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“Can’t figure out why anybody lives out here,” she said. “Just because they’ve had the big one doesn’t mean there’s not another big one just waiting to flatten them.”

“Nice breeze though,” Roarke commented. “And they’ve certainly battled back the smog and noise pollution.”

“Whole place feels like a vid, you know? Or a VR program. Too much peachy, pinky, white. Too many healthy bodies with perfect smiling faces on top of them. Creeps me.

“And I just don’t think you ought to have palm trees waving around in the middle of a city. It’s just not right.”

“This should please you then. The building you want appears to be suitably shabby and unkempt, and the locals seem to be satisfactorily shady.”

She sat up, stifled a yawn, and looked around.

Only about half the streetlights were working, and the building itself was dead dark. Some of the windows were riot-barred, others boarded. Several people skulked and slithered around in the shadows, and in one she spotted an illegals deal winding up.

“This is more like it.” Cheered, she stepped out of the car. “This thing got full security?”

“It’s loaded.” He put the top up, engaged locks and deflectors.

“Her flop was on the third floor. Might as well poke around since we’re here.”

“It’s always a pleasure to poke around in a condemned building where someone might stab, bludgeon, or blast us at any moment.”

“You’ve got your kind of fun, I’ve got mine.” She scanned the area, selected her target. “Yo, asshole!”

The chemi-head in the long black jacket rocked to the balls of his feet.

“If I have to chase you, it’s going to piss me off,” Eve warned. “Then I’ll probably slip so that my foot ends up planted in your balls. Just got a question. You got the answer, it’s worth ten.”

“Don’t know nothing.”

“Then you won’t make the ten. How long you flopped around here?”

“While. Not bothering nobody.”

“Were you around when Susie Mannery got strangled, up on three?”

“Shit. I don’t kill nobody. I don’t know nobody. Prolly the men in white done it.”

“What men in white?”

“Shit, you know. The guys from under the world. Turn themselves into rats when they want, then kill people in their sleep. Cops know. Some prolly be cops.”

“Right. Those men in white. Blow,” she told him, and started into the building.

“Where my ten?”

“Wrong answers.”

She didn’t get any right ones on her way to the third floor. Mannery’s room was occupied again, but the current resident wasn’t at home. There was a ripped mattress on the floor, a box of rags, and a very old sandwich.

Like the chemi-head outside, nobody she managed to roust inside had seen anything, knew anything, done anything.

“Wasting our time,” she said at length. “This isn’t my turf. I don’t know who to push. And if I did, I don’t know what help it would be. Living like this, people think you’ve given up. But Mannery hadn’t. Sloan gave me a list of her personal effects. She had clothes, and a cache of food, and a stuffed dog. You don’t haul around a stuffed dog if you’ve given up. She was probably zoned out when he came in on her, but she was still breathing. And he had no right.”

Roarke turned her so that she faced him in the hot, filthy room. “Lieutenant, you’re tired.”

“I’m okay.”

When he simply stroked her cheek, she closed her eyes a moment. “Yeah, I’m tired. I know about places like this. A couple of times, when he ran thin, we’d flop in places like this. Hell, it might’ve been here for all I know. I don’t have all of it back.”

“You need to shut down for a bit.”

“I’ll catch some sleep in the shuttle. No point in staying out here. I probably think better in New York anyway.”

“Let’s go home then.”

“I guess I reneged on the out-of-town nookie.”

“I’ll put it on your account.”

She dozed in the shuttle as it flew over the country, and dreamed of rats who become men dressed in white. Of a man without a face who strangled her with a long white scarf, and tied it with a pretty bow under her chin.

Chapter 17

Marlene Cox worked the ten to two shift, three nights a week at Riley