The Langley Case: A Nathan Roeder Mystery

Trying to put things together, Another gun pointed at me

I checked with Johnny to see how things were going with him. He was ready to meet up at any time, just needed to know where and when. After a second of thought, I realized that I needed to get back to him. I couldn’t just call up Felicia. She had no PDA, no way of getting connected to the world at large. I had no way to find her except to go back to the hotel and hope she was there, or that she would at least get in touch soon.

I made up a flimsy excuse about wanting to make sure no one followed any of us and told Johnny Staples to keep moving, that I would contact him when I thought things were safe. Then I headed back to the hotel, by way of an electronics store.

Electronics stores in Town are not like electronics stores in the Sprawl. Down there, only so much is available. You can get a PDA, but it doesn’t do as much as the cheapest models in Town will do. You can get a privacy screen, like the one The Albino has, but you won’t find the good ones, like the one Theresa used, down in the Sprawl.

As soon as I walked in, three salesman rushed at me. They wanted to show me all the latest toys and gadgets, whatever my shopping needs happened to be.

“I’m just looking for a PDA for my girlfriend,” I said. The lie came really easily. “The one she has is crap, and I need to get her a better one, a new one.”

“Do you have the old one with you?” One of the salesmen said. “If you do, we can transfer her contact information and all the files on her old system to the new one.”

That would be an issue. “No,” I said. “I don’t have it. This is a gift, and it’s supposed to be a surprise.”

The second salesman nodded with sympathetic understanding. “Flowers just not doing it anymore?”

It took me a second to figure out what she meant. I saw no reason not to go with it. “What do you have that’s available right now?” I asked.

Have you considered holographic flowers?” This was salesman number three, the type who tries to get you to buy things you didn’t want and you don’t need. “We have several bouquets, each with different scents available for upgrading. She can set them up anywhere, and you can deliver new flowers to her via the Net. No more dead flowers, no more rushing out to the store.”

It sounded too good to be a load of crap and something I didn’t want. “Just the PDAs, thanks.”

I knew that the first thing I’d be shown would be a piece of junk, the price inflated to biblical proportions. And it was. The model they showed me first had all the basics: telephone, date book, notepad. But it was the same kind of thing you could get in the Sprawl. I know, I’ve seen it out there. And the price was worse in the store than it was out there.

I stopped smiling and stared at the first salesman, not at the item he was holding. I didn’t say anything for three breaths, just stared at him until I imagined my eyes burning a hole in his very soul.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

He played innocent. “What?”

I turned my attention away from him and towards suitor number two, the woman. I watched her calculate commission as I did it. “I’m looking for a PDA,” I said. “For my girlfriend. A good, functional model, with all the amenities.”

The price in her eyes went up and up as I talked. She smiled and took my arm. “Let me show you what we have in stock,” she said.

The other two, dejected and maybe a little bitter, walked away. They only pouted for a second though. Someone else walked into the store for them to pounce on.

“This is our top of the line,” she said, handing me a little thing that was smaller than the PDA I had. “It’s sleek, miniaturized for her convenience. It can conference call, connect to the Net, handle finances, plan schedules, and even,” she leaned in close, like it was some kind of secret, “provide directions throughout Town.”

That was it; the clincher. “Just in Town?”

“There are upgrades for the Tiers and the Sprawl,” she said. “But we’re only authorized to sell the one for the Sprawl. I imagine you won’t want that.”

I had to keep low. “No,” I said. “I don’t think there’ll be a need for that.”

“Okay then,” she said. “Are there any optional features you’d like to purchase?”

If it’s not in the original package, it’s useless. “No thanks,” I said.

“Well, then, is there anything else I could show you then?”

There were other things I wanted. But this wasn’t the kind of store that would sell them. Here they sold things useful to normal people. There wouldn’t be any kind of bullet proof anything here, nor would there be any weapons that might help me get an edge somewhere along the line. “No, that’ll be it,” I said.

She smiled. Low pressure. Soft-sell. Not a bad way to be.

“The number with the new PDA is a temporary one,” she said as she packed it up for me. “It’ll only last for a week, so make sure at some point your girlfriend brings it in to get her number assigned to it, okay?”

One week to get Felicia a Townie identity. That wouldn’t be easy, but it was doable. “Okay,” I said.

I paid for everything and headed back to the hotel. Felicia wasn’t there.

But someone else was.

I thought I’d seen the last of Karen. I really did. But when I opened the door to my hotel room, there she was, sitting on the bed. And there was that gun again, pointed right at me. The difference was, there wasn’t a crowd around that time.

“Hi there stud,” she said. “Come in and have a seat.”

“How did you find me?” I asked.

She waved me to a chair, but stopped me and searched me first. She tossed my gun on the bed. “Theresa Langley doesn’t live in Town,” she said. “When we saw that she’d charged a hotel room, we looked into it.”

“It didn’t occur to you that maybe she was taking a break? And that was why she had a hotel room? Because she doesn’t live in Town?”

Karen shrugged. “But she’s not the type to rent out two rooms in two different hotels simultaniously. Especially not when one of them is in a dive like this.”

I didn’t think of the room I had as a dive. But compared to what Theresa probably got for herself, I could see why Karen would say that.

“So now are you going to shoot me?” I asked.

“I want the diary,” she said.

“I don’t have the diary.”

“Then yes,” she said. “I am.”

She pulled up the gun and took aim, right at the head. I had to act, but I was in no position. “Wait!” I said. “I have a copy.”

She smiled. “That’s more like it. Where is the original?”

“Back with Langley, where it belongs.”

She nodded. “And you made only one copy?”

I stood up and raised my hands in surrender. Luckily, she didn’t just shoot me when I moved. “Yes,” I said.

“And if I don’t believe you?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, you shoot me?”

She smiled. “You may not be as dumb as you look, Roeder.”

That stung. She thought I was attractive. Or at least, she used to. “So is breaking and entering part of the B3 training these days?” I asked. “Because last time I checked, robbing people at gunpoint wasn’t quite their style.”

She smirked at me. “I have more bosses than the higher ups at B3.”

A piece of the puzzle clicked. “So you’re working for our mutual friends.”

She shook her head. “Tell me you didn’t just figure that out. I guess I was wrong about you. You are just as dumb as you look.”

I didn’t have to take that sort of talk from her, and I told her so. Well, actually, I didn’t. I just kicked the chair I had been sitting in at her. And when she tried to deflect it with her hands, I tackled her to the ground, holding the wrist with the gun in it down with one arm while the other started to apply pressure to her windpipe, just like the bastard in that noodle bar out in the Sprawl.

I’m not one to hit a woman. But anyone who pulls a gun on me, twice, and doesn’t have the courtesy to use it deserves a lesson of some kind. I thought about being a hypocrite and just hitting her. I thought about head butting her. I wondered what Bogart would do.

About then, her knee came up between my legs, and I was pretty well off her.

We were both coughing on the floor, trying to get our bearings. I knew that I had to get control first. She still had a gun. If she caught her breath enough to shoot me, it would all be over.

I rolled over to the bed. If I could get up and grab my own gun, I could even the score. I don’t like hitting women, but I’m not above shooting them. Even if she is a B3 officer.

I didn’t make it. She used the pistol on me, but didn’t shoot. She just whipped it across my lower back, lurching to her feet as I fell on my back. She put one foot on my chest and pointed the gun down at me.

“That was probably the dumbest thing you’ve done so far,” she said.

I figured that would be it. She’d shoot me. Whoever she was working for would give her some kind of commendation, and Oliver Langley’s secret would go to the grave.

I tried to think of some kind of witty retort, some last line that would be throwing my spite at the world that didn’t work my way. But before I could think of anything, I heard a thud, and then Karen collapsed on top of me.

I’d left the door open.

Felicia had come in and hit Karen, hard, with my gun. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d made it to the bed. My gun hadn’t been there.

“Are you okay?” Felicia asked.

I nodded. “I’m fine.”

She looked down at me, a beautiful woman with a gun. She was wearing a skirt, and I could see that she hadn’t been lying about the panties. “I kind of like you down there,” she said.

I gave her a look and tried to get up. That blow to the back was pretty hard. Karen was a bit stronger than she looked.

Felicia had to help me up, and didn’t let me go until she’d planted one hard on my lips. If there wasn’t an unconscious B3 agent next to the bed, I probably would have tossed Felicia into it. I knew she was ready.

But there was a B3 agent. And I couldn’t go and be an exhibitionist. Not right then. Not without at least tying Karen up first.

That wasn’t how I’d expected things to go with Karen. When I asked her out on the date, I wasn’t entirely ruling out one of us tying the other one up. But I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be in these particular circumstances.

“This a friend of yours?” Felicia asked as we tied Karen to a chair.

“We dated,” I said.

“Doesn’t seem like she took it well.”

“That’s funny,” I rubbed my back where the pistol had whipped me. “You couldn’t have stepped in thirty seconds sooner, could you?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t want to step on your toes, boss.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I got you a present.”

Her violet eyes lit up. “Really?”

“Later.” Karen was coming to. I had some questions.

We didn’t assign good cop or bad cop roles, but I didn’t really think they’d be necessary. Karen woke up groggy, but it didn’t take her long to figure out the skinny once she noticed that her hands were tied.

“Morning,” I said. “This isn’t the way I expected things to go, and it damn sure isn’t the way you wanted them to go. But this is how things go, so let’s get them done, okay?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter, Karen. What matters is that tables have been turned, shoes are on other feet, you’ve got some talking to do, and I’m all ears.”

“I’m not telling you anything, you moronic lunatic.”

I leaned back. “I don’t suppose threats of torture would do anything.”

She shook her head. “Not unless you want to risk the penalties for torturing a B3 agent in the course of her duties.”

Felicia laughed. “And what duties are those?”

“Investigating a misappropriation of funds, the scamming of a citizen of the Tiers.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Theresa Langley hired you to do a job, and you’ve been charging all kinds of things to her. By my records, you’ve now charged someone else’s medical bills, clothing for you and your little girlfriend here, a hotel room when you have living accommodations of your own, and god knows what else.”

She had me there. But Theresa agreed to pay expenses, and all of those expenses came up during the actual course of the investigation. “You’ve got nothing,” I said.

“Think about who you’re dealing with, Roeder. Do you think it will really matter how much evidence we have if this goes to trial?”

I didn’t know who I was dealing with. That was the problem. But there was no need for her to know that. “Not even they could make it stick.”

She shrugged. The look on her face told me she knew that I didn’t know who I was dealing with. “Maybe not.” She said. “But the point is, I have corporate backing for being here. All the way up, you can’t touch me. I’m here legally.”

I sighed. “So torture is out.”

She sneered at me. “Yeah.”

I pulled out my gun and pulled back the hammer. “Of course, I could just kill you. We could hide the body in the Sprawl, maybe carve a certain little symbol on you somewhere. What do you think of that?”

“Still won’t get you what you want,” she said. “But it will put you at risk for the rest of your life. Every day, everywhere you go, there’ll be a chance that someone will pin my murder on you. And then what?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ve killed people before.”

“Never an officer of the law, Nathan Roeder.”

I groaned. This was getting nowhere. All it was doing was getting me frustrated. “What about her?” I asked, pointing at Felicia.

Karen looked confused. “What about her? I have no idea who she is.”

I smiled. “Exactly. You don’t know who she is. Neither does anyone else. She doesn’t exist, as far as most people are aware.”

“So?”

“So she could go ahead and kill you, and no one would ever connect it to her.”

“I’m not going to kill her!” Felicia said, ruining the whole fantasy.

I groaned. “So you won’t kill her. But how do you feel about torture?”

She scratched her head. “Do you remember what I used to do for a living?” I didn’t understand what that meant. “Yeah, I could torture her.”

Karen laughed. “Same problem, Roeder. Can she handle the fine?”

I leaned in real close. “Who would you fine?” I asked. “Who would you punish? She doesn’t even exist as far as you know.”

“We’d track her down.”

“How?”

“I know what she looks like.”

Felicia put one hand on my arm. “So I torture her, then you kill her.”

“That puts you right back where you were before, always looking over your shoulder, always on the run.”

I nodded and lowered the gun. “Yeah,” I said. “But think of where it leaves you.”

Felicia started walking through the room, looking for something. “Well, we don’t have any batteries, but I could probably make do with the cord from the lamp. Would you mind breaking the bulb for me? Oh, and could you go out into the hall and get some ice cubes? We’re also going to need to put up a privacy screen, or at least turn on the television.” She cracked her knuckles and looked over at Karen with a very scary, but incredibly sexy, look on her face. “When we’re done, maybe we can make it all look like sex crime.”

“What were those questions?” Karen asked.

This was the part I wasn’t ready for. She knew something, but I didn’t know what it was, so I didn’t know how to ask for it. “You said you’re protected all the way up. All the way up where?”

“All the way up the Tiers, you moron.”

I turned to Felicia. “If she keeps calling me names, you feel free to start the torture.”

Felicia had a wire stripped from the lamp all ready to go. She touched the ends together and made a little spark. “No problem,” she said. Then she turned and looked towards the bathroom. “You might want to get some towels, for when she loses bladder control.”

I turned back to Karen. “Who is it? Who’s at the top?”

“I don’t know,” she said. By the look of her, the way she was holding herself, the sweat on her forehead, and the pace of her breath, I knew she was telling the truth. And that she was scared.

What I didn’t know was whether or not Felicia was going to go through with the torture. I didn’t have the time to pay attention to her and Karen enough to tell.

“How high do you know?”

“I take orders. They give them.”

“Who is they?”

“They’re a group of very powerful people up in the Tiers. You work with them, they make your life better. You work against them—well, you’ll figure it out sooner or later.”

So there was a group. I wasn’t just paranoid. “Give me a name,” I said. “Someone to work from, somewhere to start.”

“I give you a name, they kill me.”

I gestured at Felicia. “Do you remember what our plan was?”

“So I’m screwed either way,” she said. “But at least I get to fuck you over.”

“This isn’t what I had in mind when I asked you on that date,” I said.

Her features softened a bit. “Honestly, Nathan, this isn’t what I had in mind either.” She sighed and pulled against her bindings. “I thought you were just a decent looking guy who was willing to take me to dinner in order to get some information for his investigation. Information it was my job to give you anyway. I was even hoping to have a good time.”

“So what happened?”

“You did, Nathan. You happened. You and your stupid diary.”

“What do you mean? When we first spoke, everything was fine. You were ready to go on a date, you even thought I was attractive,” she started to protest, and I held up my hand. “You did,” I said. “I was born a Reader, so don’t bother trying to lie. The point is, when I saw you again, you had a gun.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Why?”

“Because I was told to scare you off the case.”

I laughed. “It didn’t work.”

“I noticed.”

Felicia tapped her wires together again, getting another spark. “Are we going to do this, or what?”

I waved her back. “So something happened between us meeting and the dinner?”

Karen nodded.

“But you won’t tell me who talked to you?”

She shook her head.

“But someone did?”

She groaned. “Fuck, Nathan. You want me to spell it out for you?”