Reunion in Death (In Death #14)(48)

She risked all manner of vermin, fisted a hand in his stringy hair, and yanked his head back. "Everybody knows mother-f*cking Mook. You want to die here, or live to puke another day?"

"I don't keep tabs on the cocksucker." His lips peeled back as the point of the knife pressed against his jugular. "Maybe VR Hell, f**k do I know?"

"Good. Go right on back to what you were doing." She released him with just enough force to send him sliding into the muck again, then made a show of slapping the jagged-edged knife back in her boot for the benefit of the onlookers lurking in the shadows.

"Anybody here wants trouble, I'm happy to oblige." She lifted her voice just enough to have it echo, to have it punch through the mean flood of viper rock pumping out of doorways. "Otherwise my business is with Mook, who's been described by this fine example of humanity as a mother-f*cking cocksucker."

There was a slight movement, shadow in shadow, to her left. She laid her hand on her weapon, and the movement stilled. "Anybody hassles me or my uniform, we start busting asses, and we aren't particularly delicate about how many of those busted asses end up in the city morgue, are we, Officer?"

"No, sir, Lieutenant." Peabody prayed her voice wouldn't crack and embarrass both of them. "In fact, we're hoping to win the pool on morgue count this week."

"What's that up to, anyway?"

"Two hundred and thirty-five dollars. And sixty cents."

"Not too shabby." Eve cocked a hip, but her eyes were keen as a blade. "Could use it. When we're finished kicking the shit out of anybody who gives us grief," Eve added pleasantly. "There'll be a squad down here shaking down what's left. Which will really irritate me as I'd have to share the pool with them. Mook," she said again, and waited ten humming seconds.

"VR Hell," someone said in the dark. "Dancing with the S M machines. Asshole."

Eve merely nodded, deciding to attribute the ass**le comment to Mook rather than herself. "And where do I find VR Hell in this delightful and intriguing paradise many of you call home?"

There was another movement, and she whirled, braced, felt Peabody go on full alert beside her. At first she took him for a boy, then saw he was a dwarf. He was crooking his finger.

"Back-to-back," Eve ordered, and they started down one of the dripping tunnels, facing out, guarding each other's backs.

The dwarf moved fast, skittering along in the steaming, stinking tunnels like a cockroach on shoes that flapped against the damp stone floor. He zipped past the bars, the clubs, the joints and dives, twisting and turning through the labyrinth of the underworld.

"Morgue pool was a nice touch," Eve said under her breath.

"Thanks." Peabody resisted swiping at the sweat dripping down her face. "I live to improvise."

From somewhere deeper in the dank, Eve heard a woman scream in pain or passion. She saw a huge man crumpled on the ground sucking on a filthy brown bottle of home-brew. Against the wall beside him a man and woman copulated in an ugly parody of lovemaking.

She smelled sex and piss, and worse.

The tunnel widened, opened into an area jammed with video, VR, and hologram dens.

VR Hell was black. Its walls, its windows, its doors all coated with the same unrelieved, and somehow greasy black. Across it, in letters she assumed were supposed to reflect the devil's fire, was its name. A poorly painted image of Satan, complete with horns and tail and pitchfork, danced over the flames.

"Mook's in there." The dwarf spoke for the first time in a voice like a bass drum constructed from sandpaper. "Digs on the Madam Electra machine. Bondage shit. Sick f**ker. Got fifty?"

Eve dug for credits. "Got twenty. Blow."

He showed his grayed, pointy teeth. The twenty disappeared, then so did he.

"You meet such interesting people down here," Peabody said shakily.

"Stay close," Eve ordered. "Anybody moves in, bang 'em."

"You don't have to tell me twice." With her hand gripped tight on her bat, Peabody followed Eve into Hell.

The noise was awesome: screams, sirens, grunts, and groans from dozens of clashing machines and patrons. The lighting was an ugly red that shimmered and swayed. It flashed her back to a freezing room in Dallas, made her stomach pitch before she controlled it.

She heard the ragged breathing, the hissed words of violent sex. She'd heard those in that room, too, before the end. Heard them in too many rooms to count where the walls were thin as tissue and brutality was only a whisper away.

The sound of flesh striking flesh. Gleeful punishment.

Stop it! Goddamn you, Rick, stop! You're hurting me!

Whose voice was that? Eve wondered as she stared around blindly. Her mother's? One of the whores he'd used when he wasn't using his daughter?

"Dallas? Lieutenant?"

The uneasy tremble in Peabody's voice snapped her back. This wasn't the time to lose her focus. It wasn't the time to remember.

"Stay close," Eve repeated, and began to thread through the machines.

Most were too intent on the game, on the world they'd created to notice her. But others still had instincts sharp enough to make a cop. Though plenty of those people were armed, nothing was aimed in their direction, for the moment.

She passed a tube titled Whips and Chains where a woman, thin as a stick, wearing VR goggles, screamed in ecstasy. Sweat poured down her body like oil, over the tight leather loincloth, beaded on the restraints that locked her arms and legs to the console of her machine.