Free F Paul Wilson - Sims 02 by The Portero Method (v5.0) Page A

there?”
                 Her gaze was focused on the alley,
her dark eyes hard and bright as she watched the cops knock open the door with
a short steel battering ram.
                 “To make sure the sims were inside. You never know who’s got a source in a precinct house. If they got
wind of the raid they’d have the sims stashed out of
town and I’d have egg on my face and the cops would be less cooperative next
time I came to them.”
                 If she thought that was going to
mollify him, she was dead wrong.
                 “You could have told me, damn it!
Why’d you send me in there with no idea what I’d be getting into?”
                 “Would you have gone in if I had?”
                 “Well…” He let the word trail off but
knew the answer would have been a definite no.
                 “I didn’t think so. But because you
did, you played a meaningful part in reeling in some single-celled organisms
posing as human beings, things ”—she managed to inject so much contempt into
the word—“who make pond scum look tasty.” A wry smile. “Ain’t that cool?”
                 Patrick had to admit it was, but he
wasn’t about to say so.
                 “What happens to them?”
                 “The humans won’t see daylight for a
long, long time. Those sims in there have been either
abducted or leased under false pretenses. The charges will range from grand
theft to fraud to pandering to cruelty to animals to operating a criminal
enterprise to promoting bestiality and whatever else the prosecutors can think
of. You’re the lawyer. You can imagine.”
                 Patrick nodded, mentally adding a few
more charges.
                 Romy kept talking. “And the perps—do
I sound like a cop?—are guaranteed to get slammed with max sentences. SimGen,
as you’ve learned firsthand, is relentless when it comes to anyone messing with
their product. Their contacts in the judicial system, the ones who guarantee
them favorable rulings whenever necessary, also see to it that anyone who
transgresses against them lands lower-lip-deep in doo-doo. And after the
criminal courts are through with the bastards, SimGen chases them down in civil
court and gets dibs on everything they’ve ever owned in their life and
everything they’ll earn till Resurrection Day.”
                 “Is that admiration I hear?”
                 Romy shook her head. “No. But you’ve
got to respect SimGen’s efficiency. When their ends coincide with mine—as in
rescuing sims from these oxygen wasters—I’m only too
happy to take advantage of that efficiency. But we part on thewhy
: My reasons are personal and ethical, theirs are purely business and
public relations.”
                 “What happens to the sims?” he said,
remembering the tarted-up females.
                 “Someone from SimGen will be by to
pick up the poor things and take them to the Jersey campus where they’ll rehab the ones they can and retire the ones they can’t.”
                 “Doesn’t exactly sound like the Evil
Empire to me.”
                 She turned and glared at him. “Oh,
but they are, Patrick Sullivan. That sleazy little operation across the street
couldn’t have existed without SimGen, because SimGen made the sims that were mistreated in there.”
                 “Hey, Ford makes cars and some people
get drunk and kill people with them or use them to rob banks or rig them with
dynamite.”
                 She rolled her eyes. “You don’t see
the difference between a hunk of tin and those creatures you’re representing in
court?”
                 “Of course I do. I just—”
                 “SimGen created a new species and
enslaved it. Sims feel pain, they feel pleasure, they laugh, they think ,