“Must have happened as I was walking out the door.”

“Yeah, well anyway. Back in the winter of ‘09, Ryker was chasing down some random insurance fraud, you know the stuff, where re-sleeve policy clones turn out to be empty tanks and no one knows where the bodies went. It split wide open and turns out the bodies are being used for some dirty little war down south. High level corruption. It bounced all the way up to UN Praesidium level and back. A few token heads roll, and Ryker gets to be a hero.”

“Nice.”

‘In the short term, yeah. The way it works round here, heroes get a very high profile and they went the whole program for Ryker. Interviews on WorldWeb One, highly publicised fling with Sandy Kim even. Bylines in the faxes. Before it all could tail off, Ryker grabbed his chance. Put in for a transfer to OrgDam. He’d worked with Ortega a couple of times before, like I said we overlap here and there, so he knew the program. No way could the department turn him down, especially with some bullshit speech he made about wanting to go where he could make a difference.”

“And did he? Make a difference, I mean?”

Bautista puffed out his cheeks. “He was a good cop. Maybe. A month in you could have asked Ortega that question, but then the two of them hooked up and her judgement went all to pieces.”

“You don’t approve?”

“Hey, what’s to approve? You feel that way about someone, you go with it. It just makes it tough to get any objectivity on this thing. When Ryker fucked up, Ortega was bound to side with him.”

“Did she?” I took our empty glasses to the bar and got them refilled, still talking. “I thought she brought him in.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Talk. Not a massively reputable source. It’s not true, then?”

“Nah. Some of the street slime like to talk it up that way. I think the idea of us ratting each other out makes them cream their pants. What happened was, Internal Affairs took Ryker down in her apartment.”

“Ohhh.”

“Yeah, ain’t that a laser up the ass.” Bautista looked up at me as I handed him his new drink. “She never let it show, you know. Just went right to work against the IAD charges.”

“From what I heard, they had him cold.”

“Yeah, your source got that bit right.” The mohican looked into his glass pensively, as if unsure he should go on. “Ortega’s theory was that Ryker was set up by some high ranking asshole who took a fall back in ‘09. And it’s true he upset a lot of people.”

“But you don’t buy it?”

“I’d like to. Like I said, he was a good cop. But like I also said, Sleeve Theft was dealing to a smarter class of criminal, and that meant you had to be careful. Smart criminals have smart lawyers, and you can’t bounce them around whenever you feel like it. Organic Damage handles everyone, from the scum on up. Generally we get a bit more leeway. That was what you, sorry, what Ryker wanted when he transferred. The leeway.” Bautista tipped back his glass and set it down with a throat-clearing noise. He looked at me steadily. “I think Ryker got carried away.”

“Blam, blam, blam?”

“Something like that. I’ve seen him interrogate before, he’s right on the line most of the time. One slip.” There was an old terror in Bautista’s eyes now. The fear he lived with every day. “With some of these turds, it’s real easy to lose your cool. So easy. I think that’s what happened.”

“My source says he RD’d two and left another two with their stacks still intact. That sounds pretty fucking careless.”

Bautista jerked his head affirmatively. “What Ortega says. But it won’t wash. See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle. The two intacts made it out of the building breathing, grabbed a cruiser and flew. Ryker put a hundred twenty-four holes in that cruiser when it lifted. Not to mention the surrounding traffic. The intacts ditched in the Pacific. One of them died at the controls, the other one in the impact. Sank in a couple of hundred metres of water. Ryker was out of his jurisdiction, and the Seattle cops ain’t all that keen on out-of-town badges shooting up the traffic, so the retrieval teams never let him close to the bodies.

“Everyone was real surprised when the stacks came up Catholic, and someone at the Seattle PD wasn’t buying. Dig a little bit deeper and it turns out the reasons-of-conscience decals are fake. Dipped in by someone real careless.”

“Or in a real hurry.”

Bautista snapped his fingers and pointed a finger across the table at me. He was definitely a little drunk now. “There you go. The way IAD read it, Ryker’d screwed up letting the witnesses escape, and his only hope was to slap a ‘do not disturb’ sign on their stacks. ‘Course, when they did bring back the intacts, they both swore blind that Ryker had turned up without a warrant, bluffed and then smashed his way into the clinic, and when they wouldn’t answer his questions, started playing Who’s Next with a plasma gun.”

“Was it true?”

“About the warrant? Yeah. Ryker had no business being up there in the first place. About the rest? Who knows?”

“What did Ryker say?”

“He said he didn’t do it.”

“Just that?”

“Nah, it was a long story. He’d gone up on a tip, bluffed himself inside just to see how far he could push it and suddenly they were shooting at him. Claims he might have taken someone out but probably not with a head shot. Claims the clinic must have brought in two sacrificial employees and torched them before he arrived. Claims he knows nothing about any Dipping that went on.” Bautista shrugged blearily. “They found the Dipper, and he said Ryker paid him to do it. Polygraph-tested. But he also says Ryker called him up, didn’t do it face to face. Virtual link.”

“Which can be faked. Easily.”

“Yeah.” Bautista looked pleased. “But then, this guy says he’s done work for Ryker before, this time face to face, and he polygraphed out on that too. Ryker knows him, that’s indisputable. And then, of course, IAD wanted to know why Ryker didn’t take any backup with him. They got witnesses in the street who said Ryker was like a maniac, shooting blind, trying to bring the cruiser down. Seattle PD didn’t take too kindly to that, like I said. ”

“A hundred and twenty-four holes,” I muttered.

“Yep. That’s a lot of holes. Ryker wanted to bring those two intacts down pretty badly.”

“It could have been a set-up.”

“Yeah, it could have been.” Bautista sobered up a little and his voice got angry. “Could have been a lot of things. But the fact is that you, shit, sorry, the fact is that Ryker went too far out, and when the branch broke there was no one there to catch him.”

“So Ortega buys the set-up story, stands by Ryker and fights IAD all the way down, and when they lose…” I nodded to myself. “When they lose, she picks up the sleeve mortgage to keep Ryker’s body out of the city auction room. And goes looking for fresh evidence?”

“Got it in one. She’s already lodged an appeal, but there’s a minimum two-year elapse from start of sentence before she can get the disc spinning.” Bautista let go of a gut-deep sigh. “Like I said, it’s tearing her up.”

We sat quietly for a while.

“You know,” said Bautista finally. “I think I’m going to go. Sitting here talking about Ryker to Ryker’s face is getting a little weird. I don’t know how Ortega copes.”

“Just part of living in the modern age,” I told him, knocking back my drink.

“Yeah, I guess. You’d think I’d have a handle on it by now. I spend half my life talking to victims wearing other people’s faces. Not to mention the scumbags.”

“So which do you make Ryker for? Victim or scumbag?”

Bautista frowned. “That ain’t a nice question. Ryker was a good cop who made a mistake. That don’t make him a scumbag. Don’t make him a victim either. Just makes him someone who screwed up. Me, I only live about a block away from that myself.”