Eye and Talon Read Free

the heel of her boot scraping against the ancient brick facing. Carefully, with each small movement timed to her own pulse, she made her way to the building's corner. The sweat of her palms mingled with the rain inching along the grooves of the gun's incised grip.
    At the corner, with its blunt knife's-edge against her spine, she could look down and discern through mist the broken, rusting skeleton of the blimp that had used to cruise past the buildings' upper reaches, with its spiky, sea-creature-like antennae and swiveling pinlights, its pixel-swarm display of tantalizing off-world vistas, and synthesized voice boomily extolling the virtues of emigration to the stars. Rep-symp terrorists had brought the service-ad blimp down some time after Iris had gotten out of the LAPD's advanced training immersion compound, and she had been starting to make her mark in the blade runner unit, with an effective kill ratio knocked down from a straight one-thousand only by winging some pedestrian who had panicked in the wrong direction when she had started emptying her clip down the length of Figueroa Boulevard. Off-duty and narcotized asleep, Iris hadn't seen the blimp go down; from what some of the uniformed bull cops had told her, it'd looked like an ignited whale, as though Captain Ahab had traded his harpoon for a flame-thrower. The dead seas held no more whales; their bones rotted in the marine trenches, covered with oil. Only in bad dreams and televised news could you see one fall from the sky with such slow, sad grace.
    There .
    She'd spotted it, the target she'd been pursuing all the way from the hovel burrows beneath the old Angel's Flight tracks, in the densely humid and compacted core of the city. The troglodyte denizens, pale as cave fish and blinking at even what little sunlight was available during LA's monsoon season, had managed to excavate a dome-like space in the earth beneath the stacked-up office towers, lit it with bootleg current tapped off one of the main trunk lines, and had been selling tickets for an entertainment uniquely attractive to the bodyguarded residents of the fortified Beverly Hills and Brentwood enclaves. Most of the show was the usual tawdrily choreographed sex thing, retro Vegasy glamor from the empty spot in the desert on the city's edge where Vegas used to be, tit spangles mixed with sinister black-leather military kitsch straight out of genetic memories of Fosse-ized Weimar Berlin. But the star of the underground show, the singular sensation, had been something truly, sickly intriguing
    A replicant impersonator.
    That's entertainment , Iris had thought when she'd heard about it, down at the station's plain-clothes briefings. Show biz and flash, a genuine human being imitating an imitation of a human being. The ultimate drag queen, not transformed from one sex to the other, but deeper than that, from real flesh and blood, man born of woman, to synthesized, born of the old Tyrell Corporation's production lines.
    Supposedly Art Enesque's act — that was the rep impersonator's stage name — ran the gamut from a funny interrogation bit, with wink-nudge answers over a prop Voigt-Kampff machine and leering asides to the audience clustered around the tables and their watered drinks, to a hardcore demo, with half the chorine troop as assistants, of how much physically stronger replicants were than humans — in every department. And the finale, where the impersonator took a mock bullet in the head from a cliché blade runner, all dead eyes and grubby trench coat, was supposed to be a stone riot.
    'Let the vice squad shut it down,' had been Iris's answer when she'd been told by the squad's captain to scope the show. 'If it's over the line, they can take care of it.'
    'Nothing's over the line,' the captain had replied. 'Not in LA. Just check it out.'
    So she had, sitting hunched over an unsipped drink that her departmental expense account had paid for, inhaling the sour, mingled sweat odors of the laughing