Eye and Talon Read Online Free PDF Page A

across it at her. 'It's a rough old world out there, and nobody loves our asses the way we do. Things are happening right now, so it would behoove both you and me to keep our noses clean. Shiny, even..' With one point of the metal, Meyer scratched his chin, deep enough to draw a white line across the skin. 'So I'm not bending any rules for you. And you shouldn't be asking me to. Not if you're smart.'
    That worried her. Not much else could, but departmental politics were a jungle to her, darker than any back alley in LA. 'What do you mean? What's going on?'
    Meyer regarded her skeptically. 'You haven't heard?'
    'Come on. You know I don't listen to this kind of stuff. I got better things to do. Like my job, for one.'
    'Yeah, well, your job is what it's about. Your job and mine.' Meyer righted the swivel chair from behind the desk and sat down in it. 'I feel,' he said, 'like I should offer you a drink or something.' He laid his hands flat on the desk blotter, with its overlapping ring marks left by all the glasses that had been sat on it, like the ghost residues of the bottle's brown contents. 'That's what Bryant always did, when he was telling one of his crew some kind of bad news. Just an excuse to have one himself, the poor old lush.'
    'Screw Bryant.' The dead didn't interest her; not if they weren't one of her income sources. 'Something's going on with the division, right? What is it?'
    'Big reorganization coming down,' said Meyer. 'All through the department. Not just our little blade runner division, but top to bottom, through the entire LAPD.' He leaned back in Bryant's old chair, hands folded across the vest buttons of his Brooks Bros suit. 'Think ants in a jar. Then think about somebody picking up that jar and shaking it. Shaking it good . So when the jar gets set back down, the ants are tearing at each other.' Meyer nodded slowly. 'That's what it's going to be like, all over the new headquarters.'
    She'd seen ants; they were one of the survivor species, like rats and cockroaches and pigeons, that went on living and crawling around, no matter how bad conditions got. And like human beings.
    'What brought this on?'
    'Who knows?' Meyer shrugged. 'For this town, money problems are like the rain: they come in and kick your ass on a regular basis. And if you spend too much time looking up and wondering where it's coming from, you'll drown. Probably the last revenue bond issue tanked; let's face it, there are twenty different languages spoken in LA, and half the population are monoglots — they don't speak to anyone else. You're going to get those people to vote for more money for the police? Fat chance.'
    For a moment, Iris felt as though she were standing out in the edges of the ocean, the one she remembered from when she was a child, and the tide was sucking at her skinny-kid legs as it receded and exposed the sharp rocks hiding below the waves. Then she realized it was the scanitor units going about their business, the tiny machines scurrying about and dragging out of the office the paper they had already recorded and filed away. A bigger deaning module would come by later, and sweep up and incinerate the hard-copy pieces of the late Captain Bryant's existence. In the meantime, the edges of the battered furniture and the corners of the room were gradually becoming visible.
    'What about the UN?' Iris tilted her head, indicating the world outside the empty building. 'I thought we got some kind of peacekeeping grant from them. This being the front line and all.' She didn't have to say what the front was up against, what war was going on. The whole reason that the LAPD even had a blade runner division was because this was where the escaped replicants came. Their birthplace. 'Isn't that worth something to them?'
    'Yeah, it's worth something. It's worth taking over, that's what it's worth. Pure power-grab time.' The expression on Meyer's boyish face turned sour and cynical, making him look like a life-embittered old man. 'What I