d**k Richards: Private Eye

Chapter 1-2

“Anyway,” Raven says, “I’ve got enough to start searching the databases. Oh, and btw,” she actually pronounces each letter, “David’s going to stop by later.” Her head morphs again into that yellow smiley face, which winks at me before dissolving.

Gee, thanks for letting me know, Raven. She really needs to stop giving David the code to the doors. I’ll be there to meet him anyway, but first I need to test-fire this thing and see what it can do.

#

Count Fantabuloso likes to spot check at least one weapon in each incoming shipment for quality, and one of the ranges built for this purpose hides behind the counter of Jimbo’s Porn-n-Pawn, down in the Sawyer district. The ones for field-testing rocket launchers and other heavy ordnance are a bit intimidating, to be honest—sleek, chrome deathtraps with unidentifiable dents and stains—but those are in sound-proofed warehouses surrounded by nightclubs. Most testing takes place after ten P.M. so no one notices a thing.

The Sawyer district itself is grungy and low-traffic. You almost always have elbow room and, in the quieter hours, you can almost stretch out your arms without hitting someone. The businesses here eschew advertising. When the signs themselves read “Five Dollar Store” or “Pawn Shop,” not much more needs to be said. The primary occupation in this area of Tipton is loitering, and the denizens are very good at what they do. Hundreds of impassive faces on five floors, perched on every available surface, swivel blankly like buzzards to watch me walk by. It’s a small fraction of the thousands here, but uncanny nonetheless.

The exterior windows of Jimbo’s Porn-n-Pawn, as well as those of Jimbo’s Foodie Mart next door, each bear a green sticker proclaiming official security protection, but grilled bars are still mounted just behind them for insurance. While the windows are security glass unbreakable by anything short of multiple .50-caliber rounds, the Count sees no reason to openly display his wealth. People have enough reasons to hate him already.

I open the door and the digital doorbell rings, an annoying techno remix of Beethoven’s Eighth. The current Jimbo—the Count swaps them out every three to four months—glances at me. There are no lines of sight or fire between the door and the black counter, but I see his head swivel in the hyperbolic mirror discreetly mounted near the ceiling. I head down an aisle filled with ancient video games and computer cables on the left and remaindered romance novels on the right. A short left later I come face to face with a very bored esquire.

Like every other esquire on duty, he wears the official street uniform. The full-length arms of a black, undermesh shirt project from an overstuffed coat whose sleeves have been ripped off. The coat lies open to display a black T-shirt with the Count’s logo, a fist over crossed lightning bolts in white outline. Black jeans and combat boots complete the ensemble, and the esquire looms among the bric-a-brac like an angry bull sent to the corner for bad behavior.

“What you want?” he says.

This one has made himself quite a nest behind the counter. A collapsible metal chair leans at an angle against a dusty, rolled-up rug. The front legs are propped atop a cooler and a thick stack of old magazines, respectively. A small dumbwaiter with a missing wheel is at just the right place and height for an armrest. He can kick back, relax with his elbow propped up, gangsta-style, and watch the antique CRT TV mounted in a pile of clothes, all while still technically keeping an eye on the door. He notices me glancing at his nest, looks me over, then glares as if daring me to say something. I don’t. He’s either good enough to pull it off or will be gone before too long.

“I have a test coming up,” I say.

He’s supposed to reply with “We don’t sell textbooks” and wait for my “Really. I must have been misinformed,” but he just reaches under the counter between us, pushes a hidden button, and a door set in the wall to my right glides silently aside. Compared to the shop’s shabby wallpaper, the metal walls in the corridor beyond gleam. I step between a power tools bin and a display case filled with musical instruments, through a softly hissing curtain of air, and the door slides shut behind me.

The Baron Rutgert, a skinny man around fifty-ish who looks extremely out of place whenever he goes to staff meetings, is in his office. Balding and bespectacled, he looks and acts like a college professor. I have no idea how he came to work for the Count, but he’s all right if you don’t mind the random jumps and pauses in his conversations. You’ll be talking and then an idea will strike him. Minutes will pass and he won’t even realize he’s stopped talking.

He’s in charge of R&D and his office has every kind of electronics known to man, all of them linked together in nearly every way known to man. He doesn’t have a desk because he doesn’t need one. Projectors in his glasses display anything he calls for as he rolls around on his chair. On four wide counters, thinfilm displays alternate with processing stations, and in the center of it all is an optical switching station that lights up like a cubist Christmas tree when things really get going. He explained it all to me once—blast pressure, emission and absorption spectra, temperature fluctuations, projectile deformation—but I’m most comfortable with the analog devices in the corner. Even dwarves haven’t figured out how to fully integrate magic and electronics and for some things you just can’t beat a crystal pendulum. Or seven of them, diamonds all the colors of the rainbow, hanging by leather thongs from a bank of wooden pegs. Below them a compass with a mithril needle, a small crystal ball, and some coins to test I Ching deviations are stacked on a Ouija board. The Ouija board is new.

I nod at the baron.

He looks blankly in my direction. I can’t tell if he’s looking at me or something projected directly onto his retinas, so I remind him why I’m here.

He blinks, his eyes refocus, and he nods. “Ah yes. The Type 5-S morphology with hand-loaded magazine. I’ve been wanting to see the emission spectrum. The metallorganic interface, do you think it’s homogenous down to the cellular level? If I could reproduce that...” He rolls his chair over a row and it seems like he’s waiting for me to reply.

“Instead of standing around here wondering, why don’t we find out?” I venture.

The Baron Rutgert breaks into a smile. “Excellent idea. Let’s get started.” He rolls himself over to the analog corner, takes the blue diamond pendulum and the crystal ball, and puts his chair on autopilot.

“Why the Ouija board?” I ask on our way to the test range.

The baron grins. “I tell the new Jimbos that if anything goes really bad, they can use it to write home one last time.”

#

The targets are pretty standard. A thin sheet of paper sprinkled with holy water leads off, followed by low-thread-count cloth-of-mithril. It already has a few holes and the baron folded it double before hanging it up. Third in line is a two-inch sheet of steel alloyed with 0.5% adamantine. And, just in case, mounted to the far wall is a panel stolen—I have no idea how and have never gotten anyone involved drunk enough to find out—from a decommissioned tank that’s supposed to stop anything less potent than depleted uranium shells.

The preparations complete, Rutgert taps the frame of his glasses and the targets slide down the range, spacing themselves at optimum intervals. A side area, outside the main lines of fire, holds a complicated pedestal that looks like a mechanical spider sexually assaulting a metal traffic cone. The baron carefully places the crystal ball atop the contraption. The spidery arms click as he fixes them into place, and with another tap to his glasses they hum to life, invisible lasers crisscrossing through the quartz.

The thing always creeps me out, moving subtly like breathing. The arms further adjust themselves. When they stop, satisfied, the baron manually pushes the contraption along its track, leaving it even with a point halfway between the sheet of paper and cloth-of-mithril.

Next, he hangs the pendulum from a metal bar attached to the ceiling a few feet from where I’ll be standing. The bar is three and a half feet across, filled with notches at half inch intervals. It lowers smoothly and Rutgert hangs the pendulum near the left side. He taps his glasses again and the bar rises, more slowly this time, until the diamond’s clear of all reasonable bullet trajectories. It swings slowly in the air, tracing tiny arcs. Rutgert leaves without a word, his chair’s motor making no noise, off to further calibrate the sensors.

As always, I feel strangely exposed. Most ranges are divided into semi-private stations and have measures, usually waist-high partitions, to keep idiots from wandering into harm’s way. Here though, the range itself is barely ninety feet from end to end, and there’s absolutely nothing between me and the targets. Spherical camera nodes studding the walls, floor, and ceiling observe everything. A red X on the floor, electrical tape helpfully marking the optimal firing point, always seems like the real target.

I don the shooting goggles the baron has left behind and adjust the fit of the integrated earguards.

They’re always tight around my temples, and they let out a stretched, electronic groan as the contacts detect a human head and boot the thing up. It always reminds me of the whistle suddenly depressurized air makes when it streams out a punctured window. A yellow tint bleeds across the world and an icon in the upper left corner of my vision indicates that a recording session has been started.

“Almost done here.” Rutgert’s voice booms in my ears, the speakers adding a nasal inflection. “Are you ready yet?”

“Just about,” I say. I lift the lapel of my jacket and draw the mystery gun. It feels solid in my hand, dependable. Not the made-for-you feeling common to magical items with an agenda, but tried and true. I toggle the safety back and forth a few times, enjoying the way it clicks. The smoothed wood feels fresh against my skin and I find myself looking forward to using it. I start to reholster it until Rutgert’s ready, but a sensation of alarm sounds inside my head.

I smile. Nice try. It’s subtle, but that flash of fear isn’t mine. This gun wants to be fired. Well, it can wait.

“The pendulum’s nearly settled into Brownian rhythm,” Rutgert says. “Just a few more seconds and the last sensors will be—damn it. Diagnostics are showing a boot error in the shrapnel accelerometer pads. I just rewired the damn things last week...Okay. I just had to smack the table. It’s probably the connection. They’re showing good now. The pendulum’s in Brownian 6b, pretty standard for blue.”

The gun tries to use my irritation at needless technobabble to convince me to fire it early. I’m smarter than that.

“Whenever you’re ready, d**k,” the baron concludes.

I nod though there’s really no reason to, and the goggles superimpose a red target on the sheet of paper. I aim and a reticule appears on the goggle display, an estimate of the bullet’s most likely point of impact. I take a deep breath and the reticule steadies. I squeeze the trigger slowly.

The world doesn’t stop, and there isn’t a huge fireball when the round punches through the targets. Instead, my vision dims slightly, probably the goggles protecting my eyes from excessive muzzle flash, and then there’s a hole in the sheet of paper. Even the gunshot report’s muffled. That’s it. A little disappointed, I holster the weapon again, ignoring the sense of alarm, and take the goggles off.

#

It will be a while before the results come back, so I leave the handgun with Rutgert and head back to my office, wondering what David’s gotten into this time. The thing you have to understand about him is that he doesn’t have much going for him. He’s more annoying than anything else, but I figure as long as he’s with me he’s not huffing bubble wrap or extorting D-List celebrities. And even though I change the door codes every month, I’m positive Raven keeps him updated. He certainly shows up often enough.

He’s into ceremonial magic, which isn’t a bad thing by itself, but somewhere along the line he decided that the hallmark of a powerful magician is wearing a goofy hat all the time. I’ve seen at least five, each a vaguely Egyptian hybrid cowl/beret dyed in primary colors. He is only sixteen at most, and how he manages to survive high school while wearing these things is beyond me.