Free Black Man by Richard K. Morgan Page B

to the last.”
    Norton lifted hands with fingers draped wide and low, made phantasmal noises to match. Sevgi curled a grin under control.
    “It’s not fucking funny, Tom. Beats me why the Rim skycops didn’t just vaporize it soon as it crossed the divide. It wouldn’t be the first time those day-rate morons turned glitched air traffic into confetti when it didn’t answer nicely.”
    “Maybe they were concerned about loss of life,” said Norton, with a straight face.
    “Yeah.”
    “Now, I hope you’re not planning to bring that attitude with you, young lady. The locals probably won’t be overfriendly as it is. This is our tin can that fell out of the sky on them.”
    She shrugged. “They pay COLIN taxes just like the rest of us. It’s their tin can, too.”
    “Yeah, but we’re the ones supposed to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. That’s why they pay their taxes.”
    “Have you talked to anyone at their end yet?”
    Norton shook his head. “No one human. I tried to hook whoever caught the case just before I left. Got the machine. Standard phone interface. It said we’ll be collected at the airport by RimSec. Two of their plainclothes guys, Rovayo and Coyle.”
    “You get ID?”
    Norton tapped the breast of his jacket. “Hardcopy download. Want to see it?”
    “Might as well.”
    The Rim cops were a balanced sex and eth couple. Under the label det. a. rovayo, a dark young Afro-Hispanic woman stared out of her photo with jaw set and mouth thinned, trying rather obviously and without much success to beat a full-lipped, hazel-eyed beauty. Belying the severity of her expression, her hair coiled thick and longer than NYPD would have let her get away with. Below her on the same printout, DET. r. coyle glowered up, blunt-featured, middle-aged, Caucasian. His hair was shot with gray and shaved almost militarily short. The image was head and shoulders only, but it gave the impression of size and impatient force.
    Sevgi shrugged.
    “We’ll see,” she said.
    They saw.
    Coyle and Rovayo met them off the suborb at SFO with perfunctory greetings and an iris scan. Standard procedure, they were told. Norton shot a warning glance at Sevgi, who was visibly fuming. This wasn’t how visiting cops would have been treated on arrival in New York. Here, it was hard to tell if they were being snubbed or not; Coyle, every bit as big and laconic as his holoshot had suggested, showed them brief ID and did the introductory honors. Rovayo took it from there. She leaned in and spread their eyelids with warm, slightly callused fingers, applied the scanner, and then stepped back. It was all done with a detached competence, and among the streams of arriving passengers it had the intimate flavor of a European kiss on the cheek. Norton seemed to enjoy it, anyway. Rovayo ignored his smile, glanced at the green light the machine had given them, and put the scanner away in the shoulder bag she carried.
    Coyle nodded toward a bank of elevators at the end of the arrivals hall.
    “This way,” he said economically. “We got the smart chopper.”
    They rode up in silence, hooked a walkway across the glass-bubbled, white-girder-braced upper levels of the building, then another elevator that spilled them out onto a concrete apron where a sleek red-and-white autocopter sat twitching its rotors. Eastward, the bay glimmered silvery gray in the late-afternoon sun. A ruffling wind took the heat out of the day.
    “So you guys are on the case?” Norton tried as they clambered aboard.
    Coyle offered him an impassive glance. “Whole fucking force is on this case,” he grunted and tugged the hatch closed. “Badge coding 2347. Flight as filed. Let’s go.”
    “Thank you. Please take your seats.”
    The autocopter had Asia Badawi’s voice, low and honey-coated, unmistakable even from the half a dozen syllables uttered. Sevgi vaguely remembered reading, in some mindless magazine-space moment while she waited to see the lawyers, an