Deadstock

CHAPTER NINETEEN interviews

On his vehicle's sound system Stake played a jazz piece called "Yesterdays" from Twentieth Century trumpet player Clifford Brown. It was melancholy, and melancholy music from any era or planet, for that matter, was all right by him. He was piloting the hovercar down a wide, multilane ramp into Punktown's subterranean sector.

Caren Bistro had told him that Brat Gentile belonged to a gang down here in Subtown. The B Level of Folger Street. "The Folger Street Somethings," she had said.

Above him now, a solid sky with clouds of steam hissing out of the crisscrossed network of pipes up there. Stake slowed the car as the ramp fed into a grid of streets and the early morning traffic along this one congealed to an ooze. Among the work-bound pedestrians walking along the sidewalk he spotted several that glowed a luminous blue. Each of them turned its head to smile directly at him. One of the translucent blue figures stood at the curb with her thumb sticking out as if to hitchhike, her long hair blowing dreamily. It was then that a whispery voice spoke to him inside his vehicle.

"Open your world to Seance Friends-for the strongest, clearest Ouija channels in Paxton." He had left the holographic hitchhiker behind him a moment ago, but now she stepped up to the curb ahead of him again, her eyes seeming to look into his. The voice went on, "Make a special friend who can tell you about the long past, or even about your own future."

"Bastards," Stake said. It was legal for such advertisements to intrude into one's sound system, justified as "ambient sound," like hearing someone else's radio blast from another car. The ad didn't replace his music, but overlapped it, and that was invasive enough. It continued with a testimonial: the voice of a young girl.

"My spirit guide told me I'll die before I'm twenty, so your next ghost friend could be me!" She giggled.

Stake shut his sound system off altogether.

Further along, he made his way through a neighborhood of gray-skinned, blue-turbaned Kalians. Tenements and shops had hung black banners outside, and there was a group of protestors that shouted at the passing vehicles. Several helmeted and armored riot forcers made sure they didn't overflow into the street itself to block traffic. Stake glanced out at their furious, black-eyed faces. "What's their problem now?" he muttered.

He remembered what Janice had told him about the Kalian deity called Ugghiutu. "Sort of the

Kalian God and Satan in one body." One of the so-called "Outsiders," exiled from this dimension but waiting to return to power. He thought of the former owners of Alvine Products, their lunatic plan to design and grow a horde of giant monsters to reclaim the universe.

Despite the strict religious beliefs of most Kalians, Stake had never encountered a neighborhood that didn't have its street gang, and he soon noted a cluster of Kalian boys who wore blue satin jackets to match their turbans, which they wore facing backwards. But these were not the gang kids he was searching for. He continued on, until he arrived at last on Folger Street.

Stake cruised along the entire length of the extensive street. When he finally reached what appeared to be its end, he turned around and came back from the other direction.

He didn't spot a single gang kid. That is to say, he saw no apparent gang outfits, and what was the point of being in a gang if you didn't flaunt it, announce it in some way, brazen and proud?

Stake didn't know the full name of the gang Gentile belonged to, but he thought he knew gang graffiti when he saw it. On the face of one tenement building, in between two windows, someone had sprayed a very large, stylized dog's head baring its fangs, in red paint that glowed like neon. Though they didn't exhibit any obvious gang peacockery, there were three tough-looking kids sitting on the tenement's front steps, apparently in no hurry to be off to school.

Stake found a parking spot along the curb a little ways up, and then backtracked to the tenement building on foot. With animal-keen instincts, the kids noticed his approach right away. He hadn't been able to think of any guise he might have called up, seated in his car and browsing through the faces on his wrist comp, in order to gain their confidence. Couldn't think of an actor's role he might adopt. And so he figured he'd just jump right into it without pretense.

"Hey," he said in greeting as he came to the steps. The preteens looked a little too young to be in a full-blown street gang; maybe a tadpole gang. But you never knew. The adolescent gang called the Martians-after the god of war-was one of the deadliest in Punktown. "Do you guys know a kid named Brat Gentile? I'm a friend of a friend and nobody seems to know where's he got off to."

"Oh, please, officer," said one of the three, a Choom girl with her spiky hair dyed a metallic silver, her long mouth in a smirk. As young as she was, she'd had her eyelids surgically altered so as to look exotically slanted.

"No, no, I'm not a forcer. I'm a friend of Brat's girlfriend, Krimson. Krimson's gone missing, too."

"I don't know who the hell you're yakking about."

"Brat's in a gang from around here, the Folger Street Something-or-others."

"Snarlers," said one of the two boys seated beside the girl. "The Folger Street Snarlers."

"Snarlers. So do you know Brat?" he asked the boy.

"I'm sure I'd know his face if I saw him. But I haven't seen him or any of the Snarlers in a while." "What do you mean?"

The second boy spoke up. "It isn't just your friend of a friend that's missing, Mr. Forcer. Nobody's seen any of the Folger Street Snarlers for days."

"Mr. Gentile?"

Stake almost said Genitalia, because it had been running through his mind that Caren Bistro had said that was Krimson Tableau's playful nickname for Brat. Caren had also said, in Janice's classroom, that Brat had a brother whom she had contacted while trying to find out what had happened to her friend. Stake had been grateful to find his phone number listed on the net.

"Who is this?" asked the face on the hovercar's console screen. Theo Gentile appeared to be in his mid-twenties, and wary didn't begin to address the look in his eyes.

"My name is Jeremy Stake, sir. I'm a hired detective. I'm looking for a girl named Krimson Tableau, and I understand that your brother-"

"I don't know anyone by that name!" Gentile snapped.

"I'm told he calls her Smirk. She's your brother's girlfriend."

"I don't know where she is. I don't even know where my brother is! Who hired you?" Stake began to stammer a reply, but Gentile cut him off. "I just got back from Miniosis. You go tell your boss-I don't know anything!"

Theo Gentile disconnected. With a sigh, Stake started up the vehicle and pulled out into traffic. In his earlier cruising he had already established where the local police precinct house was located.

"It wasn't my turn to babysit the Folger Street Snarlers today," growled the beefy forcer behind the counter, not even bothering to look up at Stake. "Why don't you go earn your dirty money, gumshoe, instead of asking us to do your work for you?"

"Gumshoe?" Stake murmured to himself with a disgusted smile.

But a woman at a desk behind the burly officer looked up and said to him, "Eric mentioned something about the Snarlers not being around." Then to Stake: "Want to talk to Detective Moudry, sir? He's had a lot of dealings with the gangs around here."

"Yeah," said the first forcer. "He even took a bullet in the neck from one of the Snarlers. He had to kill the blasting punk."

Stake ignored him, said to the woman, "Yes, please, if it isn't too much trouble."

She got the plainclothesman on the phone, and a minute later he stepped out from some inner office and gestured for the woman to buzz Stake through the security door. Stake followed him back toward his office.

"Yeah," Moudry said, glancing at Stake with a cop's appraising eye. "It's funny. I'm hearing the Snarlers haven't been seen, and a couple of their family and friends are starting to get edgy."

"What do you think about that?"

"I don't think they've all been killed in some big street war; that'd be hard to keep from being noticed. I just been figuring that they're lying low for some reason. Maybe they're keeping their heads down because some other gang is gunning for them. They had a bad scuffle with a Tikkihotto gang called the Morlocks last year."

"It just seems funny to me, because I'm looking for the girlfriend of one of them and she's missing, too. A girl by the name of Krimson Tableau, nicknamed Smirk by her boyfriend."

"Don't know her," Moudry said, opening his door for Stake, "but wherever they're hiding, I guess she must be hiding, too." They both seated themselves. "What's her boyfriend's name?"

"Brat Gentile."

"Gentile," Moudry echoed, doing a search through his computer files. "Hm. I don't have an arrest record for him, but I do have his name here on a list I made of the current gang members." Then a light seemed to come on in some dusty back storage room of the detective's mind. "Ohh, Gentile. Yeah, yeah. I know his brother, Theo. Theo was in the Snarlers himself for years. These kids come and go, so it's hard for me to keep up with all of them. But we got a history, the Snarlers and me."

"The man up front said you got shot in a scrap with them one time."

Moudry waved it away like it was all just part of the game. "That was nine years ago. Javier Dias wasn't even the leader back then."

"He's the current leader?"

"Yeah. Not a total scumbag, as far as these things go. But I had him in not too long ago on suspicion of a warehouse fire. These punks get thrown a bone sometimes for torching places in insurance scams." He punched some keys. "This is him." He swiveled his monitor for Stake to see. An interrogation room vid played on its screen.

The camera showed Moudry standing, sipping a coffee, while a young man sat behind a table with a water bottle in front of him. The camera zoomed in close on Javier Dias: wiry, tightly wound, with a pompadour of curly black hair, and wearing a white leather jacket. When he spoke, he talked out of one side of his mouth and through gritted teeth in an effect that seemed as much like partial paralysis as it did toughness.

"You're wasting your time bringing me in here about this dung, Moudry," Dias said to the detective with familiarity. "Why you got to be harassing me all the time? You still hurting from that slug in your neck? That wasn't me, remember?"

"I remember. And I remember putting a slug of my own through Banshee's skull for it."

"Yeah, yeah, all in the past, right?"

"Exactly. I'm talking about now. I'm talking about the fire in the old Magog Industries warehouse."

Moudry stopped the vid and started to say something, but Stake asked, "Would it be okay if I saw a little more of that?"

The plainclothesman shrugged, and continued playing back the recording.

Earlier, while pretending to adjust his shirt collar, Stake had covertly captured some still shots of Detective Moudry on his wrist comp, thinking that his face-familiar to the Folger Street Snarlers and perhaps their kin-might come in handy. But now, he started taking a new series of shots, from the screen in front of him.

Brat Gentile didn't have an address of his own listed in any current directory, but when going on the net for his brother's phone number Stake had found that Theo Gentile and his wife lived on Folger Street themselves.

On the front steps of Gentile's tenement building, Stake depressed the key for his apartment number until a familiar face appeared on the monitor screen, warier than ever. "What?" it barked.

On his own monitor screen right now, Theo Gentile would be seeing the attractive face of a young man with high cheekbones, who talked out of one side of his mouth and through gritted teeth in an effect that seemed as much like partial paralysis as it did toughness. "Hey man, let me in, quick. It's Javier."

But both the picture and sound would be shot with distorting static. It was not a malfunction, much as Stake hoped that would appear to be the case. He owned a cheap multipurpose scanning device that he had brought with him from his car's glove compartment. He was holding this instrument just below the security system's lens. He had used it numerous times before so he knew its field, as presently adjusted, would disrupt the image with snow and distort the audio as well. Gentile would be able to see his transfigured face-but not too clearly. In addition, he wore a ski hat over his hair and stood close to the lens so it wouldn't be noticed that he did not possess the trademark white leather jacket of the Folger Street Snarlers.

"Wh… Javier?"

"Javier Dias, you stupid fuck!"

Gentile's wariness didn't seem to be assuaged much. "Javier, man, what's the blast? Where's my brother?"

"That's what I want to tell you. Hurry up before somebody sees me out here. There's this creepy guy going around who says he's a private detective, asking about me."

"Yeah, yeah, that wanker called me, too!"

An indicator light went from red to green and with a click the door came unlocked.

Gentile had opened the door to apartment 12 on the second floor and Stake had stepped inside before the young man could take in that, in addition to being without his leather jacket, this Javier was several inches taller than he should be. Stake saw the pistol in Gentile's other hand and went for it immediately, seizing his wrist and spinning him around in a move he'd learned in combat training, then slamming Gentile's front against the closed door. Gentile cried out, tried to pull the trigger in an attempt to at least shoot Stake in the leg, but Stake bent his wrist back almost to the point of breaking and the pistol clattered to the floor. Stake drew his own weapon, the Darwin .55 that Mr. Jones and his men had considerately returned to him before leaving his apartment, and let Gentile feel its touch behind his ear.

"Wanker, huh?" Stake said.

"Javier, please, man, please," Gentile blurted.

"Calm down," Stake told him, no longer imitating Javier Dias's voice as he recalled it from the police vid. "I'm not here to hurt you. I only want to ask some questions, then I'll leave."

"You're not Javier."

"And you're not your brother, but you'll do. Where's your wife?" "At work!"

"Good. I'm going to let you go, and you're going to sit. You sit nice and I won't have to be impolite anymore. Got it?"

Stake kicked the dropped pistol away, then stepped back to retrieve it and to let go of Theo Gentile. He turned around, furious and frightened and confused. He repeated, "You aren't Javier."

"I'm that private detective who called you earlier. If you'd talked to me then I wouldn't have to be visiting you now."

"I'll call the forcers on you, dung-licker!"

"Go ahead, I just came from there. Talked to an old friend of yours named Moudry. Anyway, it's in your best interest to cooperate, Gentile. We both want the same thing: to find your brother Brat."

"And what do you want him for?"

Stake motioned with his gun. "Come on, sit down."

Gentile hesitated. "How is it you look like my friend Javier now?"

"A little genetic trickery of mine. If it starts to slip, don't get spooked."

In the next room, Gentile complied and lowered himself into a chair. "You work for Adrian Tableau," he said, "don't you?"

"Hands on the armrests," Stake ordered, afraid another weapon might be tucked in the cushions. "No, I don't, but I am looking for his daughter, Krimson. So you admit now that you know she's involved with your brother."

"I don't know anything about that girl; I only met her a couple times."

"Why are you so scared, Mr. Genitalia? Who are you hiding from?"

"Hey, like I told you on the phone, my wife and I just came home from visiting with her family in Miniosis. I get back here and my brother is gone. Not only that, but his whole gang is gone. I don't know if another gang did something to them, or if it has to do with that girl's father, or what. So I been watching my ass until I found out more. I didn't want my wife to return to work but she thinks I'm overreacting. I don't think she's taking this seriously enough!"

"So Brat told you Krimson's father is a dangerous man."

"Yeah. He said her dad would highly disapprove of him going with her. You sure you don't work for him?"

"No," Stake assured him, "I wasn't hired by him. I was hired by the father of a schoolmate of Krimson's. I believe Krimson stole this girl's kawaii-doll, and I'm trying to get it back."

"What? That's all you're really looking for?"

"Yes. It's an expensive doll. To tell you the truth, I don't care about Tableau's daughter, except that I feel she's the one who stole this doll."

"Yeah, she took it," Gentile said, not looking ready to believe that the bio-engineered toy was Stake's only concern.

Just like that-confirmed at last. "Did she tell you that herself, or was it your brother?"

"Brat told me. He called me when I was in Miniosis, because he was upset. She ran out on him or something and he said it was strange."

"Ran out on him? Tell me what he said. About the doll. everything."

"Then I have to show you his room to explain. Can I get up?"

"Okay. Slowly."

Gentile rose from the chair, rubbing his twisted wrist with a bitter look of accusation thrown Stake's way. Stake followed him with his gun held loosely, but ready, as the former gang member led him into a little hallway off the living room. He opened one of the hall's doors, and the two men entered Brat Gentile's bedroom.

The walls were lost in a dizzying kaleidoscope of graffiti, like dozens of Jackson Pollock paintings superimposed over each other, some in neon colors that glowed in the dark. Stake nearly winced. There were fake painted windows and bogus open doors that looked out on surreal savannahs or ocean depths, populated by fanciful animals. Here and there posters of music stars or favorite movies added another layer to the chaos, including a poster of a Kalian glebbi grazing on a plain. Stake remembered the live specimen he had seen in Adrian Tableau's little menagerie.

"My brother loves animals," Gentile said, watching Stake.

"And he loves Krimson Tableau, too, huh?"

"Let's get it clear: it was her idea to take that doll. Brat had nothing to do with that. He told me so, and he had no reason to lie to me about it."

"But did he say if her father put her up to it?"

"Why would he do that?"

"The father of the doll's owner is a business rival of Tableau's."

"Huh. I don't know anything about that. What I got from it is that Smirk just did it because she hates that girl. Brat said her father got Smirk a kawaii-doll of her own, but it wasn't a very exclusive model so she didn't like it-she wanted this other kid's. I take it she's pretty spoiled, this Smirk. Rich girl, you know? Brat said she's a handful."

"Did you see the doll yourself?"

"No, I was away by then. But when he called, Brat told me she had it with her when she came to see him the last time. That would be two weeks ago." Gentile shook his head. "I really don't know what the big deal is with those stupid dolls. I guess it makes 'em think they look sexy, like little girls." He snorted. "Well, I suppose it does. I got to admit this Smirk is a hot little monster. I can see why Brat would put up with her dung. But I knew she'd be trouble, sooner or later."

"What did he say happened the last time he saw her?"

"Okay, well, he said she came over here after school. Matter of fact she'd just taken the doll, and showed it off to him all proud and nasty about it. He said it was a weird thing, with like an octopus face and little devil wings. It moved, too. Like a baby on drugs, is how he said it. He said it was kind of alive."

"But Brat told you she ran out on him?" Stake was running his keen eyes over the paint-slathered walls, the ratty furniture, the dirty clothes draped and heaped where Brat had left them before disappearing, himself. There was even a greasy pizza box still on a little coffee table, a number of empty bottles of Zub beer ranked beside it, as if Gentile had been afraid to tamper with a crime scene. Stake presumed that the rich girl had taken a perverse satisfaction in slumming with her less than affluent paramour.

"I'm getting to that. Like I said, Smirk came here after school to show him the doll, and then they went to bed for a while. Y'know? After that Brat dozed off. When he woke up, his girl was gone. He told me he thought it was funny that she didn't wake him up to say goodbye, but at first he figured she just didn't want to bother him. Then, he saw this."

Gentile moved to a cabinet filled with a clutter of music and movie chips in their jewel boxes, magazines, other odds and ends. He shoved aside the stack of jewel boxes and dug out an object that he'd stashed behind them. He turned and offered the object to Stake. It was a young girl's pocket-book.

"She wasn't here, but this was hanging on the back of his computer chair. And her clothes were folded on the chair, too. Even left her shoes. I got all that stuff hidden away, too. Anyway, when he saw her clothes and all he knew something wasn't right. So he got worried, and ended up calling me. He sure couldn't call her father. Smirk told Brat herself that her father is one mean bastard.

Connections with the Neptune Teeb family and everything." Gentile squirmed a little. "Maybe I shouldn't have said that."

"I've met the man. Wouldn't surprise me if he had friends in the syndy."

Stake had taken the pocketbook from Gentile and sat on the edge of the bed to open it on his knees. Makeup, a package of tissues, a little palm comp (Krimson didn't care for the wrist comp variety, he supposed). And a black hand phone, with cute-eyed sheeted ghosts all over it: a Ouija phone.

Gentile went on, "I blocked the palm comp from being traced, in case her father figured on trying to home in on its whereabouts." That could be done, even if the device were currently inactive. "I have her backpack, too, with some school dung in it. Books and such. There was room enough inside that maybe she brought a change of clothes with her. But even so, why leave her school uniform with Brat?"

"But the doll."

"He said she didn't have her own kawaii-doll when she came over. But yeah, that's the only thing she took with her when she left, apparently-the kawaii-doll she stole from that other girl."

"So last time Brat saw her, they were both in bed."

"Right. They were lying around naked, you know. Lovey-dovey, pillow talk. She picked up the doll and hugged it, all giggly, he said, trying to be cute. Brat couldn't stand the touch of it, himself. Anyway, somewhere in there he fell asleep."

Stake got up from the edge of the bed and turned to survey it again. The sheets were still in disarray, as they must have appeared to Brat on the day he had awakened from a deep, post-coital and maybe post-alcoholic slumber to find his young girlfriend no longer beside him.

Observing the hired detective, Gentile said, "Christ-o-mighty, man, now you're starting to look like me a little bit. Or what it would look like if Javier and me had a love child." He snorted again. "You doing that on purpose?"

"No," Stake said. "Mind of its own."

Gentile's gaze shifted to sweep the room as Stake's had, but with more melancholy. "I wish I'd come back from the in-laws' place as soon as he called, but how was I to know what would happen? I figured the little she-beast was just playing games with the poor kid. He didn't call me again, and when I came home he was gone. I thought he must be with his crew, but when he didn't show up I went out looking for the Snarlers and I couldn't find any of them, either. That's when I got the chills, man, deep chills."

"I have to say," Stake agreed, flipping up the pillows to peek under them, "it's very disturbing. I can see Tableau coming after your brother, but I don't know what to make of the whole gang going missing."

"I'm trying not to think so negative," Gentile said. "Maybe the Snarlers have gone underground with Brat to protect him from Tableau. Maybe they're all okay."

"That does sound like a strong possibility," Stake reassured him. But as for Krimson, he thought the odds were less in her favor. Seeing her Ouija phone had reminded him of Caren Bistro hearing the missing girl on hers.

He got down on hands and knees next and looked under Brat's bed. A sock, a porn magazine, dust bunnies. On the far side of the bed, though, he noticed something more interesting. He rose, walked to the foot of the bed and started pulling it away from the wall. Gentile came over to help him. "What?" he said.

Stake pointed down to a square hole in the wall at floor level. A grille partially covered it. Only partially, because the grille had been pulled out of its frame at one corner and bent upwards. "That an air duct?"

"Yeah. And before you ask… no, I didn't know it looked like that. But there's no way Smirk could have fit through there, if that's what you're thinking."

Stake stared at the air vent. "That's not exactly what I was thinking," he said.