I figured Zar Pickens could probably get his job back in a couple of days, so I didn't hold his unemployment against him.
"All right, Mis' Wang," I said. "What can I do for you?"
He got nervous again. "It's not me," he said. "I mean, it's not just me."
I'd had about enough of his delays. I wasn't inclined to pry the details out one by one. "Okay," I said. "You tell it your way, whatever it is you have to tell, but let's get on with it, shall we?"
He hesitated a bit, then started telling it.
"I live out by the crater wall," he said, "right out in the West End. It's cheap, y'know?"
Cheap, hell, I guessed it was probably free; at least a dozen big buildings out that way were already abandoned. Even a couple on Juarez were abandoned. The owners didn't figure it was worth the repairs and maintenance when the sun's on the horizon, or maybe even already hitting the top floors, so when a building dropped below code, or the complaints started piling up, they would just ditch it. Good, sound business practice, at least by Epimethean standards.
And whether Pickens had had other reasons or not, that explained why he'd come in person; the com lines in the West End are, shall we politely say, unreliable.
I didn't say anything. I just nodded.
Pickens nodded back. "Right, so I don't bother anybody. None of us do; there's a bunch of us out that way, living cheap, not hurting a damn thing. You understand?"
I nodded again. Squatters were nothing new. When I was a girl they'd had to make do with doorways or alleys in the outer burbs, or caves in the crater wall, but they'd been moving inward for years. Especially in the west.
"Okay, fine," Pickens said. "But then about two weeks back some slick-hair shows up, with this big slab of muscle backing him, and says that he works for the new owner, and the rent's gone up, and we pay it or we get out."
I sat back a little and let the HG-2 drop back in the holster; this was beginning to sound interesting. Interesting, or maybe just dumb. It had to be a con of some kind, but that was so obvious even squatters would see it. I put my hands behind my head and leaned back. "New owner?" I asked.
"That's what he said."
I nodded. "Go on."
Pickens shrugged. "That's about it."
"So what do you want me to do?" I asked.
He looked baffled for a minute. "Come on, Hsing," he said. "What do you think? We want you to get rid of the guy, of course!" His voice rose and got ugly. "I mean, what's this new owner crap? Who's buying in the West End? The sun is rising, lady! Nobody's gonna buy land in the West End, so what's this new owner stuff? It's gotta be a rook, but when we called the city, they said he was legit, so we can't call the cops, and we can't just take him out ourselves, because this goddamn new owner would send someone else. We need someone who can get it straight; I mean, we don't have anywhere else to go, and we can't pay this fucker's rent!" He was getting pretty excited, like he was about to jump out of the couch; I straightened up and put my hands back down.
"Then how are you planning to pay my fee?" I asked, and the Sony-Remington was back in my hand but still out of sight.
The question stopped him for a moment, even without the gun showing. He shifted again, settling back down, and the couch rippled as it tried to adjust.
"We took up a collection," he said. "Did it by shares, sort of, and we came up with some bucks. They say you work cheap if you like the job, and I sure hope you like this one, because we couldn't come up with much."
"How much?" I asked.
'Two hundred and five credits," he said. "Maybe a little more, but we can't promise."
Well, that sure as hell wasn't much, but I was interested anyway. As the kid said, who's buying land in the West End? That was just dumb. I figured, same as he did, that most likely somebody had rigged up a little swindle with the city management. That two hundred and five wasn't about to pay my fare off-planet, came the dawn, but it could pay for a dinner or two, and I thought the case might have some interesting aspects to it. For an example, I might be able to collect a reward for turning in a crooked city com-op, or if I decided I didn't need a conscience, I could take a little share of whatever the op was sucking down his chute.
"All right, Mis' Wang," I said. "I'll need a hundred credits up-front, and whatever names and addresses you can give me."
He gawked. I mean, his mouth came open, and he just flat-out gawked at me. "You mean you'll take it?" he said.
The kid just had no class at all. I wondered how he'd ever managed to land any job, even scraping pseudoplankton, and I was ready to bet that his symbiote had died of neglect or embarrassment, if he'd ever had one at all. I'd had about all I wanted of him. "Yes, Mis' Pickens," I said. "I'll take it."
That was that. He pulled out a transfer card and started reeling off the names and addresses of every squatter this rent collector had gone after, and I put it all into the com. The poor jerk never even noticed that I'd used his right name.
Chapter Two
AFTER I FINALLY GOT ZAR PlCKENS OUT OF MY OFFICE, I settled in to think about the kid's story. The com brought the music back up a little, but kept it mellow and meditative, and the images on the big holo stayed abstract.
In my line of work I always found it helped to cultivate a suspicious nature, so I leaned back and looked at whether I could be getting conned or set up or otherwise dumped on.
The whole thing looked like a glitch of some kind. Out there at the base of the western wall, if you stood on tiptoe, you could just about see the sun-assuming you were either wearing goggles or didn't mind burning your retinas. In a year nobody would live there without eyeshades and sunscreen, at the very least; more likely no one would live there at all.
A year, hell-ten weeks would probably do it. There were buildings where the top stories were already catching the sun, and the terminator was moving one hundred and thirty-eight centimeters a day. Everyone knew that.
So who'd buy property there?
Nobody. Ever since it began sinking in that sunrise really was coming, that the city founders a hundred and sixty years back really had been wrong about the planet already being tidelocked, real estate prices had been dropping all over Nightside City, and they'd gone down fastest and furthest in the West End. I guessed that you could buy a building lot-or a building-out there for less than a tourist would pay for a blowjob in the Trap, but you still wouldn't be able to collect enough in rents to make your money back before dawn, because rents were dropping, too, and there were plenty of other cheap places, farther east, like the one I lived in.
So nobody in his right mind would actually buy out there. Even if you got the property free, registering the transfer of title would cost enough to make it a bad investment; legal fees hadn't dropped any.
That left four possibilities, as I saw it.
First, someone wasn't in his right mind. You can never rule that one out completely. The really demented are scarce these days, but there are still a few out there. Maybe some poor aberrant had actually bought that future wasteland.
Second, someone had figured out how to get title to the property for nothing, not even transfer fees, and was trying to squeeze a little money out of it. That was free enterprise in action, but it was also pretty sure to be illegal. I might come out ahead if I could prove something.
Third, nobody had bought anything, but somebody was trying to run a scam of some kind on the squatters, maybe just to collect those rents, maybe to get something else out of them, and had enough pull somewhere to get away with it, or had somehow faked the call to the city. Maybe whoever placed the call for the squatters was getting a cut and had called somewhere else entirely. If that was the story, and I proved it, I could count on two hundred and five credits, but the only way I'd get more than that was if the Eastern Bunny dropped it in my lap, or if an opportunity arose for a little creative blackmail, mild enough that I could live with myself.