Headhunters

by Mel Odom

  Skater took the man’s shirt collar in his hands and dragged him outside. “Not if it’s not necessary.” He knew he still had to sleep with his memories and nightmares, and he preferred to keep as much drek out of them as he could. “Get the woman and let’s breeze.”

  At the foot of the stairs, Skater jockeyed the unconscious man over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, With all the cyberaugmentation that had been done, the joker was heavier than normal.

  Nearly two dozen neighbors peered from hiding places and from behind window curtains as Skater made his way to the street corner. Mothers called their children to them, ushering them inside the house.

  Duran came down the stairs with Kalika Chilson only a few moments later. She had tied her hair back with a red scarf that revealed her pointed elf ears, and slipped on a pair of black slacks and calf-high boots. She pulled on a lightweight handmade Nootka sweater depicting the tribe’s legend of the Birth of Dragons.

  “You can’t just drag me out of my doss like this,” the woman complained.

  Duran grinned thinly, baring his fangs. “ ’Kay, maybe we’ll just toss you back there and bed down Good-Time Charlie with you again.”

  “No.” She glared at the ork.

  Looking at her, Skater still had a hard time seeing how she could have been Larisa’s mother. Larisa’s image in his memory was still so beautiful that it made his heart ache sometimes to think about her. Visiting her grave once had convinced him that whatever good-byes needed saying between them were no longer possible.

  “Then I guess you go with us,” Duran said.

  Skater stepped off the curb to flag down a passing cab. When the cab rocked to a stop at the curb, he ushered Kalika Chilson inside, then slid in behind her. Duran took shotgun beside the driver, who immediately switched up his air fresher to counteract the smell of sex, sweat, and synthwhiskey that clung to the woman.

  * * *

  Skater slotted the hostess at the Purple Haze a large tip before they were allowed a table. The restaurant was located on Bell Street and Elliot Avenue in downtown Seattle, and was a popular dining spot. They were used to a certain kind of guest, and objected to Kalika Chilson becoming one of them. The objection was quietly conveyed out of the woman’s earshot so there wouldn’t be an argument.

  Duran maintained control over her and created distance around them, adding to the reluctance evidenced by the other patrons of the restaurant waiting to be seated for an afternoon biz lunch.

  Skater took the woman by the elbow and guided her after the elven host who showed them to their table. Kalika took a seat on the other side of the table from Skater, then moved over as the ork took a seat beside her.

  The Purple Haze offered a Pueblo menu filled with spicy meats and plenty of vegetables. Voodoo Chili remained the house specialty. Southwestern color schemes marked the rooms filled with flowering cactus plants in pots and gengineered yucca trees that grew through spaces set into the floor and changed soft pastel colors every few minutes. The biofeature was triggered by a shift in ultraviolet light spewed from overhead lamps.

  The bench seats around the table towered over the seated patrons. Small, multicolor tiles laid out in mosaics covered the table top.

  Kalika Chilson rattled her chipped and broken fingernails against the tiles nervously. “I’ve got to go to the fresher.”

  Duran looked at her. “You can wait.”

  She started to argue with him, then withered under his direct gaze. “I can wait.”

  “They’ve got bars over the fresher windows anyway,” Duran said. “Keeps guests from slipping out on the tab when it comes due.”

  A slim Amerind waitress stopped at the table long enough to drop off glasses and a sweating pitcher of ice-cold spring water imported from the NAN. She informed them that it came from Colorado and was purified by shamans as well as chem-processing plants. She also left them with a basket containing fresh chunks of steaming pan-fried sourdough biscuits and three different butter dishes.

  Kalika Chilson selected a biscuit and broke it open in her hands. She licked her fingers, then took a knife and helped herself to the garlic butter, slathering it on generously. “What do you want with me?”

  “I want to talk about Larisa,” Skater said.

  “What about her?”

  “Was she your only child?”

  Kalika Chilson nodded. “Me and her dad, we stayed together for a few years, hanging onto each other because there wasn’t anyone else to hang onto. Finally got so even that wasn’t working anymore after awhile.” She demolished another bite of bread. “Why do you ask?”

  Feeling better all ready, Skater said, “Because recently I talked to someone claiming to be Larisa’s sister.”

  The woman nodded and wiped butter from the corner of her mouth with a forefinger, then sucked it clean. “That would be Deja.”

  Skater felt like he’d been poleaxed with a stun baton.

  24

  Skater leaned back in the booth and gazed over the lunch crowd gathered at the Purple Haze. Somewhere beyond the restaurant’s walls, he knew the Seattle sprawl continued on as it did every day. Inside, though, he felt like his world had just tilted on its axis. He glanced at Duran seated across from him and let out a tense breath. Then he looked back at the woman. The waitress placed steaming bowls of chili on the table.

  “Deja was Larisa’s half-sister,” Kalika Chilson said as she picked up a spoon and helped herself. “Larisa’s father’s brat.”

  “Was?” Skater tried to mask his emotions, and guessed he was doing good because the woman barely glanced at him.

  Kalika Chilson shrugged her thin shoulders. “Was. Is. Who gives a frag? None of that drek every really mattered to me.” Skater fielded the questioning look she darted his way without real effort. “How well did Larisa know her?”

  “You knew Larisa, right?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah.” Out of habit, Skater scanned the crowd in the Purple Haze. None of them appeared interested in their table. “Did Larisa ever mention Deja?”

  “No.”

  “ ’Kay. Does that sound close to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then you know as much about the two of them as I do.” Kalika Chilson turned her attention back to the bowl of Voodoo Chili. “She was a year or two older than Larisa and kept to herself a lot.”

  “Do you know where Deja is?”

  “Any reason I’m supposed to?”

  Skater grew irritated at his questions being answered in oracle form. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “A few days ago. Maybe a month after I saw you. I can’t remember.” The woman wiped her mouth with the back of her arm.

  Skater resisted the impulse to hand her a napkin. “Where did you see her?”

  “She came by my doss.” Kalika Chilson pierced him with her stare. “You’re covering a lot of turf and not getting anywhere. Usually that’s because a joker’s trying to bleed someone else dry of any information without giving anything away.”

  Before Skater could reply, Duran leaned in, shoving his big fanged face into the elf woman’s. “You got a problem with that?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then broke their locked gaze and looked back at Skater. “No. Don’t mean nothing to me. None of it. ’Cept the nuyen I got coming when you’re done. All I was getting at is that maybe you’re wasting time you could spend better elsewhere.” She tapped her spoon against the bowl’s edge. “And this chili’s getting cold. First hot meal I’ve had that hasn’t come out of a nuker in a long time. I’d like the chance to get to enjoy it.”

  “What did Deja want?” Skater asked.

  “Wanted to know what I knew about Larisa’s baby.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  The woman lifted her thin shoulders and dropped them, fitting her mouth around another spoonful of chili. “The truth. That I didn’t know nothing about no baby. Of course, I made her pay me a hundred nuyen before I mentioned it.”

  “What
did she say?”

  “At first, the ungrateful slitch didn’t believe me. I couldn’t believe it. When she was eight or ten, when she didn’t have a home because her mom was in the lockup, I gave her my home to live at. And her not even mine, and a trog-baby to boot. Till her dad and me split up that last time.”

  “Deja is a troll?” Skater asked.

  Kalika Chilson buttered more bread, lathering it on heavy and making final adjustments with a forefinger. “Sure. So was her father, but I didn’t mind so much because he had an income. Deja was just another mouth to feed. Her mother was human. Thought she was going to be human too, for a time. She goblinized at puberty—during the time I had her. It was nasty, I’ll tell you right now. You never want to put up with the grief that UGE drek brings on.” UGE was unexplained genetic expression, by which elves, trolls, dwarfs, and orks had been reintroduced into the world as magic returned. Usually, UGE manifested itself in children at the onset of puberty.

  Puberty didn’t agree with Kalika Chilson’s estimate of Deja being eight or ten years old. Skater mentally adjusted Deja’s age up.

  “Why was she asking about the baby?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m trying to get a lead on Deja,” Skater said, knowing he was getting close to over-playing his hand. “What I’m after is the money.”

  The statement caught the woman’s attention. “Money?”

  “She owes me some money,” Skater lied. It was one of the most believable fictions in the sprawl, but it was almost nearly the biggest truth. Everybody owed money, and most people scrambled when they had trouble paying it back, leaving bounty men and enforcers stringing in their wake.

  “Is there a finder’s fee?” the woman asked.

  As Skater examined the weathered, seamed face, he wondered what Larisa’s early years were like. “If you come across with the information, you’ll get it now. If you give me drek, I guess you’ve got a free bowl of Voodoo Chili.”

  Kalika Chilson’s expression showed how much she under-appreciated that. “Last I heard, Deja had a job with one of the megacorps. She was a dataslave for Renraku, I think.”

  Skater took that in and bounced it around mentally. A Renraku tie would bring even more heat down on the team. With Fuchi and Renraku looking for them—if it came to that—there wouldn’t be many shadows left in the sprawl to hide in. “She ever mention anything about her work?”

  “We don’t talk,” the woman said. “But she got the information from me for only a hundred nuyen. What does that tell you?”

  Skater shrugged, leaving it for the woman to say.

  “It means she ain’t doing very good for herself these days,” Kalika Chilson snorted. “Even convinced me of that.”

  “How?”

  “She came to see me,” she said. “If Deja had really been holding all the chips, she’d have had me up to her apartment or her office. People holding all the nuyen, slot, they like to show it off if they have the chance. Make you feel intimidated standing there in front of them.”

  “So her coming to see you—” Skater prompted.

  “Meant she didn’t want me to come see her, and maybe see that she ain’t got it quite as good as she’d like someone else to believe.” Kalika Chilson looked wistfully at Skater’s untouched chili bowl.

  Skater pushed the bowl toward her.

  The woman moved her empty one out of the way and started eating again. “After she left, kvetching about the hundred nuyen she dropped on me, I called up Pauletta Coulter. One of the biggest gossips in the neighborhood. Her daughter used to be on friendly terms with Deja, though Larisa never cared for her. Turns out her daughter is still working for the megacorp Deja worked at.”

  “Worked?” Skater asked.

  The woman nodded and ran a biscuit through the chili, soaking it thoroughly. “Deja got drek-canned almost three weeks ago. No severance. No continuation of bennies. Flat out on her hoop.” She grinned lopsidedly, without any real humor. “So if you’re looking for money, it sounds like you’re pretty much slotted.”

  The waitress approached with their bill.

  Skater glanced at it quickly, like the money really made any sense to him, and slotted his credstick, adding a tip. The waitress thanked him with a polite smile and retreated.

  Below the table, he counted out nuyen notes. Dropping five-hundred nuyen into a blank envelope, he passed it across the table to Kalika Chilson. Maybe he was being generous, and maybe it was because she was Emma’s grandmother. He didn’t know.

  The woman pulled the envelope out of view on her side of the table and laboriously worked through the counting of it. She took the folded notes in one hand, then slipped it up under her shirt and into a pouch that evidently hung from a leather thong around her neck. “Let me know if I can help you any more.”

  Skater nodded and pushed up from the seat.

  “You two wouldn’t be willing to split a cab, would you?” she asked. “Maybe save a little nuyen on the fare?”

  “No,” Duran growled before Skater could answer.

  “Slot,” the woman grumbled. “I was just asking.”

  25

  Skater and Duran entered Lordstrung’s Department Store on Fifth Avenue and Pine Street at 14:21:03. The coming meeting with Vankler, a mercenary broker who’d worked with Luppas, had Skater tense. Duran had set up the meet, and from the accounts he gave, Vankler wasn’t a man to cross.

  They weren’t going in alone, though. Wheeler and Elvis had already gone into the Ork Underground ahead of them and staked out Maxine’s, the bar where Vankler had announced the meeting would be held. Archangel and Trey were following behind, only a couple of blocks away. All of them were carrying weapons.

  The department store held a number of people shifting through the racks of clothing and stalking the aisles of furniture, humansized as well as troll-sized. None of them gave him or Duran a second glance. The Ork Underground drew all kinds.

  No one had planned the Ork Underground, and there was still plenty of political pressure in the Seattle sprawl to get rid of it. The foundation had been laid in the nineteenth century, after a fire had razed Seattle. Instead of rebuilding, the city planners simply established new buildings on top of the old ones, leaving dozens of empty basements buried under the sprawl.

  In the early years after UGE had begun to manifest, orks, trolls, and dwarfs had taken to the underground and begun building their own subterranean city, connecting the myriad spaces by tunnels. Eventually, the dwarfs had had a falling out with the orks, packed up their tools, and left. But they left behind ornate friezes and craftsmanship that were rare and beautiful to behold.

  Lone Star hadn’t been able to properly police the Ork Underground, as it came to be called, and criminals had moved into the area as well. As things stood now, the Ork Underground was the largest black market bazaar in the sprawl, and one whose secrets were guarded by nearly every man, woman, and child living there.

  As such, Skater couldn’t have thought of a better place for Vankler’s meeting. The mercenary broker would be in the center of his web.

  Skater took a left at the customer service desk in Lord-strung’s and walked toward one of the building’s basement doors. Plain and somber at ground level, the doors masked a heavy blast-proof core. He went down the plascrete steps, striped in yellow and black so they became easily visible.

  Below ground level, the stairway widened out into a generous corridor. Track lighting illuminated the way, hanging on the walls as well as the ceiling nearly four meters overhead. Intervals between the track lighting held advertisements for various shops and businesses in the Underground. Smells of meat-heavy cooking filled the cycled air, peppered through with the cut of the air-conditioning it took to cool the Underground. The rumble of voices, mostly ork, created a constant undercurrent of noise trapped between the walls of the Underground.

  Skater was at once conscious of the wall that went up between him and most of the orks he encountered. Prejudice w
asn’t an expression or trait solely owned by humans. He kept his eyes focused straight ahead, not meeting anyone’s gaze.

  “ ’S okay, chummer,” Duran growled. “Got me here with you.”

  “I used to feel comfortable coming here,” Skater said. “Larisa and I liked to spend time down here, browsing through the shops. She loved the carvings.”

  “Times change,” the ork replied. “Human policlubs have been gaining new members for some time. Ork sympathy toward other races died nearly overall when Dunkelzahn was assassinated. Maybe if they could find out who did it, things wouldn’t be the way they are.”

  “The policlubs would have caused pressure anyway,” Skater said. His vision annoyed him. Getting fed two different receptions, one through his flesh and blood eye, and the other through the Yamatetsu cybereye that had already adjusted to the change in lighting, he found his depth perception was seriously impaired. The effect was something he’d noticed before, but wired as he was on adrenaline it was more noticeable now.

  “A lot of orks didn’t care much for Dunkelzahn anyway,” Duran said. “They figured he was slowly selling the metas out. Guess we’ll never know now.”

  The ork took the lead. Skater ghosted along at his companion’s left elbow nearly a full step back. They knifed through the hallways, skin tones changing as the neon lights splashed across them. With all the plascrete surrounding them, the whisper of shoe soles across the pavement reminded Skater of a quick-running stream. The sound remained a constant.

  The aroma of meats filled the corridors as they twisted and turned through the Underground, mixing in with spices and the odor of a dozen different woods burning. All of the Underground restaurants were linked to a ventilation system that sucked the smoke out away from the sprawl into the Sound.

  The Underground had a lot of short, broken streets that gradually led inward.

  “Ever been to Maxine’s?” Duran asked as they turned another corner.