Love Machine Read online

  He just didn’t know how much his voice carried in the narrow confines of the small whorehouse.

  “Are you calling me an asshole?”

  “Come on Harold,” the red head tugged the man by the arm. “Ignore him.”

  Tinker set the bucket down and stared at the man. He looked like the kind of guy who considered himself important.

  In Tink’s experience, those kind of men often weren’t, they just wanted people to think they were. That’s why they wore shiny suits and barked out orders, like assholes.

  “Friend,” Tinker smiled. “I don’t have a problem with you. I don’t want a problem with you. I’m just doing my job.”

  “Apologize,” Harold barked.

  “For what?”

  “Calling me an asshole.”

  Tinker raised his hands in an act of surrender.

  “Alright, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?” Harold smirked.

  “Pal, I said I’m sorry. You don’t have to be an asshole about it.”

  Harold puffed up his chest and took a menacing step toward Tinker.

  “I should beat your ass,” he threatened.

  A giant hand landed on Tinker’s shoulder and yanked him off his feet.

  He looked up at the wrinkled visage of Pomfrey, the half moon spectacles magnifying the glare in her black eyes as she peered down at him.

  “I apologize on his behalf, Harold. Now go have your fun.”

  Harold glared at Tinker, then glared at Pomfrey. He decided that wasn’t too smart of an idea and turned the glare into a nod. He pursed his lips to show he was thinking about it, and being gracious, but Tinker could swear the man tucked tail and ran. If he had a tail.

  He watched the portly businessman slip into the room with the red haired girl and tried to stand up.

  Pomfrey shook him by the collar.

  “You can’t harass the customers,” she snarled.

  “It wasn’t me,” Tinker started to say when she shook him again.

  “Just do your job,” said Pomfrey. “Or is cleaning up other men’s messes too much for you.”

  “I just want to pay you off and find my ship,” Tinker said.

  Pomfrey let him go and he straightened up his shirt under his beaten leather bomber jacket.

  “That man you just pissed off,” she pointed. “Was the head of docking and routes. He could have told you where your ship went.”

  Tinker groaned.

  “Shit,” he said. “Maybe I should go apologize for real.”

  He took a step toward the room. Pomfrey backhanded his shoulder and sent him into the wall.

  “Leave them alone,” she ordered. “They’re just getting started.”

  “I’ll tell him when he’s done,” Tinker massaged where she hit him. “I think it’s going to bruise.”

  “You’ve got too much to do to wait,” she told him and shoved him toward the bucket. “If you really want to some help, I know a guy.”

  Tinker turned his head to look from one side of the brothel to the next.

  “I guess you know more than one guy.”

  She snorted out what passed for a laugh.

  “You could say that.”

  “I just did.”

  She snorted again.

  “I know a private investigator who specializes in lost ships,” she said. “It happens more than you think.”

  Tinker thought back to how he won the NC 17 and nodded.

  “I can imagine.”

  “He’s a weird cat,” Pomfrey told him. “Exotic tastes. But Morgan should be able to help you.”

  “Great,” said Tinker. “Point me in the right direction.”

  “I will,” said Pomfrey. “After you’re done.”

  She didn’t point him in the right direction. She pointed him at the bucket and what was left of the messes hidden behind closed doors.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Morgan had a closet designed as an office on the opposite end of the space station.

  Tinker made his way there after his one day’s worth of work stretched into three, thanks to the “kind” madam who tacked on a couple of extra charges.

  He tried to make a deal with her to throw an hour or two with a couple of her girls into the mix, in trade for the third day, but she cut him loose after the noon lunch rush and told him to never come back.

  He knew she didn’t mean it.

  Ladies of the night wouldn’t give you the time of day unless you had the money to pay for it, but enough money bought all the time in the world.

  Or at least a couple of hours of space time.

  His normal visits had been mostly at night, and mostly drunk, so he had never known that there was a noon time rush on brothels. But after witnessing it for two of his three days, he had to take the whorehouse gossip on it.

  Every girl was busy for lunch.

  He found the door marked with simple black letters that looked hand painted to the metal, but with care and precision.

  There was no button, no camera, no way to let anyone inside know he was standing out there, so he decided to knock.

  The door whisked open and he almost missed on the third rap.

  He stepped into a narrow room, a small metal desk lined against one wall and two chairs facing each other in the middle of the space.

  One of the chairs was occupied by a man with average features and a balding pate. The remnants of his hair were wavy, so that what was left almost looked like a comb over.

  He had long fingers on big hands that looked out of place on his average body, and they were steepled in front of him, as if on display.

  “Pomfrey told me you were coming,” he said.

  “Morgan,” Tinker stated.

  But Morgan must have thought it was a question.

  “I am Morgan.”

  “No, I got that,” said Tinker. “PI, right?”

  “Private investigator.”

  “She said you could help me find my ship.”

  “I can find many things. I might be able to help.”

  “That’s great. It’s the NC 17, a frigate with-”

  “For the right price.”

  “Oh,” Tinker sighed. “We’re at that part already?”

  “It’s the most important part.”

  “Sure,” said Tinker. “I get that. It is important. Money makes the world go round and all that. I mean, even though we’re in space, it greases a lot of wheels. A lot of palms too, depending on the space station you’re on, am I right?”

  Morgan nodded him and looked over the tips of his longer fingers, never moving the steeple.

  “You can pay, right?”

  “Sure,” said Tinker. “Eventually. I mean, I’m good for it.”

  Morgan sighed.

  “I don’t do credit.”

  “That’s a good policy,” Tinker said. “An excellent policy. And I’m not asking for credit. I’m just asking to pay you a little later.”

  “How much later?”

  “After the job is done?”

  “Are you asking or telling me?”

  “Asking?”

  “Go back to your job with Pomfrey,” said the PI.

  “It wasn’t a real job,” said Tinker. “I had to work off a couple of nights with a lovely redhead.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “No really,” said Tinker. “She was gorgeous.”

  “Svetlana? I know, she’s my favorite.”

  “Then you know what she can do.”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course I-” Tinker tried to remember. Did he know what she could do? Their morning together was just a case of mistaken identity, the madam hearing one thing and thinking it was another. But the night before, when they said he ran up a tab, he couldn’t recall any of it.

  He remembered the look of her dressing in the morning as she woke him, but nothing of the night before.

  “You were scammed.”

  “Scammed?”

  “Yeah, you came in,
got drunk and they rolled you.”

  “I didn’t have any money to roll,” Tinker confessed.

  “They made it up. You were too drunk to tell and Pomfrey got a couple day’s work out of you,” Morgan laughed.

  “Son of a-”

  “Yeah, don’t feel too bad,” said Morgan. “It happens a lot more than you think.”

  “Not to me,” Tinker puffed up his chest.

  Morgan was nice enough not to comment.

  “No money for the fun times,” he said instead. “You have money to pay my fee?”

  Tinker patted his pockets and shook his head.

  “Did you think I was going to do it out of the kindness of my heart?”

  “No,” Tinker confessed, though he had nursed a secret hope that the connection between Morgan and Pomfrey would be strong enough that he would want to help out of a sense of duty and nobility.

  “How much is it?”

  “One thousand credits.”

  Tinker tried not to gulp. A thousand credits would buy three fuel cells for his ship. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that much.

  But in the short term scheme of things, it was a hell of a lot more than he had at the moment.

  A thousand credits more.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Up front.”

  Damn it.

  “I’ll get it,” he said.

  “Come see me when you do,” Morgan told him.

  He didn’t have to get up to see Tinker out of the door.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tinker was a man adrift. Space was dotted with derelicts from the heyday of expansion, colonization and exploration and he felt like one of the lifeless hulks that floated along the edges of the routes.

  He wandered down the corridor of the space station, in the general direction of Pomfrey’s brothel, but he knew he couldn’t go back there.

  He didn’t know how much he would need to clean to earn the PI’s fee, but he didn’t know if there were enough lunch rushes to make it happen.

  He sniffed, feeling sorry for himself for a moment. He didn’t even have enough credit to buy a drink, and he wasn’t sure where he was going to sleep once night came.

  His home was his ship and he missed it. Missed the small crew space where he sprawled out to read or watch vids or nap. Missed his tiny bed in the tiny cabin. He missed the captain’s chair in the narrow cockpit, to the left of the console with enough room for him to stretch his legs out, if he wanted.

  He could set the auto-pilot and stretch out and watch the stars whiz by as he meandered from job to job.

  Now, his ship was gone.

  Stolen by some idiot, no doubt. He could work his way back up again.

  That much he knew.

  It was part of who he was, a sheer determination to keep going no matter what. Life knocked him down and he just got up again.

  But he didn’t want to work hard, scrimp, save and bet. There weren’t many guys around who would bet a frigate on a round of Texas Hold ‘Em, and he needed a frigate for his chosen line of work.

  Finding a new ship would take too long, so he just needed to find his ship.

  And that would only take as long as it took him to raise Morgan’s fee and for the PI to work his magic to find the NC 17.

  He could see the neon glow of a bar in a common area, and headed for it.

  The space stations had several types of bars, just like on planet earth and at Musk, the huge colony on Mars. There were sports bars and upscale bars, piano bars and dive bars.

  He wanted the last kind, one full of cheap neon and smoky interiors.

  Despite being outlawed on most stations, smokers still found a way to nurse their addiction. He was not a smoker, though he did puff on an occasional cigar during a poker game or to celebrate an exceptionally good job well done. He didn’t smoke, he sipped and puffed, he liked to say.

  The neon had one letter that was burned out and a second letter on the verge. The gas in the tube flickered as he walked past, the hum of the electricity audible until he stepped through the door.

  He was not disappointed.

  There were no biker bars in space, probably because there were no bikes, and hence, no bikers. But if there were, this would be the kind of place bikers liked to hang out.

  The room was long, deep and dark. A bar along one side, three pool tables down the middle and a counter along the opposite wall that stretched all the way to the back.

  Tinker double checked his pockets again, just in case he had overlooked any credits on the first three passes, but they were just as empty.

  He moved to a seat near the middle pool table on the counter and turned around to watch the game between three mine workers, as they worked the table in stoic silence.

  “What can I get you?” a dark haired waitress with moist brown eyes barely glanced at him as she passed in a rush.

  “Waiting on someone,” he said.

  That should buy him some time. He would hang out for fifteen or twenty minutes, say he was stood up, then go find another bar to do the same routine all over again.

  She nodded and left him alone.

  One of the mine workers beat the other, then played the remaining man and beat him too.

  Tinker was just about out of time when they left, leaving a pitcher with just enough in the bottom to fill a glass.

  He slid off the stool, wiped the rim of one of the glasses on the edge of the pool table and poured the rest of the beer into it before sitting back down.

  The waitress came by, eyed the glass, eyed the pitcher and curled up a lip as she cleaned up.

  He decided to quaff the beer and disappear when four men started in a new pool game and distracted her.

  “First rule of pool club,” one of the men with the longest hair said as he sent the cue ball crashing into a solid.

  “We don’t talk about it,” said another man, moving to grip him by the arm.

  “There is no pool club,” a third laughed.

  The fourth man kept his mouth shut.

  “We don’t talk about it,” the second man repeated.

  “What’s the point of being in something so cool and you can’t talk about it?” number one mused.

  “Because that’s the rule,” said the second. “It’s the first three rules. The only three rules.”

  “But why?” the third asked. “What do you think Rolf?”

  The fourth man took his turn and sent three balls into three pockets before scratching on the fourth.

  “I think that guy is paying too much attention to what you’re saying,” Rolf nodded to Tinker.

  The other three glared at him.

  Tink raised his almost empty glass in a toast.

  “You listening to us?” number one asked.

  “Some people like to people watch,” said Tinker. “I like to people listen.”

  “Isn’t that an invasion of our privacy?” the third shifted his pool cue from hand to hand.

  “I’m just curious by nature,” said Tinker.

  “You’re going to be ass beat by nature,” said the second man.

  “Are you nature?” Tinker smiled.

  “What a great name. I’m Tinker.”

  “Huh?”

  “He said your name is nature,” said Rolf.

  “And you’re Rolf,” Tinker smiled again and got the same reaction.

  “You calling me nature?” the second man growled.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  The four men moved to one side of the pool table so they were a half circle around Tinker.

  “Calling people any sort of names that aren’t their own can be bad for your health,” said number one.

  “I don’t know your names,” said Tinker. “Except Rolf. We go way back.”

  “You do?” number two tilted his head to one side.

  “Sure, all the way to the beginning of this conversation. But they say that’s how great friendships get started.”