Free city blues 02 - angel city blues by jeff edwards

killed her¾the lion so to speak¾possessed particular speed and cunning.”
    Thurman waved a hand at the hundreds of vid screens. “There are more than a few lions out there, Mr. Stalin. You’ll have to run very fast to stay ahead of them.”
    “Perhaps,” I said. “On the other hand, I might just turn out to be a lion myself.”
    Thurman’s eyes continued to dance over the chaotic display of video. “I hope so Mr. Stalin. For your sake, and for Leanda’s.”
    He touched a control on the arm of his chair and the audio faded back up to its original volume. The interview was over.
    I glanced over my shoulder as I walked out the door. Thurman’s chair had resumed its circular dance. “I really do hope so,” he said softly.
     

 
    CHAPTER 5

    I parked on Long Beach Avenue near the corner of East 57th. It made for almost the same distance to the barricade as my usual parking spot, but it brought me into the Zone by a different route. I had no particular reason to think I was being watched or followed, but shifting my routine suddenly felt like a good idea.
    My stint in the Army had taught me two things: a nearly instinctive hatred of the lifeless shade of green that the Army calls olive drab , and that I should always trust my impulses—especially the ones with no discernible basis in rational thought.
    According to the one of the basic theories of soldiering, a sudden irrational hunch is your subconscious mind’s attempt to warn you about some emerging situation that your conscious brain hasn’t clued into yet. My Platoon Sergeant had been full of stories about soldiers who had obeyed their split-second impulses and walked away from deadly peril with life and limb intact. The private who had followed a sudden urge to veer toward the right side of a path—narrowly avoiding a cluster of anti-personnel mines. The corporal whose instinctive decision to dive for cover in an apparently threat-free situation had saved her squad from a lethal encounter with a charged particle weapon. Army lore held at least a hundred variations of these stories, all purported to be no-shitters : the soldier’s equivalent of cross my heart .
    I resisted the temptation to glance over my shoulder. Was the sudden urge to shift my routines a sign that my subconscious was picking up on some detail that I had missed? Or had I just been spooked by Thurman’s theatrical warning? I had no way of knowing. Which, in a nutshell, was the central problem with the Army’s theory. If you followed an impulse and nothing bad happened afterward, how could you tell if your instinct had been correct? Had you just narrowly averted some unknown disaster? Or had there been no pending disaster at all?
    I shook my head a few times to chase away the heebie-jeebies. It helped a little. I pawed around in my pocket for a Marlboro, lit it, and inhaled deeply. That helped a little too.
    On the other side of the barricade, I shifted my plan again. I had been headed for home to check my messages and grab a sandwich. Instead, I made an unplanned detour onto Santa Fe Avenue. At two-thirty in the afternoon, the strip was a ghost town. About a million candlepower’s worth of sunlight poured down through the dome, revealing every crack in the old sidewalks and every crumbling brick in every decaying building.
    An LAPD Tactical hover unit cruised the other side of the street at a speed barely faster than a walk. The backwash from its blowers spun off knee-high tornadoes of dirt and litter. The car was one of the new Focke-Wulf Marauders, sleek and dangerous-looking under its smoothly overlapping plates of compressed-plastic armor. The driver and his partner were nearly invisible under their own body armor and tactical equipment. A row of shallow bullet craters pocked the passenger’s side door. Someone had tested their armor for them. Judging by the spacing and the depths of the craters, it had most likely been some type of automatic weapon with limited armor piercing