Stackpole, Michael A - Shadowrun (14 page)

Cutting back and forth through the streets gave me the time I needed to make sure no one was following me. I did see another Toro, which spooked me a bit, but only because it was white and looked like a ghost of the car I'd killed. Other than that my trip through the heart of Seattle's urban gray jungle showed me nothing I'd not seen a million times before.

My haphazard course brought me into what that had once been my old stomping grounds. Normally I'd avoid that area if I were traveling with anything less than an army because the local gang and I did not get along too well. The Halloweenies—Homo Sapiens Ludicrous—were led by Charles the Red, but he'd been feeling poorly for the latter half of the summer. That allowed me to go where I wanted without being hassled.

As I entered the old neighborhood I suddenly found myself wishing for the return of hostility. A stretch of Westlake from Seventh Avenue to Sixth Avenue had gotten a significant toasting during the Night of Fire.

I remember the blaze rather well as I relive that evening in more nightmares than I care to count. Every fragment of that frightful landscape was burned into my memory in exquisite detail.

Standing at ground zero I couldn't recognize a thing.

All the burned-out cars had been moved. Buildings had been refaced and the tarmac was more level and pristine than I'd ever seen it. Old, boarded-up apartments had been refurbished and, if the window decorations were any indication, already occupied by tenants. All the little grotty businesses on the street level had been replaced with sharp-looking boutiques with awnings.

And not a single street light had a hooker grafted toil.

Looking at the place where I'd grown up I finally understood the meaning of the word desecration.

From deep inside me, in that lightless cave where the Wolf Spirit chooses to dwell, the Old One growled deeply.
Now you know what I saw in the Sleeping Time. Your people, Longtooth, they destroyed
the lands I loved. They crushed my people and savaged my world. And for what?

"So you can complain."

"Excuse me, young man?" An old woman with a dowager's hump stopped in front of me and let her little metal grocery cart come to a rest. "Did you say something to me?"

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

I smiled at her. "No, I'm sorry. I was talking to myself."

She squinted her eyes and I half-expected her to recognize me. Something did flash through her eyes and I desperately searched for a name to attach to her face, but I came up a blank. She, on the other hand, pointed at my tie. "We owe you a great vote of thanks."

I cocked an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

She jabbed my tie again. "You do work for Tucker and Bors, don't you?"

For at least this week, if I survive it. "Yes—sorry, I just started with them."

"Oh." She smiled in a kindly way. "Your company oversaw the rebuilding of this neighborhood. Did everything very fast. You'd never know it to look at it, but this place used to be horrible."

"I can believe it." I smiled at her, then stepped into the street. "Good evening, ma'am."

My smile grew as I saw a familiar narrow doorway with a pumpkin glaring down at me from above it.

Tucker and Bors might have renewed this bit of urbanity after the Night of Fire, but there were some institutions that were too sacred to be touched and too disgusting to die. The Jackal's Lantern was one of them.

I pulled open the door and reveled in the wall of smoke that poured over me. True, I'd never liked the place when I lived here, and the Halloweeners would have cut my heart out for invading their stronghold, but the Lantern was a life preserver to a drowning man. I let the door swing shut behind me and rubbed my hands together. Who says you can't come home again?

Well, whoever said it was right. The Lantern might have been too sacred to touch and too disgusting to die, but apparently it wasn't that hard to buy out.

The smoke didn't cling to my flesh like a toxic fog because it came from a smoke machine. The only light in the place still came from orange and black plastic pumpkins, but the wattage of the bulbs had been upped so you could see more than a few steps into the bar. They'd left the car fenders wrapped around the pillars the way I remembered, but all of them sparkled with a new coat of chrome. Barbed-wire jewelry still adorned various parts of mannequins, but all the rust had been polished off it and the razor wire was duller than your average chiphead's sense of reality. They still used cable drums as tables, but thick coats of epoxy sealed them, fossilizing graffiti left behind from when real people used to populate the place.

A fresh-faced girl walked up to me and smiled. The two dark triangles surrounding her eyes pointed down and an upward-pointing one hid her nose, but they'd been drawn in a dark green make-up, not the black the Halloweeners demanded. Her clothing, while stylishly tattered, had obviously been washed within the last week. Instead of looking like a zombie summoned from beyond the veil to serve in the Jackal's Lantern, she looked like a creature from the Casper-the-Friendly-Ghost school of haunting.

"Welcome to Jack O's Lantern," she smiled.

Something inside me died. "Jack O's Lantern?"

"The very same. Table for one?"

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

I blinked twice, then shook my head. "I'm meeting someone. A guy, mid-forties.. .." Her nose wrinkled in distaste. "In the back. He's nursing a beer."

I smiled. "Bring us both another."

Leaving her to traipse through the corpgeeks in synthleather trying to look tough at the bar, I made my way toward the back. Even though I didn't like the changes, I had to admit the added light was an advantage. I'd never noticed how big the place really was, or how tall the scarecrow crucified on the back wall. Of course the smiley face didn't really suit him, but not many people got this far back.

I slid into the booth and noticed my name was still carved into the table top. Even the nine lines beneath it had been left intact. "Hi, Dempsey. How's it going?"

Dempsey gave me a shrug. He's one of those guys who looks like absolutely everyone else in the world— you'd forget him in a second if you had no reason to remember him. That, and the fact that he knows people who know just about everyone or everything in the world, make him very good at what he does. Dempsey is a private eye and for someone who's got no magic and no chrome, he's lasted a lot longer than he has any right to.

"Life goes on."

"Easy for you to say." I laughed lightly. "Dropping cold intathe corp world means I have to wake up during this thing called morning."

Dempsey kept both his hands wrapped around his sweating beer bottle and appeared not to hear what I'd said. "I've done some checking, just like you asked."

"And?"

Another shrug lifted the shoulders of his kevlar-lined trench coat. "There are plenty of folks who'd love to take a shot at Tucker and Bors for what they did to the Lantern here, but no one has anything that suggests TAB is angry at the Ancients. Moreover, there are no anti-metahuman groups with ties into TAB. This city positively stinks with Humanis Policlub members, but TAB is as clean as can be in that department."

I chewed my lower lip. "What are the chances some snake is living under a rock you haven't overturned yet?"

Dempsey showed no concern over my having questioned his ability. "Slim and none. The word whispered in some high dark places is that Andrew Bors had a daughter who goblinized right after the awakening. Her daddy got her out of Seattle and has her staying in a mansion up on Vachon Island. After that, employees were screened for their attitudes toward metahumans through their employment questionnaire. You show signs of being a bigot and you're out."

"Damn." I'd been inserted into Tucker and Bors because the Ancients had gone to Doctor Richard Raven with their suspicions that TAB was backing gangs making attacks on them. As the Ancients are a rather powerful and militarily adroit street gang, the invasion of TAB headquarters was a distinct possibility and Raven started to work on the problem to forestall that from happening. The waitress arrived with our beers, and I handed her some corp scrip. She looked at it and laughed. "You should have told me you were one of us."

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

I frowned. "Come again?"

"You're a TABbie, just like me. Tabbies get a discount," She scooped up the bill and headed back toward the front.

The Old One did not like being called a tabbie, but I managed to keep him in check. "Dempsey, I need you to keep digging on the policlub angle. This whole thing smacks of race hatred to me. Something has to be there."

He nodded. "Anything else?"

"Yeah. I need you to find out if anyone has a hit out on me."

"You mean besides La Plante?"

"Yeah, besides La Plante." It was an open secret that Etienne La Plante had a contract out on Dr. Raven and any of his associates. It was also well known that hurting a single hair on any of our heads would set Kid Stealth on the assassin—proving once and for all that capital punishment, if applied quickly and without mercy, could be a deterrent to crime. "Some gillette in a Toro tried to interest me in tarmac fusion. I declined, and he flipped his lid and had an accident."

Dempsey took it all in stride. "Do I still relay information through Valerie Valkyrie?"

I thought for a moment, then shook my head. "Takes too much time. If you get anything on the hit angle, call TAB and ask for Keith Wolverton."

"And if Mr. Wolverton is not at his desk and I want to leave a message?"

"Say a relation is coming to visit. The greater the danger, the more distant the relative."

Dempsey's eyes focused distantly, then came back with a twinkle in them. "So if I say Adam and Eve are coming to see you ..."

"I'll know Stealth is freelancing again." I glanced at my watch and slid out of the booth. "Stay and have another if you want. I've got to go meet Raven."

Dempsey shook his head and left the booth. "If I stick around here, they'll come by and give me a new trench coat."

"It's hell being a fashion trendsetter." I looked at the refurbished bar and shuddered. "I think this is the first time I've been in here and not felt like taking a bath afterward."

"It's the only time I haven't needed a bath afterward," Dempsey quipped. "Those were the days."

I signed for the tab up at the front, then walked a couple of blocks to the parking garage where I'd left my Fenris. The black coupe waited for me in a darkened corner of the basement like a feral creature hiding from the light. I disarmed the anti-theft devices—you only forget to do that once—and climbed in.

I punched in the ignition code and cruised out into the light evening traffic.

The trip to Raven's headquarters took longer than it should have because of the series of turns and
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

cutbacks I used to make sure no one was following me. After Raven and the rest of our crew had done various things to anger some of the more powerful individuals in the sprawl, paranoia had become a survival trait. Just because Kid Stealth would descend like a bloody avenger on anyone bothering us did not mean we were inviolate. Insanity becomes a courtroom defense because lots of folks do irrational things, and I had no desire to have bits of me in baggies labeled Exhibit A.

I parked the Fenris in the basement garage below Raven's brownstone, then took the stairs two at a time as I climbed to the main floor. Adjusting my tie and rolling down my sleeves, I marched straight to Raven's office and paused in the doorway. "Would have been here sooner, Doc, but someone wanted me to play immovable object to their irresistible force."

Raven leaned back in his black leather chair, pressed his hands together and rested his index fingers against his lips. Seated there in a custom-built chair, behind his individually hand-crafted desk, he looked normally proportioned. The pointed tips of elven ears jutted up through his long black hair as the only clues to his heritage. If not for that, his coppery skin, high cheekbones, and broad-shouldered, muscular build would have marked him as an Amerind.

His dark eyes focused above and beyond me, but I found myself entranced by their steady gaze. The blues and reds weaving through them in an aurora-like fashion flickered past in what I imagined was a mirror of how quickly thoughts strobed through his brain. The lights slowed, then he closed his eyes and I felt myself in control of my own mind again.

"Interesting." His hands fell away from his mouth as he leaned forward and stood. "I will want a full report later, of course, but I should introduce you to our clients. This is Sting and her lieutenant, Green Lucifer."

Elven women are often described with plant imagery, but with Sting you'd have to make that an industrial plant. Sure, she was long and lean like most of them, but you could only describe her as willowy if you thought rebar swayed in light breezes. I heard she had a temper to match her fiery mane, and her yellow Opticon eyes certainly reflected none of the warmth in her soul—if she had one. She had an edge to her that made it clear why she was running the Ancients, but likewise told me why, though she was attractive, I didn't find her seductive.

"My pleasure." I smiled but didn't offer her my hand. I knew her street name had been earned because of the metal claws that could shoot from the backs of her hands and rake through flesh like it was water.

"So you're Wolfgang Kies. Makes sense, I guess."

Before I could even begin to work my way through the maze of tone and inference in her words, the nearly imperceptible stiffening of her partner drew my attention to him. Unlike Raven, Green Lucifer had the typical starveling build of an elf. His chin, or under-abundance of it, suggested a character flaw that the burning light in his gray eyes used as fuel. Green Lucifer clearly did not like the fact that Sting had paid me any notice at all, and he was aching for any opening to exert his territorial rights. That told me they were more than just partners in power and that Green Lucifer was the jealous type.