Shadowrun: Neat

by Russell Zimmerman

  “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?”

  I was a good boy, and didn’t tell her how much I’d love to check.

  “Then one of them just…just punched me!”

  She wasn’t used to Puyallup, I could tell that much just by how worked up she was over a shiner and a bloody nose. Corp executives didn’t make it to my neighborhood real often, in fairness. Whether her job had her working for Arboritech security or not, she wasn’t used to the physicality of the job. The more I saw of her, the more I was betting she was Matrix security. If not, Arboritech had pretty low standards.

  Now that she was cleaned up again, and my initial outrage at her being hurt was gone, I was almost amused by it. Her back was so stiff, her posture so tense, that I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her how lucky she was, especially if things had gone down like she told me. A half-dozen punks in gang colors, and her all alone, driving a car like that? Even in broad daylight, she’d gotten off easy.

  My shaded windows softened the harsh light that wouldn’t have done her headache any good, and her platinum hair spun as she whirled and looked at me, hands on hips.

  “And what’s being done about finding Kyoko now, Mr. Kincaid?” She was composing herself, and had some of her corporate snootiness back. It was my turn to wince.

  “We’d tracked her to a…not very nice place.” I kicked my feet off my desk and sat upright, showing my client I was taking the conversation more seriously now that it had turned directly to business.

  “Run by the Yakuza, you said. That Kenran-kai group?”

  “Yes. We rescued a bunch of other young ladies from there, but none of them were Ms. Nishimura, though a few thought they’d seen her there. It’s hard to tell sometimes with these sorts of establishments, though. The Yakuza have certain hardware they use, it plays tricks on their memories. We know she was there, though.”

  I didn’t mention that Trace was sifting through that hardware even as we spoke.

  “So what now, Mr. Kincaid? That’s twice you’ve let my corporate property slip through your fingers. It’s vitally important that Kyoko and her headware memory are retrieved, I’ve made that abundantly clear.”

  “I’m aware, Ms. Johnson. Trust me. My assistant and I will be re-enacting the seeking ritual again later tonight, to locate where they’ve stowed her now.” Actually I had tried a shortcut, and technically I was working the case even while I’d been napping. I’d whistled up a spirit of Man and sent it off to search around for her, just after wrapping up our call that morning. It took less work than a proper ritual seeking, and who knows? Maybe it’d get lucky. “She won’t get away from us again. And if she does, we’ll just find her again. It’s what we do, Ms. Johnson. We’re very good at it.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  She stalked over to the window and glared at the street outside, features glowing in the soft light, but back and shoulders still tense and tight as a strung bow. She fished in her small purse for a cigarette then fumbled with a lighter, hands still shaking a little from her recent adrenaline dump.

  I stood up just next to her. I should have just thumbed my own lighter open, but a part of me couldn’t help but show off in front of a pretty dame like her. And she was more than pretty, even with her makeup mostly wiped off. I squinted, focused, and cast; the tip of her cigarette flared to cherry-red.

  She turned and gave me a little smile. It was so gorgeous I almost didn’t notice them coming.

  Roaring engines in Puyallup means one of three things. It might be gangers. Chulos roaring past in their low-riders, Ancients or Princes of the Blood on their sleek street bikes, angry Spikes chasing them on their oversized Harleys. But in those cases you tend to hear a bunch of the same type, and there’s often a palpable hush that falls over the block as they get closer, as the regular denizens of the place scurry to get out of the way.

  It might be racers. Mostly they come out at night, though, and, again, you’ll hear several that are of the same general chassis. A swarm of buzzing Rapier or Aurora street bikes, an assortment of tricked-out racing coupes all bursting with nitrous and nuyen to burn, that sort of thing.

  Lastly, and most rarely, you’ll hear an actual chase. It might be either of the above groups, or some wild-ass shadowrunners in an armored van or something, and then you hear the sirens of some overzealous cop who’s in a hurry to get himself and his partner killed. Whether it was Knight Errant, Lone Star, or one of a dozen other individual security forces that work in the city, sometimes you’ll get some cherry-ass rookie behind the wheel, fresh from his training period, who thinks he’s going to clean up the streets and chase the bad guys no matter where they go. In that instance, you can hear different engines, but you’ll always, always, have the probie running the sirens as he tries to play hero.

  This time, I just heard a pair of high-pitched street bikes accelerating wildly, and a single racing coupe. Then, I heard them slamming on the brakes right outside my joint. Coprocessors built into my skull picked up the discrepancy, my gut did the rest. I tackled Ms. Johnson to the ground just as automatic weapons started hosing the place down. Lead tore through the air as the world around us exploded into splintering polymers, falling sheets of glass, and my client’s screams.

  The hail of gunfire tore through the front wall of my third-story office, plucking at my blinds and I felt one tug at my scalp in a graze. My cyberaudio suite categorized the weapons dispassionately while I pinned Ms. Johnson down to keep her from—and this happens sometimes, believe me—just sitting, shocked, upright into the line of fire. There were four shooters. Small caliber rounds, all spraying on full auto; suppressed weapons, but firing so much it didn’t help mask the sound much. One of them reloaded, then another, then another, then the last. The coughing autofire continued as I held my client down, tried to hold myself between her and the street, and mentally shouted for Ariana. As each of them emptied their second magazines their engines spun up again, tires peeled out, and they started racing away.

  I leaped to my feet and clawed my Colt from my holster. Lots of punks and crooks these days are chipped and wired up so they’re faster than even Skip or Hard Exit, but my gun is quick when it has to be. I lined up my smartlink’s targeting pip and my front sight and dumped a whole magazine at the first target I saw, a crowing punk with blue hair that matched his racing bike. His excited wheelie got cut short as he crumpled to the street, rear tire kicking his bike wildly around the street even as my gun stopped bucking in my mitt.

  “Make sure she’s okay!” I shouted to empty air, pointing at Ms. Johnson. Then I ejected my empty magazine, slapped in a fresh one, and jumped out my third story window.

  Ariana appeared on the physical plane just in time for me to fall through her phantasmal form, stealing my momentum from me before I hit the pavement, turning my fall into something my legs could more than manage. I darted for my car, blasting off a second magazine that pock-marked the back of their Hyundai coupe and spiderwebbed the rear windshield just before it rounded the corner. As my ally spirit swooped upstairs to check on my employer—she’d been bleeding, I recalled—I shook glass and blood out of my hair and dove into my Ford, firing it up after swiping my thumb onto the security pad.

  Hard Exit was right. Turbo Bunny and I had been bad for each other. We’d kept each other tangled up in chips, and it had almost killed both of us, but this car was a beauty.

  Someone had dropped half a Phaeton stretch limo into Black’s Junk Yard, down on Buckley and 234th, right about the time Bunny and I met. It had been an assassination job that had taken the limo apart at the rear passenger compartment, and Bunny and I snatched up the front end because she, giggling and chipped out of her gourd, had had a funny idea. We worked on that car for the whole time we were together, altering the body and transmission and a hundred other things. We took breaks to jack chips or fool around with each other, but in the end the work paid off. We di
d it all to drop that powerful Rolls Royce engine into a Lone Star surplus Americar that weighed about half as much as the Phaeton.

  The end result was a wondrous chasing machine. It was just a beast covered in flat-grey primer, with mismatched paint on several panels, graffiti decorating the body elsewhere, and a big, mean, police push bumper snarling at folks from the front end. It had too much engine to take turns gracefully if you were generous with the gas, and the reinforced frame and armored body didn’t do it any favors, but in Puyallup ash and Seattle rain, no one took the corners real well anyways. For raw power, though, it couldn’t be beat. Yeah, me and Bunny hadn’t been a great relationship at all, but at least I got a cool car out of it.

  Right now? I used it for all it was worth. I was mad as hell and floored it, rocketing after the remaining bike and car like vengeance itself. The punk on the bike doubled back and came at me with a katana of all things. I decided to ignore him until he slashed at me on his way past and sparks flew as a gash opened in my car’s armored plating. I saw a triumphant grin on his face as he rocketed past, blue hair waving. Whatever he had, it was sharp as hell and he knew both how to use it and how to ride well enough to keep up.

  He took another swipe at me as he pulled up alongside, and I could see he was driving by PAN as much as manually, because the right hand that should’ve been working the throttle was hacking away at the side of my car with a fucking katana, instead. One slash took my driver’s side mirror clean off, and I cussed up a storm.

  I let the autopilot keep my Ford going straight ahead, and shot a look over at the punk; or, rather, at his handlebars. I clenched my fist angrily and spat Enochian at him. Magic Fingers clenched tight on his right handlebar lever, and his front brake went from wide open to completely engaged. His tire locked up and his bike spun ass-over-elbows, and as I raced away down the street from the tangled mass of Suzuki Aurora and Yakuza thug, I prayed through gritted teeth that he’d fallen on his fancy fucking pigsticker.

  The Hyundai tried its best to rabbit away from me, but my snarling Ford kept hot on its heels. I rang up the Knights’ precinct house and got a buddy at the dispatch desk.

  “Tillman, this ain’t a social call,” I said, hauling my Americar around a corner.

  “So what else is new?” He yawned and glanced off-screen, ignoring or oblivious to the howling of my engine. “I told you, I’ll pay up over the Screamers game soon as I get my next check.”

  “Dammit, Till, this ain’t about that.” Truth be told, I’d forgotten the fifty nuyen he owed me. I was busy on another straightaway, another feral grin as my Ford surged forward, getting closer. Closer.

  “Some punks just shot up my joint, and—”

  “Again?”

  “—and I plugged one—”

  “Again?”

  “—and left him in the street out front. Another one wrecked back on 101st, and I’m still after the last car full of ’em. You got anyone available?”

  “Available? Sure.” He snorted. “Interested? Prob’ly not. You know the captain’s orders about district chases.”

  “Fine, fine.” I angrily engaged secondary features of my Transys, dragging the navigation info from my Americar’s dashboard over to the screen-in-screen image I had of the vaguely bemused Knight Errant officer. “There’s the GPS for it, at least, all right? Don’t go saying I didn’t call it in.”

  “Sure, Jimmy.” He tapped a finger just below the screen, either opening the attachments I’d sent him or deleting them. It was hard to tell with some of these skells. “Sure.”

  I hung up and worried about the road. At least the call log would show I’d tried to jump through the hoops, keep my license, all that happy crap. I was being a good little PI, at least in theory, and following all their silly rules. Ariana caught up and flew along behind me, hovering just above and behind my ugly Ford like she was an AR banner I’d attached, an advertisement for power. With every corner the Shin-Hyung bought a little distance, but with every straightaway I closed the gap. I reached into the glovebox and tugged out an old mouthguard, just like I’d worn in my football days.

  “Ari, get ready,” I said around the wedge of plastic, and she did. First, she strengthened my aura some, reinforcing me with protective wards and focused incantations of durability and armor. I felt good. Healthy. Protected. I had to be.

  “Hit it.” Then she did her real trick.

  We were redlining it down 196thStreet when she stole their speed from them, halfing it, then halfing it again, all in an eyeblink. Crushing the pedal down to the floormat, I rammed my push-plate square into their trunk while they were a sitting target, and then she slowed and stopped my car before I could fly through them and into the next building. Their sporty little coupe buckled and flew off the road, and she bled more speed from it just as the engine folded around a utility pole no one had utilized for much at all lately. My seatbelt tightened across my chest, and I got battered around in my driver’s seat, but my car was fine. With the reinforced chassis, armor plating, and ram bar, I lost one of my four headlights and scarred my paintjob. Their heap was totaled, too light to be durable. I called it a win as I spat my mouthguard onto the passenger seat, then clambered out of my Ford with my gun in my hand.

  I advanced on them hungry for blood, cussing up a storm and looking to break heads. When I got close enough to see into their car, I just got madder. There were four battered bodies in their little Hyundai, but only two of them were punks with guns.

  “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 I 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, 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 t
o 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 that 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 said.