Drone from the back.
The thought of touching her made his flesh crawl. “You packing, Loretta?”
“Hell. Where would I put it?” She smiled, arching her penciled eyebrows. “But you can frisk me if you like.” She slid forward on the seat, her legs coming apart, the fringed flapper’s skirt riding up her thighs. Her rolled stockings were held fast above the knee with pretty elastic garters. There were needle tracks on the bruised flesh beneath.
“You should lay off the hop, Loretta.”
“And you should lay off the crullers, John Law.”
Another snicker from Drone. Ferocity arced inside him, and quite suddenly Kovacs had reached his limit with both of them. His hand swept across the car. Loretta’s head snapped into the window with a crack. Her hair leapt against the glass, a momentary halo, then settled in a shroud over her face.
Drone freaked. “Oh shit!”
Loretta looked back at Kovacs, and the submission he’d hoped to see wasn’t there. Only defiance and finger-shaped redness creeping across her cheek.
Fine. Get it over with and get the fuck out of here. “No more side tricks! You hear me, bitch?” He grabbed her, fingers sinking into the young flesh of her shoulders, and shook her back and forth. She didn’t resist, just let herself be tossed around like a broken marionette. “Any trade you tumble to, Yousef gets his piece, or I come back for a piece of you. You get me?” He threw her against the door, panting. Loretta slowly straightened the strands of hair that had fallen across her face. She smiled. There was lipstick on her front tooth.
“Sure, John Law. I get you. I’ll be a good girl.”
Kovacs stared at her. He’d just threatened her goddamned life. Was she that far gone?
“I don’t think you’re taking me seriously, Loretta.”
“Serious as a heart attack, John Law.” She leaned across the seat and rested her tiny hand on his thigh.
“What—”
His voice cut out uncertainly on him. Her hands drifted deeper, searching, finding. As she manipulated him through his trousers, Kovacs discovered two things that were surprising. The first was that he could respond to a reeb. But here he was, his breath getting labored, his mind clouding.
The second surprise, which unfortunately came right on the heels of the first, was the nickel-plated Smith and Wesson that had somehow materialized in her other hand. It was cold as she pressed it against his neck at the juncture of skull and spine.
And Kovacs realized, in that briefest of milliseconds, why Yousef had sounded nervous.
Fuck m—
His face exploded forward, drenching the windshield in clots of smoking brain. Drone shrieked and batted around like a trapped moth. It threw open every commlink it had.
“Officer down! Officer down!”
Loretta turned. “You’re blocked, hon. No outgoing calls.”
Drone processed this, and the inside of the car suddenly lit like a supernova, white light shooting out every window. As it faded, Drone gasped to see Loretta shaking her head, still very awake, rubbing the stars out of her eyes.
“That was my highest setting! You should be down!”
She pulled her hair back from the nape of her neck, revealing the blinking protective subderm. Then she yanked a small black slab from her garter belt.
“Don’t you carry anything stronger than a neural disruptor?” she asked, checking the settings on the box.
“Smarties don’t kill,” whined Drone, extremely confused.
“Admirable.” She hopped onto her knees facing Drone, and reached over the seat with the slab, which had already begun to change shape. “Now, honey, this won’t hurt a bit.”
***
Loretta waited under the street light, seriously hurting. If this bitch is late…
The woman showed on time, though. She was ill-defined in a lumpy raccoon coat and Empress Eugenie hat, a rolled-brim velvet thing with an ostrich feather. A heavy veil covered her face, obscuring her features. Strange combo. Loretta handed the smarty’s extracted data core to the woman, who nodded and produced a baggie full of dark brown chunks. Loretta’s whole body reacted to the sight of the godsmack.
“Why’d you kill the cop?” the woman asked.
A shrug. “He slapped me.”
The woman nodded as if this were perfectly reasonable. “I need some volunteers. People no one will miss.”
“I know lots of people like that.”
“Then I’ll be in touch. Careful,” she added, nodding at the baggie. “That stuff’s very pure.”
“Yeah, yeah.” All she could think about was getting back to her kit.
The woman in the hat watched with amusement as the whore raced way into the fog.