Haldeman, Joe - Blood Sisters

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 105KB 12 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

BLOOD SISTERS

So I used to carry two different business cards: J. Michael Loomis, Data Concentration,

and Jack Loomis, Private Investigator. They mean the same thing, nine cases out of ten. You

have to size up a potential customer, decide whether he'd feel better hiring a shamus or a

clerk.

Some people still have these romantic notions about private detectives and get into a

happy sweat at the thought of using one. But it is the twenty-first century and, endless

Bogart reruns notwithstanding, most of my work consisted in sitting at my office console

and using it to subvert the privacy laws of various states and countries—finding ou

embarrassing things about people, so other people can divorce them or fire them or get a

piece of the slickery.

Not to say I didn't go out on the street sometimes; not to say I didn't have a gun and a

ticket for it. There are Forces of Evil out there, friends, although most of them woul

probably rather be thought of as businessmen who use the law rather than fear it. Same as

me. I was always happy, though, to stay on this side of murder, treason, kidnapping—any

lobo offense. This brain may not be much, but it's all I have.

I should have used it when the woman walked into my office. She had a funny way o

saying hello:

"Are you licensed to carry a gun?"

Various retorts came to mind, most of them having to do with her expulsion, but after a

period of silence I said yes and asked who had referred her to me. Asked politely, too, to

make up for staring. She was a little more beautiful than anyone I'd ever seen before.

"My lawyer," she said. "Don't ask who he is."

With that, I was pretty sure that this was some sort of elaborate joke. Story detectives

always have beautiful mysterious customers. My female customers tend to be dowdy and too

talkative, and much more interested in alimony than romance.

"What's your name, then? Or am I not supposed to ask that either?"

She hesitated. "Ghentlee Arden."

I turned the console on and typed in her name, then a seven-digit code. "Your legal firm is

Lee, Chu, and Rosenstein. And your real name is Maribelle Four Ghentlee: fourth clone o

Maribelle Ghentlee."

"Arden is my professional name. I dance." She had a nice blush.

I typed in another string of digits. Sometimes this sort of thing would lose a customer.

"Says here you're a registered hooker."

"Call girl," she said frostily. "Class One courtesan. I was getting to that."

I'm a liberal-minded man; I don't have anything against hookers or clones. But I like my

customers to be frank with me. Again, I should have shown her the door—then followed he

through it.

Instead: "So. You have a problem?"

"Some men are bothering me, one man in particular. I need some protection."

That gave me pause. "Your union has a Pinkerton contract for that sort of thing."

"My union." Her face trembled a little. "They don't let clones in the union. I'm an

associate, for classification. No protection, no medical, no anything."

"Sorry, I didn't know that. Pretty old-fashioned." I could see the reasoning, though. Dump

a thousand Maribelle Ghentlees on the market, and a merely ravishing girl wouldn't have a

chance.

"Sit down." She was on the verge of tears. "Let me explain to you what I can't do.

"I can't hurt anyone physically. I can't trace this cod down and wave a gun in his face, tell

him to back off."

"I know," she sobbed. I took a box of Kleenex out of my drawer, passed it over.

"Listen, there are laws about harassment. If he's really bothering you, the cops'll be glad to

freeze him."

"I can't go to the police." She blew her nose. "I'm not a citizen." I turned off the console.

"Let me see if I can fill in some blanks without using the machine. You're an unauthorize

clone." She nodded.

"With bought papers."

"Of course I have papers. I wouldn't be in your machine if I didn't."

Well, she wasn't dumb, either. "This cod. He isn't just a disgruntled customer."

"No." She didn't elaborate.

"One more guess," I said, "and then you do the talking for a while. He knows you're no

legal."

"He should. He's the one who pulled me."

"Your own daddy. Any other surprises?"

She looked at the floor. "Mafia."

"Not the legal one, I assume."

"Both."

The desk drawer was still open; the sight of my own gun gave me a bad chill. "There are

two reasonable courses open to me. I could handcuff you to the doorknob and call the police.

Or I could knock you over the head and call the Mafia. That would probably be safer."

She reached into her purse; my hand was halfway to the gun when she took out a credi

flash, thumbed it, and passed it over the desk. She easily had five times as much money as I

make in a good year, and I'm in a comfortable seventy percent bracket.

"You must have one hell of a case of bedsores."

"Don't be stupid," she said, suddenly hard. "You can't make that kind of money on you

back. If you take me on as a client, I'll explain."

I erased the flash and gave it back to her. "Miz Ghentlee. You've already told me a grea

deal more than I want to know. I don't want the police to put me in jail, I don't want the

courts to scramble my brains with a spoon. I don't want the Mafia to take bolt cutters to my

appendages."

"I could make it worth your while."

"I've got all the money I can use. I'm only in this profession because I'm a snoopy

bastard." It suddenly occurred to me that that was more or less true.

"That wasn't completely what I meant."

"I assumed that. And you tempt me, as much as any woman's beauty has ever tempte

me."

She turned on the waterworks again.

"Christ. Go ahead and tell your story. But I don't think you can convince me to do

anything for you."

"My real clone-mother wasn't named Maribelle Ghentlee."

"I could have guessed that."

"She was Maxine Kraus." She paused. "Maxine . . . Kraus." "Is that supposed to mean

something to me?"

"Maybe not. What about Werner Kraus?"

"Yeah." Swiss industrialist, probably the richest man in Europe. "Some relation?"

"She's his daughter and only heir."

I whistled. "Why would she want to be cloned, then?"

"She didn't know she was being cloned. She thought she was having a Pap test." She

smiled a little. "Ironic posture."

"And they pulled you from the scraping."

She nodded. "The Mafia bought her physician. Then killed him."

"You mean the real Mafia?" I said.

"That depends on what you call real. Mafia Incorporated comes into it too, in a more o

less legitimate way. I was supposedly one of six Maribelle Ghentlee clones that they ha

purchased to set up as courtesans in New Orleans, to provoke a test case. They claimed tha

the Sisterhood's prohibition against clone prostitutes constituted unfair restraint of trade."

"Never heard of the case. I guess they lost."

"Of course. They wouldn't have done it in the South if they'd wanted to win."

"Wait a minute. Jumping ahead. Obviously, they plan ultimately to use you as a substitute

for the real Maxine Kraus."

"When the old man dies, which will be soon."

"Then why would they parade you around in public?"

"Just to give me an interim identity. They chose Ghentlee as a clone-mother because she

was the closest one available to Maxine Kraus's physical appearance. I had good makeup;

none of the real Ghentlee clones suspected I wasn't one of them."

"Still . . . what happens if you run into someone who knows what the real Kraus looks

like? With your face and figure, she must be all over the gossip sheets in Europe:"

"You're sweet." Her smile could make me do almost anything. Short of taking on the

Mafia. "She's a total recluse, though, for fear of kidnappers. She probably hasn't seen twenty

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

BLOODSISTERSSoIusedtocarrytwodifferentbusinesscards:J.MichaelLoomis,DataConcentration,andJackLoomis,PrivateInvestigator.Theymeanthesamething,ninecasesoutoften.Youhavetosizeupapotentialcustomer,decidewhetherhe'dfeelbetterhiringashamusoraclerk.Somepeoplestillhavetheseromanticnotionsaboutprivatedetecti...

展开>> 收起<<

Haldeman, Joe - Blood Sisters.pdf

共12页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Haldeman, Joe - Blood Sisters

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: