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It was dark and the night had come alive by the time I shambled into The Dale. Boxy tenements rose all around, looking like clones of each other stamped along San Fernando Avenue. There were more people in the streets than there had been downtown, and I easily blended into the sea of desperation and filth. Pushers and prostitutes hawked their wares in the open, with little fear of the police showing up. Gangbangers patrolled the streets, armed with everything from iron pipes to assault rifles. This was their turf, and most cops knew better than to invade it without a squad of enforcement bots to back them up. Mountains of trash filled the back alleys, some of it predating the sanitation strike. Even the flies ignored the fact the sun had long since fled below the horizon, happily buzzing along with the neon lights.
The last time I’d been here, Frank and I had been chasing down a lead on a missing person; some corporate hotshot in the mayor’s pocket. We knew somebody had the suit’s barcode after his assets started getting withdrawn through several shell accounts and some nobody started spending like a high roller. We caught him with a bogus code freshly spliced onto his wrist, which had come from some other nobody that had gone missing. Frank and I paid a visit to a skin trader named Gregory, who specialized in making high-profile criminals disappear and redistributing access to high-value bank accounts. I had history with the man, having roughed him up a few times back when I was on the beat and before he came into favor with the Bratva. I was sure Gregory was the man to slice the suit’s barcode, but we could find no proof—or any sign of the body, for that matter. Gregory was good, and that was why I found myself standing on his doorstep.
A burly guard in a dark suit stood before the nondescript basement door, something you’d miss behind the piles of trash if you weren’t looking for it. He was a head taller than me and as broad-chested as a gorilla. He squinted as he looked me over, then his nose wrinkled and he took a step back. “You smell like shit,” he said in a thick Russian accent.
“Yeah, I’ve been hearing that a lot today.”
“Get lost before you end up in one of these bags,” the Russian said as he waved the bull-pup rifle in his hands towards the piles of black plastic bags surrounding us.
“I need to see Gregory.”
“And why would Gregory want to see you?”
I held up my wrist, exposing the barcode tattoo. “Either I see Gregory, or I go buy a coffee at the corner javamat and call every cop in New Angeles down on this block.”
“And what makes you think you’re so special?”
I groaned and shook my head as I felt around for my last smoke. “Don’t you watch the news? They’ve only been plastering my face on every holovid between here and Berdino since sunrise.” I watched realization dawn in his eyes as I lit the cigarette. I took a long drag and let the smoke waft out as I added, “And, there’s money in the bank. I want to talk business.”
The bruiser pressed a finger to a pin on his lapel and whispered something. A static-filled response came back a moment later, and he pushed the door open while saying, “Down the stairs, second door on the left.”
I sidled past the guard, my feet leaving a trail of bloody footprints as I padded down the stairs and along the dimly lit corridor. Conduits and pipes accented concrete block walls, and ductwork that had more holes in it than the jacket I was wearing dominated the ceiling. I stopped at the second door and knocked.
“What are you waiting for, the butler? Get your ass in here,” a gravelly voice shouted from the other side.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside as a rush of cold air stung my eyes. The room was larger than I expected, but still felt cramped from the low ceiling run through with pipes and ducts. The place was cold; not freezing, but chilly enough to be uncomfortable in the beggar’s rags I was wearing. I had to stoop to make my way to the center of the room, where an array of tables covered in lab equipment, surgical tools, and metal boxes surrounded an old man who sat hunched over a small workspace. There was a metal tray on the table, and on it rested a disembodied forearm. Wrinkled and gnarled fingers make a deceptively deft cut with a scalpel, and the man pulled a perfect square of flesh away from the wrist. He placed it on a glass slide, poured some liquid over it, and sealed it with another piece of glass before depositing it into one of the metal boxes. Inside were row upon row of similar slides.
“One moment,” he muttered as he stood with a groan, lifted the box, and walked to a row of freezers set along the back wall. Once he had deposited the grisly collection with a dozen similar cases, he turned back to me. “Well, I’ll be damned. If it isn’t Harold Jacobson, the most wanted man in New Angeles. I should have known you’d end up here.”
“It’s good to see you too, Gregory,” I said as I rolled a metal stool over and took a seat opposite him at the table.
“Hmph,” the old man grunted as he sat down. “Don’t try that old friend bullshit on me. I work with the Russians now, remember? Everybody’s an old friend with them until they decide you’re not valuable and put a bullet in your head.”
“Lots of that going around,” I muttered, the memory of Frank’s face coming apart flooding into my mind like an unwanted call from an ex-wife.
“Hmm? The way I hear it, you’ve taken after them. I don’t buy it though. You’re an asshole, but you’re not a cop-killer.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” Gregory slid his chair to the side and grabbed a transparent tablet from another table before rolling back. He punched a few security codes in, then scrolled through some sort of database. “I hear you want to talk business, so let’s cut the crap and get to it. You need a new tag; that’s why you’re here.”
“You’re as insightful as ever, old man. Are you sure I didn’t just come hoping to buy a new pair of shoes?” I held up one of my cut and filthy feet.
Gregory grunted at the sight of it. “I can take care of that too, but it’ll cost you.”
“What’s new?”
The old man nodded as he continued to scroll through the hundreds of entries on the tablet. “I’m guessing you want something incognito. Some good-for-nothing that nobody noticed was missing.”
“Yeah, but it has to be clean,” I said. The last thing I wanted was to trade down to a petty crook. Even that might get me too much attention. And with my face as public as it was, that was the last thing I needed.
“Don’t insult me,” Gregory said. “I don’t sell tainted goods. You need the best, and that’s why you came here.”
As usual, the old man was full of himself. If I had wanted the best, I’d be in the back room of a surgical clinic downtown with a proper doctor who traded skin as a side gig. Instead, I was in some dirty, poorly lit basement with a washed-up mortician who lost his license when his personal fetishes led to one-too-many corpses being buried missing a foot.
Gregory sat me in what looked like an old dentist’s chair and strapped my arm down. “You want something for the pain?” he asked.
“Let me guess,” I muttered, “it’ll cost me.”
“Nothing’s free.”
“Yeah, but just a local.” I didn’t trust him enough to be put under. I’d probably wake up missing a kidney.
The old man spun around on the stool and rummaged in a rusty old toolbox. He retrieved a syringe that was thankfully wrapped in plastic, along with a scalpel and a pair of forceps.
“You sure those are clean?” I asked.
Gregory jerked a thumb back to the main work desk. “See the miniature autoclave? It’s not there for show. Giving people gangrene is bad for repeat business, after all.”
It was always about the bottom line with this guy, but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about losing my arm to an infection. Gregory opened the syringe and slid the needle into my arm without warning. The quick prick was nothing compared to the burning sensation of the anesthetic as he squeezed it into the flesh around my identification tattoo. He repeated the process two more times, again with the bedside manner of a retired mortician.
“Okie dokie...” Gregory tossed the empty syringe into a metal coffee can and rolled over to the freezers. He picked up the tablet and checked something on the screen before opening the door. He thumbed through one of the boxes, muttering. “Nine seven five forty-two. Nine seven five forty-two. Nine seven— Aha! Here we are.”
For a criminal barcode slicer working out of the basement of an abandoned tenement, Gregory was surprisingly organized.
He rolled back over with a glass slide in his hand and set it in a small dish of warm water, which let off ribbons of steam in the chilly room. He reached down and pinched my forearm, hard enough my skin turned red even though I couldn’t feel anything. “Numb yet?”
I nodded.
“Good, time to get to work, then.” Gregory tore open the plastic wrap containing the other implements and, with the scalpel in one hand and the forceps in the other, he sliced into my forearm. Compared to the gruff way he went about everything else; he handled the blade with a surgeon’s precision. He cut slowly and steadily, the depth of the blade never wavering. He made four even lines with almost perfect right angles, then dabbed away the blood with some gauze.
“You might not want to watch this part. Most don’t,” he said.
“I’d rather know what you’re up to.”
“Good for you.” The old man chuckled as he pinched the corner of the square with the forceps and pulled up, gingerly slicing under it with the scalpel. He pulled the skin higher as he went, carefully lifting the barcode away from my arm and cutting until it popped free. He then turned and dropped it into a nearby trash can.
“Not keeping that one?” I asked.
“I told you,” he said as he dabbed away at more blood. “I don’t sell hot codes, and that’s one of the hottest this city has seen in a while.”
I sighed as the weight of the moment hit me. This was just the first step in a long crusade. Seeing my face up on the holovids and knowing I was being framed for Frank and Kristoff’s murders was one thing, but having my ID sliced made it feel real. My mind had been as numb all day as my arm was in that moment, and suddenly all the physical ailments washed away as the reality of my situation struck home.
“All done,” Gregory said. I looked down in surprise. While my mind had been drifting off, the cutter had affixed the new barcode and cauterized the seams with a surgical laser.
He untied my arm and gave me a chance at a closer look. I twisted my wrist, flexing the newly affixed skin. It was swollen, but didn’t seem altogether unnatural. The skin tone was too pale, but that would correct in time. “You are good.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” Gregory hobbled over to a locker on one wall, opened it up, and rummaged around. He tossed a pair of old work boots onto the floor, followed by some dirty blue jeans, a black button-down shirt, and a charcoal-gray trench coat. “Don’t suppose you have a hat to match?” I asked.
Gregory glared at me with one eye half-closed, turned back to the locker, and came back with a navy-blue baseball cap with the New Angeles Rockets team logo on the front. Seeing my obvious frown of disapproval, he added, “You take what you can get.”
Resigning myself to abandoning my usually dapper fashion sense, I stripped out of the beggar’s clothes and put on what Gregory had offered. I didn’t ask how much he was taking out of my account for them as his fingers worked furiously on the tablet. I didn’t want to know, and there was nothing I could do about it.
“Okay, my friend,” Gregory said in a horrible impression of a Russian accent as he lit up a cigarette. “Your new name is Jasper Rogan. You were a sanitation worker who went missing after the strike started. No family—nobody to come looking for you or ask questions. A buddy of yours, one Gordon Hewitt, tried to file a missing person’s report, but the NAPD was too busy to do the paperwork.” The old slicer set his smoke in a glass ashtray and started to clean up around the old dentist’s chair.
Sounded about right. A lot of trash men went missing around that time. Some just hit the bottle hard and ended up rolled over in an alley. Others were so deep in debt before the strike even started, they were desperate for a fresh start.
As I pulled the coat on, I turned to Gregory and asked, “Say, you haven’t done any special jobs for the Russians lately, have you? Maybe something on the road?”
“Special? No, not that I can recall,” Gregory answered as he placed the tray of bloody instruments into the microclave on his desk.
“You sure? No house calls? I saw a job recently that was exceptionally fine work; ‘the best’, as you described your own. A young girl with a cyberjack. Pretty thing with bright orange hair.”
Gregory picked up his butt from the ashtray, took a quick puff, and stamped it out with a shaking hand. “I don’t do house calls.” He stood and stepped around the desk, gesturing towards the door. “Now, you’re going to want to put some ice on that to keep the swelling down. And don’t try scanning it for about twelve hours. It needs time to settle into place. If you let it swell, it’ll take longer.”
I stood and walked toward the door. Gregory sighed as I passed by. He must have been relieved, thinking I was leaving without more questions. “One thing...” I muttered, turning back to the little man. “You haven’t been to Monterey Park lately? Maybe Catawba Village?”
He was sweating, which was quite an accomplishment in the cold basement. The fog from his breath came in rapid puffs. “No, can’t say I have.”
As he reached out to open the door, I grabbed him by the wrist and gave it a quick twist. He yelped in pain as I jerked his arm behind his back, but I clapped my other hand over his mouth before it could grow into a full-on scream. As I led him back to the table, I said, “You know, for some reason, I don’t believe you. I think you did this job and you don’t want to talk about it.”
He tried to say something, but with my hand over his mouth, it was too muffled to make out. I pulled up on his arm and down on his shoulder, sending his face crashing into the table next to the microclave. I popped the door open and grabbed the scalpel out of it. It was already hot enough to burn my hand, but I ignored the pain. Steam rose from the blade like smoke from a California wildfire as I held it just before Gregory’s face. “Scream, and you lose an eye,” I said as I pulled my hand away from his mouth.
“You’re a cop. You can’t do this,” he whimpered.
I twisted the hand holding the scalpel, showing him his own handiwork in the form of the bootleg identification stamp newly cauterized onto my wrist. “Do I look like a cop to you? Now, tell me about Evie Simms. Who hired you to cut her ID, and where is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said as tears ran down his cheek and dropped onto the table.
“You don’t know what? Who, or where?”
“Both. Neither. It was all handled over the dark net. I got an order, and I did the job. I never met anybody in person.”
“What about the stamp?”
“There was a dead drop. I packed it in a cryo case and left it behind a dumpster.”
“A dumpster where?”
“Behind the club.”
“What club?”
“I’m not telling you anymore, they’ll kill me.”
“And you think I won’t?” I ran the scalpel down Gregory’s cheek to stress my point. “Don’t scream,” I reminded him.
The little man whimpered and whined like a kicked puppy, then caught his breath.
“What club?” I repeated.
“Dreamworks. They sent me to her apartment to cut her stamp. Then they told me to drop the cryo case off behind the dumpster in the alley behind Dreamworks, by the back door.”
I let go of Gregory and put the scalpel down. Sergei, you slick bastard. The club owner acted surprised Evie didn’t show up for her shift the other day, but he must have known all along why she wasn’t there.
“Are you done?” Gregory asked.
“Yeah, except for one thing.”
The old man grabbed a cloth from the table and pressed it over his bleeding face. “What’s that?”
“I need a gun.”