No Dogs in Philly by Andy Futuro Page B

seemed to have that other
thing, that special sense, ways of knowing the things you lock up
in your head all private from the Net. That was their
advantage.
    So how to beat that? Well, not by sitting
around the apartment. Boots on the ground. Experience. Asking
around about a girl with blue eyes—hopeless—and what was the other
thing ElilE had said? Fires. Asking about strange fires. That was
no help either. Fires were every day, all the time. An elzi wanders
into a house and busts up the stove. Fire. An elzi wanders into a
power plant and gets fried. Fire. A woman catches her husband
cheating on her. She shoots him and sets a fire to cover it all up.
Fires all over the friggin’ place.
    Alright, that was out. But the eyes…there was
something there. They were strange eyes, pretty eyes. If this girl
was like ElilE said then these eyes were magical, there was more to
them than just the look. That was something you noticed. That was
something that was worth something to a certain type of someone.
And maybe this girl was a saint, but she had to eat, and probably
needed a slap of something or other to shake reality for a spell,
and if she was just regular folk she only had a few options. That
meant pimps—no, too easy. She would have been found on the Net.
That ruled out freelancing then too, she’d leave a footprint.
Auction records too. Huh, was she just street walking? Then she was
dead anyway…no, either she had another way of bringing or, or, or…a
benefactor. A patron. Maybe a once-in-a-while thing when she really
needed a fix or her stomach was caving in.
    It was a shitty theory. There were infinite
ways she could be occupying herself or scraping together what
passed for a living. She could have worked in the hippy coop
cleaning or cooking or planting vegetables. That would keep her off
the Net and still give her a life. But she didn’t think so. ElilE
said this girl had a troubled childhood, like hers—bastard, how
dare you dig in my shit pile—and if she really did have an
alien following her then that was sure to shake up her brain just a
little. That meant drugs. That meant booze. Maybe it even meant
body modding. All of that was expensive—more than a coop brought at
least. The sell-sex theory was shit in a bag, but it felt
right.
    She giggled at the simplicity of it. She
wouldn’t have to tromp around the garbage pits of the Fish at
all—she’d just put a price on the girl’s head. Easy as pie. Whoever
her benefactor was (if he existed) he’d be rich to her but he sure
as hell wouldn’t be downtown real-person rich. What was the price,
ten? No, she’d make it really sweet. A straight twenty grand for a
girl with blue eyes, the bluest they could find, they had to be really blue. Get a picture and send it along, no Net, don’t
wanna get the porkies involved. Real pics on real paper. She
clapped her hands together. A plan! A dangerous thin rope to hang
herself on but better than she’d had five minutes ago.
     
    Smokey Lou was at his bar, Smokey Lou’s, as
usual, smoking, as usual. The bar was famous in the Libs district
for, what else? Smoking. And smoking accessories. And girls. The
two worked together in the center stage, some poor skag in a
woman-sized hookah with a thousand little squid dicks running out,
sucked on by fat and for some reason always hairy men. It was quite
a spectacle, Saru had to admit—the naked woman, somehow not puking
out her lungs, swaying inside the swirling smoke, rubbing her bare
tits and ass up against the glass from time to time. Different
girls, different flavors.
    “ You’re saying, twenty thousand
for a girl with blue eyes?”
    Lou looked shocked, almost offended by this. He
was, like his clientele, fat, hairy, and unpleasant. He was always
sweating and his fancy white shirts and suits always looked like
they’d just come out of the wash. His breath smelled like an
orangutan’s nut sack and every conversation involved her warning
him repeatedly to point his