by Mel Odom
“She’s one of your cousins, too.”
Snakechaser grinned and spread his hands. “Family. You see what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
Hawke nodded, knowing it made sense in Snakechaser’s view of the world. “You interfered with Big Eel’s efforts to get the child.”
“I did. All the way up to tonight. And now my cousin and my littler cousin don’t have to worry about that evil man anymore.” Snakechaser sipped his drink. “A lot of people don’t need to worry about Big Eel anymore. It works out for everybody.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“I’m saying you’re going to need people to do this. Especially if the corps are trying so hard to find her.”
“I’m getting a team together.”
“Who do you have?”
“You, if you’re in.”
Snakechaser nodded. “I’m in. You’re family too, mon ami. A cousin. But whoever else you bring in, they have to have your interests close to their hearts as well. It can’t just be about the nuyen.”
That made Hawke uncomfortable. “It’s not going to be like that. I keep people at a distance. You know that.”
The houngan grinned again. “Sure you do. You keep telling yourself that. You came into my office tonight, stepped right into a mess of troubles I had, and didn’t bat an eye.”
“I batted an eye. I even thought about leaving.”
Snakechaser laughed. “It would have been all right if you did. I was in the astral, ready to lower the kibosh on all of them. You just saved me some effort, is all. If I could have been taken by those people, you don’t need me.” His face grew more serious and the golden eyes brightened. “You need me, and you need more people like me. They’re out there, and you know them. Reach out. There are people who like you.”
For a moment, Hawke remembered Deckard, and the way things had gone at Tang’s. “Not everybody likes me.”
“So don’t ask those people. Problem solved.” The smile returned, and Snakechaser’s gaze held steady. “What are you looking for? Maybe I can help connect you.”
“I’m going to be moving around a lot, using thin SINs, and some big corps are sniffing around trying to find me. First person I’m going to need is someone to watch my back.”
“Muscle.” Snakechaser nodded. “Definitely. Who do you know?”
Hawke hesitated. Runners kind of knew of each other in the shadows, but they didn’t like their names—real or false—jandered around without real reason.
“I’ve worked with Hammer Bresnahan and Franchise Klee. And Twitch Liu. All of ’em are good in a bad spot.”
Snakechaser shook his head. “I know Hammer. He’s good. I’ve heard of Klee. Also good. But I’ve worked with Twitch. She’s fast and lethal, but she can be . . . arbitrary.”
“I know, but I’ve never known anyone whose gun-fu was so strong. I’ve only worked with her once, and she leaves an impression.”
“Good and bad. There’s a reason you’ve only worked with her once.”
“I know. She’s not my first choice.”
“She wouldn’t even be on my list, mon ami.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“I’m not the first person you came to, am I, mon?”
Twitch hauled in the one-man sailboat’s mylar sail with practiced ease, dropping it down the mast to the boom. Wearing only a blue-and-white horizontally striped bikini that accentuated the golden honey of her skin, thin and underweight even for her petite frame, she looked relatively helpless on the four-meter long vessel, but she knew what she was doing. “It’s okay. You can tell me the truth.”
“No, you weren’t.” Hawke had spent sixteen hours tracking the others down, only to receive no joy. He stood on the small plascrete dock above the bobbing Sunfish sailboat and watched Twitch batten the hatches. Being on the dock made him somewhat uneasy, because it shifted underfoot with the incoming tide. Ocean waves slapped against the rocky shoreline only a few minutes away.
Farther inland, the regular beach crew hung out along the shoreline. Fishermen occupied other docks and used multiple rods to troll the sapphire waters. Places where the coastline was too harsh and broken had palm trees and brush growing right up to the edge. A few other sailboats and a couple old cruisers cut through the waves along the horizon.
Negril’s economy was wobbly at best, fluctuating with the slim tourist trade still hanging on and with smugglers delivering goods to Miami and other ports along the CAS. The illegal trade was strictly small-time, but it remained profitable.
Twitch shrugged, and didn’t seem to take offense at Hawke’s admission. “I couldn’t reach a couple other guys.” He was brutally honest. There was no other way to be with Twitch. She could detect a lie effortlessly, and her skills were all natural.
Glancing over her shoulder, Twitch shot him a wry grin. She was Chinese by way of Jamaica, so she looked Asian with her small body, skin tone, and ebony black hair that hung past her shoulders. Even her SIN name, if it truly was so, seemed too big for her. Twitch suited her better than Jessie Liu. But her natural accent was totally unexpected: pure Caribe, mon.
“Hammer’s been busy lately,” she said, “and Franchise got harpooned by Lone Star in Atlanta last week. He’ll get out, but not in time if you need him fast.”
“They were my first picks.”
“They would have been mine, too.” There was no animosity in her words. Twitch always spoke the truth, no matter how bad it got.
“I need someone fast, but I want someone good.”
“Evidently you didn’t want to work with me.”
“I didn’t go to you first. I’m here now. Nobody’s as good at close-in gunfighting as you are.” Hawke paused, wishing she would face him, but not really knowing if that would make this any better. After the last time, he’d never expected to see her again. “You scare me, Twitch. I like a run to go smoothly. With you, that doesn’t always happen.”
“Life is a loose ping-pong ball in a room filled with mousetraps. I hate it when things are too cut and dried. I like to kick loose. Can’t blame me if I like to live in the moment, mon.”
“I can if you get someone killed.”
Her voice tightened then. “I’ve saved people with you, Hawke. No one has ever died because of me.”
So far, Hawke thought. But he didn’t say it because that would have been a full step over the line.
“But you’re here now.” Twitch raked black hair out of her face with her fingers.
“I am.”
Squatting to tie the sail to the boom, making sure she was turned so that he took in all her curves and recognized she was a woman, Twitch smiled up at him. She was a tease, and she knew her small stature put people off guard, and in just that moment of distraction that bordered between lust and guilt, she could kill three men. Hawke had seen her do it with a holdout pistol no bigger than her tiny, closed fist. Just bam bam bam; a rapid syncopation that had ended lives.
Finished with the boat, Twitch picked up a small bag with built-in flotation and reached up to Hawke. He took her petite hand and pulled her onto the dock. She was surprisingly strong and athletic. In addition to being a crack shot, she was an incredible gymnast.
“What’s the run?”
“I’m still working out the parameters.”
“Okay, what’s the payoff?”
“I’m still working on that as well.”
She took a pair of dark sunglasses from her bag and slid them on, then scrunched up her nose at him in a frown. She looked about twelve. Except for the curves. “I gotta be honest, mon. Doesn’t sound like something I’d be interested in, and I ain’t sayin’ that just to drek all over your day.”
“It’s dangerous. Kill teams from two corps, including Aztechnology, are after me. Possibly a third corp involved as well.”
One of Twitch’s eyebrows lifted over the bridge of the sunglasses. “Ooooh, you know how I like danger, mon.” Excitement wiped out the look of disapproval. “Have you t
alked to Jovi about this?”
Jovi was Twitch’s wife and the love of her life. She was a fixer, managing goods—legal and smuggled—and runs. She stayed far back in the shadows, and managed Twitch’s business affairs.
“I did. Otherwise I would have never found you.”
“But you didn’t tell her everything.”
“She’s a fixer. She doesn’t want to know everything. That’s part of her guarantee for anonymity. And part of her protection.”
“Wiz.” Twitch looked up at Hawke. “I suppose we need to leave right away.”
“Chron’s ticking on this one. Every minute makes things just a little more dangerous. And I’ve still got to pick up more people.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Twitch and Jovi kept a small cabin in back of Savann-la-Mar. Standing in front of the bulletproof and soundproof window that pulsed the image of an empty room when viewed from outside, Hawke gazed down the hillside at the sprawl. The metro area was small, and the country’s history still showed in the old lighthouse and the stone-and-mortar fort built sometime in the 18th century.
Most of the houses were older, two-story affairs painted in bright colors. Many had been converted into tourist shops with personal quarters on the second floor. People thronged the narrow streets, gathering around markets and street musicians.
Hawke liked the look of the country and the sprawl, but it wasn’t home.
“So, Hawke.” Jovi’s dulcet voice was educated, but there was no mistaking that she’d been born in the islands. “I didn’t think our paths would cross again. I wasn’t hoping I’d never see you again, mon, but I don’t think I would have minded. Yet here you stand.”
Hawke turned and reached for the tea his nose told him Jovi had carried in with her. The small cup and saucer almost disappeared in his big hands.
Hawke took no insult over the words. Jovi was as straightforward as Twitch. “I didn’t think I’d be here either, but I need her.”
Jovi studied him coolly, without expression. She was a person who studied people like she had all the time in the world. When she had the time. And she never once thought she knew everything about someone. People were constantly a source of interest to her.
Where Twitch was small, Jovi Alexander stood almost one point eight meters tall. Her Jamaican ancestry showed in her long limbs, the kinky hair she cut into a short block style, and her flawless, dark mocha skin. She was careful with her makeup, accentuating her eyes and drawing them out instead of burying them in color. Like Twitch, she was in her late twenties, and liked to flaunt her figure. She wore a yellow and black tiger-striped sun dress that cut high across her rounded thighs and plunged between her modest breasts.
Twitch was in the back bedroom, packing, leaving them a few moments to talk.
“How is she?” Hawke asked.
Jovi flashed him a flirty smile. “She keeps me happy.”
Feeling a little uncomfortable at the deliberate overshare, Hawke sipped his tea. “Congrats on the wedding. I missed that.”
“Null sheen. What we do isn’t exactly socially based. Our wedding was small, just for us. You have a private life.” She raised an arched brow. “I assume?”
Hawke ignored that. “I need to know if she’s solid, Jovi, because the situation I’m getting her into has left a lot of bodies behind already. She’s going to be walking onto a battlefield with me.”
The flirty smile disappeared. Jovi took her own cup of tea to a small loveseat and sat, crossing her legs. Hawke heard the smooth glide of skin. “Sit. We have a few minutes. She has to say goodbye to her guns.”
“You see.” Hawke sat and managed not to spill his tea. “That’s one of the things that worries me.”
Jovi laughed, a delicate tinkling that shouldn’t have come from someone so big. “I can’t imagine you worried.”
“This is what worry looks like on me. After last time, I wasn’t going to work with her again.”
“Yet again, here you are.”
“Because there’s no one else I know who’s as good. I need her, Jovi. I need her to be the best she can be. I don’t want to take her out there just to watch her flame out. Not because she can’t help me do what I want to do, but because she’s special.”
“She is that, mon.”
Hawke waited and watched the woman. His deception suite didn’t pick up any micro expressions, but Jovi was good with lies when she had to be. “I need you to be straight with me.”
“I am.” Sighing sadly, Jovi dipped her tea bag a couple times into the hot water, then took it out of the cup and set it on the saucer’s edge. “She’s solid. She hasn’t been out since the last time she went with you. She knew she had problems, and she knew she needed to work on them. We got some help for her. She’s gained weight, learned to sail, and hasn’t killed anyone since that last run.”
Hawke stepped back through that, realizing the last run he’d used Twitch on had been fifteen months ago. “That’s a long time to go without work.”
“She doesn’t have to worry about the financials. I take care of that. She could take off another year and be just fine. Without me helping out.”
Twitch had never been one to spend credits. She was a minimalist, a trait Hawke understood. Life came with too much baggage. The trick was to get rid of as much of that baggage as possible.
“But she needs the work. She can live here quiet and small with me, spend her mornings out on the salt, but she needs that excitement. Watching her lately has been like watching a caged bird. It ain’t natural for her not to live at least some of her life on the edge.”
Jovi locked eyes with Hawke. “I’ve tried to get her to let go of it. I want her to let go of that life. I’m the only reason she’s stayed here this long. That, and the fact that nobody will take a chance on her.” She bit her lip. “No, that’s not true. There are people who would take her, they’ve come around, but they would use her. She’d be out there on her own.”
“She’s going to be out there on her own with me, and I’ve never been this deep in the drek before. You need to know that.”
“I understand what you’re saying, mon, but the thing is, you bring people back when they’re out there with you.”
Not all of them. Maybe that loss showed on his face, or maybe Jovi just knew the score.
“Not all of them. I know that. I’d be a fool to think there weren’t some losses. But you don’t intentionally leave a chummer out there alone.” Unshed tears showed in Jovi’s eyes. “I have to let her go because she needs this, but I don’t want to. You’re the safest bet I can make, Hawke. Don’t let me be wrong.”
Hawke didn’t know what to say to that, and he was saved from having to say anything when Twitch returned. She wore canvas capris and a flowered top, not looking anything at all like the Twitch he usually knew. A small hat sat at a jaunty angle on her head.
She smiled. “Everybody through talking about the crazy girl, hey?”
“No one said you were crazy.” Jovi frowned. “And I thought we agreed nobody was gonna use that word around here.”
“Hawke wasn’t here for the rules. I thought maybe it might have come up while you were talking.”
“No,” Hawke said.
“When do we leave?”
“I’ve chartered a plane to Miami. I don’t want to wait ’til morning to get out of here.”
“So we can leave right away?”
“Yeah.”
“Good, because sitting around waiting to go would be hard.” Twitch walked over to Jovi, hugged her, and kissed her tenderly. Then she stepped back. “Don’t worry about me while I’m gone.”
“I won’t.” Jovi’s voice cracked only a little. “I never worry about you. Make sure you drop messages.”
“I will.” Twitch walked out of the house, and Hawke spotted some of the old swagger he remembered in the roll of her slim hips. She knew he was watching, but she was thinking more about what lay ahead of them.
Twitch was the only person Hawke
knew who loved the idea of walking into a fight. He put his tea down, nodded a final goodbye to Jovi while trying not to see the tears in her eyes, and followed the gunslinger to his rental car.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Although Flicker couldn’t see exactly what the houngan was doing as he sat at the foot of Rachel Gordon’s hospital bed, she felt some of the power coursing through the room. Or maybe she was only creating the sensation in her mind because the lights overhead dimmed every now and again.
But there was also the shimmery movement in the air around the two of them. Flicker had seen that before when dealing with mages. She didn’t ask questions. Even if Snakechaser chose to answer, she wouldn’t understand how everything he was doing worked.
She didn’t know what to make of the man. She’d never heard of him, and wasn’t versed in voodoo in any way, but Hawke had said he—and she—could trust him with their lives.
At this juncture of everything going on, everyone who got brought into the run was getting trusted with her life.
Flicker had to admit she didn’t like that, and she totally understood what Hawke was getting at when he’d dug in his heels about getting more manpower. Every member added to the crew stripped away another layer of concealment.
It has to be done. She told herself that again and again, till she’d lost track of the number of times. You don’t want to walk around with a target on your back.
That was if she even got to keep walking around at all. There was no guarantee she’d leave their present hideout alive. She had sources out in the world, fixers who watched developments in the corps, and who kept their eyes on the blackboards where runner info flowed like a twisting sewer. Runner intel was corrupt; truth and lies and every mixture between, twisted and turned and inflated and conflated. There was no way to know whether something she found there was even true.
But every now and again, a crumb leaked onto the Matrix that a runner could use. Flicker kept watch, but she was looking forward to getting someone really wiz who could peel back the real secrets on the Matrix. Hawke had promised he knew a guy.
