moment I clambered on it, too—which was quite uncomfortable for me, since my butt had to rest on the right angle between the couch’s back and the unupholstered bottom.
Our combined weight was more than Moose could push off him, at least starting in a cramped space where he couldn’t get any leverage. As we sat there—me naked, Pickover with a smoking bullet hole in his chest (and another favorite shirt ruined, I imagined), furniture upturned—Crazy Gustav happened to appear in the corridor, heading to his apartment. His sandy hair, as always, was askew, and he looked at me from his pinched, stubbly face. “Hey, Lomax,” he said, “you really know how to class up a joint.”
I crossed my legs demurely. “Thanks.” I thought about asking him to call the cops, but Crazy Gustav had no fondness for them, and we seemed to have the situation under control. So instead, I just tipped my nonexistent hat at him, and Gustav went into his apartment, shaking his head.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Iwanted to go get some clothes, but my weight was part of what was keeping Moose trapped. “Okay, big fellow,” I called out. “Let’s start with the basics. Who are you?”
“Nobody,” he rumbled from beneath us, his voice muffled.
“Captain Nemo was nobody,” I said. “Everybody else is somebody.”
“Not me.”
“What’s your name?”
“Don’t have one.”
“Come on. People have to call you something.”
“Trace.”
A cool name for a copy, I thought. “I take it you’re hired muscle, Trace. But hired by who?” If he corrected me to “Hired by whom?” I’d fire a shot through the couch at him.
“Actual.”
“Who’s that?”
“That’s all I ever call him. Actual.”
“He a good boss?”
“You kidding?”
“No. If he sucks, maybe you want to change allegiance. Is he a good boss?”
“He’s skytop.”
I knew a lot of old-fashioned slang—old movies did that to you—but I hadn’t heard that one for a while; Trace might as well have called him “groovy.”
“And where is this . . . this skytop gentleman? Down on Earth?”
“No.”
“Here on Mars?”
“No.”
“Where then?”
“Figure it out.”
I took a breath. “Fine, be that way—but don’t say I didn’t give you a chance. Anyway, the professor and I can’t very well sit here all day. So, first things first: toss the gun out from under there.”
Trace didn’t do anything.
“Well?” I said.
“I’m thinking.”
His transfer brain operated at the speed of light, instead of the pokey chemical-signaling rates used by biologicals, but stupid had its own velocity, and I waited while he weighed his options.
And, at last, he reached a conclusion. The Smith & Wesson went skittering out from underneath and came to rest beneath my framed Casablanca movie poster. I couldn’t go retrieve the gun just now, but at least we were making progress.
But then I heard that annoying ping that I could only hear when the front door to my place was open: the elevator had arrived. There were the sounds of people moving along the corridor, and then Detective Dougal McCrae and Sergeant Huxley were standing there in the open doorway, looking at us. Mac was in plain clothes and had his piece out, and Hux, in his dark blue uniform, was carrying that garbage-can-lid thing that I knew was the broadband disruptor. “We had a report of two gunshots,” Mac said, rolling the R in “report.” “And I recognized the address.”
It didn’t seem the time to point out that all gunshots make a report—well, unless a silencer is used.
Mac went on. “We sometimes let one go. But two?”
“Thanks for dropping by,” I said. “There’s a transfer behind the couch. A thug. He broke in here.”
“While you boys were having some fun,” said Huxley.
“While I was in the shower, you cretinous pinhead.”
Mac raised his voice. “This is the New Klondike Police. Come out with your hands up. And I should warn you, we have a broadband disruptor. Don’t make us use it.”
Trace had two options, neither of which was particularly dignified. He could crawl out head first on my right, or he could worm his way out feet first on my left. I could tell that he’d opted for the former by the way the couch was now shaking beneath us.
When he was no longer behind the couch, he rose and held up his hands; the galoot was big enough that his fingertips were touching my ceiling.
“If you gentlemen will excuse me,” I said, and I headed to the bedroom, pausing along the way to pick up my S&W. I quickly threw on some clothes—by this point, the dry air we had under the dome had sucked