Reboots: Diabolical Streak

by Mercedes Lackey;Cody Martin

  Then he’d been summoned and bound, all of his vast being forced into a tiny object, and been cut off from all of that. Now, though he didn’t much like to think about it, he was no longer immortal. Long-lived, certainly, but no longer immortal. He was tied to the mortal plane. The Between had become his nowhere-space; a place of emptiness, where he could still retreat to, but not for millennia or even decades. His existence had become hollowed and terrestrial all at once. It was something he had learned to live with and, despite everything, was comfortable with now. After all, there was single malt scotch.

  There was a sensation of traveling on the same level for a while, followed by the feeling of rising. While in the nowhere-space, Humph changed his face again. He was going to need a new one to retrieve the watch. When he felt that the watch was no longer rising, but moving horizontally again, he waited for a moment, then materialized about twenty feet on the back-path, behind the waiter, counting on the fact that the man would be too busy balancing the heavy tray to notice anything going on behind him. He tailed the waiter just long enough for the man to reach the appointed door, and as he started to put the tray down, Humph hurried a few steps. “Here, pal, lemme give you a hand with that,” he said, retrieving his watch as he aided the waiter in dropping the tray onto a receiving table beside the door. The waiter nodded thanks, then turned to the door, using his pass-key to get in. On this level, you didn’t expect to have to answer the door yourself. Humph hurried on.

  That went almost too well. It’d be nice to have good luck instead of no luck to bad luck, and I’m not one to look at easy money askance. But still…Humph shrugged the feeling off, focusing his thoughts on the job at hand. It didn’t take him long to find Harry’s room; it was one of the larger suites and was tucked in a corner, which meant it didn’t have an abundance of adjacent rooms like the smaller ones did.

  Well, now he was here, so this was the sixty-four-million-credit question. Sneak in, or bust in? There was no question but that Humph was going to have to get in, the only real question was how. He tested the door, mostly out of reflex—and found that it swung inside easily. And that could only be bad news for Humph. Oh, goddamnit all. I hate it when I’m right. His belly tightened up, and the feeling of uneasiness came back with full force. He hunched down as he pushed the door all the way in, keeping behind the wall and only peeking out enough to see into the room. When no one started shooting or yelling at him, he decided it was safe enough to venture inside.

  To put it plainly, the room was a mess. Most of the highly expensive wooden furniture had been overturned, some of it broken to pieces. Brocade upholstery was shredded. One of the crystal light fixtures was hanging out of the socket, flicking on and off unsteadily. The bed was torn up, with stuffing and bits of memory foam showered around it like debris from a bomb’s crater. Linens with a thread-count higher than an executive’s salary had been reduced to rags. Humph began to poke through the remnants of the room, toeing over piles of scattered papers or ruined silk-velvet drapes. He’d tossed a lot of rooms in his time, looking for clues or hints that would help him finish a job, and he recognized this room for what it was; a setup. Whoever had done this job wanted it to look this way, not because they were looking for anything in particular. It was painting a picture with nice broad strokes; only a critical eye would recognize it as an orchestrated scene. And with a joint with as much security as this one had, how had “they” gotten in to do this in the first place? What in the hell is going on here? Something is way wrong with this entire gig. I’ll give it one last sweep, see if I can find anything that’ll point me to Harry, and then hightail it back to the office to—

  Humph froze when he heard the door squeak on its hinge, his thoughts stopped midway through. He was almost startled enough to drop the face he had glamoured on. Slowly, he turned around to face whoever was there. The man standing in the doorway, obviously drunk, was a perfect match for Harry Somerfield. Mid-30s, boyishly handsome with a hint of sleaze, tailored casual suit, and a bottle of high-end liquor in hand completed the picture.

  “Uh, are you with Housekeeping?” Harry slurred, so drunk that he was momentarily oblivious to the fact that his expensive hotel room had been trashed.

  Humph was about to offer a witty one-liner when he noticed two red dots circling over Harry’s breast pocket. Reacting without bothering to think about it, Humph dove for Harry, tackling the drunk in a rough bear hug. Two lasers stitched the door and the wall that Harry had been standing in front of, cutting lazy lines into them and setting them on fire. The lasers stopped just as quickly and silently.

  Two snipers—maybe more. I gotta figure out how many shaved monkeys are in this equation. Harry had started struggling underneath him, mumbling about paying his tab. Humph roughly shoved his head against the floor. The targeting lasers started up again, sweeping the walls of the room, looking for victims. Things immediately took a turn for the worse; at the end of the hall past the open door, Humph saw two lugs in suits round the corner. Upon spotting Humph and Harry, both began to reach inside their jackets; guessing that they weren’t fumbling for their room keys, Humph reached out and slammed the now fully engulfed door shut. “Stay low if you want your head to stay attached to your shoulders!” He started to drag Harry bodily to some cover while keeping himself as low to the floor as possible; there was an overturned table near the wall with the window. Getting behind the table wouldn’t give them much cover, but they’d be close enough to the wall to avoid the snipers. One problem at a time.

  Humph had just enough time to reach into his uniform and retrieve the Webley-Fosbery revolver and peer around the edge of the table before the flaming door was kicked in. Both of the lugs had some very nasty pistols in their hands, and were scanning the room.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, part of him was facepalming. Burning hells. “Two guys bust through the door, guns blazing.…” When I catch whoever is writing my life, I’m going to feed him his liver. The Boggart waited until one of them was distracted, talking to someone on the other end of the earpiece that he was wearing. Humph leaned out around the right side of the table, leveling the heavy revolver dead center at the thug’s chest before squeezing off two rounds. The thug crumpled while his partner dove for cover. Then the thug got back up, shooting as he ducked behind a pillar. “Damnit! Bastards have body armor. I don’t have the right bullets for this. Shitfire!” The table that Humph and Harry were hiding behind was starting to get chipped away; the thugs were methodical, if nothing else, and were working from the top to the bottom of the table with their shots.

  Harry had finally started to come to; Humph found that gunfire often had a sobering effect on most beings. “W-what the hell! Who are you? Why are those guys shooting at us? Where’s sec—” The Boggart smacked Harry, hard, to shut him up.

  “They’re trying to kill us. There are snipers outside, so we can’t jump out onto the fire escape. This table isn’t going to last much longer; once it goes, we’re going to get turned into Swiss cheese. Any other questions?”

  Harry gulped, and then nodded. “Yes. What the hell are you going to do about it!”

  That’s actually not a bad question. They couldn’t stay here much longer; the two goons were getting cocky now, and had come out of cover to advance on the table, still firing. They were decently trained; communicating and making sure that one was covering the other when someone had to reload. Any move that Humph made would probably get him shot. He could hide in his pocket watch, but then Harry was certainly dead meat; these guys clearly wanted both of them dead. Pocket watch…got it! He fished the pocket watch out of the borrowed uniform, then chucked it hard over what was left of the top of the table. I hope it went far enough, otherwise this’ll have turned out to be a very bad idea. He waited a heartbeat, went to the nowhere-space, and immediately came out of it again centered on the watch. Both of the goons were now in front of him, still working on the table with their expensive guns. Unceremoniously, Humph raised his revolver and plante
d a lead slug in the back of each of their heads. The goons fell to the floor like puppets with the strings cut, no time to react before they were already dead.

  “Time to beat feet, Mr. Somerfield!” The snipers hadn’t cut him down; they must’ve been confused by what had just happened. Humph knew that wouldn’t last, however. He ran full tilt toward the table, ducking at the last second; a laser beam cut through the air an inch above his left ear. Humph expended the last two shots from the revolver in the general direction of the snipers; hopefully it’d give them something to think about. Without missing a beat he grabbed Harry by the collar and dragged him toward the remains of the doorway; both snipers had finally wised up and were firing in concert again.

  It was all that Humph could do to keep Harry upright and moving, half dragging and half carrying him down the hallway. All the gunfire might have sobered up his head somewhat, but the rest of his body was still very drunk. Amazingly, he hadn’t dropped the bottle that he had been carrying. Time to figure out an exit strategy. I’ve got to get this guy back to the office and lose this heat. Why the hell haven’t the security alarms gone off? There were two most-likely answers to that; either someone had bribed hotel security to look the other way, or someone had hacked the hotel’s system. Either explanation meant money, and a lot of it; places like this one didn’t get cracked cheaply. This whole deal was stinking more and more the deeper he stepped in it. At least he wouldn’t have to contend with innocents stepping into the line of fire. The sound-proofing in this joint was world-class. You could probably set a nuke off in the hall and no one in the rooms would hear it. They reached the elevators after what seemed like ages; Humph had to use one hand to keep Harry from toppling over while he punched the elevator controls with the grip of the revolver. Thankfully, you didn’t need a key to call an elevator from this floor, the assumption being that anyone up here was supposed to be.

  Those snipers wouldn’t have been sitting idle; there was, without a doubt, going to be a reception committee waiting for both of them. Humph punched in the service floor; lobby was sure to be a no-go, even if the hired goons weren’t there. Hotel staff were usually funny about having their customers getting dragged out by strange beings. Once the doors closed, he threw Harry up against the wall of the elevator, lifting him up by the lapels on a what had once been a very expensive jacket, before all the burn marks and tears.

  “Spill it, pal. What’s going on? Who has a hard on for you bad enough to send a squad of guns to grease both of us?” Humph gave him a light slap to help bring him around; instructional rather than punitive. Harry just stared at him with his mouth a little open and his eyes bulging a little.

  “I—I—I—” Harry stammered. Not exactly useful. And the elevator was in “express” mode, heading straight to the service level without stopping at any other floors. The doors were going to open in a second—

  Just as he thought that, the elevator slowed and stopped, and the doors whooshed smoothly open. The sight they revealed was not a pleasant one. Two out-of-breath thugs in suits, standing right at the entrance of the elevator clear as day. There was a beat where everyone just stared at each other; then everything happened at once. Both thugs started to reach for their weapons. Humph spun around, still holding onto Harry’s jacket, and threw the playboy at the thugs. Reflexively, they caught him, one of them dropping his weapon in the process. Just as quickly, Humph was on them; he was out of bullets, so he pistol-whipped the one on the right, catching him in the temple. The other was trying to shove Harry off when Humph kicked his knee out; the man fell to the floor with a squeal of pain before he was silenced with a second kick to his chin. Both thugs were out, at least for a few moments. He kicked the one he had pistol whipped a few times; partly just to make sure he stayed down, and partly out of annoyance.

  Harry had collapsed in a messy pile on the floor, still babbling about how he didn’t know what was going on. Dumb bastard is in shock. Can’t say I blame him too much.

  Humph had a sudden flash as he manhandled Harry up off the floor. These goons hadn’t been prepared for his reflexes or his strength. What did that mean? Boggarts such as himself weren’t nearly as numerous as some other Paras were, so there wasn’t much recognition by the average Joe. By nature his kind were solitary, and usually were tied to one place.

  Well if they didn’t know what he was capable of before, they were probably figuring it out now. Better take advantage of the fact while he still had an advantage. Rather than try and get Harry to move under his own power, Humph heaved the playboy over his shoulders in a fireman’s-carry position, and sprinted for the back door. There were a few startled wait staff and other hotel employees about, but he was moving too fast and didn’t look like he would brook any opposition. Having the Webley-Fosbery tucked into his waistband certainly didn’t hurt that impression.

  Ever the cautious one, Humph had left a rented van-pod about half a block away in an alley. Sometimes renting from Hire-A-Heap paid off, especially when you were trying to be inconspicuous; the risks you took with the vehicle in question having a motor powered by anemic hamsters were offset by the fact that it was invisible and no one wanted to jack it. Not worth the time or effort. The only change to the egg-shaped carrier since he’d left it was that the inevitable wag had written Wash Me in the dirt on the side.

  The pod responded to the proximity of the key in his pocket by sliding open the cargo door. A malfunction—it was the driver door that was supposed to pop—but one that served his purpose better right now. He heaved Harry inside, the playboy still as limp as if he was the one who had been cold-cocked, and wrenched the driver door open.

  Humph changed his face again as he climbed into the driver seat. Another one of his standbys, meant to look like any regular shmoe; easily forgettable. He also shrugged off the stolen uniform jacket, opting to throw it in the back on top of Harry. “Stay down and out of sight,” he growled as he plugged the key into the dash-socket. The van thought about that key for a lot longer than he would have liked, despite having recognized it to open the door for him, but finally, and reluctantly started. “Warning,” said the robotic voice from the dash. “We are in a non-controlled access-way. Vehicles will not be under auto-control.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” the Boggart snarled under his breath, and hit the accelerator. The pod responded sluggishly, but did move out. At least he’d fit in with every other driver in these alleys; they all drove like madmen once off the traffic grid. Deliveries had to be made and every second you were late cost credits off your take-home pay. Three more pods sped toward him and scraped past him, just barely not hitting the wall. One rode his tail for a moment, and as soon as the way was clear, squeaked past him and accelerated. Humph wished he had that one right now.

  The Boggart keyed his comm unit; it was set to call the office on autodial. The line rang for a good two minutes before he cut the connection. Not good. Skinny Jim always picks up by the third ring, no exceptions. That means the office is a no-go. He had to think fast, now; find someplace to stash the mark and collect his thoughts. He didn’t have Jim and Fred to op for him, which was bad; he’d be flying blind.

  You worked for years without a partner, he reminded himself. All right, then, let’s do it. Yanking the cyclic around and peeling down an intersecting alley, he pummeled his brain for an alternate safe house.

  ***

  It was close to an hour later before Humph had found the right spot to hole up in. He had driven around for a while, mostly at random, before he parked; hopefully no one who was paying attention would think that there was any pattern to what he was doing, and get a direction off of him. As stealthily as possible, he had climbed under the van-pod, poking around in its guts and desperately hoping the hover system wouldn’t give out; if it did, his troubles would be over, permanently. After burning himself twice and getting a nice shock from an exposed wire, he had found what he was looking for; the GPS locator that the rental company used to keep track of its fleet. It hadn’t be
en enabled yet; usually they only did that if there was suspicion that the vehicle had been stolen, or if the law came with a warrant. Still, Humph didn’t want to take any chances, so he removed it without completely busting it. There was a parked taxi not too far away; the driver was off duty or otherwise occupied; a few more minutes of jerry-rigging, and the locator was now affixed to the frame of the cab. If anyone did start looking for his ride, they’d have to chase the cab around for a while before they figured out the game; might buy him a little time.

  With that chore out of the way, Humph took a circuitous route to the safe house. In all actuality, it was more like a safe closet; barely big enough for the bed, sink, vidscreen and toilet. If two people wanted to pass each other, it would be a tight fit even with both turning their shoulders. Comfort wasn’t why he had rented it, though; it was cheap, and in a part of town where keeping your mouth shut was often part of a long-term survival strategy. Paying in cash and slipping a couple hundred extra to the building super sealed the deal; discretion, aided by another forgettable face and a fake name.

  Stashing the van-pod down the street, Humph resigned himself to lugging Harry to the apartment. Across the street and up three flights of stairs. My day keeps getting better and better. If anyone asked, he figured that he could get away with saying that he was helping his friend who had drunk too much to get home. It would even be partly true, after all. Harry was drunk, and had passed out. Around here, he imagined that it wouldn’t be an uncommon sight. After an agonizing climb, he had finally managed to get Harry to the apartment, plop him on the bed, lock all of the security devices on the door, and slump to the cheap carpeting next to the sink. He was almost desperately grateful that if he needed to—and he probably would—he could retreat to his watch to escape Harry. And Harry’s snoring. Harry was a world-class snorer. And somehow still had that bottle clenched in his paw; empty now, probably poured out in their flight from the hotel.