Shadowrun: Neat

by Russell Zimmerman

  “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 ugliness out front.

  Jesus, I was so sick of this case and so tired of lies and so bone-weary of these criminal shits talking like they actually owned one sliver of this neighborhood. 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 at the time I’d been busy counterspelling, 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 that it hurt just to look 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 past. 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 anyways.

  “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 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, and 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 to tap 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 half an 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 towards 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 in half an ork razorboy’s face, 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 been grumbling at me about having to use gel rounds, before it had started. Enzo was pissed at me afterwards, for not letting him and his men take any prisoners away with them. Ariana had been busy, after healing the Mafia shooter, 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 clicks 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 any more, 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.”

  “As far as Mitsuhama has to know, she got snatched and shot up by some shadowrunners, you killed them, you recovered the data before she died, and now you’re a corporate hero for recovering their research. No one has to know it all happened by accident. She gets tagged as KIA, Mitsuhama stops looking for her, my client’s happy, your bosses are happy, and we all win.”

  I leaned in, letting him see the blood and ash on my suit and face, the sparkling glass in my hair, the determination in my eyes. I wanted him to see the shit I’d waded through to be able to talk to him, face to face, when I said this next sentence. I might be killing myself by saying it, but he had to hear it if he was staying in Puyallup.

  “But you know, and I know, that you won’t ever steal a Puyallup girl from her family and make her into a fuckin’ cyborg sex toy ever again. Or it’s all off the table.”

  I leaned back, shoulder slumping, drained. I snatched up a glass of who-the-hell-cares from his table and downed it in one gulp. I’d said my piece. The solution made sense to me. If it didn’t make sense to him, maybe we’d all die right here and the Yakuza would have to send someone else and this whole mess could just start all over again.

  TEN

  Thirty minutes later, my Americar rolled to a stop outside my office. Exhausted and bloody, I hauled myself up and out of it, stretched the stiffness out of my back, and looked up at the woman I knew was still waiting there. I gave her a minute to handle the stairs, and when she came out front, I gave her a long look.

  “I know your name isn’t Johnson. I also know it hasn’t always been Tanaka, like your Shiawase records say. I know it was Nishimura, back when you worked for MCT.”

  She nodded, trying to look through the tinted windows to see who sat in my car.

  “I know Kyoko’s not an Arboritech employee, or a Shiawase employee at all. I know she’s MCT. I know she didn’t make it out in the extraction that got you out ten years ago. I know her father, your ex-husband, died in another extraction last week, at the same time the secondary team was grabbing her from that car.”

  I know that’s why you wore black, I wanted to say. You wore the Western, not the Eastern, color for grief because Shiawase wouldn’t let you officially mourn someone who died working for Mitsuhama.

  “I know she’s your daughter.”

  I know you love her, I could have said. I know you love her enough to bash in your own face with a car door to fake being attacked, just to get my blood up. I know you love her enough to hire men to kill you when you light a cigarette against a tinted window, just to force me to chase them and speed up a confrontation that will get her back. I know you love her enough that when I lied and told you the research was lost, you were still willing to pay to get your little girl back.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you—” she started to say,
but I spat a wad of WhiteBrite on the ground to shut her up. Ariana opened my car door and—carefully, like a child holding a baby—lifted Kyoko’s unconscious form from where she lay in my passenger seat.

  “Save it. I know you’re not sorry. I know you’d do it again. That’s the only reason I’m giving her to you.”

  I held out my hand with a small datachip in it.

  “Take this. It’s the datadump from the Yakuza clinic. Your husband’s research is on it, and so is a whole bunch of other stuff. Give it to Shiawase security, they’ll figure out a way to use it. I made a deal with the Kenran-kai, not MCT.”

  She took it from me, then threw herself at me again in a hug while Ariana carried her baby girl to Ms. Nishimura’s little coupe. She smelled like vanilla, still. She was soft and warm, still. She was crying again. This time it was all for real, though. The actual emotions threw me off-balance. I wasn’t good with real gratitude. I stiff-armed her away as gently as I could.

  “Get outta here. Go take care of her,” I said, trying to muster up the energy for a smile.

  She left. A mother and her daughter, reunited after almost ten years of murder and lies and corporate bullshit and syndicate pride, finally left together in their car. I reached into my coat for my flask and took a celebratory drink as I started up my stairs.

  Fuck you, world. I beat the Downtowners who act like no one decent or worth trying to make decent comes from my neighborhood. I beat the Mafia toughs and Yakuza punks who act like they’re natives when they’re really just parasites, sucking this place dry. I beat the megacorporations that play puppets on both sides, monsters that tear families apart to stop research or to snuff out a project or just to make a couple bucks. I beat Knight Errant, the so-called cops, who turn their back on Puyallup outside of the couple blocks closest to District Hall, and I solved their case for them. I beat the whole damned system. I won this one. Me, not you.