DETECTIVE MOXLEY, Part 2: “Everybody’s Sorry”
Moxley sat in a robot diner on Wernerplasse, rolling a flavored vapor tube from one corner of his mouth to the other. Before him on the table lay a pocket tab. He was using it to scroll through surveillance feeds.
It made no sense. He simply could not wrap his brain around it. Ray Neiring was boring’s next door neighbor. The man was the definition of “by the book,” never straying any farther from the rules than Moxley could tempt him. So why was Mox now scanning through half a dozen recordings that showed Ray Neiring breaking the law?
His phone vibrated against his thigh. It had been doing that all morning. The on-off vibration pattern was for contacts he had blacklisted. Bill collectors and lawyers, for the most part. He knew a moment’s anxiety as he considered that Rena Terry’s attorneys had finally tracked down his new number.
Moxley sighed and swallowed the last of his bulb of coffee. It was burned and tasted of plastic. He drank it anyway and continued ignoring his phone. His eyes were locked on the tab.
In one low-res crawl, Neiring was shown breaking into the home of his supervisor, a government inspector named Jeffrey Teller. Apparently Neiring had ransacked Teller’s residence and then fled. He was shown in a series of still shots from a remote camera in a robot bodega a few blocks from Teller’s house. It was Neiring, all right, and he was using a prybar to pop open a sucrose-water dispenser. The stills showed him filling his pockets and then leaving without even trying the chit module built into the machine.
Who would knock over a convenience store for sugar water and ignore cash?
Another feed, predictably, showed Neiring smashing a slidewalk protein bar vendor. The recording was from the vendor’s own built-in camera, so the recording was at a crazy angle. There was no doubt that it was Ray, though. Moxley couldn’t figure the dead-eyed expression on his friend’s face. Neiring ripped open the vendor’s housing and took a stack of protein bars, but he never changed expression. He might have been standing in a pay toilet for all the interest he showed in what he was doing.
“What were you after, Ray?” Moxley said quietly. “What were you into?”
Moxley’s first thought had been drugs. A hidden addiction that ramped up quickly and unpredictably would explain Neiring’s bizarre behavior, but drugs weren’t Ray Neiring. Ray looked askance at Moxley’s incipient alcoholism; there was no way he was nursing a Sleep habit. Was it something else, then? Maybe custom pharmaceuticals? Designer drugs could produce a strange mixture of symptoms, and that would fit, but Mox didn’t like how that smelled. It was an easy answer, but it was wrong. His gut refused the easy out.
Moxley tucked the tab inside his coat, swallowed the last of his burnt coffee, and began making a list in his head. He had three more records that also showed Neiring committing crimes. But there were no public tickets in the system on Ray, no alerts or lookouts. That, too, made no sense… and he could think of only one explanation.
Moxley’s phone trembled in his pocket. He fished it out and put it on the table. A tiny holographic carat appeared in the air above it. Mox thumbed the face of the phone to chase the icon away. That was just the alarm system built into his office. His security system had just discharged another tray of nails at a would-be intruder. He was going to catch hell from his landlady about that. He thumbed the phone again.
“Memo,” he said. “Plaster dip.” The phone trembled when he tapped it. He dumped it back in his pocket, stood, and threw a plastic chit on the tabletop before leaving the diner.
He had too much time to think about Ray as he drove across town. The car belched smoke from both bow and stern. Its AI was permanently brain damaged. Moxley didn’t need the navigation system, though; he knew Hongkongtown like a pedicab driver.
Traffic was the usual riot of hydrogen bikes, runabouts, and pedal carts, liberally mixed with pedestrians who clearly believed their lives were charmed. The average Hongkongtown foot commuter simply ignored anything on more than two wheels. Street etiquette said it was the bigger guy’s job to avoid anything smaller than he was. There was something vaguely maritime about it.
“Larboard on Dragon face,” whispered the car from a taped-over speaker in the dash. “Mandy pumpkins meters pancakes with a safe and legal u-turn.” Mox had tried dumping an entire mango shake down there once. He had long ago disconnected all of the drive circuits, so at least the damned thing couldn’t lock the brakes or send him careening into a building. He also kept pasting layers of tape to the speaker to muffle the car’s mindless ravings. The AI, stubbornly, refused to stop talking.
“Shaddap,” said Moxley, not without affection.
“Shaddap,” said the car in his voice. “Gimme three soy dogs to go.” That was yesterday’s lunch order. The car’s audio pickups would occasionally isolate voices inside and outside the vehicle, record them, and play them back. Last week, the car had scared the daylights out of him by playing back a snatch of street noise replete with a hooker shouting bloody murder at her pimp. Unfortunately, he couldn’t simply find the AI and yank it. The old car’s ignition and electrical system was wired through the Automotive Intelligence, so jerking the thing out of there would leave the vehicle dead. Replacing it was also out of the question. This was a Monkton Dayliner, a model that was twenty years obsolete. Replacement parts cost a fortune and a salvaged AI module was several tropical vacations out of his price range.
He cut through the outer ring of the Redlight, trying to avoid the worst of the morning commute volumes. On Vega Ave, a Human Services van was parked in front of Madame Oy’s. Moxley wondered if they were raiding the joint or simply patronizing it. He made a mental note to avoid the place either way.
It was mid-morning by the time he pulled into a reserved spot in front of Building 801. This was one of several bureaucratic waystations ringing Hongkongtown. It was also where Raymond Neiring had worked and, he realized, where Ray’s official-use vehicle might still be parked. Maybe he could find it and poke through it. There had to be a way. That was not why he had come, however. He was looking for—
“Violation,” said the parking robot that rolled up to the crumpled gold nose of his Dayliner. “This is a non-parking area. Violation. Violation.”
“Six one,” said Moxley. “Five one. Four Three. Override beta beta sixkiller.”
The robot buzzed and shuddered as if offended. Finally, it withdrew, rolling noisily away on the slidewalk. Moxley grinned and spat out his spent vapor tube. He ambled up the stairs, entered the building, and managed a reasonable approximation of haste as he made his way to a cubicle at the rear of the building’s desk farm.
Every person in this building was a government inspector. That meant any one of them could arrest Moxley if they saw a reason to do it. Moxley waited for the man seated in front of him to turn around, to acknowledge his presence. He quickly grew impatient.
“Hey,” he said.
“I’m busy,” said the inspector.
“Fine,” said Moxley. “Then you’re under arrest.”
The inspector stopped pawing at his touch screen. Mox watched his shoulders tense. The inspector was wearing a pistol on his right side, under his shirt. It would be something small, probably a government-issue compact loading explosive rounds. Deadly enough from across a room. Certain death at the width of a cubicle.
“What,” said the inspector, slowly turning in his chair, “do you want, Moxley?” The ID badge he wore identified him as Aldo Shebeiskowski. The holographic image of Shebeiskowski’s face was several years too young.
“Hello, Sheb,” said Moxley. “Nice to see you, too. So sorry to hear about your best friend losing his clowns and running amok in the streets. How can I help you?”
Shebieskowski glared at him, then sighed. “All right,” he said. “All right. Point taken. I really was sorry to hear about Ray, Mox. What do you need?”
“How easy is it to delete something from the city network?” asked Mox.
The inspector blinked. “How… what? Why do you want to know that?”
“I have this problem,” said Moxley. “My best friend is lying scattered to ashes on the floor of a storage locker.”
“You don’t have any friends,” said Shebieskowski. “And I told you I was sorry about Ray.”
“Yeah, you did,” said Mox. “You’re sorry. I’m sorry. Everybody’s sorry. But that’s not going to scoop him up and pour him back into his pants, is it? Ray was on a rampage in the last week of his life, Sheb.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So,” said Mox, “I want to know why you helped cover it up.”