“Who the hell is this?” The repeated question sounded less curious than it did angry at this point. More than one regular bar patron had morphed into full-blown stalker over the course of her career, and calls like this one were often the first sign of a problem. “I’m not fucking around here! If you are some kind of sicko I swear I’ll have Mook tear your goddamn arms off!”
“Mook?” The voice sounded distant, like the name had jogged an old memory. “Is Mook okay?”
“What?”
“Is Mook okay? He looked pretty busted up last time I saw him. Poor guy.”
Kitty’s irritation began to melt into confusion. “Busted up? Buddy, I don’t know who you are, but nobody ‘busts up’ Mook.”
“I saw it, Kitty. It was Tank. Put the poor fucker right through the wall. Never seen anyone handle Mook like that before.”
“Tank? You mean... that was like, two years ago—” she stopped herself mid-sentence. “—Wait. Who the hell are you?”
“Two years, huh. I guess that’s why you don’t remember me, baby.”
“I am not your baby, asshole. I’m hanging up now, don’t call me—”
“Wait! Don’t hang up!” There was something earnest in the plea, and against her better judgment Kitty stopped her hand before it hit the connection stud.
“It’s me, Kitty. Chico! I know I been gone a while, but I’m back now.”
A slug of pure ice hit Kitty in the guts. Irritation, confusion, and curiosity fled like small prey before the heavy unrelenting dread now pressing against her skull.
“Chico?” It was a whisper, a tiny and weak plea for mercy.
But the voice was merciless. “I was pretty fucked up, you know? Some Uptown folks put me right again. I’m better now! I’m back! We can be together now, baby!”
“Chico,” Kitty breathed. “I can’t... We broke up Chico! We were no good together. Don’t you remember?” In her own mind, Kitty thought of all the different ways in which her brief dalliance with Chico Garibaldi had been ‘no good.’ She could have started with the most obvious problem, namely that Chico was a professional murderer. Of course, in Dockside his career was neither strange nor frowned upon as a profession. Less obvious was the sadistic glee Chico took in hurting people. If his targets had been the only ones to experience this aspect of his personality, it would have been one thing. But since he had delighted in indulging this fetish on Kitty as well, she had been disinclined to overlook it. Worse than his penchant for physical domination had been his deep, almost atavistic need to control and possess her. He had made every waking moment of her life a hell of competing pain and anxiety, and his behavior tortured her sleep with nightmares of where his attentions might ultimately lead.
As frightened as she had been of Chico, the Dockside bar scene raised very few victims. When she had put up with enough, a quick word into The Dwarf’s ear helped end her tragic romance in a way that allowed her to feel safe. Chico had always been an asshole, but never a suicidal asshole.
“I know I was a rotten boyfriend,” Chico replied. The dismissive tone, unapologetic and transparently insincere, sent Kitty’s teeth together with a click. Chico did not notice because Chico never noticed anything that was not specifically relevant to his personal whims. “But I’m better now. They fixed a lot of things in my head. I’m tougher and stronger. I’m gonna be a real big deal from now on.”
He said this like it was all that needed saying. Like every bit of hurt and terror she had experienced at his hands could be dismissed as if it had not happened. Only the arrogance of a true sociopath could believe that the reason she had left him had anything to do with his social status.
She had been frightened when she first realized who had called, but now something hot and angry burned away the cold knot of fear.
“You listen to me, Chico.” Her voice was a husky, throaty growl powered by near equal portions of terror and rage. Her next words proved that for the moment, she was a touch more furious than fearful. “You stay the hell away from me. You stay way the hell away from me or so help me God...”
“Aw baby,” Chico wheedled. “Don’t be like that...”
“Like what?” She nearly shouted it. “I don’t want to see you, get it? I don’t want to be with you. I don’t want you around me. If I see you anywhere near me, I’ll tell Rodney and he’ll have Barney beat the shit out of you. Again.” Chico was a hell of a gunfighter, but when Barney had caught him without his pistols in hand, the subsequent fight had been a laughably one-sided affair.
“Now, come on, Kitty. You know that’s not how it works with us. You’re just mad is all. I get it. I can be a real jerk sometimes. But I told you, I’m better now. It’s gonna be different this time, you’ll see.”
The hopelessness of it all started to eat through Kitty’s angry emotional armor. She might as well be talking to a wall. A narcissistic and homicidal wall that no quantity of words or emotion would ever breach. Chico was back and he was not going to take ‘no’ for an answer. He never did. She wanted to cry, but she could not bring herself to allow Chico to see her weak. Instead she barked out the first three words that came to her head.
“Fuck you, Chico.”
“Hey!” His voice had a growl in it, a familiar rumble of sadistic pique. “There ain’t no call to be talking to me like that! Just because you can’t—”
Kitty broke the connection with a cry and hurled the earpiece across the room. The next ten minutes were spent quietly sobbing into her pillow. It was not in her nature to cry like that, though she indulged herself just this once. Since ten minutes of self-pity was about all any Dockside girl on her own could spare, she then wiped her eyes and sat up with a sniffle. With that out of the way, the terrified girl then invested precisely sixty seconds in consideration of whom to call first. A decision made, Kitty went to retrieve her earpiece and find her handheld.
Unsurprisingly, when she finally extracted the device from its hiding place beneath some dirty laundry, there were several messages from an unknown code waiting for her. No special detective training was required to determine that these all came from Chico. She read the first few, but stopped when they devolved into alternating bouts of psychotic ranting and pathetic pleading. These set her anxiety off again, each increasingly unhinged missive reminding her of how unstable he could be. The tone and grammatical deterioration of his messages brought into stark relief just how wildly his moods could fluctuate and how cruel he liked to be when angry. She almost deleted them, but stopped herself when she realized they may be helpful later.
Forcing a calm cleansing breath in and out, Kitty punched in a code.
After two chimes a chipper voice, dripping with rustic charm and unrestrained glee answered. “Hey there, Kitty-cat! What’s got you buzzing my comm so early in the day?”
“Mindy?” She tried to keep her voice clear and strong, but fear is an insidious thing and a tiny tremble broke her facade. “Mindy, I think I need help.”
Both the glee and the rustic charm vanished in an instant, and it was a professional assassin who replied. “What’s going on?”
“It’s a long story. Can I meet you somewhere?”
“First of all, did you call me because you don’t have a lot of girlfriends and need a shoulder to cry on? Or did you call me because you need my skills, specifically? I only ask because that leads directly to the second question: is it safe for you to move? I can come to you if being out in the open is a risk.”
Kitty had not thought of that. “I uh, I think it’s safe to move. God, I hope it is. My ex is back in town and he’s kind of a stalker.”
“When you say ‘stalker,’ do you mean he’s the guy who likes to send you flowers every day and recite bad poetry at your favorite restaurant? Or are we talking about the kind of guy who will follow you around and sneak into your apartment to watch you sleep and then maybe steal your underwear?”
Kitty took a big breath. “I mean he’s the kind of guy who used to hit me a lot and thinks that so
mehow this means we were meant to be together forever.”
“Oh.” Mindy paused. “That kind of stalker. All right, I’m on my way. Stay put. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. In the meantime, pack some stuff. Enough for a couple days at least.”
“Okay. See you in twenty minutes, then.”
Kitty killed the connection and stifled another bout of crying. Crying would not keep Chico from bashing his way in and beating the crap out of her in a twisted attempt to demonstrate that he owned her body and soul. Crying was a waste of time, water, and salt. She set herself to the task of stuffing clothing and toiletries into an old and rarely-used gym bag. When she was satisfied she had sufficient supplies to last a few days of couch-surfing, she sealed the bag and moved to her bed table. Her fingers touched the handle and paused. Opening this drawer would be a committed step and she was acutely uncomfortable with the ramifications.
She pulled, and the thin drawer slid open to reveal some loose jewelry, a bottle of ibuprofen, and a small black pistol. The gun felt cold and alien in her palm as she gingerly wrapped her fingers around the grip. She had not held it in her hand for a long time, and she was surprised at how heavy it seemed. Kitty was not supposed to have a gun, of course. A few youthful indiscretions had ventured into felony territory and forever branded her as a prohibited person. This was Dockside, however, and it had been a simple thing for Barney to acquire it for her after the last time Chico Garibaldi had needed to be convinced to go away.
For a moment she just looked at it, taking in the graceful sweep of the contoured grip where it merged into the angular frame. A single delicate finger traced a line along the short three-inch barrel affixed to a deftly machined power cell housing and firing chamber. Turning it over and hefting the gun, Kitty tried to make sense of it and how it had become her bedside companion. It was a small model, designed for easy carrying. It fired five-millimeter hyper-velocity beads with enough power to kill a man but less than the bigger guns she had seen on Barney’s hip. She had only ever discharged it twice, both times with Barney when he attempted teach her how to use it safely. The noise, the recoil, the flash of heat and light, all of it frightened her. Once Chico had been run off, the pistol had been consigned to her bed table and mostly forgotten.
It was not forgotten anymore, and this set her pretty face into a defeated frown. The gun was everything she hated and feared about Dockside. Its very existence was testimony to how terrible the world could be to anyone. Its home in her own bed table was an indictment on how awful the world had been to her, specifically. Things like guns should not exist, and she definitely should not have need of one. Yet there it sat in her palm like one and a half pounds of ugly reality, not caring a whit about what should and should not be. Kitty hated the ugly thing, but she also needed it. Another girl might despair at such a thought, but she was a Docksider, and despair was not something she had time for.
Guns are for the way things are, she thought. Not for how they should be.
Shoving her hand deeper into the drawer, Kitty retrieved a simple holster and in a minute the gun sat securely at her hip, just as Barney had showed her. Lots of street muscle liked to just shove a gun under their belts and swagger around like old-fashioned outlaws, but Barney had made it very clear that this was stupid and a great way to drop an expensive tool. Kitty could not afford to be stupid, so the weapon rode securely in a spot that allowed for an easy draw.
The door chimed just then, and Kitty’s heart thrummed at the sound. It might be Chico, or it might be Mindy. Her apartment was nowhere near modern enough for her to have an intercom or a door scanner, so for an instant she simply stood confused as to what she needed to do. Her comm buzzed with a new message just then, and a sigh of relief came unbidden to the young bartender when she saw it.
“It’s Mindy. Street is clear. Meet me out front.”
Rudely yanking the gym bag from the floor, Kitty ran out the door and down the stairs. The small blond stood waiting in front of the lobby and Kitty thought she looked odd. It took Kitty a moment to realize what seemed different about her, and the absurdity of the observation momentarily drove her fear from the front of her mind. Mindy was dressed in a very pedestrian manner. The assassin wore normal pants (perhaps a bit too tight), a shirt that fit her enormous chest (as well as any could hope to), and a light jacket. There was nothing remarkable about the outfit at all, except for how bizarre it was to see Mindy not putting all her assets out where they could be seen. She wore her face differently as well, Kitty noticed. Kitty had grown accustomed to Mindy’s irrepressible, almost ditzy charm. The vapid smile and the sparkling blue eyes were not in their usual configurations. Kitty saw a darker, far more frightening version of the pretty little blond who spent most weekends trying to get into her pants.
Oh my God, Kitty thought as her brain pieced the totality of her situation together in frightening new ways. Much of what she knew about Mindy was second-hand from the other customers at Hideaway, and while not ignorant of Mindy’s career, neither had she ever given it much thought. Her face froze in a bland smile, belying the silent scream echoing inside her head. This is not some horny drunk bimbo with a gun, and it never was. This is the most successful assassin and man-hunter ever. She kills people, for shit’s sake!
In that moment it occurred to Kitty that she was not merely calling in a favor from a regular customer, and this was not grizzled old Barney trying to make a problem go away for her. She had just enlisted the deadliest woman in space in her quest to get rid of Chico Garibaldi. She was in way over her head.
“I’m really sorry to bother you with this, Mindy. I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Don’t worry about it, Kitty. I know how these things go. Let’s get you off the street.” Even Mindy’s tone was different. It was clipped, businesslike, terrifying. “Then we’ll see what we can do about your ex-boyfriend."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Marty Mudd ran the best gin mill in all of Dockside.
Many people might point out that this title was not a prestigious one, but Marty took it very seriously. He stocked the best beer around, and even had some choice liquors available for discerning customers. There were absolutely no discerning customers in all of Dockside, but the bottles sure looked nice on the shelf behind the bar, so they stayed.
Being two o’clock in the afternoon on a weekday, Marty was not exactly awash in clientele when Roland came through the front door. This was not to say that the bar was empty, as the Dockside economy thrived on shift work. Shift work made for strange schedules, so a few worn faces doing yeoman’s work towards acquiring a proper drunk could be found at any time of day. It was a thin crowd all the same, and the gnarled old bartender was happy to see another customer come in on an otherwise slow afternoon.
“When a man comes in here at this time of day, it usually means one of two things,” Marty drawled. “Either the woman has kicked you out, or you got your ass fired.”
“I’m self-employed, Marty.”
“Bullshit. You been working for Lucia for a while now. You’re just too dumb to realize it, is all. But since I can see you ain’t maimed, I can assume Ms. Ribiero hasn’t kicked you to the curb, either.”
“Yet.”
“Yet,” Marty agreed. “And I lost a bet on that. Who’d a thunk a classy lady like her would stick with you so long? Especially when a perfect guy like me is just hanging around all single and shit.”
Roland stepped up to the bar and leaned his elbows on the stained faux-wood surface. “You’re not her type, old man.”
Marty grabbed a mug and began to fill it with a nice Czech pilsner. It was one of Roland’s favorites and he kept plenty on hand. He slid the beer across the bar to Roland and winked. “I’m everybody’s type, haven’t you heard?”
“Right.” Roland sighed and took a swig. “You think Brian can handle the bar for a couple of hours? I need your help with something.”
Craggy gray eyebrows rose. “My help? I’m only good at a couple o
f things, pal. You need beer poured or a woman wooed?”
“I need help finding a gun.”
“I’ve seen your storage locker, Tank. I don’t think you need any more guns.”
“This one is special.”
Marty’s eyes turned starry and distant. “All guns are special, Roland. All of them.”
“Eight-millimeter, probably a handgun. It takes both beads and flechettes. Maybe slugs, too, for all I know.”
“That ain’t so hard to find,” Marty said it with a scowl. “Colt Dragoons are eight-millimeter and they take beads and slugs.”
“But not flechettes,” Roland corrected. “This thing threw a custom penetrator through four floors of a building, with minimal deflection.”
Marty scoffed hard at this. “Ain’t a handgun, then.” He said it with finality. “Power cell would be too small, too much heat for the frame too. It’d burn the hand of whoever was using it. Let’s not even discuss the goddamn recoil.”
“I could handle it,” Roland replied with a knowing look. “Or someone like me could, anyway.”
Finally, the man understood. “Ah. I see.” He cocked his chin over his shoulder and shouted, “Brian! You’re in charge. I gotta head out and do a thing!”
A tousle-haired teenager‘s head poked up from behind the bar. “Okay, Marty. It’s slow in here, anyway,” he called back with a wave. “See you in a bit, then.”
With the logistics of pub management handled, Marty then turned to Roland with a shooing motion. “Let’s go.”
As they exited the bar, Roland began to fiddle with his comm to ping a car. Marty stopped him. “We can take my truck. You’ll fit in the back and that way there won’t be any transponder trace of where we went.”
Roland scowled, which was hard to notice because his default facial expression could hardly be called sunny. “Your ride doesn’t have a transponder? How do you not get pulled over?”
“Oh, it has a transponder. It’s just the damned squirreliest thing. It forgets where it’s been, and often sends wildly inaccurate location data.”
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