Chapter 10: Tail Job
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I had my mouth open to say something when the partition door opened a quarter-metre. The tall dark handsome boy in the jerkin looked out, pale-faced and tight-lipped, saw me, shit the door quickly again, but not before I had seen on the floor behind him a lot of yellow plastic packing crates lined with bubble-wrap and packed loosely with books. A man in very new overalls was fussing with them. Some of the Geiger Counter's stock was being moved out. When the door shut I put my dark glasses back on again and nodded at the blonde. "Tomorrow, then. I'd like to give you a card, but you know how it is." "Ye-es. I know how it is." She shivered a little more and made a faint sucking noise between her bright lips. I went out of the store and spinwards on the boulevard to the corner and onto the street to the alley which ran behind the stores. A small black truck with blank sides and no lettering on it was backed up to Geiger's place. The man in the very new overalls was just heaving a box up on the tailboard. I went back to the boulevard and along the block next to Geiger's and found a taxi standing at the kerb. The driver, a fresh-faced kid with a cybernetic arm, was reading a horror story on a roll-up screen. I leaned in and showed him a K-bill: "Tail job?" He looked me over. "Cop?" "Private investigator." He grinned. "My meat, Jack." He rolled up the screen and tucked in away in a cubby-hole and I got into the cab. We went around the block and pulled up across from Geiger's alley. There were about a dozen crates on the truck when the man in overalls closed the doors and lifted tailboard and got in behind the controls. "Take him," I told my driver. The man in overalls gunned his motor, shot a glance up and down the alley and ran away fast in the other direction. He turned left out of the alley. We did the same. I caught a glimpse of the truck turning anti-spinwards and I told my driver to close in a little. He didn't or couldn't do it. I saw the truck two blocks away when we got to the junction. There was a lot of traffic and the fresh-faced kid tailed him from too far back. I was telling him about that without mincing words when the truck, now far ahead, turned hubwards again. When we got to the turn the truck had vanished. The fresh-faced kid made comforting sounds at me through the panel and we went up the hill at ten kays looking for the truck behind bushes. Two blocks up, there was a tongue of land on which there was a white apartment house with a basement garage opening. We were going past that and the fresh-faced kid was telling me the truck couldn't be far away when I looked through the arched entrance of the garage and saw it back in the dimness with its rear doors open again.
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Part 1