The Unbelievable Mr Brownstone Omnibus 3

by Michael Anderle

  The men all pulled out brass knuckles and slipped them on.

  The lead mobster smiled. “Don’t worry, Garfield. We’re not going to kill you. We’re not dumb enough to kill a guy who works for Brownstone, but we’ve got to make a point to you and all these people who aren’t Brownstone that you can only hide behind your daddy so much. We still rule this town.”

  Trey looked at the men and nodded. “Fair enough. No one pulled any guns, so that means I don’t have to pull a gun. We can keep this all nice and fair.”

  The four mobsters advanced, and Trey shook out his hands before raising his fists.

  “You smug bastard,” the lead mobster replied. “We might have let you run away with your tail between your legs, but now you’re going to feel some serious pain. Probably going to have to break something to make our point.”

  “Less talk, more walk, bitch.” Trey grinned. “Show me the strength of family ties.”

  Two of the men rushed forward. Apparently, they were smart enough to not try to take him one at a time. Too bad they weren’t smart enough to avoid attacking him at all.

  Trey delivered a hard right hook to one, his gloved fist slamming into the man’s head. His target spun several times before collapsing to the ground. The other man threw a quick jab, but the bounty hunter blocked the attack and replied with a headbutt.

  The mobster stumbled back, gritting his teeth, blood spurting from his nose.

  Trey advanced and threw two quick jabs, one to the stomach and the other to the head. The man collapsed in a heap, moaning.

  The bounty hunter shook out his hands. “You see, that’s your problem, bitches. You should have asked around more about me before you took me on, and then you would have avoided getting all embarrassed and causing trouble you didn’t need to.”

  The remaining enforcer stepped in front of the lead mobster and pulled a knife.

  Trey sighed. “Damn, now why did you have to go and do that?” He gestured for the man to attack. “Come on, little man. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  The mobster charged, and Trey let the man stab him. His vest wasn’t much use against blades, but it slowed the attack enough that by the time it hit his strengthened skin, the only thing he felt was a sting. The mobster grinned down at the knife, obviously waiting for blood to well up. His grin disappeared after a few seconds, and he looked up.

  Trey waved to him and slugged him hard in the face. The mobster’s head snapped back, and he collapsed to the ground, his eyes rolling up.

  “Just you and me now, bitch,” Trey sang.

  The lead mobster whipped out his gun and pointed it at Trey. “You sonofabitch. What the hell?”

  Trey stared at him. Depending on where he was hit, even with the gloves, he wouldn’t escape injury, but if the man didn’t kill him with one shot, Trey could survive with the help of a healing potion. The thought quashed any fear.

  A quick rush could disarm the man, but beating him down then wouldn’t be good enough. It might convince the mob to come at him again in the future with more men. No, Trey needed to demolish the man’s very soul to win and make sure no Mafia bastards ever came at him again.

  Trey clucked his tongue. “Like I said, we started this all very polite-like, especially on my end, and then you guys decided to come at me. Out of respect for the fact that you didn’t pull a gun immediately, I didn’t go for a gun.” He held up his hands. “And look, the thing is, I don’t want any particular trouble with family men other than the guys with bounties. The way I see it, if one of your guys is enough of a dumbass to get tagged with a bounty, he’s fair game, you know what I’m saying?”

  The mobster’s face twitched. “I’m the one with a fucking gun on you.”

  Trey snorted. “And your friend there just stabbed me, and I didn’t even blink. Don’t that make you think just a little bit that maybe, just maybe, I’m out of your league? I could have wasted all your asses with ease, but there’s a couple of reasons I ain’t doing that.” He held up a finger. “First of all, I ain’t remembering you all having any bounties on your asses, let alone dead-or-alive bounties.’ He held up a second finger. “Second, I’m like you. I’m a family man, and I belong to a family headed by one major badass, James Brownstone. He ain’t want me stirring up trouble. Out of respect for you and him, let’s just end this shit. I’m gonna walk over there and get in my truck and drive off. If you want to live, you’ll put your gun away and help your guys back into your car and drive off.” He scowled at the man. “Or you can try to shoot me, and then I’ll be forced to kill all your asses to make a point. You’ll be dead, and I won’t have any money to show for it, and I’ll waste a lot of time talking to the cops. Why don’t you save us both the trouble?”

  He locked eyes with the other man. After ten seconds, the mobster’s arm began to dip. A few more seconds passed before the mobster let his gun drop to his side.

  “You’re tougher than they say,” the mobster muttered.

  “Well, I learned from the best.” Trey grinned. No reason to let the asshole know about his artifact. “Look, you may think I’m an uppity bitch, but the truth is, the big man might kill you if you cause trouble, and I might come after you if you have a bounty, but the Silver Ghost is real, and she’s going around killing people just because they are crooks. If you really want to do something to help your family, let them know to pass on any information about the Ghost. Like I said, money in it for you.”

  The mobster stared at Trey, his mouth open in disbelief.

  Trey waved and walked back to his truck. He opened the door and slipped inside.

  The mobster was still standing there, gun at his side, when Trey pulled away.

  16

  Peyton licked his lips and clicked his mouse.

  Okay, let’s do this thing.

  His eyes moved back and forth as he looked over the collated coordinate data Shay had sent to him and Heather, along with the nature of the victims and the times of the incidents. A few more keystrokes and a map with various colored dots appeared on his second monitor.

  There’s got to be a pattern here. Just because a bunch of teens couldn’t find it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. There’s a reason the Silver Ghost chose these victims and these locations, so what is it?

  He frowned and looked at Heather’s webcam picture. Judging by the deep frown on her face, she wasn’t finding much either.

  Peyton entered a few more commands to initiate additional analyses.

  “I’m just not seeing it,” he muttered. “It looks like random noise. I’ve tried to run a bunch of pattern-matching algorithms, and I’m not getting any decent fits. It’s like there’s no pattern at all.”

  Heather shook her head and sighed. “Same here. If there’s some sort of time- or location-based pattern to this, it’s not something I can identify through any of the analyses I’ve run. I’ve got a few general-purpose matching algorithms running, and I’m waiting for results on those.”

  Peyton furrowed his brow. “Yeah, me too. Sounds like a good plan. I mean, even if she is an alien, it’s not like she’s totally inscrutable, right? I mean, she lived on Earth for ten years as a human and fit in with humans. She’s probably got the equivalent of a better education and technology. There’s no reason to think she has some master ability to plan attacks that come off as completely random to us lower lifeforms, right?”

  Osiris meowed from beneath the computer desk, perhaps offering his thoughts on who the true masters of Earth should be.

  She’s not a mouse. You won’t be much help.

  After a few seconds of intense typing, Heather shrugged. “We don’t know if this Silver Ghost is the alien, and if she is, we can’t really say one way or another. I mean, to be honest, judging by the Oricerans, different intelligent species think all sorts of different ways.”

  “But she’s not some weird rock monster or flame sprite or some crap like that.” Peyton shook his head. “She’s humanoid, so that’s got to mean she’s at least somewh
at like us in thought, right?”

  “We don’t know that she’s humanoid. We only know the shape she’s presented to Shay. For all we know, she’s an android of some sort. That might explain the appearance.”

  Peyton snorted. “Android who rants about evil and monsters? She doesn’t sound like an emotionless machine.”

  Heather tapped a few keys. “Who says alien machines have no emotions? Assuming she’s not a machine, she might have some really foreign way of thinking or access to advanced math techniques or something else we can’t begin to understand. The point is, we don’t know one way or another, so we can’t make any assumptions. The only thing we can do is keep plugging away at the data and trying to find something useful. Anything else is just a lot of pointless guessing. It might be fun as a thought experiment, but it won’t help us track down the Silver Ghost.”

  Peyton sighed and slumped in his chair. It was hard to find fault with Heather’s logic.

  “Maybe there’s something else we can do. Something more proactive than looking through data.”

  Heather frowned. “Like what?”

  “I was wondering about us sending up like an entire fleet of drones. Just coating the city, and looking for where we lose signal—like a passive detection grid. If we have enough, maybe we can narrow it down to a certain area and have James go there.”

  Heather frowned. “There’s no way we could coordinate that many drones without running into other trouble. It’d be too much of a risk of leading them back to either you or me.”

  “We could mass-hack a bunch of drones to use as a temporary net.”

  “That’s the same problem. We can’t guarantee the Ghost will attack on any particular day, and if we take over hundreds of people’s drones, someone’s going to notice. That’s going to cause trouble.” Heather shook her head. “And hundreds might not even be enough. We don’t have a clear idea on how far her jamming goes. It might take thousands of drones to cover enough area, and that’s just not practical.” She sucked in a breath. “No, we need to narrow the area down a bit if we’re going to give James a chance to find her. There has to be something we’re missing; some pattern. We just need to find the right dataset to compare the sightings to or tease out the pattern some other way.”

  “But isn’t the government looking at all this stuff too?” Peyton asked. “I mean, we’re both badasses, don’t get me wrong, but the FBI has access to analysts, too. They’ve got to be thinking the same thing.”

  “They also have a lot more rules about what and where they can go, especially for criminal investigations.” Heather nibbled on her lip. “We semi-criminal freelancers can use our freedom to find things they couldn’t dream of finding.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Have a little confidence. We’ve both hacked into tons of government systems, and you hacked into servers and landed top-secret Project Nephilim and Ragnarök information—the super-secret alien stuff that’s not supposed to exist.” Heather grinned and typed a few commands in. “No, I’m not convinced that a bunch of government data analysts can find something better than we can on this job. Yeah, if they threw the whole NSA at it or something, that’s one thing, but they’re not doing that for a random vigilante in Los Angeles, even a level five. Besides, you’re forgetting something important, something that separates us from the FBI.”

  Peyton furrowed his brow. “What’s that?”

  “If this is Erin, we already beat this bitch once.” Heather grinned. “After all, she’s the one who got so spooked she faked her own death. Our low-tech primitive human asses beat her, and that was when she had years and billions of dollars to set herself up. She’s got to be more vulnerable now, not less, so we can beat her again, especially since she decided to come to our city and mess around.”

  Peyton bobbed his head. “Shit, you’re right.” He clicked through a few custom self-learning pattern-matching algorithms and fed them the location and time dataset. “What if it’s something ridiculous, though, like she rolls a die to figure out where to go? If it’s truly random, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “Truly random means every variable is random, though. If she’s pre-selected certain locations or times, then there’s still a pattern. We already know she limits herself to attacks at night, for example, so I doubt it is truly random.” Heather shook her head. “But if it is, yeah, we’re fucked, but I’m having trouble believing a vigilante alien decides her victims by a dice roll or something without any other fundamental pattern. Not only that, she has to know where and who the victims are. It’s not like she’s just traveling around beating up muggers. She killed those hitmen in their apartments, and they weren’t in the middle of a job. No, there’s a logic here. Otherwise, it just seems…wrong, somehow. Too weird. Maybe even too human.”

  “As opposed to an alien who loves classic trucks and barbeque and hot-tempered human women?” Peyton raised a brow. “Our definitions of what might be too human don’t stand up to the people we know.”

  “Okay, you do have me there.” Heather laughed. “It sounds ridiculous when you say it that way, though.”

  “Everything’s ridiculous since Oriceran. Keep in mind, they are aliens, too. Just because they’re from a magic planet doesn’t change that, so it’s hard to worry too much about figuring everything out.” Peyton shook his head. “Since I took care of my brother, all I worry about is helping my friends. I try to let everything else sort itself out, and you have a kid. I’m guessing he’s easy to focus on.”

  “He is. It’s just…” Heather narrowed her eyes and began typing furiously.

  Peyton frowned. “Heather?”

  She didn’t respond. She continued typing, her frown turning into a smile.

  “Heather, what is it? What did you find?”

  She held up her hand to stop him before returning to typing.

  Peyton shrugged and crossed his arms, waiting for her to finish doing whatever she was doing. She must have had a good reason.

  Please, please tell me you found something, and not that it correlates perfectly with a particular dice-rolling sequence.

  Heather stopped typing and clicked her mouse a few times. “I just sent you a file. Read it over real quick. It’ll be easier if you look it over rather than me explaining.”

  A window popped up along with the icon for the transferred file, and Peyton clicked on the icon. Several labeled rows and columns appeared, with information on the incidents and the location data, but there was an additional column with text in it on the far right he hadn’t seen in the previous data.

  Peyton clicked on the first row in the far column. The full text of the message popped up in a separate window.

  He quickly scanned it. His eyes widened, and then he clicked another message and read it, and then another.

  Peyton blinked. “How did you even know to match up the data against these files?”

  Heather smiled. “I was trawling local message boards for certain keywords, and my search algorithm kicked back possible matches. I ran a couple of quick follow-up comparisons, and that’s what I found. The times and locations match.”

  “But this…is, seriously?” Peyton shook his head.

  “Why not?” Heather grinned. “Puts a new perspective on busybody neighbors.”

  “If I’m reading this right, it suggests that the Silver Ghost is picking targets through a combination of social media bitching, neighborhood watch boards, and local HOA noise complaints, along with police reports.”

  Heather nodded. “Exactly. It’s not any one of those sources, it’s the interplay of them all. The police reports probably form her initial filter, then she follows up with the other sources to pick out targets that might have a more general impact, or whatever you want to call it. The social media probably gives her a good feel for the urgency of the targets.”

  Peyton grimaced. “It’s a good thing I keep to myself, and I’m still coming back from being dead.”

  Heather chuckled. “Don’t you see?
This is the key.”

  “I get that we found the pattern, but how do we use it? It’ll get us some probable targets, but it doesn’t look like she’s going in a particular order or anything. It’ll narrow down the number of targets, but it’ll still involve James having to somehow be able to drive to anywhere in the greater LA area at a moment’s notice. I don’t know how practical that is.”

  “Maybe.” Heather smacked her lips. “But we can potentially use these places to lay a trap or something. Now that we know what data sources she’s using, if we insert the right data, it’ll increase the chance of her going somewhere we want her to go.”

  Peyton frowned. “She might be too smart for that.”

  “I don’t know. For now, let’s just let Shay and James know. They can figure out how to use the information, and we can continue probing things and seeing if we can find more useful stuff.”

  17

  James stared down at his phone and grunted as he shifted in his recliner. He looked at Shay, who’d just been sent the same information, and waited for her to look up. Her wrinkled brow smoothed out after a minute, and she shook her head before sitting up on the couch.

  “Okay, they’ve cracked the code,” Shay murmured. “The thing is, how do we want to use it? Chances are, whatever we do with it, we will potentially only get one shot if the Silver Ghost realizes what we’re doing with it.”

  James shrugged. “It’s easy. We just have them plant information that suggests I’m going to go after some piece of shit in a particular location. There’s no way she’ll resist coming after me if it’s the alien.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Shay frowned. “If she just wanted to come after you, why hasn’t she already? It’s not like your address is top secret.”

  “Because she’s waiting for the right opportunity. And even if she was willing to beat down the AET, she still tried to warn them off. If she comes after me in the middle of a residential area, she’s risking collateral damage, and maybe her warped little conscience won’t allow that.” James shook his head. “I’m willing to take advantage of that to make sure no one else gets hurt. If she doesn’t want to get other people involved, it’s fine by me, but if I go somewhere that’s empty at a particular time and present a nice juicy target, she’ll come. I just need to find a place that will be safe enough for us to fight, but where it makes sense that I might take on a bounty or look for one.”