redRobe

Chapter Four Drowning in an Empty Pool

‘War… what is it good for,’ sang the newspaper vendor, badly.

Sanchez slid his card down the vendor’s slot and yanked out a fresh copy of the Post. It was a crude print-out of the newsfeed, ink still sticky on its surface, the hyperlinks all dutifully underlined but useless, going nowhere…

The civil war in Spain was almost over. Italy’s national bank was in the hands of the World Monetary Fund. Only the Vatican was refusing to be audited. Holding out politely but firmly under the orders of Mexico’s own Declan Begley, better known as His Excellency Cardinal Santo Duque.

In London, the Prime Minister was defending the WorldBank arms embargo that had led to the slaughter of unarmed liberals in Valencia, on the grounds that allowing both sides to be armed would only have extended the war.

None of that got read by Sanchez.

The shooting on the Paseo de la Counter-Reformacion was relegated to a two-line snip at the bottom of the sheet, two-thirds of the way down late-breaking news. Sanchez didn’t bother to read that either.

Half an hour later it would make headlines when an AI at DFPD finally reminded everyone who the dead man was. But at the moment CySat/Mex’s ex-CEO was just another body in the morgue.

‘Enjoy your read,’ said the vendor and Sanchez kicked it, his boot ricocheting off its reinforced metal sides. The machine picked itself up with as much dignity as a knee-high cube can manage and shut its front flap with a loud clang.

‘Everyone’s a critic’ The vendor stamped off up the road, stopped briefly outside a review bar and then kept going towards a more upscale part of town.

‘Coward,’ Sanchez shouted after it. The machine ignored him, but a Swedish girl in a red crop top stopped long enough to give Sanchez a quizzical stare. Then she was gone too, pulled up the sidewalk by a blond boyfriend who muttered something rapidly in her ear.

She had good tits and an even better ass. Sanchez looked after her, considering. Then he patted the Colt tucked into his silver and leather belt, shook his head sadly and headed towards his bar. For once, Sanchez had better things to do than chase after tourists. Like take a good look at his new toy.

Between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m., south of Alameda was tourist town. After that, most tourists went back to their high-rise Marriotts or Plazas in the Zona Rosa to eat almost-Mexican food and watch Brazilian porn, while those the quarter really belonged to came out to count that day’s takings and drink cold beer in the cafés the tourists had only just left.

As an arrangement it worked well, except for the occasional backpacker stupid enough to hang around in search of the ‘real’ Mexico. A quick punch in the gut, a knee to the face and they woke up with a hangover-sized headache, no watch and an empty wallet if they were lucky. The rest never woke up at all.

Sanchez grinned. He’d rolled his share, back when he was a kid and before franchised vats meant stealing kidneys wasn’t worth the prison sentence. Who hadn’t? But he’d moved on since then, gone respectable. These days he ran five whores and had a major share in nightclub. Hell, he was practically a tax payer.

And he wasn’t a killer, either. Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t killed. He had, but not for fun, not for a long time and only in the line of business. Sure, some of his donors had died, but only the stupid ones who didn’t bother to read his instructions when they awoke. After they’d donated, Sanchez used to pack their limp bodies in ice and leave them in a bath with printed instructions to call 0800 HELP-HELP-HELP and ask for surgical emergency when they awoke.

He had a good deal going with the hospital too: including a sliding scale of kickbacks that depended on the size of the donor’s insurance policy. And if the donor went flatline, then the hospital lifted the cornea and anything else in demand, and Sanchez skimmed ten percent of the sale price off the top.

It had been a good living, until even the not-so-rich started growing their own spares in advance, just in case. Which was enough to kick the bottom out of any market.

Sanchez sucked at his teeth and kicked his way into La Piscina before the toughened door had time to swing open. The hinges hissed, or it could just have been hydraulics adjusting pressure.

La Piscina had been a swimming pool before it was a club, until concrete rot had drained it of water and patrons. Now steps cut and welded from steel grating led down into what had once been the shallow end. At the deep end was a small bar for those partying. Chill-outs drank at long bars up on the sides if they could hack climbing the ladders. The place was almost deserted, but that was usual. Nothing real in Day Effé started before midnight.

Sanchez chose the small bar.

‘Dos Equis, cold.’ Without waiting, he headed towards a table in the corner of the pool. It was empty as always. Slumping into a metal chair, Sanchez pulled out the Colt and rested it on the table’s chrome surface. When the barboy arrived, Sanchez looked between the Colt and the boy, waiting.

‘Nice gun, senor…’ The boy put the cold beer carefully on the table, then placed a frosted tumbler beside it. Finally, he put down a saucer of freshly salted almonds.

Sanchez nodded. ‘You know how much this gun is worth?’

The boy shook his head. He didn’t even dare guess. Not when the patron obviously wanted to tell the boy himself.

‘Any idea?’

The boy shook his head mutely.

‘More than you are.’

The boy’s polite smile revealed the teeth of the poor, the kind Sanchez once had. Worth more than him? Neither of them doubted it. Pietro was one of the empty ones. Condemned to hollowness by il papa, by John Paul II’s pronouncement way back in 1997 that clones had no souls.

‘Get me another beer,’ Sanchez demanded, watching as the boy carefully didn’t look at the full bottle already on the table. The kid was learning, too slowly and helped by very public kicks and slaps, but he was finally getting it right. Which was just as well. Sanchez had leased him from Zampango, from the same orphanage as the whores he’d left out on the freeway. And he’d told the manager he wanted a bright one this time: one bright enough not to get himself killed. The girls Sanchez just wanted pretty-and young.

‘Hey,’ Sanchez said suddenly, grinning as the kid froze in his tracks. ‘You been messing with my girls?’

Over by the steel steps someone laughed. Spanish Phillipe probably. Built like an ox and with brains to match, he was what you got if you bred cousins with each other often enough. A Neanderthal brain in a Cro-Magnon body.

‘Well?’ Sanchez asked. He was smiling at the small crowd round the bar. Counting off men he’d known since childhood, men who looked up to him, one or two even sliding Don in front of his name like he was some hidalgo. Sanchez kept smiling until he saw how quiet the boy had gone, how the kid’s shoulders had tensed up.

‘Turn round,’ Sanchez demanded, ‘look at me…’

The boy did and Sanchez saw the guilt etched in Pietro’s large blue eyes. Etched there as surely as any retinal pattern, along with slow-burning anger. The hatred of a calf for the butcher.

‘Which one?’ The pimp demanded, lifting the Colt hiPower from the table in one lazy move and flicking off the safety catch. He pointed the muzzle at the boy who stared back, wide-eyed. A tiny red dot stood out on the boy’s white apron, just over his heart. The boy couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there right enough.

‘Well,’ Sanchez demanded. ‘Which was it?’ He moved the tiny red dot up to the boy’s face, centring it between his eyes.

‘Maria,’ the boy said softly.

‘Maria?’ The man’s voice was contemptuous. ‘How the fuck do I know which one’s Maria… What does this little slit look like?’

‘She’s not a slit’

Sanchez looked at the boy in disbelief. And then stood up so slowly that the whole club was silent by the time he made it to his feet. Each step he took across the concrete floor echoed off the white-tiled walls. No one even shuffled in their seat.

It didn’t take much to club Pietro to the floor. About as much effort as it took to slam a heavy door.

‘Which one?’ Sanchez demanded, dragging the kneeling boy to his feet.

The boy said nothing so Sanchez clubbed him again.

‘Which one?’

Even if his lip hadn’t been split Pietro would have found it hard to speak with the barrel of a Colt pushed into the underside of his jaw, but he tried anyway.

‘Small, long dark hair. We were…friends back at Zampango was what he wanted to say. Only saying that was one sure way to get hit again. Sanchez’s arrangement with the orphanage might be beneficial to both manager and pimp, but talking about it was off limits. Sanchez didn’t want everybody getting the same idea.

‘Have you any idea what I do to people who steal from me?’

The pimp looked into the boy’s frightened face and liked what he saw. Plus everybody else in the club was watching him. That was good.

Pietro shook his head.

‘She’s mine,’ said Sanchez. ‘You want a piece of her ass, you deal with me.’ He said it like he was explaining the obvious to someone too stupid to recognise it. Hell,’ the man looked round the club and grinned. ‘I’ll even give you discount. After you’ve reimbursed me for what you’ve already taken.’

Spanish Phillipe laughed.

‘Well, can you pay?’ Sanchez asked.

Of course he couldn’t. The boy just stood there, blood trickling slowly down his chin to Rorschach-blot in slow drops onto the front of his white apron. Sanchez would probably charge him for that too.

‘Say five dollars a time?’ The pimp’s voice was still amused but it carried an edge now, jagged like glass. There were two ways the next thirty seconds could go-joke or tragedy-and even Sanchez himself didn’t know which way events would stack. Pietro decided it for him.

‘No.’ The boy shook his head, but he wasn’t answering the question he’d been asked, because the words still ricocheting round his skull were a response to something Sanchez had said earlier. ‘She’s not yours. You don’t own Maria. No one owns anyone.’ He said it with all the conviction of the very young. As if it that might make it true, even when it obviously wasn’t.

‘We’ve been ‘mancipated…’ He tripped over the word, but still everyone in the club knew what he was talking about. Nine months earlier, Pope Joan had issued a papal bull making it a sin to own clones of anyone except yourself. And sat in his villa on the coast near Cancun, his excellency Cardinal Santo Ducque had approved her edict, even though he was a known enemy of the liberal schism.

‘Of course I don’t own her, you dumb fuck,’ the pimp said heavily. ‘I lease her ass from the orphanage at seventy-five bucks a month. And believe me, it’s fucking robbery.’

Sanchez pushed the Colt hard against Pietro’s neck. ‘You know how much I have to pay the orphanage if you die… ?

‘Nothing. It’s covered by the insurance.’ Sanchez tightened his grip on the gun, knuckles whitening. He was waiting for the boy to shut his eyes, but the boy didn’t, he just kept staring at the little lights on the side.

One after another, diodes lit in slow sequence along the breech of the Colt as the pimp’s trigger finger kept tightening until even Sanchez knew he was about to kill the boy. Only it didn’t happen like that at all.

One second the pimp’s smile was hardening, the next the Colt had flashed lightning bright and Sanchez was screaming, long and high like a newly-castrated horse as the gun fell from his nerveless fingers to hit the floor. He was whimpering to himself like a child in pain as he squeezed his hurt fingers first hard, then harder.

There wasn’t a mark on them.

‘Jesus fuck,’ said the Colt crossly, ‘what are you waiting for?’

Pietro realised seconds ahead of the others that the gun wasn’t just talking, it was speaking to him.

‘You want to get killed, you little fuck?’

Pietro didn’t. He scooped the Colt off the floor and settled his fingers round the handle. Enough diodes lit to decorate a Christmas tree and then died away, leaving only a tiny red light flashing slowly on the left side of the handle, next to the boy’s thumb. It meant the Colt was ready to fire, not that Pietro knew that.

‘Take him out,’ demanded the Colt. ‘That’s lesson one, for fucking free. When the time comes to do something, get it done.’

Pietro looked at the pimp who was staring at his own frozen fingers. Every nerve had been burnt out in a single pulse without any visible sign of damage to the epidermal surface.

Slowly Pietro raised the gun until he saw the small red dot appear on the pimp’s chest but still he didn’t pull the trigger, just stood there clutching the heavy hiPower. All he wanted was for life to get back to how it was before this started. Getting shouted at, even slapped, that he could handle. But killing someone like Don Sanchez was beyond his reason-and beyond his expectations.

Anyone who had thought the club was quiet before revised their opinions now.

‘Put down that gun…’

Pietro glanced over his shoulder to find Spanish Phillipe behind him, slate-grey eyes flicking between the boy and Sanchez.

Decision taken. Inside Pietro’s skull dendritic nerves fired, creating a new matrix that flared and died into a new path that would make it easier to take the same decision next time. Only Pietro didn’t see it like that and wouldn’t have understood the implications even if someone had been there to explain them.

He just pulled the trigger.

Bits of Sanchez hit the white-tiled wall behind the pimp, painting it red. But most of the pimp just ignited from inside. It smelt like someone was cooking a roast.

‘Roll; said the Colt.

Pietro didn’t. Instead he stood slack-mouthed looking at what had once been Sanchez and was now a length of rapidly-burning meat. Phospex did that, instantly. Guaranteed.

‘Fucking roll’

Pietro did what the gun demanded, hitting the tiled floor of the pool and rolling between the legs of a shocked bystander.

‘In there,’ said the Colt and Pietro went scrabbling into the gap behind the bar. No tiles, just a skim of flaking polycrete that was wet with beer slops and sticky with spilt food. But what mattered was the soft armour plating that ran along the back of the counter. Alternate layers of boron-fibre and kevlar mesh, from ground zero to above waist-height on an adult. Something Pietro didn’t begin to appreciate until Spanish Phillipe’s first hollow-point slammed into the bar and flattened out into a worthless chunk of lead, velocity already spent.

‘Not bad,’ admitted the Colt. ‘Now fire the fuck back…

‘No,’ it added loudly when Pietro started to stand up. ‘Hit the fucking ceiling.’

Pietro aimed the hiPower at the roof of the bar and pulled its trigger, sending shards of concrete falling onto the shocked crowd below.

‘You want to run on manual or automatic?’ the hiPower asked him.

Pietro shrugged. He hadn’t the faintest idea what the Colt was talking about and figured it wouldn’t make any difference if he did… Sooner or later they were going to slaughter him…

‘Okay then,’ said the Colt, ‘you want automatic?’ It paused, sighed… ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ The gun bucked in Pietro’s hand and another slug exploded into the ceiling, dropping chunks of the floor above into the club below. And it kept firing until Pietro could see straight into the room overhead and then into the room above that. ‘Okay,’ said the gun. ‘Now open that door and fast…’

The boy looked around but couldn’t see a door. Behind and to both sides were white-tiled walls. In front was the counter. There was no door.

‘In the fucking floor.’

Pietro looked down and saw a square hatch set under the bar. It was edged with steel. ‘That’s not a door, it’s a hatch,’ he told the Colt.

There was a moment’s silence. And when the hiPower spoke again its voice was quiet, infinitely patient. ‘I suggest you open it. Whatever it is. Before someone else decides to kill you.’