Hammer Town Read online

  Hammer Town

  by Selina Rosen

  This is a work of fiction. All the events and characters portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved by the publisher, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form, including electronic formats, without the written permission of the publisher, except for purposes of reviews.

  Published by Yard Dog Press

  710 W. Redbud Lane

  Alma, AR 72921-7247

  http://www.yarddogpress.com

  Edited by Lynn Stranathan

  Copy Editing by Leonard Bishop

  Cover art and design by Brad Foster

  Copyright © 2002 by Selina Rosen

  First Edition: October, 2002

  Second Edition: August 1, 2006

  ISBN 978-1-937105-02-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Lynn

  Chapter 1

  Tarent laughed as he looked at Mishy’s face on the screen in front of him. “You threatening me, now that’s rich.” Tarent’s eyes narrowed to slits as he glared back at Mishy’s image. “What can you do to me, Mishy? You’ve had it, man! It’s over! You’re washed out. Why don’t you just give up now while you still have at least one shred of dignity left? One little tiny insignificant piece of turf.”

  Mishy snarled back at him. He was a man walking the razor’s edge. Tarent wanted him to be afraid, maybe he should have been, but Tarent had pushed him way beyond that. There was a point at which all reason just shut down. Mishy had reached that point. There was only a black burning pit of rage in his stomach, and the need for revenge in his heart. He had no other purpose; nothing else had any meaning. “Laugh your stupid black ass off, Tarent. Some things are worth more than money, or turf, or even power. My father told me, long ago, when I first took over his business, he said, ‘Never take all that a man holds dear, because there is nothing in this world as dangerous as a man who has nothing to lose’.’”

  “And nothing as impotent.” Tarent laughed hatefully. “What is this shit? Your last great hurrah? You can’t do anything to me, and we both know it.” He took in a deep breath. “Save your threats for the few people you still control, the scum that I left for you – your ever-dwindling empire. Don’t waste your breath on me. I was never afraid of you, Mishy. I’m certainly not afraid of you now. Computer, close transmission.”

  Mishy glared at the blank screen and smiled. “The cocky bastard. It’s all just a matter of time. Soon he’s about to learn that the road to hell goes both ways.” Mishy laughed as his chair swiveled to face the men waiting for his orders. “We’ll see if I’m as impotent as he thinks I am or if I can get it up... Way up, when I have to!”

  Mishy’s face left the screen to be replaced by swirling colored lights and the mechanical music the dygarhythms machine produced for Tarent’s entertainment.

  The door slid open and his daughter walked in, short and thin, fine featured, regal and graceful. She was a brown-eyed beauty, immaculate and cultivated – a credit to him and to her dead mother. The bitch had at least been good for genetic material, he thought as he leaned back in his chair, which moved to accommodate him.

  He looked up at his daughter. For the moment at least, she had his undivided attention. “So, Elantra, what can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about school, my residency.” She sat, and the chair, anticipating her intention to sit, rose to meet her.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The program runs too fast for me. I’m two or three days behind...”

  “No problem, just slow the program down....”

  “I’d like to go to college, Dad,” she said nervously, not sure whether her new approach to this old argument was going to get her any further than earlier attempts. “I think that if I could study with other people, interact with them on an academic level... Work on real patients instead of holograms...”

  “How many times do we have to go through this, Laney? The answer is still no. Having all those people around is just going to distract you from your studies. As for patients, you’d never get the variety of cases in a hospital that you’re getting from the program. Laney, you’re only twenty-one years old, and you’re seven months away from having your MD. Why change things now when you’re so close to finishing? If you go into a residency program it will be two years before you get your degree. Rejoice in technology, dear. Don’t fight it. It takes three times as long to do things the old way. I should know. When I was a kid the programs were different – they called it a public tutor board. It’s very hard when fifty kids are all asking the terminal questions at once. The public program made learning slow and tedious, I can only imagine what it would be like if the kids had been sitting all around me as well, screaming out their answers, all asking questions...”

  “Maybe I could learn something from their questions or from the answers they give and receive. Maybe they would ask questions I wouldn’t think to ask, come up with answers not even the program had thought of. Treating a real patient with the flu has got to be better training than treating a holographic patient with malaria – which by the way there hasn’t been a real case of in over two hundred years...”

  “Elantra... You are being ungrateful. You have always had the best of everything. Maybe I should send you off to college so that you’d appreciate just how easy you have it...”

  “Just let me go for a while. If it’s as awful as you say...”

  “The answer is no. Now I let you do this doctor thing because you had your heart set on it, but I have never really embraced the idea. The idea of anyone purposely exposing themselves to so many germs – it boggles the mind! You aren’t going off to college, and that’s final. Now... find something pleasant to talk about, or go to bed.” Tarent turned away from her to look at the swirling colors on his screen. She was being dismissed.

  Elantra had enough of her father in her that she wasn’t going to be put off that easily. “I... I don’t even know what people look like. I feel like I have spent my whole life in this building. Like some pet or house plant. Just once, I would love to step outside these walls and see just how awful it is out there. Do you plan to keep me here the rest of my life? I’m going to leave eventually, whether you like it or not... I just don’t see why it’s such a big deal...”

  Her father laughed, but didn’t turn to look at her. “You’re exaggerating, Elantra. Right now is not a good time. It’s not safe outside the building. The street urchins are fighting over a piece of turf, and...”

  “What does that have to do with us, with me?” she demanded.

  “If you’d let me finish. I’m in the middle of a corporate takeover, dear. Sometimes the competition doesn’t want to play by the rules. They stir the thugs up and then none of us are safe until things cool down and the police agencies can get things back under control.”

  “There is always some excuse, some reason why I can’t have a life...”

  “I’m a villain because I want to keep you from going through the hell that I went through on the streets...”

  “I’m a prisoner here!” Elantra screamed, and the chair helped her to stand up. “You can’t keep me at home forever, Father.” She turned on her heel. The door opened before her, anticipating that she wanted to leave, waited a sufficient amount of time and closed behind her. She stepped onto the moving walkway and it carried her to her room, where her door opened before her and closed behind her.

  “Music on, “ she ordered. The dygarhythms machine kicked in. “Chair up.” The chair rolled up behind her and rose to meet her flopping butt. She was mad. Dealing with her father always left her feeling like
a six year old. He was always going on and on about how he was sparing her from the horrors of his own youth, but she was sure the truth was he hadn’t been outside a building much more than she had.

  He certainly didn’t leave the comforts of the building now. Tarent Powers never left PowersTower. If he had his way neither would she, and if Tarent Powers was good at anything it was getting his own way.

  She was furious, and she was bored – if it was possible to be both. “H.V. on,” she commanded, and all around her colored lights began to dance. “Holo-vision, so named because of the hollow way it makes you feel,” she mumbled. “Give me something to fit my mood.” The computer read her body heat and heart rate, and then picked a suitable program – two people beating each other up with big sticks. She sat back and watched as the images played out her frustration and her rage. The pictures didn’t really look like people, but they were close enough for most. For most that was, but not for Elantra. She longed for physical contact with real people. People besides her father and his well-paid lackeys.

  She decided to do something drastic. She decided to go out. She dressed appropriately, grabbed her cat for company, and using all the tricks she had learned over the years made her way out of the building undetected. Feeling very smug, she called for a car. Her victory, however, was short lived. Before the car had time to arrive, three people wearing masks appeared seemingly out of nowhere. There was a smell, an awful smell, and then nothing.

  Tarent rubbed at his temples. “How the hell did she get past my security system!” he screamed.

  “Don’t know, boss.” The man rubbed at his own head, perhaps to show sympathy for Tarent’s headache. “Maybe she smuggled something through on one of her tutorials.”

  Tarent nodded. That made sense. He inwardly cringed; he should have had the tutorials screened. After all, he screened all other data that entered his system. “Do we have a clear picture of who grabbed her?” he asked.

  “Look for yourself, boss.” He pointed at one of the screens that lined the wall in Tarent’s office. Men in masks – they could have been anyone, but Tarent was fairly sure he knew exactly who was behind the abduction of his only child.

  A third man ran into the room, completely out of breath although he probably hadn’t run any further than the length of the hallway, and even then on top of the moving walkway.

  “Any sign of Elantra?” Tarent asked him.

  The man – too winded to talk – shook his head no, and took three deep breaths before he spoke in gasps. “We’ve looked all around the building and the surrounding area, nothing.”

  Tarent wasn’t too surprised. After all, the computer hadn’t found her anywhere.

  “Did we at least get a make, a model, a license number on the car, anything useful?”

  “They must have used some stealth thing. None of the cars the cameras picked up had Elantra in them.”

  Tarent’s computer buzzed, and then Mishy’s face filled the screen. Mishy smiled broadly at Tarent. “I told you, dick head. Don’t fuck with a man who has nothing to lose.” He laughed sadistically, and the transmission ended.

  Tarent let out one long, loud scream.

  He jumped to his feet and said more to himself than anyone else, “The bastard just wants to fuck with me.” Tarent paced across the room twice then stopped. “Computer, run the agencies. I want the best one.”

  “You want to hire cops, boss?” one of the men said in disbelief.

  “Like I don’t own cops all over this city. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what Mishy did or why. Mishy’s got Elantra, and he’s going to use her to get to me. As much as I know about Mishy and the way he operates, the cops know more. Any of you know your way around SlumTown?” The other men were silent. “I didn’t think so.”

  James Rank took a double take. Powers was the last person you expected to see on a police agency terminal. Unless of course you were accessing his file to see if he was most probably involved in the crime you were investigating. Tarent Powers was the biggest crime lord in FreightCity. Everyone knew it, but try as they might they could never get anything on him. The bastard owned way too many politicians for that. Tarent was a smart crook. He stayed holed up in his building, running everything and never actually getting his own hands dirty. It was hard to prove someone was guilty of a crime when all you had to prove it were a few vague computer files.

  “I got to tell ya, too happy to see your ugly mug I ain’t. What the hell do ya want?”

  “I realize that you people at the police agencies all suffer under the delusion that I am some sort of criminal master mind, but you’ve yet to turn up any evidence to prove your pathetic theories. I’m clean, Rank. I’m clean, I have the money, and by law you have to take my case...”

  “You were never fuckin’ clean, Powers, not even on the day you were born. Just good at coverin’ yer ass. I know the fuckin’ law, Powers, and I don’ have to take your fuckin’ case unless you’ve already been turned down by every other agency in town – and that ain’t what my terminal is tellin’ me...”

  “You’ll do what I tell you to do, punk...”

  “Ya threatenin’ me, Powers? Cause if ya are I can haul your ass in and we can charge the city a small fortune for gettin’ yer sorry ass out ah yer buildin’...”

  “I’m not threatening you, Rank,” Tarent said through gritted teeth. He wasn’t used to kissing anyone’s butt, much less the police. Unfortunately he was between a rock and a hard place. “Mishy took my daughter...”

  Rank choked on his laugh, but cut it short. “Now don’ tell me yer surprised ‘bout that considerin’ what ya did ta Mishy. Hell, I’m surprised it took him this long ta do somethin’.”

  “I didn’t do anything to Mishy.”

  “Nothin’ that we can prove. Nothin’ at least that will hold water in court. Apparently Mishy has all the proof he needs. One of these days, maybe today, yer gonna step your ass over the line one too many times, and one of the agencies is gonna grab ya. I only hope it’s us. I could use that kind of money right now. But who knows? Maybe Mishy will take care of ya for us. Either way we win.”

  “I’ll give you twenty million dollars to find my daughter, return her to me safely and bring Mishy in.”

  “Ya pay us twenty million dollars, we find your daughter and return her to ya, same price alive or dead. Ten million up front, ten million on delivery. As for Mishy... we leave Mishy where he’s at...”

  “Mishy kidnapped my daughter...”

  “I doubt Mishy left any more evidence of what he did than you do. Jus’ cause no one can prove what ya did don’ mean ya didn’ do it, and both of us know what ya did to Mishy. I’m not about to get in the middle of your fuckin’ turf war. I’d lock ya both up and pocket a bunch of money if I could. But as long as you’re runnin’ around free an able, I’m sure not goin’ to be the fool to lock up anyone who’s a thorn in yer side. We’re not stupid, Tarent, we know that if we take out all the little guppies there’s jus more shit fer the big fish in the cesspool.”

  “Quit talking shit, Rank. That’s no deal! It’s a bunch of threats and innuendoes. You’re wasting minutes and my daughter may have only seconds. I’m not an idiot. You really expect me to pay you a small fortune to maybe rescue my daughter and you let her kidnapper go scot free?”

  “That’s my deal, Powers, take it or leave it. I doubt any other agency is going to offer you anything any better. Thanks ta people like you we have plenty of business, and we’re not hurtin’ for work.”

  Tarent seemed to think about it for a minute, then he nodded. “All right, Rank, but it’s ironic that you’re the one who’s calling me a crook. I want this kept as quiet as possible. I have many enemies, lots of people besides the police agencies who would like to take me down. I want my daughter back in one piece, Rank. But I can’t afford to lose face. If everyone knew that my daughter was taken right in front of my own home...”

  “Don’ tell me how to be a cop, and I won’ tell ya how to be a
crook. I’ll work for ya ‘cause ya have a legitimate case. But if ya think I’m gonna take orders from ya like one of yer goons, then yer outah yer fuckin’ tiny little mind.”

  James listened to the computer drone its data for the tenth time. No matter how many angles he came up with, no matter how much information he fed the computer, it always spit the same name back in his face, and he was running short on time. According to the computer not one of his other detectives had more than a twenty percent chance of retrieving the girl alive. Only one of his agents had a ninety percent chance of success. He sighed as the computer droned the name again, “Conner McVee.”

  “Well?” Jason Hunter asked, sliding into Rank’s office on a moving walkway. He had been hovering around the office for ten minutes like a vulture waiting for something to die. He very much wanted the computer to say that he was the one to lead the assignment, no doubt because whoever did it was going to get a huge cash bonus. “Well?” he asked again.

  “Everyone’s on the case, Jason.” James sighed, he wished the computer had chosen Jason – or anyone else for that matter.

  “But am I assigned to the case. Is it my case?”

  “Sorry, but no,” James said.

  “Who?” Jason asked, all the wind taken out of his sails.

  “McVee,” James answered.

  Jason laughed. “Conner “The Hammer” McVee! She’s never going to take this assignment, and thinking she would is just ludicrous. Would you do it if you were her?” Jason didn’t give him a chance to answer. “Come on, boss, give the job to me. You know I can do it, and you know Hammer isn’t going to.”

  “The computer gives you a less than twenty percent chance of success, and it gives Hammer McVee a clear ninety. No one has the kind of connections in SlumTown that McVee does, or anythin’ close to her arrest record. As for McVee not takin’ the case... Unlike yerself, Hammer is not a cop for the money. She’s in it ‘cause she has a very well-defined sense of what’s right, an what’s wrong, an she wants to help make things right. Tarent may be the scum of the earth, and McVee may have good and personal reasons to hate him, but this girl has committed no crime. I doubt even Hammer wants to see Tarent punished bad enough to see an innocent woman killed.”