I had to send out GridGuide override after GridGuide override, but it did the trick. Their old truck probably wasn’t even tied to the city traffic-nav system, as they didn’t seem to have any trouble pouring on the gas in violation of local traffic laws. I had more engine and less mass than they did, but they had a psycho with a very big gun distracting me. Gaining ground was slow going, and before long my windshield started to spiderweb.
“Bulletproof” things really aren’t, if you’re dedicated enough.
I threw caution to the wind and floored it—really floored it—to try and catch the ork while he was reloading, before he did any more damage. His stark white facial tattoo caught the light, a skull inked to the outside of his face, and his eyes showed whites all around them right before the impact.
My push-bar rammed into the back of their Rebel, and the driver had to change his game plan. The ork nearly went flying, dropped his gun, suddenly more worried about staying in the truck than killing me; good.
The impact lent the truck more speed, but that was momentary. It just meant I had space to floor it again and ram ’em proper. The second collision sent the ork down, scrabbling to lower his center of balance, getting jostled around and nearly flung from the back of the speeding truck. My Ford bucked as it rode over their bumper, which broke away and rolled under my tires as my push-bar strove for more damaging hits.
The Rebel’s tires slid back and forth, rear-end uplifting, losing traction. Just as he got it back together, just as the ork knelt to lift the AK again, I hit them with a pit. Bumping into the Rebel just behind the rear wheels, side-to-side, not just front-to-back, I sent ’em spinning.
The Nissan Rebel, my Transys reported to me, was known for having a high center of balance, and rolling under extreme conditions.
I braked while they tumbled sideways, end over end. Bags of corpses went flying, and so did the ork. I did my best not to run any of the bodies over; didn’t care if I clipped him, though. I slowed, they slid to a stop.
I left my headlights on and circled wide, Colt in hand. The ork was nowhere to be seen, the driver—a human, same facial tat, similar ugly disposition—had squirmed from the wreckage, bleeding, with a big Ares Predator in his hand. He had one hand up against the glare, kept the Predator trained on my Ford, waiting to me to silhouette myself.
Instead, I poked him in the back of the head with my muzzle, and pointedly thumbed back the hammer.
“Let’s talk. I just want to ask you a—”
He was really, really stupid.
In fairness, maybe he was just in shock from the crash. Maybe he was high on something. Maybe he thought—despite the fact I’d just run him off the road, and had a gun to his head—I wouldn’t kill him. Maybe he thought he was wired up fast enough to do the impossible. Maybe he was just crazy as hell and figured he couldn’t die.
He rolled and spun, tried to bring the Predator around to bear on me.
I had to. I double-tapped, two to the head.
“You dumb fuckin’ bastard.” I glowered, put one in his chest just to make myself feel better, stepping backward to try and avoid some splash. I glared down at him, mad at the bastard for being such a mad bastard.
I pocketed his commlink—after I found it ten meters back, he must’ve had it out on the console before the crash—and searched for the ork. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t dead, wasn’t unconscious, wasn’t groaning in pain. He was gone, and I wasn’t the elven ranger Gentry’s Matrix icon so desperately wanted to be: hell if I could track a guy on concrete.
Fuck.
Waste of a night.
I got back in my Ford and took off before Knight Errant showed up, just in case they were ever going to. I had scuffs on my paint, scratches across the hood and front, and a few fractures on the windshield to show for the night’s effort. I knew where some of their drop-offs were, but now that they were burned, they’d change ’em.
They were assholes, by and large, not idiots. They’d change ’em.
Out of ideas and with sunrise threatening, I headed home. I needed to sleep, needed to come up with a fresh idea. Minirth’s ghost would have to wait another day.
CHAPTER 29
It was pushing noon when I came to, sprawled out on my mattress, stiff as hell. I couldn’t be sore, my body chemistry didn’t allow for it, but I could sure as hell be stiff.
I checked my side with a grimace and the bathroom mirror; the stabs were as healed as I could get them. One of the laws of magic was that you could only magically treat any given injury once. I’d done a half-assed job of it the night before, but it was what I had. The puncture wounds were raw, red, scarring over, but they weren’t bleeding, at least.
Breakfast—lunch?—was a couple protein shakes, washed down with a beer. My windows were still plywood. My suit was still dirty. My apartment was still cold and empty-feeling. I grabbed another beer, a full stomach being a happy stomach, and threw myself into my desk chair to check messages.
Pink had touched base with a quick message saying he’d hoped I’d gotten home in one piece, and attached a few missing persons files from his neck of the woods, maybe helping out. Tillman left me a message offering to take care of my parking tickets if I dropped the fifty he owed me. Chase: Errant Knight sent me an exciting update in septuplicate, because Trace thought she was hilarious, and enjoyed subscribing me to mailing lists.
One, though, one was from Kosuke Tomizawa, Oyabun of the Kenran-Kai, Puyallup’s friendly neighborhood Japanese mafia.
Oh.
I shot a glance to my internal chronometer, cussed, and started getting dressed.
He was on his way here. Now. I’d woken up just in time, had maybe five minutes to get ready for a lunch meeting, as it turned out.
I kept one eye on my cameras while scrabbling to tuck in my shirt—no time for a tie—and just barely had it all done in time. I heard the high-pitched whine of street bikes outside, glanced from my one actual-glass window to the camera and confirmed the new arrivals.
The last time I’d seen Blue Tigers—a two-bit street gang, a minor league feeder-team that funneled thugs into the Kenran-Kai proper—outside my window, they’d been lining up with machine pistols to try and kill my client and me. This time, two of them sat just below my window, eyes on the street, while one apiece pulled up just in front of my two external cameras. One gave me a cheeky salute, in fact. They were letting me know they knew, politely showing their hand, making it clear they were aware of my security, and that they were allowing me to see them.
It wasn’t the punks on the Yamaha Rapiers and Suzuki Mirages I was paying attention to, right now, despite their bold blue hair, their neon-glowing frames, their openly worn katanas and slung machine pistols.
It was the Phaeton limousine that rolled up, the Rolls-Royce that pulled up to the curb, smoothly gliding through the city like a shark through the ocean, and stopping right out front of my place.
I stuffed my hat on my head, dragged my coat on, and trotted down the stairs.
“Mr. Kincaid.” Tomizawa’s driver stood at the door, crisp and neat, polite, impeccably sharp in her black-and-white suit, no tattoos showing, no weapon visible. I was pretty sure she could kill all four of the Blue Dragon punks without taking off her little chauffeur hat, if she wanted.
She opened the door and I clambered inside, ducking my head, removing my hat as my eyes adjusted to the comfortably dim lighting.
It was nice, if you’re into amazing legroom, real leather sets, room for the whole Ares bikini team to frolic, top-end electronics consoles, embedded tridscreens, more armor than my Ford, a built-in wet bar, and all sorts of other stuff commonly associated with words like ‘opulence’ and ‘luxury.’ Last I’d checked, a new Phaeton could’ve paid my rent for about ten years.
It was a Phaeton I’d poached my Americar’s ridiculous engine from, though, so I felt almost a kinship with Tomizawa. I was practically in the Owners Club, right?
“Tomizawa-sama,” I gave the man himself a n
od, the closest to a bow I could manage, though right now sitting down would be my excuse.
“Mr. Kincaid.” I didn’t get an honorific in return, but hadn’t really been expecting one.
“Dine with me,” he said, and it wasn’t an offer I was expected to refuse.
Tomizawa was an older guy, maybe twenty years my senior, but still trim, still fit. His hair was neat and short, his mustache clipped precisely, his suit impeccable, stylish, and expensive. One of his bodyguards—the magician, who I’d met the hard way, barely taking him out with me, Ariana, Skip, and Trace—sat in the back with us, offering up plates of food.
The ride was smooth enough that I didn’t have any excuse. A little swing-arm tray-table popped up from somewhere, and I had a plate of masterfully rolled sushi in front of me, porcelain chopsticks to try my luck with. I was a cheap-plastics-at-the-noodle-bar kind of guy, but I held my own. Tomizawa’s every movement was precise, certain, efficient. There was no wasted energy to him, no sloppiness.
He was a man working very, very hard to hold together Seattle’s bottom-of-the-barrel Yakuza organization, and by all accounts he was pulling it off. Tomizawa had been the Kenran-Kai’s sole leader since their formation maybe half a decade ago, the only Oyabun, ever, of this newly-formed clan put together by Seattle’s Yakuza rejects, warriors dishonored by a master’s death, soldiers plagued by addictions and other flaws, soldiers stained by being metahuman or less than purely Japanese. They got the Yak’s shit jobs, ran the Yak’s shit districts, but Tomizawa was making a go of it. Reining in rabble like the Blue Dragons, filling his ranks with cast-offs from old regimes, he was making it work, making a play on Puyallup, steadily taking, and taking, and taking from Enzo and his Uncle Joseph.
And then there was me, the stupid prick stuck in the middle.
I swallowed my last little roll, slurped at something sweet in a little saucer-cup—shit, but I was out of the loop on Japanese table etiquette, but Tomizawa’d sipped his, right?—and waited for him to finish eating. If I’d committed some grievous sin, he didn’t kill me for it, so at least I had that going for me.
“Mr. Kincaid,” he said again, after his magician had reached out and removed Tomizawa’s tray, then plucked mine away, too. “What do you want from me?”
Well. Lunch time was over.
“I’m looking into a murder. It’s led me to some dark places. Ghouls, vampires. Trouble. They tend to nest up, tend to hide out, in the Barrens, or in places they can reach from the Barrens. They also tend to be sloppy, as often as not. I was hoping you could help me pinpoint their location, remo—”
“Mr. Kincaid.” He cut me off, not having to raise his voice, just having to open his mouth. “What do you want from me?”
“I want your help to get some people-eating bastards out of our district.”
“No.”
“No, as in you won’t he—”
“No, as in that’s not what you want from me.”
Goddammit, more fucking riddles and cuteness and people talking in circles. I just glared, didn’t trust myself to speak up. Not without Ari at my back, not without Adversary to help me against his combat mage.
“Mr. Kincaid.” Tomizawa spoke again, voice soft, almost gentle, mild, patient. Like I was a child. “What do you want from me?”
“Honest answer?”
He lifted his eyebrows, daring me to do so.
“I want you out of my city. I want you and your kind to go away and leave the rest of us alone. You, Enzo, everybody. No Kenran-Kai, no Gianellis, none of your bosses from the Shotozumi-gumi, none of his bosses from the Finnigans. Hell, no Ancients or Chulos, no Reality Hackers, no Blue Dragons, while we’re at it. No one out to hurt and take and steal and scare, no one bleeding the district dry for the money they need to bribe councilmen, who let them go back to bleeding the district dry.”
I shrugged.
“But I know I can’t get that. I know that Christmas ain’t ever gonna come. I know you people’ll never be out of my house. So, what I try to settle for, what I hope we can reach, is an arrangement. A compromise. You make your money, but you keep your trouble to the soldiers. You only kill each other. You only hurt each other. You take your little turf wars out on the other syndicates, and you leave the actual people alone.”
“Then we are not so different, you and I, detective.”
“My apartment’s about the size of your limo here, so yeah. I was just about to say we had a lot in common.”
“Do not allow your impudence to get the better of you, Mr. Kincaid.” Tomizawa’s features didn’t change, his brow didn’t furrow, he didn’t frown. He just spoke calmly, matter-of-factly. “I am being reasonable and complimentary, especially considering the circumstances under which we first met.”
Yeah, that. When I’d killed a bunch of his dudes, trashed his base, stolen his working girls, then demanded he return a kidnapping victim to me. In public. It’d been a busy night.
“Detective, you and I want the same things. We want business to run smoothly. We want as little disruption as possible, as little destruction as possible, as little conflict as possible. My interests in this district are purely financial. I don’t want to alienate the people of Puyallup, or hurt them, or be bothered by them.”
“You just want to rent ’em working girls, sell ’em drugs and chips, collect their paychecks in gambling houses, loan ’em money when they’re desperate, buy their elected officials, all that sort of thing?”
“Yes, exactly. You see me as a problem, Mr. Kincaid, but it’s the nature of the people in your home that create that problem. I offer goods and services, they purchase them. It is simple. It is business. There is no malice in it, and there need not be any cruelty. Tell me, detective, whose neighborhoods are bloodier, mine or Enzo Gianelli’s?”
Fuck.
“Enzo’s.”
“Whose neighborhoods are cleaner?”
“Yours.”
“Who maintains order in the districts he oversees, who hires from within the community, who has opened his traditionally…conservative…organization to hire women, to hire metahumans, to employ magicians such as yourself?”
“You’re never going to convince me you’re good for this place.”
“And you, detective, are never going to convince me you’re just a humble ‘private dick,’ instead of being a linchpin of the community, a regular face, a figurehead. Your low opinion of me, Mr. Kincaid, I try not to take personally. Your low opinion of the Kenran-Kai, however, hurts my bottom line.”
The Phaeton coasted, slowing down, then stopped smoothly.
“I want to help you, Mr. Kincaid. I want to rid this district—my home, now, though perhaps not so fiercely and totally as it is yours—of menaces like ghouls, if I can. This place—” He nodded out the window. “This place may be of some interest to you in such an investigation. But were I you, detective, I would be well gone from here by sundown.”
The doors unlocked, his driver appeared and opened it. There was no clearer message than that. Get out. Snoop around. Fuck off.
I held out a hand, instead. I didn’t want to, but I had to. He’d given me something. Even if he insisted it was a gift, insisted it was out of concern for the well-being of the neighborhood, insisted it didn’t come with strings attached, I couldn’t let him think I thought the same. I wasn’t wired that way.
“If this pans out, I owe you one,” I said as he shook it.
I stuffed my hat back on as his Phaeton glided away, as his escort of Blue Dragons roared off, accelerating like the children they were.
I knew the streets I was on. I knew what sort of things happened in these abandoned rental facilities, these empty warehouses. I thought I knew who—what?—did business in them. It was time to find out, though, for sure.
I had a good six hours for the sun to keep the worst monsters at bay, right?
CHAPTER 30
I started with the dumpsters, the trash piles, the garbage heaps. Not just because of the night bef
ore, but because that’s half of a PI’s job. You roll up your sleeves, you dig in the trash, you see what you see. Sometimes you find a gun, a burner commlink, a used condom. Sometimes you find a corpse, bloody clothes, half-burned photographs. It’s never clean and never fun, but it’s often useful.
Here? Nothing. Nothing worthwhile, at least. Burnt one-shot BTL chips, used syringes, food wrappers, sure. Nothing exciting. Nothing I was after.
I headed inside, letting my cyberoptics account for the darkness. BTL heads and squatters scattered, grumbling, praying, scurrying away. I tugged a protein shake out of a coat pocket, waited to see who’d slow down, who’d be curious.
She was a heartbreaker, a dwarven girl of maybe fifteen, with knots in her hair and some scars on her face. She wore a baggy jacket, pants with holes in them, carried a small canvas sack.
“Hiya, kiddo,” I held up the shake, let her see it, let her see it wasn’t opened.
“Whatchoo want for it, mister?”
“Just answers, doll.” I went ahead and tossed it to her, underhand, easy. I took a step toward her when I did, closing the gap so I could lower my voice.
“My questions’re about ghouls.”
She gulped half the shake down, keeping one eye on me while she did, and it went wider when I asked. She came up for air, shaking her head.
“Don’t know much,” she said after licking her lips, because wiping them clean with the back of her hand meant wasting food. “I know they’re around. Everyone does. Near here. Under here.”
“You know how they come and go? You know their in-and-outs?”
Another gulp, another head shake.
“No one does. No one that comes back out.”
I nodded.
“All right, kid. All right.” I eyed her, frowned. She was so young. How’d she get here?
“The name’s Jimmy. Jimmy Kincaid. You ever hear anything good—not just these guys, just something interesting, y’know—you head uptown a little, yeah? Near the district buildings. It’s not far. There’s a noodle joint there, good an’ spicy. I’ll hook you up with some grub, you share what you hear, okay?”
Shadowrun: Shaken: No Job Too Small Page 17