No Dogs in Philly

No Dogs in Philly

By Andy Futuro

Copyright 2014 June Day Press

Smashwords Edition

This book is available in print at most online
retailers.

To Teofil, MC, G.E., Jamike, and Sky

Pronunciation Guide

Gaespora: Guy-ass-pour-a

Elzi: El-zee

Saru: Sah-roo

Ria: Ree-uh

UausuaU: You-ows-you-ow. Often abbreviated to
Uau.

Wekba: Wake-bah

ElilE: Ee-lie-uh-lee

Hemu: He-moo

IlusithariusuirahtisulI:
Ill-oo-suh-thar-ee-us-ear-ah-tuh-sul-eye

Chapter 1

Saru had ignored the calls from the
Philadelphia Daily, the call from Frank Galloway to appear on
Wake the Hell Up! Philly
, the call from Lorelei Ilesella to
be interviewed on
Tonight Tonight
, and even a call from
Mayor Whitlow’s press secretary requesting a photo op. The call
that gave her the greatest pleasure to ignore came from the
Gaespora. It came in the usual fashion of summons from the
ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful wishing to impress. There was a
custom sonata su-tone that had been attuned to her psychosomatic
profile. The image that appeared on her player was of a peaceful
green forest with a trickling brook—it was a pretty accurate
re-creation of the forest behind her parents’ farmhouse in Tyrone.
This told her all she needed know: they wanted her, and her
specifically. She hit ignore.

Five seconds later the su-tone appeared again,
the sonata and the image of her parents’ forest. She hit ignore
again. Five seconds later there was a new su-tone—not pleasant
piano, just a horrible grating, like scratched vinyl and kitchen
knives clattering in the sink. The forest was burned to the ground
and the river ran with blood. What the fuck? She hit ignore. She’d
never seen any su-tone like it. She ordered her player to ignore
all messages from suspected Gaesporan nodes.

The su-tone appeared again, about five minutes
later, and now she was pissed. She had spent good money on an
override, floating a standard bid of over $3,000 to block
commercial calls. Any jackass dumb enough to call her private line
would have to pay at least that amount to make an attempt. It
worked in screening out the riffraff but she realized there was no
way she could win a bidding war with the Gaespora. They could keep
her player ringing day and night for a lifetime. She unfastened the
dime-sized player from below her right earlobe and placed it on the
center of her desk. She retrieved
Ethics in the Age of
Knowing
(a gift from Eugene, never opened) from the otherwise
empty bookshelf, held it over her head, and smashed the player just
as it began the vinyl scratching again. Problem solved.

The next morning her office was closed. The
whole damn building, forty-five stories, right on the corner of
Thirteenth and Locust. There was a crowd of confused workers out
front surrounding the superintendent, who was trying pudgily to
answer their questions: What’s going on? Why is the building
closed? Why can’t we get to work and trundle on in our sad, sad
lives?

“
The building is under new
ownership,” the super said, shouting over the crowd. “They’ve
changed all the locks.”

“
What do you mean ‘new ownership’?
How is that possible?”

“
Please, people, I know just as
much as you do at this point. I got the call this morning. No one
gets in.”

“
That’s not legal!”

“
You can’t do that!”

“
What about our jobs?”

“
What about our stuff?”

Saru left and turned down Walnut Street,
walking east, no particular destination in mind. They had taken her
player and her office—for there could be no misunderstanding the
message. They wanted her, bad, and they were willing to spend a lot
of money and inconvenience a lot of other people to get to her.
There were, as far as she knew, over sixty different businesses,
large and small in her building—she occupied a tiny two-room office
on the thirteenth floor that didn’t even have its own bathroom.
They could have sent two toughs to stand in front of her door or
bribed someone to change the locks, but they bought the whole damn
building and all that headache.

She found a Nikafe and bought a small black
that she jazzed up with a splash or five of bourbon from her flask.
She sat at a small table facing the window and watched the people
hurry by. It had started to rain, gray drops for a black sky. An
elzi lay outside in front of her, body blocking the gutter. The
water pooled around him, black, acidic, rising to his neck. She
wondered if he would drown.

This was a lucrative age for the private
investigator—so many people disappearing, and a weak, underfunded,
unmotivated, amoralized police force more likely to take a bribe
than a stab at a criminal. Saru was good, she knew, but hardly the
best, and maybe no one else realized how lucky she’d been in the
Favre case. Nine times out of ten it was a kid looking into the
UausuaU, no real mystery to solve—fuck, her job was 90 percent maid
service—but the Favre job just happened to be an honest kidnapping
and she just happened to be friends with enough scumbags to get a
good tip.

The rescue was a solid piece of work, she had
to admit. The kidnappers were suspected Puritans, crusaders,
implant and improvement free as whatever God made them. They had
taken the child not for ransom but to bring him over to their way
of thinking with good old-fashioned torture—the family had gotten
some fingernails in the mail. The kid was a scion of the Favre, the
family that owned Priamco that owned Freedom Innovation
Technologies (FIT) that begat Diasis that manufactured all manner
of vaccines against the diseases of sin. It was an odd target as
the Favre had about as much operational knowledge of Diasis as Saru
did of her own small intestine, but the Puritans didn’t strike her
as being a particularly educated bunch.

She had hired a few mercenaries to go on the
hunt with her. There was a Net ranger named Pollycock, who’d proved
useless as the Puritans obviously didn’t use Net technology. She’d
found a sniffer on South Street, a scent fetishist who had jammed a
screwdriver in his eyes and ears to focus on his favored sense. He
had a keyboard on his wrist, a real hack job held in place with
chicken wire, but it worked well enough to communicate and hammer
out a deal. She’d figured that if these folks were serious in their
beliefs they’d have to stick to a pretty narrow diet to avoid
Gaesporan food alteration and they’d have a unique smell. It didn’t
turn out to be the case—the sniffer was good but not that good and
there were all kinds of other things that got in the way. Leading
him around the city on a leash, she’d seen how the general reek of
shit and garbage confused even a man who could sniff out a pig from
his donut farts.

They had to be in the AZ, the Assistance Zone.
There was barely any technology there, no cornercams or autometers,
fuck, not even running water or a security spike in most places.
Any Net access points would be illegal and unmonitored. There was a
great mass of elzi, lured by the unmonitored Net access and the
assistance points, the great pillbox buildings that delivered food
weekly to the poor and useless. Originally actual humans had
distributed the food aid, but that plan had been scuttled quick as
the elzi didn’t wait in line and they didn’t fill out paperwork.
Every Monday underground trolleys brought in food to the
distribution centers. It was raised up on elevators, the domes
opened, and elzi swarmed over the feast in an orgy of consumption.
Paradoxically, this was the safest day to venture into the
Assistance Zone—an elzi was less likely to take a lick at your
throat if he had bread in his belly. Every month or so a resolution
was entered in council to poison the food and clear out the elzi
menace, but the rehabbers always shot it down. Idiots.

She had ventured in on a Monday with the
sniffer, no real plan other than to follow his nose and find some
granola-munching zealots. They had wandered aimlessly, almost
running into an elzi frenzy, which seemed to excite the sniffer for
some reason. The very odors that repelled her, the diarrhea reek of
decay the elzi exuded, were ambrosia to him. She thanked her
private God that she’d been blessed with fetishes considered close
enough to normal.

There amidst the shrieks and growls of the elzi
and the ecstatic panting of the sniffer, she had had her
breakthrough. The kidnappers had nabbed this kid off the street,
shot the fuck out of his Royce, dragged out the driver and two
bodyguards and executed them. They’d used blenders to liquefy the
brains and prevent memory recreation, but the bullets themselves
were the key. They cost a fat buck—these were high-class, tuxedo
bullets, not something your standard thug could afford even if he
saved his welfare checks and mugging spoils for a lifetime. She
checked the three munitions stores in Rittenhouse that stocked
blenders. No robberies, but a sale at Franklin’s Freedom Assurance
Emporium to a Walter Fran four days earlier—two days before the
kidnapping.

From there it had been almost too easy. She’d
hopped onto the Net and plugged in Walter Fran and the Favre Group.
There were sixteen connections. Walter Fran had gone to school with
Charles Favre, the boy’s father. They had started a company
together, Glorium, a religious update impulse motivator that
identified sinful thought and generated warnings ranging from
flashing red hallucinations to migraines. They had argued over the
scope. Walter believed it should be a tool to guide the McFaithful
and Charles saw it as a corrective measure for the prison
population.

The feds got involved. They wanted the impulse
to become a standard input in all citizens—part of the birth
cocktail. It would warn citizens away from thinking treasonous or
law-breaking thoughts. The bill made it out of committee, but then
it was squashed by the Hawks with Gaesporan backing. The Gaespora,
of course, opposed any mass impulse programming of the
population.

The whole deal had become a distraction to
Charles. He was by then involved in building Priamco. He bought out
Walter and as a final fuck you he changed the company to Glorium
Galorium, a sex impulse that delivered pleasure depending on the
degree of transgressive thought. It became a best seller. The whole
kidnapping was a grudge, nothing more, an attack of opportunity by
one elite on another.

Proof would have been impossible, and even if
she’d gotten it the momentum of the legal system favored the
aggressor. She’d found Fran’s condo in Rittenhouse, a penthouse
suite, though not in the nicest building and nowhere near as nice
as the Favre estate. She’d bribed the garage guard with a few
hundred bucks and waited behind a pylon next to Fran’s car. When he
came out she’d zapped him unconscious with her cattle prod and tied
him up with zip wires. The old ways are best, her mother used to
say. She’d driven Fran in his own GMW to the Favre estate and
handed him over to their director of security, along with her
report. They would’ve tapped his brain and ripped out the memories
of the thugs he’d hired, or maybe just straight tortured him. There
was a chance he’d hired the thugs and been vague on the
instructions, but she didn’t think so. If it was a grudge he’d want
the proof, want to know, want to see his revenge on the big
screen.

She’d taken a cab to the police station and
turned herself in. Eugene had phoned and argued her case and the
Favre had paid her fine. She was in and out in forty-five minutes.
The Favre security people had found the boy in a church basement in
the AZ. The kidnappers had broken a few bones and pulled a few
teeth, but he was fine. He took a trip to the Gaespora and was
healthier than he’d ever been. The whole adventure was quite
exciting for him, quite a win—a good story to impress the fun
girls. He could have died in a ditch for all Saru cared, but
finding him alive and pretty earned her a fat bonus, so all in all
she was happy. It had been an exciting week, a lively news cycle
for April, and somehow in all the excitement some dipshit security
guard somewhere had mentioned her name to the press and now Saru
Solan was famous. A hero, a true face of private justice, a symbol
that the system worked. Shit.