Neat

by Russell Zimmerman

  “Yeah.” Lighting up, I crossed the street towards Enzo’s big black SUV, which was about as subtle as it was fuel-efficient. “I thought he seemed that type, too.”

  “I’m glad you don’t bind spirits.” Ariana gave me her bright, childish, smile. It’s the one she gives me that shows just how much she adores and respects me. It makes me feel guilty every time. “Even just air spirits!”

  “Not real often, kiddo. Not if I can help it.”

  Enzo and his boys were climbing out of his Suburban, and I gave a little laugh around my Target. The Italians were all suited up and ready to play. Tactical vests, kneepads, assault rifles, gas masks against the Puyallup ash as much as anything else. They reminded me of the old Lone Star FRT guys, playing dress-up before an op. Enzo had promised six guys, and that he’d stay home. Instead I counted three, plus Enzo himself.

  “What’s that stuff in your trunk?” He ran a hand over his slick hair when he saw Skiptrace across the street from us, checked his reflection in the tinted windows of his SUV. The razorgirl and hacker were both hauling grocery bags stuffed full of something bulky and light blue out of my Ford, and Enzo was too high to focus long enough to figure it out.

  “Blankets for the dames,” I said, turning up my collar against the rain and blowing some smoke downwind.

  He turned and gave the bounty hunters a long look. Both of them just wore sports bras and cargo pants under heavy armored jackets, not yet zipping them up against incoming fire. They both had little circuitry-stylized tattoos ringing their navels, Skip’s dark against her skin, Trace’s faintly glowing and animated.

  “Yeah,” Enzo leered. “If I was dressed like them, I’d want a blanket, too.”

  His men snickered. I didn’t.

  “Not those dames, Enzo. And if you talk like that in front of them, what happens to you ain’t no one’s fault but yours.”

  I flicked my smoke away and headed back across the street to check in with Skiptrace. The Ford’s trunk was slammed shut, both of them content with the bottled water, the cheap blankets, and the sliver of kindness I’d prepared for the girls we were about to free. My plan wasn’t very elegant, but it was simple. That didn’t mean everyone liked it, though.

  “Are you sure we gotta do this your way?” Skip glowered, checking the magazine in her pink AK. Trace looked grim, but stayed quiet and focused on loading her smaller Smartgun. Ari manifested between them and tried her best to look dour and businesslike and professional, like a shadowrunner from a trid show.

  “Yeah. It’s the only way to make it work.” I tried to give them a reassuring smile, but couldn’t quite muster it up. I didn’t have all the pieces of my plan—not this little assault, but a real plan—in place just yet, but I knew this part was important.

  I gave it a tick to let either of the girls respond, and when they didn’t, I sauntered down the street and into the ‘massage parlor.’ I paused at the door, making a big deal about shaking the rain and ash off my coat, when in reality I was taking my time, merging my aura with the wards that wrapped around the place, and carefully pushing my way through them.

  The inside of the place was dazzlingly gaudy. The well-dressed killer inside the door tried to tell me they were closed, but I flashed my credstick and he grudgingly let me in. The AR assault was almost overwhelming, the layer upon layer of sex ads just pissing me off instead of firing me up. I eventually picked one of the popup menus at random and ordered a naughty librarian, hoping that would at least get me a girl of legal age. Dirty schoolgirls had two of their own submenus, and through the AR overlays I saw a couple of lounging, half-naked girls that looked far too young to do anything but turn my stomach. The despair and soul-grinding degradation of the place had soaked into the building like a stain, and I felt my already tenuous grasp on magic slip a little farther from me.

  I followed the AR directions to get to my room, paying attention to how many Kenran-kai family thugs I spotted along the way upstairs. I was an impeccable gentleman with the working girl that met me in my assigned room. She was sprawled lazily on the bed, which made me feel not quite so bad when I chanted in Enochian and poured mana into her until she was unconscious; at least I didn’t have to worry about her falling over. Somewhere between the chanting and the background count my throat was raw already, and I knew my work was just getting started.

  One hand rested on the wall of the Sleeping Tiger, the other clung to the wand at my hip, and I started chanting again. Ariana and I hammered at the wards at the same time, from both sides, and in a few heartbeats that felt like hours, they shattered. Alone, she could have done the same thing. Alone, I couldn’t have.

  When a look out the window showed me Enzo’s assault team closing in and his big revolver blasting the outside guard off his feet, I swung out into the hallway. My Colt bucked twice in my hand, and the suit-clad guard stationed at the top of the stairs dropped like he’d been poleaxed.

  I held my burner in my right hand, and used a modified tactical-flashlight stance from my Lone Star days; I kept my wand in my left hand, wrists crossed, thumb capping the back-end and the front-end pointing towards trouble. I waited and covered the hallway. Girls started screaming, and two more Yakuza toughs—easily marked by their full body tattoos, and tattoos easily marked by the fact they were butt-naked—scrambled away from their fun and into the hall, guns at the ready. Half a magazine later and my Colt had both of them down. I reloaded while I had the chance.

  There was plenty more shooting from the ground level, so I slid down the hallway, clearing each room as I went and hollering for every girl I found to stay put, until I stood at the top of the stairwell. Another pair of shots dropped a Yakuza man halfway up the staircase, and I moved down. A nine-tailed fox kami fought a Mafia soldier in the main lobby, but even as I watched Ariana swept in to help him out. I double-timed it down the stairs to look for the Shinto magician who’d summoned it. In my haste, I missed something on my TacSoft overlay map.

  My right shoulder exploded in a spray of blood and the overpressure of a rifle firing at me, point blank, sent my head spinning as I sprawled out in a heap. Behind me, half under the stairwell, a suit-clad Yakuza thug laughed. Endorphins coursed through me to blunt the pain to a dull throb, and instead of being hurt, I was just mad. The downside to the gorgeous rosewood grips on my Colt Government Model 2061—the fancy 150th anniversary model—though? They didn’t stay put like the ugly, black, rubber ones did, and my Colt tumbled from my hand as I fell. The Yakuza killer lowered his Nitama bullpup at me, grinning as he reached down and got ready to use the underbarrel shotgun to finish me off.

  I focused everything I had through my wand, spat an Enochian word of power, and a spear of blue-white energy flashed up to smash into him. At my prime, that spell would have dropped him like a Thor shot. As it was, it was enough to make him stumble, knocking his shot high and wide. My flare compensation and dampening systems fought to overcome the muzzle flash and the roar of his gun so close to my head, and my hand dove for my pocket. Just as he got his balance back, I thumbed open my Cougar lockblade and slammed it down on his foot. The weapon focus slid effortlessly through shoe, meat, and bone to handily pin him to the ground. He yowled in pain. I wasn’t sure if I had enough juice in me for another combat spell, but hell if I wasn’t gonna try.

  But before I had to kill myself overcasting, a half-dozen rounds from Skip’s chattering AK tore into his chest and knocked him backwards. His left foot tore messily from my too-sharp knife, leaving the Cougar standing there, the Puyallup version of the sword in the stone.

  My mouth was full of blood as I sat up. I knew it was from the violent overcasting, but I muttered something to Skip about my falling down. She knew enough about magicians to know what had really done it, but she knew enough about pride to just nod brusquely instead of kicking me when I was down. My right shoulder was a train wreck, and it was all I could do to haul myself to my feet and lean heavily against the bloody foyer wall.

  Ari, meanwhile, felt
what kind of shape I was in and finished playing around with the fox-kami. Impossibly sharp claw-hands simply rent the lesser spirit asunder, and she swooped to my side in a flash of color and concern. She held me still while Trace trotted over and Skip covered us, and before long my shoulder was good as new. My Corpsman stopped chiming in my ear, and I nodded at the girls. There was still fighting to do, and I resented how they doted on me sometimes.

  I heard Enzo shout over sporadic gunfire from another room, high as a kite, his laugh crackling into my headware over our shared channel. He was cursing about how they couldn’t find the damned mage, but had just taken out another spirit. The rest of the joint was clear, which only left the basement. The girls and I found him, and the real fight began.

  The Yakuza magician was a half-naked bundle of tattoos and power. Live-looking dragon tattoos glowed as they crawled up and down his arms, his chest was dominated by a faintly glowing tsunami scene, and he threw storms and lightning bolts and gouts of flame and angry spirits at us one after another. He knew his stuff. It was dazzling and over quickly, like it always was when both sides knew what they were doing and one side cheated.

  Trace and Skip poured on fire to make him shore up his physical defenses, and Ari and I kept him busy magically. She slung spells at him and did her best to withstand his return onslaught, but the disrupted astral plane of this place weakened her, and the Yak seemed used to it. I was there to pick up the slack, though. I don’t have the raw power I used to, not by a long shot, but I can still catch incoming spells with the best of them. The very, very, best. This asshole wanted to blast my ally spirit? Not a chance.

  Skip blasted round after round as he threw Barrier after Barrier into place, I knocked away or snuffed out every combat spell he tossed at us, and Ari just kept pounding at him with her own—my own, technically—offensive magic to keep him off-balance. Eventually it ended when Trace just waded in instead of reloading, surprised him, and smacked him square in the head with the stock of her stubby Ingram. Skip and I gawked at her for a second, then both just laughed. It’s some fucking hacker we had, so demure and bookish. Ari started laughing a few seconds after we did, just to fit in. All the laughing died away after we caught our breath, when we got a better look at the basement.

  We were in a med-clinic. A horrible one, judging from the astral taste of the place, but there was no other name for the tables we saw, the hardware and machinery lining the walls. Trace stood protectively next to her as Skip started inspecting a machine that was still turned on, chatting to it like she always did with new pieces of electronics, talking to it soothingly, introducing herself before plunging in entirely, trusting us to watch over her while she worked. It looked like a data terminal to my inexpert eye, not a piece of surgical electronics. Ari snatched up the unconscious magician with one hand and waited while Trace and I watched Skip. Ariana didn’t quite get computers, but it was hard to blame her. A cursory inspection of the dataterm prompted Skip to take a break from her VR manipulations and flash me a thumbs-up.

  >I found the files from Kyoko’s headware, she texted me from deep into her electronic reality. >Data transfer, seven hours ago.

  Ariana and I went upstairs, leaving Trace to her work and Skip to her hovering. She dumped the Yak spellslinger onto the ground and hurried over—having forgotten for a bit—to heal the bleeding Mafia thug she’d helped. She decided to save him twice, and she was the only one that could; her healing magic was as good as mine had ever been, and in moments she had the bleeding stopped and his wounds closed up. He looked at her like she was the Virgin Mary, and I laughed and lit a smoke.

  Enzo found us as the other two of his guys herded about a dozen working girls down the stairs. He’d taken a hit of novacoke to take the edge off his first firefight in who-knows-how-long, and he was riding the high by griping about how the Yakuza had too many guys. I got my first good look at the girls, and didn’t like what I saw. Under the makeup, under the cosmetic surgeries, ignoring their silly little costumes or the lack thereof, I recognized a few of them. In the background, impossible for me to ignore, Enzo yammered on about his offended sensibilities.

  “I can’t get a six-pack of fellas to do a hit for me, but these Jappos, they’ve got twelve fuckin’ guys guarding a whorehouse! You believe this shit, Jimmy? Ha! A dozen fucking guys, here! Plus I know they’ve been doin’ freelance work lately to boot! What’s this neighborhood comin’ to?”

  I grabbed onto his adrenaline and novacoke and enthusiasm and used all that energy of his to push him out the door and leave the place to me. He had too much initiative and not enough work to do, so it was easy to just steer him away. The conversation was as one-sided as if he’d been on a telephone. I chattered at him quick enough for him to keep up, but too fast for him to interrupt, and had him halfway across the street before he realized we were walking anywhere. It’s what I do. Me, and the anger in my gut, and the head full of supercomputer that tells me just what buttons to push? Talking rings around a mook like Enzo was easy as breathin’. I just hoped it wouldn’t catch up to me too soon, once he realized how I was playing him.

  “Leave the gas cans, I’ll take care torching the place. Nah, don’t worry about the Yak thugs, I’ll handle it, me an’ Skiptrace got plenty of zip ties and all that. We’ll talk about the hardware after Trace is done looking at it. Same with the working dames, don’t worry, we’ll handle the detail work. Skip and Trace will take them to Khayyim’s to get their simrigs pulled, then we’ll talk to them. Half those gals are locals, and I’ll be damned if that blonde one ain’t Ray-Ray’s kid sister. Yeah, I’m calling Ray-Ray to let him know. No, he probably doesn’t want her to keep working for you. I’ll give them a couple square meals and a three-day bus pass myself, if any of them have somewhere else to go, but I swear to God, Enzo, like half of these girls are kids we’ve seen around the neighborhood. You put them to work before a doc helps them out and we give them the chance to retire, I’ll tell your Uncle Joe myself.”

  And on and on and on, I chattered at him like an autogun until we were standing next to his Suburban. He was too coked up to want to interrupt me, riding his high and malleable and feeling like he’d just won something. He’d still get maybe a half-dozen new girls out of it, and the prestige of taking out a dozen Yakuza hitters with just his three guys. We both walked away happy, and hell if I felt bad for fast-talking him like I did.

  It was only when I went back into the Sleeping Tiger to check on the girls that I realized Nishimura Kyoko hadn’t been upstairs. She wasn’t milling around in the lobby. She wasn’t there at all. We’d missed her. Again.

  Trace, Skip, and Ari took care of the rest while I made the call on my Transys. I didn’t want to tell Ms. Johnson I’d lost her company property again, but her credstick was heavy in my pocket, and I’d promised her an update. The Kenran-kai still had Kyoko, and she deserved to know.

  EIGHT

  Puzzle pieces fell into place while I stole another nap back in the office, but then my headware chirped me awake. It let me know a guest was in the hall, and Ms. Johnson rushed into my office and threw the whole puzzle all apart again.

  She was dressed more conservatively this visit, black, middle-executive, corporate approved wear, but her face was a mess and so was the rest of her. Blood ran freely from her busted nose and one eye was already swelling shut, her makeup all runny from tears. I reacted instead of thinking—Hell, I was still half asleep—and I was on my feet before she was halfway into the room. The damaged goddess threw herself into my arms, sobbing and in pain.

  I should’ve had Ariana do it—but she was so close, so warm and soft, smelling sweetly of vanilla and with her beauty marred by the ugliness someone had inflicted on her—that I did my best to fix her myself. She winced and clung to me, nails biting into my neck as her nose straightened and closed, and in a few heartbeats her eyes were a matched set again. She grabbed me to keep crying and the strain of even such a minor spell almost knocked me over, but I half-sat on my desk ins
tead and tried to coo supportive nonsense at her. Healing magic has never been my strong suit, and neither has crying dames, but I can get by when I have to.

  I gave her a minute to calm down, leaving her in my office while I checked the street. Whoever had done it was long gone, and I couldn’t really say if it was lucky for me or lucky for them. I crawled around her car, checking it for bombs or bugs or anything else nasty, trying to see if she’d been targeted specifically, if the attack had just been a distraction to let them rig her wheels, or for anything else I could find that might keep her safer than if I didn’t find it. All I spotted was some blood on one car door, right near the edge. It was a weird spatter pattern, and a little smeared, but I figured maybe it happened when she got knocked around.

  “It was those Yakuza thugs, it had to be! Those…those…Kenran-kai! Or their dirty little Blue Tiger gang you told me about!”

  I was back in my desk chair and she was pacing restlessly in front of it. Sunlight peered at us through my half-tinted windows, and a glance at my headware chronometer told me it was getting close to noon. I’d called her very early in the morning, on my way back to the office, and she’d been less than warm in response to my update.

  “You said it was the Yakuza that had Kyo-chan, and that you fought with them already, so it only makes sense they’d be outside your office!”

  It wasn’t impossible, I guess. But it wasn’t much like them to just rough up a dame for going to the wrong office, and then let her live. If they were here for me, they would have come for me. There had to be more to it. Mitsuhama Computer Technologies, a major rival of Arboritech—or rather Arboritech’s parent company, Shiawase—had strong Yakuza ties. Did they know who she was? Did they know who she worked for? Had it been her they were after, and not me by way of her?

  “They laughed and shoved me, Mr. Kincaid, and then one of them wouldn’t let go of my arm. Do you think he bruised me?”