Shadowrun: Shaken: No Job Too Small

by Russell Zimmerman

  A glance showed me where the thickest bundle of wires headed, and the rough-hewn hole in the wall, leading next door, betrayed the scuff of steel on steel to my ears. Tinman. Finally.

  I waited, letting my cyberears do their work while rebooting my smartlink and running antivirus protocols with quick mental commands. The next room was well lit, and the soft whir of recording equipment could be heard. The whisper of static told me the audio gear was live as well.

  “We had an agreement, Tinman.”

  I took a step along the braid of wires, Colt up.

  “Fuck you, Kincaid!”

  “Three little rules, Tinman. Three little rules, and you couldn’t even follow them.”

  A boxy little Cobra submachinegun snaked around the corner at me, held in a tinned-chrome hand. I didn’t duck out of the way and wait it out like I had with his gun-thug’s Cobra down the hall. Instead I put a double-tap into the wall even as his muzzle rounded the corner, earning a grunt of pain from the other side of the drywall and his gun withdrawing.

  “I said no selling to kids.”

  I fired into the plaster again, a little further from the hole, blasting right where my thermoptics showed his heat leaking into the wall.

  I remembered the mother who’d come to me three days ago, asking me to do something about Tinman and his little nest. She told me her son was a good boy—they always do—but that he’d fallen in with a bad crowd—they always do. She had told me he was too young for this sort of thing, but that Tinman’s crew had lent him the money for a ’jack, then charged him ridiculous interest to put him in a deep hole. She told me they’d pushed him into peddling chips at school to pay them back, and when Knight Errant had taken her son away, they hadn’t cared about the rest. She told me how the ork manning the door had beaten her when she’d confronted them. She came to my office, begging, bruised, offering enchiladas and prayers if I could help her. I’d almost stormed the place and killed them right then.

  “I said no snuff.”

  I fired again, methodically, blasting clean through the thin interior wall, putting round after round into him. He had dermal plating, I knew, and who-knows-what other combat augs.

  There was nothing wrong with him enough bullets couldn’t fix, though.

  I remembered the chips my investigation had turned up, the chips I’d had a friend scan—not wanting to slot them, and wanting Skip and Trace to know I wasn’t wanting to slot them—and the way they’d almost turned even her bounty hunter’s stomach. Trace didn’t get green around the gills very easily, and just bouncing through thirty-second intervals of a forty-minute BTL chip, even with all the safety filters churning on her hand-crafted cyberdeck, it had been enough to knock her speechless and grim. She’d just nodded at me instead of going into detail, and her girlfriend, Skip, had wanted to punch me for asking the favor in the first place.

  Tinman and his boys were selling murder-porn, the experience of killing someone, the high of ending an innocent life in tortuous detail. Snuff chips were bad juju. The worst kind of karma out there. They were killing people just for kicks, and then selling the thrill to anyone who wanted to slot the chip. I’d almost stormed the place and killed them right then.

  “And I said no Turbo Bunny.”

  I emptied the rest of the magazine through the wall into him, still slowly walking forward, still cycling through vision modes, smartlink pip dancing over his heat signature as the air filled with plaster dust.

  I remembered my friend, my ex; the girl who’d gotten me into BTL chips all those years ago, and the girl who’d helped me get off them. I remembered seeing her during my three days of stakeout, wanting to shout at her or shoot at her, but instead forcing myself to just watch her come and go on her own. You couldn’t help someone else when they were craving—they had to help themselves. Her sleek racing bike had slowed to a crawl once, come to a full stop a second time, and the third and fourth she’d pulled up to the curb, taken her helmet off, let her hair flow gorgeous and long and elf-perfect, my cybereyes zooming in and leaving no doubt about who she was. She’d stopped, but she’d never gotten off her bike. I’d heard them cat-calling her, seen Tinman out front waving at her, offering her discounts, and then cursing as she’d pulled away. She’d been tempted, but she hadn’t bought anything. It stung that she hadn’t called me. It stung that she’d known to come here, and they’d tried their damnedest to get the claws back in her, despite my warning. I’d almost stormed the place and killed them right then.

  “Three little rules, Tinman. Just three. And you had to fuck up every single one of them.”

  He crawled away from me on his belly, scratching chromed-up arms through a pool of blood, trying to reach the gun he’d dropped. I stepped up and into this last room, their recording studio, and stooped down to pick up his dropped Cobra.

  “No kids. No killing. No Tee-Bee. That was it. All you had to do was follow those three rules, and it was live and let live. I know you paid off Knight Errant. I know you keep the peace in this neighborhood. I know you say you mostly leave folks alone. I know you keep your beetle-heads safe. I know you say you’re just offering folks a distraction, and that even SINless folks’ve got a right to get away every once in a while. I know all that.”

  Tinman rolled over onto his back, groaning, looking up at me from a tiled floor with a drain in the middle. Half his head was shining from a sweat-sheen of fear, the other half gleaming chrome in the hard lights of the room. His metal side—the arm, the leg, half of his face—scraped and skittered on the tiles as he tried to drag himself away, leaking almost as much hydraulic and battery fluid as blood. He’d chromed himself up to look tough, inhuman, intimidating. Now he was just a broken piece of machinery.

  There were lights and cameras all over the room, some of them pulled down by his crawling and tumbling, others still on, still rolling, still recording. This was where they made the movies, this two-bit studio, right here. This is where they killed for fun and profit, where they spent hours and hours making the recordings they pushed on kids and burnouts, making a new generation of psychos and junky chipheads.

  “Three rules, and you couldn’t do it past, what, a month?”

  I leveled the boxy Cobra.

  “Puyallup’s tired of your shit, Tinman. The neighborhood doesn’t want you here. And that means I don’t either.”

  He whimpered something, but I was way beyond listening. I emptied the magazine into him, making sure.

  Sending a message.

  I left all the equipment running as I left, fishing my pack of Targets from inside my coat, letting a smoke hang from my mouth as I stepped over corpses and cables, making my way back outside into the Puyallup ash. A soft rain was falling, and I held onto my smoke, leaned my head back, and peered up into the ash-grey clouds overhead. My cyberoptics flicked from side to side, glancing around at windows, curtains opening, the neighborhood coming back to life, just a little.

  I listened to the rain as I walked down the street to my Ford a few doors down. Ari’s spells slipped away from me, the mild tingle of being cocooned in upkept enhancements ended, and soon she was hovering in the air next to me, moving her legs, even though she wasn’t walking. She was a creature of aether and will, imagination and power, summoned from the metaplane of elemental earth—giving her coppery skin, silver-shining hair, eyes like jewels—but with powers that transcended those of a normal spirit or elemental.

  She was also probably my best friend.

  Ariana spun like a schoolgirl, and made a point of physically manifesting enough to stomp on a small puddle, giggling, whirling.

  The street came alive, bit by bit, just minutes after the last gunshots echoed away. It hadn’t taken me long to recover my empty magazines, make sure the down were down, and saunter outside, but the neighborhood responded quickly, nevertheless. Everyone knew what had been happening in that BTL den, and everyone knew it wouldn’t happen there any more.

  An old ork with wisps of white hair clinging in a semici
rcle over his ears gave me a one-tusked nod from a stoop. A towheaded little girl gaped and waved at Ariana with her secondhand dolly’s little plastic arm, then ducked shyly back from her window. Someone turned their radio back on, filling the street with music instead of gunfire. Mrs. Ramirez appeared on the sidewalk after a few moments, hurrying against the rain as she left a warm tray on the hood of my car.

  I allowed myself a smile, willed some of the street’s life energy into my control, and squinted down at the end of my cigarette. The cherry smoldered to life, and for once no wave of exhaustion followed even this minor spell. Ari beamed at me. The streets were life. Life was power. Power was magic.

  I waved at Mrs. Ramirez before picking up the tray of enchiladas and sliding a few days’ worth of supper onto the passenger seat of my big Ford. Ari drifted soundlessly through the side of the car and into the back seat, and then we drove off.

  Simple as that. No one would call Knight Errant for Tinman and his crew. The footage might show up on the Matrix somewhere, though, posted in dark corners that the cops didn’t care about, and all the right people would learn all the right things from it.

  Puyallup is bad enough already. The locals don’t want any more of your trouble here. And if you’re too naughty, Jimmy Kincaid will pay you a visit.

  CHAPTER 2

  I sucked down a protein shake, lukewarm chocolate and terrible, and reloaded my Colt thanks to the spare 2061 mag in my glove compartment—who ain’t got one?—while cutting across town to my next gig. Story of my life; juggling jobs, balancing responsibilities, making my way from one scraping-by contract to another.

  I let my ugly Ford’s auto-nav system do most of the work while rebooting everything on or in me to make sure I’d completely shaken off that hacker’s nonsense. My Colt was fine, my Transys headware was doing okay, my implanted Corpsman med-system checked out, and—while all those diagnostics were rolling—my Ford dragged me out onto the highway, southbound. I call the north end of Puyallup home, but I had biz with a southie crew.

  Cleaning up Tinman’s band of psychos had been personal as much as professional, but I had bills to pay. Paranormal investigator or not, most of my work was just like your average private dick: snooping on cheating spouses, catching deadbeat parents, supplying video evidence for custody cases. Real glamorous, enlightening stuff. My bread and butter came from standard private eye jobs, spying on folks in entirely legal ways. My magic, no matter how burned out it might be, opened a few other doors for me, too, but that was legit stuff, most of the time. Laying down wards, using a few tricks other guys didn’t have when it came to finding a lost whatever-the-hell, that sort of thing.

  That said? Standard eye-on-the-street work wasn’t all I had to offer (which is good, ’cause any chump with the cred can get a spy drone for pretty cheap these days). I had the neighborhood connections and street cred, legal and otherwise, to also get the occasional bodyguard gig, to be asked to handle block disputes, and—every now and then—the shape of my elven ears got me a job, too.

  I’m not as elfy as some. I never picked up much Sperethiel, I’m not sure how much I buy into this whole ancient culture malarkey, I’ve never visited, or wanted to visit, Tír Tairngire, my ‘promised elven homeland,’ or whatever. That said, there are folks in Puyallup who do buy into it, and buy into it hard. And they’ve got money, mojo, and muscle on their side, enough to rival the big dogs like the Yakuza and Mafia, even. Sometimes it pays to play along, and keep yourself on their good side.

  A body can do worse than having the Ancients in his commlink’s speed dial, is what I’m saying.

  Sure, they’re a little nuts. The all-elf gang, as crazy about their froo-froo fantasy crap as they are their motorcycles, adrenaline junkies one and all, just as likely to knife an ork or troll as look at ’em, a bunch of wannabe Robin Hoods who’ve somehow got half of Seattle all ga-ga over what rebellious bad-boys with hearts of gold they are…they’re not all there, and there’s no doubt about it. But underneath all the leather and chrome, take away the sneering elven supremacy and the gunrunning, and some of ’em—trust me, brother, just some of ’em—are halfway decent guys. What’s more, they’re not all a bunch of Tír-born fascists. Plenty of ’em came up on the same streets I did, and joined Puyallup’s biggest gang to try and give the place a little bit of law. There’s lots of local boys wearing the big, green A.

  One of those halfway decent ones, as it turns out, happens to lead the gang nowadays. Belial, he calls himself, and he’s the Barrens-born bastard of Green Lucifer. Lucy was a real piece of work; he used to head up the crew back in the day, until he fucked off to I-don’t-really-caresville. Psycho. Major hard-on for the elfy stuff. Word is he’s running the whole west coast of their crew, but Seattle don’t really miss him. People feared him instead of respected him.

  It was a gal named Sting, a proper Puyallup brat, born on, raised on, and hard as the streets, that kept Lucifer in check. Sting’s another old-timer, always tried to do right by the neighborhood, and lots of that looks like it rubbed off on the kid. I don’t know if he really buys the elven underdog schtick, looking out for the folks in this pointy-eared ghetto, or if he’s just faking it. If he’s faking it, though, he’s still going through the motions and doing a little good work.

  More importantly, if there’s one outfit that runs the southern half of Puyallup, it’s these elves in black and green. I mostly work further north, closer to the rest of the Sprawl, they mostly stay south-side, closer to the highways that are a smuggler’s lifeline to Tír Tairngire. Our paths don’t cross real often, but a gig’s a gig, and they were offering one.

  Speaking of which? My job today had to do with the Ancients and another band of would-be elven Robin Hoods. Smugglers, too. All-elf, too. Tír-expatriates, too. The Laésa, they’re this more recent outfit. Elven mafia, basically. The shit hit the fan down in Elfy-Land, or rather the shit’s been hitting the fan on and off for a dozen years or so, see, and a whole bunch of Tír-born folks have been coming and going ever since, right? Including, or maybe especially, lots of criminals. Well, just about the most popular safe port for ’em is here, Puyallup. Specifically, the elven ghetto, Tarislar, down-district in the south. That’s long been Ancients’ turf, for that very reason.

  So. Laésa, meet Ancients. Ancients, meet Laésa. Puyallup, meet trouble.

  You can’t have two gangs with the same recruitment base, the same sales pitch, and the same penchant for fast bikes and recreational pharmaceuticals all hanging out right next to each other without expecting a little trouble. They compete over young recruits born here in the neighborhood, over starry-eyed wannabes from elsewhere in the Sprawl, over discontent expatriates roaming up from the Tír, and the cold-blooded politicians that hide spies among them. They compete over lucrative smuggling runs carrying Tír-only drugs and magical components, over the specialized mechanics who soup up their racing rigs, over groupies into pointy ears and youthful rebellion. They compete over damned near everything, the way only siblings can, and just like siblings sometimes things get a little too rowdy, a little too violent. Lately, Tarislar’s been running a little bloody. A bunch of kids who think they’ll live forever get together with swords, fast bikes, and an excuse to pick a fight, and it’s not like it’s a stretch for things to get nasty pretty quick.

  That’s where I come in.

  I’m just right. Elven enough that they trust me, ’cause I fit the requirement to be an Elder Judge Of The Grand Poobah Muckety-Muck Whatever, their so-called ancient traditions and metaracial purity mumbo-jumbo, but not so elven I’m competition, too. I don’t drink the same fancy wines they do, stick to their trendy vegetarian diet, hug trees, race motorcycles. I don’t speak the lingo or recite the poetry, I don’t give two tugs who’s calling themselves Princes down south in Tír Tairngire, and I’ve got no ties to any political faction these two bands of knuckleheads squabble over. I’m just elven enough to count, I’m always happy to keep a pair of syndicates off my back, and their nuyen sp
ends as well as any other client’s does.

  Jimmy Kincaid, impartial judge to turf disputes, trying to keep ’em from getting bloody. That’s me. A chaperone.

  The meet-up was at an old warehouse, torched a while back when some Halloweeners were a little more confident, abandoned as soon as the half-assed insurance investigator shrugged and stopped caring. Most of the roof was still there, more walls than not, but enough of the open sky was visible that their magical elfy hoopla would still be held under the stars and moon, or whatever it was they cared about.

  The place was normally pretty dead, but, man, it was hopping tonight. Ancients and Laésa kids were scattered everywhere, souped-up bikes out front, tricked-out engines howling, chrome flashing, brittle egos sharpening themselves by rubbing against one another. United by their non-conformity, both sides loved black leather and chrome, but there the cosmetic similarities stopped. I tweaked my monochrome filters to compensate, had a little fun with it, just picked up green while keeping everything else black and white.

  The Laésa tended toward monochromatic outfits, anyway. They weren’t quite as uniform as a proper gang, but were fans of white, black, and all the shades of gray in between—who says they don’t fit in here in Puyallup, with our muddy morals and layers of ash everywhere?—while the Ancients were soaked in the acid green they loved—patches, mohawks, glo-strips, bio-tats, flashing bright as an intersection stoplight shouting go, go, go.

  Young bravos did wheelies, stoppies, and who-knows-what-else on nimble little courier-quick bikes, while older toughs, sporting more scars and less smiles, leaned against heavier combat-ready road hogs, wearing less leather and more armor. The vacant lot, rain-slick and ash-slippery, was half-party and half-staredown, the two sides mingling, greens and grays, in a tornado of activity that circled the half-dead warehouse proper. A few prospects had hauled up a keg from somewhere, a few others were competing in augmented reality to DJ for the night, a couple sat down like arm wrestlers to sync up their hardware and get into hacker duels for fun.