Nobody in Dockside knew it, but Rodney spoke eleven languages fluently and had a master’s degree in chemical engineering. It stung him in the pride a little to keep that inside, but pride did not build empires. Branding did. Nobody would remember ‘Rodney the Polyglot’ or ‘Rodney the Chemist.’ But ‘Rodney The Dwarf?’ That was something the street level hoods with two-digit IQ’s could wrap their underdeveloped brains around. He’d been called worse. By that selfsame great-grandmother, no less.
Granny had a cusser on her, that’s for sure! The little man thought as he sat in his office going over the week’s receipts. It had been an interesting week. The infiltration from Uptown was well underway, but he had managed to sour many of those moves without getting exposed. It would buy him time, but those Combine bastards would soon get tired of the backroom bullshit and put boots on the ground. He needed to pull them his way before the corporate types at Gateways put so much heat on the docks that smuggling rates on contraband shipments would get too astronomical to make a decent profit. He had managed to turn the tide by convincing the whores to unionize under that crazy Madeleine chick. It was a strategic move that he knew would come back to bite him down the line; Madeleine had an ego that no amount of Uptown bribery was going to budge. But the only thing that sold better than contraband in dockside was tail, and pulling that money away from The Combine had just made acquiring Dockside less attractive. He wished there was a way to get Gateways to fight the Combine privately, but the corporate strategists weren’t that dumb. They didn’t need to fight a massive criminal enterprise to win. They just had to cinch the docks so tight that The Combine couldn’t profit from them. Of course, that would be a huge expense and hassle that they would just as soon not have, but they would do it if that’s what it came to.
The loss to Gateways would be annoying, but the loss to the Dockside rackets would be astronomical. The blow to Rodney’s operations would be just plain unacceptable. Which brought his thoughts to the big, ugly problem in the Southeast.
Just who the hell was Roland Tankowicz? Rodney could spot two things very easily no matter how they presented themselves. The first was a crazy bitch. Rodney knew when a woman was going to be a psycho within seconds of meeting her. He had married five psychos already, his skills in finding them were uncanny. Why he always married them was a completely different mystery. That was probably granny’s fault, too.
But the second thing he could always spot was a stone-cold killer. Rodney knew how to pick talent and he knew when he was looking at a serious hitter and when he was looking at a scared punk who was just acting tough. This Tankowicz guy gave Rodney chills in a way he wasn’t comfortable talking about. He had personally watched every scrap his boys had instigated with the giant this week, and he had never seen anything like this guy. Rodney went over the list in his head.
Tough as a hickory nut? Check.
Strong? For a guy without an armature? Ridiculous. Check.
Fast as all hell? Double check.
Skills? Holy shit, yes. Check.
Rodney wanted Roland on his crew like he had never wanted anything in his life. That was some kind of hitter and he knew it. But Rodney had already figured out that the damned idiot had a bad case of “fool’s honor.” That stupid, pigheaded idea that even though you were just another piece of shit floating in the dirty commode of the universe, somehow, if you just believed, you could still be a god-damned hero. He doubted even the big bastard realized it, but that guy was never going to be street muscle. That didn’t mean he couldn’t be useful, but it precluded Rodney from bringing him into the fold.
More’s the pity, he lamented for one whole second and then got back to figuring out the best angle for manipulating Sir Lancelot into being useful. A man like Tankowicz had to be played very carefully, and Rodney soon lost himself in considering all the ways this might be accomplished.
Which is why the explosion of his front door was so surprising and shocking to him. The bearded gangster toppled form his office chair at the enormous crash and the vibration in the floorboards that accompanied it. A framed picture of Granny plummeted from its place of honor on the wall and shattered.
Rodney scrambled to his feet and swiped his organic finger across the terminal to pull up the feeds from his monitors. His office was well in the back of the building to shield him from the music, and the distance reassured Rodney when he finally saw what had happened.
Roland Tankowicz had just kicked the door in and was dragging Manny the bouncer in by the scruff of the neck. Manny looked like he had lost a fight with a mining ‘bot, and that was scary. Manny was about as nasty a scrapper as a guy could hope to find in Dockside. He looked like a chastised teenager in the hands of Tankowicz. Rodney’s heart started to race. He fumbled in his desk for his shotgun. The old-school slug-gun was loaded with explosive pellets, which made it about as scary a gun as you’d want to use indoors. He checked it to make sure it was ready to go and then keyed into the security channel on his comm.
“Boys, let’s jest find out what the big shite-stain wants, but don’t let him push ye’ around, either.”
This was a tightrope. He couldn’t show any weakness, but he wasn't sure about what Tankowicz could and could not do. He had eight solid guys in-house tonight. Heavy hitters every one of them, so he just had to hope that his boys could handle this.
In the main bar, the music had stopped before the last of the debris from the door had hit the ground. This was a mercy because whatever the DJ was spinning that night made Roland’s brain hurt. When everyone was looking at him, he casually tossed the doorman into the center of the dance floor where the big goon rolled and skidded limply to a stop. It looked worse than it was. The man had augmented bones and it would take more than a bit of a tumble to hurt him permanently. Roland was just trying to be dramatic. He was oddly comfortable, despite the novelty of the situation. Roland had been in numerous fights all over the galaxy. But these had all been military actions. There was nothing military or strategic about this. He did not have to worry about ammo, supply lines, air support, or squad-level tactics. He didn’t even have a clear mission objective. This was just going to be a brawl. Just a beautiful, simple, uncomplicated, neighborhood-rules street fight.
It felt nice. It felt natural, and the words came easily, “Listen up! I am here to see The Dwarf. That gentleman”—he gestured to the unmoving bulk of the doorman— “did not see fit to facilitate my needs. I assume someone here will be smarter than he was.”
The crowd murmured and several individuals shoved their way to the front of the line. Eight in total, all with the look of professional fighters, wordlessly fanned out to surround Roland in a wide semicircle. The crowd pushed back and away from them as they did it. They had seen this before and everyone there knew how it was going to go down. The eight goons quickly formed a neat skirmish line separating Roland from the back of the house which of course immediately told Roland exactly where he needed to go.
Goddamn amateurs.
Roland smiled at each, “I have been told that if I kill anyone, it will need to be in self defense, so you can all have the first shot for free.” He spread his arms and waited patiently.
One man, tall and lean and sporting two very large pistols in low-slung thigh holsters, spoke first, “Take it easy, Tank...”
Roland raised an eyebrow, “Tank?”
The man smiled, “No one’s got the time to pronounce your last name, buddy. Rodney ain’t sure he wants to talk to you right now, what with how tense you’ve made everybody. Poor Manny is real popular around here. Looks like he’s hurt real bad, too.”
“He’ll live. He should have let me in. Also, he ripped my coat.”
“Was it a nice coat?” Two-Guns asked with a knowing smile.
Roland shrugged, “Not really. But finding my size is hard.”
“I bet,” Two-Guns chuckled. He rested his hands casually on the butts of his pistols, “Why don’t you just talk to me. Outside. And we’ll see if we can
sort out whatever it is you need to talk about with the boss.”
“Sorry pal. Above your pay grade.”
“You really wanna do this, Tank?” Two-Guns looked around with a smirk, “Eight on one?”
“The question is not whether I want to do this, Cowboy. The question is whether or not eight guys are going to be enough to get the job done.”
Roland had not come here to negotiate with a lieutenant. He had been sent to make an example of The Dwarf. He almost felt bad for the guy. Two-Guns was trying to be reasonable, at least.
“Don’t be stupid...” Two-Guns did not sound as confident as he had been a second ago. Back when he thought Roland was trying to bluff. That seemed like a very long time ago, indeed. Because it did not look like Roland was bluffing.
10
Walter Bixby had taken one drink. It was a big one, but he forced himself to stop after the first. His hands were still shaking, but he could not say if it was from want of booze or from the contents of the message he had just received.
He thought about just not going. He could simply ignore the message. He could get absolutely shit-faced drunk right now and no one would suspect he had ever even seen it. He would miss the meeting because he got blackout wasted like he sometimes did, and everyone would chalk it up to Detective Sergeant Bourbon-Breath being the same loser they always knew him to be. Then he could go on like nothing was wrong.
But if he thought that would actually work, he’d be drunk already. He knew it would not work, and so he had taken one healthy slug to fuel his courage. Then he sat.
He sat in his office in the dark and stared at his terminal.
The message was from an old informant of his from his time at The Sprawl. A time when the up-and-coming detective had been making slow but methodical progress putting together a case against a bunch of Uptown movers and shakers who had ties to The Combine. He had been close when IA came looking for a dirty cop, and Walter in his idealism helped them find one. To this day Bixby had serious suspicions about the timing of that, and he had never stopped pulling on those threads.
The message was still open on the screen. It was murderously brief. Just eight little words that represented the culmination of almost ten years of dogged police work. Work no one recognized and no one respected. Work that had cost him his health, his marriage, and his sobriety. The alley behind his office was littered with the remains of burned DataPads over this case, and now that he at last had a good lead, he was almost too scared to pursue it.
I’m like a goddamn dog chasing a car. I have no idea what to do if I ever caught it.
The message awaited still, implacably patient, “I know who they are. Meet me here.”
Beneath that was an address. There was no time given. It was obvious that the time was ‘now.’
The ‘reply’ button awaited his finger. The words ‘on my way’ had already been typed. All he had to do was push the button and go.
Push it, you gutless piece of shit!
Walter let his own self-hatred drive his finger and his reply disappeared down fiber-optic cable and across the air as digital signals where he had no hope of recalling it. He deleted the message and then removed his terminal’s storage cell. He then formatted the device and burned its remaining memory. There was no turning back, now.
It’s done. Now get up and do this!
Walter stood and immediately swayed precariously as he went lightheaded for a moment. He steadied himself on the desk, took another long look at his mostly empty bourbon bottle, and then stepped toward the door. He grabbed his brown coat from the same rack as his dusty tac vest and slipped the storage cell into the inside pocket. Then with a heavy sigh he left his office for the crowded streets of a Dockside Saturday night.
Walter pinged for a ride and waited impatiently for the nine minutes it took for one to show up. He sighed with relief when he saw that it was a driverless model. That meant one less person who knew where he was going. He pulled out his police-issued emergency transceiver and spoofed the cars location transponder as soon as the door closed. Now anyone who ran the car’s logs would find only uninteresting static for this ride. It was a lonely feeling. No one would ever find out where Walter Bixby had gone if he never came back.
Best not to think like that.
The car pulled out into the street and began the trek across Dockside to the address in the message. Twenty minutes later it pulled into a train yard and meandered across the tramlines to stop in front of a cargo tram maintenance building.
The location was not selected at random. The trams ran all night, but the AI-driven machines needed no light and no human operators, so the back side of the station was remote and pitch dark to hide them from prying eyes. Charging stations fed by dozens of crisscrossing overhead cables hummed and buzzed, creating a high-voltage Farraday cage around them eliminating the risk of exposure to high-tech remote spying devices. Trams roared and crashed constantly up and down the three dozen separate tracks and switching stations, creating a background of low-frequency white noise that would render all but the most sophisticated listening devices entirely useless.
It was a place seemingly purpose built for secret meetings. Walter Bixby could not have picked a better spot to meet if he had tried. He ordered the car to wait for him, unsure if any service would come out here on a ping if he let it leave. It would cost a fortune, but it was almost a mile to the street if he had to walk out and he was not interested in that much exercise tonight. He had enough to worry about without sweating his ride home.
He stood in the dark beside his car and watched the fare charge climb while he waited for his informant to show himself. He figured the mole was already there and just watching to make sure Walter was alone. Snitches were nervous folk, and justifiably so. Most never lived to see gray hair.
Five minutes stretched into ten, and the fare kept climbing. Ten minutes became twenty, then thirty. The fare ceased to bother Walter at that point.
Where is he?
It was one thing to be cautious, and quite another to be excessively late.
The scrape of shoes on concrete made Walter jump. He whirled clumsily to see who had made the noise. Since he had been prepared to find the thin scruffy face of his snitch, the stern clean-shaven countenance of this man came as quite a shock once the reedy light from faraway street lamps threw enough illumination against the skin to make it visible.
“Who are you?” the cop stammered, confusion muddling his question into an inaudible murmur lost within the roar of passing trains. The man before him stopped about five feet away from Walter and smiled. The face was youthful and handsome. He wore a nice tailored suit and had the build of man who got quite a bit of exercise.
“Detective Bixby?”
“Who wants to know?” Walter had recovered from his shock enough to find his voice again.
“Billy ain’t gonna make it tonight. He suffered an unfortunate accident on the way over.”
Walter’s heart leapt into his throat, “I see. Are you the accident?”
The man’s lip curled into a smirk, “I was certainly unfortunate, yes.”
“So why am I still alive?”
“Detective. Please. Don’t insult me. You are alive because I gotta find out how much you've figured out and who you’ve told. How do you wanna do this?”
Walter should have been panicking. He should have been terrified. But strangely, he was almost relieved.
He smiled sadly, “You got a name, hitter?”
“Roger Dawkins, if knowing it makes you feel better.”
“Well Roger,” Walter was relaxed and calm. His hands weren’t shaking for the first time in months, “You mind if I have a drink?”
“Suit yourself. As long as you start talking.”
“How are you going to do it?” Walter fumbled in his coat for his flask.
Roger laughed, “Fearless fuck, ain’t ya? I’m gonna break half your bones, crush your skull and dump you on the tracks.”
Walter no
dded, still searching, “No club, so I guess you’re souped up pretty good, huh? Well I gotta admit it’s a good plan. I’m a drunk. People will believe I wandered in front of a train and got hit. As long as no one asks why I was out here in the first place, it should be a pretty clean job.”
“No one’s gonna ask shit.” Roger was enjoying himself, Walter could tell.
“Of course they won’t, it’s Dockside. Ah, here it is!”
Walter drew his Taurus and fired.
He was a fat man, and he was a drunk. But he was a crack pistol shot and he kept his weapon like most men kept a mistress. The bead drilled a hole in Roger’s suit dead center on his expensive silk tie, but did not penetrate.
Worth a shot, Walter mused as his enemy moved.
Dawkins charged and Walter kept firing, walking his hits up Roger’s torso trying to get a head shot. His fourth bead creased Roger’s neck and started a nasty leaking cut, but the augmented hitman was on him by then. A fist like a wrecking ball shattered two of Walter’s ribs and icicles of pain stabbed his chest in a dozen places. Another fist came down for his head but Walter sacrificed the bones of his left arm to spare himself from a killing blow. A kick hurled Walter ten feet backwards and smashed his back against the platform. The pieces of broken rib ground against each other and tore a scream of purest agony from the wounded detective. Consciousness began to fade into a hazy gray cloud for Walter. He heard Roger Dawkins swearing vehemently and griping about his suit being ruined. The voice was hollow and distant but getting louder and closer all the same.
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