Pornutopia offered me the Hank Weazely motherlode. He was a simple guy who’d just gotten off work on a payday. Boobs, bacon, and betting. This was Weazely’s kind of place.
I’d called ahead on my way over, talked to Petey Left-Eye, the day manager. Petey’d talked to Three-Tusk out front, and when I parked the Ford and headed for the door, the big orkish bouncer just nodded me through; he knew I was here for work, not sight-seeing, and waived the cover.
I still stopped by the bar and grabbed a drink, though. It wasn’t the tits I was here to look for, or even the wilting breakfast buffet.
“Whiskey. Neat. Whatever you got.”
The bottle-jockey got to work and I scanned the bottles behind him, or rather the mirrored wall just behind the bottles. My Lone Star facial recognition protocols ran, top-end cyberoptics automatically compensating for the bar’s dimness, the distracting light effects around the dancers, the augmented reality overlay that tried to hide a few scars, a few stretch marks, a few second-rate implant marks. I fought against my detail-obsessed Sideways gene-treatment, dragged my data-starved attention away from the clear target, the dancers, and started scanning the customers.
I slid the bartender a rumpled Aztechnology ten-nuyen bill for the drink and waved away any change. Downing the whiskey—less peaty than I was used to, smooth, maybe something Japanese—in one gulp, I held up the shot glass and adjusted the zoom on my optics, angling the glass to scan different parts of the club.
“And there…we…go,” I said to no one in particular; the bartender had wandered away, and Ari was on the Astral, invisible, hovering protectively over the sad-looking waffles at the far end of the buffet line.
I slapped the empty shot glass down and turned on the rickety stool, grinning from ear to ear because there—not huddled against the gambling machines, where I’d figured to find him—was ol’ Hank, sitting by himself in a corner booth near the back. He had his head down the way a loser sometimes did. My headware told me about recent races, and I figured that explained away the assortment of empty glasses in front of him, with just one or two still full.
He was drinking away fear, or trying to.
“Weazely!” I gave him a big smile as I strode over, arms up like I was about to give him a hug.
“Weazely,” he whined, correcting the pronunciation in a way that never made him seem less weaselly. Hank was an unfortunate-looking soul; a little bug-eyed, a little rat-skinny, and with an overbite that didn’t do him any favors in the nickname department.
His defiance ended with the pronunciation proclamation, though; he wasn’t running, and that was a good start.
I settled in next to him, keeping my body between him and the aisle, between him and the doorway beyond. He just shrunk away, turning to put his back to the wall and his face to me.
“What do you want, Jimmy?”
“Money, Hank. Money.”
“Get in line!”
“I’m the first one here. Everyone else lines up behind me.”
“Behind Enzo Gianelli, you mean,” he sniffed, indignant.
It was my turn to be offended.
“You think I’m working for Enzo?”
“Well, yeah, I mean—”
“You think I’m collecting for the fucking Gianellis, Hank?”
“Then…who?”
“Christ, man. I’m here from your old lady. I’m not so hard-up I gotta take straight muscle work from…Hank, seriously. That hurts my feelings.”
I gave him a wounded look, Ari materializing opposite us in the booth, her magical tones subdued, making herself look just like a normal elven woman, and one—thankfully—more clothed than the dancers and drink-girls elsewhere in Pornutopia. She fought a giggle, knowing I was playing a trick on Hank, but not really understanding lies.
“You know what’d make me feel better, Hank?”
“Money.”
“Gold star! I don’t take Enzo’s money for breaking legs, Weazely, but I am collecting an honest paycheck from Darlene. She wants her alimony, I want my cut, you want me to leave you alone.”
“But I don’t have the—”
“You want me to leave you alone and not call Enzo right now on the supercomputer built into my damned face.” I cut him off, looping an elven-long arm around him, dragging him next to me in an affectionate half-hug that could be passed off as a headlock. My voice dropped, taking on darker undertones. “You don’t want me to hold you right here in this booth until Enzo and a few of his guys show up, so that I take their finder’s fee—you know me an’ Enzo go back, you know I could talk him up to a good twenty, maybe twenty-five percent, just on principle—and I collect about four times what Darlene’s offering me.”
“You know me, Weazely. You know that I know how much you owe. I know you threw your whole paycheck on Kobayashi Maru because you thought there was no way any other pony could win. I know you don’t have the money right now, for me or for Enzo, but I know you’d much rather make a deal with me than try to do the same with Enzo fucking Gianelli, right?”
I let him go, looked at him straight in the eyes.
“So, you give me something good. Something I can use, right now. Something worth the hassle of tracking you down, something worth the trouble of me talking to Enzo for you, and something worth Darlene yelling my ear off.”
I scooped up his last full glass, threw it back and looked pointedly toward the door. Gin. Particularly ginny, not my favorite, but it was a free drink and the principle of the thing.
“You give me something I can use, Hank, or we both sit here until a couple Gianelli boys show up.”
CHAPTER 4
It wasn’t great, what Weazely’d given me.
He let me know someone had shot up Tinman’s BTL joint yesterday, and that there might be trouble. He told me about a sure thing—like I’d ever believe him about the friggin’ horses—in a couple upcoming bets. He promised me anything he could ever do from his swing-shift manager position working for city sanitation at Eta. He swore he and Darlene would name their next son after me, or daughter after my sainted mother. He spilled about some office gossip he’d heard, about other gamblers he knew, just in case I wanted to throw them under the bus that was Enzo Gianelli to buy some time. He sang about a district councilman who was a regular at Pornutopia, cheating on his wife.
It wasn’t great, but it was enough. Favor for favor was the law of the land, and he was giving me enough to work with that I could call it worth my time.
Hank Weazely was on a bad track, and he was fixing to end up in a bad place because of it, but hell if I was gonna be the one to serve him up to the Gianellis. He didn’t have the money, so Darlene was gonna have to squeeze blood from a different stone, but I still felt invested. I didn’t have any other hits on my radar, so I headed across town to talk to Enzo. By now word had probably reached him that I was looking for Hank, and word might have even reached him that I’d found him; best to confront the issue head on, be honest. He’d respect that.
When I said hi at the door, his bouncer—the orkish one, rippling with slabs of implanted muscles that made him look like a freakish comic book superhero squeezed into a nice suit vest—punched me in the stomach so hard I threw up on his shoes. I called it a victory, since the Sideways meant I didn’t hurt from it, and since his shoes at least claimed to be Italian leather, and must’ve cost a bundle.
Ari scratched at the walls between the Astral plane and ours, but I spat out a mouthful of half-digested, burned breakfast and waved her away.
Enzo’s human bouncer got in a lick or two, but I was ready and rolled with them. I mostly focused on making sure my hat didn’t fall clean off, holding it on while I took a couple hits. I didn’t put up a real guard, didn’t let myself really fight back, just took the swings as the price of doing business. I let ’em think they hurt me more than they did—more than they could—and then I made ’em work to get me inside, dragging my feet, making them carry me as much as drag me, laughing on the inside as I hea
rd the ork bitch about the puke in his shoe.
Hey, in this business, I take my wins where I can get ’em.
The pair hauled me into Sunny Salvo’s like I was a bad kid ducking my birthday party. Salvo’s was an old neighborhood icon, an anchor of the community, a terrible pizza joint full of arcade games and ancient animatronic cartoon-robot-animal things, all bright lights and overpriced soda, worthless toys paid for by hard-earned tokens, that sort of thing. Sunny Salvo’d been around since me and Enzo grew up together in this very neighborhood, but Enzo Gianelli, nephew to the Seattle Don and the real power behind the family name, had moved into the place and used it as his base of operation for years.
I sat my hat on the table like I’d just been invited over for an early dinner.
“Hi, Enzo,” I reached into a coat pocket—mostly to make his boys jumpy—and fished out a crumpled pack of Targets.
“Don’t you smoke in my joint.” Enzo’s chair was bigger than mine, making him look a little taller. He leaned forward, trying to play it up. “This place is for kids. No smoking.”
I rolled my eyes and put the pack away again. Kids. Right. His, and his army of nieces and nephews and stuff, maybe, but it was hardly a neighborhood joint suitable for family fun, not since the Mafia’d moved in.
“And don’t you ‘hi, Enzo’ me anyway, you prick.” He crossed his arms, forearms veiny from stress and brawn, pinkie rings glinting, the same gold flashing from a series of chains around his neck, tangled in his wooly chest hair, a button or two too many undone on his gaudy silk shirt.
“I’m a Capo now, dammit. A Capo, you understand me? Who the hell do you think you are, Jimmy, doing what you do, then showing up at my place?”
I dabbed at my split lip with a few napkins, giving him a genuine shrug. Maybe I’d actually pushed him too hard lately.
“What’re you pissed about this time, Enzo?”
“What am I…you! The lip on you, Jimmy. That’s what I mean! There’s no respect in you! ‘This time,’ he says! ‘This time,’ because he can’t keep straight the shit I’m mad at him over!”
He wasn’t just ranting to his no-necked doormen, who still flanked me and loomed from behind. His mage was there, too. A pimply-faced punk from the Order of Merlyn. They’d been a street gang a couple decades ago, a wizzer pack, all mages and mage-wannabes for muscle. Over time, they’d been folded into the Finnigan family, who ran the Seattle mob. Enzo here had finally ranked his very own magical advisor, and he’d gotten…
“Uranus, that’s right,” I cut in, talking to myself as much as anyone else. The kid had a scraggly little patch of hair on his chin, hair thinner than Enzo’s, shoulders skinnier than Ariana’s beneath trying-too-hard all black. “How’s biz, kid?”
They all took grandiose names, Merlyns. His hadn’t come with a whole lot of dignity attached. He didn’t answer, just sneered at me.
“Hey! You talk to me, Jimmy, not him. Not my doorman, not my men—yeah, I know Georgie and you had a phone call this morning—you talk to me. Capo Enzo Fucking Gianelli.”
“Okay, so talk, Enzo. What’s on your mind?”
My headware rumbled, tracking medical data about Enzo across my field of vision. He’d been a Novacoke-noser for years, now, and had gotten worse. He’d lost weight from it, looked fitter but less healthy, if you get the distinction. All muscle and energy, now, no smoothing, soothing Italian layer of fat to him any more. No calm. No stillness.
“I’m tired of it, Jimmy. Tired of you. Poking your whole private dick routine into my business, into my uncle’s business. That whole mess with the Sleeping Tiger,” he started.
Yeah, I figured he’d be mad about that. I’d promised him a torched Yakuza sex-den, and a bunch of new working girls poached from the Kenran-Kai, his rival family in the district. He hadn’t quite gotten all of that. Or, uh, any of that.
“And don’t think I forgot about those guys of mine you killed. Paulie and Gino weren’t straight, but they were solid earners.”
I’d killed them—well, Ari and I had—because they’d been kidnapping folks on the side, and not cutting Enzo in. He hadn’t been mad about it at the time, really. I guess it made the laundry list now, though.
“And you might not know it, Jimmy, but I got people at the Spirit Focus. I know about your deal with Toe-mee-zaw-wah. Yeah, that’s right. Ol’ Enzo’s got ears everywhere, pal.”
Tomizawa was Enzo’s opposite, and not just because he ran the local Yakuza. He was older. Smarter. Scarier. He and I had made a deal, and we’d done so, yup, at my favorite joint, the Spirit Focus. It was a nice bar. Tomizawa appreciated the jazz, I appreciated his compromise. Everyone won. Except Enzo, who was apparently still sore about it.
One of his big beefeater doormen put a hand on my shoulder, like I was about to try and scramble out of my chair.
“And last but certainly not least, Jimmy, now I’ve got you jerkin’ me around about Hank friggin’ Weazely, and money he owes me. Lots of money.”
I made a face and tried to shrug—no doin’, it must’ve been the ork that had a paw on my shoulder—like it was no big deal.
“Weazely ain’t bad, and I got a case. A legit one. On the books, PI work. I found him first, and lo, let finders keepers be the law of the land.”
“You sound ridiculous,” Uranus snorted at me.
“No, Jimmy. No! He owes me. I don’t care who hired you, I don’t care why. He borrowed, he bet, he lost. He’s due. He’s overdue. I know you found him at Pornutopia—”
“That sounds ridiculous,” I snorted at him.
“I know you found him there, Jimmy, but you didn’t call me. You know you’re supposed to. You know it’s my neighborhood, you know he owes me, you know people who find people call me.”
“‘Your’ neighborhood?”
I didn’t snort this time, wasn’t being funny. My voice was a little lower, my jawline a little more set.
“This isn’t your neighborhood, Enzo. I’ve lived here longer, I didn’t move here ’cause my dad got pinched, didn’t move away again first chance I got. This is my home, man. I go outside and walk it. Puyallup ain’t fucking yours, and it ain’t just ’cause the Yaks are taking it from you. ‘Your neighborhood,’ Jesus. You work out of a pizza dive with a robot and augmented-reality cartoon sun, Enzo. You ain’t your uncle. You’re never gonna be. And this neighborhood isn’t yours.”
The hand on my shoulder had receded, like the ork was worried about getting hit in whatever thunderbolt from on high was about to strike me down.
“That’s the thing, Jimmy,” Enzo’s voice was soft and mean, the last wave of self-control only just barely keeping him under wraps. “That’s the thing that pisses me off. The disrespect of you. The contempt.”
“Don’t be so contemptible, then, and I’ll sto—”
A big fist cut me off, and while the Sideways meant it didn’t hurt, I saw stars for a second. Ariana whined to come help.
“No,” I said out loud, even though I knew the mental command was enough to force her obedience.
“Yes, Jimmy,” Enzo said, giving me his darkest scowl. “I’m sick of it. The insults, the little jabs, you thinking you’re so damned clever. I remember you making fun of Uranus, too.”
Since I might’ve been about to get shot in the head, I managed not to snicker. Man, was my day turning sour.
“And the Order of Merlyn, loyal allies to the Gianelli family here in Seattle—” Enzo sat up a little straighter, trying to sound official. I can’t take anyone with pinkie rings seriously, though. “—has reason to take offense that that.”
“Hermeta Auric Order of the Aurora member, I challenge thee!”
Uranus loomed from the shadows, pointing at me like he was about to cast Finger of Death or something.
“What?” I blinked.
“I mean, I mean, Hermetic Aurora Order of the Aura member, I chall—”
“Enzo, are you kiddin’ me with this?” I gave the kid’s boss an incredulous look.
&nb
sp; “You know what I mean!” Uranus shrieked, a little spittle flying.
“Listen, kid, I pay my dues to them, sure.” Sometimes. “But I don’t care about some wizard beef, okay? Ease up. The sorting hat says we gotta be enemies, whatever, but don’t try to poison your boss against me over some silly—“
“Do it, Jimmy.” Enzo was dead serious. He must’ve noticed how much of the heavy lifting Ariana did, must’ve decided to test the waters a little bit. He wanted this, wanted to see what I could do. My PeopleWatcher headware ran medical diagnostics on him, checked pupil dilation, heart rate, blood pressure, the full scan. He was serious, and he wasn’t even high. Just angry. Just honest. “You fight this duel thing. This…whatever you wizards do. You do it, I let you out of here.”
“I do it, you halve Hank’s debt, and you gimme twelve hundred nuyen. A grand for his old lady to cover her groceries for a bit, two hundred for me and my trouble.”
“I…” He blinked. “The fuckin’ balls on you, Jimmy.”
“I’ll fight your little wiz-kid here, sure. I’ll pretend to give a damn about my reputation in the magical community, I’ll respond all formal-like to this challenge bullshit, I’ll let you throw him at me to express your grand family displeasure. Whatever. But you know the old saw, Enzo. If you’re good at something, never do it for free. So I ain’t. I’m getting paid.”
“You lose this thing, you might die.”
“I won’t. And if I do, you still cut the debt in half, and you pay Darlene Weazely all twelve hundred.”
“You’re a psycho.”
He didn’t know the half of it.
CHAPTER 5
“I am Uranus. Son of the Order of Merlyn, Initiate of the Second Grade.” He sneered a little, like I was supposed to be impressed. I’ll be honest, though, on the Astral he glowed a lot brighter’n me. “I am a master of the Hermetic arts, trained in the methods of Centering and Divination.”
Why the hell did Enzo never seem to know what was going on, then? His personal Gandalf was supposed to be a diviner, and they still hung out in—ah, whatever. Fine.
Shadowrun: Shaken: No Job Too Small Page 5
