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“’Cause you crazy, man!”
Eve pointed at Cab Guy to shut him down.
“Your cart’s in the street, pal.” A scrapper, Eve noted, about half the size of Cab Guy, with New York as pugnacious in his tone and attitude as his bloody nose.
“Yeah, it’s in the ever-fucking street, but I didn’t shove it there. Goddamn kids did. Damn kids, they come along, and one’s ordering a dog and fries so I’m on him, you know? And another one of ’em musta flipped off my brakes. Next I know the bunch of ’em are shoving my cart off the corner. Laughing like hyenas. Look what they done to my cart.” He spread his arms wide as blood dribbled out of his nose. “What they want to do that for? I’m just trying to make a living here.”
“Can you ID them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Look at my cart, wouldja? Look at my stuff.”
“I see these boys!” Cab Guy waved a hand in the air. “I see them go flying across the street. Airboards.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Cart Guy bobbed his head. “They had airboards. Couple of them riding tandem. I didn’t see which way they went. I was trying to grab the cart, get to the brake, but the cab…” He shoved back his hair. “Man. Sorry about your cab.”
“Not your fault. I see the kids. I can help identify.” Cab Guy offered a unifying smile with bloodied teeth. “Sorry about your cart, man.”
Eve turned the situation over to a black-and-white and a couple of beat droids. Cab and Cart Guy were now enjoying solidarity. They’d be neighborhood kids, she assumed. And they’d likely roll another cart or two before the day was done. But damned if she was going to help track them down.
She was ten minutes over the hour already.
It came to a total of twenty minutes behind before she could park, flip her On Duty, and hit the sidewalk. She’d already seen him
—her expert consultant, her superior lay. He leaned against the wall of the graffiti-scrawled, post–Urban War rattrap that held Bang She Bang, wearing a dark suit with the thinnest of pinstripes with a spring-weight overcoat billowing a bit as he worked on his handheld.
His wrist unit was likely worth more than the building against which he braced. In this neighborhood with its funky junkies, chemi-heads, grifters, shifters, and spine crackers, a man’s life was at risk for his shoes. From her vantage point, she saw what Tiko would’ve called a suspicious character swagger in Roarke’s direction, his hand in his pocket and his fingers very likely closed over a sticker.
Roarke simply flicked his gaze up, over, locked them on. And suspicious character kept on swaggering by.
“You.” Eve jabbed a finger at one of the grunts loitering in a doorway.
“Fuck you,” he called back, and added his middle finger in case English wasn’t her first language.
Eve flipped out her badge as she crossed the sidewalk. The badge itself didn’t mean much here. It was all about what she put behind it. “That’s Lieutenant, as in: Fuck you, Lieutenant.”
Beside the grunt, his gap-toothed companion sniggered.
“Here’s what I could do,” Eve supposed. “I could slap your head against that wall, while I’m kicking your balls into your belly,” she added to the companion. “And after that, I can have you in restraints while I turn out your pockets. You’re carrying illegals.”
“Fuck you know. You can’t rouse without probable.”
“I see the illegals. I’ve got X-ray vision.”
“No shit?” The companion grinned at her, wide-eyed. “That is frosty, complete.”
“Ain’t it? But I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do runs on both of you, then come around to your flops and turn them upside down and inside out. I’m not going to personally see to it that you spend the next several days in a cage. I’m not going to do that because you’re both going to stand right here until I come back, and you’re going to watch my ride there as if it were your own beloved child. I come out, and my official police vehicle’s exactly where I left it, in exactly the condition I left it, we part friends. Otherwise, I’m going to be paying you a visit later. Got it?”
The first guy shrugged. “I got nothing better to do.”
“That’s handy, because I do. You got ten now,” she said and pulled out the bribe. “You get another when I come back. I bet your name’s John Smith,” she said to the companion.
“Hell, no. Clipper Plink.”
“That’s what I said. You’re Clipper Plink.”
“How do you know this stuff?” He eyed her as if she were the Second Coming. “You got superpowers, bitch?”
“Damn right.”
