Bad For Business

Bad For Business

  Steven Jay Hamilton

  Copyright 2014 Steven Jay Hamilton

  Cover design by Jeramiah Campbell

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  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Coming Soon

  Excerpt: Lost Lamb

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks go to the three members of my writer's critique group. They helped me heat and hammer this piece into what it is now. Also, a special thank you to Kristie for copy editing with me—it was harder than it sounded. Thanks to Jerry, for his patience with me until we found the right cover.

  Bad for Business

  01

  I stood in front of my shattered office window, my eyes passing from shards of broken glass to the limp body of the dead woman the Agents hadn't bothered to move yet. She lay partly on her side, midsection arched over the remains of my window sill. Her head was slumped over, a streak of blood running from her angled jaw to her pointed chin. Her hair was corn silk, matted with rusty rainwater against her broad forehead. Pale legs stretched naked over the cement, smooth skin dappled with rainwater. A wrinkled button-down shirt covered her torso, streaks of crimson showing wet down the unbuttoned white fabric.

  My office was a single room that shared its brick facade walls with a pawn shop and a convenience store. The sign over the shattered window was a cheap slab of thick plastic with words painted over it—no flashing lights or animated high-resolution screen like my neighbors. Adrian Shetler Private Investigations. Affordable Rates. Bloody shards of glass had spilled into the room where I met clients. A burgundy pool was soaking into the beige carpet and the chair in front of my desk had been knocked over.

  “Mr. Shetler,” The Law Enforcement Agent craned his neck over, trying to make eye contact with me, “We need to finish this line of questions.”

  I gave a short twitch of a nod and motioned that we back away, “It's raining, Agent. Can we finish under the overpass?”

  He glanced up at the large cold droplets that had been striking his uniform. Vapor that had condensed with oils and coolants, collecting along the cool steel surface above us. The illusion of rain.

  He wore the black jumpsuit of a patrolman, made of a stretchy insulated fabric that could be used in the vacuum of space if the need called for it. Oval patches of a rough gray material were stitched over the joints. Probably to fortify the bullet-resistant fabric beneath.

  He pulled a tiny folded square of white plastic from the pocket of his lapel and shook it until it became a poncho. He took the few steps to the long cement column that held up the overpass and pulled the poncho over his head.

  “Approximately what time did you find the body?” He produced a thin chrome tablet device and faced the shining black lens at its center toward me.

  “About half past midnight,” Behind the Agent, I could see one of his fellows lean the woman's head forward to examine the wound.

  “Are you aware that curfew is in effect for this sector?” He raised the device centering the camera on me, “Please keep a neutral expression.”

  I did as he asked and he took my picture. No doubt running my background while he took my statement, “I'm aware of that curfew, Agent. I came here because the broken window triggered my building's alarm.”

  “Right,” He drew a stylus with a glowing blue LED at its tip and tapped something on his screen, “Our records indicate that an alarm was triggered at twenty-three forty-seven hours. What took you so long to get here?”

  “My apartment is on the twelfth level,” I leaned to watch as they were pressing her hand to a tablet, “You can imagine the length of the walk to get down here to level one.”

  “Uh huh,” His eyes were scanning over something on his screen; probably reading the finer points of my failed military career, “That's all we need from you for now. We may have some other questions in the next few days—don't go planet side for a while.”

  The Agent closed the screen on the device, tucking the thin plane of reflective metal into a zipped nylon bag. I walked toward the body, my hands finding the seams in my trench coat pockets. Another uniformed Agent in a PVC poncho was hunched over her. The glowing tablet in his hand showed a negative search in the database for fingerprints and DNA. He recorded the time of death based on body temperature and noted the apparent cause as a fall from a great height. Above my street, the nearby buildings rose like monoliths of girders and sheet metal, paneled with windows and air conditioners until they met the steel ceiling of the slums. There were probably hundreds of terraces, windows and catwalks she could have fallen from.

  The Agents had arrived with an ambulance, a squat vehicle painted white with a long red stripe along its square back. A slight groove on the underside meant it could be transported with the magnet rail, but I knew the rail didn't come to this part of town. Down here in the slums, the ambulances only ever came to retrieve the dead.

  The passenger door hissed and pivoted up on its hinge. Another Agent swung his legs out and walked from the side of the vehicle to approach the body, holding a streaming paper cup in one hand, “No missing persons reports that match the description.”

  The Agent that knelt by her side stood up and approached the back doors of the ambulance, “Not surprised. Sounds like another junkie to toss into the incinerator. They've been dropping like flies this week.”

  “Hopefully there's an open slab in the morgue. This time of year the incinerator has a line. It'll take a couple days before she goes in,” He took a pull from his cup, it looked like coffee. I could tell from the reddish undertone of it he was drinking the synthetic stuff.

  They took a gurney from the back of the ambulance and loaded her on. I kept my eyes fixed on hers until they zipped her up in a white plastic body bag. After loading her, they shut the doors and started the engine with a hum. The ambulance drove through a puddle and turned down a street at the intersection, lights fading in the darkened alley. I was left standing in the rain, broken glass under my feet, the blonde woman's dark blood washing into the storm drain.

  If she had landed just a few meters away from my window, she would have struck the storefront for Ramon's Pawn or the Shop Quick. Either of those owners would be down here getting wet and wondering how they would repair the damage. But it had been my window. I wondered if she had come to me alive if I could have helped her stay that way. She had found her way into my office and she had needed my help—I figured that was enough to make her my client. Besides, I couldn't let people die in front of my office, it was bad for business.

  My fingers found the scrap of paper in my trench coat pocket, damp but it was still readable. It had been in the lapel pocket of the girl's shirt, her only possession. The shirt had been too big for her, shoulders cut square for a man. Whoever owned it must have had some contact with her before she had died. It wasn't much, but I had to follow it. I couldn't let the Agents file this one away. Just another dead rat in the slums. That wasn't good enough for me. Someone needed to know who she was and how she'd died. I didn't see anyone else around who gave a
damn. I figured she deserved that much.

  I had lifted the paper before I'd called the Agents. It was a tag for a cleaner somewhere on the fourteenth level. A place called Whistle Cleaners. The fourteenth level was still low class but it wasn't the rat trap the slums were known to be. I thumbed the clearance card in the pocket of my coat. It only granted me passage up to the twelfth level, where the veteran apartments were. I'd have to find another way to get there, but I had tricks.

  The New Independence Orbital Station has high-grade security. It gets tighter as the levels ascend up to the highest grouping of habitats. These areas are where the rich and powerful make their homes, sipping illegal wine, drinking real coffee and eating meat cut from an animal.

  I turned my back on the broken window and started down a deserted alleyway. I opened my jacket's hidden inside pocket. I only had two rolled tobacco cigarettes left. I'd have to talk to my drug dealer soon. I pressed the cigarette between my lips and walked another block.

  My sector in the slums is made up mostly of low sagging brick-paneled buildings and flat streets of cracked fading pavement. In some places the buildings have fallen, collapsing in like dry hollow bones. It is hard to get a building crew down to this level and many property owners don't have the creds for it.