Stackpole, Michael A - Shadowrun (26 page)

"I'll drop you at Raven's before I head out."

"Give me ten nuyen."

I dug my hand into my pocket. Could Guinness ever check it out, Kid Stealth would surely make its datachip of World Records in ten different categories—all of them lumped under the Homicide heading. I pulled a credstick from my jeans pocket and handed it to him.

"I want to see a receipt and my change back," I added. Stealth might have had more unsolved murders to his credit than Elvis had imitators, but if I didn't give him a hard time he'd be insufferable.

Stealth took the stick and disappeared it into a pocket. "Wolf, this one plays at death."

I nodded. That was about as close as Stealth would ever get to telling me to be careful. He ascribes a lot to the "a word to the wise is sufficient" school of caring for other folks. Given that the last time he tried to show concern over my fate he shot me in the back, the verbal message did seem more friendly. "I'll keep you posted, I promise."

Without so much as a nod, Stealth turned and withdrew into the alleyway. I didn't turn to watch him because the Old One tries to make me laugh at Stealth's cyberbunny hopping gait. In terms of lethality, doing that strongly resembles sucking on twenty packs of nikostix a day for longer than I've been alive.

The other reason I didn't watch him is that Stealth was likely to cut up and over to Seventh by using those miracle claws of his to scale a building. Getting my knuckles bloody as the Old One tries to prove we can do that too is really annoying.

The Old One's sensory gifts did come in handy as I directed them back toward the street. As I walked in the general direction of where I'd left the Fenris parked in another alley, I heard someone sobbing.

Tears aren't all that uncommon in the sprawl, and more than one Samaritan has been lured into a headache by thinking he was rescuing a woman in distress. In this case, however, the sob wasn't coming from a voxsynth chip, but from the throat of a little gamin of a girl slumped against the alley wall.

The rain had soaked her hair and made it clump into stringy tendrils about as skinny as her arms and legs. She wore a clear plastic raincoat that ended somewhere between her neon green hot pants and her argyle knee socks. Her blouse matched the shorts in color and ended just below her breasts to show off a flat stomach. It also showed off her ribs. As she looked up at me with hollow, red-rimmed eyes I wondered if she was an anorexia poster-child.

I gave her a smile I hoped wouldn't threaten her. "How long have you known Albion?"

She blinked as I said his name. "You knew him?"

I nodded. Looking up the street I spotted a diner where I'd eaten before without dying. "C'mon, let's get out of the rain." I reached for her arm, but she retreated away from me.

"No way, chummer. I may be griefin', but I'm no flatliner."

I held my hands up and kept them open. "Okay, bad start. My name is Wolfgang Kies. I knew Albion and I'm going to find out what happened to him. If you want to help, it'll make my job easier."

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She watched me warily, then nodded. " 'Kay. Albie mentioned you. I'm Cutty."

I pointed to the diner and she nodded. "How long you and Albion been together, Cutty?"

She cut across the street like a zombie hungering for a bumper-kiss. She never noticed the squealing brakes nor did she acknowledge the curses shouted at her. I let the Old One growl at anyone who vented his wrath on me and that generally calmed things. Once across Blan-chard, Cutty headed into the diner and dropped into a booth like a rag doll suddenly stuffed with lead shot.

The waitress frowned at her, but I gave her one of my "this could be your lucky day, darling" smiles and she relented. "Soykaf for me. Milk and some soup or something for her, okay?" The waitress snapped her gum, then turned and sang out our order to the ork working the kitchen.

"Third time is the charm. Cutty, how long had you been playing house with Albion?"

Her head came up and I saw a spark of life in her brown eyes. "A month, I guess." She blinked twice, then frowned. "This is October, right?"

"November, but who's counting?"

"Oh, two months, then."

"Gotcha." I'd last seen Albion on a very warm July night, which put him with her within six weeks of leaving his friends in the Barrens. "He was cool during that time? No problems?"

Cutty nodded. "Like ice. Did some boosting, you know? His thing was fixing stuff, though, and he used to patch decks together before folks would fence them. Made him sort of legit, you know? Then folks started recommending him and he fixed lots of stuff."

"I get the picture." And the picture I got was a dismal one. I'd been hoping Albion had gotten himself in solid with some group or gang or specific place that might narrow my area of inquiry. If I had to track every cracked or heisted deck he laid screwdriver to, I'd be looking for his killer long after Kid Stealth rusted away to nothing.

The waitress arrived with our food, and Cutty stared at the clam chowder with the same look of horror you'd expect if the waitress had regurgitated it right there at the table. She looked at the milk as if the waitress was Lucretia Borgia. I compensated for this by regarding the steaming cup of soykaf like it was the Holy Grail and the waitress as if she was the Madonna. Clearly, though, the waitress thought of herself as a different sort of Madonna and I realized the kind of music we could have made together would have beat Gregorian chanting by an ecclesiastical mile.

"Drink, eat. You need the milk to strengthen your bones and the soup will put some meat on them." I appropriated a bit of her milk for my soykaf, which suddenly made her possessive about the food. I feigned offense, which seemed to please her somehow and made her eat. "Albion didn't have any steady killtime, did he? Anything that would have made him a candidate for a toxic lead dump?"

She nodded her head as a droplet of chowder rolled down over her pointed chin. "Just started a caper at the Pacific Northwest Huntsman's Club. Got it through a person he did some fixing for. Steady work that didn't cut into his side biz. Didn't need a SIN for it."

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That last bit would draw Albion like a flame draws a moth. Albion fiercely defended his independence and wanted nothing to do with the system. Like all those who scurry in the shadows, he dreamed of being as big as Mercurial some day, but the chances of that were slimmer than Cutty here. What he didn't know, what few of us without SINs did know, is that it's easier for the society to destroy you than it is for them to even notice you.

"That's a place to start. Do you remember who gave him the job?"

Her wet hair flew back and forth as she shook her head. At least I think she shook her head, but I couldn't see any of her face around the edges of the bowl as she tipped it up to drain it. The bowl came back down and a plastic sleeve came away from her face smeared with the last of the chowder. "Don't remember." She looked over toward the counter and licked her lips as she eyed a stack of frosted donuts.

I'd seen bricks with a longer attention span than she had, but I put it down to her being in shock. Our waitress returned and brought with her the donut tray. Cutty selected two big chocolate-frosted fat-pills and I passed, so Cutty took a third in case I reconsidered. I paid the bill and the tip while Cutty watched the credstick vanish almost as hungrily as she'd looked at the donuts.

"With Albion gone, what are you doing for money?"

She smiled at me, her eyes growing vacant. "For fifty nuyen I'll do anything you like."

"Yeah?"

She nodded solemnly. "Anything."

"You got it." I pulled out my slender cash supply— figuring she'd find the bills easier to use than a credstick—and laid down two twenties and a ten. "You said anything, right?"

Cutty licked at the frosting in a way she hoped was suggestively erotic. "You pay, piper, and you call the dance."

"Good." Had I a necrophile's taste for skeletal women, I might have come up with something truly inventive for her to earn my money. As it was, I had a more sinister plan in mind. "For this fifty nuyen you're going to sit here and wait for an elf named Salacia to come see you. She was a friend of Albion's before you knew him—just friends, not lovers. Tell her about him." I got up from the booth. "Stay with her and the rest of Albion's family and let them know what happened to him."

Cutty looked up at me and shook her head. "Albion always said you were a weird chummer, but one he could trust. He didn't trust many." "You'll wait?"

She nodded sadly. "I'll be with Salacia, and then you can tell me how Albion's story ends."

I left Cutty in the diner and made my way back to the Fenris. Though he's not much on technology, even the Old One likes the Fenris. Low and sleek, angled except where the flat black body curves neatly around a wheel well or back around a bumper, the car looks like a wedge sharp enough to split the sky from the planet at the horizon.

Even before rounding the corner of the alley I pulled out the remote for the antitheft system. Because this section of town wasn't that bad, I'd set it for only one chirp, with the defenses on Stun. As the car came
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into view, I tapped the control and got a single chirp back in response as I deactivated the security system. From behind the car two startled kids jumped up and started running down the alley.

Their laughter made me believe they'd been up to mischief and little more, but caution made me check the rear of the Fenris. Two big old rats, the fat kind that feast in dumpsters, lay twitching on the ground.

The kids had been amusing themselves by catching the rats and tossing them against the Fenris' body.

The resulting shock left the rats half-dead, but served as a practical lesson to warn the kids off messing with my ride.

The Fenris whisked me through the Seattle streets. The radar-bane coating Raven had sprayed over the car's surface made it reflect less light than the rain-slicked street. I cruised around, checking my six for folks following me. When I saw it was clear, I made for Raven's place and used the car phone to call Salacia at the house in the Barrens.

Another of the kids who lived at the house answered the call. Sine said she'd get word to Salacia and they'd pick Cutty up quickly.

"Good," I told her. "But the girl's in shock. Maybe you can do for her what none of us could do for Albion."

She agreed and I hung up as I guided the Fenris into Raven's underground parking garage. The automatic door shut behind me and locked tightly. I climbed out of the Fenris and locked it, then put the security on two chirps and set it on Mangle. Anyone stupid enough to break into Raven's place deserved all the surprises he could handle.

I went from the garage straight into the basement computer room. The sanitary white of the walls and tiles is a shocker at the best of times, but it seemed almost dreamlike after the rainy Seattle evening. The same could be said of the room's sole occupant after an evening spent with Braxen and Kid Stealth.

Valerie Valkyrie covered a yawn with a slender-fingered hand. She still looked radiant from having met Jimmy Mackelroy, the
enfant terrible
of the Seattle Seadogs2. Actually I think the radiance came from helping him through the trauma of Seattle's loss in the series, which beat the hell out of how she'd moped last year until spring training. Though she'd lost her heart to him, she still had a smile for me and I returned one with interest.

"Good morning, Ms. Valkyrie. Are you up early or up late?"

Heavy lids half-hid blue eyes. "After thirty-six hours that sort of question hardly matters." She glanced back at the deck and the datacord that usually fit snugly into the jack behind her left ear. "Another marathon Dementia-Gate session. I could have gone longer, but Lynn said she wanted to leave the game so she could rest up for your date tomorrow night. You getting serious on her, Mr. Kies?"

2 Valerie took it as a personal victory that Jimmy referred to the team as the Seadogs in Matrix chat she set up for him, despite the trouble it could have caused him. Granted, only a few of her closest friends were present, and the one transcript of the chat came bundled with a virus that did nasty things, but it was a victory for her nonetheless. "That date's tonight, Val, after the sun comes up." If it weren't for Valerie's cafe-au-lait complexion coming to her through genetics, she'd have looked as pale as Albion. "You have seen the sun this month, haven't you?"

"Nice dodge, Wolf." She smiled and killed another yawn. "You here from the Committee For the Production of Vitamin D, or have you got a job that's beyond your meager computer talents?"

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"Meager?" I frowned as I pulled off my black leather jacket and tossed it onto one of the white leather chairs sitting in a corner. "I know how to turn one of these things on and off, you know. Meager, sheesh."

She gave me an exaggerated nod. "Sure you do. What do you need?"

"The Pacific Northwest Hunting Club lost an employee tonight. You pulled a file on him back when we went after Reverend Roberts. You remember Albion?"

"His file was a null. Burkingmen had some anecdotes about him. He was working at PNHC?"

"So I understand. A member recommended him. I want to know who that was and something about him."

"Is that all?" Valerie rolled her eyes. "Look, Wolf, no jack."

I stuck my tongue out at her, but she'd already started beating out a harsh staccato on her keyboard. I left the room and mounted the stairs to the first floor. In the kitchen I grabbed two cups of kaf and exchanged a series of uninformative grunts with Tom Electric. He had his eyes glued to a Bookman and was doing his best to upload some self-help book into his gray-ROM.

"Annie's coming back to town, eh, Tom?"

Grunt and nod.