No Dogs in Philly by Andy Futuro Page A

a lover if it ever got too hot. She wasn’t the
honeypot type and she’d never gotten the chance to use it, but hey,
why not have it just in case?
    It was time to get out the lucky shirt, the
pink tank top with the big purple heart in the center. Alright
lucky shirt, do your thing. She couldn’t quite remember why it was
lucky—did she win a scratch-off when she was wearing it? No, that
wasn’t it. It had something to do with Eugene, right? They went and
had champagne at the Borazali after she nailed her first conviction
and they both got a little too friendly. No…she’d dressed up for
that, in that skimpy golden tube that her dad would’ve smacked her
back to Jersey for wearing. Huh. It bothered her she couldn’t
remember why it was lucky. What’s the point of a lucky shirt if you
can’t remember the thing that made it lucky?
    Ah, now the real question—the gun. She didn’t
like guns, not because they were guns. The actual shooting and the
ritual of caring for them she found relaxing. But carrying a gun
complicated the justice process. With her trusty prod and a tranq
or two she could apprehend a suspect, deliver justice, pay the levy
at the Po-Stop and be gone. But a gun slowed everything down—why
did she have the gun? Did she use it? Where did she get it? Did she
have a permit? A license? What kind of bullets was she using? The
longer she stayed in jail answering questions the more the risk.
Better to be walking the streets with the elzi and the thugs, where
you could run and fight and had options other than sucking down a
beating and likely something more if you weren’t too ugly to look
at.
    But if this charade got all magical her prod
wasn’t going to do much good. She still had that flank-steak smell
of ElilE’s hand roasting at full power, and if these feasters had
any tricks up their sleeves she wanted a few of her own. She
strapped on the pancake holster—nicely concealed by the peacoat—and
did a quick check of her Betty. It was illegal, of course, like
everything fun, for being made of layered composite materials that
nine times out of ten showed up as nothing more than a blip on a
scanner. In her wilder days she’d gotten some back-alley saw jockey
to patch it into her implants because au natural she couldn’t shoot
for shit—apparently aiming took patience and discipline. But with
her add-ons she could circumcise a newborn from fifty feet away
with just a thought. The saw jockey must’ve gotten some nerves
scrambled in the process because every time she used the damn thing
it made her nipples thrill. Bastard probably did it on purpose—you
don’t get kicked out of med school for incompetence.
    Alright, all dressed up and no place to go.
Time to put the old brain to work. She grabbed a stick of Chew 20
to get some fuel in her system and then paced the room kicking at
things in an attempt to mimic thinking. The girl is in the fish.
Well, that’s pretty obvious—she’s in the Fish. It was a comforting
thought. The Fish was a labyrinth of hip warrens, the kingdom of
the homeless pseudo-society. It was huge and crowded and had a
shitty network connection so it would be impossible to find her
without more info. But what info did they have? She’d been dozing
for twelve hours and her hunters, rivals, the dicks who were going
to cost her ten million tickets out of Philly were out doing…what,
exactly? How were they getting their information?
    The Net of course, hacking security cameras,
hacking private implants, arrest records, viks—what anyone did when
they wanted to drag up dirt on someone or find them and kill ‘em.
But this girl was hard to find—unregistered, probably, no
birthright implants or maybe she’d paid someone to dig ‘em out. She
had a small profile so she was probably hip herself, no real
residence, no money, day-to-day scraping it together—probably never
went to school. So they’d tracked her to the Fish, not a huge
surprise, not a huge concern except…they