These Mean Streets, Darkly (The Liquid Cool Prequel) Read online

  THESE MEAN STREETS, DARKLY

  A LIQUID COOL PREQUEL / SHORT STORY

  The Cyberpunk Detective Series in a High-Tech, Low-Life World

  AUSTIN DRAGON

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Free Offer

  Chapter 1 | Beware the Rabbit Hole

  Chapter 2 | Red and Blue Light Show

  Chapter 3 | Frantic

  Chapter 4 | Street Shakedown

  Chapter 5 | Liquid Cool

  REVIEW REQUEST

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  CONTINUE THE ADVENTURE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

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  Now, put on your raincoat, grab your laser pistol and let's get into the world of Liquid Cool.

  Enjoy!

  Chapter 1

  Beware the Rabbit Hole

  METROPOLIS WAS MORE. It was an urban megacity that occupied a region nearly twice the size of almost all others in the nation, hence its power. Amateur wordsmiths in the media were always trying to make up new hyphenated words to describe it—omni-city, over-city, super-city. Megacity seemed such an antiquated and ill-suited term. Metropolis was called a megacity way back when it was ten times smaller. All its buildings, both business and government, were larger and taller today. The downtown business district, with City Hall right smack in the middle, towered over the many ethnic neighborhoods, with the only exception being the exclusive, super-rich ones, of course. Everything spiraled out and away to create a concrete maze from the ground to the sky. There were no houses as in the past. Everyone lived as they worked, in mega-skyscrapers. There were no individual storefronts. Businesses were either part of a floor, owned the whole floor, or owned the entire business tower. The dark urban landscape was offset by flashing neon and video signs. Street lampposts hung over nearly every city corner, and lights liberally adorned the surfaces of buildings, usually in some kind of geometric design. If that wasn't enough visual madness, there was the glowing eye-wear of the people themselves. Bright lights scared away the gloom and doom of the dark and cloudy skies—nine out of ten city psychologists said so. This "neon jungle" was filled with fifty-million two-legged animals (humans) living, breathing, and dying beneath the ever-present rain.

  Buildings dominated the horizontal space, but the public transportation thoroughfares sprawled out vertically, ultimately circling the entire circumference of the city. All private hovercar traffic was funneled into designated virtual lanes, one above another. The only vehicles that could fly where they pleased were the police, firemen, and garbage trucks. And then there were the megacorporate zeppelins floating through the air, flashing their advertisements for the hour or the day.

  There was a system to life that everyone followed from the smallest guy, shuffling along to make a living to the god-like guy, consumed with power and fortune—where to work, where to live, where to play. Public schools, public transportation. Labor and delivery rooms to birth your babies, morgues for the "meat" (dead bodies), and finally, funeral parlors for processing to the crematorium. The cycle of life. That didn't mean that the gray people of the masses had to go about life in the rain without style. In their designer Goodwill wet-wear clothes and glowing shades, they found their own particular way to cope and survive in the drudgery of the world. Know your place, don't upset the order of things, and, though you'd never get Up-Top, make it to retirement to relax free-and-clear for your last decade or two of life. Most accepted this unsaid, universal contract. Most accepted that they were mere automatons in the cosmos, even those not bionic, either working for international or multinational megacorps, the archenemies of Big Brother, or working for uber-governments, the "Man," the archenemy of Big, Bad Business. Metropolis wasn't a bad place, but it wasn't a good one either.

  There was another choice, a third choice, as an occupation—the streets. Forgo the legitimate, nine-to-five corporatist or government job for the freedom of the streets. But that was euphemistic talk for the Crime World. There was no money to be made being an off-Grid survivalist. In the criminal world, a bigger criminal or the cops would probably get you eventually, but many didn't mind the side-hustle, the gamble to try to beat the odds. Make—or steal—enough to live like an obscenely rich and famous scenester or wealth-hog, or buy your way Up-Top where Paradise was not a hallucinatory dream, but a real-life, fairytale reality for the masses and not the select few. The ultimate payoff could be huge, which was why the risks were so deadly. Every slippery-shoed hustler, knuckle-dragging thug, and in-bred criminal underboss was in your way, and you were in theirs. There were the streets and then there were the mean streets, which despite the neon lights were dark and dangerous. Mean streets were the places that every legit, Average Joe should stay far away from.

  The back streets were truly black—no digital signs, no nearby street lamps, no building strobe lights; only the natural light from the sky, which meant near-darkness. It was a not-so-nice part of town. No smiley faces or smiley people here. Crime never tried to hide here. It happened right in the open on main streets as well as the back-alley corners and the many not-so-respectable establishments. It was Exhibit A of the inevitable dark side of the free-market. Dirty money for dirty products and dirtier services. "Some place in the city has to be zoned for sin," the conventional wisdom said, otherwise the filth would be knocking on everyone's front doors, both respectable and rich alike.

  The name of this part of the city was Whiskey Way, and, back in the day, all kinds of illegal things were run through its streets. Can a place be inherently bad so much of the time that it always attracts bad people? No one knew the answer. Whiskey Way was always a crime hot spot and neither City Hall nor any Mayor was ever able to "solve it." On these streets, even if bright and sunny were possible, it would be like looking through a cloudy glass—darkly.

  The thin man stood tall in his three-piece suit, though he was actually scared at having to deal with such a person—a crazy thug, who watched him through dark shades. In the dark of day or the pitch-black night, everyone covered their eyes with glasses.

  "Did you know that the sky has all kinds of shades of red in all that blackness? Like blood and bruises." Red snickered as he popped another red pill. "What's the name?"

  "Easy Chair Charlie."

  The Thin Man was already reaching out his hand with a photo.

  Red took it with a metallic hand and studied it. "Where?"

  "Sweet Street in Old Harlem."

  Red reached out from the shadows again. The Thin Man handed him a wet bag of cash.

  "It must be serious for you to venture out all by your lonesome to the mean streets, in the rain, through dark alleys, far from your luxurious, upper-floor domicile. Maybe I can be your next-door neighbor one day."

  "I much prefer you down here."

  "Where I belong, right?"

  "Down here you're something sinister. Up in my world, you'd just be a freak in a rabbit mask. I doubt that perception would be good for the psycho business."

  Red laughed. "When you're right, you're right." He finished flipping through the money. "You know why I like cold, hard cash? Because that way no one can ever double-cross me. Credit cards can be bugged, traced, tracked, or erased remotely. We couldn't allow that to happen. Don't trust that digital stuff. Gotta remove all temptation from the equation. There're no apples in my garde
n."

  They both went quiet and still. A pedestrian half-ran down the street nearby. Red was invisible in the shadows, but the Thin Man had to pull his black hat down a bit to hide his face. The passerby had neon-blue shades and was an average-looking guy in a suit with a hoodie; obviously trying to get out of the rain, somewhere fast, or both.

  "Let's get on with this," the Thin Man said under his breath. "You have the money. I need it done within the hour."

  "You know how I do things, right?"

  The Thin Man was getting more impatient and looked up at him. There was no neon sign with its blink-blink to pierce the night, but the Thin Man could see him fine with his night-view red spectacles. Red's silly buck-toothed grin, his large floppy ears sprouting from his head like bean stalks, those dark holes for eyes behind the shades, and dressed in a similar suit—though not as dapper.

  "I do. So go do it."

  Red snickered again. "I'll get a-hoppin'."

  The sky was especially menacing today, she thought. A vast expanse of blackish-blue with streaks of red, but there was no accompanying downpour, not even a drizzle—but it was coming. Boy, it was coming hard. She could tell from the rumble above.

  This was Metropolis weather. Drizzle, rain, storm, repeat. Old-timers like her actually remember the old places like Seattle. The world was now Seattle—always raining. But the Metropolis didn't care. Its structures were always growing higher into the sky, its technology always expanding with flashier machinery, the throngs of the gray masses always multiplying with more offspring—as if there wasn't enough people packed into the city. But the rain was more powerful. It slowed the pace of human progress to a crawl. If it weren't for the rain, the skyscrapers would have reached Saturn by now, the machines would have become suicidal, and the people would have become homicidal. The rain actually kept the world manageable. You could run, but not too fast. High-tech could progress, but never smother the end-users.

  Carol lifted up the collar of her gray slicker, shivering just thinking about the downpour to come. She returned her black gloved hands to her coat's pockets. "We're late, you know," she said.

  The little girl, decked out in her trendy gray wet-wear—a hooded, two-piece gray outfit with attached knapsack and soft lunch-box in her hand—continued to skip through the puddles on the sidewalk. Even in a hurricane, she would stay perfectly dry, except for her cute face with blue eyes and a lock of light brown hair dangling out from beneath the top of her hood. With each splash, she watched a hint of some color in the water—maybe a blue or orange or lavender. Her goal was to see every rainbow color for the day. She stopped to glance at her mother with a smile. "Skip with me, Mommy."

  "I'm too old for that." She would never tell her daughter that the ground puddle rainbow display was courtesy of the City's nasty 'natural' chemical residue. "And I don't want all that water all over my stockings," she continued. Other than her slicker, Carol wore her plastic head scarf and plastic boots over her shoes. She called herself old, but she had a ways to go before really being old. She was a White female with dark hair and minimal make-up. A mini-umbrella was always clipped to her slicker, but she never used it. The wind loved mini-umbrellas, snatching them right out of human hands to use as a projectile to hit some unsuspecting fool in the head.

  "You need frubber leggings like me, Mom." The girl was now posing like a model, sticking out a leg wrapped snuggly in the wet-wear legging, which looked almost exactly like her natural skin. Her mother always wondered if she wore them for style or for boys.

  "I'm okay, thank you. I'll buy the fancy clothes for you, and I'll keep my old, boring clothes. That's what parents do. Now, come on. We're late. And the rain will bucket down any minute."

  Their weekday walks to her school in the early morning hours always took them through the outskirts of Woodstock Falls, a working-class, multiethnic neighborhood. Nothing crazy or wild ever happened here, and that's exactly how the residents and business owners wanted it. But that didn't mean she was any less vigilant of the surroundings. Even safe neighborhoods were not immune to the occasional undesirable or street punk.

  Carol didn't run. She wanted to go at least a full week without slipping and falling on her butt. Her daughter skipped ahead of her, one puddle after another. At this time of morning the streets were virtually empty, except for early morning deliverymen, sweepers, and the ubiquitous trash collectors zipping by in their hovertrucks.

  It was their daily ritual Monday to Friday—Carol walking her daughter to school, without fail.

  At the other end of the street in the shadows, he watched them. His telescoping goggles automatically adjusted focus to follow the females. He stood quiet, leaning on the corner building under the large black awning. He was too far away and it was dark enough that he could be right across the street from them and they wouldn't see him.

  "Digital man killed the analog man..." he hummed the lyrics to himself. The song was barely audible from his old orange headphones.

  He stepped forward in his exceedingly comfortable, five-toed, platform shoes to follow them.

  The walk wasn't a bad one. Her daughter loved it, because it was that quiet time for her to play unencumbered by any other care in the world. For her mother, it was quiet time too, but far from carefree. While her daughter joyfully skipped along the slick sidewalks, her eyes were constantly roving for trouble. She was a meek woman, except when it came to the safety of her daughter. In that regard she was a vicious, carnivorous tigress. "Freakazoids," she called them. The prowlers and pedophiles that the media liked to report on and scare parents about.

  "Let's go this way, Mom."

  "Which way?"

  "Alien Alley." The girl pointed to the neon sign, wall poster adorned pedestrian-only alley.

  "Why? Are you expecting to see some extraterrestrials?"

  The girl laughed. "No, Mom. There's no such thing as space aliens."

  "Except for the human ones."

  "It's a shortcut."

  "How many times do I have to tell you—?"

  "'There's no shortcut when it comes to safety'," the girl repeated her mother, word for word, before she finished.

  "Then you ask me to allow you to walk to and from school by yourself."

  The girl sighed, now realizing she had sufficiently wound-up her mother.

  "Okay, Mom! No Alien Alley. Pretend I never asked."

  "Imagine how many freakazoids are down there. I never even heard of this alley."

  "We pass it every day to school, Mom. It's always empty."

  "Then why don't they call it Empty Alley?"

  "Oh, Mom. Forget it!"

  "You don't take safety seriously."

  "I do."

  "I wish you did."

  "I do, Mom."

  "Like this instant, there's a damn freakazoid following us."

  "What?" The girl stopped skipping and immediately turned around. She stared back down the long, dark street. "Where?"

  Her mother just watched her with her hands in her pocket. Her daughter looked at her, then back down the street. She stared for a while, and then the smile returned to her face.

  "There's no freakazoids back there, Mom. You're just trying to scare me for nothing."

  "Doesn't look like I'm doing a very good job."

  "Mom, they've shown us the entire Scared Straight series in school multiple times, including pedestrian street safety."

  "Listen to you."

  "Mom, I do keep a good look out when you're not here. I promise I do. Just how you taught me. Promise."

  Her mother lifted her arm to glance at her large wristband watch. "Let's move it. We'll be late for sure, and I don't want you to get another tardy demerit."

  "Let's cut through Alien Alley, Mom. It's empty. We can run. No one can catch us if we run."

  "I'll get wet."

  "No, Mom. We'll be running too fast for that. And we'll beat the big downpour that's coming, too." The girl looked up to the sky, squinting, as if something was about to f
all on her any minute. "You'll be right with me. Let's do it, Mom. Live dangerously, Mom."

  Carol stood there, watching her daughter with a half-smile.

  Her daughter had already turned back to walk to the alley. "We'll get through the alley lickety-split and to school on time. But we have to run now, Mom."

  "Give me a minute." Carol touched her plastic head scarf and bent down to make sure her socks and boots were pulled up. "Old folks have to prepare themselves for childish recklessness. It's not spontaneous anymore for us."

  "It is going to bucket down, Mom. You said so yourself."

  "Okay, young lady, you can stop now. There is such a thing as overdoing it and losing the sale, when you got it in the bag, by adding one thing too many."

  Her daughter grinned at her.

  Carol stood up straight and looked back with an oh-so slight grin. "Run!"

  Mother and daughter disappeared into Alien Alley with sounds of feet sloshing through water.

  Chapter 2

  Red and Blue Light Show

  THE POLICE CRUISER glided through the sky thirty-feet above all the normal congested traffic. It was a standard five-seater hovercraft with its two officers in full silver-and-black body-armored uniforms and visored half-helmets. The driver was Officer Break, a Black policeman on the Force for some twelve years. Officer Caps, the White policeman in the passenger seat, joined the Metropolis Police Department a year later. The senior officers had been partners for over seven years now. While most policemen couldn't wait to get off beat work for Homicide, Vice, Sex Crimes, White-Collar, or anything else; they both preferred the grunt work. It meant do your shift and then go home; nothing more. Moving up the ranks meant more paperwork and more headaches. The only headaches they wanted in life were those from restless wives and kids entering puberty.

  "Come in Unit 7-8-2-7," a voice echoed through the front speakers.

  Officer Caps touched a flashing red button on the dashboard.