Striper Assassin (25 page)

She goes into the bathroom to use the toilet, then checks herself in the mirror. The faint rash around the base of her neck has been annoying her for weeks. The redness is still visible. That puzzles Tikki because she doesn’t usually suffer from such problems, from any sort of physical complaint. Evidently she came into contact with some toxin that her body has not been able to cast out with its usual ease.

Probably silver—the stuff is like poison for her.

She rubs at the redness, but that’s a mistake. The more she rubs, the redder the skin gets and the more it complains. That ticks her off, and her sudden rise of anger speaks to her instincts. The change begins before she can stop it, before she’s entirely aware of having started; and once started she finds she hasn’t the will to stop. Somehow, it seems written into the fabric of the night. Fur rushes over her skin. Her body lengthens and swells. Her breathing becomes a rough, husky rumble too deep and resonant for anything even remotely human. She drops to all fours, and walks back into the center of the main room.

Moonlight flowing in through the windows sets her back to bristling. She flicks her ears, feeling a sudden urge to grumble, to growl or roar, announce herself to the night, declare her dominion over the city, but she resists, keeping her silence. That’s the smart thing to do. Discontented, Tikki stretches and yawns and drops belly-first onto the mattress. On a night like tonight, when the moon fills the night and her predator’s soul yearns to run wild and free, she should be out in the wild somewhere, in the dark reaches of some primitive land, like the woodlands near Seattle, or the forests and river valleys of Manchuria and southeast Siberia…. Stalking…. Hunting…. rising out of the brush around some waterhole… striking like lightning…. Silent and swift…. Bringing down prey…

Life in the wild is so simple. She was born to it. She understands it. She knows it well enough to act, and act correctly, without even pausing to think. By comparison, her life within the human domain often seems…

Complicated…

Hard just to think about.

She lowers her head onto the cradle of her crossed forelegs, then rolls onto her side, looking up at the windows.

Tonight, she took three humans as prey, and let two others escape. The three she killed, the one named Hammer and his cohorts, deserved what they got. The threat of death must be answered with death. Her every instinct commands it. If she had not killed those three men, they would be hunting her now, and they would keep hunting till they found and killed her.

The contest between predators is as much a part of the world as life and death, and so it must be. The hunter who shares her land with other predators soon grows weak and dies for lack of prey. That does not mean that all killing is right or even justified, even to her. It means that it is better to kill than be killed, better to dominate than submit. Were Tikki meant to simply bare her throat and let herself be murdered by any animal, two-legged or four. Nature would not have given her the soul of a hunter or the weapons with which to hunt.

What then of her human guise? What is the point of it? Is it merely a deceitful mask? She finds that hard to accept. Tikki has come to believe that Nature would not have equipped her to pass for human if Nature did not intend her to play some significant role in the human domain. Her problem is that defining the role, her proper role among humans, has proven as difficult for her as it was for her mother.

Her mother often said that Tikki must find her own way. She has been doing that most of her life, from her earliest days in Seoul and Shanghai, to her recent experiences in Seattle, and now to the present moment, here in Philadelphia. She came here in search of a man who used her. That man, in order to further his own plans, sought to have her killed. She wonders now if she will ever find him, and what she will do if she does.

However, for now that is not the real issue.

Tonight…

Things are not going as they should. That is why she came to this doss in northeast Philly rather than going to one of her usual lays, and why she hasn’t checked in with Adama yet.

She doesn’t understand why she didn’t save Hammer for interrogation. She should have done that, if only to make him reveal the identity of those who hired him. Sure, she already suspects that Adama’s competitors hired him, but it would be good to have confirmation. She could just as easily have killed Hammer after the interrogation, and she’s somewhat surprised that Adama didn’t suggest it. Most Triad leaders she’s known, especially Red Poles, those in charge of enforcement, have been big on symbolism. Few things are more symbolically endowed than leaving the torture-mutilated body of an enemy’s assassin on the enemy’s doorstep. In some parts of the world, that’s standard practice. Doing anything less would entail a serious loss of respect.

But that is not all that doesn’t seem right. What really bothers Tikki is the realization that she went to the waterfront warehouse intent on killing, slaughtering, totally annihilating the animals hunting her. That was very stupid. She knows better than to think in such limited terms, she’s known better since she was a child. Maybe she can afford to think that way in the wild, but in the city, she must be smarter, more scrupulous in evaluating the possible effects of her actions.

There’s also the question of identity. In certain circles, a great many people believe Tikki to be a killer, and even more accept without question that she hires out as muscle. In recent years, however, she has taken steps to conceal her identity while taking two-legs as prey. The question then is how Adama’s competitors, the Honjowara-gumi yakuza, could have known that she is the one who has been dusting their mid-rank executives? How did they know to send Hammer after her? Just a guess? Did she commit some error? Could there be a spy or informant in Adama’s organization? Could Adama himself have betrayed her?

Disturbing questions, for which she must find answers, but none are quite as disturbing as something else that happened tonight.

Back at the warehouse, she let the elf media-girl and dwarf camera-guy escape, but she had briefly considered slaughtering them both just because they were there. Instinct seemed to demand it, telling her to kill them, tear them apart, sate herself on their meat. She felt the moon burning into her, reaching down into her predator’s soul. She resisted because she did not like that, did not like what she felt, did not like it at all.

Now, she likes it even less.

The elf girl reeked in ways that only mages ever do. The dwarf stank of cybernetics. Tikki would be hard-pressed to decide which is more revolting, the flesh of a metahuman or the metal-infected meat of the cybernetically enhanced.

But that was beside the point.

The point was this:
Tikki
decides what she will do, where and when she will kill,
if
she will kill. No one else makes that decision. No one. That is her absolute rule, her law. All must obey. Even she. Even instinct. Ruthlessly enforcing that law is how she has managed to survive for so long. If she had killed every time the desire arose, she would have been like a creature run amuck, and humanity would have banded together long before now to hunt her down and destroy her.

Admittedly, her eternal argument with the darkest urgings of her instincts sometimes goes against her. She has done things even in the recent past that she now regrets. She does not moan and cry about it because that would accomplish nothing. Rather, she strives to learn from her mistakes so that the next time she will not repeat the error. So that one day soon she will know her place in the human world as well as she knows her place in the wild.

She might take humans and metahumans and other species as prey, but they are not her
natural
prey. She would never hunt them for their meat. No more than she would hunt another tiger or Weretiger, or any Were at all.

That is why taking the elf and the dwarf would have been wrong. What the humans call murder. What she has always thought of as simply unnatural. A crime against Nature. The two metahumans were neither predators nor prey. She could have no justification for killing them. They were just bystanders, as innocuous as they were irrelevant. She had every reason to let them go unharmed, and that should have been apparent to her from the moment she first saw them.

What’s wrong with her?

She shakes her head and grumbles.

32

The raid gets under way at about 05:45.

Kirkland waits and watches from behind the wheel of his unmarked car. At first, nothing too dramatic happens. The sky is overcast. What little sunlight that gets through the clouds and the haze is barely enough to tickle the photocells of streetlights and security floodlights. Everything looks gray and damp.

A van and a Ford sedan appear at opposite ends of the block. Five men in casual clothes emerge from the van; another four get out of the sedan and begin walking toward the middle of the block. The men are wearing neo-Kevlar insulated clothing and are armed with everything from heavy automatics to submachine guns, but at a glance the average citizen would never guess.

Directly across from where Kirkland waits at about mid-block is a big, three-story building of chrome, steel, and glass. Most of the chrome shows signs of fire damage, and most of the glass is either smashed or covered with plastic sheeting. The asphalt lot surrounding the place is littered with trash and there are even a couple of abandoned, smashed up, stripped-down autos. A chain-link fence with twin gates crosses the front of the property. A large sign standing just inside the fence announces that the place is available for sale or lease, et cetera, et cetera.

All seems quiet.

Kirkland keys the comm mike lying in his lap and says in a calm, casual voice, “Traffic Five-David, ten seventy-two.”

Traffic Five-David is the comm call-code of a chummer of Kirkland’s who happens to be on vacation this week. A 10-72 is a request for a time check. The computer-synthesized female voice of Central Dispatch replies with the time. The plainclothes cops across the street take the time-check request as their signal.

One member of each of the teams makes a cradle of his hands and gives his partners a boost up onto and over the chain-link fence. It isn’t a very tall fence. Within mere seconds both teams are over the fence and heading into the building.

Kirkland checks his watch. The raid is occurring at his request, but he has no problem sitting back and watching the action with a coffee in one hand, a Pyramid Gold cigarette in the other. He’s done his time on the front lines. Breaking down doors and rousting suspects is, by and large, a job for people with a few less years and a bit less weight than he’s carrying around. His ex-wife has been telling him that for years. Lately, he’s begun to wonder if she might be right. The more Kirkland hears about the hot-blooded warriors of Flash Point Enforcement, the more he’s convinced that he should stick to interviewing homicidal maniacs and serial killers and leave the heroic bulldrek to others.

For the sake of good form, he’s carrying a Predator II under his jacket today instead of his usual automatic, but he’s not planning to get out of his car—not now, anyway—not unless things get really out of hand. And if something really does go wrong, he’s got a fully loaded MP-5 submachine gun stashed under his seat. Whether he reaches for that or just throws himself across the front seat in hopes of not getting shot depends on what happens.

About four minutes go by.

The comm under the dash gasps briefly, and somebody says, cheerfully, “Tac-Seven… join the party.”

Kirkland takes a drag off his Pyramid Gold.

A big Chrysler-Nissan cruiser comes roaring up the block, streams right on by, then comes to a screaming halt just past the building, turning sideways to block off the road. Right behind it is a pair of heavy security vans.

The first cuts sharply over the sidewalk, smashes through the gateway of the cyclone fence, and screeches to a halt in front of the building. The second van stops beside the first. A pair of cruisers stop at curbside, flanking the entrance, while a patrol wagon cuts sideways to block off the other end of the road.

All the vehicles bear the Flash Point Enforcement logo. So do the heavily armored troopers who jump out of the vans and heavy cruisers to train a variety of semi-and fully automatic weapons on the building: shotguns, assault and sniper rifles, even a pair of medium machine guns. This is one of Flash Point’s Tactical Response Teams. They’re known to move fast, hit hard, arrest first, and ask questions later. Sometimes, that’s a good thing.

The double doors at the front of the building swing open. One plainclothes cop emerges, grinning broadly and holding up a bag filled with some white substance. Kirkland supposes they got lucky. The rest of the plainclothes cops bring out a line of prisoners, twelve of them, a mixed bag of humans, orks, and elves. Most are in their underwear. One of the three females is wrapped in a blanket.

The armored troopers take over, applying prisoner restraints. Kirkland checks that he’s got his Minuteman shield hanging securely from the breast pocket of his jacket and stands up outside his car. Sal Maroni, the Tac Team CO., walks over.

“Got some felony narcotics,” Sal says.

“Nice,” Kirkland says. “Nice work.”

“Where’s your boy?”

“I think that’s him now.”

Carefully creeping around the patrol wagon blocking off the east end of the street is a dark blue Mitsubishi sedan with a Minuteman Security placard on the driver’s sun visor and winking red and blue emergency lights discreetly planted in the front end. The sedan stops in the middle of the street, just a few steps away from Kirkland. The man who gets out from the back wears a black fedora and a dark blue suit. The brim of the hat casts a shadow that hides the man’s face above the level of his mouth.