A Motive with a Universal Adapter 02

Still on her back, Ritz fired another shot towards the door as she pushed herself towards the cover of the kitchenette counter. I hid behind the sofa. I doubt it was bullet proof, but it was the best option available.

"Y'know, you're making a lot of noise," Bob called from the bedroom. "Somebody's probably called the cops by now, and this is kinda starting to feel like a stalemate."

"What do you suggest?" Ritz called back. I could see her fumbling with the link cable she'd extracted from her gun. Her trembling hands couldn't seem to find the neural port at the base of her skull to plug the jack into.

"Are you two gōhō? Do you really know the owner?"

"Yeah, we're legit," I told him, then pushed myself up to my feet and sprinted the eight steps to the kitchenette. Each step seemed like a short eternity, and with every one I expected shots to ring out from the bedroom and cut me down. But if Bob saw me dash to Ritz's aid, he played it cool.

"Let me do that," I whispered to Ritz, crouching behind her. My heart was racing, but my hands were steady enough to plug in her smart gun link.

"That was dumb, but thanks," she answered in the same hushed tone.

"So let me walk," Bob called from the bedroom. "You two stay and tell the cops you ran off a burglar. I'll leave empty handed. There's nothing here that's worth anything to me anyway."

"What if we say no?" Ritz called back.

"Then when the badges show up, I point to my paperwork and tell them you tried to rob me. Cops love documentation. By the time they figure out it's fake, it'll be too late to matter."

"We'll just tell 'em about the master key," I replied.

"I'll tell 'em the owner changed the lock illegally and I had to pick it... Wish I'd thought of that a few minutes sooner."

"What do you say, Rhoades?" Ritz asked as she pushed herself up to prop her back against the counter.

I mentally flipped on the radio receiver in my aural implant and scanned through the police bands. Sure enough, there was a dispatcher sending a squad car to investigate a report of gunshots at Whitehaven Mansions.

"Tick-tock ladies," Bob prompted.

I nodded to Ritz.

"Alright, fine! Get the hell out of here," she called. Then to me she said "Go open the front door and lock it behind him."

"I'm coming out," Bob called. I couldn't see him from the foyer where I stood by the open door.

A moment later he stepped into view. Both of his hands were raised, a small tool bag in one and his gun in the other. The barrel of the weapon was pointed at the ceiling and his eyes were pointed at Ritz where she still sat on the kitchenette floor, knees up and back against the cabinets.

In my ear, a beat cop was telling the dispatcher he was en route to the call.

Bob glanced into the narrow foyer and our eyes met. A look of confusion on his face turned instantly to comprehension when he realized where I was. Then the comprehension turned to chagrin, like he knew his plan wasn't going to work, but he had to go through with it anyway.

I knew instinctively what was about to happen.

Bob turned back towards Ritz, dropped his weight, lowered his gun, and opened fire.

"NO!" I screamed over the muted pop-pop-pop.

I stepped forward to grab Bob from behind, but before I could, the thunder clap of a shotgun blast rang out.

Bob staggered backwards, arms reeling, and I only just managed to dodge to the right before he stumbled into me. Luckily, I had enough presence of mind to grab at the gun in his hand.

The front of Bob's shirt was torn open from the shot, the skin of his chest a chewed and bloody mess. But beneath the flesh and gore I could plainly see the hexagonal pattern of metallicized ceramic plates. Subdermal armor implants.

Bob got his feet back underneath him. I didn't know what kind of shape Ritz was in, and I couldn't stop to find out. With his gun clenched in my hands, I pulled the weapon to my chest and dropped all of my weight to the floor. There was another gunshot from behind me—it had to be Ritz—and Bob's grip on the submachine gun slipped free.

I looked up in time to see him scrambling out the door into the hallway. Managing to throw my shoulder against the door, I slammed it shut, then threw the heavy slide-bolt to keep it that way.

Looking back, I saw Ritz grasping for the top of the counter to pull herself up. A trio of bullet holes perforated her jacket and her top but none of them seemed to be bleeding. The knee of her pants leg was blown out where the hidden shotgun in her thigh had taken Bob by surprise.

"I swear, I ruin more pants that way," she quipped as she struggled to her feet.

"Yeah, maybe consider a skirt from now on," I suggested, as I reached down to help pull her up.

"I'll think about it," she agreed. "But right now, let's get out of here."

"No, the police are still three minutes out." I handed Ritz the submachine gun. "Let's see why he was so anxious to keep us out of the bedroom first."

The sheets had been stripped from the mattress, and the bed frame disassembled. The empty closet and bathroom doors stood open. Any knick-knacks on the bureau had been removed. A thick charcoal-grey rug with a very masculine geometric pattern was laid out on the floor, and I was almost certain I had seen Bob rolling it up when we came in.

I grimaced as I got down on my rug-burned knees and rolled the carpet away. There was a floor safe underneath. Jackpot.

"Did you know this was here?" I asked Ritz. She was leaning in the frame of the bedroom door next to a cluster of bullet holes.

"No." She shook her head.

"Then we're gonna need that hydraulic thing in your leg to open it," I urged her. "C'mon, quick. We only have a couple of minutes."

She kicked off her shoe, and the servos in the cybet-leg pulled her whole foot up and out of the way leaving a thin steel wedge where her heel had been. The safe had been designed to thwart exactly that kind of break-in attempt though. The lid closed onto the sides so that the jamb was beneath the level of the floorboards.

We needed speed more than secrecy. A controlled burst of fire from Bob's submachine gun chewed up enough of the bamboo flooring to expose a seam in the safe. Ritz sat her butt on the floor and I maneuvered her heel into the tight crevice under the safe's door while a cop's voice in my ear reported that he was entering the lobby.

The first time Ritz tried to pop the safe, the spreader wedge slipped out as soon as she turned it on. The second time she managed to warp the heavy steel enough to create a deeper gap in the seam. That let us jam the wedge in far enough that on the third try, with a pronounced metallic groan, the door to the safe burst open.

"What's in there?" Ritz asked, as we both leaned forward to peer inside.

A cheap nylon duffel bag.

"No time! The cops are in the elevator." I snatched the bag and it's contents by the straps. "We have to get out of here!"

Ritz struggled to her feet. "There's a stairwell at the end of the hall," she suggested, checking something on the side of the submachine gun. "Turn left out the door. Don't wait for me. Go!"

I don't know what she had in mind, but I suspected the phrase "blaze of glory" was involved.

"Fuck that!" I grabbed her arm and slung it over my shoulder. "We're getting out of here together. C'mon!"

As we stepped out the door, I realized just how screwed we were. The hallway was at least a hundred meters to the end. As quick as the building's elevators were, we'd never stagger that distance before the cops got to this floor and caught us red-handed.

Ritz knew it too. "We're not gonna make it," she grumbled. Her pistol, resting in its holster, was still jacked into her skull. She clumsily pulled it out of her jacket, preparing for a shootout with a gun in each hand.

I scanned the corridor, desperate for a hiding place or a distraction. All the doors were closed and probably locked. I tried each one we passed anyway. The fake plants tucked into shallow niches every ten meters were a laughable option. Then my eye fell on a bright red fire alarm pull.

In my mind, I saw dozens of people pouring into the hallway from behind the locked doors. I saw Ritz and I swallowed in the flood of residents sweeping us towards the fire exit. I saw befuddled cops trying to make sense of the chaos.

So I yanked down the lever as we stumbled past.

The hall lights flashed, a siren blared, and every door on the hall remained resolutely closed. Probably because no one was home in the middle of the day. Also because, as I well knew, in a high-rise fire, you shelter in place until the fire fighters come and evacuate you floor by floor.

Ritz and I were still alone in the empty corridor, the first and only people the cops would see the moment they stepped off the elevator. My dumb idea for a distraction had failed.

"What did you do that for?" Ritz yelled in my ear over the screaming siren.

"Seemed like a good idea at the time."

But then there was another voice in my ear. The cops in the elevator were calling down to the cops in the lobby to release the lifts. The building's fire control system had locked out the elevators and sent them all down to the lobby for the fire fighters.

"Ha-HA! Ritz, I did it!" I squealed with joy. "I shut down the elevators! C'mon, we still have a chance."

We picked up our pace as much as we could. Towards the end of the hall, a door finally opened long enough for a man to stick his head out, look around with a frown, and then retreat back into his condo.

"Key locks and stairs? This building is adorable," I gasped as we pushed the stairwell door closed behind us. Hauling her to the fire exit had taken more effort than I expected and we were both winded. "Up or down?"

"Down," she gestured with her pistol, panting. The ear-splitting fire alarm echoed in the concrete stairwell and made it difficult to hear. "There's a skywalk over to Dubenich Arcade on forty."

"That's handy."

"Yeah, Joe and I used to walk over for brunch sometimes, after... y'know." Her expression sank into the memory for a moment but she quickly recovered. "Let's see what's in that bag."

"We don't have time. The cops have the elevators running again and it won't take them long to check the stairs."

"If there's Lucidrine in there, this will be a lot easier for both of us. We'll be a lot less conspicuous."

"If there's not, we'll waste a lot of time."

"If there's not, it won't matter anyway."

"Well, I can't argue with that."

Ritz used the stair rail to lower herself awkwardly down to sit on the top step, while I unzipped Joe's duffel and emptied the contents onto the concrete landing. There were bundles of dollars, euro, and yen; a half-dozen passports with fake IDs and deb-chips clipped to them; a pair of disposable polymer one-shot pistols; a sealed Manila envelope with the words "Setec Astronomy" scribbled on the front.

And underneath it all was a translucent plastic box like a cigarette case with three ampules of pale yellow liquid and a data-chip inside. "Is that it?" I asked, afraid that Ritz would say 'no'. "Is that Lucidrine?"

"It sure looks like it," she replied and I exhaled without realizing I had been holding my breath. "Only one way to be sure though. Do you still have that air-hypo from last night?"

I dug the injector out of my bag, loaded it with one of the ampules, and handed it to Ritz. "We should probably clean any residual jezi out of it first, but I guess there's not really time."

"I'll risk it." She took the hypo from me and with a trembling hand, pressed it to the inside of her elbow and mashed the trigger.

"How long does it take to kick in?" I asked, but the look of relaxed bliss that came over her face gave me my answer. Her shoulders slouched and the trembling stopped and she very slowly collapsed back onto the stairwell floor.

"Oh, yeah," she sighed, her gentle expression at odds with the blaring siren. "That's the stuff... I just need a minute." She wiggled her fingers and flexed her living foot to hasten the effects to her extremities.

I gathered up the contents of Joe's safe into the duffel bag again, but just before I tucked in that envelope, curiosity got the better of me. I made a spur of the moment decision to check its contents. Ritz frowned at me when I tore the top open, but she didn't object.

"These are vid-chips," I told her. "Like, dozens of them. Any idea what's on them?"

"None." She shook her head.

"Let's get them back to my place and find out." I folded over the open end of the envelope and tucked it into my purse.

The arcade in the Dubenich Building connects to four other high-rises via skyway. Crossing over to Sterling Center, taking another skyway to Latimer Tower, and then going down and through the lobby would put us on street level less than a block down from the Peach Tree. We'd hardly have to be out in the rain at all.

Ritz folded Bob's submachine gun in half and tucked it into her jacket as she whisked down the stairs ahead of me. She unplugged her pistol and retracted the cable, then adjusted her jacket to hide the bullet holes in her blouse, all before we reached the landing on the fortieth floor. It was startling to behold the difference in her grace and balance with Lucidrine in her system.

There were people milling about the skyway entrance on the fortieth floor. Some were trying to decide if they'd rather wait out the fire alarm in the Arcade. Some had come back from the Arcade and discovered the active alarm. A pair of badges were watching the skyway, but they weren't stopping people from coming or going, so Ritz and I strolled past like we belonged.

The rain patter on the roof eventually drowned out the fading siren behind us. Forty floors below, the street seemed to flow like a river of umbrella canopies beneath us. AVs emerged from the shroud of rain, zipped past, and then faded away again.

"Shit," Ritz muttered as we left the skyway and stepped out onto the Arcade rotunda. The spiraling thoroughfare wound four times around the inside of the building. On the outside were all manner of shops and eateries, on the inside, a grand view across the open plaza below.

"What is it?" I asked as she took my elbow and steered me up around the spiral towards the Sterling Skyway.

"Bob. He was watching the skyway exit from across the plaza."

"Shit." I hadn't noticed him, and when I looked back I couldn't see him, but I was pretty certain Ritz had teleoptics and other image enhancement tech built into her Optishield. "Did he see us?"

"Yep. I'm pretty sure that's why he was there... I'm starting to think he was looking for something specific."

"And I bet he thinks we have it," I agreed. "Did Joe have any enemies? Andybody he owed?"

"I'm sure there were some. I mean Militech, obviously," Ritz speculated, steering us to the outside of a knot of pedestrians, putting them between us and Bob.

"Robertson might send someone to clean out Joe's place," I agreed, "but at least they don't know that we--" Before I could finish the sentence, a foggy recollection bubbled up out of last night's drug fugue—something Ritz had said on TV.

"Fu-uck! You talked about Joe in the interview last night!" I moaned, a little louder than I meant to.

"Yeah, I did," Ritz retorted in a brusque tone. "I had to, because you didn't mention him at all. You made the whole story about Hoshi."

"I did that on purpose so Militech wouldn't connect us to him!" I snapped back.

"Smart move," she snarked. "Wish you'd told me sooner."

"I meant to, but I had to get you to do the interview first! Then after we shot up the jezi... I guess I forgot."

"It's alright," she assured me, "I wasn't at the top of my game last night either. Use that radio link in your ear. See if he's telling anyone else about us."

With a thought, I turned on my scanner as Ritz herded me up the spiral walkway. I listened to two second fragments of every public channel in use—janitors, taxis, delivery dispatchers—and a few channels that I shouldn't have access to. The blackmarket upgrade had cost me a month's rent, but it got me emergency responder channels and that's where the real stories are.

On one channel I heard a short burst of noise; not static, but not not-static either.

"There's an encrypted signal on a public channel," I told her.

"That'll be him. It's not safe to go back to your place."

"No, we have to," I objected with a little more panic in my voice than I wanted. "My camera's there."

"Buy a new one."

"All the raw footage we shot—Okami, the shootout in Chatsubo, the cell phone. We need it."

"It's not worth risking your life for," she countered quietly, quickening our step to catch a gang of drunken chromers loudly belting out the latest Johnny Silverhand hit. "These are professional killers. Bob's gun fires a subsonic seven millimeter round and has a built-in suppressor. It's lightweight, quiet, and concealable—designed by Arasaka for black-ops ninja work."

"Ritz, we need that footage to tell the story. And if Militech gets it, they can use it against us."

Her pace slowed as she did the math in her head, trying to refute my argument. At least that's what I thought she was doing, until at the very last second she yanked hard on my shoulder and pulled me into a store front just as a delivery man with a cart piled high with boxes passed us going downhill the other way.

"Alright, fine," she grumbled, pushing a finger in my face. "But we do it my way. You move when I say 'move', you stop when I say 'stop', and under no circumstances do you ever waste time asking me 'why'. We crystal?"

Unable to come up with a clever response I just nodded.

"Watch for Bob," she ordered. "He was about twenty-five meters ahead of us the last time I had eyes on him. He may try to come find us or he may wait for us to come to him. If you see him let me know. And give me some cash, I need to do some shopping."

That's when I noticed we had taken cover in the entrance of a Personal Defense eXpress Mart. I dug the stack of Euros out of the duffel bag and handed it to her and she made a beeline for the PDX ammo counter.

She said Bob was twenty-five meters ahead of us. That put him between us and the skyway to Sterling Center. Would he try to ambush us there? Would he follow us? Did he have other people we wouldn't recognize waiting to do it instead? Were they already in my apartment?

I was starting to think maybe Ritz was right, and going home was just too risky. I tucked one of Savage Joe's hold-out pistols into my pocket, just in case.

"Gimme your key card," Ritz ordered and I literally jumped with a shriek because I had been so focused on looking out for Bob that I hadn't heard her come up behind me.

"Jesus! Don't do that," I panted, digging the card out of my bag.

"Sorry. Here, put this on." She handed me a gaudy denim and nylon jacket with zip-off sleeves and 'Gibson' printed across the back in such big letters that it had to be a fake.

"Oh, no. Ritz, this is hideous," I complained.

"Yeah, and it'll stop an eleven millimeter slug. Put it on and keep your umbrella in your hand," she instructed, ignoring my anxiety. "We might not have time to dig it out. We're going to move fast so that anyone following us will stand out if they try to keep up. Ready?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I think so."

Ritz took my wrist and pulled me into the thoroughfare. There was no sign of Bob as far as I could tell.

We crossed the skyway to Sterling Center Galleria with Ritz dragging me forward through the flow of foot traffic on the moving walkway. She kept glancing back over my head.

In the Galleria, an escalator and then another took us down to the Latimer Tower skyway. In Lattimer Tower we had to wait for a crowded elevator from the metro-deck down to the expansive lobby that filled half a city block. Through it all, Ritz unapologetically shoved and elbowed us forward, outpacing the pedestrian currents.