NightSun Read online

  This is a Genuine Vireo/Rare Bird Book

  A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Dan Vining

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Rare Bird Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,

  Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  This is a work of fiction, all of the characters and events in this story are imagined.

  Set in Dante

  Book Design by Robert Schlofferman

  epub isbn: 9781947856417

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Vining, Dan, author.

  Title: NightSun : a novel / by Dan Vining.

  Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Genuine Vireo Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: 2018.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572647

  Subjects: LCSH Private investigators—Fiction. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. | Dystopias—Fiction. | Science fiction. | Noir fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Noir | FICTION / Science Fiction / Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic.

  Classification: LCC PS3622.I56 N54 2018 | DDC 813.6—dc23

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter One

  Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” played over the thin Echoflex speakers sunk into the black ceiling joists. Coming out onto the runway from behind purple curtains, a bit hesitantly, was the next pretty thing, dressed as a secretary, or at least some tired old man’s idea of one from back when they still called them that, when the song was still young.

  “She isn’t a woman, but isn’t she pretty?” the MC said. Only his eyes were visible through the inch-wide slit in the painted-out window of the DJ booth.

  The club had a name but it kept changing so nobody bothered to remember it anymore. The space had last been a theater, before regular people stopped going out to the movies. The reconstructors had ripped out the seats and flattened the floor and converted the black hole into a “gentlemen’s club.” It could hold a hundred people, but this Tuesday night there were just eight or nine men in the joint. And one woman who stayed in the deeper shadows at a table for one.

  “Call her…‘Jane,’” the MC said.

  Two men clapped in response. Two or three others set down their drinks and joined in, thinking Jane would like it, that somehow it would buy them something with her. She walked that one-foot-in-front-of-the-other walk out to the end of the runway and stopped as the music faded, replaced by ambient tones from a machine. She just stood there. It was like a fashion show, only she wasn’t selling anything. Yet she wore “business attire,” sixties vintage, a tight gray skirt that ended below her knees, a white blouse, and a gray jacket over the skirt. Hose, heels, probably a garter belt. She took a step forward, went right up to the edge of the stage, and looked out into the red-and-white glare, projecting alone. It was as if she were looking out her office window before she started work, as if it were morning and she were the first one in and already needed to see what she was missing, cooped up inside like this. She was good at her job. She let them get a long look at her—let them start filling in the blanks in their own heads, let them make her theirs—before she turned her back on them. As she walked toward the purple curtain, an old-style curved-corner gray metal desk, a roll-around armless chair, and a black obelisk of a file cabinet glided out to meet her, as soundless as any dream, a slick bit of stagecraft. The desk came to an at-rest position just as she reached it.

  She took off her suit jacket, folded it, and put it over her chair, smoothed out her skirt, and sat down. She straightened a stack of papers in the “out” basket, whipped away the gray cover for the IBM Selectric, folded it, and slid it into the top drawer of the desk. The set was on the diagonal so they could see the leading edge of her shape as she sat there. But this wasn’t about her legs or her hips or her breasts, though her body was exhibition quality. They’d all already seen as much skin as they were going to see: a V of flesh at the collar, her bare arms, her knees and calves. And that beautiful, unsatisfied face. There wasn’t a sound—there weren’t any sound effects—but the phone “rang” and lit up. She looked down at it and sighed and waited another long second and then picked it up, pretending to answer. She smiled ever so slightly.

  Who was calling? You.

  It was a story bar. Some called them “fiction clubs” or “vignette joints.” They’d come along in LA in 2017 or ’18, the next thing after the last bleak permutation of the strip bar had been exhausted, after women had offered every inch of themselves and skin—just skin—had grown hard to market. What do you sell of a woman when you have sold every inch of her? Her story. A secretary, a nurse, a waitress. A checkout girl at the grocery store. A bank teller. A teacher in a classroom between classes, looking out the window. (Why were they always looking out windows?) What was her story? What was she thinking of? You. Coming home to you, running away from it all with you, counting the slow minutes until she could be in your arms. Most men weren’t good enough at lying to themselves to buy into the story if these little dramas had been set in the here and now, in the present. Things being the way they were now, there was no place to find this kind of fantasy but the past. Fantasy was probably too pretty a word. Whatever you wanted to call it.

  Human hunger. That’s what Nate Cole called it, with a mixture of his own longing and a general disgust at the ways of man. He was something of an expert on the subject of what men wanted, what drove them to do what they do, what fires burned inside them, burned them right down to the ground sometimes. He was a cop. If they had story bars for women with men in poses and vignettes, and if Nate had somehow come to be on one of those stages, he would have been billed as The Protector. Hard on the outside but soft inside. That fantasy.

  Nate Cole was a White—big, good-looking—a standout even before he opened his mouth. He looked as if he’d played high school ball out in the Valley, but he hadn’t. He was almost tall enough and good-looking enough to require him t
o go into show business. It was 2025 and most of the other CROs—the cops on the beat—were small now, certainly smaller than cops had been in the old days when half of the LA force was made up of White former high school linebackers, meaty Catholics, or strapping Born Agains, the other half Latin or Black or mixed-race former running backs or point guards, in a ratio determined by whether an African-American or a Latino was mayor. LA had long since forgotten how or why to get a White mayor elected. These days, governance seemed to be about keeping people of color happy—or keeping them down, depending on which way the riot smoke was blowing.

  Nate fiddled with a bullet as he watched Jane, turned it end over end, wearing down the lead another fraction of a millimeter. He always needed something to do with his hands. The bullet was an old .38 Special, round with a flat head, a range load, and a wad-cutter that weighed as much as ten regulation rounds now. Thirty-eight hollow-points were what they issued to the men and women in blue back in the olden days, back when they still wore blue and hardly ever had to shoot anybody. Then, even one round fired meant a week’s worth of paperwork and straight-faced debriefings on hard chairs. And that was if nobody died. Nowadays, all Internal Affairs really cared about was whether a cop coming in off a shift dumped his “brass” in the recycling bin. (They still called it brass though the casings were polymer. The slugs themselves were tempered glass.)

  Jane produced another phony smile as she spoke into the phony phone. Nate was almost falling for it and was annoyed with himself because of it.

  “I didn’t know you were into drama,” a dark voice said, standing over him. A female voice. “I took you for an old school skin-and-gin type.”

  Nate raised his glass. “I’m as liberal as the next guy.”

  Ava Monica was a cop, too, but private. Tonight she wore a dripping black raincoat. She took it off, draped it over the empty chair.

  “You call that rain?” Nate said.

  “Anytime it even drizzles now,” Ava said. “I think it’s going to be the last we ever see.”

  She was dressed in her signature outfit, a cat suit with a tight hood that fit like a helmet and went right up under her chin and over her ears, an outfit made out of some kind of knit that would make anyone who’d ever read a book think of a knight’s chainmail. The suit was dark gray and tighter than it needed to be.

  “Hey,” Nate said, “I just noticed: you’re a woman.” She was still standing.

  “And pretty,” she said.

  “Where do you hide your gun in that get-up?” Nate said.

  “My mind is my weapon,” she said.

  “Yeah. Me, too,” Nate said. “That and all my, you know, weapons.”

  She sat down before he could tell her to. The two of them watched Jane for a long moment. “This goes right over my head,” Ava said.

  “Young Mom Washing the Dishes is next I think,” Nate said.

  “Nothing sexier than that.”

  “I’m not sure it’s about sex anymore,” Nate said and looked across the table. It had been a couple of months since he’d seen Ava. He’d forgotten how good-looking she was. He wondered what that meant, that he’d forgotten. With Nate, every thought had a follow-up. “You guys threw in your cards on that a while ago,” he said.

  “You guys?” Ava said. “I haven’t played for years. I’m out here all by my lonesome.”

  Nate said, “I know a gunner, works nights just like you. I’ll hook you two up. You can go out for brunch in the Marina.” Nate drained his club soda. “You want a drink?”

  Ava shook her head. Her eyes kept returning to Jane. “So if she’s not a woman, what is she?”

  “It’s complicated,” Nate said.

  “She’s not mechanical, right?”

  “They don’t have robos this real,” Nate said. “But I guess they keep trying. They got a sex doll out now with a heater in it. And a cat that gives a shit.”

  Ava pried her eyes away from the stage. “I don’t even want to know,” she said.

  “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

  Ava didn’t like it when men blew her off. “Complicated how?” she said.

  Nate said, “They start with Thai or Islander boys, sixteen or seventeen. Bleach the skin, fix the eyes, make a few cuts, start the augmentation…”

  Ava held up her hand to stop him. He stopped.

  The stage lights went out. When they came on again, Jane and her stage set were gone. There wasn’t much applause. The lone woman in the shadows at the back of the club stared into her untouched red wine.

  Ava broke the silence. “I forget, are you giving me money this time or the other way around?”

  Nate dug an envelope out of the chest pocket of his RefCord armored jumpsuit and tossed it onto the table. “Or maybe you want food stamps,” he said. “I think I got a block of soy in the trunk of the rig.”

  “I tell you what, I’d take a cheeseburger. A hundred-dollar cheeseburger.”

  “The TV said no beef until the end of the month. I forget which month.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ava said. “How do you run out of cows?”

  Nate pushed the envelope toward her. “Thanks,” he said, and meant it.

  “So he was there.”

  “Wearing an XXL Rams shirt and a stupid little twenty-five-caliber auto in his sock, a steak knife in his back pocket. His brother was in the other room, too high to get involved. Just like you said, pill-crushers one and all.”

  Ava said, “So you took him alive?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I’ll sleep just fine,” Ava said. “He was a brute. He made his little boy go fetch the baseball bat he beat her with.” She took the envelope of cash and made it disappear into the folds of her slinky suit.

  She looked him in the eye. Nate Cole. She was thinking, Hey, I could have a drink with him… Where’s the harm in that? Across the street was a real bar with a singer/piano player with a long memory. She could admit she was lonely. She was way downtown tonight, in more ways than one.

  She got up, pulled the raincoat over her shoulders, and flipped the hood over her knit headpiece. “The night calls,” she said.

  “I always forget how tall you are,” Nate said.

  “I always forget how bad you are with women,” Ava said.

  Nate watched as she walked out. The crowd just sat there in the dark, deader than dead, watching the empty stage, waiting for the next fake thing to happen. None of them even looked at Ava, a real woman in the here and now. As she reached the padded leatherette door to the outside, it opened by itself, letting in the hiss of the rain, like a sound effect, like some kind of cheap cue for melancholy, and she was gone into the night.

  Chapter Two

  The CRO cops—it stood for Civic Reconnaissance Officers, as if all they did was look—had given up the ground game and gone to the air. There weren’t fifty rubber-tire patrol cars left in the Los Angeles Police Department. Cops still walked a beat or rode bicycles, but most of the real LAPD manpower was in the air. Everything was in the air: EMT rigs, fire trucks, bomb squads, SWAT. It wasn’t by choice. The streets now were all but useless, for people in cars and trucks anyway. Getting from downtown to Century City or Westwood or Long Beach in a car took longer than getting from LA to Santa Barbara.

  The gridlock was the result of the immutable Law of Unintended Consequences. In 2018, California had built twenty-two new mini-nukes—called Schwarzeneggers for their squat shape and brute power—fired them up before the mud was dry, lit up the state. The juice in the grid was so cheap now it wasn’t even metered. The gridlock problem blew up a year after the nukes came along, in 2019, when the government introduced a stripped-down rubber-floor-mat one-speed one-color electric car called a Federal. Built in China. A busboy working half-shifts could pay off a Fed in six months, if the government hadn’t already given him one outright when he got a
vasectomy. From Oxnard to Anaheim, the lights in the ’burbs were blazing, but nobody was home. Overnight, all eighteen million Angelenos hit the dusty trail in their Feds, nose to tail, elbow to elbow on the 10 freeway, on the 405, on the 60, on the 90, and on every cross-town surface street, creeping along, covering a half mile every two hours, happy idiots listening to their music players. (Federals didn’t have radios.)

  After a few months, the smart people caught onto the obvious and started leaving their cars home in the driveway—walking, biking, skating, or riding the Metro trains—but most Angelenos somehow had never figured it out. Or maybe they just liked driving. Or “driving.” By now the population was up to twenty million, even after subtracting the three million Mexican nationals who moved back to Mexico in 2024. Freeways were clogged, big streets were clogged. Some smaller streets were halfway open for part of the day, except for the intersections. Street cops wrote thousands of $384 tickets for “Abandonment of a Working Vehicle on an Operative Thoroughfare.” The city bus system had all but died. Who wanted to sit with other people crawling along when you could sit alone crawling along? City buses turned into diners with a nostalgia theme. At least there weren’t any hit-and-run accidents anymore.

  The cops flew lightweight two-person helos not much bigger than Jet Skis. They had an official name made up of letters and numbers, but everyone just called them Crows, like the cops who piloted them. A CRO in a Crow, man and machine become one. The stubby sky-cruisers were black on the bottom and white over the cockpit, which meant that from below they were all but invisible. From above, you could see them from miles away. The white paint was photoluminescent. From on high, LA at night looked like a reef thick with prowling fish.

  The CRO rigs were the product of another big-dollar rushed government engineering job, but they were rock-solid and fast as a Ferrari. The super-efficient engine was internal combustion, aluminum, ran on hundred-and-one-octane race fuel nobody could get just for fun anymore. Lift came from a pair of six-foot rotors side by side above the cockpit, control from stabilizers on the tail. Some engineering trick made the birds almost silent. The city had pulled down all above-ground wiring. No telephone poles, no wires to impede the CROs in their Crows. Every building three stories or higher was required to clear a space for a landing pad. “Always There…” was the LAPD slogan painted on the door now—complete with the ellipsis—replacing “To Protect and To Serve.”