Jack L. Chalker - God inc 1 - Labyrinth of Dreams

VIP免费

2024-12-13 0 0 391.72KB 116 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt

THE LABYRINTH OF DREAMSTHE LABYRINTH OF DREAMS

ebook ver. 1.0

For Jack Williamson,

who seems to have come up with the idea first

back in the dark ages of SF,

with love and respect.

Spade & Marlowe, P.I.'s

It ain't often when a big case just up and walks into your office on a bright

spring day, but being a private dick is all danger and adventure and you never

can take anything for sure.

The dame looked exotic, like she was just off the boat, but her movements and

particularly her eyes said she was here with a definite purpose in mind, one I

might not like. She was covering a lot up, that was for sure. Her hair had more

black dye than a licorice factory and she reeked of cheap perfume like a whore

out for her first trick, but I knew right away that she wasn't no woman of the

evening. Her big brown eyes met mine and her mouth turned up in a nasty curl, as

if she wasn't real pleased with what she was seeing. This was a dame with a will

of her own, one that wouldn't be easily turned from anything she had in mind to

do.

I felt like a kitten caught raiding the garbage pail; she had that effect on you

even before she said anything at all. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had the

feeling we'd met before, like when you remember dreaming the winning horse in

the fifth but only after the race was run and you bet on the nag that was still

trying to find the track. And now she spoke, the words in accented English

striking my heart like machine gun bullets at the Jersey marshes.

"Hey! Horowitz! You want I should clean this pigsty, and maybe the pig with it?"

I sighed, my lovely fantasy shattered. "Mrs. Kybanski, have you ever heard that

a little politeness will get you a long way?"

"No. Sing a few lines. Besides, if I wanted to work with people, I would've

taken the waitress job at Denny's. You're the only one left in this dump, and

since it ain't been condemned as a public danger yet, I got to clean it. Bad

enough I got to walk these streets after dark. I don't have to do it so late

except for you. Why don't you go home? You ain't gonna miss no clients. They

don't even come here in the daytime!"

Unfortunately, that was close to the truth, but her stock appeal for pity had a

flaw in it. "Mrs. Kybanski—there are twelve offices in this rundown excuse for

an office building, and eleven of them are empty. You just came in five minutes

ago. Clean them first. I'll probably be long gone by then."

"Yeah, sure. Use your routine, your schedule, your convenience. Why not just go

home to your shikse and get a good meal for a change? Not that you don't look

like you been getting a good meal once too much."

That was why I tolerated, even liked, Mrs. Kybanski in spite of her wonderful

manners and disposition. No matter what her other flaws, she was the only one

I'd met in the seven years I've been married who thought of Brandy as a shikse

and nothing else. That was why she could work this neighborhood. As for being in

the neighborhood after dark, I might get a little nervous, sometimes, but

anybody who dared to attack Mrs. Kybanski deserved what he would get.

"That's who I'm waiting for, Mrs. K.," I replied. "She's been out all afternoon

on a case, and she's overdue getting back." The truth was, I was worried. I

always worried when she went out alone on one of these things, even though it

was just tracking down the address of a guy who owed about ninety years' worth

of child-support and alimony payments. We were on a contingency fee, as usual,

which made it all the more important. The wife had thought the guy had skipped

to parts unknown, but a few days ago somebody who knew him swore to her he was

running a 7-Eleven over in south Philly. Trouble was, she couldn't remember

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20J....D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt (1 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:20 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt

which 7-Eleven store, and there were like fifty over there. Those damned stores

multiply faster than coat hangers and grocery bags.

So all I could do was sit around the dingy little office with its cracked

door-glass and its cardboard-and-tape patch on the window and try and occupy my

mind. We had a drawerful of unpaid bills, a bunch of collection notices, and

very little else. The only reason they let us stay in the office was that nobody

else would be idiot enough to rent it, but even that had its limits. The fact

was, we were sinking fast, and were only really keeping going by handouts from

Brandy's large family and from old friends of her dad who'd started this agency

long ago. Me, I had no family to speak of and no real friends, not since I got

married, anyway. Of course, they weren't real friends at all if that was gonna

put them off. The closest relative I had was Uncle Max in Harris-burg, who owned

a number of car dealerships, but he hadn't even sent me a birthday card since I

got married. Worse, I hate most police and detective work; it's boring and you

get no respect at all. Trouble is, I don't know how to do anything else and I

never saw anything else any better. I often think I was just born wrong. I was

intended for one of those rich multimillionaire Jewish families that have twin

BMWs and get wings named after them at Mount Sinai Hospital because they needed

a tax loss that year.

God got the religion right, but He must have been having an off day that

time—something I'm accustomed to (off days, that is)—and dropped me in the

family of a shoe salesman in Baltimore, with no rich relatives except Uncle Max

(and he wasn't rich then), who worked six days a week to feed and clothe and

house us and to try to save enough money to get me a good education and not have

to go through this. Instead he only got ulcers, then a heart attack of the kind

you never go back to work from and where the medicines cost a hundred bucks a

month, and Mom had arthritis so bad there was no way she was gonna make it,

either. I managed high school—public, not the fancy prep school with the old-boy

network they wanted for me—but I knew right off that if I was gonna make it in

the world, it had to be Uncle Max style. He started selling cars for others

while living like a dog, putting all the money in investments, becoming salesman

of the year repeatedly and doing a lot of politicking. He even switched to a

synagogue miles away because its members had better business connections.

So, he finally finds this daughter of a rich lawyer and marries her, although

she's a hundred-percent Jewish American princess, a loudmouth nag, and to me she

always bore a strong family resemblance to Lassie. But her daddy bankrolled the

car business and now Max has nine dealerships, a couple of million bucks,

his-and-hers Cadillacs (he doesn't sell German cars), and, last I heard, a

mistress or two on the side to console him. Me, I just couldn't play that game,

so as soon as I graduated I joined the Air Force.

Now, that's not all that dumb. You actually have to volunteer for flying duty,

and I never much liked airplanes, so if you check "nonflying status" you get an

office job or a mechanic's job and you go home at night. In fact, the only

potentially dangerous nonflying job the Air Force has is Security Police, its

own cops. So, naturally, they made me a cop.

I had thought about letting the Air Force send me to college, but when I found

out how much time you owed them for it, I kept putting it off; so I didn't go.

Traffic detail at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod wasn't exactly bad duty, and

neither was security patrolling at Homestead just south of Miami, but trying to

keep a bunch of crazy anti-American protesters out of Clark in the Philippines

when you're ordered not to use a weapon is something else. After I got out of

the hospital, I started looking somewhere else for a career.

Now, there is a sort of old-boy network among service cops, and I found a job as

a patrolman up in Bristol, New Jersey, that was close enough to home and quiet

enough generally to be comfortable, although they didn't pay beans. They did,

however, underwrite getting a degree, along with my service benefits, but the

degree they wanted was in either criminology or police science—the liberal arts

of the crime-busting world. That got me bumped up to detective and almost

sixteen grand a year. It might not sound like a great salary now, but it was a

lousy salary then. How I'd settle for it now, though. ...

Anyway, junior detectives always get stuck on Vice, which even in the best of

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20J....D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt (2 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:20 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt

towns is like working in a human sewer half the day and doing paperwork the

other half. Almost all the officers were on somebody's pad, which is how they

made out on that salary, but the first time you bust a thirteen-year-old hooker,

or try and find the source of a fifteen-year-old with more needle marks in him

than a pincushion, you find it hard to protect the scum behind them. You know,

the guys with the big houses and the twin BMWs. . . .

Not that I'm so morally against corruption that I would never take anything

under the table. I just couldn't bring myself to do it in that world, even

though I knew that world would grow and thrive with or without me. The big

trouble was that if you weren't on the take, your fellow officers couldn't trust

you. I drew the out-of-town leads, the dead-end stakeouts, and the cases

involving competitors to the entrepreneurs who supplied central Jersey who they

wouldn't mind getting taken down a peg or two. I admit I wasn't very diligent at

it; they also would hand you the kind of stuff that could get you killed real

quick. It wasn't real comfortable, but it was more of an education than Temple

ever gave me.

So there I was, as usual, the outsider, the loner, the misfit. I guess I should

have taken up religion again or something, but while I'm proud of my heritage I

just couldn't take all the social stuff, the insularity, the class divisions,

that came along with it. Besides, I always had to work weekends. I'm no beauty

and I never went in much for the social graces; and the Levittown princesses

didn't want a cop, they wanted a doctor at least. I'm moon-faced, hawk-nosed,

with a potbelly, and I started balding at twenty-five (Thanks, Dad). So long as

I stayed in Bristol I was stuck anyway, and the trouble was, I just had no place

to go. Uncle Max offered me a job selling cars in Harrisburg, but if I wanted to

do that kind of work, it was easier—and paid better—to just go on the pad.

So, anyway, they stuck me on this kiddie-porn case that involved liaison with

the Camden police, a bunch of guys with bigger payoffs and an even more jaded

outlook on life than my own sweet department. I was trying to track down a

couple of long-missing local kids whose faces had shown up in a kiddie-porn

magazine in Denmark, some of which had gotten imported back here, and they were

recognized. The importer was in Camden, and clearly was far more than just an

importer, and we were all on him. Even bad cops draw the line someplace. Most of

'em, anyway. With some relief they assigned me to temporary duty in Camden

because they needed more men for stakeout duty than Camden could spare, and

that's what first brought me to this neighborhood and how I met Brandy.

The neighborhood looked older than England and not nearly as well kept up.

Blocks and blocks of narrow streets and rowhouses and smashed windows and sour

smells and garbage all over the place. There was this one little office building

stuck in the middle, so run-down-looking that to this day I believe that if they

took away the boarded-up and condemned row homes on either side, the place would

collapse. It kind of bends in the middle, somehow. The windows are all barred

but rusty, and they're all cracked or have holes through them filled with tape

or cardboard. The neighborhood itself was mostly black here, although there were

some Asians now, mostly Koreans and Vietnamese who couldn't afford even the

slums of Philadelphia just across the river. A couple of blocks away were a few

small white enclaves, mostly old folks and those too poor to move to a

higher-class slum. Eighty percent of the place were on permanent welfare; the

other twenty percent were burglars, dope dealers, pimps and whores, and folks

whose businesses needed this kind of anonymity.

There was no way I could stake out a neighborhood like this; I'd stick out like

a sore thumb, but I needed a place staked out, preferably by somebody familiar

with the place. I needed a good source of information, too, since it was clear

that Camden Vice leaked like a sieve even on kiddie-porn scum. A source had

recommended a private detective agency actually in the district; shady, the

source said, and on a shoestring, but they did anything for a buck and kept

their prices within an investigation's contingency fund. You went in this

building and walked up two flights and it was the second door on the left.

SPADE & MARLOWE, Private Investigations, it said on the door in faded and

peeling letters. The glass was frosted, but it was also cracked, and was held

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20J....D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt (3 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:20 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt

together with masking tape. Inside, it was full of file cabinets and a week or

two of half-eaten lunches; and roaches had the right of way in the small outer

office, which contained no desk and only one chair, an ancient overstuffed thing

.like you'd see in my grandmother's living room in the old days but cracked and

torn, with stuffing coming out this way and that, and springs that had

surrendered when Grant had commanded the Army. The door to the inner office

looked open—I soon discovered it was nonexistent—and I walked to it and looked

in.

There was a single old oak desk piled high with crap, a thirty-year-old manual

typewriter on the floor, an old black dial phone from the fifties at least, and

heaps of papers and other residue. It looked like my apartment. At first I

thought nobody was there, but then I heard noises coming from behind the desk

and then a head popped up and looked at me.

She was chocolate brown, with a full oval face, the biggest brown eyes I ever

saw, and Afro-style hair so huge and bushy I thought at first it had to be a

wig. "Oh, sorry, didn't know anybody was here," she said in a very low, throaty

voice. Then she stood up, all five foot five of her, and stared at me. "You a

cop?"

"Yeah, I'm a cop. Sam Horowitz—out of Bristol, so don't get upset. I need some

help, and I was told this agency was handy for the kind of help I have in mind."

She was chubby, almost fat, but it was as if weight gained after a certain point

had gone entirely to her breasts and hips. She wore a faded tee shirt with a

marijuana plant, on it and the words buy american!, and faded and patched jeans

that seemed far too tight. "What kind of work?"

"Uh—excuse me—but the place is called Spade and Marlowe. Are you one of them?"

"Marlowe's dead," she responded matter-of-factly. "I'm the Spade."

I was always uncomfortable with that kind of humor, but it was too good a line

not to appreciate. It was soon clear that she wasn't the secretary or a partner,

but the whole damned agency. She picked up a creaky old wooden chair that had

been overturned behind the desk and pushed it out and to the side. "Take a

seat," she invited. "That's the only chair, but I don't use it much anyway."

"Thanks, I'll stand. Now, then, Ms. ... ?"

"Brandy Parker. This job pay?"

"Some. A lot if we can get some results. The families involved have big rewards

out."

"How big?"

"A few grand. The rewards, anyway."

"Take the chair," she invited, perching on the desk. "I'm suddenly very

interested."

I told her about the case so far, the missing kids, the kiddie-pom pictures, the

tracing to the distributor who worked out of a building in this area, all of it.

She listened attentively, asking a few very good questions when she needed

clarification, and seemed to get increasingly interested when I showed her the

magazine and the pictures of the two kids before they were snatched. I liked the

fact that the more we talked, the less money seemed important and the more her

own anger grew. She was used to all the shit that went on around these

neighborhoods, but this was particularly dirty, and the faces—and the contrast

in the pictures—made it very real.

The cops had been right; she was very good when working in her element, and

turned up a number of solid leads within forty-eight hours. The Camden cops

would have to make the official bust, but we needed to feed them place, time,

and the rest. Brandy's car was broken and she hadn't had the money to fix it, so

we used my unmarked one, which for anything requiring traveling meant we saw a

lot of each other. The word finally came down that a pedophile ring was working

a seedy hotel in the low-rent district, and we staked it out for very long

periods. A week of all-night stakeouts will let you get to know somebody pretty

well.

Maybe it was because we were both lonely, both generally depressed, or maybe

that we just had the same idea of right, wrong, and maybe, but we just sort of

clicked in spite of our ingrained prejudices. No, it's not the way you think.

She had more prejudices about Jews than I ever had about blacks. Hell, three

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20J....D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt (4 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:20 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt

fine, upstanding white guys had stood around while I lay bleeding on the ground

back at Clark while two black SPs had finally braved the stones and dragged me

back, saving my ass. Even though we'd been poor, my parents had always marched

in civil-rights campaigns—they were old enough to remember "restricted"

neighborhoods against Jews—and I never thought of blacks as being any different

than Poles, Germans, Spaniards, or Chinese for that matter. In my family's world

there were only two kinds of people, Jews and goys.

Brandy Alexandra Parker. Her father, the colonel, had always liked that drink,

and it made a cute and appropriate name for his only child. Except for the fact

that Harold Parker had been a career soldier and career MP, he and I had a lot

in common. I think I would have really liked him. He'd joined the Army as an

enlisted man at age eighteen, and worked his way up. He was a "consultant" to

the Navy at the Philadelphia Navy Yard when he realized he'd never get any

higher than lieutenant colonel—when you're an Army career man and they post you

to the Navy, they're trying to tell you something—and he'd retired. He was a

proud man who felt a keen obligation to excel just to prove that a black man

could be ten times the soldier of those white smartasses, and considered

prejudice not a barrier but a challenge. He was too old and too overqualified to

get civilian police work, and the places where he could sign on offered him low

and insulting positions, so he decided to try it on his own.

He also was caught up in the romance of the thing, to a degree. Spade & Marlowe.

Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Only the best of company for Harold Parker. He

didn't have much savings but he had a pretty fair pension, so he went out, got a

license, rented a cheap office that looked right, and even hired a neighborhood

girl just out of secretarial school as a secretary. A year later, at age

forty-six, he married her. She was already six months pregnant at the time.

Brandy wasn't his biological child, something she was kept ignorant of until she

was in her late teens and he was trying to keep everything together and keep her

from quitting school to help him. Her mother wasn't there to help; she had

suffered from rip-roaring high blood pressure, and after Branday's birth, was

warned not to try again. She worshipped the colonel, though, and became

pregnant. The combination of that and being sloppy with her high-blood-pressure

pills proved fatal. Brandy had been only ten when her mother had dropped dead of

a stroke. She hadn't even gotten to thirty.

The colonel had set up the agency in the Camden ghetto at a time when it was

rare to have a black private eye. He saw a need and filled it in the good old

American tradition, arguing that black folks got divorces and skipped support

payments and fooled around almost as much as white folks did. For a while it

paid. Not handsomely, but when added to his retirement it was adequate—of

course, his clientele then was of a higher class. When the ghetto became a place

for the very poor, the paying clients went to large agencies with fancy offices

and set rates, some black-owned and -operated, others the same ones that before

hadn't wanted their business. He found himself working longer and harder for a

diminishing client base, and he was no youngster anymore—but he had a youngster.

The paying jobs often required him to be out late, and she wound up more and

more in the care of her mother's relatives, mostly cousins and the like, who

really considered it an obligation and weren't very good at the guardian job.

Brandy understood, but she developed a crushing case of private-eye-itus, caused

by having a father who was a P.I., and by too many television shows, and she had

little interest in school. She was a fat girl with no real family life and was a

class wallflower, kind of like me except for the fat business—that came only

from Bristol. She went a little wild as a teen. The only way to get boys to pay

attention was to proposition them; the rest was taken care of by readily

available drugs. She spent the rest of the time watching black-female-avenger

pictures and reading lurid novels. She was a good reader because her father

always was, but she got lousy grades and didn't really care. Her father,

increasingly trying to hold the business together and with his health beginning

to fail, finally couldn't help but notice and did a little personal detective

work. The first thing he found out was that the report cards he'd seen had been

stolen blanks. She had more absences than days present, and although he thought

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20J....D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt (5 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:20 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt

at sixteen she was in high school, the fact was that she was still in the ninth

grade.

Just as bad, her closest girlfriend had been dead on arrival from an overdose of

drugs and pills, and never mind the two abortions. The guilt hit him like a lead

weight. I kind of feel sorry for him at that point, torn between trying to force

her to the straight and narrow and his guilt at letting her go off in the first

place.

I'll never know what that scene was like, but somehow a compromise was reached.

She didn't want school and he wanted her out of that crowd, that was for sure.

She dropped out and went to work for him at the agency as his secretary,

receptionist, and assistant. She had promised him she'd get away from the bad

crowd, stop fooling around, and in a year or so get her GED high school

equivalency and even go to college. She never did, though. Of course, she was a

good reader, a fast typist, and she knew the basics of math, and she was smart

and could learn whatever she needed to learn. The fact was, her reading alone

made her better educated than half the people I know who are college graduates,

but her lack of formal schooling did have an unfortunate side effect in that she

has the same inferiority streak in her that a lot of folks who never finish

school have, and had an inordinate respect for anybody with a lot of education,

even if they don't deserve it and know less than she does. If she ever runs into

an ax murderer who is also a college professor, we're in deep trouble.

The cure, at least, worked. She loved the work, had his files straightened out

in no time, found out how little money they really had, but the cases he got she

worked on, too, and became good at stakeouts and at making endless phone calls

for data. She also went on a diet and took judo and karate lessons at the "Y"

and from one of those Korean karate mills that have popped up all over. She got

to brown belt, which makes her formidable and gives her confidence in the

streets, anyway. All those black-female-avenger films, I guess. She's also a

very good shot, although even now she's only licensed to carry a pistol when

performing a task for a client, and then only when hired as essentially a guard.

She saw herself in much the same way her father had seen himself and the

business. He had spent his life battling prejudice and doing the best job

possible, and she saw herself as showing that not just a black but a black woman

was as good in this profession as any man.

Then, one day, the case of a lifetime walked in the door in the form of a chief

aide to the Reverend Billy Thomas. Thomas was one of those superman types—young,

personable, golden-voiced degrees in divinity and law, a family whose power in

the black community came from decades of fighting for equal rights and justice.

.. . Well, you know the sort. He was in Philadelphia, and he was about to run

for city council in a district that was about fifty-fifty in racial makeup but

had always been represented by an Italian. He was convinced that his opponent

had organized-crime ties, and that to break him loose from his sixteen-year seat

they'd have to get something on him they could use in the papers. They could

have hired a bunch of big shots, but they wanted to use somebody who was black

and totally independent of any larger companies. If the colonel came up with

something really useful, it was worth twenty-five thousand dollars to the

campaign, and he got a grand as up-front expense money.

The colonel was good at his job. If he hadn't clung so desperately to his

failing independent company and had gone with one of the big Philadelphia

concerns, he could have made it big. This one, however, was different; a last

miracle from heaven. It not only paid well, but if he could bring this off, the

resulting publicity from his success—where bigger and better companies had

failed—would bring him so much business he'd have to hire assistants and get

good office space.

For the first couple of days, he was very excited about what he was finding, but

he used Brandy only as chauffeur on occasion and for random checks from cop and

lawyer sources. She couldn't follow the thrust of his investigation from that,

and he was pretty close-mouthed. It wasn't that he was trying to exclude her; it

was just that this case was everything he'd gotten into the business to do, and

for a right moral cause. Soon, though, his elation turned to frowns and gloom;

he was finding information on the councilman's ties far too easily and there

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20J....D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt (6 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:20 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt

were disturbing undercurrents. Telling her he'd know once and for all after a

night's work, he'd left.

They found his body, with five bullets in it, floating in the Schuylkill River

the next day. The cops said it was an obvious mob hit, but could not tie the

councilman into it. Brandy buried her father, then went to work. She dug,

probed, traced, deciphered her father's notes; and because she knew his sources

and knew how he thought, she began to reconstruct his movements and learn what

he had learned. Eventually she came to the same conclusions her father had:

there were clear trails to mob money on the part of the councilman—too clear. So

clear you needed only a legislative aide and not a private dick to find them.

The fact was, most Italian big shots, like Jewish big shots and Methodist big

shots, had inevitably crossed paths again and again with bad elements. It was

almost as if somebody had already traced out all those paths for the councilman

and then filled in the blanks showing sinister motives when, say, the councilman

met a mob godfather at a Columbus Day dinner, or belonged to the same Knights of

Columbus lodge as a couple of mob men.

The fact was, the old Italian wasn't clean, but he was as clean as a city hack

politician can get. There was, however, a mob connection in the race. The

Reverend Billy Thomas looked very much like a wholly owned and operated

subsidiary. When it was clear to them that her father knew this and only needed

confirmation, they had acted, setting up an informant's meet late that night,

one that was to turn over incriminating documents. The colonel had his own sense

of moral outrage, and was even more upset that this would be pulled by his own

people and others he admired and trusted. He also was smart enough to know that

the headlines from busting the Reverend Billy would be every bit as good as the

ones from busting an Italian. They knew it, too. They hadn't taken any chances.

With single-minded determination and solid detective work she broke the case,

and proved to the Philadelphia cops how the incriminating evidence on the

councilman was manufactured. They were delighted and pulled out all the stops to

do the rest. They never got the actual triggerman, but when they began to get

the real goods on the Reverend Billy, he began to get the sweats. Somebody

behind him didn't trust him, either. While this was still unfolding, an armed

band of intruders broke into his home and killed him— during a robbery, of

course. It was only a surprising coincidence that he was to meet the next day

with federal prosecutors to cut a deal.

The results were not, however, what Brandy would have expected. She had proved

herself to both herself and the world, but the only mention of even the agency

in the papers was that her father had been killed by mobsters linked to the

reverend. The Philadelphia cops were highly impressed with her, but it wouldn't

do to admit that a twenty-one-year-old black female high-school dropout had

broken a case they couldn't. Her own family and circle of friends, however,

almost completely cut her off. She was a "traitor" to the black race; her old

man deserved what he got for trying to bring down a black leader. So what if the

rev was crooked? They all were. At least he was our crook. Business fell to

zero. Even those who didn't know a thing about it were not about to hire a girl

like her working alone.

Interestingly, the only people who seemed to have no ax to grind with her were

the crooks. She sold the house in west Philadelphia and moved into a studio

apartment in an old section of Camden near the office. She paid off a lot of

bills and lived on the rest for a while. And, although it was sparse and didn't

pay very well, she actually got a few clients—all from the wrong side of the

law. Loan sharks out looking for deadbeats and not able to run them down; guard

jobs at illicit gambling dens; finding goods on cops who arrested the wrong

people. Not big money, but it helped. The cops, too, used her on occasion, which

is what had brought me there. She had deep sources among the small potatoes of

the underworld, and while she was not about to squeal on them she was

occasionally useful in digging for major crimes in places the cops just couldn't

look.

When I met her, she was pulling in just enough money to keep in business, but

she'd have made more by closing it and going on welfare, in real cash terms. She

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20J....D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt (7 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:20 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt

was her father's daughter; she couldn't give up the dream no matter how

impossible it was, and she'd managed to make herself just useful enough to both

cops and crooks that she was reasonably safe, and the local junkies knew that

she didn't have anything anyway and was a bit too dangerous to tangle with. The

only thing was, the cops and crooks both knew they didn't have to give her much;

just barely enough to keep going. What kept her going was her dream, her felt

obligation to her father, and the fact that she was good at the job and she knew

it.

The grimness of reality had made her withdraw into something of a fantasy shell,

though. She didn't date. She had contacts, not friends. That's when I met her.

Of course, it was timing on my part, too. My dad had finally died after years of

inactivity, and my mother lasted only six months after that. I could have made

use of the old-boy network through the synagogues and social organizations, but

I hadn't been to shul or belonged to any of those things since I was eighteen.

There was nobody, really, but Uncle Max, and I already told you about him.

So, anyway, two people who really needed somebody and were in the same line of

work, more or less, but were socially unlikely to ever come together had,

through the Fates, done so. I kind of got a taste of things just hitting a bar

or restaurant with her and seeing the kinds of funny reactions and sideways

looks. It didn't matter if it was a black place or a white place, it was all the

same.

Oh, yeah—about that kiddie-porn and kidnap case. Well, we firmed up that the old

hotel was the place where pedophiles of all races, creeds, and colors met in the

area, and we linked our distributor to not only the hotel but also to, would you

believe, a professional baby photographer in Cherry Hill. An undercover cop then

made the connections and infiltrated the network.

He chose the easy way, setting up a kiddie-prostitution meet and then picking

one of the two we were looking for out of photos kept in a nice family album.

The kid—the girl—was all fancied up and brought to the hotel, but they smelled a

rat, somehow, at the last minute, and we could sense it. There were squad cars

around ready to make a move on the undercover man's signal, but it just didn't

happen.

I was pretending to doze in the lobby, dressed like a bum and smelling of cheap

booze, and Brandy was all dressed up like a hooker, all made-up and really

underdressed, cigarette dangling from her lips, and perched sexily on the edge

of an end table leafing through a magazine. Both of us looked totally natural in

that cesspool. We saw them bring in the kid and I was shocked at how they'd made

her up, and even more by her glassy eyes and automatic behavior. The undercover

guy came in a half-hour later and went straight up to the room, but a lot of

time passed. Too much. Finally Brandy read my mind and sauntered over.

"You take the desk clerk and call in the Marines," she whispered, as if coming

on to me. "I'm going up and see what's wrong."

I didn't like that. "Let me go up."

She gave me a kiss—the first time she'd ever done that. "You just go do what I

say. I'll be all right."

Yeah. All right is not the word for it. She swished and swayed on too-high heels

over to the old elevator and I made my way over to the desk. I hate guns, but

lives were at stake. I didn't want to risk identifying myself first; some of

these places have floor buttons for warning signals.

The clerk was sitting back in a chair next to the old-fashioned switchboard

reading the racing news. I checked my back, pulled my .38, and said, "Real quiet

now, you be a statue. Police." He started to make a move and I was behind there

and cracking him in the face with the gun in no time. I had been right—there

were three buttons to the right of the switchboard, out of view of the desk

area. He hadn't gotten a chance to push any of them. I picked up his phone and

dialed a special number. "Come on in. It's going down wrong," I said, and that

was that. I then looked around. A half a dozen hookers, bums, and junkies were

around that place and not one of them even deigned to notice what I was doing.

The trouble was, after five minutes the cops didn't seem to be noticing, either.

I decided we'd been had and ran up the stairs. When the desk bastard woke up he

could push all the buttons he wanted.

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20J....D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt (8 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:20 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt

Brandy had been listening at doors on the third floor, but just as I saw her

there was the unmistakable sound of a shot from one of them and she ran to it,

reaching in her purse and taking out the biggest damned handgun I ever saw. She

blew the lock off, then kicked open the door but kept her back to the wall, very

professionally. There were screams and shrieks inside the room, and when Brandy

saw me she whirled and plunged right into that mess.

The bastards had gone down the fire escape probably before she'd blown the lock

off, leaving the kid screaming there and one very badly wounded detective. I got

to him and he opened his eyes, saw me, and groaned. "Setup," he managed. "They

knew.. .. They wanted me. ... Where the hell's the backup?"

That's what I wanted to know.

By now the hotel resembled a cemetery, and not from the bodies. At the first

shot the place had erupted like Mount Saint Helens, spewing its human garbage

all to hell and gone before the real cops got there. Not even the deskman was

there. I got down there, called for an ambulance, then called the Vice tactical

number. The sergeant seemed very surprised to hear from me.

"What the fuck you doing there tonight?" he roared. "We got it set up for

tomorrow night!"

"Like hell! Your man was here and now he's bleeding his guts out on the floor

upstairs. We were here, and so were the bastards and the girl. I called the

ambulance—I can hear it coming now. We were set up, you son of a bitch!"

"Hey, man, take it easy! Yeah, it was on for tonight, but we got orders at roll

call direct from on high that it was off until tomorrow."

"Then you got a high leak who might just have gotten your man blown away. Patrol

units are just coming in the door now, along with the ambulance." I told the

floor and room number to them and they didn't wait, they went right up. "You

want a bad cop who's a cop killer, you find out who was on the other end of that

tactical phone number I called when this went down. You call Internal Affairs

and get them moving now! Either that or you retire before you find a hole in

you!"

They got the undercover man to the hospital, and he made it, minus one lung and

the use of his legs. They took the kid into Juvenile, and after a lot of

questioning "got much in the way of where the kids were being held and how it

all worked, but in spite of fast raids they came up short. The word was out and

everything had moved and dug

in. Internal Affairs finally traced the leak to a desk sergeant and his

girlfriend in Communications. I don't envy them their stay in New Jersey's

less-than-luxurious prison system, surrounded by folks who just love cops. At

the price of one good cop's lung and legs we got one of the kids back, and state

police finally nailed a bunch of small-fry and the photographer, but that was

that. The distributor's still in business, still living in a fancy Cherry Hill

home with the twin BMWs and the ideal American family, and somewhere the other

kids are still in hell. That's the way the business goes, and why I was more

than ready to quit it.

I found myself, at the end of that wild night, just sitting there on that creaky

couch in the lobby and trying not to think. Brandy came up behind me and began

massaging my shoulders. "Want to go get a drink?" she asked.

"Yeah. Any distilleries nearby?" I still looked like a bum and she looked like a

hooker, but there were several diners with bars attached in Camden where even

that wouldn't attract attention if you showed money, and she picked one.

"Who did you think you were up there?" I grumbled. "The Ebony Avenger or maybe

Super-girl? They pay cops to do that, and train them."

"I'm just now getting the shakes over it," she admitted. "Still, those cops they

pay weren't there, and that little girl and that undercover cop were. It just

sorta clicked and I didn't even do no thinking about it. The truth is, even

though I'm scared about it now, I really enjoyed it. I mean, I—we—saved two

lives tonight. That's more than I done in this job in all those years. I don't

know. Maybe I should just get my diploma and be a cop."

"It's just as boring as what you're doing, only it pays regular," I told her.

"For the pay and perks, though, you spend ninety percent of your time playing

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20J....D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt (9 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:20 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt

politics or getting stepped on." I paused. "You did good tonight, kid, even if

you did scare me out of a year's growth and make the bald spot bigger."

"Huh? I did? Scare you, I mean? Why?"

" 'Cause you're one of the good guys in a world full of garbage," I responded.

"Maybe because you're making about thirty cents an hour out of my payoff fund

for this and you still put those lives over your own." The booze was getting to

me a little, and I was bolder than usual. "Maybe it's because in that outfit

you're the cutest, sexiest black bombshell I ever seen."

Well, you can figure the rest. We went back to her place, and went at it all

through the night. I had to. She pointed out that her conscience wouldn't allow

her to throw any white man out in that neighborhood at that hour.

Even though the case was wrapped, I only lived and worked an hour or less away,

and we kept seeing each other. It was amazing how well we meshed, considering

just how different our backgrounds had been. Oh, sure, she loved to dance and I

couldn't dance a step, but that was minor. She liked the Phillies and hated

basketball, same as me. Neither of us could ever get worked up over which dumb

millionaires with glandular conditions could put a ball in a basket without

jumping. My taste for jazz was matched by her fondness for blues music. We both

liked spicy ethnic foods and neither of us could get excited over a fried

chicken. We even liked the same kind of books—murder mysteries and detective

novels, I admit, both old and new, where detectives did the kinds of things real

detectives only dream about.

The truth was, I couldn't think of much but her when I wasn't with her, and she

was getting the same way about me, as it turned out. She couldn't move in with

me, though, because she couldn't be a long-distance call from her office and her

contacts and stay in business at all, so we found an old but serviceable

one-bedroom apartment in the old suburbs of Camden and moved in together; but my

hours plus the commute and her erratic schedule didn't leave us much time

together. I tried to get her to quit, since with her overhead, small as it was,

she wasn't bringing in much money anyway, take the high school equivalency exam,

and maybe go to college, but she would have none of that. And that's how I wound

up quitting the Bristol police and becoming a full partner, such as it was, in

Spade & Marlowe.

We got married shortly after that in the courthouse, and honeymooned as fancy as

we -could afford—Atlantic City. The moment they discovered that I'd married a

shvartse, my old friends always had something else to do and never called. Her

few friends weren't much different, particularly the men. Uncle Max never

returned another phone call. Even the Associated Jewish Charities stopped

sending form letters asking me to contribute. She also took my last name;

something that pleased my ego, although it wasn't anything I was hung up about

or even expected. She just loved the idea of somebody who looked like her being

Brandy Horowitz.

We did get some new friends, though. Every time we came across another

salt-and-pepper couple there seemed a kind of instant bond, although the nature

of the bond was never mentioned. The fact is, though, that in the five years

we've been married I've never been unfaithful to her and never really wanted

anybody else. We were like two kids and we didn't give a damn. Even the looks

don't bother me anymore. Knowing just how hand-to-mouth life would be, and how

insecure it would be, I'd still do it all over again with no regrets.

The funny thing is, after I came on with the agency, business picked up. Not

great; maybe we cleared fourteen grand a year the best year after expenses, but

it picked up. I don't know what it is, but poor black people want a white when

they have trouble with the authorities. I guess it's just because the system is

run by whites and they figure (wrongly) that a white guy can talk their language

and cut through the bullshit, but it picked up. The usual stuff of real P.I.

work— divorces, money transfers, security analysis for the little businesses,

that kind of thing. Noting that you can reduce holdups by half by just painting

the curb in front of a store yellow, for example. The city never knows if it's

legit or not, but while it doesn't help crooks fleeing on foot, or local

burglars, it sure as hell makes holdup men uneasy to park in a yellow zone

waiting for a getaway. That cops notice. So, instead of taking a risk, you hold

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20...D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt (10 of 116) [1/19/03 4:16:20 PM]

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：

file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20L%20-%20G.O.D.%20Inc%201%20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txtTHELABYRINTHOFDREAMSTHELABYRINTHOFDREAMSCopyright©1987byJackL.Chalkerebookver.1.0ForJackWilliamson,whoseemstohavecomeupwiththeideafirstbackinthedarkagesofSF,withloveandrespect.1.Spade&Marl...

展开>> 收起<<

Jack L. Chalker - God inc 1 - Labyrinth of Dreams.pdf

共116页,预览24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！

Jack L. Chalker - God inc 1 - Labyrinth of Dreams

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: