Neat

by Russell Zimmerman

  Hard Exit gave me a long look, then nodded. She steered my big Ford down an off-ramp and got ready to tackle the barren, ash-strewn, Puyallup streets. The engine roared.

  “You and Bunny might’ve been bad as all hell for each other,” she drawled at me, catty enough that her Texas twang came out whenever she gossiped a little, especially about a fellow high-and-mighty Jackpointer. “But that girl did wonders for your car.”

  The Americar snarled in agreement as we hit an empty straightaway, and Exit opened it up and let the horses run.

  Ariana squealed in delight and clapped her hands, never mind that on her own she could fly a hundred times this speed. Hard Exit floored it. I smiled a little and rummaged in my coat for my pack of Targets. I whispered under my breath, concentrated, squinted at the tip of the smoke until it flared red, then took a long drag.

  “You and those little spells,” Exit smiled at me, one eye on the road.

  “You know as well as I do, girl,” I let smoke pour from my mouth as I sighed, and I did my best not to think about the vampire, all those years ago. “The little ones are all I got left.”

  THREE

  Gunshots outside woke me up. It was just another Puyallup weekend, nothing headed my way, but it still sat me upright and had me blinking my cybereyes as I scanned the office.

  I can tell dreams from reality because my dreams are in color. I live most of my life in muted sepias or black and white, depending on my mood. Every cyberoptics suite worth the nuyen comes with color filter options, but I’m one of the few that use the things. Every case I’ve gotten, I’ve worked this way, looking at the world without color. I take a break every once in a while, sure, but there’s just something about it that sharpens me, that makes it all feel more fun. Coprocessors and microcomputers work in tandem with the color filter software and allow me to highlight certain objects—of particular importance or particular interest—to be shown in full color, contrasting remarkably with the shades-of-grey background, like Ariana does. But for the most part, only my memories and my astral jaunts are in color, and aren’t dreams somewhere between the two?

  Hard Exit and I had ended the night over Thai take-out from the joint two floors below my office, splitting a bottle of cheap wine. We’d had a short conversation about work, then a longer one about life in general, cases, jobs, that sort of thing. She also gave me a job. Nothing scandalous happened; she and I didn’t have that kind of relationship. We were just two old friends talking work while one of them tried not to sound like a has-been and the other tried not to sound like a shadowy legend.

  Talking to her hurt. Not a sharp pain, but a dull throb. Every time I saw her, I remembered how we met. I thought about the cross-training exercise, Lone Star condescending to some CAS military police, and how wrong it all went. I remembered the beating I took in her place, and the legal fallout that had cost me my badge. The part that hurt, though, was how she felt about the whole thing. How she told herself she owed me something. How she felt sorry for me. Pity aches. It was still a good night, though. It was nice to have a friend I hadn’t conjured.

  Then I’d gallantly seen her to her armored cab—I half-heartedly offered to pay, but couldn’t have if she’d said yes, as much as drivers charged to come here—and then she was gone. She had work waiting in Denver, she said. She’d look me up next time she was in town, she said. Sure, just let me pick the place next time, I’d said.

  But today was a brand new day. Well, sort of. Four in the afternoon still counted as brand new, right? I clawed my apartment’s refrigerator open to a selection of bottles, more than half of them Sylvan Mist, that fancy Tir-imported water. A few cases had fallen off a truck, someone assured me, and since they didn’t have nuyen to spare I’d taken them as payment for a recent job. It was good water, I guessed. I grabbed a beer instead. The longneck was tall, blonde, and cool. Two outta three ain’t bad, and it went down smooth enough to wake me up for a shower.

  I stood under the spray of the shower until I felt something like metahuman again, and clean clothes finished the job. I’d left my bloody suit strewn around the apartment after Exit had left, but Ariana had cleaned up after me like she always did. There it was, crisp and pressed looking, back to charcoal and pinstripes, waiting for me after I dried off.

  Ariana had even changed my fedora back to normal, and when she manifested halfway through me frying up some soybacon and egg substitute from a carton, I gave her a bright smile. She returned it, dazzling. Pleased that I was pleased, her frustration at last night’s exclusion was long forgotten. She had a fantastic ability to move on. I envied it.

  We chatted while I ate, and she pretended not to have been astrally eavesdropping while Hard Exit and I had talked the night before.

  “So it’s a missing corpkid,” I said, scraping at some congealed faux-egg with my fork. “Likes to go slumming here in Puyallup from time to time, and never made it home after her last little bit of club hopping. The whole thing’s not really Exit’s style, is all. The client’s gonna come by about six and fill me in on everything else. Some corporate security type from Arboritech, wantin’ the girl back.”

  “I hope you find her, boss,” Ariana said, ruby lips turning into a worried frown.

  “I will, kid. I’ve got the best assistant in town, don’t I?” That cheered her up, and I made the smile grow a second later. “And since it’s a job tracking someone down, you know who we’ll probably call in?”

  “Lizzie and Dawn?” The spirit positively beamed. She was no good with street names, sometimes.

  “Call ‘em Skip and Trace, kid,” I grinned back at her. “Or they’ll get mad.”

  Skip and Trace—sometimes just Skiptrace—were partners and, well, partners. An ork razorgirl from Carbanado alongside a hacker gal I’d first met in college, the pair of them were making a name for themselves in the bounty hunting business. Trace, she of the coffee-brown skin and chrome-gleaming headware, was a top-notch data retrieval operator, second to none at playing virtual bloodhound through augmented and virtual reality. Skip knew every ork in Puyallup, it seemed, and half of ’em in the Underground, and she was as nasty in a fight as anyone I knew. The pair of them were also Ariana’s best friends in the world, after her wonderful boss and creator, of course, and even though the three of them made maybe the strangest trio in the whole ’plex, they got along great.

  Me? Not so much. I settled for grudging respect with Skip. She hated that I’d met Trace first, that I’d known her back from our days when she’d tutored me through the Introductory Matrix Searches—MTX201—that I’d needed as part of my Criminal Justice degree. Never mind that nothing had happened, despite those being wild and carefree college days. Skip just didn’t like that I’d known her girl longer than she had. Skip also wasn’t crazy about elves. Skip, specifically, wasn’t a fan of elves that drank too much, or dabbled in things that she—and Hard Exit—thought folks shouldn’t dabble in. Skip had nearly killed me the first time they caught me slotting a chip. Coming up in the shadowrunner crew of some Keebler named Deke meant she was a top-notch shooter, but it came with some baggage.

  Still, the two were some of the best in their biz, and the three of us—four, really, since Ariana did the magical heavy lifting—did good work. We called ourselves consultants, detectives, bodyguards, investigators, bounty hunters, retrieval agents, bail bondsmen. Everything but shadowrunners. Puyallup already had enough of those.

  Ariana used magic effortlessly as I struggled through a Magic Fingers marathon, but between us we got the place cleaned up. I’d kicked the bedroom door shut, we got the dishes under control, and we swept up the incessant Puyallup ash that tracked everywhere. Ari whisked the dust off my desk and a couple of plaques and frames, and I took in my certificates; top of my class at Lone Star Academy, Bachelor’s in Criminal Justice, Bachelor’s and Master’s in Thaumaturgical Applications, printed hardcopies of my investigator’s and magician’s licenses, and—tossed onto the wall just to add quantity to wow the clients, no
t because I expected them to read ’em—my championship certificate from the Seattle Golden Gloves Youth (unaugmented) tournament, circa 2053.

  My headware chirped at me about our security system tracking movement out in the hall, and a second later came a knock on my office door. I heard my client coming before I saw her, but when I did get the view, I stood up from behind my desk without realizing it.

  She was gorgeous. Not the sultry coffee-darkness and curves of Trace, the girl-next-door sweetness Hard Exit mixed with swaggering physicality, the wholly artificial and inhuman beauty of Ariana, or even the augmented, edgy, street-dangerous allure that Skip could exude on a good day. No, she was just stunning. Dressed head to toe in classy black to keep the ash from sullying it too visibly, in an elegant dress that hugged her curves like a sportbike, slit high enough for mobility and to allow a second look at a leg that deserved a third. A custom holster rig was built into her outfit, and a pearl-handled Ares, jewelry as much as a weapon, peeked out at me from her waistline. Her almond-shaped eyes bespoke some Asian ancestry, but she wasn’t dainty or petite, and she wasn’t trying to look it to fit the stereotype. She had curves to die for. Her hair was platinum blonde, even dusted with Puyallup’s soot, and all the least classy parts of me really wanted to confirm that it was a dye-job by checkin’ the old fashioned way.

  “Mr. Kincaid?”

  “Please. Call me Jimmy,” I gave her my best smile. Ariana crossed her arms and vanished in a huff, seeing my aura and reading my mood plain as day.

  “And you may call me Ms. Johnson,” my client said with a polite smile, subdued compare to mine, as she sank into the single chair opposite my desk.

  “Is that really necessary?” I spread my hands and shrugged as casually as I could, disliking the, well, shadowrunner feel of such an obviously fake name.

  “In this instance? Yes. Professionalism is always necessary. I’m not sure what you’ve been told about my assignment for you, but I’m here on behalf of Arboritech, looking for a missing person. Not a cat stuck up a tree.”

  Jeeze. You help a neighborhood kid out once, get a tom down from a high branch so her family can have something to eat that night, and word spreads like you’re some pet retrieval specialist. This dame had a bit of a mouth on her, I’ll give her that.

  “Fine, Ms. Johnson, corporate cloak-and-dagger it is.” I emphasized her name a little, then leaned forward in my chair, wishing I’d shaved that week. “My standard rates are—”

  “Inconsequential.” One finely-manicured hand waved in my general direction, and she tilted her nose up just a bit. “I’ve been authorized to pay you five thousand nuyen for the retrieval of our employee and certain data currently stored in her headware.”

  Somehow she’d just gotten even prettier, in my eyes. Five thousand could keep the roof over my head for almost half a year, or really help me pay some debts. I’d be able to sling some nuyen to Lone Star for my back-payments on loans, catch up on my dues to the stick-in-the-muds from the Auric Aurora across town, and take the edge off my interest to Khayyam.

  I managed not to let out a low whistle at the princely sum, just as well as I’d managed not to loll my tongue out of my mouth when she leaned forward—neckline dipping, creamy skin contrasting sharply with that black dress—to set a credstick onto my desk. It was an old-fashioned touch. I wondered if she just figured we didn’t have proper wireless networks out here in Puyallup, or what.

  “I trust this will suffice for the duration of the case?” Her eyebrows arched a bit, and the tip of her tongue slid across her lips.

  “Sister, for five grand, I’m all yours for about a month.” And for another peek down that dress, the rest of my life. I wouldn’t touch her credstick, though, not yet. I let it sit. I wasn’t going to take her money until I knew for sure I could take the job. “My…contact was light on the details, though. What else can you tell me?”

  “A girl, one Nishimura Kyoko, has gone missing. She was last seen headed towards the Daisy Chain in this district, as she often did on weekend nights.”

  “This district, maybe, but it ain’t for lack of trying. The Chain’s way down in Tarislar, sister, about as far from here as you can get an’ still call it Puyallup. And it’s deep Ancients or Laésa turf.” The two lawless elf groups changed their minds every couple weeks about which of them ran the popular nightclub. The only thing they both agreed on was that it was theirs, not a Mafia or Yakuza joint. “If she went missing outta the Chain, those elves’re the ones to talk to, not some gumshoe from the wrong end of the district.”

  I owed my clients honesty every time. In this biz, my word was all I had. I wanted her money—hell, I needed her money—but I wasn’t gonna make some missing teen stay missing by lying to a client about what I could and couldn’t do. I got along with those crews alright, but not enough to step on their toes like this. If the girl was mixed up in Ancients or Laésa business, my pointed ears and the half-dozen jobs I’d done for ’em wasn’t gonna get her girl back.

  “She never made it to the Daisy Chain,” Ms. Johnson clarified, uncrossing and recrossing her legs in a way that made her more comfortable on my rickety old chair, but distracted me from business for a couple seconds. “Ms. Nishimura was attacked shortly after her vehicle exited the highway, her boyfriend was shot dead, and she was taken.”

  “Oh.” Oh! I remembered hearing something about a snatch-and-grab shootout the other day, remarkable only because it had happened so close to the District Hall. I’d been scanning the screamsheet headlines while using my optics to snap incriminating evidence for a nasty divorce case. Nasty divorce cases were closer to my norm than this sort of thing. The carjacking had been a little unusual. Violence was second nature here in Puyallup, but most professional crews wouldn’t jack an out-of-towner car that close to Knight Errant’s district office.

  I was on retainer with Mr. Campa, the ork that Puyallup had elected, and I handled wards and miscellaneous thaumaturgical security issues for his offices. Lots of Lon’s council members didn’t need my help, because they were already in the pocket of the Italians or the Japanese, and had mob or Yakuza spellslingers to scratch their backs. I worked for the rest of ’em, the ones who got voted in clean and tried to stay that way. The ones I liked. Someone getting away with a carjacking, kidnapping, and murder right under their noses wasn’t doing any of my District Hall buddies any favors. I also had more than a few contacts in the local precinct, even if not all the cops liked me.

  “So Knight Errant isn’t bein’ helpful enough?” For a legit corp job, hunting a legit corp kid, there was no reason for her not to go to the legit cops. Or try to, at least.

  “In Puyallup?” She smirked at me a bit, and I nodded.

  “Yeah, I figured. Still, I’m legally obligated to remind you to take a missing persons case to them.”

  “I have. They seem to have accomplished nothing since I did exactly that twenty-four hours ago, so I’m exploring other options. Are you able to help me, Mr. Kincaid, or not?”

  “Were you able to bring something like I asked?” I stopped musing and hoped she’d gotten Hard Exit’s call. I might not have to go butt heads with the Knight Errant office, might not have to go snooping around Ancients turf, might be able to handle almost this whole damned case from my office, if she’d been able to bring me…

  “Something of personal significance to Ms. Nishimura, yes.” Johnson reached into her slim purse and hauled out a small toy. My optics tagged it as a yellow and white doll of a cartoonish horse, bright and cheery colors, all shining plastic and rounded edges.

  “It’s a ponicorn,” the corporate executive from Arboritech said very primly. “We recovered it from her company housing. It’s my understanding it was her favorite when she was younger.”

  As ritual links go, you could do worse than someone’s favorite childhood toy. I thanked Ms. Johnson for the help and the credstick, and let her know I’d give her a call if I found anything. These rituals took time, but I hoped to cut out a wh
ole lot of middlemen with that little toy horse she left sitting on my desk straddling a credstick holding half a year’s pay.

  She smelled like vanilla when I held the office door open for her. I kept an eye on her as she sauntered down the hall, watched the street out front to make sure she made it into her coupe okay, then reached for a Target and sank back into my cushioned chair.

  Ariana wasn’t real happy with how I’d looked at my new boss, and she let me know it as soon as Johnson’s BMW had vanished down the street. She wasn’t too pleased with me for lighting up, either—y’ask me, I think her elemental-plane-of-earth self just doesn’t like all that fire and wind I’m inhaling—but whether she was cross with me or not, I knew I had Ari’s help.

  I let her get her grousing out of her system as I spun up my headware Transys and sent Trace a short message, just asking for a routine background check on our missing girl to see if anything of interest came up. There was no reason not to have her working the Matrix angle while Ariana and I worked the magic. I finished my smoke, then nodded at the ponicorn and Ari cooed as she carefully picked it up, the artificial colors of the little toy almost as bright as the artificial colors of my girlish ally.

  We headed into the other room of my dive; not the one with the rumpled mattress where I slept, or the fake-oak desk where I sat for clients, but the one where I got the real work done. Some hoity-toity types, especially Hermetic mages, called this sort of room a sanctum. Shaman preferred terms like medicine lodge. Me, I just thought of it as my library. A library reinforced with wards, shelf-lined walls full of datachips and old hardcopy books, summoning materials, fetish items and curious trinkets, sure, but basically still a library. My own personal brand of magic used whatever worked, and that meant I hoarded this sort of thing.

  Ritual magic can take a lot out of you, and the hard truth was that I didn’t have a whole lot left in me. I still knew what I was doing, though, still knew the tricks of the trade and the formulas and focusing techniques. Ariana supplied the raw mojo, I refined it and guided it, and with a toy that the girl had cared about, had handled and played with and named and loved through her childhood, we’d have a clear link to her.