Chapter 50:// Cheering up

 

“You really know how to butter up a lady,” Katerina said through the phone, from the other side of the bulletproof glass.

“Yeah. Third date, visit in jail. Fourth date, let’s make it a conjugal visit,” Leo said.

“Down tiger,” she said, but her naughty wink said otherwise.

“How’s my dog?”

“I thought you didn’t want him.”

“I do want him, I’m just kinda tied up at the moment,” Leo said and pointed around the jail facilities.

“Well, he is mine now. We are having lovely dinners, Aibo and I. If you want him, you better get out soon.”

“That astronomically expensive lawyer Miss Bibi hired for me says I’ll be out soon. They found video from the-”

Leo paused and stared down at his black hand, a damaged dead weight.

“-The day they framed me, on my phone. No idea how it got there. The video has been expertly wiped at the precise time of the murder, so that makes it a cause for further investigation. They found military grade cyberwarfare stuff in my augmentations, so they copied everything to a computer forensics lab and did a hard reset on everything. We won’t manage to prove anything, it’s way cutting edge stuff, but it’s enough to show I’m innocent.”

Katerina forced a worried smile. “Sounds good. All that damned tech… Nothing but trouble.” She cheered up again. “Hey, you can stay over at my place when you get out!”

“Ugh, that’s nice. But I don’t want to become a burden or anything…”

“Hey, Dumbo. You remember when you last paid your rent? You are evicted. Your stuff is in boxes in my living room at the moment.”

Leo darted up, “Don’t open them!”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Why? Is there anything naughty you don’t want me to see?”

“No…” He said and sat back.

“Well?”

“Are you sure you got everything?”

“Apart from the mouldy fridge, yeah.”

Leo sighed in relief. “OK. There are some mp3s around there that I don’t wanna lose, they were my dad’s. They wiped my walkman clean, that’s the only backup.”

“Don’t worry. Everything will be there waiting for you. Including myself.” She stood up, blew a kiss in the air and left slowly, letting him take a good look at her swaying posterior.

Damn vixen.

Leo hung up the receiver, closed his eyes and imagined himself coming home after a hard day’s work, to a lovely woman who could make a shithole flat seem like a slice of heaven.

He looked forward to that.

 

 

The end