Out of the Black - Lee Doty [24]
With a shrug, Ping got out of the car, patted the tape-covered hole in his roof, and headed for the building's entrance.
Cold sunlight and the smell of freshly mown lawn dominated the morning. It was a stark contrast to the grisly dark beneath the bridge he'd left only hours ago. In places like this, in the optimistic light of the morning, it was almost possible to believe that the extremities of the world's problems were bounded by lost love and pop quizzes.
The front door's security system admitted him after verifying his police ID and he strode into the sparse lobby. The only inhabitant was a bristly-haired student maybe in his early twenties. He was sitting on a couch, engrossed with his tablet.
Ping made his way carefully across the freshly mopped floor. As he passed, the guy on the couch glanced at him over the top of his expanded tablet. Perhaps he was waiting for someone he didn't know well, because he gave Ping a surreptitious, but longer-than-usual appraisal. The kid probably realized his mistake and his eyes returned to his tablet.
Ping exited the slippery lobby and entered a waiting elevator. He pushed the button for the fourteenth floor.
As the elevator doors closed, Ping's eyes settled on a red-brown smudge near the handle of a utility closet across from the elevator. The elevator's doors closed before he got more than a glimpse, but his memory and imagination combined to turn the probably innocent smudge into part of a bloody handprint.
Back on the first floor, across from the closed elevator doors, behind the door with the smudged blood, sat the freshly used mop and bucket. Though the empty bucket and utility sink were clean, the mop head was still tinged with the rust-black residue of blood. The pieces that added up to three bodies were concealed in two cleaning supply cabinets, wrapped in multiple layers of thick industrial trash bags. Beneath the cabinet, lying where it had fallen in the rush to conceal the morning's violence, was half of a military auto-pistol. Half of the barrel, the front corner of the trigger guard, and the bottom of the grip and magazine had been removed by a single, clean slash. The edges of the slash were smooth, as if an industrial laser had cut the metal and ceramic of the gun.
Before Ping's elevator had reached even the third floor, the man in the lobby pulled the phones from his ears and paused the movie he'd been watching. For a moment, his gaze led on the frozen image on the screen: Roy Batty, leader of the outlaw Replicants, stood in the pouring rain, a white bird folded in his hand. Blood colored his face, but a look of resigned sadness softened his eyes and an odd smile pulled at his lips.
A similar mix of mirth and melancholy passed through the man's eyes as he closed and stowed his tablet. He stood and turned to look back toward the elevator bank, his face set with grim purpose.
***
Jin swam like a fish through the crowded sea of humanity, lost in the lights and sound and the fury of her tainted blood. Around her, the dance floor's lights painted every surface with dazzling patterns. The music shifted and fluttered around her- everything designed to maximize her experience.
The club was impressive, but the real show was the people; it was like having a family, she assumed. Everyone she saw, she understood. It was like she had somehow passed through them, coming away with some sense of their essence. This was magic, the magic of the twenty-first century, the magic of the mind. It was like Mr. Spock said once: "there is nothing real outside our perception of reality." Spock... deep.
She slithered and danced among the other fish in the crackling electric sea, thinking happy thoughts, feeling faux compassion, simulated empathy- loving everyone she saw. The energy around her made her want to dance harder, faster. She was an expanding