Cementopolis

By Van Ledyard

The inside joke was that they were hatchlings, genomic trash, chicks from the Pentagon henhouses. The black humor masked the hard reality that the super soldiers created at the Eau Claire Project and other black sites were now unexpectedly timing out. They faced certain -- and a grisly -- disintegration.

 

Trevelyan Moss, an Eau Claire "graduate" and a veteran of the serial wars in the western Pacific, is sent to the Navy's Cyberwarfare outfit in Souda Bay where he meets Nepheli, the math whiz and Cretan beauty.

 

Moss takes an express discharge from the Navy. He will go undercover in New Racine, the half finished smart city on the shores of Lake Michigan, to take down a renegade oligarch terrorizing much of the Midwest with a fleet of driverless bomb cars called Weevils. Moss talks Nepheli into joining him along with Marcus, her teenaged son. Desperate for a new start, she agrees to go. But she's frustrated and mystified at how little she knows about Moss' background and his reluctance to talk about his family.

 

The undercover work gets Moss close to Eau Claire. And maybe – how exactly he doesn't know -- he can begin to find some answers, make some connections, find some genomic clue that will make him whole.

 

Nothing seems to stop Moss. Not Bad Axe Security, the oligarch's brutal private police. Not the warring gangs in New Racine's no-go zones. Not even double-crossing Col. Mac McKelvey, the man who had mentored Moss — controlled really — since Eau Claire days.

And it all goes horribly wrong.

 

Ah the smell of electric vehicle fires in the morning! In New Racine, the future ain't what it used to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Van Ledyard
• Release date: Jun 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227925831

Van Ledyard

Van Ledyard lives and writes in western Michigan. He is a veteran journalist and fiction writer and a confirmed internal combustion parttisan. Follow him at @VanLedyard on X

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For K.K.

Set me as a seal upon your heart,

As a seal upon your arm;

For love is stronger than death ...

—Song of Solomon

Cementopolis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are in all cases the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locations, is wholly coincidental. – VL

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Also by Van Ledyard

Sheer Joy in Detroit

Copyright 2024 by Thornapple Media LLC

Spam in a Can

The screechy voice rasped in his ear, distant, barely audible. With a gloved hand, the tall man in the reflective vest and baggy rain pants pressed the helmet against the side of his head. Go ahead.

They’re all dead.

Say again.

They’re all dead. An old man and two dolled up droids. All tumbled on top of each other. A big pile of bodies.

Be careful about the droids.

Be careful about what, Mossie? They’re all dead.

The droids, man. They’ll wake up and kill you.

Sure looks like they’re dead to me. The old man for sure.

Watch yourself, Oz.

Roger that.

Get the hook on it. I’ll be right there.

Trevelyan Moss backtracked along the road away from the crash scene, back to where the narrow blacktop curved sharply and chiseled into the hillside, walking back almost to a point where the pulsing emergency lights of the ambulance and the tow truck dimmed out of sight. He had this weird superstitious hunch that if he looked directly at the flashing lights, they would make him go off on one of his episodes. The stroboscopic effect of the emergency flashers left streaky, watery globes of light as after-images on his retina. The strobes hadn’t triggered anything in him, not yet, and maybe it wasn’t anything to worry about considering how much time he spent lately around scenes like this. Just the same.

The night rain had let up — a rare drenching spring shower that turned the semi-arid landscape into a wheezing black lung. Moss pulled off his vest, tugged at the drenched T-shirt underneath, and slipped the fabric cover off his helmet as if he were peeling back a loose scalp. High over the crash scene a drone sent aloft by the ambulance hovered in place, picking up a single heat signature from the bodies in the car and locking a bright spotlight on the scene. Moss dropped the metalized half visor over his eyes as he walked farther away from the flashing emergency lights. Behind him and out of sight he heard the hydraulics wheeze and strain as partner Oswald Davies tilted the flatbed to the road and brought it to stop with a bang on the pavement. In the silence that followed, the waspy buzz of the ambulance drone could be picked up as it angled out a little farther over the ravine.

Moss didn’t look back.

The visor head-up display outlined the curve of the hillside and the cut of the road running around it like a graceful ribbon, the buried electronics in the roadbed showed in the visor as a single bright yellow line and scintillated with tiny flags, icons, tags and labels. Moss walked up to a stretch where the indigo icons for the guardrail sensors – tiny gears with numbered fly-out tags – were oddly missing. He unzipped the blackout pocket on his rain pants and flipped through the illuminated onion-skin pages in his Folio until he found the settings for his helmet and rebooted the mapping function. No change. The wireframe image on his visor showed the gap and, beyond it, the blackness of the steep ravine and then the distant skeletal mapping for the lakeshore road beyond — a good half mile below and off to the east. Zooming in, he picked up the guardrail sensors on the lakeshore road and passing vehicles flagged with plate numbers in various colors and codes indicating trip origin and destination. Nothing unusual out there. Beyond the lakeshore road was the great sucking void of Lake Michigan at night, the undifferentiated blackness spotted with a single ship icon — a robot ore boat creeping north like a ghost ship.

Moss flipped up the visor and pulled off his damp gloves. He pinched his eyes at the bridge of his nose, tearing up slightly, and looked down again into the ravine. He fished a pair of night vision lenses no bigger than swim goggles out of his rain pants and held them in place over his eyes. The ravine, and the long runout to the lake, shifted into a greenish haze and the rolling headlights on the lakeshore road burned like gassy flares. Moss blinked twice and found a pinpoint spot of light to fix the position of the freighter. Out there on the lake somewhere two or three men tending a robot ore boat were headed north, to the Soo maybe or Duluth, sleeping, smoking, drinking, playing cards. We have nothing to do but we work at it all day. Nature abhors a vacuum and you’ll always find a man eager for a do-nothing job. Moss tucked the night lenses away and drew a long heavy flashlight from his tool belt.

Scuffling back toward the crash scene, Moss puzzled over the gaps in the guardrail sensors. He walked along, washing the flashlight over the graveled shoulder. Most curious of all, there was fresh dirt turned up where the sensors should have been planted (the intermittently functional adaptive digital guardrails contracted by the untouchables at Wisconsin DOT). In the middle of this stretch were short, angling tire tracks indicating the exact spot where the sedan—a brand new autonomous Versailles dually licensed as a free driver according to the dispatcher—shot over the side, skidded across and down rock ledges through the tangled brush until vehicle and passengers came to an abrupt stop against a stout sugar maple. The dispatcher who handled the emergency alert picked up a faint pulse for a minute from inside the cockpit and then it flatlined. The droids of course didn’t have vital signs to display.

Moss fingered the last smoke from a crumpled pack of Pall Malls. He took a dizzying first hit and looked down at the empty wrapper with the Kosovar flag, wadded it up, and tossed it into the ravine. He slid his Folio, not much bigger than one of the old paper passports, into the blackout pocket and closed the Velcro tab. He kicked at a muddy lump at the edge of the pavement and pushed the beam of the flashlight closer. With the toe of his boot he turned the earth—as if stubbing out a cigarette—and exposed a shattered sensor casing that had been pounded into the dirt. He found four others in similar shape, all carelessly covered up with a spot of mud, and all with tell-tale production markings from the Fujian cartel. Moss swept the flashlight across the wet pavement and shoulder, looking for other clues in the wet, pitted asphalt that sparkled with the reflected light of the emergency flashers. Nothing. Just the soft traces in the muddy shoulder where the car went over.  Launched would be more like it. Moss took another drag on the smoke and cupped his hand over the earhole on his scarred helmet with CHOATE stenciled across the back. Now it was McKelvey calling him.

Who’s there from New Racine?

Moss looked back up the road. Pocho and Habib, the EMTs. Ozzie is getting the winch ready.

Don’t let those ambulance morons near the vehicle. It’s is encrypted but we’re working on the updated key.

They’re harmless. Maybe a little greedy, that’s all.

Why is the camera blacked out?

We picked up a sweep, Moss said, slipping the flashlight into his tool belt.

Oh alright. We sent the Tarantula over. Skidmore’s on it. He’s the best we have. Pluck it right out of the ravine.

Not necessary. It’s already on the hook. We’ll report on the way out. I gotta go, Mac.

The brick.

Yeah, Moss said. We’ll grab the brick. Bad Axe is about 40 minutes out –-.

They just sent back up. But they’re cloaked. Need I say more?

We’re getting busy.

The tow truck and the ambulance had popped their telescoping spotlight struts and as Moss walked back, he watched the rescue drone drop closer to the Versailles, the luxe sedan nose down in the ravine against the maple. The road and hillside were now brighter than a summer’s noon. Ozzie was gripping the hook end of the winch cable as he stood in a huddle with Pocho and Habib. Pocho had his face buried in a sandwich wrapper while Habib, coffee in one hand, was stamping his foot and barking out loud with laughter. When Habib saw Moss walking toward them, he held up three fingers and pointed down the ravine. The EMTs from Amity Wellbeing had dropped a stretcher basket on the pavement and hooked it to a braided nylon line. Pocho, short and stout with a severe side cut that left a swath of black hair on his scalp like a mink pelt, talked through a mouthful of sandwich as Moss joined the circle of men.

Moneyroll, jellyroll baby. Turns out we got three stiffs down there, Pocho said, brandishing the sandwich. One organic. Two bots with clear resale value. Once we detail them.

Moss wasn’t listening. He rubbed at the thick pad at the base of his thumb and forefinger where the skin was turning into dark blotches that looked like age spots. He squeezed hard until the skin reddened and then did the same to his other hand. He put both hands out, as if gesturing for someone to stop, and watched the skin clear under the lights.

Hello Mossie. Habib jabbed at him with a rolled-up Scroll, his company issued information appliance.

Moss looked up. He shifted around and turned his back to the trucks and the emergency strobe lights.

Coffee cup in one hand, Habib snapped his wrist and the Scroll flattened into a glowing, rigid panel. He began to read out loud. White male age 117 and in good health. Looks like a broken neck from the scan we picked up. Cardio flatlined. Pharm profile unremarkable. Habib poked at the Scroll with the pinky of his coffee hand. The image of a genomic wheel popped up and started filling with concentric rings as the data loaded. Another poke of the pinky and the genomic rings ratcheted back and forth like tumblers in a lock and stopped, segmented in colored tiles. Third-gen edit for Parkinson’s. Stable. Epigenetic tinkering on the margins but nothing outlandish. Irritable bowel syndrome treated in 2027. At least that’s what this says.

Pocho shoved his sandwich at Moss and Ozzie, as if offering a bite. How much you guys want for the bots?

Who is he? Moss asked.

Habib handed his coffee to Ozzie and worked his thumbs across the Scroll. He frowned, worked his thumbs some more, and paused. Interesting, he started as he looked up. His name is Watts. Edmund Watts and he’s some sort of scientist. General manager of the ... Arcadian something ... project. Company history is cloaked. He’s carrying a dual driver’s license, which you’d expect with the Versailles.

Gimme that, Moss took the glowing Scroll from Habib. Akkadian Research Project. Lab is in Kenosha. Privately owned. He tapped for the Watts mugshot and it came back blank with REDACTED striped across the empty frame. Odd. He connected the Scroll to the Versailles and called up the interior camera. Bodies piled up in front and steering column retracted. The girl droid had been thrown from the back and wound up wedged between the bucket seats which were in a reclining position used in driverless mode. A metallic sound clapped in the background, probably the powertrain caught in a shunting closed-loop limbo. On the Scroll, Moss couldn’t see the downturned faces in the lurid, overexposed paparazzo image that bleached the color out of man and droids.  Watts, wearing a windbreaker and a ball cap, was slumped forward in a heap with the droids, their heads almost touching as if they were kids crouched down to inspect a bug. The female bot rested one hand on the retracted steering wheel. A colic of white blond hair curled up from the crown of her tousled head, as if she had just wakened from sleep.

Habib, snatching the coffee cup back from Ozzie, pressed the point. Like I said, Arcadian.

Moss didn’t look up. Akkadian. But I don’t have time to explain the difference to you.

Ozzie squeaked, It’s not ark it’s ack.

Habib erupted. What are you laughing at Shrek? Like I said, Akkadian.

The mocking smile on Ozzie’s face drooped into deadpan and he took one step toward Habib before Moss stopped him with a forearm across the chest. The high collar of Ozzie’s rain slicker pushed up almost to the twisted cauliflowered protuberances that served as ears. He was easily a good 150 pounds heavier and a head taller than the EMT.

That was insensitive Habibi, Moss told him, handing back the Scroll. Sometimes words can hurt.

Ozzie grinned and flared his nostrils. Yeah, that was insensitive. He knocked Habib’s coffee out of his hand, splashing it open on the pavement. Before Habib had time to react, Ozzie shot an arm out and clamped a gloved hand over ambulance man’s throat. Pocho jumped in. Moss grabbed Ozzie in a bear hug, barely getting his arms around the shoulders, and pulled him away.

OK knock it off, Moss shouted.

Habib rubbed his Adam’s apple and glared. But just for a moment. Habib’s eyes swelled and focused, the brows pinched, his spearpoint chin cocked to one side, as he stared into Ozzie’s face. That was, as Moss had seen a thousand other times, the Oswald Davies Double Take. It was impossible to look at Ozzie’s face without studying it, often without any sense of decorum, like a toddler studies a raving drunk in the street. The poorly fitted plates of Ozzie’s skull, the scalp shaved close with deep creases across the forehead, the hippo ears, the broad mushroom of a nose with thick bivalve nostrils that pulsed as he talked, and those sunken brown-black eyes under hedgerow brows. Habib stared. Habib nodded, as if to say, no more. Ozzie pulled off an oily glove and pointed at him with a forefinger thick as a roll of quarters. Next time, Ozzie said in his incongruously high voice, I break your pencil neck.

I said knock it off.

Pocho changed the subject to something nearer and dearer. Moneyroll Mossie. Birdie can’t match our price. I’ve got a connection in the Villa Blocks. We both do better.

They’re not independent, the Villa, Moss said. They’re an offshoot of the Comanches.

No, they’re independent, Pocho said. For sure.

Next thing I hear is ... trust me.

Pocho wrapped up the remains of his sandwich. Right? When did I ever go sideways on you? I can get 150, 160 for the bot. Tonight.

Birdie’s crew. Take it or leave it.

Moss looked north where the road would have followed the cut and then turned into a long descent to the lakeshore. No sign of approaching vehicles in the boiling blackness. He pulled the tab off his blackout pocket again and fanned the pages of his Folio until he got to the local map. It showed an irregular patchwork, translucent overlapping squares, where all detail was blacked out.  And they were in the middle of it. Moss scratched the blacked-out space with a fingernail and a NO DATA icon pulsed briefly.

We have maybe half an hour, 45 minutes to get this done. You two lifesavers take the bots but you have to run them through Birdie’s crew. You get half, Birdie and Oz and I split the rest. He’ll forward our taste. No exceptions. Agreed?

Habib and Pocho in their hi-vis ambulance coveralls and first aid belts both nodded and the four men looked down at the crushed coffee cup lying on the pockmarked asphalt. Thumb print puddles of creamy coffee shimmered under the spotlights. Habib kicked at the empty coffee cup and walked back to his ambulance.

Skip the rescue basket, Moss called after him. We’ll pull them up in the car.

Gripping the winch cable, Moss rappelled down the rocky ravine to the Versailles. He found an opening under the car and crawled on his belly over the scoured rock and sheared off shrubs and shackled the line to a rear wheel strut. He got to his feet and cupped his hands on the window glass. The slanting beams of the spotlights exposed the lifeless body of Watts and the inert droids frozen in place. Ozzie revved the turbine on the tow truck above, taking up the line, and the Versailles began slowly crabbing up the hillside.

With one hand gripping the taut cable, Moss moved with the wrecked car, his boots slipping and sliding on the hillside but keeping pace. The passengers had fallen away from the dashboard now and clumped together helter skelter at the side of the cabin like drunks passed out at a party. Moss heard the chop of the twin rotors and looked up see the heavy lift Tarantula swoop into view, its camera pod mapping the terrain, searchlights sweeping the already lit up hillside. Moss squinted and steadied himself against the rotor downdraft and waved off the drone. It hovered like a blimp for a moment as it retracted four landing struts, raised the extended hook on a long lanyard, and closed the bay doors on its underside. The rotors tilted and the Tarantula raced out of sight as if it were a UFO defying the Earth-bound laws of physics.

By the time the long, glassy Versailles was up on the roadbed, Pocho and Habib had billowing body bags laid out on the pavement. A warm drizzle began to fall and left droplets on the bags that beaded up and shone like jewels. Watt’s bag had the film backing for the autopsy that would automatically scan and forward its results to the coroner before they got down the hill. The other bags were simply pouches for the droids. Moss clapped a magnetic mobilizer to the roof pillar of the mud streaked and dented Versailles and two massive gullwing doors flipped open. The interior lit up like a hospital operating theater, and the three casualties tumbled to the pavement in a heap.

Versailles GTS zero to sixty in 2 seconds even in auto mode cabron, Pocho said, kicking at the deep V in the grille where car met tree. Six hundred grand out the door. This some sort of rich dude?

Moss bent over to pick up Watt’s ballcap, which rolled off his head when he hit the asphalt. The three forms lay on the pavement face up, frozen in a Pompeiian embrace, oblivious to each other and the four men standing around. Moss turned the cap over. Gold letters against a dark blue field: USS Keweenaw. Second Korean War. Moss rubbed a thumb across the ersatz scrambled eggs stitching on the bill.

The little boy so guapo, Pocho said, pushing the droid with his toe. The boy bot could have been a teen. He was in a candy cane striped blazer, stars and stripes bow tie in a tight Oxford collar, white slacks, and boat shoes. Like he just fell off the dock at Venetian Night. The girl, one of the teen vixen models that seemed always to be on back order, was slender and gorgeous. Baby face, oversized blue eyes, that tousled white hair with the insolent colic. White sleeveless blouse falling open provocatively, pale blue pedal pushers, and red, white and blue boat shoes. Down one side of her face, from her ear lobe to almost her chin, a wide bloodless gash had opened.

The girl can be fixed, Habib announced. Turning to Ozzie, he said, But maybe you want guapo instead of selling him to Birdie?

Maybe you want to take boy-bot home for an evening of mechanical passion with the missus, Ozzie suggested.

Habib’s shoulders were shaking. I could use some help. The woman is insatiable. Of course, she’s married to me, right? Maybe little guapo and his friends ride in the cab with me and I put you in the bag?

Moss yanked his helmet off and set it on the roof of the Versailles. He ran his fingers through his matted hair, shook it loose, and scanned the car’s cabin. He got himself half in on one knee and ran his hand under the dash until he felt the patch and popped it loose. The data brick fell into his hand. It showed three green dots, fully functional. Moss slipped the brick, about as big as a pack of his Pall Malls, just inside his sleeve, and went around to the open cab door of the tow truck. Ozzie was now supervising Habib and Pocho, who were lugging the bodies from the wrecked car over to where the bags were laid out on the pavement.

As the others continued their smack talk, Moss set the Versailles data brick on the tow truck driver’s seat and found an identical blank brick in the door pocket. Squeezing the two drives together like a sandwich, he watched the clone copy the Versailles data in a twinkling. He put the original back in the wrecked car and walked over to the open barn doors of the ambulance and grabbed an empty sandwich bag (Stewie’s Famous Subs) and half gone drink. As he walked back to the wrecker, Moss saw Pocho and Habib under the ambulance drone zipping up the girl bot as Ozzie stood by snarking at them. Moss stuffed the cloned data brick in the sandwich bag under a thick cover of cold fries, and left it all in plain sight on the dashboard of the tow truck. He examined the straw on the drink cup, thought better of it, and pitched it into the road.

Look out! Habib was shouting and backpedaling. Get back.

Pocho was down in a crouch, his fingers spread on the pavement like a sprinter in the starting blocks. The tow-headed girl bot was sitting up and looking around, poking out of the body bag which was now draped over her like a loose V-neck sweater. Edmund? Why are we stopping? She turned and spotted the bareheaded Watts laying atop the body bag next to her. Edmund? It’s time to go now.

Next to the girl, the yacht club boy bot began to stir inside his zipped up body bag.

Get Up and Kill You

The bot shot his arms to the side, ripping the bag apart at the zipper.

Madre! Pocho shouted. It’s a alive. It’s activated. Watch out!

The ambulance driver stood up and in one motion drew a short metallic wand from his back pocket and cast it like a fishing rod in the direction of the bot. A long ripping arc of white-blue light, oscillating in a tight waveform, shot into the darkness past the bot’s head. The telescoping shocker, resembling the chrome antennas of antique automobiles, wobbled in Pocho’s hand as he took aim again.

Don’t. Moss, an unlit Pall Mall dangling from his lip, picked up Habib’s scroll where he had tossed it to the pavement and snapped it open.

The bot turned his head. I’m going to have to ask you to refrain from lighting that cigarette. The smoke nauseates me.

Moss aimed the Scroll at the bot and hacked into its operating system via the Amity Wellbeing network. He thumbed through the functions menu, the network (connected, public, transmitting) and identification (serial number redacted). He jumped out of Habib’s network and toggled into the Choate Recovery Services gateway (striped with the company slogan: Business is picking up!) and looked for a backdoor. He ran the same protocol, found the bot’s serial number and brought up the configuration.

‘You didn’t answer me. I’m asking you very politely not to smoke. If you light that cigarette, I shall be very cross with you." The bot rolled back, executed a perfect kip-up that shredded the fabric of the body bag, and jerkily stood up, his back arched, shoulders pulled, head slightly inclined toward Moss.

Pocho was waving the shocker, its single electrode-emitter sputtering. C’mon Mossie. Pendejo bot gonna go apeshit on us. Look at him.

The bot took a step toward Moss, who was intent on the Scroll. Without looking up, he flicked the unlit cigarette to the road.

Thank you very much. Very kind of you. The bot wheeled and strutted back to the inert form of Watts, squatted down and effortlessly picked him up. With one arm under the old man’s neck, the other hooked around his knees, it began to walk away down the road. Watts’ feet swung gently as the men gaped at the two lifeless forms receding into the darkness.

Moss, his thumbs sliding across the surface of the Scroll, shouted, Stop. Return. The bot and his bundle spun around and starting walking back.

Return Edmund Watts, Moss told it. Assume first position. Supine. Rigid.

The bot squatted down, and with all the care of a mother putting a sleeping infant into its crib, carefully laid the old man on the body bag. The nautically natty bot stood up and turned toward the men.

Pendejo. Pocho was now standing next to Habib, who had unbuttoned his overalls in the steamy air and cinched the sleeves around his waist. Ozzie stood a ways off, gripping the winch cable and heavy shackle in hand. Habib shuffled a half step back, and looked around for an exit path. The shocker in Pocho’s hand sputtered with tiny arcs of blue light.

Supine. Rigid.

The bot was smiling. A thin, wry smile creased his dewy complexion as he scanned the faces of the men. As you wish. In his ridiculous candy-striped blazer, white slacks and boat shoes, the bot folded himself down onto the wet pavement and stretched out, hands crossed over his chest just below his jaunty stars and stripes bow tie. His entire frame stiffened, the irises in the oversized eyes dialed back to pinpoints, his heels oddly rubbing against the pavement as if palsied.

Shut down, Moss said. The bot slumped as if falling into unconsciousness and Moss went through the same steps for the girl bot.

He broke Habib’s Scroll into a tube, handing it back.  Ok, gentlemen, let’s get busy. And thanks Pocho for not frying our little friends and completely ruining their resale value.

Pocho walked up to the boy bot and booted him roughly in the leg. Pendejo.

The men worked under a clearing night sky and a comfortable westerly breeze. Moss stole a glance out to the lake where the stars were pushing through the thin wisps of cloud cover and drawing a line on the horizon. He pulled himself back into chores with some effort, walking around the Choate tow rig, checking the tie downs on the Versailles perched on the flatbed. Moss retrieved the small spotlight drone and as he was setting it in the truck’s toolbox, imprecations in three languages filled the air.

Pocho and Habib, each with an arm, and Ozzie, grabbing the ankles, struggled with the dead weight boy bot as they carried it to the open rear doors of the ambulance. Bang—they dropped its head on the metal deck of the ambulance and Ozzie pushed it in, its neck arched like a wrestler. And then more curses as they loaded the uncooperative frame of the girl — bang went the chin-up white-blonde head.

Moss walked over to where Edmund Watts lay in repose, the soft wattles under his jaw loose and spotted with raindrops, a concentric hatband impression around his thin hairline. The dead wide-eyed mug stared up and struck him as familiar, somehow. But try as he might he couldn’t place him. A news photo? One of McKelvey’s dossiers? The Navy? Watts’s face was remarkable only for its generic blandness – the slightly too small nose over a slit mouth exposing recessed incisors stained with nicotine or hashish, clean shaven but with pronounced bags under the eyes. Moss bent from the waist and slid his fingers to the back of the man’s cold neck. He pressed his fingertips against the bones. No implant or other hardware that might offer a clue. And nothing in the Versailles — no Folio, no personal papers, not even a shopping list.

They had everything buttoned up and Moss, behind the wheel of the tow truck, and Ozzie, riding shotgun, were about to start down the hill behind the ambulance when the armored personnel carrier, running dark on its night camera, flicked on its search lights not 50 yards in front of them. Ambulance and tow truck waited until the wheeled APC rolled up and stopped crosswise in the road. As expected, it was one of the Bad Axe Security vehicles in matte black stealth paint and bearing the dull bronze labrys, the corporate double axe-head symbol. Ozzie, his arm resting on the open window of the passenger door and looking out, said softly, Hey Mossie. Four black clad troopers—helmeted, gloved, booted, with machine pistols strapped to their chests, bearing no insignia but the labrys—climbed out of the ravine roughly at the spot where they hauled the Versailles up. The troopers stopped, shoulder to shoulder. One of them made a motion as if turning off an ignition key.

A heavy drone – one of the massive crowd control models fitted with speakers, gas grenades and banks of high intensity spotlights—swooped in low overhead, its rotors tearing and chopping at the air. Bad Axe always over did it.

From where they sat, Moss and Ozzie could not see the rear of the APC but they watched closely as its rear doors opened and partially swung into view. Moss reached for his sunglasses in the console tray — it was still dark but all the intense lights were creating white spots in his field of vision — and checked his side mirror. Another half dozen Bad Axe troopers appeared out of nowhere and took up position behind the Choate flatbed. Moss shut off the gas turbine, humming at low rpm, and idly plotted an escape route along various paths when a plainclothes figure in a BAD AXE SECURITY windbreaker came around from behind the personnel carrier. Shorter and older than any of his crew, with a full head of wavy, unkempt gray hair, he crooked his arm and made a little circular motion with his hand. The Bad Axe troopers who had emerged like underworld shades out of the ravine rushed the ambulance. 

The tow truck shook and swayed slightly. Moss pressed the sunglasses against the bridge of his nose and watched in his side mirror as Bad Axe troopers clambered up on the back of the tow truck and popped up the gull-wing doors on the Versailles. Now the man in the Bad Axe windbreaker was at the open passenger side window. Ozzie, his arm hanging out of the window, his fingers strumming the sheet metal, greeted him. Howdy Bodnar. Since when do you leave your cushy office to go night hawking?

Since none of your business.

I thought you were still running the gangbanger crimes unit, Ozzie said. Guess you solved all the crimes there, huh?

Capt. Peter Bodnar, of the Bad Axe Security Group New Racine Station, gave Ozzie a dismissive glance and shook a cigarette out of an unmarked pack. The skin over his deep-set Australopithecus brows bunched up as he lit the cigarette and smoke curled from his nostrils. He stole an uneasy glance back at Ozzie. And then another. Ozzie was broadly smiling, unblinking, mouth slightly open.

Bodnar gave his head a quick shake and looked past Ozzie to Moss, who was sipping from a warm can of Augsburger. You want to tell me why you two are on this run? Way out here? Something interesting going on you want to share with me?

Moss sucked air through his teeth as he swallowed the beer. "Actually no I don’t care to talk to you about that. I’m a very private