Shadowrun: Shaken: No Job Too Small

by Russell Zimmerman

  “You ain’t even talking to us, you silly dick!” I told myself she meant it as slang for ‘detective,’ even as Skip kept going. “Best. Recording. Ever!”

  Trace fought a little grin, giving the commlink a playful wink. “Sorry, Jimmy. If you’re getting this, it means you called us while we’re working with Chase.”

  Fuck.

  Chase: Errant Knight. The bounty-hunting tridshow, so-called reality tv, sponsored by Ares, along with every piece of gear the titular star used. He was in town, shooting a new season. Skip and Trace had gotten the hook-up, were on-location with him, doing Zeus-knows-what in Zeus-knows-where in the Sprawl, shooting up bad guys with camera drones recording the whole thing.

  Dammit. Dammit.

  “See you later, Jimmy. Leave a message, I guess?” Trace gave me a smile and a finger-wiggling wave, Skip pointed, still laughing, almost crying from it.

  “But we ain’t gonna check it, ’cause we’re busy bein’ famous! Sucker!” Skip snuck in one last shout before I got a pre-message beep.

  I floored it, taking out my frustration on the gas pedal as I sent a mental command to hang up my headware phone. In old movies—the black and white things my cyberoptics make life look like—they always had these huge telephones with big, blocky handsets. They got to slam them down when they were pissed, got to break stuff with ’em if they were pissed enough. Me, I just got to think real hard to end a shitty call. I was missing out.

  Born in the wrong century, that’s me.

  The Ford’s big front-end snarled my frustration as I pulled onto the on-ramp and transitioned my Transys over to evening traffic reports. I wasn’t in the mood to get snarled up in some go-gang bullshit, taking stray shots as packs of bikers fought over stretches of highway. The coast was clear, looked like, so I kept the pedal down—it made me feel better, sue me—and headed toward Puyallup.

  I had other resources, other connections, other folks who could crack a commlink and share juicy files with me. I liked Skip and Trace, but that didn’t mean I relied on just them.

  I headed toward Sunny Salvo’s.

  CHAPTER 10

  “James,” the voice that greeted me inside Salvo’s was sonorous, deep, powerful. Confident. It wasn’t Enzo, with his brittle pride and hollow, novacoke-fueled swagger I was talking to, no. It was someone with a voice worth listening to.

  Enzo was a bully. This was a man.

  Shit.

  “Don Gianelli.” I took my hat off, but hell if I was bowing or kissing a ring or whatever. “Long time no see.”

  The Don was maybe a dozen years older than me, still fit, still powerful. Salt-and-pepper hair, a neatly-trimmed goatee, a suit that’d pay for my rent for a year. He had Enzo—gaudy Enzo, balding Enzo, smug-faced Enzo—over one shoulder with his little mage, a massive troll in a perfectly tailored suit on his other side.

  “Sit, James, sit,” he’d always called me that, ever since me and Enzo were kids. My dad called me Jimmy. Joseph Gianelli, an up-and-coming crime boss, Enzo’s uncle had always called me James, like I was an adult.

  Ari’s mental link let me know the troll was hiding power. Real power. He was an adept, she told me, and one with more raw Talent than Uranus. I couldn’t counterspell a physical adept. I definitely couldn’t take one in a fight.

  Uranus leaned in to whisper to Enzo about Ariana’s protective hovering on the Astral, Enzo leaned in to whisper to his uncle, and the Don waved him away. He wasn’t stupid. He knew. He knew what she was, how she worked. He was an educated man. A Don.

  “James, we need to have a talk.”

  There was no greasy slab of pizza, no sniveling Salvo Junior who’d been browbeaten into opening his kid’s restaurant to the mob, no obviously threatening Mafia men at my back to intimidate me. Joseph Gianelli didn’t need the cheap tricks, didn’t sit down at tables covered in children’s food, didn’t let Salvo keep the silly robots and AR-gaudiness powered up when he was here.

  “My nephew tells me there’ve been some problems lately, James.”

  Enzo gave me a smug look, lip curling a little, confident now that his uncle was here.

  All I could think of at that moment was a game, maybe thirty years ago, when he and I were neighbor kids. His old man, Joseph’s brother, was locked up in McMillin. My old man was lead hack there, watching over him. In those days, half of Puyallup was like our street; correctional officers and their families all crammed in next to the white-collar crooks’ blood, getting along pretty okay. Seven, eight, maybe ten years old, me and Enzo played street ball. Enzo was a bully, even then. He liked to pitch, since it meant everyone was looking at him.

  I remembered Joseph, his uncle, fast-tracked toward an MBA, standing on one side of the street with the crooks and their kin. Slick hair, fast car, sharp clothes, always with a gorgeous dame. I remembered my old man, strong jaw, buzz-cut, lines in his face, standing across the street, staring down Joe instead of watching the game.

  Enzo kept pitching inside, trying to push batters back off the plate. High and inside, snickering when they flinched or laughing out loud if he got sloppy and hit ’em. He’d take a walk, he’d give up a base, just to hit someone. Even as a kid. Fucking Enzo.

  “No problems, Don.” I shrugged, refusing to be afraid, and not just ’cause Ari was close. “A little mojo test, that’s all. Order of Merlyn taking a swing at my club, is all. You know how brotherhoods can be. No harm, no foul, though.”

  “Not that, James. What led up to that, what came before that. The matter of that little man’s debt, and our right to collect it. The misunderstanding with the Sleeping Tiger, Kenran-Kai’s little massage parlor.”

  Bunraku parlor, actually. Whorehouse. Nightmare factory, where girls were cybernetically implanted, forced to work as prostitutes, memory-wiped and personality-overriden day and night. Enzo’d wanted to keep it after we shut it down. I hadn’t let him, because I’d had to trade it to save a little girl.

  “And the troubles before that,” the Don kept going, waving a thin cigarillo—that’s right, Enzo, tell your fucking uncle he can’t smoke in this joint, I dare you—airily. “The two disloyal men you decided to go after yourself, instead of reporting to him. Clashes with the law where you may have been involved. Minor rackets, some of them with men associated with us, that you put a stop to in recent years.

  “It’s about rispetto, that’s all. It’s a matter of respect.”

  “I respect you, Don.” I respect that you’ve got a small army you can call up. I respect that you could have me killed just about any time you wanted to. I respect that you’d burn down half of Puyallup to do it, that you could burn down the other half if you were stupid enough to go to war with the Kenran-Kai, that you could disrupt the delicate balance of power in my home city with an errant wave of your hand.

  “Do you respect my nephew? My Capo?”

  I remembered Enzo whipping that ball at me, trying to embarrass me in front of his uncle, that gorgeous girl on his arm, my dad, my block. Trying to scare me off the plate right outside of my own home. I remembered taking my swing, leaning outside to get distance, putting my whole body into it. I remembered the crack of the bat, and that line drive I sent right down Enzo’s throat. I remembered how he cried at the bloody nose, how my old man had smiled—smiled!—and then gone back inside, satisfied with the day’s game, win or lose.

  “I respect you, Don.”

  “You see that? The fucking balls on this guy, Uncle Joe? What’d I te—”

  The Don silenced him with a little glare, a flick of his eyes, a small shake of his head. Enzo went red-faced, flushed to the top of his balding head, and I wondered if years of Sunny Salvo’s shitty pizza might do him in, right then and there.

  “I appreciate your honesty, James, but you can see how an answer like that doesn’t comfort me. It doesn’t make me feel like this is a conversation we’ll never need to have again, you understand? It doesn’t let me feel like this is a problem that’s been solved in any meaningful way, that I ca
n go back to my home and sleep well tonight, knowing you won’t keep being a pebble in our shoe, here in Puyallup.”

  “Sorry?”

  Not sorry.

  “I’ve known you a long time. Just like I knew your father. He was a good man. You’re a good man. You’ve done some good work for this neighborhood. You don’t play favorites. I know that. Don’t make me regret it, James. Don’t make me think word’s getting out that we’re going easy on you.”

  I wasn’t going to make a promise I knew I’d break. I just stayed quiet. He gave me a long look, and right as Enzo seemed like he was either gonna have an aneurism or speak out of turn, the Don started talking again.

  “So tell me, James. What brought you here tonight? After the recent unpleasantness, after knowing my nephew’s upset with you, what made you come here?”

  “I came here to ask a favor.”

  Enzo nearly had a stroke. Uranus gawked. The Don held it in for a second before shaking his head, breathing sweet, cherry-smelling smoke at me, and loosing a smile that could cut glass.

  “Get out of here before I have you killed.”

  I stood up. Enzo paled. Uranus started whispering—Latin, no doubt—and the troll shifted his weight just a little bit, reached up with one big hand and silently took off his glasses.

  I thought about it. About calling down Ariana like an angry god, about making a play. I thought about responding to the threat with violence, about seeing how quickly I could get my Colt, thought about if it’d be faster to grab the untouched wine glass between us, break it on the edge of the table, and go for the side of the Don’s throat. I wondered how fast the troll was. I wondered if it would be a good way to die, if it would help Puyallup, or just leave her open to the Yakuza and the Mafia counter-push.

  I smiled and reached for my hat.

  “Sure thing, Don Gianelli.” I smiled at Enzo; trying to make it wolfish, trying to make it a promise. “See you ’round, Enzo.”

  “You mean ‘Capo Gianelli,’ you fuckin’ prick,” he called after me, all dignity and gravitas.

  CHAPTER 11

  When I got out front, the Ford’s tires were slashed and the two doormen—same mooks as earlier—were elbowing each other and giggling like they’d pulled off a Sunday school prank. The Don did have Matrix support. If he had someone slick enough to get past my car’s security so it wouldn’t alert me to vandalism, he had someone who could get into this second-rate commlink without breaking a sweat. He had someone, he wanted me to know he had someone who could give me what I wanted. He had to know I didn’t want muscle—couldn’t ask for muscle after the Sleeping Tiger fuck-up—and he knew I’d never ask Uranus for magical help. He knew I’d been there looking for a tech-geek, and he knew he’d show me that he had one.

  I didn’t give the pricks the satisfaction of looking pissed off. I whistled a jaunty little tune as I climbed into the Ford like nothing was wrong, and drove off, ignoring a half-dozen tire pressure reports as they swarmed over my virtual dash.

  Runflat tires or not, they didn’t really run, you know? I limped along, grimacing, and didn’t even have to whip up my nav-map to know where I had to go next. Black’s was a neighborhood institution, and I’d been there more times than I could count. It had been at the Black Junkyards where I’d first met Turbo Bunny, who’d gone on past me to turn into one of the current shadowrunner greats. It had been at Black’s that we’d worked on my Ford together, put together the Frankenstein monster of a discarded, oversized limo engine and a patrol-modified Ford Americar, halfway as a joke, just out to see what it’d drive like. It had been at the Black Junkyards after a chip-addled tryst—she and I all tangled up, our pile of clothes next to a button that would’ve dropped a fucking car on our fucking heads—that I realized she and I and chips were gonna kill each other someday. It had been at Black’s where we’d first set up our gentle-elves’ agreement to avoid one another, to talk only through the long-suffering owner, Black, or through mutual friends like Hard Exit. Black’s was the only place I could go to fix this monster of a car, and it had great prices anyhow, so Black’s was where I was heading.

  Black wasn’t there this late, though.

  “Hoi,” his sometime assistant grunted as I walked in, a sturdy-looking dwarf with an increasingly shaggy, increasingly wild beard. He had brown hair going gray at the temples and streaking his bushy beard, but dwarves age about like elves do, and he could’ve been anywhere between thirty and fifty. Hardpoint was his name. I knew him. Some of Seattle was starting to know him. He was a rigger, and not a bad one. Maybe no Turbo Bunny—and sure as shit not as easy on the eyes as her—but an up-and-comer, a hot hand with a gun-drone, and as reliable as a shadowrunner could be.

  “Hardpoint,” I nodded. He and I’d chatted a few times, even if we weren’t necessarily friendly. I glanced at the guts of a gun-drone spread across the counter, let out a low whistle at the top-end assault rifle the little vectored-thrust contraption was built around. Ares Alphas weren’t cheap. Upgrading security with cobbled-together ’bots was how he paid Black for getting to use the shop. “How’s biz?”

  He gave a noncommittal grunt again, a little shrug.

  “Good enough. Black isn’t here.”

  I saw a camera drone zipping around, wondered how many more he always had up and running, flying a perpetual perimeter. Of him, or of Black’s? Riggers, man. They kind of weird me out.

  “Yeah, figured. Listen, I got some flats. Need to get good wheels under me again.”

  He tossed his head without really looking up from the half-dismantled drone he was working on, leaned back over his baby, hands working. The dataterminal at the end of the counter already had what I needed pulled up, right size, three of ’em runflats again, but the fourth a standard tire, all of them flagged in the junkyard thanks to their new policy of slapping RFIDs on incoming inventory.

  I smiled and quirked an eyebrow. He was a sharp one, this dwarf.

  “Ari.” She faded into existence next to me. Hardpoint didn’t even look up. Our mental link meant she knew what I was looking for, meant she knew the places in the junkyard to go looking for it. “Easter Egg hunt, okay kiddo? Betcha can’t carry all four at once.”

  “Betcha I can!”

  Mental link or not, deep-down sharp as a whip or not, she was a kid. An excited, eager to please kid.

  “Waffles for supper says nuh-uh,” I gave her a ‘dare-you’ smile.

  She took off.

  Hardpoint hadn’t blinked, just stayed focused on the task at hand. He had a limited amount of time to do his work with Black’s big junkyard inventory and tools, and he focused on it. He worked on one thing at a time, got it done, got it done right. He knew his cars, knew his guns, knew his drones.

  Maybe he knew other electronics.

  “Hey, ’Point.” I leaned on the counter, careful not to touch what he was working on. “I’ve got this commlink…”

  CHAPTER 12

  “Seven Steps to Heaven” woke me up, jangling directly into my inner ear, pointed there by my unflinchingly loyal bastard of an Avalon headware computer. The jazz tune was a favorite of mine, but the version I used for an alarm clock was a terrible rendition of it. It jarred me awake without fail, even though it left me in a lousy mood.

  It was ten in the morning. I had an hour to clean up and check for messages before Hardpoint’s boy was supposed to show up, guaranteed to be able to help me with the codeslinging I’d need. Gentry, the guy was called, and Hardpoint had given my elven ears a sly grin when he’d told me about the hacker. Ariana and I had grabbed waffles on the way home from Black’s. I’d made a few calls after that, checking around to see if anyone knew any reason I shouldn’t trust the kid with a few jobs, but he’d come up pretty clean. Gal, a madam operating out of a high-end Downtown hotel after getting her start in Puyallup, gave him a glowing endorsement. Good enough, I figured, for a commlink and a few security cameras.

  While I slept, Skip and Trace had sent all their contacts, me included
, a few more emails about Chase: Errant Knight, just in case we cared. I’d gotten a parking ticket after all—automatically charged to my SIN, delivered electronically, the wusses—from the campus cops, and Weazely sent me a note too panicked for decent punctuation, unless he’d always typed like that and I’d never noticed. He’d heard about me going to Sunny Salvo’s a couple times, and was worried I’d ratted him out, after all. I messaged him back not to worry about it, and to give Darlene a hug for me.

  I hoped Don Gianelli wasn’t going to kill him to send me some sort of message.

  I started on one of my chalky, chocolatey protein shakes for breakfast, let Ari spruce me up with a couple spells, and fought a yawn. About two minutes early, my Transys chirped with an incoming call from the number Hardpoint had given me. Gentry was pretty punctual, I’d give him that. I glanced down at the small security camera feed that kept an eye on things out front and in my hallway, and didn’t see anything.

  “Kincaid,” I answered, brow furrowed just a little. If he was calling me from traffic halfway across town, since he didn’t seem to be calling me from right out front, my estimation of him went down a little.

  “Nice to meetcha,” the decker gave me a sunny grin, judging by the angle he had his commlink in his hand, and I saw a cloudy sky over his head. “How, uh, how do I get into your building? Stairwell door’s locked, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want me to bust it.”

  The loopy bastard was on the roof.

  “You…ran here?” I gave him a sidelong look a few minutes later, back in my apartment. He was in a color-shifting courier’s bodysuit, armor-lined and glowing with tech logos, the sort of thing loopy bastards who run everywhere wore. He had a poncho on over top of it, at least, giving him a little chem-protection against the rain, and covering—more importantly to him, I’m sure—his cyberdeck from the elements.

  “I run everywhere,” he said, like it was a totally reasonable thing for someone to say in the 2070s, not the 1070s.