Hell, this case was half solved already, right?
FOUR
The next morning I woke up to my headware commlink chiming. My meet with Ms. Johnson had been over for hours, Ari and I had focused and chanted the night away, and then she’d carried me—easily, like a parent hefting a sleepy child—to my messy bed and left me there to sleep off my exhaustion. Everything magical came harder to me, since the vampire attack had left two holes in my neck and a gaping chasm where my power used to be. I wasn’t half the mage I used to be. I wasn’t even close.
I answered on the fourth or fifth ring, trying to shake away dark thoughts and cold memories.
“You ready to go?” Trace popped into my vidphone box, at the corner of my field of vision until a flicker of thought zoomed in, enlarged and centered it.
“With you? Anywhere.” I gave her my brightest smile, and she just snorted and rolled her eyes.
“Well, it’s seven, Kincaid. Skip and I are downstairs, and we’re just waiting on you.”
“I’ll be right down.” She hung up, and I started across the room for my coat and hat. This case was almost in the bag. Ari and I had tracked the girl’s location down to a shithole tenement not ten klicks away, and all that was left was the ugly part; blasting our way in and taking her. Luckily, we were all pretty good at the ugly part. The two of us had gotten a good look at the astral forms of the shadowunners holding her, we’d seen that she was still in one piece, aura bright and clear, and we just needed time to recover and get Skiptrace along for the ride.
Yessirree, the girl was as good as safe, I figured.
Seven in the morning wasn’t a time I saw real often, but the nap had been enough of a help, the Sideways did the rest. I was ready to kick in doors, slay some dragons, and rescue the princess. I hoped the good little corp-girl had learned her lesson and stuck to safer neighborhoods after this, though. Her aura had been roiling with fear and anger when we’d seen her, flaring brightly compared to the muted colors and dispassionate rage of the augmented criminals who’d snatched her right off the street just for sitting in the wrong car.
I chewed three pieces of WhiteBrite on the way over to stay sharp, reassured by Ariana’s upbeat chattering from my passenger seat, by the hum of Trace’s sleek little Suzuki and the snarl of Skip’s big Harley on the road behind me. Seven was a weird time for me to be up, but even moreso for these shadowunners-turned-kidnappers. They’d all be either asleep or exhausted when we rolled up, slow to react when Trace and I went in the front door, quick and lethal. They didn’t have a magician with them, so Ari was our real ace. It’d be a piece of cake.
We parked a block away and Skiptrace climbed into the back of my Americar, then waited in silence as I whistled us up some extra help. The Spirit of Man didn’t get summoned as easily I might have several years ago, but it showed up all the same. I sniffed hard and ignored the taste of blood in my mouth—and Ariana’s look of concern—as I chatted with it out my driver’s side window. It was a miniature street urchin made of Puyallup ash, used condoms, a food wrapper, and a couple used slap-patches, all whipped together from the gutter in the blink of an eye and a rush of power. I told it what I wanted, and it complied; a heartbeat later me, Skip, Trace, and my Ford were easy to overlook. Ariana faded into the astral on her own, and my Americar carried us down the street, the next best thing to invisible.
The spirit’s favor multiplied the usual Puyallup apathy a thousandfold. No one cared enough to pay attention as we parked outside their housing project. People standing not two meters from us glanced away and didn’t notice as we piled out of my car and geared up for an assault. The dealer on the corner didn’t bat an eye as I popped the trunk and grabbed my old Mossberg CMDT, or Trace slung on her Smartgun X, or Skip noisily racked the slide on her big ugly AK-98. The gaudy, childish, pink polymer of her gun was the most feminine thing about her. Ari, who had wheedled her into the colorful purchase some months ago, floated alongside us as we made our way into the building and climbed up the stairs.
I hate the projects. They’re egg cartons full of desperate people who live packed into buildings made of concrete and fear. Gangs run them, drug and BTL slingers run them, addiction runs them. The district can’t afford anything but the most basic of upkeep and maintenance, so they’re lucky to have water, power, and maglocks on their doors. I’ve seen the astral side of prisons—literally—with less fear and frustration soaked into their steel and glass. Life and brightness and magic didn’t come easy in a place like this.
Ariana felt it, her colors muting a little as we got closer to our target. My professors called it “background count.” I called it a pain in the ass. Skip sure as hell didn’t mind, taking point with her augmented muscles, long legs taking steps two and three at a time. Trace didn’t seem to notice, either, of course, but she was as mundane as a loaf of bread, just like her girlfriend. Me, though? Me, clinging to my Talent by the skin of my teeth? I was glad to have my shotgun and Colt with me and not just my wand, and we’ll leave it at that.
When we slunk out of the stairwell on the seventh floor—Trace and I a little out of breath, Skip looking impatient, Ariana just looking sad to be here—we knew something else was wrong, though. We weren’t just being overlooked; the hallway was empty. No chipheads sat on the stained carpet, burning their souls away with better-than-life programs. No punks wrapped in leather and spikes approached to sneer and swagger and revel in the fear they caused. No pushers lounged and waited for fresh marks. No children chased devil rats with dull knives and sharp sticks. No joygirls or pimps prowled and looked for business. No parents hid their younger ones from the eyes of their neighbors, no couples bickered, no tired, old women limped down the hall on their way to serve up slop at a greasy spoon. Puyallup came more alive at night, sure, but even for early morning, even for the building we were in, something was off.
Skip’s combat boot took the door clean off its hinges—I could pick a lock when I had to, and Trace could sure as hell fool a maglock, but we were in a hurry—and we rushed in. Ariana skipped through the wall and manifested in the middle of the room while the muzzles of our guns led the other three of us inside. Then we all hit the brakes. Dammit. Our magical camouflage fell away and a sidelong nod sent my spirit of man scampering back home, even though it technically owed me more favors. I didn’t need it any more. The place was empty.
Or, rather, the place was full of corpses.
We lowered our guns, and I let out a long, low sigh. We’d all seen our share of violence, don’t get me wrong, but this place was a regular charnel house. We cleared it anyways, just making sure, hoping against hope the girl might still be here despite the recent slaughter, but she was gone.
Skiptrace took off. Trace would scour the Matrix for more information and research, do some real digging try to piece together what had happened and why and what to do next. Ari and I stuck around to do the same thing the old fashioned way. Trace got more mileage out of her commlink than I did, but I knew more real-world tricks than her. I’d scour the place for clues and details, and put pieces together until I saw a clearer picture.
Ariana hovered in the middle of the room, and after I nodded at her she cast a handy piece of detection magic. It was a great little spell, and one that’d solved more cases for me than mana blasts and my Colt put together. She cataloged every item in the room, her inhuman voice clear as a bell, rattling off a list of everything in the place, one piece at a time. I half-listened, half-looked around, trusting my cyberaudio suite to record it so I could play it back later if I had to. Lone Star had cut me a raw deal when they’d decided to throw me away, but at least they hadn’t taken their headware back. I shut off the color filter on my optics to make sure I didn’t miss anything, and went to work.
“One hundred sixty-four 9mm shell casings,” she started.
They were hard to miss, and our initial rush had sent more than a few skittering across the floor. Most of the shooting had come from just where we’d stopped, the sid
e of the tiny living room closest to the door. The Sideways parts of my brain counted the cases almost as fast as Ariana did, and found the pattern in their spray easily, comparing it to the pockmarked wall across the room. Three shooters had fired from near the entrance, the fourth up closer, hosing down the opposite side of the room willy-nilly. Terrible groupings, lots of muzzle climb, more misses than hits. Enough had hit, though. Four bodies sprawled out messily on the other side of the room, lending credence to the shooters’ quantity over quality approach.
“—four spent twelve-gauge casings—”
So there’d been some return fire, but not much. There were more bullet holes than just those four shotgun blasts, and no other cases scattered around. I wasn’t surprised, though. Caseless rounds were plenty common, it was really only here in the Barrens you saw much cased ammo any more, after all. Whoever had taken these four out had been using older, cheaper, hardware. It wasn’t a shock that the runners, meanwhile, had opted mostly for caseless stuff. I leaned in close and checked a few of the return-fire bullet holes, guessed them to be from a big pistol not terribly unlike my own Colt. The main shooters, though, who’d won the fight, were poor enough for cased ammo, sloppy enough to leave the casings behind, but cheap enough to take any empty magazines before they left.
Ariana droned on in the background, dispassionately listing items. I nudged with a toe here and there, knowing the bodies had already been disturbed post-mortem to get looted. Three of the shadowrunners had big empty holsters that would fit a fat-framed Browning or, more likely, an Ares Predator. None had credsticks on them.
“—one human digitus secundus mammas severed at the proximal phalanx. One human digitus tertius severed at the proximal phalanx. One human digitus annularis severed at the proximal phalanx...”
The big ork that was the closest to the shooters had gone down missing most of a hand. He was just another razorboy clawing up out of the gutters, but I’d seen him around before. He went by Yard Dawg, and I remembered toasting and cheering with him down at a corner dive during a live broadcast of the Super Brawl. He’d been an up-and-comer three or four years ago. Then a down-and-outer, just like the rest of us.
He hadn’t died pretty. Something sharp, wicked sharp, had come at him low and to his right. He’d been chipped fast enough to try and block, but the blade had swept up, through his hand, and sliced neatly across his throat. He’d popped a cyberspur while he bled out, but never gotten it wet. The razorboy’d gone down swinging but missing.
Curiously, he had a broken nose that had been crudely taped up, a split lip, a black eye, and some blistering around the cranial injuries that looked like burn marks. Someone had hit him hard and fast and more than once, and done so well before this gunfight, but judging from the size of the wounds the fist had been pretty small. Huh.
“—four software chips, three twelve-gauge shotgun slugs—”
The shotgunner was behind the couch, covered in blood and cushion stuffing from the shredded furniture. He was a weedy little guy, built more like the elven stereotype than I was. He had a half-dozen datajacks high on his left temple, and in their rush his robber-killers had missed some of the chips he’d dropped as he died. I crouched behind the couch with congealed blood under my shoes, staring at their leftovers. Ari’s spell—my spell, technically, but she cast it better than I could—didn’t know exactly what sort of chips they were, but I did. CalFrees, and I recognized the maker’s mark, a tiny logo etched on each of the small gem cases. A couple years ago, I would’ve called it a jackpot. I tried not to think about Turbo Bunny, and made myself think about anything else, instead.
“…two sets of zip ties, severed…”
That made for a timely reminder of what I was really after, and a nice distraction from unpleasant memories. The girl. I was here for the girl. I stalked over to the old-fashioned heating unit. It’s where we’d seen Kyoko hours earlier, aura blazing with anger and fear, tied to it by hard plastic restraints. They were cut now, and the slices that had freed her dug into the cheap metal, too. It was the same blade that had opened up the team’s heavy, I was sure, and it was mono-edged or I’d turn in my license.
I tugged at my pocket and thumbed open my tactical knife, a folding Cougar shortblade. It was a weapon focus—vampire insurance, I called it—but not much of one. I kept it around more for the mundane sharpness than the hint of orichalcum and wisps of enchantment. I held it against the metal pipes and dug in gently, seeing how hard I’d have to press to match, or close to match, the depth of their cut. It was easy as pie, went in without hardly any pressure. Whoever’d cut her free had been careful about it, then. It was like they didn’t want to hurt her, or they didn’t want to damage a package. I shut my Cougar and clipped it back inside my pocket, then paced around the room sucking on a Target while Ariana kept rattling off the room’s contents.
The other two corpses didn’t bear any obvious gang ink—and obvious gang ink was the only kind worth having—either, didn’t wear any patches, didn’t get hits in my own steel-trap memory or ping anything on my facial recognition protocols. They were just some thugs Yard Dawg had picked up to help with a job, looked like. They were chromed up irregularly enough they had money to burn on augmentations, but hadn’t gotten them together like gangers or syndicate soldiers might.
So. The apartment total was one ork, three humans. Dead from a hail of bullets that had to have come from something suppressed—like Trace’s Ingram, or maybe even something smaller—that I figured came from four shooters, two magazines apiece, judging from the patterns in the spent shell casings. And one monoblade, don’t forget. There was very little return fire for a group of professional shooters, and there’d been no signs of forced entry before Skip had knocked on the door herself. That meant they’d been let in, they’d been face-to-face with their killers and close enough that a draw-strike had started it all. A deal gone bad, maybe?
Fuck them, I didn’t care. Where was the girl? I sighed out smoke and flicked my Target away.
“And one cigarette butt,” Ariana said, right on cue. She glared at me for it, but only half-heartedly. I flipped my optics back to muted grayscale, and gave her a tired smile.
“You did real good, kid,” I reached out and tapped her chin gently with a fist, and she dazzled me with her grin. “C’mon. Let’s go get some breakfast, then head back to the office for a bit and see what Trace can dig up.”
“Waffles?” Her eyes lit up, and I gave her a nod. She didn’t need to eat, but she liked to. Waffles were her favorite, and with Ms. Johnson’s certified credstick burning a hole in my pocket, we could afford a treat.
Ariana concentrated for a second, and the stone-sharp edges of her form wavered and softened, her skin tone turned from gleaming bronze to a human tan, her ears shortened to what you’d expect on any other elf. When she wanted to, she could look perfectly metahuman. She didn’t bother most of the time, because she knew Skiptrace and I liked her however she was the most comfortable.
I gallantly offered her my elbow, and she daintily stepped over the spent shell casings as we made our way to the door.
During the drive, I spun up my Transys and sent mental commands to ring up autodial number four. I got ahold of a buddy down at the district Knight Errant office to let him know there’d been a shooting—Phelps cared about as little as I thought he would, but it cheered him up to know their carjackers were dead—and to let him know that if he wanted to spread the word from his desk that I’d done it, he could. No one would actually investigate it, and they’d never press charges, but word of mouth was half my secret to success.
Phelps had been a Lone Star guy back in the day, a coworker of my old man, who’d hopped companies when the Knights took over. Part of why he did well was his long time in the district and local contacts, and part of why his local contacts still liked him was me. He returned the favor, always playing me up with his fellow cops, making sure they knew I was someone they could count on. Four dead shadowrunners wouldn’t hu
rt my rep any, and him letting the department know I was on the trail of the missing girl just added to that rep.
I ate waffles with my imaginary friend, drove back to my doss, and went to sleep for a couple hours. Ari and I still had the ponicorn toy, and unless Trace really came through with a data-search miracle, that was still our best lead.
FIVE
I woke up early that evening feeling frustrated as all hell, with Seven Steps to Heaven jangling away in my inner ear. It was a fantastic jazz tune, but I’d long ago found my least favorite rendition of it—I swear, these mooks butchered the poor thing—and programmed it as the alarm clock in my headware. It didn’t improve my mood any, always waking up to a seminal song getting molested.
Nothing.
It’s what Ari and I had found trying to track down Kyoko again last night. We’d gone through the motions, followed the same rituals, focused on the gleaming plastic ponicorn, chanted in Enochian all through the rite. Nothing. Then we’d tried it again, and a third time before even my stubbornness had given way to the reality of it. Whoever had the girl now had her behind wards, and that meant trouble.
Checking my Transys, I found a datadump from Trace full of several interesting facts, and filed the documents away along with some guesses they led me to. It was a start. The puzzle wasn’t complete, but the pieces were taking shape. She’d gotten somewhere, at least, and I piped her a quick confirmation message and let her know Ari and I were still working.
Then I slung my coat over my rumpled suit, settled my hat on my head, and hit the sidewalk. My real office. My real job.
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