The Langley Case: A Nathan Roeder Mystery

Getting to Know the Girl, Another Attempt on my life

The noodle place Max took us to was the kind of place you wouldn’t want to take your mother. Unless you didn’t like her, that is. It looked the way it smelled: like a dog someone had beaten to death, then urinated on. A week and a half ago.

We walked in, and I was afraid to sit down. Too much chance of disease. I felt like I needed a shot just looking at the place.

Max sauntered to the bar and took a seat, slamming his hand down on the counter. Whether it was to get the cook’s attention or just to kill a rodent, I have no idea.

Felicia looked about as interested in that place as I did. She looked around, hoping to find a pristine booth somewhere in the corner. But it looked like the corners had been claimed as a bedroom and a bathroom for the homeless, sometimes simultaneously.

“And why are we eating here?” I asked.

“Because it’s the best noodles in the Sprawl,” Max said. “And it’s safe here.”

“That’s because no one else would come here,” Felicia said.

“Don’t let the look fool you.” Max slapped the table again. Finally, the cook turned around.

“Fuck off,” he said. “We’re closed.”

I looked around. The lights were on. There was a big neon sign in the window that flashed the word “Open” every few seconds. Next to it was a printed sign that said “We never close!”

Max hit the bar again. “Listen to me, shit heel,” he said. “We came in here for noodles, and we want our fucking noodles. So stop jerking off over there and put some god damned noodles in water.”

“No water,” the cook said. “Just piss.”

“Even better,” Max said. “It starts out warmer, ends up hot faster.”

Felicia leaned close to me, put a hand on my arm. “I don’t think I want to eat here,” she said.

I didn’t say anything; she’d already said it all for me.

The cook smiled. “Okay, fatty,” he said. “You can eat. But the fag and the whore have to go fuck themselves.”

I was getting tired, ready to reach for my gun.

That was when I learned how much smarter Felicia was than she looked. “Good,” she said. “I wouldn’t wish the shit you cook on my own mother. Maybe on yours though, you fat oafish creep.”

The chef smiled again. “Okay, whore,” he said. “You sit down too.”

She moved to the bar. I still had my hand in my pocket. On my gun. “How about it, fag?” He asked.

“You’re lucky I don’t shoot you,” I said.

“You couldn’t if you wanted to, shit for breath.”

“You’re one to talk,” I said. “I could smell you when I was a child. I always thought I was just smelling death.”

“You were, fag.”

“It was pretty fragrant in comparison.”

He smiled. “Okay, faggot. You can eat.”

I shook my head and walked over to the bar. As I did, I passed through some kind of field. The ugly cook lost the warts and dripping saliva, and his stained t-shirt became a white jacket. The cockroaches disappeared, and even the smell of rotting feces disappeared. It was like I was somewhere else.

The cook winked at me. “What’ll you have?” He asked.

I didn’t know what to say, so I just said the same thing the others had said. “Noodles.”

“You want some kind of flavor to that, faggot?”

“What are my options?”

“Chicken, beef, pork, teriyaki, sushi, lemon—”

“Teriyaki.”

He nodded and smiled, whipping a bottle up behind his back and catching it, pouring it down into one of the bowls of hot water. He started whistling some old tune I couldn’t catch, almost as a signal that we could talk without worrying about him listening.

“So where are we going?” Felicia asked.

“To Enticement,” Max said. “We’re supposed to drop you off.”

She stood up and moved towards the door. “What?” She asked. “You think you’re sending me back there?”

“Sit down, sister,” I said, pointing to her chair. “Why don’t you let your mouth do the talking?”

She looked past me, at Max. “What does that even mean?”

Max shrugged.

I filled in. “It means sit down, tell me why I shouldn’t do what I said I would do, why I should do something that’ll get me killed, for a girl I just met.”

“I thought you were taking me to Town.” She crossed her arms over her ample chest and pouted, just a little.

It was cute. I wasn’t in the mood for cute anymore. I pulled out a cigarette. “Mind if I smoke, fatty?”

“Go for it, fag.”

I lit up. “You thought I was taking you to Town? Why would I do that?”

She shrugged. “I just—I don’t know. I was hoping that for once, things would go my way.”

I laughed. “How have things not gone your way? Ever?”

She glared hard at me. “Listen to me, Nathan Roeder. You have no idea what my life has been like.”

I blew a gust of smoke into her face. She didn’t cough. I was impressed. “Enlighten me,” I said.

“I was born to be a hooker,” she said. “I was designed to be gorgeous, to have a high libido, and to love sex. But they didn’t design me to be smart enough to realize that I didn’t choose this life. I just got lucky. Lucky enough to realize that I was a slave, a whore without any chance of being anything else. I’ve been trying to get out, to get to Town, to go somewhere that would let me be more than just a dancer or a whore. So fuck you if you think my life is perfect. You try being born only able to do something degrading and dehumanizing, and see if you want something to go differently!”

There were tears in her eyes. At least, I thought there were. I never wanted to kiss a girl as much as I wanted to kiss her, right then.

“What a load of crap,” Max said.

She slapped him faster than I’d ever seen anyone move. “Nice reflexes,” I said.

She sniffled and wiped a hand across her face while Max was rubbing his. I felt left out, so I took another drag on my smoke.

“You don’t want to go back,” I said. “I get that. But it doesn’t solve my issue.”

“What’s your issue?”

“Two things. First, if I don’t bring you back, The Albino will have me killed. That’ll be three out of three I can’t go near.”

“So? You’ve gotten by this long.”

“Yeah, and it gets harder and harder to make ends meet when I’m a detective who can’t work out in the Sprawl.”

“I could help you out,” she said. “I could get a job, and live with you, and—”

I held up a hand. “Whoah there, sister. Let’s not start picking out curtains and china patterns just yet. Even if you did that, it wouldn’t solve my other problem.”

“What’s that?”

“The Albino has something of mine. Something that doesn’t belong to me. If I don’t get it back, then I can promise that someone in the Tiers is going to have me killed.”

I hadn’t mentioned yet that there was already someone in the Tiers who wanted me dead. Until I was sure it wasn’t Theresa, there was no need to share that particular bit of information.

“And you can’t get it back without bringing me in?”

“On the nose in one.”

She scratched her chin. I couldn’t help but look at the line of her jaw. “Once you’ve done that, though, all bets are off, right? You don’t need to keep me there, do you?”

“No,” I said. “Once I get what I want from The Albino, I could care less about what happens to you.” That wasn’t what I meant. At least, it wasn’t true. But I didn’t want to say that, not in front of Max and the fat cook.

The cook put our bowls in front of us. “You eat with chopsticks,” he said. “Otherwise you pathetic wastes of sperm.” He held up a salt shaker to emphasize. “Good only for seasoning.”

I had no problem with chopsticks, and I didn’t want salt. At least, not anymore. Love your seasonings, don’t love in your seasonings. Max had no trouble either, but Felicia seemed to have trouble.

“What’s wrong?” The cook asked, “Monkey too stupid to use sticks?”

She shifted in her seat. “I’m having difficulty concentrating,” she said.

“You need to clear your mind, Monkey.” The cook smiled at her, and I saw that his missing teeth had not been an illusion.

Felicia blushed at the suggestion. I looked hard at her, the way only people like me really can. Her breathing had changed, and there was more blood flow. Her pupils were a little enlarged, her eyes a bit glazed over, and the muscles in her lower back were a bit tightened, affecting her whole posture.

She was horny.

“I can’t,” she said. “Not here.”

“You need quiet, peaceful spot?”

She laughed. “Something like that.”

She must have noticed how wide my eyes were. She started blushing more. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You weren’t kidding, were you?” I asked. “You really were bred for—”

“Yes, I was.” She withdrew a little, temporarily distracted. Her whole posture changed. She was more defensive, hands in her lap between us, protecting herself from me. “Why is that so hard to believe? There are Greens, there are people who can live underwater. Why not people like me? Wouldn’t that be the perfect feature to design us with?”

“It’s not like the Greens,” I said. “Greens are designed not to hunger as much.”

“And I was designed to hunger more.”

“Photosynthesis is not the same as nymphomania!”

Max’s ears perked up. He hadn’t been following the conversation to that point. “Are you saying she’s horny?”

He almost started taking off his pants, ready to offer his ‘assistance’. That’s just the kind of man Max is. A slimy, perverted one who will never get laid often enough for him to be satisfied.

Tears welled up behind her eyes. “Yes, that’s what he’s saying. He doesn’t believe that I can’t help it, and he thinks I just enjoy being a whore.”

“You’re a whore?” The cook says. “I’m sorry. I thought I was insulting you, not identifying your profession.” He lowered his voice a little and pointed to me. “He’s not really a faggot, is he?”

She turned her sparkling purple eyes to me. “I don’t know,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear, even if others had been in the restaurant. “Are you a fag, Nathan Roeder? Are you interested at all in what you see?”

I looked her up and down, trying to think of a way I could deny that I was interested. The way her breasts heaved, the way her figure curved, and the bits of skin visible at just the right places in all the right amounts took the decision out of my hand. I could have said I wasn’t interested, but one look at me would prove I was lying. She didn’t even have to be a Reader to figure that out.

She laughed a little. It didn’t feel like it was at me. The cook smiled, satisfied. “Good to hear, faggot,” he said. “I’d hate to have to come up with something new.” He pointed down at the bowls. “Eat now, before it gets cold, and I have to pee in it to make it warm again.”

“My favorite thing about this place is the service,” Max said.

“Go fuck your mother,” the cook responded.

The noodles were good. I understood what Max meant about them being the best in the Sprawl. They were about as good as I’d ever had. Solid flavor that just lingered all through you. But something told me the cuisine was not why we were really here.

Felicia had fought for control of herself, and it looked like she was winning. “I can’t help my genetics any more than you can, Nathan. It was all done to us both before we were even born.”

That much was true. “Fair enough,” I said. “But if you were genetically designed for this, and you get this distracted when you don’t have sex, what’s the problem?”

“Have you ever actually talked to a hooker?” She asked.

I shrugged. “Not usually.” I scooped more noodles into my mouth and thought for a second. I realized that the statement I made suggested that I often spent time with hookers, just never really talked to them. That wasn’t even a half truth. “I don’t usually have to, in my line of work.”

“Why not?”

“Because they don’t know anything.”

She looked at me like she’d just scored a major victory. I didn’t see what she was talking about. “Why don’t they know anything?” She asked, once she saw I wasn’t getting it. “They’re always there, they always see things. They’re constantly around the kind of people you need to talk to. So why?”

I shrugged again. “Because no one talks to them.”

“Why not?”

I thought about the few hookers I had talked to. I never thought it was a trend. But still, “in my experience, because they’re stupid.”

She leaned back, in triumph. “Damned right,” she said. “Most whores are stupid.”

“Hence the nickname,” the cook said.

“It’s not an accident.” Felicia gulped down a chunk of noodles. “We’re usually designed that way. If the parents have any brains between them, they get weeded out of the baby when they do all the other alterations.”

“So how did you get to be such a super smart whore?” Max was apparently feeling left out.

“My parents were both stupid.”

“So?”

“So they figured there weren’t any genes for intelligence coming into play.”

I nodded my head, finally understanding. “So you won the lottery.”

She shook her head. “Yeah,” she said. “I feel like such a winner.” Her sarcasm dripped into the noodles.

We probably would have talked more. There might even have been a breakthrough. Some crying, maybe a hug. I might have gotten more in touch with my feeling. But there just wasn’t time.

I didn’t even get to finish my noodles.

The door crashed open, and there he was. Brett. Bandaged nose, walking all kinds of stiff, along with three other guys. “What a dump,” he said.

“That’s because your mother’s the cleaning lady,” the cook said. He crossed his hands over his chest and looked down under the bar. I leaned forward a little bit and saw the kind of firepower he had at his disposal. No wonder he was such a dick.

Brett pointed a finger at the cook. “You shut up, maybe you’ll live to sell your shitty food another day.”

I didn’t turn around. “I thought we’d settled things for a while,” I said, scooping more noodles into my mouth.

“The hell we have, Nathan. The Man wants to see you.”

“Can I finish my noodles?”

He took a few steps in. I heard the door close behind him. So it was just him and the other three. With the cooks guns, that was possible.

“No, you can’t finish your noodles. Get up, Nathan.”

I stood up, chopsticks still in hand. “We’re outside of The Man’s territory,” I said. “What makes you think I’m going to come quietly?”

Brett looked to his three friends. “Oh, Nathan,” he said, “I was hoping you wouldn’t come quietly. We have unfinished business.”

I looked the other three up and down, real hard. The first moved like he had some actual training. That made him dangerous. Thug number two got away with just being big and strong. And thug number three looked like he had never been trained, but from the shape of his nose and the little scars on his face and knuckles, I saw that he had at least been trained by experience. That made him the most dangerous of the three.

“I don’t see how,” I said. “I think things finished real easy.”

The first thug came towards me then, without preamble. He moved like he knew what he was doing, putting his hands up and turning his body sideways, to present less of a target. I wondered if he’d ever really been hit before, in a real fight. “It’s a different world, son,” I said.

He looked a little confused, and I used that confusion to stab one of my cheap plastic chopsticks into the space between his knuckles. He yelped in pain, and I slammed the heel of my palm into his throat. My other hand came over top as he dropped, pounding his head down a little bit faster. He hit the floor and stayed there.

“We don’t have to do this, Brett,” I said. “But if we do, the numbers are even now.”

“Fuck you Nathan.” He pulled a gun out from a shoulder holster. Why hadn’t I noticed that earlier? “You come with me, right now, or I’ll shoot your little friend.”

I checked where he was aiming. Max, not Felicia. I shrugged. “Shoot him,” I said. “I owe him money.”

Max yelled a protest, and Brett changed where he was aiming, pointing the gun at the cook instead. That told me three important things. First, he had to bring me in alive, so he couldn’t shoot me. Two, he didn’t really want to shoot anyone. And three, he wasn’t supposed to hurt Felicia. She was more important than she realized.

The cook pulled out the biggest gun I had ever seen in real life. It was so big it seemed ready to hum a tune on its own. “Windows are cheap,” the cook said. “Blood comes off linoleum real easy. You feel valuable?”

Brett’s face went pale. Max laughed. The big thug stepped forward. He was between the two men with guns. Right in the line of fire. Not smart. Meaning he definitely got by on his brute assets. That was a problem. For me.

I put my hands in my pockets, hoping the charged knuckles would be good for another hit. If I could take one of the two remaining guys out that fast, the third one wouldn’t be that much trouble. It was nice the way they came on one at a time.

He stepped forward. I stepped closer. He pulled back his fist. I slammed my forehead into his nose, just like I’d done to Brett. He leaned back, deflecting most of the hit. His eyes still watered, and that was enough. I pulled my hand out of my pocket and swung for the fences, at a low, hard pitch. The electricity going through his body, starting at the groin, should have just knocked him down. It should not have pissed him off.

But it did.

He slammed a fist into my face that felt like a wrecking ball. As I staggered back, I wondered if I’d ever be pretty again. If he’d pressed the attack, probably not. But he had already fallen to his knees, clutching himself in pain. The strike had just been to get me away.

I moved towards him and spun on my heel, jutting out my hip and using all the momentum to slam the heel of my shoe into his temple.

He didn’t get up after that.

But I got knocked down as door number three opened up on me. He tackled me while I was still spinning. I didn’t even have my feet under me just yet. On the way down, he hit me at least twice in the kidneys. I wondered how long it would be before I pissed clear again. My head impacted off the floor, and suddenly, it was a wrestling match. He had his legs wrapped around mine, and was trying to get a hold on my arms, all the while digging his chin into the back of my shoulder.

I was stronger than he was. I could feel that. But he had all the leverage in the world. It wasn’t long before I couldn’t really move.

I felt Brett’s foot kicking into my gut. He missed the rib. Silver lining. “You ready to go, Nathan?” He asked. “Or should I keep kicking?”

I spit a bit of blood on the floor. “Keep kicking,” I said.

I heard an impact, and the sound of breaking bones. I wondered if I was in shock. Then I saw Brett collapse to the floor, and saw the barrel of a gun out the corner of my eye.

“Buy noodles or get out,” the cook said, holding a shotgun just past my shoulder, at that pain that was holding onto me.

As soon as the guy’s grip on me loosened, and I could turn a little bit, I slammed an elbow into his face. He wasn’t expecting it, but recovered quickly. I put my forearm on his throat. He punched my in the crotch. I punched him in the nose. He kicked at my shin. I jumped up and slammed my knee into his chest, knocking the wind, and probably a few years of schooling, out of him. He tried to bite my arm. I increased the pressure on his throat and tried to punch his kidneys through his stomach.

We wriggled for a little bit longer. He didn’t get in any more good shots, but when it was over, I felt like curling up in a ball. I rolled off him, after I was sure he was out. I thought about breaking his neck, just to be sure. But I didn’t really have the energy.

Lying on my back, hurting in a dozen places, I looked up at the cook. “Thanks,” I said.

“You’re a pussy,” he told me. “You looked like you needed my help. Faggot.”

I smiled. He laughed.

Felicia came over and bent down. “That was hot,” she said.

I laughed. “Not from this end,” I said.