She didn’t feel like waiting for them to show up at her doorstep, the way the first two die-hard loyalists had appeared. Another slow, meditative sip, her tongue almost numb to the taste; she’d have to think of some way of contacting the shadow corporation .
A sharp, quick sound came from behind her. Someone had knocked on the hovel’s front door.
That’s too good, thought Sarah. She carefully set the cup down on the table.
Either the universe, in its mysterious and infinite workings, had learned to read her mind, or her hallucinations had become even more convenient. All she had to do was ask for something and it would be provided. With only one catch to it .
She turned around in the chair, facing the door. “If you don’t exist,” she called out, “then go away. I don’t need you.”
A muffled response came through the thin fiberboard. “Hello?” The knob rattled, as though the person on the other side had tried it and found it locked. “Is there anybody home?”
If it were a hallucination, considered Sarah, I would’ve given it a key. She got up and went to the door, pulling it open.
The man on the hovel’s doorstep was shorter than her, running to fat, as if compressed from a taller size. “You must be Sarah—” He smiled, blinking at her from behind ordinaryseeming lenses. If he was part of the shadow corporation, he hadn’t adopted the same square black rims as the late Wycliffe and Zwingli had. “Sarah Tyrell? Am I right?”
It struck her that hallucinations shouldn’t need introductions. Maybe he’s real. “You could be.” She put her hand against the door frame. “Depends on who you are.”
“Miss Tyrell, my name is Urbenton. That’s all I go by.” His smile broadened, creating more elaborate details in his rounded cheeks. From his breast pocket, he extracted a business card and offered it to her. “That’s how people know me.”
She looked at the card, holding it by one corner. The man’s name appeared beneath larger letters spelling out SPEED DEATH PRODUCTIONS, with a company logo of a stylized, sharp-edged skull with wings. “Charming.” She tried to hand it back to him, but he refused it with an upraised palm.
“Keep it.” The man radiated an oily unctuousness, as though his excess body fat were percolating into the air around him. “Just in case we can’t come to an agreement right now, Miss Tyrell—”
“How do you know my name?” Sarah tilted her head, eyeing him with increasing suspicion. “My real name.”
“I’ve got a lot of contacts,” said Urbenton with a wink. “Contacts are important in my line of business. I’m a video director. Producer, too. I do it all
A memory fragment drifted through Sarah’s head. The names, of both the man and his company, sounded vaguely familiar to her. Deckard had said something about them, a long time ago. Before he had left the planet the first time. Something about going to do a job for them. That’s how he knows my name, she thought.
Because of Deckard. She tucked the business card in her neckline. “What’s that got to do with me?”
Urbenton glanced around the narrow, shadowed streets of the emigrant colony, then back to Sarah. “May I come in? So we can talk?”
“We’re talking now.” She folded her arms across her breasts. “As I said-what’s that got to do with me?”
His smile appeared more forced. “Let’s just say . . . that maybe we can do business together. You and me.”
“Oh?” She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Such as?”
“I have good reason to believe, Miss Tyrell, that you’d like to have a certain Rick Deckard taken care of. Murdered, as it were.” The smile disappeared, replaced by a hard glitter in the man’s eyes. “How would you like it if I made that possible for you?”
Sarah regarded the man for a few seconds, then stepped back, clearing the doorway. “Perhaps,” she said, “you’d better come inside.”
“This’ll do. For now.” He steered the child toward an opening beneath words outlined in flickering lightbulbs, half of which had gone permanently dead.
“Let’s go in here.”
Behind the bar, an unshaven figure swabbing out glasses with a dirty towel; he spotted Deckard and the Rachael child as soon as they stepped into the dimly lit interior. “Hey—” The bartender pointed a black-nailed finger toward the little girl. “No minors.”
Deckard left the girl a few steps away from him. With the briefcase dangling from one hand, he leaned an elbow on the bar. “Let me tell you something.” He kept his voice low, face close to the bartender’s. “I was just talking with somebody who claimed that there’s no little girl at all. She’s a hallucination.”
An ugly smirk curdled the other man’s lip. “Yeah, right. Now get her out of here.”
Opening his jacket partway, Deckard displayed the black metal of the gun he’d taken from Sarah. “About that hallucination. Some very influential people think the same way.”
The bartender’s eyes shifted from the gun back up to Deckard’s face. “There’s a real nice booth in the back. Suitable for a party of one.” He tried to smile. “Like yourself.”
“Thanks.” Deckard peeled a bill from the rapidly dimishing roll in his pocket and laid it on the bar. “I really value my privacy.”
The establishment was dark enough, and so sparsely inhabited that he was able to steer the Rachael child to the back with little fear of being spotted. Once away from the bar and its pallid fluorescents behind the ranks of bottles, the only illumination came from the video screens hanging at strategic intervals from the ceiling. A flickering wash of blue tinted the isolated faces gazing up, their hands cradling the carefully nursed drinks that kept the patrons from being eighty-sixed out of the place. None of them looked around at Deckard and the girl slipping into the farthest booth; eyes remained on their stimulus fix from the cable monopoly. He stashed the briefcase beneath the table.
“Won’t he call us in? That guy?” The Rachael child had easily figured out that Deckard was trying to keep them from being spotted by the emigrant colony’s police. The evasive route that he had taken them on this far left little doubt. “You don’t trust him, do you?”
“Of course not.” Deckard didn’t look at her, tucked into the darkest part of the booth and shielded by his own body. Eyes adjusting, he scanned the bar’s interior for any suspicious indicators. He was grateful that Batty, the part of him imbedded in the briefcase, had heeded his warning about staying quiet in public. “But we don’t need to worry just yet. The bartender’ll keep a lid on it for a little while, just on the hope that I’ll feed him some more money.”
“Is a little while all we need?”
The child’s voice was capable of unnerving him; she sounded on occasion like an adult asking questions with a child’s sharpness. Deckard supposed that came from her unusual upbringing, whatever it had been, on the Salander 3. “I just need time to think,” he said, glancing over at her. “If I get that, maybe we have a chance.”
“Oh.” The Rachael child mulled over his words, forehead creasing. “What’re you going to do?”
“I said, time to think. Not talk.”
He was rewarded with silence. Spreading his hands flat on the table, he leaned his head back against the booth’s padded leatherette and closed his eyes.
“Not interested in the show, huh?”
Deckard’s eyes snapped open at hearing, not the child’s voice, but a man’s.
Even before he focussed on the figure that had slid in on the table’s other side, his hand had darted inside his jacket and fastened onto the gun.
He wasn’t quick enough. The other man was quicker, reaching across and seizing Deckard’s wrist, pinning his hand beneath the jacket. “You don’t have to do that.” The other man smiled. “Think of all the commotion it’d make in here.