Standard Hollywood Depravity by Adam Christopher

Author:Adam Christopher [Christopher, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor.com
Published: 2016-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

11

I drove, but not too fast. Traffic was fair and we didn’t need any undue attention.

Honey knew what I was doing because she kept quiet and she kept her eyes on the road as she sat next to me in the passenger seat. The bag was back on her lap and she had both arms wrapped around it. If anyone got a glimpse of us when we stopped at traffic lights they might have looked twice at the big guy filling out a trench coat who had kept his hat on and the small girl wearing not much, but this was Hollywood, California, and what people did in their cars was not anyone else’s business.

She gave directions. A left, a right, a left again, and then straight. I knew the streets. I had a map of the city in my permanent store. I wasn’t the kind of robot to get lost. I imagined the map had been essential for my old job. It sure was for the new one. I knew where to find people and I knew the best places to sneak up on them and I knew the best places to take them afterward. Although most often I left them where they were. That was a good trick, one of the tools I used to avoid suspicion. You kill someone and you move the body then that person’s absence is noticed and when it is noticed people start looking and when people start looking they find things you don’t want them to find. A body in a Dumpster in an alley will lead to things. I was good at not leaving fingerprints and at not leaving any other kinds of clues but even I wasn’t perfect. Inviting people to look where I don’t want them to look is asking for a world of trouble.

But you kill someone somewhere people expect them to be—in their office or in their kitchen or in a motel room in the arms of their mistress—and you make it look good then people are still suspicious but maybe they don’t go looking quite so far as they should.

So goes the theory.

Except tonight I had my target sitting right next to me and I was driving her around. My plan had been to arrange an accident in the club, one involving my steel fingers and her windpipe. There was already one body in the joint along with a lot of men who, on the balance of probabilities, were probably not so keen on any undue attention. Nobody would have reported anything. In fact, they might well have helped cover it up.

That would have been a nice piece of work. Satisfying, in a professional sense. Like the weight of the door on Falzarano’s crimemobile.

Now that was out the window, but things weren’t all bad. Honey was sitting next to me. So I couldn’t kill her at work. But I could kill her somewhere else. Somewhere dark and quiet. She wouldn’t be found for a while. I could make it look good.

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