“This is one PUFF bounty I’m going to have to run past Earl first,” Lucius said.
* * *
Arata Inoue generally had very good habits for a gangster. His home and offices were well guarded and he always travelled with at least one body-guard and a driver. He generally varied his routine. The exception to that was Friday night. Friday night he always visited his favorite underground club. The club was so extremely Japanese, gaijin need not apply. He entered through the back. There were guards on the back and he had a bodyguard and given his background Inoue wasn’t going to be a slouch. But that was the weak point.
The sole issue was that he didn’t arrive at a regular time. He’d generally leave his offices around 2000 to go the club. But the times varied from 1700 to 2300. If he left “early” on Friday, 1700, he generally went somewhere for dinner before going to the club.
We set a watch on his office and waited. The club was in the Salmon Bay warehouse district. From the exterior, it looked like nothing but a warehouse. The cars parked around it should have been a clue as to its real nature. According to the org-crime file I’d read, they knew it was a center for prostitution and gambling but they’d never had enough probable cause for a search warrant.
We’re MHI. Our probable cause had just been cremated and the ashes buried in Potter’s Field. Well, most of it.
“You sure you’re up to this?” Doctor Joan asked for the umpteenth time.
“Oh, yeah.” There would be at least two guaranteed shooters and the boss. My target was the bodyguard. Louis had the driver. Jesse would watch one door and Phil the other. Brad was cradling an M-79 loaded with a bean-bag round. He’d used the grenade launcher in Vietnam and was a sure hand with it. Doctor Joan was back-up shooter and get-away driver.
Each of us had a secondary target. Louis, for example, was also packing an M-79 although his was slung. The trail car, which wasn’t trailing the gangster but headed our way by another route, had Doc Lucius and Timmy packing more heat. If worse came to worse and we couldn’t do “discreet,” we would have to bail. We couldn’t endanger bystanders, and legally if they’re not PUFF applicable our private company just can’t go around shooting people.
“Just try to make sure he doesn’t make it through the door,” Doctor Joan said as the signal flashed. The target was entering the basket. She started the van. “And try not to get killed yourselves.”
The timing was tricky. We had to get there as he was exiting the car. If he was well out of the car, he’d be into the club like a shot and we couldn’t go after him. Civilian casualties would be guaranteed. If we got there when he was still in the car, the car would drive away and we’d be in a car chase trying to follow a souped-up Acura in a Ford Econoline.
Our timing was good enough. He was out of the car but stopped well away from the door to the club when we rolled up. The van doors opened, we rushed out, and all hell broke loose.
The bodyguard, who was standing behind his boss covering his back, got nailed in the teeth with a bean bag. Inoue pulled out a Sig and fired twice, missing me with both shots. Say what you will about the yakuza, they don’t spend nearly enough time on the range.
I shot him in the kneecap as Brad came around the vehicle. Another beanbag round and the local yakuza Laudable Man was tagged and bagged.
The snatch and grab was over in seconds. We were gone before the first person came running out of the club. A couple of shots were fired in our direction but we were history.
* * *
On the way out I called a certain number.
“Hello?”
The voice was pure American. No wonder the yakuza bosses didn’t trust this guy.
“We have a matter to discuss,” I said in Japanese. “Be at warehouse nineteen in the Mason Industries Park in three hours. Come alone.”
“Who is this?” Michael Oshiro asked.
“I think that will become obvious in just a moment,” I said in English with a slight southern accent. “When your phone starts ringing off the hook.”
* * *
When Michael Oshiro, wearing a very nice suit, arrived, alone, at Warehouse Nineteen, he was met by two people in ski masks who politely led him into the warehouse.
The Mason Industries Park had been in receivership for years. Mason Industries had declared bankruptcy in large part because of the Environmental Protection Agency having conniption fits over all the toxic waste scattered around the property. Given that it was a Superfund site which had never gotten the funding for cleanup, it was going to sit there for a long time.
In the middle of the warehouse Arata Inoue was kneeling under a Coleman lantern. His hands and feet were secured with plastic handcuffs and rigger tape was over his mouth. The guy had a mouth on him.
I was standing next to him, wearing a suit about as nice as Mr. Oshiro’s, with Sword of Mourning sheathed in my hand. No ski mask. This had been my idea, and I was the one who was supposed to understand the cultural issues, so Earl had said this was my party. It turned out my boss was surprisingly familiar with Japanese organized crime.
“Good morning, Mr. Oshiro,” I said in Japanese. “Please come in. We mean you no harm.”
I emphasized the “you.”
“There will be repercussions for this insult,” Mr. Oshiro said, politely.
“The insult is already given.” I’d managed to get MCB to let me keep the head of the Jorogumo. I removed it from a box at my feet and held it up. “This is an insult to both my clan and the clan of Agama-kai. The Old Fathers perhaps are slightly unknowledgeable in certain areas. There may be a belief that in the United States, with our silly laws and our rights and loopholes that indulge the needs of the guilty, certain actions are acceptable.”
There was a whistle and Arata’s head rolled across the floor. There was a massive spray of arterial blood as he sprawled in an ungainly heap.
“There are areas of concern,” I said, flicking Mo No Ken to clear it. “Your area of concern is taking money from businesses for no good reason. Smacking around whores. Offering loans to the desperate for interest that will make them your slaves. We do not care about those. Those are minor issues. Our area of concern is preventing the likes of this,” I held up the head of the Jorogumo, “from spreading across the earth like the lava of Mount Fuji.
“This,” I said, shaking the head so hard remaining ichor splattered on my suit, “was an insult to my clan. To bring this here? To kill with it on our territory? No. However, this insult was made not by the Fathers of the Land of the Rising Son but by this worthless one,” I said, toeing Arata’s corpse. “The insult is expiated.”
“The Fathers may disagree,” Oshiro said.
“Then they can bring it,” I said in English. “We’re better armed, better trained and if you really want to get busy we can bring the entire God-damned MHI down on your heads. Your organization fucking used the supernatural to commit a crime. That puts you all on the PUFF list and means every single member has a price on his head.
“The last motherfucking group the yakuza want to piss off is Monster Hunter International. My boss said your Fathers have worked with him before. They’ll know. Agama-kai has already pissed us off once. Don’t double down.”
I dropped the head of the spider-woman on the body of the dead yakuza boss, picked up his head by the hair and walked out.
We needed something for the PUFF confirm.
CHAPTER 12
One thing I haven’t covered, so far, is vampires. I liked a lot of “stuff” about working in Seattle. But like the movie later said: “The one thing I can’t stomach is all the damn vampires.”
Forget Santa Clara (where I worked, briefly, later), Seattle is one of the vampire capitals of the world. It’s the weather, isn’t it? If the cloud and rain cover is thick enough, a really strong vampire can be out briefly during the day.
They also can pass better. You see someone deathly pale in Mexico City or Phoenix and you’re immediate thought, if you’re a hunter, is “Vampir
e.” In Seattle it’s “Goth” or, hell, “Long Term Resident.”
Next to Microtel, vampires were our number one call-out. They should rename it Fang City.
I’ve got to back up on vamp details to explain the general consonant of how they turned up in Seattle so frequently.
The PUFF table listed, then, four categories of vamps. Now it’s five and since I had a hand in that I’ll go with the five set. The five categories, now, are Standard, Higher, Major, Greater and Master. The addition was “Major.” And this chapter is about why.
Standard vampires are those turned by lower level vampires by “bite, die, turn” who are very “new.” Basically they’re angry, hungry, usually confused, psychotic, strong fast zombies.
Higher vamps have gotten past the zombie stage. They’re not much tougher, but they’re thinking more clearly, like what they were like when they were still alive, but with an evil predatory twist. Higher can be downright clever. Both of these kinds are fairly easy to kill during local daylight. They’re usually asleep during the day, they can be roused, but at best they act like someone on sleeping pills or who just cannot wake up without the first cup of coffee.
Major are stronger and faster than Higher vampires but the main difference is that they tend to be alert during the day. They cannot handle even weak daylight, as Greater and Master vampires can, but they are, trust me, a right handful underground during the day. These are clever enough that they generally got some daylight guardians of some sort. They also begin to have the ability to use telepathy and hypnotic dominance of humans and other sentient and non sentient beings.
Greater vampires are immensely strong and fast, like blurringly fast and throw you half a football field strong. They can walk in daytime as long as they are not in direct sunlight. That will still set them on fire. They can take a bit of low-albedo reflected sunlight but generally have to stay in heavy shadow. They’re old enough they’ve generally developed a strong resistance to pain and can drink holy water if they have to. It still causes a hissing and burning reaction.
The higher they get, the more they seem to abuse the laws of physics. How do vampires get stronger? Nobody really knows. Most Hunters guess it is a matter of age, or the stronger the creator, the stronger the creation. Personally, I agree with the scholars at Oxford, and think it must be a matter of how much blood they’ve drank and lives they’ve consumed. One professor estimated that to reach Master level, they’d have to have killed about fifty thousand people.
Fifty. Thousand. People.
Now Masters are slaughter machines. Fortunately, they’re super rare. And I’m glad.
Masters have been reported to have a huge number of abilities. Like werewolves they transform, although it’s almost instantaneous. More like dropping an illusion. They can take the form of a bat demon like being. Bi-pedal with massive talons on hands and feet. Thin but supremely strong, flip a tank, and so fast that the “sound of a thousand bats” thing is any clothing rippling in the wind as they move. You can’t see them when they move according to the reports.
If you ever have to face a Master Vamp, my suggestion is calling in a B-52 strike.
I’m totally serious.
But with that out of the way I can talk about Seattle and vampires.
From what we know, smart vampires, higher and above, get along even less well with each other than humans. A very powerful vampire can generally dominate weaker ones by force of personality. It appears two vamps of similar ability are always looking at each other as a potential lunch if nothing else. They can, apparently, still fall into something resembling love. So you can have pairs that are lovers. Het, homo, bi, whatever. And, yes, they do still have sex apparently although they cannot produce offspring. But, generally, they don’t get along real well and are very territorial and controlling.
So you’re a newbie vampire who has been turned by some vamp in, say, New York, and you’ve drunk enough souls you’re getting your headspace and timing back. Suddenly you’re working for the ultimate toxic boss. If you step out of line, you’re liable to get drunk by your boss for your troubles. You think about it and decide to take off. You want someplace that’s got food and preferably not a lot of sunlight…
And you move to Seattle. Which seems perfect.
There you set about starting your own little coven of vampires and you’re not going to make the same mistakes as that asshole in New York. You’re going to do it right…
Every few months some homeless would start disappearing somewhere in our region. Tacoma, Greater Seattle, etcetera. And we’d be on another vampire hunt. And about half the leaders would have a New Jersey accent, I swear. It was like the NYC area was churning the damned things out. I later found out there was a reason for that.
Most of you have probably been on at least one vamp hunt. The vampires usually have a clutch of human captives they’re feeding on, generally kept in a pit or a locked room, always in total darkness since they vamps see fine in that. Pretty unpleasant is an understatement. Always remember to bring rope and if it’s not too far of a walk some sort of ladder as well as the usual forced entry tools like a Halligan and axe. (Generally referred to as “irons.”)
They’re generally somewhere below-ground. If you’ve got homeless missing in a particular area, look in basements of abandoned factories, disused subway tunnel areas, that sort of thing. Generally best to do that during daylight hours ’cause you never know what level of vampire the master or mistress is going to be.
This gets to my main vampire story the pro-tip of which I’ve just covered.
Pro-tip: Just because you’re dealing with a vampire that seems like it has to be a newbie, it might not be. Even old vampires make mistakes. Especially if love is involved.
We were missing students from the UD. Male and female but mostly female. There must be a serial killer on the loose! It wasn’t just UD. Women and some men, all college age, had gone missing from the general area. Mostly they’d been at bars and met someone and left to go, you know, hang out, talk about Heidegger…Photos of them indicated they were all white or Asian and notably all were fairly attractive.
Serial Killer in the University District!
It was something we’d seen before. New vampires who had just gotten their sentience back tend to get all into the Vampire Mystique. They were powerful immortals! Human chicks loved to have their blood sucked! The worst were the occasional former nerds who suddenly had a taste of power and dominance. They were strong! They were powerful! They were immortal!
Just ’cause you don’t senesce doesn’t make you immortal. Having your head cut off is still going to kill you.
Smart vampires are careful and feed only on people nobody notices or cares about. IE: bums, runaways. They don’t live in big palaces. (Saw that later in Eastern Europe after the Fall.) They stay on the edges and feed on the edges. Because there are a lot more of us than them and we are very good at killing them.
We looked at this one and made a snap decision that turned out to be wr—wron—incorrect.
“New sentient vamp,” Louis said, looking at the request sheet from the King County Sheriff’s office.
“Early higher,” Phil said. “Probably a nerd. Look at the pictures of the victims. He’s practically picking them on whether they’ve got modeling and pageant background.”
“There any empty mansions with a basement in the area?” Brad asked.
“Not that I know of,” I said. “We could ask a real estate agent.”
So Louis and I put on our best clothes and engaged a high-end real estate agent. I had just sold a successful start-up in Portland that used an advanced algorithm to speed up daemon translation processing based on “my PhD in Coptic linguistics” and was “semi-retired.” My scars were due to a “BASE Jumping accident.” I wore tailored polo-shirts and kakis. Louis was my “partner” wearing a tailored suit. I never knew Louis was such a fashion horse. He looked like a member of Jesse Jackson’s entourage. We practically held hands.
There weren’t many high end mansions available near the University. I “just loved the energy of an intellectual district,” true. The agent was probably wondering why we were so jumpy every time we checked out the basement. The basements were important for “Louis’ wine collection.” Louis was a wine connoisseur. Also, I was surprised, true. He had picked up a sommelier certificate from the French Wine Institute while recovering one time. “Contract sommelier” is a great cover if for no other reason than most people don’t know what it is but it’s French so it must be sophisticated.
No vamps in mansions, though. And kids were still disappearing.
That sent us back to our usual tramping around in sewers and abandoned factories and warehouses.
I preferred the mansions.
Brad was the expert, there. Over the ten years he’d been on the Seattle team he’d gathered a base of knowledge so good on abandoned commercial real estate he really needed to just retire and go into that field. Another pro-tip: spend some time working in the commercial real estate field during recovery periods. You’re going to need to know every abandoned shit-hole in your territory.
And where Jesse was the designated tracker when we hit the woods, Brad was the one that could find the scuff mark that said “Monster” in all the other crap in an abandoned factory.
Seattle had been building for a long time. And like most cities in earthquake and flood zones (most of them) had been built on destruction. You would not believe how many old homes, factories and warehouses there were under the current homes, factories and warehouses.
But no matter how we looked, we could not find this bastard. And kids just kept disappearing.
Finally, I broached the subject of gnolls.
“We’ve got some,” Doctor Joan said, her nose wrinkling. “We leave them alone, they leave us alone.”
“They’re harmless,” Phil said. “What do you want with gnolls?”
“Van Helsing sometimes uses them for CIs in London,” I said. “Have you ever talked to them?”
Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC Page 17