Shadowrun

by Russell Zimmerman

  “I can’t believe…you motherfuckers brought your girlfriends on a fucking drive-by?!”

  I kicked out what was left of the driver’s side window to make myself feel better, then reached inside and pulled out a gun-thug by his stupid blue hair. A Sandler TMP submachinegun came out with him, clattering onto the pavement right after he did. The shooter in the back tried to climb out, gun muzzle leading the way, so I put my weight into it and kicked the door shut on his arm. Twice. His gun hit the pavement, and I kicked it away. He kept trying to clamber out of the back, so I let him, then punched him into the gutter.

  Both of them were battered and bleeding, concussed and with at least a couple busted bones. That was the good news. The bad news was that their girls were too. It was ugly. Real ugly. Ariana hurriedly patched up the better halves with gentle adjustments to their auras, then picked up on my angry mood. With a mischievous grin she reached out to one of the girls and spun her aura like a top, rippling the colors madly and implanting a suggestion.

  As I stooped to pick up their machine pistols, she did it to the other gal. Soon, both girls were—now hale and healthy—shouting in Japanese at their half-conscious boyfriends, kicking them, slapping them, insulting their families. I dumped the magazines from each of their stubby little Sandlers, worked the slide to eject the last round, then flung ’em halfway down the street in either direction.

  I leaned against their heap while I lit a Target and tried to think about what to do next, when an ugly thought hit me. Maybe it was the last puzzle piece, the last thing I was missing, the last little bit I needed to fit it all together.

  My mind hummed along with the Sideways that had attached itself to my genes, finding patterns, putting pieces together, mulling over the clues until they made sense. Last but not least, I accessed my headware MapSofts and charted the course the fleeing thugs had been taking.

  I recalled the minor spirit I’d called up earlier that day. I released it from future services once it told me the general district it had narrowed down the search to. I started pacing as I called up some of the files Trace had been sending me, scoured through the bio of Kyoko, the information she’d secured from the Yakuza data terminal, the information she’d uncovered on my Ms. Johnson, on the Kenran-kai, on the Blue Tigers.

  I almost had it all put together. I only needed one more piece, one sliver of information to confirm what my gut was telling me.

  I spat my Target into the Puyallup ash and reached down to grab the driver by the shirt. His girlfriend backed off and then went to double-team his buddy. I picked him up half out of the gutter, leaned in close, and looked him in the eye until he focused on me.

  “Who sent you?”

  I gave him a chance. I don’t know if he was too stubborn to take it, if he was too rattled from the crash, or if he didn’t even speak English. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I gave him two heartbeats to answer me, then I hurt myself tearing straight into his mind to rip the answer free through sheer force of will. I’m not a fan of using that kind of magic, but when I’m good and pissed I’ll do it, and I’m damned good at it.

  I pulled the mental picture from his head, the hard and ugly and mean way. It hit me like a gut punch, but I knew. I knew who’d sent them, who’d told them where to find me, and exactly when to shoot. The last puzzle piece fell into place.

  At first, it made me even angrier. I threw the punk down and left him to his girlfriend’s anger and mockery, stalking back to my car right through a mystified, half-manifested Ariana again. I told her not to bother patching up my little cuts or cleaning away the glass and the ash and the blood; I wanted him to see how worn out I was by all this bullshit when I talked to him.

  I called Trace from the car and told her where to meet me and why. I told her to set up standard insurance protocols; she got the bundle of files ready and had them set to send out if I didn’t cancel the transaction in a few hours. She was a pro. She handled the data for me first, then let me know what she thought of the actual plan.

  “Jimmy, you can’t do this.” Her eyes wide since she’d heard where I was going and why. “It’s crazy.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past vain.” I hung up on her after a grin and kept driving. I knew I’d see her and Skip there. They wouldn’t want to miss the show.

  Roaring down the Puyallup streets in my ugly Ford, I made one more call. I spat out just a handful of words, but the answer I got would make all the difference in the world.

  “Her headware’s empty. The data’s gone.”

  I let it sink in for a second while I heard my old man’s voice. “Tell the truth when you can,” he’d said.

  “Do you still want her?”

  Nine

  I loved the Spirit Focus—if I loved any single club in Puyallup—more than I loved Puyallup itself. The joint had seen its share of trouble, being nominally Yakuza turf, being frequented by wizkids with Puyallup’s taste for combat drugs, being crowded full of Fort Lewis soldiers on leave crammed in next to syndicate toughs with chips on their shoulder. But for all its rough edges, it had soul. Soul like Puyallup, if you looked hard enough, soul that made it feel like home. I’d heard Barry Mana sing here, live. Pure soul. Life. The very stuff of magic.

  I’d never been angrier or more tired as I entered the Focus than I was that night. Skip and Trace stalked in next to me, and only the fact I was a regular patron—so regular the doorman didn’t even try to stop me—kept there from being any ugliness out front.

  Over against the wall, the bartenders glanced up at me. It was the Frankies, and I suspected they’d back me up if things got ugly. Big Frankie was a dwarf, Little Frankie was a fomori. The pair of them had met while fighting in the Desert Wars together, and rumor was they kept some serious surplus hardware under the bar. They hadn’t used it when some Tempo-head flipped out a couple years back, or at least I hadn’t seen them, but I’d been busy counterspelling at the time, so I might’ve missed it. Guns or not, not many people would be in a hurry to fuck with either of them. I nodded at Little Frankie as I stalked through their joint and glared around looking for a target. Throwing my hat on the bar, I rapped my knuckles on the wood.

  “Whiskey. Neat.” Frankie the fomori made it a double because the old veteran recognized the look on my face. While he poured, I saw the man I was looking for. I downed the drink in one big gulp, then off I went.

  I stomped right up to the VIP lounge and the private table of one Oyabun Kosuke Tomizawa, head of the Kenran-kai association, the Gianelli equivalents from the local Yakuza. Lord knows how many killers he had hidden in that crowd, but I was spitting mad and didn’t much care any more.

  Two of them waited at the top of the stairs, moving to stop me. Both were familiar. One was clad in designer Vashon Island suit pants and a crisp, clean tank-top, with dragons crawling across his arms and a glowing tattoo beneath his shirt. The other was a punk with blue hair, one arm in a gelcast, a monokatana slung at his belt, and a case of road-rash so nasty it hurt just looking at him. Huh. Small world. Neither one were in my fan club after these last couple days. I stopped just in front of them, then looked over their shoulders to the only occupied table up here.

  “Tomizawa-sama,” I awkwardly bowed to him and mustered up the honorific, even though it left a bad taste in my mouth. “Tell your boys to let me through. You and I gotta talk.”

  He lifted one manicured eyebrow curiously, but gave me a slight nod to continue. They parted and let me pass. Tomizawa was impeccably dressed in a custom-fitted suit that had subtle stylistic alterations to make it a throwback to the golden days of jazz clubs. His hair was neat, his face clean-shaven save for a pencil-thin mustache, his manner confident but distant. He looked like a really swell guy, and as far as I could tell he hadn’t, personally, done a damned thing to me these last few days, but I hated his guts anyway.

  Jesus, I was so sick of this case and so tired of lies and so bone-weary of these criminal shits holding court like they actually owned one sliver of this n
eighborhood.

  “You’ve got someone I’ve been paid to retrieve, and I’ve got some items of yours you want back, and some favors to call in that you don’t know I did for you, and some favors to offer you, all in exchange. I don’t know you, and you might not even know me. I’m Jimmy fucking Kincaid and you and I have been swapping bullets and chasing each others’ footprints for the last couple of days, and I’m sick and tired of it, so here I am.”

  He didn’t nod for someone to kill me. I took that for a good sign, but when I sucked in a breath to keep going his yappy dog of a right-hand-man, Bluehair McSwordpants, started hollering in Japanese, too fast for my linguasoft to get all the details. I caught that it was mostly threats, partly it was scolding me for disrespect, occasionally it was pretty mean stuff about my mom, which to be honest I didn’t really appreciate.

  Then he switched to English, which was a real mistake.

  “This cowardly dog hides behind the skirts of women!” Skip and Trace flanked him, sure enough, but he wasn’t smart enough to let that stop him. His voice was half-angry, half-pleading with his boss. “Tomizawa-sama, he counts on tusker whores and mongrel half-breeds to protect him even as he demands an audience!”

  Trace reached out and punched him square in his broken arm for that. She’s got spirit, that gal. He let out an angry yelp, but when his good arm reached for the grip of his katana, a cold glare from his oyabun froze him in place and kept Skip from killing him.

  I butted in while I could. “If you ever open your mouth and disrespect my friends like that again, I’ll snuff you out like a candle, so ka?”

  I looked him in the eyes long enough for him to see I meant it. Their magician was older, more level-headed, and he shifted sideways to keep an eye on us. Tomizawa’s cold glare shut the kid up, and he arched an eyebrow at me to continue. As I spoke, he began tapping a finger on the table, like he was keeping time to my improv session.

  “You’ve got the girl. I know why the two-bit shadowrunner posse snatched her. It was an extraction, not a carjacking. I get that now. I don’t know why you sent your boy and his pack over there in the first place, but I also don’t care. Maybe debt collection, more likely a smuggling chip deal, whatever, but it came down to a fight.”

  “It was probably something that ork said that pissed your boy off, as calm and level-headed as he seems right now,” I grinned around a Target as I lit up. I was hitting my stride, and relaxed into laying out all the pieces for him. “My guess is they were arguing over a beetle deal, and Blue here went for his blade. Then the rest of his boys lit ’em up with their little autoguns, and it all just happened to go down about a half-hour before me and my crew showed up for the girl.”

  “Now, genius that he is, your boy didn’t know who she was— just like I didn’t know why she was there until recently—so he just snatched her up as nuyen on the hoof. She got taken to your bunraku parlor for basic in-processing work, dragged down to the basement to get her existing headware wiped clean and her simrig and sex-slave hardware installed.”

  “But that’s when your magician spotted her aura.” I nodded at the wiry spellcaster, standing just behind his boss. Trace had busted him up pretty good, but I didn’t let the grin distract me. “She’s what, sixteen? No particular athleticism listed on her corporate records, but I’ll bet you my car she’s the one who smashed an ork razorboy’s face in half, back before Mr. Slicey-Dicey here killed the guy, right? They had to fight her tooth and nail to get her tied up, and there’s no way a girl her size, with no martial training, did what she did, and has the aura she does, without some spark of Talent. She’s an adept, and your magician saw that. I did too, but I didn’t recognize it at first.”

  He didn’t stop me, just kept looking at me, absorbing what I said, tapping his finger in time to my chatter. I took another drag on my cigarette and kept going, since he was letting me.

  “Which is why she’s in your house right now. You weren’t sure what else to do with her, so you dosed her with Bliss, kept her zip-tied, and just parked her in a guest bedroom or something, waiting to hear back from your bosses about brainwashing, rehabilitation, or whatever you want to call it. The Kenran-kai are working hard to recruit magic and metahuman muscle, but she’s better than meta; a cute little Japanese girl with some real Talent who you’d rather mold into a bodyguard or hitman than rent out in a bunraku parlor.”

  Here came the tricky bit.

  “But I won’t let you do that, because I got paid to get her back and I gave my word. Now, right now you probably just think I’m some rude guy who’s wrecking your night out, or some angry gaijin who’s mad at a few of your men, but there’s more to it. I know who hit that parlor of yours, because I was there. Ask your mage, if you have to.”

  I still wasn’t dead, so I kept talking.

  “I know that what happened hurt your business, and I’m sorry about that, but it could have gone much worse for you and yours. What men of yours lived, lived because of me.”

  We went out of our way about that. Skip had grumbled at me about having to use gel rounds before it had started. Enzo was pissed at me afterward for not letting him and his men take any prisoners away with them. After healing the Mafia shooter, Ariana had been busy keeping as many Yaks alive as she could.

  “Your building is still standing because of me. Your man here is still alive because of me. Your girls are gone, but I know where all their simrig hardware is. And let’s be honest, it’s not really the horses you invest in, it’s the saddles, right?”

  Tap, tap, tap went his fingertip.

  “So things went poorly for you last night, but they could have gone worse. You can fill that place back up, I’ll get you back their headware, and you’ve already got your men back by now, even if you cut off their pinkies or something.” I was getting sidetracked. Fucking Sideways, always distracting me.

  “My point is, that was a gift. I don’t expect you to give me the girl just for that, but I wanted you to know that it was me, James Kincaid, that did you that favor by way of introduction. But I need that girl back, Tomizawa, and I’m about to tell you why you’ll say yes.”

  He inclined his head again, ever so slightly. Not a big talker, our Tomizawa. He seemed content to just let me go until I ran out of steam, and I was happy to oblige him. I only really had two cards to play. It was time to lay ’em out.

  “First and foremost, everyone with a brain knows the Kenran-kai are working to make Puyallup their home. Whatever. It’s my home, too, and it always has been. Your organization is recruiting muscle from locals, and whether I’d want the job or not, I appreciate that you’re putting forth the effort. I’ve driven through your neighborhoods, and I know your men keep order well. Some people feel safer there, and that’s good.”

  “But I’ve also seen to those girls we rescued. Thirteen girls got taken out of your bunraku parlor, Tomizawa, and five of them were locals. Six, if you count Kyoko, who got snatched just a couple klicks away, even if she fell into your parlor thanks to that idiot instead of your design.”

  His finger tapped quicker.

  “Think about what it’ll do to your little ‘hearts and minds’ program if word gets out about that. Your regular pump-and-dump clients won’t care, but their wives will. Their girlfriends will. The geek on the street will. The guy you’re out to recruit as a soldier, and his mother, and the guys who might otherwise sign up to work the door there? They all will. Enough of them will care that eventually District Hall will have to care, and I’ll speed that right along if I have to, and soon enough the councilmen that are in your pockets won’t be sitting on the government anymore, because no one can take money from the guy who makes local girls into sex slaves. You’ll have to start all over, push new candidates through, bribe or bully ’em all over again, invest all that money from scratch. You’ll lose recruits, you’ll lose momentum, you’ll lose money, and you’ll lose clout if enough people hear how many of your sex toys are local girls pushed into the business against their will.
All it takes is word of that reaching enough people.”

  I leaned forward a bit.

  “And I know a lot of fucking people, pal.”

  His finger stopped tapping. He shifted in his seat, leaning forward in return, focused like a laser. My emotion recognition software just couldn’t read him. My gut wasn’t doing much better.

  Glad I wasn’t playing poker with him, I pressed on. “But second? I know who that girl is, even if you don’t. Your doc had her headware wiped instead of readin’ it, and your boys never listen to what the cattle says, right? According to Trace, no one had checked the external drive you have down there in your butcher-shop, the one that you dump all that headware onto, the one you use to upload new personalities later in the process. I know who she is, and it’s not who I first thought.”

  “She’s Mitsuhama, pal. And her skull was carrying around the last copy of some confidential MCT research. They lost her in that extraction, you lucked into finding her, and then you took the only part of her they cared about—her data—and you let it slip right through your fingers. But I’ve got someone who wants her more than they want that data. Someone outside MCT.”

  His hand vanished below the table, either to retreat from my latest statements or to reach for a gun. I didn’t care which. I was almost out of steam, here. If I was gonna die tonight, I’d die finishing my argument.

  “So here’s what I suggest. You give me the girl. I give you back the data, I give you back the headware we plucked out of your girls, and I stay quiet about where you recruited ’em from. I just leave the Gianellis to keep sitting on their thumbs, eating pizza, and letting you take their turf if that’s what you want to do. I don’t care what your organizations do, as long as it’s to each other. They used to live here, now you do. If that means the neighborhood likes you better, so fucking be it.”