The yellow tape stretched across the front door had an imbedded photo-active matrix; the words POLICE CRIME-SCENE scrolled across the plastic surface in five languages, including basic warning iconics for the illiterate.

I ran the key chip through the lock’s sensor track. The door glided open without so much as a whisper. I ducked under the tape and into the private penthouse lair of Ms. Brenda Forsyth.

With the master computer shut down, the apartment was very much a dead thing. The subtle pulse of the housekeeping machinery was missing. The cleaning robots lay still in their maintenance alcoves, the all-seeing Artificial Intelligence banished to whatever land machines dream of when they sleep. The lights and ventilation still worked ¾ along with the sinks, toilets, and anything else that could be controlled manually ¾ but the automatic functions were all dead.

That was action-item #1 on the Standard LAPD Crime Scene Check List: freeze the area within the perimeter of the scene to preserve the forensic evidence. That usually meant shutting down the domestic gadgetry as quickly as possible. Automated cleaning systems have a nasty habit of vacuuming up tell-tale hairs and fibers, or scrubbing blood off of floors and walls.

This extravagantly-furnished apartment didn’t look much like a crime scene, though. No blood. No signs of a struggle. No corpus delicti. Just that vague empty feeling that a home gets when the owner is away and probably isn’t coming back.

I stopped near the edge of the lavish Persian rug that dominated the living room floor. It was difficult to believe that foul-play would dare to rear its ugly head in this professionally-decorated bastion of luxury. But the police tape across the front door seemed to suggest otherwise.

There were at least a dozen pictures of the missing woman sprinkled about the room, from small framed photographs with family and friends ¾ to near-poster sized trids in hi-rez 3-D. She was an investigative reporter for one of the news vids, and most of the trids looked like publicity stills. The centerpiece was a 3-D shot of her standing ¾ microphone in-hand ¾ in front of a spray-foam police barricade while a rioting crowd overturned vehicles in the background. If the pictures were to be believed, she was a beauty. Dark hair, dark eyes, and an intensity of expression that came across as smoldering.

I turned my attention to the rest of the room. The panoramic windows opposite the door were set to opaque. I spotted the local-operating panel, walked over to it, and ran my thumb across the control sensor. The glass cycled itself from mirrored-black to full transparency.

Leaning against the windowsill, I stared out into the deepening twilight. Los Angeles flickered and shimmered twenty-three stories below me, a dazzling latticework of holograms, animated billboards, and laser imaging systems that seemed to etch the streets in grid lines of liquid neon. A hundred meters overhead, the light-show repeated itself on the underside of the dome, glimmering ghost images mirrored in faceted panes of transparent polycarbon.

Through the eastern curve of the dome, I could see cascades of falling sparks where construction robots were arc-welding high in the superstructure of the new dome. It was too dark to see the robots now, but I’d seen them plenty of times before: metallic centipede-shapes with multi-jointed appendages that could double as arms or legs.

It would be full dark soon, but the robots didn’t care. They didn’t need light to see by.

Detective Nicoletti’s voice came from behind me. "She sure as hell didn’t go out that way."

I straightened up and turned away from the window. "I’m sorry?"

Nicoletti nodded toward the window. "The Forsyth girl… She didn’t go out the window. Not that one, anyway. Or, if she did, nobody reported scraping her off the sidewalk."

I reached for my cigarettes and then caught myself; this was someone else’s apartment, and a crime scene. "So you don’t believe that Brenda Forsyth is dead?"

Nicoletti shrugged one shoulder. "She’s not classified as a homicide. Not yet, anyway. Officially, she’s just missing."

"I’ve heard the official police party-line," I said. "What do you think happened to her?"

Nicoletti stuffed his hands in the pockets of his dark blue LAPD jacket. "I’m not getting paid to do your thinking for you," he said.

I sighed. "Okay, fine. Just get me copies of the files and we’ll call it even."

Nicoletti shook his head. "The Lieutenant told me to show you the apartment; I’m showing you the fucking apartment. He didn’t say anything about giving you access to the files."

"Come on," I said. "We’re both trying to figure out what happened to Brenda Forsyth. There’s no reason we can’t work together on this."

"I had the departmental AI’s run a data pull on you," Nicoletti said. "It came back Drunk-comma ¾ Loser-comma ¾ Has-been. What makes you think the Department needs your help?"

I rubbed my left eye and thought about the cigarette again. It had been a long day and it was getting longer. "Is it absolutely necessary for you to bust my balls? Or can we skip the Bad Cop routine so that I can do my job?"

"Your job is interfering with police business," Nicoletti said. "And if your client wasn’t Ms.-Rich-Bitch-Senator’s-Wife, I’d tell you to take your job and stick it up your ass."

"Unfortunately for you," said a voice from the other end of the room, "Mr. Stalin’s client does happen to be Ms.-Rich-Bitch-Senator’s-Wife. Which pretty much means that you’d better give him whatever he asks for."

My eyes jumped to the source of the voice. Vivien Forsyth stood in the open front doorway of the apartment. Even from across the room, she was strikingly attractive. Her coal-black hair was short, but stylishly cut, and she wore a beautifully-tailored turquoise silk business suit that probably cost more than my car. She ducked under the police tape and walked toward us. The door slid shut behind her.

The fabric of her suit adjusted itself minutely as she moved, tensioning itself in some areas and relaxing in others. Not silk then, some sort of smart fabric that reacted to her every move, keeping its smoothly tailored appearance regardless of her body posture. Was there such a thing as smart silk? I had never heard of it, but then I hardly traveled in the same circles as Vivien Forsyth.

I knew from personal research that Vivien was in her late fifties, but she had the benefit of the finest surgical boutiques and genetic tailoring that money could buy. Between them, the scalpel and the test tube had halted her apparent age at about twenty-nine. Young enough to be beautiful, but old enough to be regal.

Nicoletti turned to face her. "Ms. Forsyth, I take it?"

Vivien gave him a patently false smile, flashing a set of even white teeth that undoubtedly cost more than the suit. "An astounding display of logical deduction," she said. "You must be a detective."

Nicoletti returned her fake smile with a twitch that only included half his mouth. "That’s what it says on my badge."

Vivien stopped about a meter from his position. Her gray eyes had a sparkle to them that might have been amusement, or might just as well have been annoyance. "I take it you boys aren’t getting along. Is it something serious, or are we just comparing Testosterone levels?"

I made eye-contact with Nicoletti. "Nothing we can’t work out."

Nicoletti opened his mouth, but Vivien interrupted. "Excellent. I was told we’d have full police cooperation, and I expect nothing less."

Nicoletti stiffened. "The Department can handle this case, Ma’am. Your Rent-A-Cop here is only going to get in the way."

Vivien arched an eyebrow. "I compliment you, Detective. You work quickly. You promoted me from Bitch to Ma’am in... what? About four seconds? That’s got to be some kind of record."

Nicoletti’s neck turned dark red.

Vivien smiled. "And it’s hardly fair to call Mr. Stalin a Rent-A-Cop. He’s a Detective, just like you are. He just happens to work in a private capacity."

Now, my ears were burning. This felt altogether too much like having my Kindergarten Teacher defend me from the class bully.

"Don’t try to compare my job to his," Nicoletti snapped. "This guy hasn’t got¾ "

Vivien cut him off again. "You’re right. It’s not a fair comparison, is it? Mr. Stalin has a reputation for getting results. My daughter has been missing for nearly two months, and your Department has produced no results whatsoever."

Nicoletti’s right hand jerked, and for a fraction of a second, I thought he was going to hit her. But some deep-buried survival instinct must have warned him that his career was sliding toward the abyss. He flexed his fingers slowly and then extended his hand to be shaken. "Detective Lawrence Nicoletti, Missing Persons, West Hollywood Division."

Vivien brushed his fingertips with a minimalist handshake. "Vivien Forsyth," she said. "But you can call me Ms. Rich-Bitch." She glanced around the apartment. "What happened to Becky Hollis? I thought she was working Brenda’s case."

Nicoletti started to say something, and then he caught himself. A half-second later, he said, "they moved the case to me. I usually get the ones that are at a standstill."

"I see. Detective Hollis wasn’t good enough?"

Nicoletti shook his head. "I didn’t say that, Ma’am. But, as you pointed out, she had the case for two months without making any real headway."

"So Hollis was the B-Team, and you’re the A-Team?"

The corner of Nicoletti’s mouth crooked. "I didn’t say that either," he said.

"Then what are you saying?"

"I’ve got the case, Ma’am. I’ll handle it."

Vivien nodded. "A nice, diplomatic answer. It dodges my question rather neatly. But the real answer is that someone pulled the plug on Detective Hollis. If I’m not mistaken, she’s on indefinite loan to Traffic Division."

"It’s... ah... not appropriate for me to discuss Departmental politics with a civilian," Nicoletti said. "No offense, Ma’am."

"None taken," Vivien said. "But you don’t have to worry about airing your department’s dirty laundry in front of me. I already know about Detective Hollis. I’m the one who had her taken off the case."

Nicoletti stared at Vivien.

"She was dragging her feet," Vivien said. "Refusing to share information with me. So I made a couple of phone calls. It’s amazing what a little pressure can do, if one knows where to apply it."

Nicoletti’s eyes narrowed. "Is that some kind of threat, Ma’am?"

"Consider it a prediction," Vivien said. "I predict that you will give Mr. Stalin and myself full access to my Daughter’s case files. Otherwise, I predict that you will have a long and illustrious career handing out parking citations."

Nicoletti’s voice hardened. "This is a crime scene," he said. "As senior officer present, I’m exercising my right to clear it of civilians. I’m going to have to ask you both to leave." He held out his hand. "Stalin, give me the key."

Vivien’s eyebrows went up. "Are you trying to show me the size of your testicles, Detective?"

"The key," he said again.

I dropped the key chip into his palm.

"Don’t test me," Vivien said.

Nicoletti pointed to the door. "I am formally directing you to leave the premises," he said. "If I have to ask you a third time, I’m going to consider it obstruction of an on-going police investigation. And I am formally admonishing you against making threats, however veiled, to an active duty police officer in the performance of his duties." He seemed to take particular pleasure in his last words. This was his threat, disguised even more thinly than Vivien’s had been.

Vivien stood for a second and then smiled. "I understand completely, Detective Nicoletti. Of course Mr. Stalin and I will vacate your crime scene." She nodded to me and then headed toward the door. I followed.

As soon as we were on the other side of the police tape, she stopped and pulled a slim oblong of blue plastic from her pocket. It was a phone, the exact same shade of turquoise as her silk business suit. "Wait here," she said. I nodded, and she walked to the other side of the elevator lobby to make her call.

I leaned against the wall next to the door and watched her out of the corner of my eye. It looked more like three calls, all of them extremely short. I couldn’t hear anything that she said, but it was obvious that she was pleased by the results. I fully expected her to stomp back into her daughter’s apartment and take Nicoletti by storm. Instead, she pushed the button for the elevator and beckoned me over.

I was surprised. "We’re leaving?"

She smiled. "No. We’re almost leaving."

"Why are we almost leaving?" I asked.

"Because fifty-percent of winning the battle is holding the high ground. And, in this case, the high ground is downstairs in the parking lot."

"Right," I said, without the foggiest idea of what she was talking about. "Let’s almost leave, then."

A few seconds later, the elevator doors opened. I followed her in. The doors closed smoothly, and the elevator dropped at a speed that ratcheted my adrenaline up a half-notch.

Pale blue holographic digits superimposed themselves on the burled paneling above the door and began counting down rapidly.

Vivien stabbed a button, apparently at random, somewhere in the middle floors. The elevator began to slow.

"Now, what are you doing?" I asked.

"We left quickly," Vivien said. "Detective Nicoletti needs a chance to catch up."

The elevator coasted to a stop and the doors opened. Vivien waited patiently for them to close again. After a few seconds, the elevator dropped again, still moving too fast for my stomach.

When we got to the lobby, Vivien pulled out her phone again, pressed an auto-dial key and then put the phone away without speaking into it.

We didn’t speak again until we were past the doorman, and standing under the parking shelter.

"What was the deal just now with the phone?" I asked.

"I was summoning my chauffeur," Vivien said. "Ordinarily, I do it as soon as I know that I’m leaving. But, in this instance..."

I nodded. "You’re not in any hurry, because you’re waiting for Nicoletti to catch up."

"Exactly."

I reached into the pocket of my gray windbreaker and fished out a pack of Brazilian Marlboros. "Mind if I smoke?"

Vivien looked at me out of the corner of her eye. "Suppose I say ‘yes?’"

I stuck a cigarette in my mouth and pointed across the parking lot. "Then I go stand way over there, and smoke by myself. And you can wait here for Nicoletti by yourself."

"Go ahead. Light up," Vivien said. She shook her head. "Why does every man I meet today want to show me how big his testicles are?"

I lit the cigarette and inhaled a lung full of smoke. I exhaled. "This is not about the size of my testicles. I just wanted a cigarette. Are your cancer immunizations up to date?"

She nodded.

"Then it can’t hurt you."

"I know that it can’t hurt me," she said. "I just don’t like the smell."

"Fair enough," I said. "I’ll go stink up the other side of the parking lot."

Vivien grabbed my sleeve. "You’re staying right here." She wrinkled her nose. "Why do you do that, anyway? Get your genes tweaked. You can walk away from those nasty things with no cravings at all."

"I’m a dinosaur," I said. "I resist change. My nasty little habits are damned near all that’s left of the old me."

Vivien rolled her eyes. "What in the hell does that mean?"

I shrugged. "Makes as much sense as calling this parking lot the high ground."

"Touché’," Vivien said.

I took another drag off my cigarette. "Tell me what you know about your daughter’s disappearance."

"I don’t know very much," Vivien said. "No one does. What little I do know, you’ll be able to read when you get the police files.

"Indulge me," I said.

Vivien took a deep breath, and then paused for a few seconds. "She... Brenda... came home on the evening of September seventeenth. The lobby security cameras caught a clear shot of her entering the building at six fourteen p.m.. The camera recorded her walking into the elevator ¾ then the door closed, and she was gone. Nobody’s seen a trace of her since." Vivien looked at her watch. "Fifty-four days. She’s been gone for fifty-four days already."

"I take it the security camera never caught a shot of her leaving."

"No," Vivien said quietly. "The police have been over every second of tape since Brenda’s disappearance at least twenty times. They even ran it through an AI designed to identify people by posture and body language, just in case she had decided to sneak out of the building in disguise."

"Would Brenda do something like that?"

Vivien shrugged. "She might, if she thought she had reason."

"Your daughter is an investigative reporter, right? Have you considered the possibility that she’s gone under cover to investigate a story? Maybe she’s working on something big, something with enough explosive potential to make it necessary for her to go in under cover."

Vivien’s lips turned up in a weak smile, a fraction of the confident grin she’d unleashed on Detective Nicoletti. "You certainly know how to say what a worried mother wants to hear, Mr. Stalin. That’s exactly the scenario that my feverish little mind concocted when I learned that my daughter had taken an express elevator to Never-Never Land." Vivien brushed a lock of hair away from her forehead. "It may be foolish. It may even be delusional, but it helps me get to sleep at night."

The look in Vivien’s eyes told me that it was time to redirect my line of questioning. "Let’s get back to the night of September seventeenth," I said. "Did Brenda make it up to her apartment?"

"Probably. It’s impossible to be absolutely certain, because nobody actually saw her up there, but the data files in her apartment’s AI were tampered with on the night she disappeared. Twelve hours worth of recordings have been erased ¾ starting about six hours before Brenda walked through the lobby, and ending about six hours later. The police think something happened in her apartment that night, and someone erased the AI’s files so we couldn’t find out what it was."

"Maybe we should call in a data-retrieval expert," I said. "Digital information can leave electromagnetic trace evidence, even after it’s been erased. With the right equipment, a skilled technician can read those traces. It might be possible to resurrect some of the data."

Vivien shook her head. "The police called in a whole team of data retrieval experts. The files weren’t just erased; they were eradicated, using a custom-tailored virus that wrote and re-wrote nonsense data to the deleted file sectors hundreds of times. Any trace data that might have been left in the AI’s memory is long gone. I hired a few experts of my own, to get a second opinion. They spent a week on Brenda’s AI. They provided me with a nicely bound report of their findings, essentially restating what the police computer evidence team had already told me: the data was irretrievable. The bill they sent me was positively obscene."

"Somebody definitely doesn’t want us to know what happened in that apartment on the night of the seventeenth."

Vivien nodded. "I would say that’s a safe assumption."

A sleek green Dornier hover-limousine slid up to the curb. It stopped with the right rear door carefully aligned with the tips of Vivien’s shoes. The big car settled onto its ground-effects apron with a sigh that was barely audible. The blowers were whisper-quiet, and I couldn’t hear the car’s turbines at all. Hover-cars are noisy by nature. It took serious money to build a car that quiet, and equally serious money to maintain the kind of near-silence that the Rich were apparently accustomed to.

The gull-wing door opened with a muted hiss, folding itself up and out of Vivien’s way. The interior was an elegant womb of dark green diamond-tucked leather. The rear seat was more like an overstuffed couch than anything I would expect to see in a car ¾ however luxurious. With the addition of legs, it would have been at home in a Victorian parlor.

I looked at Vivien again. "The fact that Brenda’s AI was tampered with doesn’t necessarily rule out the idea that she arranged her own disappearance. If she were planning to drop out of sight, she might well have zapped her own files to cover her trail."

Vivien got in and slipped over to the far side of the pseudo-couch. "A possibility that I’ve considered," she said. She patted the leather beside her and cocked her head impishly. "Do I have to issue a formal invitation?"

"My car is parked over there," I said. "Anyway, I thought we weren’t leaving."

"We’re not. This is how we’re going to almost leave."

I took another hit from my cigarette and held it up as I exhaled. "Can we almost leave in a minute? I’m not done with this yet."

"Put it out," Vivien said. "At what I’m paying you, I’m reasonably certain that you can afford another one."

I dropped the cigarette and ground it out with my toe. "All right. But this is going on my expense account." I climbed in. The leather was even softer than it looked.

"Leave the door open," Vivien said.

"Of course, Madam," said a disembodied voice.

I glanced up toward the front of the car. There was no driver. In place of the traditional wraparound instrument panel and control yoke was another Victorian couch. An AI driver. In my mind, the already-staggering cost estimate for the car surged upward by an entire income-bracket.

"I thought the Rich preferred human service to machines," I said.

Vivien brushed a lock of raven-colored hair behind her ear. "As a rule, I do. But human servants will talk. I don’t always care to advertise where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing."

I nodded.

She turned her face toward me, the first signs of strain glimmering in her gray eyes. "Can you really find my daughter?"

"There’s a good chance," I said. "I’m pretty good at this kind of thing, but I don’t work miracles. Right now, I’m just trying to get a feel for things. I don’t know enough about your daughter ¾ or the circumstances of her disappearance ¾ to give you a better answer than that. If I reach a point where I don’t think I can help, I’ll let you know. I don’t pad my expenses, and I’m not in the habit of wasting my clients’ money."

"I knew that before I hired you," Vivien said. "I made a few phone calls. That’s one of the reasons I chose you over the big firms."

"One of the reasons? What ¾ pray-tell ¾ is the other reason, or reasons?"

She dipped into a side pocket of her silk jacket and pulled out one of my business cards. It was a simple affair, black lettering on white cardboard. No holograms, no active-matrix graphics, not even a logo.

My phone number and address were on the back.

Vivien fanned herself theatrically with the card. "It certainly wasn’t your stellar advertising campaign."

I shrugged. "The people who need me seem to find me. The ones who don’t, go to somebody else."

I looked back toward the doors of the building. Nicoletti was coming down the front steps, two at a time. "Speaking of advertising, your most recent campaign seems to have snared a customer."

Nicoletti covered the distance between the stairs and the curb in about three long strides. He stopped when he got to the car, took a deep breath, and leaned over to glare through the open doorway. He was coming to Vivien on her turf, now, and the look on his face said that he knew it. He let out the breath. "All right, Ms. Forsyth, it looks like your telephone tips heavier on the scales of justice than my badge. For the moment, anyway."

"I expect full access to the files," Vivien said, "and anything else pertaining to my daughter’s case."

"Of course," Nicoletti said quietly.

"You will extend that courtesy to Mr. Stalin, as well."

The muscles in Nicoletti’s jaw tensed visibly. "I understand."

"Good. You can begin by giving Mr. Stalin a copy of the computer files."

"I don’t carry them with me," Nicoletti said.

Vivien turned her wrist over and glanced at her watch, a slim Breguet on a braided gold bracelet. "I didn’t really expect that you would," she said. "I’ll send a bonded courier to your office in two hours. I trust you’ll have a copy ready when he arrives?"

"Yes Ma’am."

"Perhaps you’d better make Mr. Stalin a copy of the door key, as well," she said. "He may want to spend some time there, to get the scent of the case, or whatever it is that Private Detectives do."

"Your daughter’s apartment is still classified as a crime scene," Nicoletti said.

"Only because it’s a high-profile case. If my daughter had been a mid-grade computer programmer for one of the multinationals, you would have turned her apartment back over to the property manager a month ago. We both know that preserving a crime scene for this long in a missing persons case would be unheard of ¾ if the victim’s family didn’t have money and power. Well, we do have money. And we do have power. I’ll get that key, Detective. I’d rather not run over you to do it, but I will get it. Do you understand?"

"I... understand," Nicoletti said.

Vivien nodded. "Excellent."

Nicoletti paused for a second. "Why are you doing this?"

"I want my daughter back, Vivien said flatly.

"Obviously," Nicoletti said. "But I don’t understand why you aren’t letting us handle it. I thought you guys were big time pro-cop. It seems like I can’t turn on the vid without catching a thirty second spot of your husband painting himself up like Mr. Law and Order. Cops have a friend in the Government. Is that all just bullshit?"

"Not at all," Vivien said. "My husband is quite sincere; I assure you. He really does think he’s a one man crusade against crime. But he has his agenda, and I have mine."

Nicoletti’s eyebrows went up. "So, as far as your concerned, cops can pretty much stuff it?"

Vivien flashed him a sardonic little smile. "I didn’t say anything like that. I happen to agree with about ninety percent of the Senator’s political beliefs. You and your fellow officers are overworked, underpaid, and improperly supported. Despite that, you manage to do a pretty damned good job most of the time. I respect that, and I am grateful to you for doing it."

Nicoletti cocked his head and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. "But you’re still going to yank my chain? That doesn’t make sense."

Vivien shook her head. "I have no desire to yank your chain, Detective. But I would dance naked in the streets if I thought it would bring Brenda back even ten seconds sooner. If you find her, I will be forever in your debt. Mr. Stalin is here in case you don’t find her. Think of him as a frightened mother’s insurance policy."

Nicoletti turned his eyes to me. "I think you’re throwing your money away," he said.

"It’s my money," Vivien said. "I’m certainly entitled to throw it away."

"I guess so," Nicoletti said.

"I know so," Vivien said. "Now, unless you have something other than opinion to add to this conversation, that will be all."

Nicoletti stared for a second before it occurred to him that he was actually being dismissed. He straightened up, turned on his heel, and began walking toward his car.

When he was out of earshot, I nodded in his direction, "you could have gotten the files without stepping on him. You could have made a single phone call to one of your gophers, and gotten what you wanted in half the time."

"Of course," Vivien said. "In fact, I already have a copy of the files, current up to just a couple of days ago."

"You just wanted to kick him in the balls?"

The expression on Vivien’s face said that I had missed some crucial point in her exchange with Nicoletti. She paused for a few seconds. "You’re armed at the moment, are you not?"

I pulled back the left side of my windbreaker to reveal the 12mm Blackhart riding in my shoulder holster.

"Could you shoot Detective Nicoletti from here?"

"Why on earth would I want to do that?"

"I didn’t ask if you would," Vivien said. "I asked if you could."

I looked through the window at Nicoletti’s retreating back. "Yes," I said.

"Could you hit him?"

I gauged the distance and his dwindling size. "Probably."

"How?" she asked.

"I don’t understand," I said.

"How would you do it? Or, more precisely, what gives you the ability to do it? I assume there is a certain amount of skill involved."

"There is," I said. "And more than a little practice."

Vivien said, "exactly. Your weapon ¾ one of them, anyway ¾ is that cannon you call a pistol. You know how to aim it and you know when to pull the trigger."

I nodded slowly.

"I have my own weapons," she said. "I know how to aim them, and I know when to pull the trigger."

She sighed. "I didn’t enjoy rubbing Detective Nicoletti’s nose in the dirt, but someone should have explained the rules to him as soon as he took over the case. Apparently that didn’t happen, so it’s actually fortuitous that he decided to be difficult early-on. It made his education quick and relatively painless. Better for all of us. He’ll be petulant for a while ¾ his ego demands it ¾ but I believe you’ll find him cooperative."

I nodded. "I see. And how will you handle me, when I become difficult?"

"I have no intention of handling you," she said. "As long as you’re working to get my daughter back, you can prance around in women’s underwear and act like a flaming son of a bitch. I don’t care in the least. And, I frankly don’t care whose throats you have to cut along the way."

I climbed out of the car and stood up. "Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that."

I took a step back and watched while the door closed and the apron inflated. Vivien’s limo glided away from the curb.

My own car was a six-year old Pontiac Tempest with fading metallic blue paint. It was a good car, not quite the opposite end of the spectrum from Vivien’s limousine, but a pretty far cry nonetheless. The alarm system emitted a warning bleep to let me know that I was entering the car’s sensor perimeter. I pulled out my the key chip and let my car scan it so the poor dumb machine would know that Daddy was home. It bleeped again, a friendly welcoming tone this time, and then it buzzed once to tell me that someone had been close enough to my car to make physical contact. I waited for a few seconds, but there were no more of the ominous buzzes, telling me that my unknown visitor hadn’t actually attempted to enter my car, or open any of its maintenance accesses.

I looked the car over carefully. My visitor had plastered a bright orange decal to the upper edge of the windshield. It was a traffic ticket, citing me for parking in the Residents-Only section of the lot. (I was parked in Brenda Forsyth’s spot, on the theory that she wouldn’t be using it any time soon.) The signature block at the bottom of the decal was signed by Officer L. V. Nicoletti. Under it, he had written ‘Just practicing for my new career.’

I knew better than to mess with the decal. It would only yield to a tailored molecular solvent that was jealously guarded by the police. Any other sort of tampering would release an electro-chemical reaction that would permanently etch the LAPD logo into the glass, rendering the car undriveable. In addition, the orange pigment in the decal was a chemical taggant that would indelibly dye the fingers of anyone stupid enough to meddle with it, making them easily identifiable to the police. Supposedly, the chemical taggant was so microscopically fine that it could penetrate the pores of just about any gloves made. I didn’t know if that last part was true, but the rumor was usually enough to keep casual vandals from messing with the decals on other people’s cars with the intent of ruining their windshields.

A small rectangle in the upper right hand corner of the decal was a photo-active matrix, showing the date and time ¾ November 11, 2055 / 7:51 p.m. ¾ followed by a string of changing digits that advised me of the number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds remaining until this citation expired. If the decal wasn’t removed before the counter reached zero, in thirty days (minus a few minutes), the electro chemical reaction would self-activate, melting the accusatory LAPD logo into my windshield.

I slipped the key chip through the lock sensor. Unlike Vivien’s obedient gull-wings, my door did not fawn all over itself getting out of my way. But it did unlock itself, which was close enough for me. I opened the door and climbed in.

Seen from inside the car, the decal was located high enough above my line of sight not to present an obstruction to my driving, but it did keep drawing my eyes back to it, the way that a sore tooth attracts your tongue no matter how hard you try to ignore it. I’d pay it. I had no choice, as Nicoletti very well knew. It was hardly a crippling shot, but his message was clear enough. Two messages, actually. First: when this case was over, Nicoletti would still be a cop. And second: Vivien Forsyth’s umbrella of money and power would not cover me forever.

I plugged the key chip into its slot on the control yoke. The instrument panel flickered green as the plasma display flared to life. The computer beeped and gronked for about ten seconds as it ran auto-diagnostics and sequenced the car's various systems on line. The turbines wailed as they spun up. They seemed overly-loud after the well-heeled silence of Vivien’s showboat.

Nicoletti’s ticket hung at the upper edge of my vision. I could handle him. I could handle this case. Money, power, and bullshit aside, it was a simple missing persons job. How hard could it be?

I punched a music chip into the stereo slot: a collection of Blues tunes that I had transferred onto microchip myself, from a forty-year old compact disk. As near as I could determine, I was one of about nine people left who still listened to the Blues. There’s not enough of a market for anyone to turn a profit by re-mastering the likes of Lonny Johnson, Rusty Parker, or Billie Holiday. So, the few copies that are left are all amateur re-recordings made by dinosaurs like yours-truly.

I pressed the play button, and the whine of the turbines got lost in the buttery-sandpaper voice of John Lee Hooker, singing about cheap whiskey and love-gone-wrong. I fished out a cigarette to finish setting the mood.

There are people in this business who swear that they can smell trouble coming. Who knows? It might even be true. Perhaps the twenty-first century edition of Homo Sapiens has clawed its way far enough up the Natural Selection curve to evolve a really useful pro-survival trait, like a hyper-acute intuition for danger. A tight little bundle of neural receptors somewhere deep in the medial forebrain, calibrated to the twin carrier frequencies of adrenaline and bad news. Or ¾ perhaps it’s something more ancient ¾ some primal remnant of the animal hind-brain that can snuffle out stray whiffs of disaster like an olfactronic sensor vacuuming up the air and straining it for microscopic traces of explosives or drugs. Or, maybe it’s all just wishful thinking; a natural human resistance to the idea that we are frail creatures clinging to existence in a universe that can blind-side any one of us without warning.

Whatever its origin, if such a thing as the mysterious danger-sense even existed, I obviously didn’t possess it. If I had, I would have driven away right then... Away from Vivien Forsyth ¾ away from her daughter ¾ away from the entire case, and everything that was coming with it.

I punched the button that kicked in the blowers. The Pontiac rose softly as the apron inflated. I backed slowly out of Brenda Forsyth’s parking slot and drove into the night.