Chimera Read Online Free Page B

Domingo would be my client for another twenty-two hours and ten minutes. I said, "Did I mention I get eight hours off for sleep, an hour each for meals, and as many bathroom breaks as I want?"
    She smiled, baring very white teeth. What do you call the canines in a cat? Her teeth, like so much of her, passed for human at first glance. But her fangs, like those of her forebears, had been designed to rip flesh from her prey. "If we're both lucky, Mr. Maxwell, it won't take you long to find what I'm after."
    A home repair show followed the news. Neither of us got up to see if it was possible to change the channel. If I ever have a house with gutters, I'll be able to take great care of them.
    A human cop saved me from learning how to take equally great care of tile grout. She was short, stocky, and a little more communicative than her predecessor. She seemed to have decided to treat us like guests you could shoot if they misbehaved. "Mr. Maxwell? Zoe? This way, please."
    The cat kept her eye on the bot backing up the human. I began to wonder about Minnesota's policy on bots in general. Some people don't like them, the way some people get the creeps from dolls and puppets. But copbots are humanform in silhouette only. Okay, they have optics where a human's eyes would be so they can send stereoscopic images to CityCentral. Still, they look as lifelike as a wooden artist's mannequin. No one would look at a copbot and see any kind of mimicry of life.
    Then I thought about the way housecats chase light from laser pointers. I had no idea what Zoe Domingo saw when she looked at a copbot or what she considered a mimicry of life. Bots move, don't they? The apeman that werewolfed in New York had torn into a copbot with the same berserker glee that it had taken to its biological prey.
    The second cop duo brought us to a small room with a table, four uncomfortable plastic chairs, and a monitor mounted high on the wall. Classical music played in the background, something almost soporific. The walls were sky blue, a soothing color, but that and the music did not make this a soothing room. The closest thing to decoration was a "no smoking" sign bought cheap from an office supply site. I'm sure there's a room in police headquarters where they would bring the governor if they needed to question her about something. This wasn't it.
    The cat took a chair and closed her eyes. I was getting envious. I watched her nap and wondered what I had gotten into. I had just decided to light a cig and see whether the smoke would summon anyone when two men entered.
    "Mr. Maxwell? I'm Detective Vallejo. This is my partner, Detective Chumley." No one offered a hand, so I nodded to them. Vallejo was a small, round man in a business suit that absorbed light. My first thought was that he wore it to look thinner. But nullight is expensive—if he'd wanted to be thinner, he clearly could've afforded the occasional visit to a body shop. His voice was pleasant, with a hint of an accent, his tone was polite, and his smile looked sincere. I knew I was supposed to like the guy, but I did anyway.
    Chumley looked like he'd walked out of a museum exhibit for the theory of human evolution. If he grew a beard and got a forehead tat, your only question would be whether he had gorilla or baboon genes. My vote would've been for gorilla. I first thought his suit was cheap because he hit a body shop every week. Then I saw that his hands were hard like a fighter's and decided that his muscle came the hard way, and the cheap suit was a badge of honor. Or maybe it was to annoy his more fashionable partner. Or maybe it was just to say that he didn't want to get anything on good clothes, like your blood.
    Chumley's expression of perpetual constipation told me I wasn't supposed to like him. Stifling the impulse to assure him he was doing one hell of a job, I stood and offered my hand. "What can we do for you, detectives?"
    Vallejo's grip was firm, to emphasize that he was more than a dandy.