The American Zone

  “Just talented.” I shrugged. “And it’s the second drive-by. The first one was nine years ago.”

  He went on. “The gorilla and the chimpanzee have criminal records that go back almost to the Gallatin Administration, and Forsythe’s Security says they’ve had their eye on the other two since they came through the broach a month or two ago.”

  The CLA woman told me, “I guess the only thing you have to do now, Lieutenant Bear, is to accept these.” In ten thousand other cultures, she would have added, “and sign for them.” Or never made the offer at all, of course. In one hand she held out a black mesh bag full of weapons. Pretty good muscles for a girl. I was impressed.

  Counting extra magazines for the ordinary powder-burners, and spare power cells for the laser, the damned thing probably weighed thirty pounds. Whenever you win a duel in the North American Confederacy—and I guess they were saying that this qualified—you’re expected to take the other guy’s toys. It’s the custom. Matter of fact, that’s how I’d wound up carrying that federal agent’s Browning High Power and keeping Tricky Dick Milhouse’s Rezin in a showcase at home.

  “Remember, now,” she said, giving me a big smile, “you’re supposed to share with your little friends.” The tradition was that anyone who’d participated in a gunfight—on what was later declared to be the goodguy side—was supposed to receive some token of the victory of niceness over nastiness. Or a cut of the booty, if you want to look at it that way.

  In her other hand she held out a stack of small plastic zipper bags, that innovation in evidence-gathering I believe I’m responsible for. Inside each bag lay a big, thick, heavy, two-ounce platinum coin, smeared with human, chimpanze, and gorilla blood and embossed deeply with the easily recognizable likeness of H. L. Mencken, the martyred former president of the Confederacy. Old Henry had fought a duel with his own vice president and won—then been assassinated by the vice president’s mother.

  I love this place.

  “The Studebaker is yours, too, Lieutenant, if you want it,” said the CLA woman. “So are these, to be divided, like the car and weapons, five ways I believe.” With a look, she indicated the garage door—closed now, and locked, I suspected—of our most recent interviewee. I grinned, wondering how Congressbeing Paulchinsky’s discontented wife Agnes would feel about living in the Confederacy once she’d received a fifth of the value of a big, expensive, and only slightly bullet-riddled hovercar and four platinum coins worth a little less apiece than a kilobuck back home. Here, where money went a hell of a lot further, they were worth a hell of a lot more.

  I’d been through something like this once before. I knew what it was. I knew what it meant. And I didn’t like it one bit. Badguys are few and far between in the North American Confedracy, so there isn’t much of a criminal labor pool available for designer dirtywork. Nevertheless, somebody who didn’t wish to soil his very own dainty little fingers had enlisted these goons, these gross incompetents—because there simply wasn’t anybody else to hire—and paid them each the equivalent of three or four month’s salary, to kill us as dead as they could.

  “We’ll take the car,” I told her suddenly, “for about ten minutes. Then maybe the congressbeing can find a use for it. Help me look for something, will you? Hey, Will! Lucy! Let’s check out the trunk of this thing, I just had an idea.”

  “Did it hurt?” Lucy winked at me.

  It wasn’t easy getting the trunk open. From the number and variety of bullet holes in it, I began to suspect that some of those two dozen neighbors the CLA man had mentioned had done a trifle more than watch the gunfight. If you’ve ever tried to shoot a door open (admittedly not too common an experience), then you know that more often than not, what you actually accomplish is to shoot it closed—and locked. Captain Ramius of the Red October said it to Jack Ryan: bullets are hard on machinery. In the end, we used the big White-Westinghouse laser to cut around the lock. It took all of us to force the lid upward on its damaged hinges. And I wasn’t surprised by what I saw when we finally got it open.

  “What in the abominated name of whiskey taxation is that?” Lucy exclaimed, pointing with her Gabbett-Fairfax to indicate a long green fiberglass tube with lettering stenciled on its surface in a typeface I’ve always thought of as “G. I. Joe.” At the same time, my darling Clarissa waved to me from the back of an orange ambulance that had just arrived. She was taking off with the patients she’d just helped us to create. Sometimes being a Healer in this culture could be a lot like having one of those Roosevelt New Deal government jobs where you dig holes and then immediately fill them in again.

  I replied, trying not to sound smug, “That, my dear friends, happens to be the field case for a Stinger missile where I come from, almost certainly the Stinger that was used against us on the Greenway. I don’t know where these guys were hiding at the time, but they’re consistent: they’re terrible shots.”

  Suddenly, I heard an all-too familiar voice behind me. “Pardon me, sir!” It was the Spaceman’s Fund lady again, with her big hat and veil and her basket of change. She was certainly nothing if not persistent. I stood up suddenly and cracked my head painfully on the underside of the trunk lid, but the look on her face when she recognized me was almost worth it.

  “I believe,” I grinned at her, holding the top of my now throbbing melon, “that I gave at the office.”

  SOMETIMES THERE’S MIDNIGHT baseball in Greater LaPorte—it’s one of the most beautiful experiences you can have out of bed—but not tonight. There are heavily armed security guards at None of the Above Park all night (of course they’re heavily armed in the daytime, too, when they’re shopping with their wives and kiddies in the mall), but I was an old friend of their boss, the grim and grizzled chimpanzee who’d guarded my body when it had first arrived, full of submachine-gun perforations and leaking messily on Ed Bear’s driveway at 626 Genet Place, nine years ago. Sitting now, in a shadowed corner of the gigantic parking lot in Will’s battered old 211 Rockford, I raised Captain Forsythe on my personal’Com and gave him the Readers’ Digest version of what the fearless leader of the Greater LaPorte Militia—and little old I—were up to.

  “Please! Please don’t tell me any more, Win,” he demanded. “I don’t want to know. You two miscreants promise not to burn down the ballpark or steal all the seats?”

  I wanted to tell him I was more of a creant, than a miscreant. But the fierce old guy really meant it in his own way, although he was trying to be nice, and both of us promised solemnly. Forsythe punched up a three-way conversation and told the employee at the nearest gate—his people do wear uniforms; you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a fully grown orangutan in a military kilt—to unlock it, look the other way when we came by, and pass the word to the other guards that they couldn’t see us, either.

  “Come to think of it,” I told Will once our business with Forsythe and his Assorted Anthropoids was over, “I have no idea how High Colonic’s going to get in.” Will yawned, drew his big silver pistol, and pulled the slide back a quarter of an inch to reassure himself that the chamber was still loaded. I don’t know who the hell he thought could have sneaked into his holster and unloaded it. “Not our problem, partner. It’s 8:52—let’s go.”

  All right, so I dragged the .41 from my sling and rolled the cylinder to make sure there were six fat cartridges occupying the cylinder. So what.

  Naturally, all of the elevators and escalators had been turned off, so Will and I got to climb six flights of metal stairs in the dark to get to the beer garden where High Colonic had said he’d meet us. Will seemed okay—he is younger than I am, after all—but by the time I’d finally clawed my way to the top, I’d decided to take some of that hyperbaric oxygen therapy Clarissa had been trying to sell me on.

  I probably wouldn’t want another cigar for a month.

  I hated cloak-and-dagger stuff like this with a passion. Sneaking around and being sneaked at. Now that I was all the way up here, I’d much rather simply gaze out through the openwork o
f the most beautiful athletic arena I’d ever seen, and enjoy the multicolored lights of the most beautiful city I’d ever seen, scattered across the darkened land to an invisible horizon that—in terms of peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity, anyway—was truly limitless.

  Unless the badguys won this thing.

  I might even get to watch a real live spaceship taking off. They did that here, right from the tops of skyscrapers at the very heart of the city (wherever the hell that is), employing technology identical to that at work in the GLPM’s electrostatic aerocraft. It was quite a pretty sight, with all their running lights twinkling and an eerie glow emanating from their several thousand high-voltage electrodes. Once aloft—at around one hundred thousand feet or so—they’d fire up their main fusion-driven engines, and that was quite a pretty sight, as well.

  Even in high summer, it was more than a little frosty, six stories up, fairly late at night, in an openwork construction of steel beams, brick columns, and zero walls. That’s the High Plains for you. The air curtains weren’t running any more than the elevators were, and a Rocky Mountain chill had begun seeping into my kidneys and shoulderblades. I felt around for the control lump sewn into the seam of my cloak and turned up the temperature, hoping that whoever our unknown enemies were, they wouldn’t have had time to hire a replacement for the four stooges—like somebody who had an infrared rifle scope.

  Nine o’clock came and went.

  Ten o’clock came and went.

  By eleven o’clock, I couldn’t feel my toes anymore (note to self: buy some electric shoes), and there were no messages, on any of our communications systems, indicating what, if anything, had gone wrong. High Colonic simply hadn’t shown up and now I felt like an idiot for ever believing that he would. Fortunately, it hadn’t been some kind of deadly trap, either. Nobody had taken a shot at us or tried to push us over the railing. Call it even for the night, I guess. Go home. Visit with Clarissa. Go to bed. Usually she warmed her cold feet up on me. Tonight, she was going to get a surprise.

  Slower than we’d climbed up, Will and I climbed down the six cold flights of metal stairs. At each step my toes felt like they were going to break off, like glass, and my kneecaps were going to flip across the parking lot like Tiddlywinks. We asked the guard if he’d seen anybody (he hadn’t, and checked with his colleagues for us), told him good night, and headed for Will’s car. “Wait a minute, Will!” I hollered at him, just before he grabbed the door handle to lift it up. For a long minute he stood there with his hand outstretched, looking like a curbside jockey. “Who’s to say somebody didn’t sneak in down here while we were up there and put a bomb in your car?”

  Will got an exasperated look on his face, and said, “Win, believe me. If anybody had even breathed hard in the direction of this car, it would have set up a shrieking that would have awakened every corpse in every graveyard in this city.”

  I gave it some thought. “Unless they knew how to cheat around your security system. You could do it, couldn’t you?” When other arguments fail, try flattery.

  He bit. “There’s always that, I suppose. Say—”

  I’ve tried. There isn’t any way to accurately simulate the sound that interrupted him. In that moment something happened that I had previously thought could only happen in cartoons. An object fell out of the clear black sky. It was a car, about twice the size of Will’s old Rockford. It crashed onto the surface of the parking lot, almost exactly sixteen inches from my left big toe.

  I may never hear correctly in that ear again.

  Overhead, just visibly underlit by reflected city light, I saw the long, ghostly silver oval form of a dirigible without running lights. I drew my revolver and considered shooting at it, but any of the big 240-grain slugs that failed to stop in the airship—which is mostly empty space, wrapped in plastic and filled with helium— and came down again had to hit somewhere. At this angle, they might even hurt somebody.

  “Okay,” Will asked, once the dust had settled. The parking lot lights had come on by themselves, and there were dozens of guards from Forsythe’s rushing toward us from the stadium. “Was that a trap or only a coincidence?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, suddenly distracted by the thought of all the wondrous things that are sold in vending machines in the Confederacy. “Do you suppose they’d let me back in to change my underwear?”

  20: THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

  Ever notice that the “Golden Age” of television was when commercial sponsors had the strongest control over program content?

  —Memoirs of Lucille G. Kropotkin.

  You’d think I’d have learned by now.

  Will dropped me off at my front doorstep, still feeling like I was frozen to the bone. It was like one of those Chicago drive-bys where they roll the body out the door, onto the sidewalk, and put the pedal to the floor. I no sooner got the door down on the Rockford than he sped off, down the drive and across the street, anxious to see his brace of pregnant brides.

  I shuffled through my trouser pockets, an awkward task for a man with his arm in a sling, and turned toward the door. I could have had some kind of automated door thingummy, I suppose, that would recognize my voiceprint, or the pore pattern on the end of my schnozz, but I like real locks with real keys. For that matter, I could have simply rung the doorbell, or even called Clarissa on my pocket’Com, but the girl works hard and I didn’t want to wake her up if she was asleep.

  With my good hand busy with the key in the lock, and my attention focused on maybe waking Clarissa up after all, I didn’t see or hear my assailant until he put his hand on my shoulder. There were two of them. They’d been waiting in the bushes at the front of the house.

  The first one swung a big fist at my head. I saw the buttery glint of brass knuckles, ducked, and stepped into him, letting go of the key, getting a hand on my revolver as my elbow hit his solar plexus. He smacked the doorpost, bruising the housepaint and his knuckles, then danced up and down, cursing as the other one came at me.

  They were wearing nylon stocking masks. By now my gun was out and I drew a fast bead on the second guy’s midsection. I started pulling the trigger, but only got the hammer halfway back, when the first guy, accidentally or deliberately, crashed into me from behind. By reflex, I pulled the trigger the rest of the way through and heard an anguished bellow as I fell forward on my knees. Almost at once, somebody stepped on my gun hand, grinding down hard and crushing it painfully between pistol and pavement. I thought I felt my trigger finger break where it passed through the guard and was bent forward toward the muzzle. I couldn’t support myself with my other arm, because it was in the sling.

  Somebody else, or it could have been the same guy, kicked me as hard as he could in the ribs. He should have used the brass knuckles. I’d been kicked that way before, in a Federal Boulevard bar check that went sour back in my uniform days. It wasn’t pleasant, but I rolled with it almost gratefully, and that saved me another vicious kick, this time in the head, from the other guy, who kicked his partner in the shin, instead.

  It also let me take aim and fire from where I lay on my back—guess the finger wasn’t broken after all—hitting the first kicker in the right thigh and tearing away at least two pounds of meat. I never heard the noise or felt the recoil, but I sure as hell heard him scream, and so did a lot of other folks from Oklahoma to Montana. The second kicker tried to rush me—the rule (and most of the time it makes good sense) being, “Run from a knife, attack a gun.” I lifted the Model 58’s muzzle in his general direction and pulled the trigger. The bullet took him underneath the jaw and seemed to lift him three feet into the air. He came down right on top of me, literally dead meat.

  “Stand down, Win!” That was my brave and beautiful wife, standing on the doorstep in her pretty pink nightgown, Webley Electric in hand. The first guy I’d shot was unconscious, having leaked rather profusely on my driveway.

  “Don’t worry, honey, I won’t shoot you.” She took only a cursory glance at my attackers, threw
herself onto her knees beside me, and began taking inventory. As her fingers moved professionally over my body, I felt hot, very unprofessional tears falling on my chest, but he didn’t make a sound. I could have told her I was okay. The only damage I’d sustained were the stomped fingers and the kick to the belly that had probably saved my life. I climbed to my feet, feeling so stiff it almost brought tears to my eyes, but not wanting to show it to my child bride. “Let’s see who these clowns are.”

  One was still breathing. Clarissa produced shears from somewhere and got his pantyhose mask off. To say that we couldn’t believe who it was only understated the matter by a couple orders of magnitude.

  Getting the dead guy’s mask off—he’d taken one through the right upper arm, as well—was no joke, as accustomed as we both were—she the Healer, me the homicide dick—to that sort of thing, but the results were even more unbelievable, and horrifying. In the end, we stood together, arms around each other, staring down at two guys, one badly wounded, one very dead.

  Both of them were Bennett Williams.

  THE PRETTY LITTLE girl stood on tiptoes as the bespectacled proprietor behind the counter rang up her order.

  “Now let’s see here, Mary-Lou,” said the man with the white apron. “You’ve got the CZ-61 Skorpion submachinegun, 500 rounds of high-velocity .32 ACP hollowpoint ammunition, and—what’s this?”

  The little girl was typically American. She couldn’t have been older than eleven, maybe younger, to judge by the missing tooth in front. She wore a frilly gingham dress, white bobby socks, and saddle-shoes. Her shiny dark brown hair had been carefully braided into a pair of pigtails with ribbons in the ends that matched her dress, and she had freckles across both pink cheeks and the bridge of her upturned nose.