by L. E. Price
Paradise Clash: Bounty Hunter
(Paradise Clash, Book One)
L.E. Price
Copyright 2019, L.E. Price. All rights reserved.
Contents
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38.
Credits
1.
The parents called it a kidnapping. Jake knew better. One glance at the half-assed ransom demand, one look at their daughter’s room — his practiced eye noting what was there and what was missing, like her favorite clothes and her prescription drugs — and he had the missing girl clocked. Then it was just a matter of narrowing down the suspects. Did she have a boyfriend the parents didn’t approve of? Of course she did. She’d stopped seeing him a month ago, they told him. They looked dumb enough to believe it, too.
Just another Romeo and Juliet job: girl from a double-A-credit family falls for a bad boy from the Gullet, and they run away together to live happily ever after. Or until the charm of slumming it wears off two weeks later, and she comes home with her tail between her legs. Jake told the parents to sit back and wait. They insisted, and their money was good, so he took the case.
A trail of digital breadcrumbs led him down into the Gullet. The clenched throat of Old Philly, hemmed in by arcologies on either side. The gleaming copper skyscrapers, as wide as they were tall and each one a self-contained city of its own, cast the old-world slums in permanent shadow. The sun only touched the broken streets at high noon, and even then, it fought to shine through a permanent haze of mud-brown smog. Jake moved among the locals, anonymous, with his face masked under an aftermarket rebreather and UV-tinted goggles. He kept the stained leather hood of his overcoat slung low; it was an Outsider’s Special, a mutant and bulky garment somewhere between a trench coat and a rain slicker, draping his burly linebacker’s build. The coat performed double duty, keeping out the elements and hiding the hardware he was toting underneath.
A couple of scavengers, with their hooded heads bent and faces shrouded under insect-like masks, scurried to one side to let him pass on the sidewalk. Politeness was a survival skill in the Gullet. With everyone cloaked and masked and their hands out of sight, safest to assume you had a weapon pointed at you at all times. Nobody was looking for any trouble here.
That was during the daytime, anyway, when more or less honest people were out doing business. After dark, when the steel shutters rolled down, Wild West rules went into effect. If it wasn’t the thrill-kill gangs running wild or the resurrection men operating human chop-shops out of armored meatwagons, it was the arcology kids rolling in packs, turning the slums into their personal safari. The sun was the city’s warden, or maybe its absentee father; the second it turned its back, the beasts came out to play.
“Eva, what time is it?”
He subvocalized the words, moving his tongue and jaw while his lips stayed shut. In response, a woman’s cool, steady voice echoed through his inner ear.
“The time is two-fifteen. By the way, you are overdue for both your annual medical examination and for a diagnostic on your Werther implant—”
“Eva, thank you.”
He’d be out of here by sunset. With the girl.
Jake navigated the streets by memory. Nothing ever changed in the Gullet. Re-purposed, maybe. The tower up ahead had been a hotel once. The steel sign over the doors, pitted with decades of acid rain and turned a corroded oil-blossom green, read Saffron Palace. The palace had fallen, though, arches sagging and a corner of the roof in full collapse. Glazed tarp covered the broken windows from the inside. Jake paused, giving a dubious eye to the door reinforcements. The puffy yellow plastic billowed out around the frame like an inflatable lifeboat, patched and wilting.
“Eva,” he breathed as he stepped inside, “run atmospherics.”
The door hissed and clamped shut behind him. The old lobby was a squat, now. Cots lined the walls, some empty, some carrying ragged human cargo. Most of the occupants were in dreamland, either lost in a virtual-reality paradise or drifting away on a narcotic haze. Jake could never tell the difference. Ragged, wet coughs filled the air, and even the rebreather couldn’t cut the stench of body odor and stale piss.
“Building atmospherics only functioning at forty percent,” Eva told him. “I recommend keeping your protective gear in place.”
He made his way to the stairs at the back of the lobby. He didn’t give the elevator a second glance. It was either dead or a deathtrap, and this was the last place Jake wanted to get stuck in a cage.
“By the way,” Eva added, “your continued insurance coverage through Horizon Biomedical requires regular medical reviews. If you fail to complete these reviews in a timely—”
“Eva, thank you.”
She kept going. “I’m sorry, this message is sponsored by Horizon Biomedical and cannot be skipped. As I was saying, your continued insurance coverage—”
The virtual assistant continued to remind him of the importance of healthy living and regular checkups as he climbed the rickety staircase to the third floor. The carpeted runner under his boots might have been yellow, once, but years of caked-in dirt and neglect had turned it mottled gray. Jake’s gear rattled under his coat, and he put a gloved hand over the bulge of his shoulder holster.
He stood at the door to 308.
The girl had run off with her Romeo, a bottom feeder who went by “Chizz.” Chizz had small-time dreams and a small-time rap sheet to go with it. A little strongarm, a little smash and grab. Lately, he’d gotten into credit card fraud. Only problem was, Chizz had a crew, and there was one piece of intel Jake couldn’t dig up: namely, how many of his boys were on the other side of that door.
Shock and awe, then. He rapped his leather-sheathed knuckles on the door.
“What you want?” a gruff voice called out on the other side.
“Pizza delivery.”
He listened to the sound of locks and deadbolts clicking. The door swung open.
“Fool, we didn’t order any—”
The guy on the other side, a greasy teenager in a concert t-shirt and torn jeans, froze like a statue. The bulbous tip of Jake’s gun, striped yellow and black like the bloated belly of a hornet, pressed against the middle of his forehead.
“My Jazzer’s been overclocked,” Jake said. “Got the pulse emitter cranked up so high that at this range, well…I pull the trigger, your head’s going to look like somebody dropped a Jello casserole. So don’t make me pull it.”
It was a lie, but the lie got him inside. The kid backed up, hands up and empty, cross-eyed as he focused on the gun.
“Nice and slow,” Jake told him. “You’re doing great.”
He took in the scene on the other side, fast. Hotel furniture had been pushed to the walls, making room for long folding tables laden with cardboard shoeboxes and electronic equipment. Jake recognized most of the gear; Chizz had laid hands on a ripper, designed for stripping data from stolen credit cards. The ripper fed its stolen plunder down a tattered ribbon cable to a bulky brick of a lapto
p with an armored shell. Military-grade decryption engine, he thought. Must have wandered off a base somewhere. No wonder the atmosphere processors aren’t working, he’s probably pulling half the juice in this building just to power that thing.
The man of the hour sat at the keyboard, with a Billy goat beard and a shock of ginger hair. His would-be Juliet stood behind him, hands on his shoulders, looking like a princess in designer pink couture. On the far end of the table, another kid in his early twenties was wrangling stacks of colorful plastic. The teardrop tattoo beneath his left eye gave a twitch as he squinted, and his hands slowly slid out of sight.
“I wouldn’t,” Jake warned him. Then he addressed the room. “I’m not the police, and I don’t care about your little hustle here. Amy, your parents sent me. You’re coming home now.”
“Chizz?” her hands tightened on his shoulders. He reached back and gave her fingers a protective squeeze.
“You aren’t going anywhere, baby.” He looked to Jake. “You’re a bounty hunter? Okay. How much?”
“How much what?”
“How much to turn around, walk away, and forget you found us?”
“What, you’re gonna offer me stolen plastic?” Chizz’s buddy at the end of the table was still reaching. Jake’s eyes narrowed to a squint. “Chizz, tell your boy to put his hands where I can see them. Otherwise he’s going to make me nervous.”
The teenager standing at the point of Jake’s gun swallowed, hard, as his eyes bulged. “Yeah, c’mon, don’t — don’t make him nervous, okay?”
“We got something better than plastic,” Chizz said. “Check it out.”
He fanned out a handful of glossy, colorful cards, like a gambler showing a royal flush. The splashy logos were big enough for Jake to read a few of the names. Golden Temple, Paradise Clash, Naval Tactics…
“The hell are those?” he said.
“Time cards, man. For full-immersion simulations. We run the credit card data through the crypto engine, pull a legit cash transfer through an offshore bank in the Caymans, and invest it into prepaid time cards. Laundered, untraceable, just as good as real money. You can sell ‘em on the street for less than their face price to turn them into cash, or use them yourself.”
“I don’t do sims.”
“Everybody does sims,” Amy said. “What are you, a dinosaur?”
“Screw this,” Teardrop said. His hands dipped back under the table. “He’s going to rat us out. You know he’s going to rat us out.”
Jake glanced his way. “Hate to break it to you, but you’re not important enough for anybody to put a price on your head. I rat you out, Philadelphia PD gives me a handshake and a ‘thank you’, neither of which pay my rent. The only person I’ve been hired to bring back is Amy. And for the last time, put your hands on the damn table.”
Jake had spent enough time in seedy rooms just like this one, surrounded by scared, desperate people, to know what would happen next. He saw it like an avalanche in slow motion. Teardrop’s nerve broke and he jumped up, kicking his chair back, a bulky black pistol in his fist. It was a slugthrower, built to spit custom ammo from a compressed powder cake. The teenager he had at gunpoint was a lesser threat; Jake put his free hand on the kid’s chest and gave him a shove, sending him tumbling back into the card table. He crashed into the crypto engine and hauled it down to the floor with him.
Teardrop was lining up his sights, going for a headshot. Stupid. The move cost him two seconds he couldn’t afford to spend. Jake dropped low, aimed his gun for center mass, and squeezed the trigger. The Jazzer bucked as it let off a concussive blast, the air rippling like a heat mirage. The shockwave slammed into Teardrop’s chest with the force of a freight train and knocked him off his feet. He hit the filthy carpet, out cold. The teenager was already scrambling back to his feet, dazed but throwing his shoulder into a charge. Jazzers were one-shot weapons, and he wasn’t going to give Jake time to reload.
Jake flipped the gun in his hand, holding it by the bulbous barrel, and whipped the steel grip across the kid’s forehead. Skin split, spattering Jake’s overcoat with droplets of glistening raspberry, and the kid slammed to the floor five feet from his buddy. He clutched his face, groaning, going fetal. Out of the fight.
That left Jake, Chizz, and Amy. Amy pressed her shoulders to the wall.
“This only has to be as rough as you make it,” Jake said.
Chizz gave him a hyena smile as he pushed his chair back.
“Know what my favorite game is?” he asked. He turned his hand, brandishing a knife with a serrated six-inch blade. It caught the fuzzy overhead lights and gleamed like a surgeon’s scalpel. “World Brawl Heroes. I’ve got one hundred and twenty-six hours logged on Kumite mode.”
Jake holstered his gun. His coat-flap rippled as his hand came back out with a thin cylinder of black steel.
“Not sure what that means,” Jake said.
“Let me show you,” Chizz told him. Then he raised the knife high and lunged in for the kill.
2.
Jake flicked his wrist. The cylinder of black steel erupted, sprouting a rod two feet long. His backup weapon was officially named the Marburg Arms Energy-Displacement Tactical Baton Mark Two, but he called it what everyone else on the street did: a Scorpion.
Chizz closed the distance, faster than he looked, and brought down his knife in a killing strike. Jake side-stepped and the baton lashed out, steel clanging against steel. Chizz rallied fast. He ducked under a follow-up swing and jabbed for Jake’s belly. Jake whipped the Scorpion in a whistling arc at the last second, a frantic blow that forced Chizz to jump back. The two men circled each other like predators, unbloodied and hungry for the kill.
Jake waited, patient, studying him. Chizz made the next move. The high-swing again, soaring in and bringing the blade whistling down. Jake side-stepped, didn’t even try to parry him this time, and leaped back when he thrust for Jake’s guts a second time. Jake’s back hit the wall. No more room to maneuver.
The kid learned how to fight from playing video games, Jake realized. He thinks in patterns, move-sets. He thinks I will, too.
Third time was the charm. Chizz stepped back one foot, braced his knife and went for the overhand lunge one more time, his style ingrained through hours of repetition and practice. Perfect, if he was fighting a robot. Instead of getting out of the way, Jake went all in, charging him and closing the gap before he could bring the blade down. He grabbed Chizz by the hair, lashed the Scorpion across the kid’s gut and doubled him over.
Chizz’s nose cracked against Jake’s knee, breaking like glass. He howled, blinded by pain and going wild with the knife. No style now, no studied moves, just raw fury. The baton hissed through the air and connected with his wrist. Then came the sickening crack of steel against bone. Chizz dropped the knife, fell to his knees and clutched his fractured arm. Jake calmly pressed the tip of the Scorpion to Chizz’s shoulder.
“Night-night,” he said.
Then he squeezed the rubberized grip, hard, and sent an electrical storm surging through Chizz’s body. Chizz crashed to his stomach, eyes wide, flopping like a fish on a dock.
“You…you didn’t have to do that,” Amy breathed.
Jake flicked his wrist. The baton retracted, slithering back into its hilt.
“Nope,” he said. “I didn’t. Until your ex-boyfriend and his buddies insisted. I said this only had to get as rough as they wanted it.”
“He’s not my ex-boyfriend. We’re in love.”
Jake leaned against the door, catching his breath. He had a twinge in his hip and it stung like a hornet every time he inhaled. It was funny, he thought, how a fight didn’t really hurt until it was over. Before he could answer Amy, his virtual assistant’s voice rang in his inner ear.
“One hour until sundown. Please note that GPS shows you standing in a double-red-level crime district. Emergency services are not available after five P.M., please consider immediate departure—”
“Eva, thank you,”
he subvocalized. He looked to the girl. “I really, truly do not care. Hell, run away again tomorrow if you feel like it. Your parents will probably pay me to do this all over again.”
“Great way to earn a living,” she seethed. “You must be real proud of yourself.”
Jake sighed and opened the door.
“Kid, I’m just trying to pay the rent. Pride isn’t remotely part of the equation.”
* * * *
An outsider might think Jake’s scrap of turf over in East Philly was no different from the Gullet. Same crumbling brick buildings, same desolate streets marred with potholes like craters on the moon. Rows of Colonial-era houses, patched with plastic and synthetic steel like hard, cold quilts, stood shoulder to shoulder in the shadow of the arcology towers. Every window at street level had roll-down shutters or wrought iron bars.
Locals could read the lay of the land, though, like old hobo signs etched in chalk. A green diamond spray-painted on a battered stop sign marked this week’s border between the Sinaloa Kings and the Blackstone Ranger Mafia. Stay off the border-street, don’t wear the wrong colors on the wrong side, and don’t look like you have anything worth taking, and you’d probably be fine. Locals knew their own, and they watched out for each other. They wouldn’t call the cops if you were in trouble, but a cry for help had a good chance of flooding the street with baseball bats and shotguns. Arcology punks knew better than to safari down here. The ones who didn’t either learned fast, or never went home.
Jake hung his hat in a three-story office building down at the edge of the commercial strip. A ghost smiled from the side of the brown brick facade, faded paint on a mural — some kind of soft-drink ad, he thought — painted decades before he was born. Now there was nothing left but the faintest, translucent shadow of a cherubic child with a glass bottle in his hand, vanishing in the copper sunset. Jake unlocked the front door, rolled the night shutter down behind him, and pulled his UV goggles up on his forehead.
“Atmospherics: safe,” Eva purred in his ear. “Air quality is…acceptable.”