by Norris Black
"We can maybe put an end to this whole thing once and for all," finished Dagda. "Which brings me back to my original question. What now?"
"It's high time we paid a visit to the miserable strange-eyed bastard who first pulled me into this mess. That same bastard who also appears to have been dressing up in robes and convincing impressionable youth to commit atrocities. Murder Rowe is at the center of all this. First though, we need to make a quick stop somewhere. I'm not walking into the lion's den without some hardware on hand and that—" I said, pointing to where the silver gun still rested on the floor—"can stay right where it is for now." I felt another pang of longing to go pick it up even as I said the words but buried it deep.
We spent the next several hours going over the events of the last week, mining every encounter, every conversation for any nuggets of information we could get out of it while outside the sun rose into a cloudless sky and the wounded city came alive.
Red Market was the place to go to buy anything, whether it be legal, illegal, or so out there laws hadn't even been invented for it yet. It wasn't too far from Five Points Plaza, so we left the Marauder parked and walked. From sunup to sundown the streets surrounding the market were a swarm of activity. Mara had stayed back to see if she could glean any more information from her connections along the wyrd. The Parakas encounter had thrown her a bit, and she was determined to understand what happened there even if she had to drag every wych in the city around by the ear to do it. Which left just Dagda and me to shoulder through the teeming masses while vendors hawked their wares from stalls lining the streets to either side.
"I'll be right back," I said to her. "In the meantime, take a walk around and pick up anything you think you might need. I have a feeling shit's about to hit the fan in a major way and we might not have a chance at another shopping trip."
"What are you going to be doing?"
"The man I have to see is a little on the twitchy side and, even in civvies, he'll spot you for a Seraph a mile away."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Take a look around. Do you see anybody else walking like they own the entire street?" Dagda had been striding with head held high and shoulders squared. It was in stark contrast to the bent and huddled movement of most of the market's denizens and had earned her more than one nervous glance. "The only people who walk like that are gangers out looking for a fight and Seraph. And no one is going to mistake you for a ganger."
She seemed inclined to argue the point but instead just frowned and did her best to draw her shoulders in a bit as she wandered off to check out a nearby stall stocked full of colorful clothing. I couldn't make out the words, but she was mumbling something to herself in what sounded to be quite an angry tone.
I headed off down the block, bobbing and weaving around my fellow early-morning shoppers as one stopped abruptly as something caught their eye, or others blocked the thoroughfare as they chatted with old friends. Passing a stall selling all manner of blades, I was tempted to pick up a sharp looking machete so I could cut a path through the thicket of inconsiderate patrons ahead of me. After a few more minutes of pushing and cursing I stumbled into the shop of notorious swindler and con man, Adolphus Merk.
"Gideon Brown! I heard you were dead," boomed Merk in greeting as he caught sight of me. Merk was of a height with me but weighed about three times as much, most of which was belly. He gifted me with a brilliant smile that split the massive dark and curly beard of his face and waved a handful of thick fingers encrusted with rings glittering in the morning sunlight. In his other hand was a white rag he was using to wipe down the counter in front of him.
"Not dead, just retired."
"Isn't that what I said?" he asked, feigning confusion before hitting me with another brilliant smile as he mopped his bald head with the rag he had just been polishing the counter top with. It was a nervous gesture, the morning air still too cool to cause sweat. "Regardless it is a wonderful thing to see your bright, shining face. It is as if the sun itself has risen inside my shop. Tell me, what can such a poor man as me, do for one so great as Crash City's only professional skeptic."
Putting that joke as my business name was one of the most regrettable decisions I've ever made, right behind getting out of bed last Tuesday.
Unlike many of the vendors in Red Market, Merk's shop was an actual store with walls and a door. He had inherited the place from his father, who had been one of the original market vendors, back when the place had been a small cluster of merchants eking out a living in the years following Godfall. The hefty proprietor ostensibly dealt in baked breads, his wares lining racks along two walls. Despite those outward appearances he made most of his money off selling illegal firearms to anyone with cash on hand. He was also a horrible cheat and doing business with him was begging to be robbed. However, he traded in information as well as weaponry, and information was something I sorely needed.
"I need a reliable gun, a location, and a time. And I'd prefer you don't hit me over the head and steal my wallet when giving me any of those three."
"Gideon! I am offended. Are we not old friends, you and I? What would make you say such horrible things about an honest merchant like myself?" That pearly smile again. "These ingredients you ask for. Why, they sound like the recipe for a murder. Are you cooking up a murder, friend Gideon?"
"In a manner of speaking, I guess I am," I said with a chuckle at the accidental pun. "Though not in the way you mean it. I just need to find someone, so I can have a little chat with them."
"I see, and the gun?"
"I want to make sure they hear me."
"I indeed have found the potential of having holes poked in my generous self to significantly increase my attention span," said Merk as he slapped hands to his gut.
He dropped the smile and his face was suddenly all business as he sized me up. "Let me see your hands."
I held them out, palms up while he leaned over the counter for a closer peek. He grabbed my right with his own massive mitts and flipped it over, giving it a firm squeeze. "Hmm," he said just as the hand holding was getting awkward. "Wait here."
He trundled off through a beaded curtain and into a back room returning several minutes later with a loaf of bread as long as my forearm and half again as thick.
"That's a lot of bread." He placed it on the counter between us. As he did so, I noticed a thin line down the center of the bread, like someone had cut the loaf in two and stuck it back together again.
"It certainly is," the gun dealer said with an exaggerated wink. "But trust me, it is the perfect caliber of sustenance for a man of such refined taste as yourself."
Merk had a reputation for robbing you blind on any deal he could, but he was also renowned for the quality of his wares.
"How much?"
"Before we discuss something so insignificant as cost, let us hear what other needs you have. You mentioned a place and a time. If I am to provide either I will of course need to know the who of the matter, yes?"
"Murder Rowe."
His eyes went round. "It appears I mistook my good friend's desire. I thought you were cooking up a murder—and now I understand your earlier laugh, 'puns are a poor man's humor' as my father used to say, but I digress. You are not looking to serve up death, but to gorge on it yourself."
"I'm not looking to do either. Like I said, I just want to have a chat with the man."
"I am not a person to get between a gentleman and his fate. A place and time I can give you. Once the sun takes to its bed you will find the one for which you search at a club in the fourth ward. He is there every evening, watching over his little flock from a second-floor office perch."
"The Underground? I heard that place burned down." I hoped he didn't catch the tenseness in my voice when I named that hellish place.
"You are seemingly well-informed yourself fine sir, perhaps I should be concerned you will become a business rival, no? Of course, you shall clearly be dead soon enough and corpses make the easiest riva
ls, so it would seem I have nothing to fret over. Yes, the Underground has indeed gone the way of ash but that is not the place of which I speak. The Crowe's Nest is where the old bird finds his roost."
"Crowe's Nest? Seriously? This fucking guy. At the least he should be shot for having no imagination." Next came the part I had been dreading. "Alright, what's the bill?"
"Your coin is no good here Gideon," said Merk with another of his brilliant smiles. "In fact, judging by that poor garment hanging on your shoulders that may once have been a coat, you are in far more need of it than I." The smile dropped as the baker's expression turned to serious intensity, showing a glimpse of the man behind the jovial mask. "Jayna was a friend of the store. A good friend. She deserved better than what she received. Some blame you for what happened, but I do not. I know you tried to help her, and when she was beyond helping you avenged her. For that you have my gratitude."
It was like being punched in the gut. I attempted to speak, but no words came out. The bearded baker held up one finger, instructing me to wait, before disappearing into the backroom. He returned several minutes later with a smaller loaf of bread. He loaded both into a paper bag for me to carry.
"One last thing," I said as I pulled an envelope from my coat pocket. "Can you deliver this for me? Today?"
Merk's eyebrows rose as he read the name on the front of the square of folded paper. "You indeed consort with dangerous folk. I shall ensure its arrival." He tucked the envelope into his apron and laid one bear paw of a hand on my shoulder. "I hope to see you again friend Gideon."
With nothing left to say I grabbed the bag and headed back out into the morning sunshine. The day had begun to warm but the cold ghosts of the past wrapped me so tight I barely felt it.
Chapter 19
"Are you mocking me?"
Dagda was waiting for me not far from where we had separated. A tan longcoat, twin to my own—though in much better shape—wrapped her tall frame. A matching fedora concealing her distinctive hairstyle completed the outfit.
"You told me I needed to blend in. I see why you like these coats so much, all these pockets are very useful. Does it look okay?"
"Well yes, I did say that, but I didn't mean—" I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes in exasperation. "It doesn't matter. You look fine. Can we just go?"
We walked in silence for a few minutes, me with my arms full of suspiciously heavy loaves of bread and her with hands in the pockets of her new coat and hunched forward like she was walking into an invisible wind.
"I don't walk like that," I said.
"If you say so."
Dagda was becoming more open the longer she was outside of the rigid lines a Seraph soldier had to comform to. It was nice to see.
"Why is it called Red Market?" she asked.
"You don't know?"
"I know what it is. All the city's hot spots are covered as part of academy training. Red Market is infamous as a hive of criminal activity. We send patrols down here regularly, but I never understood the name and I've always been curious about it. None of my instructor's would give an answer when questioned. They'd just tell me what activities I needed to keep an eye out for. Its history was unimportant to present-day operations."
I snorted. "I guess that shouldn't be surprising. It's not a pretty story, and I don't think you're going to much like hearing it."
"Tell me anyway."
I squeezed past a man in a tattered pink bathrobe who was too absorbed in his scrutinization of a selection of bells of varying shapes and sizes laid out on the vendor's table in front of him to move out of the lane way. As I did, I thought about where to start the story.
"It was probably about forty years ago, a few years after the cult riots had been put down." Sometimes you just have to start at the beginning. "This area had been all but abandoned by then but a dozen or so merchants had an idea to make use of the space. Most of the main streets this side of the Battery run right through here. It was prime property, so these merchants staked a claim and set up shop. Word spread and soon enough people were traveling from all over the city to procure goods in scarce supply everywhere else. It was much smaller back then, but still buzzing with people. Of course, that buzz attracted the attention of your kind."
"My kind? You mean the Seraph?"
"Yeah. They'd come down here, rough folks up, dig through the wares looking for anything on the forbidden property list. Now and then they'd cart someone away to your fine dungeons."
"If they hadn't broken the law, they wouldn't have been arrested."
"So you say. I doubt they saw it that way. Most were just trying to scrape a living together for them and their families. Anyway, as the story goes, during one of these raids one of the vendors' sons, a young hothead by all accounts and barely more than a boy, took exception to the Seraph coming in and tossing his dad's shop on a regular basis. He got into a fight with one of the soldiers. A fight that ended up with the young man bleeding to death in the street."
"So that's where the name came from? I mean it's tragic, especially for the boy's father, but still..."
"No, the name came later. You see this young boy had a big family, lots of cousins with that same hotheaded blood in their veins. The next time the Seraph came calling these cousins were waiting for them. They hung them from streetlamps, right above where their kin had died."
Dagda paled, already seeing where this was headed. "Oh no."
"Exactly. The Seraph descended on the market like a storm. Men, women, children were all put to the sword. Not even one was spared. You see, the Seraph couldn't allow the transgression to go unpunished. Lessons had to be taught. It took another five years before another group of merchants took a chance on the market. Rumor has it the walls of the shops were still stained red with blood. I don't even remember what name they tried to give this place, but from that point on, everyone knew it as the Red Market."
Her face bore a grim expression. "Rumor. Stories. Even if what you're saying is true, and I'm not convinced its nothing more than a tale spun by a merchant's clever tongue to stir up business. But if there is a tiny morsel of truth in your story, I am certain it did not happen in the way you're describing. The Seraph act only in the interests of the greater good."
"If you say so," I said, noting she was once again walking with her back straight and her shoulders squared, the playfulness gone from her step.
The rest of the walk back to Five Points Plaza was a silent one.
Chapter 20
The Crowe's Nest was an old warehouse which at some point in the recent past had been converted into a dance club. I was just glad this one wasn’t in a basement. Music thumped into the night and vibrant colors flashed through windows set up high in the corrugated steel walls. A line of young people dressed in what I can only assume was the latest fashion trends stretched down the block while they waited to be let in. Could be I'm out of touch, but I didn't understand the fascination with neon. It looked like a giant had vomited a rainbow up and down the block. In contrast to the riot of color masquerading as people, the door was flanked by a pair of Rowe's henchmen wearing their typical all-black attire. Now and then the line would shuffle forward as the doormen either let someone in or turned them away.
The fact the Seraph hadn't shut this place down made it likely the local office had been paid to look the other way. It's an observation I didn't share with Dagda. She was still a little raw from our conversation at the market that morning.
"How do we get in? I somehow don't think we're going to meet the dress code," said Dagda as she pointed to our matching longcoats.
"Sometimes the only way out is through."
"Through?"
"Yeah, through them," I said and started off across the street directly towards the muscle watching the front door.
As we neared the closest thug, a wide-shouldered man with a shaved head and close-cropped blonde beard, I did my best to come off as calm, cool and collected but inside my heart was racing. I noticed
my hands were trembling and quickly stuck them in my pockets before Dagda noticed. As I stepped within arm's reach of the bald doorman a voice in my head was screaming, telling me to turn around and go find a nice, quiet, dark hole to hide in.
"Sometimes the only way out is through," I whispered to myself.
"Back of the line pops," said the doorman before taking a closer look at me. "Actually, why don't you head on home, this isn't really your kind of place." He caught sight of Dagda as she came up alongside me. "You though," he said, looking her up and down. "For you, I'm sure we could come to some sort of arrangement."
I barely saw the punch that shattered the doorman's nose, and I suspect he didn't see it at all. His head flew back with a startled yell, blood flying from his face. Dagda followed up on her straight right with a sidekick to the knee. Something snapped and the man collapsed, screaming. The second doorman turned as he drew a pistol from inside his jacket only to be stopped by the barrel of a handgun pointing directly at his forehead before he had cleared his own weapon from its holster.
I pulled one of the twin hammers back on the shiny black Boxer .577 handgun to ensure I had his undivided attention. The gun had been a welcome surprise when I dug it out of one of the two loaves of bread Merk had given me. It was an expensive piece of weaponry and while the two-barrel over-under design meant firing capacity had been reduced from my old revolver's six down to two, it more than made up for it by overall stopping power. You hit something with a round from the Boxer and it left a mark. As for the contents of the second loaf of bread, well, that was even more of a surprise.
The uninjured henchman was keeping his hands in the air and away from his holstered gun. Dagda reached over and took the weapon, sticking it one of her coat pockets.
"Here's what's going to happen," I said, proud of how steady my voice sounded even though I felt like I could shit my pants at any moment.
I probably should've gone before we left Mara's.