Tech hadn’t gotten us enough, and magic wasn’t getting us anything new. That left the streets themselves; the living, breathing, secret-holding word of God spread between the thousands of souls who called Puyallup home. Someone had gunned down a foursome of shadowrunners without getting scratched, swiped up a girl and hidden her under magic, and in doing so, had interfered with my case. I’d get the information from Puyallup itself. I knew the place. I knew the people.
I started outside the projects where we’d last spotted her. A pair of metas and a pair of humans had died, and everyone on that floor had been smart enough to keep their heads down and not see a thing. That didn’t mean the whole neighborhood was blind, though, or deaf and dumb. Without a friendly spirit keeping me ignorable, folks knew me, and a few figured out what I was doing here. I went to work.
I bought a scoop of something gray and lumpy from a street vendor just out front, and paid triple what he was charging. I spelled it out to him, asked him to keep an ear out, and moved down the street. The flimsy paper cup of soystew went to a bum, and I told him the same thing and let him know there’d be some synthahol in it if he found anything good to tell me. I flirted with a whore to draw out her pimp, slipped him some scrip, and left him my contact number. A block away, I flashed the credstick to buy a round of soynoodles for everyone huddled under an awning against the rain, expertly scooped up my own bowl with a pair of chopsticks, made nice with the owner and a couple of hungry folks who asked me—warily, at first—what my angle was. Then I did it all over again at a local watering hole, a strip joint full of bored-looking dames with obvious scars and chips slotted mid-dance, a corner store where the local gangers lounged out front in exchange for protection money. I checked with the maintenance crew of the housing project proper, brought them a pair of cheap bottles full of sour liquor to break the ice, drank with them and asked them to spread the word.
Everywhere I went, I showed a little generosity. I dropped my name, I told them I wasn’t a cop, and I asked about the shooting and the girl.
No one knew anything, of course. Not at first. Not face to face. Not in public. Bleary eyes turned hooded, people glanced away, mouths tightened with suspicion, shoulders knotted up. For most, it was pure reflex. They didn’t know a damned thing about it, but they knew Puyallup’s cardinal rule; if you rat someone to the cops, you die. For some there was a little head tilt before they clammed up, a nervous glance around to see who was listening, a narrowing of the eyes that told me they’d heard about the shooting in question. Some of them, I could tell, thought they knew something, or thought they knew someone who might. The same routine followed every tiny bribe, every little prod for info; I left a contact number from one of the half-dozen Trace had set up for me, thanked them for their time, and left before they got spooked.
Everyone’s got a commlink these days. Hell, the bum I’d talked to hours earlier had been dictating into his, about to post a rambling blog post about dragon weddings and mana spikes and alien conspiracies, judging by what I’d overheard as I’d approached. Folks might not’ve wanted to look a mug like me in the eye and talk in public, but when I told them it might save a girl’s life—and more importantly, promised a payday for the info—I knew maybe one in ten would call me back.
I took my time, talking with the streets. I strolled from corner to corner, shop to gin-joint, noodle bar to gambling den, pimp to dealer, then looped back around when enough time had passed that I could expect a different crew of locals. I wiled away the whole evening, and half the night, spending money, drinking with regulars, lighting smokes for people, flirting with hookers and waitresses, ignoring BTL deals right under my nose. Always, always, I reminded them that I wasn’t a cop, that I had nuyen if they had info, and that I was Kincaid, the guy they’d heard of before. I was from here, same as them.
“I was born right over there,” I said a dozen times, or a hundred, nodding to one side. Then the other way, “and I live right down there.”
Exhausted, throat sore from cheap whiskey and talking for hours, I lit up a Target to sooth the scratch with mellow smoke. Outside, feeling a Seattle drizzle roll off my fedora and longcoat, watching it turn the Puyallup ash into slippery scum, I leaned against a gang-tagged wall to check my Transys for new messages.
Several of them said I needed a bigger dick, that they wanted to help me find a hot girl tonight, or that they were exiled Tir Tairngire nobility that needed my SIN so they could transfer me a couple million nuyen for safekeeping. I was impressed. Trace had assigned me this number ten whole hours ago, and only a handful of spam got through. Another six or eight were bullshit, people repeating what I’d let slip about the shooting, telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, desperately trying to earn a payday when they didn’t know anything.
Then one mentioned the Sleeping Tiger bunraku parlor. One mentioned the Blue Dragons, a little wannabe go-gang. Another Tiger mention. More Dragons. Kenran-kai, an anonymous e-mail said, the Yakuza family. A new girl was at the Tiger. I completed a few credit transfers and paid my debts. I had what I needed.
I flicked my smoldering Target into the gutter, nodded to a couple middle-shift hookers as I started walking, and headed to my Ford. I’d heard of the Blue Dragons before. I’d heard of the Sleeping Tiger. It started to maybe make sense. I knew where I had to go for confirmation. I shot Trace a quick message with an address and a note to hurry up, then drove across town.
SIX
Sunny Salvo’s was the bastard child of a pizzeria and an amusement park, a reality-augmented nightmare of flashing lights, garish cartoon characters that burst out at you in 3D, loud arcade games with a lightshow and catchy jangle apiece, and slabs of grease, cheese, and bread that smelled like pizza, but cost like caviar.
Every kid in the neighborhood loved Sunny Salvo’s twenty, twenty-five years ago—back when it’d just been flashing lights and an animatronics display, before this fancy, wireless crap came along—but one kid liked it so much he’d set up shop there. Between the annoying AR with their subroutines and protocols that bypass spam filters, the clanking, whirring, animatronics nightmare that continued to chatter away on the main stage, and all the background noise, it was probably a nightmare to stake out. It proved he didn’t give two tugs about any kids that might be in here when the shit hit his personal fan, mind you, but it was still probably a nightmare for the Knights to try and keep tabs on.
Skip and Trace were waiting out front, trading glares from across the street with the pair of thugs flanking the doors. Ariana hovered astrally behind me and Trace and Skip followed as I strolled up. Backlit by the garish lights of Sunny Salvo’s, the pair loomed even larger in their ill-fitting, dark suits. One was a human trying to get as big as an ork, the other an ork working hard to earn troll status. They both had linebacker’s shoulders that flowed neatly into fat heads, not bothering with anything like a neck, looking like a pair of steroid-abusing bobblehead dolls.
“Where you think you’re going, pal?” The human sneered as I jawed a piece of WhiteBrite.
“What, nobody told you? We’re tonight’s band. Jimmy Kink and the Kinkettes.” I thumbed over my shoulder to the girls and gave it a second before I cracked a grin. I reached up and tilted my fedora back a little so they could get a better look at my face. “It’s me, ya mook. Kincaid. I want to talk to Enzo.”
“Yeah? Well Mr. Gianelli don’t want to talk to you. He’s eatin’.”
That made my smile turn sharp. “Enzo might be eatin’ in there, but Mr. Gianelli sure as hell isn’t. Mr. Giannelli is Enzo’s uncle Joseph. The fuckin’ Don. Mr. Gianelli’s across town in Tacoma right now, having big discussions with big men, making big decisions that might, someday, trickle down to Enzo. And really? Mr. Gianelli wouldn’t be caught dead running a criminal syndicate out of Sunny Fuckin’ Salvo’s.”
I spat my WhiteBrite at the ork’s patent leather shoes and gave the human a brilliant smile. “Now go tell Enzo that Jimmy Kincaid wants to talk to him about some busines
s, okay?”
Enzo and I hadn’t quite been friends these last several years, but we hadn’t quite shot at each other, either. He and I had history, and I hadn’t quite burned down those bridges. We’d grown up in the neighborhood, on and off, him and his ma living here when his dad was inside McMillin, watched over by mine. Back in the day, the neighborhood had been all families of convicts or families of corrections officers. We played stickball in the street instead of killing each other. McMillin wasn’t some ultramax high security gig, it was soft time. There was no malice to it. Enzo and me, we grew up together.
But in the years since then, he’d gotten more and more tangled up in the family business. He’d also gotten erratic, started hitting novacoke pretty hard. Just last year I’d tangled with a couple of his boys as part of a missing persons gig, but they were doing dirty deeds on the side and not giving Enzo his cut, so it seemed like he hadn’t minded too much when they’d both wound up dead. On paper, he was a Mafia soldato and I was something close to a cop; oil and water. In practice, we’d grown up three houses from each other until his old man had finished doing five-to-ten, when my old man had shown him the door and let him out. I hoped that still carried some weight.
The human thug leaned back to poke his head inside. A moment later, the pair of them shared an incredulous look and then hauled the doors open for me. Skip and Trace stayed outside, no doubt doomed to spend the next several minutes shooting down propositions from the pair of mafia torpedoes.
“Hiya, Junior,” I nodded to Salvo’s son, who ran the place now, on my way in. He looked up from wiping down a table and gave me a smile. Enzo saw me, too, but he didn’t smile.
“Jimmy. Good to see ya.” Enzo didn’t really mean it. He also didn’t stand up, instead finally giving me a brittle plastic smile as I got close. His thinning hair was slicked back, and a designer shirt hung open to show off his gold chains and chest hair. His hands were on the stained table, ugly rings flashing on his pinkies. The place was empty except for him and a scrawny, blond kid sitting at his big table next to him.
“Enzo,” I nodded as I took my hat off and tossed it on the table.
“Why you gotta be bustin’ my guys’ balls like that, Jimmy?”
“They were disrespectin’ your uncle, Enzo. They should know better.” I reached for a slab of grease and flour pretending to be pizza.
“You know I’ll make capo soon, Jimmy. Callin’ me Mr. Gianelli is no insult to my Uncle Joe.” He smiled again, this one as slick as his hair.
“Sure, Enzo. Sure. Who’s your friend?” I nodded at the pimply kid. I recognized the symbols on a medallion he wore. I knew what he was, but not exactly who.
“I serve the Order of Merlyn. You may call me Uranus,” the kid said, tilting his chin up a bit to look down his prominent nose at me.
I quirked an eyebrow. Enzo looked a little embarrassed, a little sullen.
“You shittin’ me, Enzo?” I turned my incredulous gaze towards his boss. I knew that particular wiz-gang-turned-Mafia-initiatory-circle used names from mythology and the zodiac, but wow. “Talk about scrapin’ the bottom of the barrel, huh? The Finnigans finally send you an Order of Merlyn advisor, an’ they give you one named asshole?”
“Uranus was the primal Greek lord of all the skies!” His voice cracking, the kid rose from his chair to slap the table, his face turning red. I was worried about his blood pressure. After a bite of pizza, I was a little worried about mine, too.
“He was consort and husband to Gaia, father of the elder gods, the titans!”
“Yeah. I’ve read the books. He also got castrated. You will, too, if you don’t get ‘your anus’ outta here. Enzo, me an’ you gotta talk. Privately.”
Ignoring his continued bluster, I took another bite of cold pizza before giving the kid a flat look, watching as he blinked rapidly at me; a sure sign he was trying to push his sight over to the astral.
I gave it a tick, then watched the blood drain from his face. Don’t get me wrong; most of my astral form was a black hole that vampire had left in my aura, and a good deal of my magic had been taken along with it. But I didn’t forget the things I knew, and one of the first tricks I’d learned was how to manipulate my aura to change my apparent power level. When I worked at it—and I’d been working at it as soon as I saw the punk’s Order of Merlyn medallion—I could look almost as powerful as I’d been at my peak, glowing with Talent like I had at my prime. And, more importantly, hovering just behind me was the radiant astral form of Ariana, shining and inhuman and blazing with more than enough power to destroy Uranus quite easily all by her lonesome.
Enzo nodded for the kid to leave, Uranus skittered out of there like his ass was on fire. In private, Enzo and I could talk ways we couldn’t around ears. Any ears.
“The Sleepin’ Tiger,” I said without preamble, lighting up and kicking my heels onto an empty chair. “Know about it?”
“Sure. Yakuza fuck pad. One of their puppet parlors, a real earner. They keep a small army on-hand, way I hear it.”
He eyed me warily. Enzo wasn’t the brightest bulb around, but he still had good instincts. Even he could tell I was up to something stupid, which should’ve been a warning sign to me.
“I want to hit the place, Enzo. Hit it hard. Get the girls out, send a message.” I couldn’t tell him which girl, couldn’t tell him what message. “I thought you might want a piece. Word is the Yaks have some extra muscle on the streets lately, and I figured maybe working together might be a good idea on this one.”
“You come in here, you spook my associate, you break bread with me without my invitation, and after all, that you want a favor?”
“You really think there’s bread in this?” I cracked a grin as I stubbed out my Target on my—or rather, his—half-eaten slice of pizza.
“Figure of speech,” he said, still half-glaring.
“I’m not askin’ a favor from you, Enzo. I’m offering you one.”
My headware worked its magic, and I paid close attention. It read his posture, expression, pupil dilation, body temperature. Between the chrome in my head and the gut-full of experience I had at this sort of thing, all I had to do was play my cards right and he was mine.
“Hear me out. I don’t want all the girls for myself, just one for a case. The rest, if they want, can turn. Work for you outta that joint in Loveland, or wherever. We tell your Uncle Joe the whole thing was your idea, and you called me in to help, right? The Kenran-kai take a hit, the Gianellis get some new working girls, you look like a good earner. You want to make capo? You gotta show some initiative.”
I’d caught him between hits of novacoke. He licked his lips like he was thirsty, and I knew he was thinking about his next hit as much as he was listening to me. Good. It made him pliable, and when he did take a hit, he’d convince himself this was all the best idea ever.
“Easy deal,” I said, shrugging and looking casual as could be. “I go in, hit their wards, the rest of you storm in and we hit ’em from all sides at once. We clean ’em out, drive off with the girls, torch the place. Any of the skirts that want out of the life get out of the life—on my dime, not yours—and the rest go to work for you instead of the Yaks.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I had the hook in, now I just had to reel a little. I put my feet under me, stood up, and made like I was ready to leave, like I was just going to stroll across town and go do it all by myself, instead, and leave him here eating pizza and getting fatter.
“Hold on now, Jimmy. Let’s work out the details.” He reached across the table to shake my hand instead, pulling me back into the conversation. I talked shop with him while he tugged a popper, a one-shot inhaler, from his pocket. The higher he got, the faster he nodded.
SEVEN
We weren’t hitting the bunraku parlor until four in the morning. They were supposed to close around then, and the smaller the crowd the better. I’d parked in an alley down the street, killed the engine, leaned the seat bac
k, and drank myself into a nap while Ariana sat on overwatch. She liked to look out for me. I wasn’t getting a whole lot of sleep lately. I just dozed off when I could, and hoped the dream-memories weren’t too bright or sharp.
“I’m glad he’s not here because I don’t like him!”
Ari’s sulking voice woke me up.
“Whozzawhat?” I hauled my hat up off my face and tried to figure out what the heck she was talking about.
“Uranus.” She didn’t giggle when she said his name. She didn’t get the joke, which was probably for the best. “That jerk Enzo just drove by and I flew into his stupid van to see if Uranus was with him and he’s not and I’m glad he’s not because I don’t like him.”
“Enzo’s here?” That sat me upright.
“He just drove by and they stopped down the street and Uranus isn’t with him and I’m glad.” Her tone was terribly matter-of-fact. “Because I don’t like him.”
“What’ve you got against the guy?” I smiled at her after getting my seat fixed, then slid out of the car. She flew through the hood and windshield to follow me. Skip and Trace were at the other end of the alley, talking and loading fresh magazines for tonight’s raid. I wasn’t crazy about the Uranus punk, either, of course, but Ari’d really taken a disliking to him.
“He likes air spirits.” She mustered up the words with the disgust a human girl her age might reserve for a detested boy-band. I’d shaped Ariana from earth, not air. Ally spirits or not, certain elemental animosities remained even after being summoned and fully formed.
“Yeah, I thought he seemed the type.” I fought a smile as I reached into my coat pocket for a Target.
“He has a bunch of them bound. I could see them.” She stuck out her ruby-red bottom lip to pout, stark against the grayscale city. Spirits didn’t like being bound, but some mages didn’t care much. It wasn’t a trick I pulled real often. I was different from most folks in my Tradition that way.
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