Shadowrun: Shaken: No Job Too Small

by Russell Zimmerman

  Good.

  “You in the wrong place, keeb. You too, halfer. Dandelion District’s North a’here.”

  “I’m not lookin’ for the Elven District, thanks.” I cast ’em a sidelong glance, Sideways and cyberoptics doing their job, counting heads, tracking weapons, scanning for identifying physical characteristics, like distinctive, skull-shaped tattoos.

  “Don’t care what you lookin’ for, keeb. Just sayin’. You found something else, instead.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “You sure you wanna do this?” I took another pull off my beer. Pink sighed.

  The big guy answered by coming in with a big overhand swing of his club, a standard number one strike, right to left, high to low. I swayed to one side and slipped off my stool, letting it sail past me and crack the heavy end of his pool cue onto the bartop, adding a mark and shattering the stick.

  He held the broken pool cue up in front of him like an idiot, looking at it like he’d never hit a thing with another thing before. My beer bottle—alas, poor SoyBud, I knew him, Pinkerton!—smashed across his head a split-second later, just right, high up, clipping the temple just so. The bottle broke, blood flew, and he dropped like he’d been poleaxed.

  “You maybe should’ve brought more guys,” I said to the five that were left.

  Two rushed Pink, three came at me. He planted his short legs against the bar and launched himself backwards, stronger and heavier than he looks. Somehow dwarfs always blindside the rest of us with how powerful they are. Pinkerton barreled into them and soon all three were down on the ground, twisting, biting, grappling, wrestling. In close like that, they’d have no real reach advantage. In close, his broad shoulders and strong grip’d make short work of ’em.

  Which left me mine, natch.

  One threw his stick to distract me, then came in with a punch instead. I let the bent cue clatter off my left arm, then slipped his right straight and stuck my broken beer bottle in his face. He howled and stumbled backwards, clutching his face, and I let him go ’cause his two buddies were coming in hot. I blocked again, clinched for a second, and snuck in a head butt because refs were for the ring, not the barroom. His buddy bowled right into me, heavier than my current dancing partner, and drove me back into the bar itself. My Corpsman let me know there was some structural damage, but I ignored it to get in a good left-right that blasted the big guy back, buying me a little space and all the time in the world to call in my heavy hitter.

  “Ari,” I said, smirking.

  The answer I got was a big right cross that took me off my feet, turned me around, slammed me headfirst into the bar. I started bleeding, my Corpsman started flooding me with pop-ups, and I saw black working in at the edges of my sight. It didn’t—couldn’t—hurt, but I wasn’t really happy, either.

  One ganger’s boot smashed into the back of my knee as I tried to get up, a second one started kicking me in the ribs pretty good. I held onto a leg for dear life, then started twisting. He went down in a tangled mess, but when I went to get up I caught the heavy end of a pool stick across the back of my shoulders.

  I crawled over on top of the one I’d wrenched to the ground, just kept grabbing and twisting whatever I could find, while he did the same and tried to bite me through my thankfully-lined coat. His buddy started jabbing at my ribs with the broken end of his cue, and while it didn’t exactly hurt, it wasn’t a sign of affection, either.

  My left hand snaked down for my wand as I twisted and wiggled for space, and I felt it warm up my hip as I channeled power through it. I reached out with my right and tapped the poking one on his lead leg, my hand swathed in pure mana, the lightest glancing touch turned into a magical assault. The casting took a little something out of me, but he fell backward, his knee broken, so I called it a win.

  With my attention no longer split, and with me still soundly on top, I slammed my grappling partner’s head against the concrete a few times—nothing fancy, no jiu-jitsu or anything, just me with a hand on either side of his head—giving him a bonk, bonk, bonk, until he stopped moving.

  Whew.

  Clambering to my feet, I saw Pink bashing ol’ Glassface over the head with a barstool, his initial two opponents down in a heap. I laughed and shook my head, swiping away my Corpsman biomonitor’s medical warnings, and dusted myself off.

  “Only three each, huh? And to think, you were worried this joint’d be trouble!”

  Then I noticed the switchblade sticking out of my side, staining my shirt and pants a deep, slick red.

  “Oh, fuck.” Pink’s eyes went wide.

  “Amen,” I reached down and plucked it out of me, wincing as the blade scraped bone. It didn’t hurt—clearly—but it felt weird as hell. Like nails on a chalkboard, but inside of you. My Sideways did both of its jobs, clearly showing me exactly how deep the blade had penetrated by scanning it as I threw it away, but also flooding me with a fresh wave of endorphins to keep me from caring too much.

  I barked out a laugh.

  “Well, so much for calling this one my good suit, huh, Pink?”

  “Uh, Jimmy, shouldn’t you maybe oughtta sit down?”

  I shrugged, clambering up onto a fresh barstool and reaching for his beer, miraculously untouched in the fracas.

  “May I?”

  He nodded, I drank. He waited.

  “Jimmy, maybe you should call Ariana, y’know? You’re leakin’ pretty good, pal.”

  “Hah! Fuck me, yeah. Guess I should’ve…done…one sec.”

  I finished the beer, then reached down and tried to focus. It was hard. I hadn’t healed myself in a long time. Hadn’t healed anyone. I’d always had Ari for that. Half of Puyallup’d had Ari for that. Still, if Martin de Vries could do it, I unrealistically insisted to myself, I could do it.

  “Presto change-o, coming right up,” I tried to sound reassuring, but was pretty sure I was screwing that up, Pink just kept watching me bleed out.

  “Cnila,” I muttered, Enochian for blood.

  “Bliors,” I whispered, Enochian for comfort.

  “Fuck.” I cringed, feeling the wound and how quickly my hand went red-wet and warm.

  It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t easy, and it left me almost falling off the stool, but I managed enough of a spell to stop the bleeding.

  “So.” Pink gave me a crabby look, eyes down, watching the half-dozen assholes and not wanting to make eye contact with me. “No Ariana, huh?”

  “Excellent work, detective.”

  “And you just didn’t feel like maybe mentioning that to me, before we walked in here?”

  “No, I did not.” I slid off the stool, twisted a little to test the wound. I felt a bit of a pull, but nothing reopened. My Biomonitor reminded me I should probably get a tetanus shot.

  “You don’t think being down our howitzer is worth mentioning?”

  “Would you’ve come with if I’d said so?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking up, looking pissed, looking hurt that I’d even asked. “I just would’ve liked to know, Jimmy.”

  Oh.

  I looked away first, ’cause I was a shitheel.

  “Hey, assholes.” I kicked one of them over, wingtip to his shoulder, flipping him. “Who’s awake?”

  None of ’em were patched up, and that wasn’t good. That said, it wasn’t unusual for a gang to lay low, comparatively speaking, when Knight Errant put the heat on. You didn’t have to wear your patched-up leathers, but tattoos were forever.

  “Eeny, meeny, miny, yo!”

  I found the one I’d tagged with the skull-tats earlier, a charmer with half his face done up like his skin was missing, red and white ink on tan skin, a bio-tat that probably glowed in the dark because isn’t that charming. He had a broken leg and blood on his hand, probably from stabbing me with what I’d thought was a broken stick, but hadn’t been. I didn’t really like him.

  “You. Yeah, you. Your tat’s not finished, and you’re not packing. That means you’re a probationary m
ember at best. But you do have a prominent skull tattoo, in a joint like this, and no one’s eaten your face off to express dominance. So! That means you’re in, even if you’re at the bottom. Tell me how the Disassemblers work. Tell me where I can find them.”

  “Fuck off, keeb!”

  I threw the empty beer bottle at his twisted leg.

  “I’m in no mood for your shit, pal,” I let a little of my Mentor’s threats slip into my voice, into my sneer, into my blood-slick bad attitude. Pink looked away, busily eyeballing the other punks, making sure no one had a nasty surprise for us.

  “You tell me what I want to know, or I’ll snatch the life right out of you, buddy. One limb at a time, one spell at a time, I’ll do you slow because bigger spells just piss me off, these last dozen years or so. It’ll take a while, but you’ll be dead and stupid instead of alive and stupid.” I stood over him, glaring down, letting the few lights play tricks for me, knowing that nothing works quite like a basic physical domination accompanied by unrelenting psychological warfare. My PeopleWatcher subroutines ran, telling me how scared he was, just in case I was an idiot and couldn’t tell myself.

  “And then I’ll burn this filthy place down with you and this pack of idiots still in it, and I’ll just hang out for a while. One way or the other, I’m finding your gang. You’ve just got to decide if you’re going to tell me, or if I’m going to just jump ’em while they’re having you like fuckin’ barbecue after this place burns to the ground.”

  His fear—his real fear, bone-deep terror—at that prospect confirmed an awful lot of dark, bloody rumors about the Disassemblers. It also added the acrid scent of urine to the room’s already sorely lacking ambience.

  But hell if he didn’t tell us some good stuff.

  CHAPTER 28

  Pinkerton headed his own way afterward. He told me to call when I needed him, but he’d done enough—honestly, he’d done more than enough, if y’ask me—for one day.

  I’d gotten my lead. Now I just had to hunt it down.

  I scraped together enough power for a quick fashion spell, cleaning off the worst of the stains and knitting the hole shut in my suit. It came easier than when I’d healed myself, but not much. I sat in the front of my Ford for a few minutes after that casting, just trying to get an even keel again. Then I went to get some more grub; I was in for a long night.

  I was staking out a drop-box. There were dumpsters all over the city—duh—but some of them served a secondary purpose. Some of them were, in a word, meat lockers. If you didn’t care about freshness or quality, if you weren’t planning to use a corpse for parts whole enough to be sold, if all you were was a bottom-feeder in an organlegging outfit, the guy with the shit job to just dispose of corpses? If all of that was true, you worked the drop-box circuit. You stayed on the bottom rungs of the ladder, you cleaned up after everyone else, and you maintained your organization’s business contacts by providing yet another unsavory service to the criminal underbelly of Seattle.

  If you whacked someone, you could dump the corpse in certain places. Roll up, pop the trunk, toss the body, take off, and it was all taken care of. The Disassemblers and Tamanous would use the parts, if the kill was fresh enough and the organs they were after were in one piece. If not, their ghouls—the scavengers of the scavengers, living garbage disposals—got it. Either way, a valuable criminal service was being offered, the Infected got their meat for a while, and your despicable organization branched out from recycling to waste disposal management.

  This wasn’t my favorite stakeout, no.

  I’d hit up a Stuffer Shack—they were so well stocked up here, outside of Puyallup—for food, WhiteBrite gum, and coffee, and I was just left waiting. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I didn’t have Ariana glowing in the back seat, nattering away at me about cartoons or spell formulae. I didn’t have a line open to Skip and Trace, they weren’t watching from down the street or around the back-end of the alley, ready to help out. Hell, I didn’t even have a head full of messages from Reynolds, demanding status updates and micro-managing like this was a research project; he was leaving me alone, despite days of radio silence, just letting me work, staying out of my way for once. I didn’t have anything except the tug on my spirit that told me Ari was gone, the emptiness where my Mentor’s gifts had been, and the nagging guilt over a dead friend I hadn’t been around to save.

  I squinted, cyberoptics zooming and focusing through the darkness. Movement. The Toyota Elite backed up—slick wheels, high comfort, and a price-point to match, it was a classic luxury sedan—and the trunk popped open. Two guys in suits got out, my TacWhisper cyberaudio went to work. Ah, balls. Korean. They were chatting, probably bitching about working so late, but in a language I didn’t know and didn’t have a slotted linguasoft ready for.

  Yeah, I was recording. Why not? I wasn’t after the dumpers tonight, but you never know when footage of some Seoulpa killers dropping off a corpse might come in handy.

  They barely glanced around, overlooked my grubby Americar with the windows tinted all the way up. Their cargo was bundled up in black garbage bags, and I felt my stomach turn a little. Three bags. Pieces, not a whole body. There was no mistaking the way they hauled it, though, the way they tried to reach and turn and lean to keep anything from hitting their designer suits, the way one of the bags was leaking—zoom, enhance, confirm that it’s blood—and left one killer laughing at the other for the mess he’d made.

  I wanted to grab my Colt. I wanted to just floor it, run ’em down with my Ford. I wanted to let loose Ariana, have her throw lightning from on high like an angry storm goddess.

  I gripped the wheel, instead, lucky gloves creaking against the leather, going white-knuckled as I made myself sit and stew instead of go stop ’em.

  I had a job. The job came first. I couldn’t blow this by running off half-cocked and borrowing trouble. I had enough enemies in sharp suits and fancy cars. I didn’t need, couldn’t afford more. Not when it meant jeopardizing Minirth’s investigation, too.

  They made some sort of call, one commlink out before they were even back in their car, lighting up the alley as they drove away.

  I just had to wait, now. Just had to fill my mouth with WhiteBrite gum and coffee to stay sharp and awake, had to fight the urge to go across the street, knife open some bags, try to identify someone’s missing son or daughter, someone’s husband or wife, someone’s sister or brother. I had to wait, had to see how they handled pickup after getting a call about a delivery. I needed to tag their vehicle, shadow ’em if I thought I could, had to be ready to roll.

  Their pickup came in a pick-up. It was an old Nissan Rebel, covered in rust as much as paint, with an ugly ork standing up in the back, holding onto the roll-bar. Their headlights blasted right at my Americar as they navigated the turn, backed up so the truck-bed was just next to the dumpster.

  I held still and trusted in the tinting and their boredom; this was just a job to them, just like everything everyone ever did was just a job to them, no matter how stupid or evil or risky. They were trash men, doing a crappy job, and this was just another sack of garbage they had to haul from point A to point B. They weren’t alert. They weren’t looking for me, any more than the grousing Seoulpa Ring killers had been.

  The ork didn’t even climb out, just smack-smacked the cab when they were close enough, then leaned and reached. One, two, three, he flung the bags in the back of their truck. He didn’t fidget to try and keep them from leaking on him. He didn’t seem to care.

  Then they rolled out. I scrolled through my headware as I thumbed my Ford to life, looking to see if they bothered with a license plate. No luck—I had to check, though—so I rolled out after them, lights off, staying a half-block back. The big ork sat on the side of the bed now, greasy hair blowing in the breeze, wearing leathers and denim, not a care in the world.

  I kept my distance. I knew how. I’d played this game before. If there’s one thing every private eye needs to be able to do, it’s take a joint
out. If there’s a second, it’s tail someone.

  They hit two other drop-boxes—I flagged ’em in my headware, safe and sound while staying a corner away, a block or so behind, a dark shadow in my grey-and-black Americar, lights off, windows black. I coasted to stops and used the parking brake instead of the pedal, not even wanting the lights to possibly give me away.

  “C’mon.” I tapped anxious fingers on the top of the wheel, “C’mon, c’mon. Make a delivery, you pricks. Show me the next step up your ladder.”

  The Rebel rolled up to one last drop-box. The ork stepped into the dumpster again, one foot in the truck, one in the trash, and rummaged until he found the right bag. Then, once again, flung it carelessly into the back of their Nissan and slung his leg back over, stepping in corpses, high leather boot soaking in murder. All in a night’s work.

  They started rolling again, and the ork leaned forward after another thump-thump on the cab at the next stop sign.

  “That’s it, assholes. Be tired. Be done. Head for home.”

  The ork leaned away from the window again, as I rolled up to the stop sign they’d pulled away from. I glanced at my nav-system to double check our location, then glanced up again, following them. We were solidly on the outskirts of town now, moving into the half-empty industrial districts, the parts of the city that looked like home to me. The dark parts. The dangerous ones. When I looked back up, the ork stood in the back of the truck bed, blocky AK-97 assault rifle pointed at me.

  Shit.

  He started firing just as the driver started racing away. The Kalashnikov chattered away on full auto, spitting lead and lighting up the empty street with muzzle flashes. Sparks flew as his rounds chewed at my armor plating, and I floored it, hit the lights, triggered my high beams. The glare bought me a second as he held up one hand against the lights, and I made the most of it. My Ford’s oversized engine snarled as their rust-heap burned rubber, and the chase was on.