Read Made to Kill for Free Online

Lot of men. Hard workers too. Foreign, see. You want good workers you get foreign workers.”
    I didn’t know enough about it to venture an opinion so I didn’t say anything.
    The man kept raking. “Heard them talking,” he said. “Yes, I did. Foreign workers. Good sort. Hard workers. You want good workers you get foreign workers.”
    “So I’ve been told,” I said. “Shame they didn’t clean up after themselves.”
    The man straightened up and laughed. He took his cap off, took in the view, then put his cap back on. “This mess has been here years. The sign was falling down something real good. None of this is from them. They were good workers. Real clean. Real tidy.” He paused. “I think they were Russian. I guess it’s real tidy back in the USS of R.”
    Then the ranger looked at me with narrow eyes. “I guess you’re okay.”
    “I’m okay?”
    “You’re okay. Have a look around all you want, mister. Just lock the gate on your way out.”
    I didn’t want to tell him that he was going to need a new padlock. “So I’m a mister then?”
    The man laughed. “Hell, I don’t know. Are robots misters or sirs?” He raked a little then stood tall and leaned on the rake. “Say, did they ever make lady robots?”
    I told him I didn’t remember and he laughed and shook his head and muttered something to himself. Then he walked to his canvas bag and shoveled crap into it. Then he hoisted it up over a shoulder, and moved on. I watched him for a few minutes and saw him stop in another patch of hill where the rubbish from the sign had clumped around some brush. Tucked around his safety rope at the back were a pair of thick gloves that he pulled out and pulled on. They nearly came to his elbows. He bent over and started tugging on a large angled piece of metal with sharp edges.
    Hell of a job, cleaning the hillside on his own. But he got on with it and I got on with mine. I took another look back at the sign.
    And lo if there wasn’t a guy up there, above the sign, standing on what must have been the summit road the man from the Parks Department had talked about. The man was silhouetted against the sky behind him and no matter what I did I couldn’t bring the contrast around to make him out, but I could see he was wearing a trench coat and a hat. Tourist, I guess, stopping to take in the air and the view. I didn’t blame him.
    The man from the Parks Department grunted then made a satisfied sigh that you could have heard down on Sunset Boulevard. I looked and saw he had got the metal scrap out of the bush. Then I looked back up at the sign and the man had gone, so I forgot about him and got back to work.
     

 
     
     
     
6
     
     
    I spent a few hours on that hot hillside and I didn’t find anything and I didn’t know what I was looking for anyway. There was dirt and there was brush and there was trash and while I could have taken some dirt for spectrographic analysis—being a robot has some uses—I didn’t see the point. Charles David certainly wasn’t here now and the idea that he’d left something useful, as my client had suggested, was rapidly receding into the realms of fantasy.
    Which meant I was at square one. Not even that. Square zero. I started to wonder if Mystery Girl was cracked in the head. The only information she’d given us about the target was a last-known-address that turned out to be a hillside high over Hollywood.
    I checked around me. Some clouds had materialized high above but they were fighting a losing battle against that infinite blue.
    I hadn’t seen the man from the Parks Department for a long time so I thought what the hell and I pulled up the collar of my coat and whispered to Ada.
    “I got nothing.”
    “Hands, Raymondo, hands.”
    I turned on my heel, decreasing my elevation by two inches as I drilled into the dirt.
    “So now you want me to use a telephone?”
    “Someone could be watching.”
    “There’s nobody up here but me.”
    “What about your ranger