Wolf and Raven

by Michael A. Stackpole

  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.”

  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 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 slenderfingered hand. She still looked radiant from having met Jimmy Mackelroy, the enfant terrible of the Seattle Seadogs[29]. 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?”

  “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?”

  “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.

  I looked at the container that had carried the book chip. “All I Need to Know to Understand Women I Learned In Catholic School? Are you sure that will help you, Tom?”

  Hopeful grunt and emphatic nod.

  I shrugged and carried the dual mugs of soykaf from the room. Tom’s ex-wife comes to Seattle every six months or so, whether Tom’s recovered from the last visit or not. I wondered at his choice of scanning material beca
use Annie struck me as about the most unnunlike woman I’d ever met. Then again, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that she’d found a convent out there that catered to macrobiotically nourished, politically correct, archeo-feminist, neo-retro splatter-metal enthusiasts with bipolar disorders.

  Valerie silently forgave me for taking so long when I handed her the brimming mug. “Got your prey.”

  “It was that easy?”

  “No, love. I’m that good.” She shook her head, her thick brown braid flopping from shoulder to shoulder. “What does Lynn see in you?”

  “She knows, deep down, I’m just a real sensitive guy.” I gave her a crocodile smile, then leaned against a mainframe cabinet. “Who is he?”

  “She. Selene Reece is her name. She’s a great granddaughter of Harold Reece. He was a newspaper tycoon before the Awakening. He diversified and left everyone a lot of money. She’s a black sheep of the family, the illegitimate daughter of a granddaughter who used a lot of recreational chemicals at a time when it was thought LSD could keep one from goblinizing.”

  I nodded. Orks and trolls usually bred true, but some folks in the general population are tagged with “monster” genes. They tend to kick in around puberty, causing embarrassment somewhat greater than having your voice crack or your face break out. In essence, their whole body breaks out, and they shift from being normal human kids to orks or even worse.

  It's not pretty and usually very confusing. There are plenty of orks who don’t make it through the transformation with their psyches intact. There are even more con artists making a fortune selling everything from sugar pills to votive candles to prevent kids from undergoing the change. While kids might not fully understand the problem, their parents do and will do just about anything to avoid the humiliation of having a child “run away.”

  “This Reece recommended Albion to the Club as a hire? I have a hard time placing Albion and his porcupine coiffure in that kind of place.”

  Val shrugged and sipped her soykaf. “Cheap thrills for the elite without their having to go slumming. The club’s computer didn’t have any record of his employment, but the tailor who made his uniform still had a copy of the employment record. Selene Reece is listed as his sponsor.”

  “Checks with what Cutty told me. Where is Reece now?”

  “You’re expecting a lot in exchange for a kafcup. Tom Electric would have brought me donuts.”

  “I owe you. Do you know where she is?”

  Valerie nodded her head. “According to the club schedule she’s up in the Yukon. She won a lottery and is going after a snow moose. Won’t be back for a week.”

  I smiled widely enough that Valerie knew I was getting myself into trouble and wanted her to set it up. “Can you crack back into their computer to confirm a dinner engagement for me with her there, tonight, about six? Make it look like it was on, then got scrubbed by the lottery win.”

  She looked hard at me. “You’re seeing Lynn tonight, Wolf.”

  “I know, I know.” I set the mug on top of the computer. “Set the dinner thing for six. I meet Lynn at eight. I just want a chance to look around. I’ll be in and out, fast. I want to reconnoiter so I can report to Doc when he gets back.”

  Valerie drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I suppose, but if you stand Lynn up, you’ll regret it.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Val, honest.”

  “Good.” She smiled wickedly. “Because if you do I’ll make sure you’re on every boiler-room investment house hot list from now until the collapse of Western civilization.”

  III

  This is the part of the story where most narrators would mention that they slept fitfully and had prophetic dreams about the past and future melding together. I’m supposed to tell you all about the dreams, using cryptic terms that will confuse you until things come together later. It’s the way you know the stuff you’re reading is art.

  I’ve got no dreams to share. That doesn’t mean I didn’t dream, mind you, but just that I don’t want to share the dreams. From the second my head hit the pillow in the spare room Raven has allotted to me, I dreamed of Lynn. The dreams might have been prophetic—in fact, I was hoping they were—which explains why I’m not going to share them.

  I had fully intended to sleep until the sun was so far over the yardarm they’d have to use a satellite link to communicate, but Stealth whooshed and creaked on into the room I use. My eyes came instantly open, but my Viper stayed under the pillow. No sense in wasting a bullet on a target that could have taken an Exocet hit without denting his hide.

  “No new toys to show me?” I sat up in the bed and let the frivolity drain out of my voice. His armor is better against humor than it is against bullets. “What’s up, Stealth?”

  “Valerie Valkyrie says you’re asking about the Pacific Northwest Hunting Club.”

  I nodded. “Albion had a job there for the past week. He was recommended by a member. I thought I would check it out this evening.”

  Stealth remained absolutely still for a moment. He didn’t so much as breathe, which he really didn’t need to do anyway. To help in the assassination work he used to do before he became claw-abled, Stealth traded a lung lobe for an internal air tank with a slow-release oxygen system. Saved his life once—gave him enough time to free his feet from a block of cement at the bottom of the Sound.

  At last the Oracle spoke. “You will be armed?”

  Stealth lives by that fragment of wisdom that says “No problem so large that it cannot be solved by the suitable application of plastic explosives.” He proved that, both in his professional and private life. In fact, to get out of the cement block, he blew the lower parts of his legs off. That is why, when we do have casual conversations, I don’t tell him about hangnails or hernias.

  “Actually I expected this to be a soft recon. I have to meet Lynn later . . .”

  “Ms. Ingold.”

  “That’s the one. She doesn’t much like guns—she’s still hinky about the grunges who grabbed her, so I thought I would travel light.”

  “I see.” He froze for another second, then turned and started out of the room.

  “Hey, Stealth, wait!”

  He slowed and looked back over the shoulder at me.

  “My change from the cab?”

  His Zeiss eyes blinked at me once, then he turned and left.

  Stealth’s silent departure didn’t bother me as much as it might have someone else. He’s weird enough that if having him owe me money meant he would try to avoid me, I could live with that. Then again, for all I knew, he had gone off trying to figure how to give me change in bullets of differing calibers.

  The Old One gave me a salutary yip as I looked in the mirror at the results of a shower, shave, and the suitable application of sartorial accouterments. I appreciated the sentiment, but I’d wait for Valerie’s opinion before deciding whether I was comfortable with my choices. Not that I was that comfortable in the clothes—neckties and nooses have more in common than both starting with the letter N.

  Valerie gave me a full 1000-watt smile. “Oh, Wolf, if I had an icebreaker as sharp as you, I’d be in the Aztechnology database and gone running on a kiddie-deck. Double-breasted blazer of blue, good choice, gray slacks, dark socks, white shirt, TAB tie, nice, and the wing-tip shoes.” She gave me the hairy-eyeball. “You fixing to make this date real special?”

  I winked at her. “Val, every date with me is special. And the answer is no, I’m not handing her some gold-bound ice. We’re having dinner with her great-aunt from St. Louis.” I wanted to toss another wisecrack out at her, but the well was dry. Thinking about Lynn and me and the future required so much brainpower that it didn’t leave me enough idle cells to keep coming up with smart remarks.

  Val gave me a hug and told me to transfer it to Lynn, noting, “You’re on your own after that, jack.” I gave her a peck on the cheek and specifically told her not to pass that to Jimmy Mackelroy from me, then headed out into the garage. I disarmed the Fen
ris from outside its effective range, then took it roaring out into the Seattle night.

  The rain had vanished and the dark sky looked clear and a tad crisp. I found the Pacific Northwest Hunting Club on the first try and parked down the block. Two chirps from the remote left it on With Extreme Prejudice, which would be more than enough to keep the local footsponges from mistaking it for a bar, bathroom, or king-size bed.

  I managed to wrestle the double-breasted jacket’s internal button into its hole by the time I reached the awning extending out over the sidewalk. A doorman waited at the top of the stone steps and opened the door for me without comment. Up another flight of steps and a left turn brought me to the club’s foyer, where a large man greeted me with a smile. “Yes, sir?”

  “Evening. I’m Wynn Archer. I’m supposed to be dining with Selene Reece.” I nervously glanced at my watch. “I’m early.”

  Dark clouds of confusion spread over the man’s face.

  “Ms. Reece has no dinner reservation tonight, sir. Perhaps you are confused as to the evening?”

  I shook my head and let my smile tell him I knew I was right. “Wednesday the twenty-seventh. I’ve been looking forward to this for two weeks.”

  He held up a hand. “Just a moment.” He disappeared behind a curtain and I heard the clicker-clack of a keyboard. I knew Valerie had managed to mess up his records when the sound of key-pounding got louder.

  He returned with a smile on his face. “There has been a mistake, sir. Ms. Reece apparently did have reservations, but they were canceled when she went out of town on an urgent trip.”

  “Are you sure? Perhaps I should wait in the lounge until we see if she makes it. I’m sure you understand that she would have canceled with me if she didn’t expect to be here.”

  The host started to tell me the lounge was only for members, but I stuck him on the horns of a dilemma. If he gave me the bum’s rush, he could end up embarrassing a member because her plans didn’t happen to include informing him of her comings and goings. He took a look at me and must have decided I looked harmless.