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ago,” continued Gomez. “Jill told me she was down here at the Hollywood Starwalk Park and was afraid she was being trailed by some goons.”
    â€œShe contacted you instead of the cops?”
    â€œI’ll explain that later,” Gomez said. “Important thing is that Jill’s gone. It looks like she was tagged and abducted.”
    â€œAny idea why?”
    Gomez answered, “She’s back writing, working on a vidwall movie about our old Tek chum, the late Sonny Hokori.”
    â€œThat bastard,” said Jake. “You figure there’s a Tek angle to her kidnapping?”
    â€œI think, Jake, that in the course of her researches she found out something she wasn’t supposed to find out.”
    â€œBut Hokori’s outfit is completely defunct. We took care of most of that.”
    â€œWe can speculate at length later,” suggested his partner. “Can you get down here?”
    â€œWithin a half hour,” Jake assured him.

3
    Jake paced the large drawing room, hands in pockets. “Okay, give me the rest of what you’ve got.”
    Gomez was sitting on the edge of an armchair, holding a palm-size e-notebook. “Jill arrived here by way of a skycab,” he told his partner. “It picked her up at an address over in the Laguna Sector of Greater LA. That turns out to be her present home.”
    â€œRobot cabbie?”
    â€œ Sí , and the bot claims nobody tailed them and nothing else unusual occurred.”
    â€œWhat about other cabs that deposited people in the vicinity?”
    â€œNobody was brought to within a block of this ruin since early this morning,” answered Gomez. “I doubt those two cabrones lurked around here that long.”
    Jake stopped pacing and straddled a straight-back chair. “You mentioned she was working on a script about the late, lamented Sonny Hokori.”
    â€œThe same Tek entrepreneur who helped frame you into a stay up in the Freezer.” He pointed at the ceiling with his thumb.
    â€œSonny’s dead and gone, so’s his sister,” said Jake thoughtfully. “But there are still a lot of other Teklords above the ground.”
    â€œI don’t know exactly what Jill found out, but it was sufficient to get her snatched.”
    â€œWe ought to be able to gather some facts from one of our informants.”
    â€œYou want to handle that angle, amigo? ” Gomez stood up, clicked off the e-notebook and slipped it into a side pocket.
    â€œWhile you?”
    â€œFirst off I’m going to visit her hacienda and talk to her current husband,” replied the detective. “He’s a gent named Ernst Reinman.”
    â€œWhich husband is this by now?”
    Gomez held up four fingers. “ Cuatro . I have the distinction of being the first in the series,” he said. “She’s been hooked up with this Reinman for a bit over two years and he’s an executive with a charitable org called the Starvation Center.”
    â€œDuring her days with you,” mentioned Jake, “she had a tendency to stray now and then. Would there currently be other gentlemen friends in her life?”
    â€œI’ve already got somebody researching that for me,” Gomez said. “But I do know that a gent by the name of Mervyn Illsworth has been providing Jill with some of her background information for the script.”
    â€œI’ll check on him before I contact any informants,” volunteered Jake.
    â€œIllsworth resides at Tube Village in the Long Beach Sector.”
    Jake then inquired, “And why didn’t Jill want to bring the police in on this?”
    â€œMostly, far as I know, because she used to have a rotten reputation with the SoCal law and still likes to avoid them as much as possible,” said Gomez. “During her heyday as an enthusiastic Tek customer—well, she got in several fairly serious tangles with the forces of law and order.”
    Jake