Stealth cranked his head around to look at Braxen. "Most of the kid's blood will be in this lung. He got hit, started bleeding, and ran himself to death."
Braxen nodded but made no notes. He and I both knew that if Stealth-one of the world's experts on innovative means of rival-retirement-pointed it out and it concerned death, he wouldn't be wrong. "What kind of gun?"
Stealth's foot claws grated slightly on the cement as he straightened up again. "Customized rifle. Long barrel to maximize accuracy and muzzle velocity. Good work."
The cruiser's headlights made Braxen's tusks stand out against his swarthy flesh. "You do the work?"
"I'm not a toymaker."
"Wasn't a toy that killed this boy, Stealth."
Stealth shrugged as if to say "have it your own way." He jammed his hands into the pockets of his trench coat and sat back on his haunches. The headlights left him a silhouette except for the reddish light burning in his Zeiss eyes.
I knew from the set of Stealth's shoulders that he wouldn't be saying anything more to Braxen. "Harry, your forensics people will verify what Stealth is saying."'
The ork cop shook his head. "No, they won't. No autopsy for this one." "What are you talking about? It's a suspicious death, isn't it?" I glanced down at Albion's body. "You need an autopsy for your investigation."
"Whatinvestigation, Kies? This kid's got no SIN. He doesn't exist as far as the system is concerned. He isn't even a statistic."
I wanted to grab him, but two things stopped me. The first was the realization that Braxen was absolutely correct. Without a System Identification Number, neither Albion nor any of the other denizens who lurked in the shadows of the sprawl had any official existence. Schools wouldn't take them, hospitals wouldn't treat them, help centers ignored them.
Well I knew, for I myself had grown up without a SIN.
There was no way the system was going to investigate the death of someone like Albion. Had he been an elf or ork or Amerind, his own folk might have taken an interest in him. Lone Star, however, was a private corporation hired to keep the peace in Seattle, not to clean up after some murderer who got careless when dropping his trash.
The second thing that stopped me was Braxen's tone. For all of his being a cop, Harry Braxen wasn't like most of the blue crew. He'd grown up in Seattle and, as an ork, knew all about discrimination and the callousness of the system. He'd known who Albion was the instant he'd seen him, but he had probably called me down to identify the body to get me interested in the case.
"Spill it, Harry. I don't like standing in the rain."
Braxen squatted next to the body and I dropped down beside him. Kid Stealth's shadow hid both of us and Harry kept his voice low enough that only Albion and the Murder Machine could hear us. "Could be this is the fourth body I've seen dropped like this. Two gillettes down by the docks and one dreamchipper up in Bel-mont. She was the first and we got some datafiles on her before they lost her body. Files were dumped." "She have a name?"
"Athena Neon is what I filed her under. She had a neon rose tied with a yellow ribbon tattooed on her butt."
I nodded slowly. "It went down the same way?"
"Identical except for maybe one detail." Braxen reached out and turned Albion's face to the left and then to the right. "Can't tell with him, but the other three had all lost a lock of hair. One of the gillettes was a guy I'd popped the month before. That was how I first noticed it-his rat-tail was missing."
In the back of my mind the Old One-what I call the slice of the Wolf spirit lairing in my psyche-started to growl. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prick up. "No other links?"
Braxen shrugged. "You know that sometimes us cops keep 'hobby cases.' "
"Ones you work on in your spare time, right?" I smiled. "I have a list of women like that."
Harry nodded. "Well, these killings were a hobby case of mine, but my files are gone, just flat vanished. Someone with mondo-juice hit my corner of the Matrix and wiped them out."
I straightened up. "You're going to call a meat wagon for him?"
"Unless you think Salacia and her people want to make arrangements for him." Braxen looked down at the kid as a wind-whipped plastic bag molded itself to Albion's face. "The kid should have stayed where he was safe."
"Amen," I said to that, knowing that to find out what happened to Albion, I'd be going places that weren't even in hailing distance of safe.
II
Stealth and I retreated deeper into the alley as the morgue van arrived. The attendants zipped Albion into a body bag glistening with rain. Harry supervised and handed the driver a card. Then he got into his car and followed the van away, taking his headlights with him and leaving us in the dark.
I turned to Kid Stealth. "He's gone. Give me what you've got because I know you're dying to have me show him up."
Stealth answered me in a flat monotone. "Doc Raven will be back from Tokyo tomorrow night. We can give him the scan, let him decide what to do about this."
"Stealth, let me do some legwork first." I pointed to the place where the rain had begun to darken the lighter outline of Albion's body. "The trail will get cold."
"The killer will be back." The red lights in Stealth's eyes bloated and shrank. "He's a thrill killer."
"What?"
"This is his recreation." Stealth looked at me for a moment, looked away, then nodded. "The bullets you use in your Viper1…"
"Silver, drilled and patched with a silver-nitrate solution to make them explosive."
"Why?"
I hesitated. Kid Stealth hadn't been around during the Full Moon Slashings so he didn't know what Raven and I had run into back then. I'd developed the bullets to deal with that mess and I'd kept using them since, just in case. I sensed in his question, however, not so much a desire to know the history of my bullets as to understand the thinking that went into producing them.
"I had them done that way so they would maximize shock and destruction. Bullets are meant to kill and I wanted mine to do the job well."
Stealth studied me for a moment before answering. "The bullet used on Albion was designed to make him
1The nice thing about carrying around and using a gun as old as the Beretta Viper 14 was that under most current laws, antiques weren't really considered "weapons" for concealment purposes. Me, I never saw the allure of these newfangled guns full of computer components and all. Go ahead, rely on Windows Sniper 4.0 if you want to, but I prefer not to need software patches when I'm in a firefight. die.Back before the Awakening, before magic came back to the world, there were people who would test their hunting skills by using a bow and arrow to take wildlife." Stealth held his hands before him as if visualizing what he was describing. "Bows are uncertain. Because an arrow might not cause enough damage, innovative arrowhead designs were created. One type had three or four razored edges that spiraled around the arrowhead like the edges on a drill-bit. It was called a bleeder and was designed to chew up as much of the animal's insides as it could, while leaving a blood trail for the hunter to follow."
The Old One howled angrily in the back of my mind. "Stealth, you mentioned a stressed copper jacket with a light bullet and light charge. You're saying Albion was shot with the ballistic equivalent of a bleeder?"
"His wound was non-midline."
1frowned. "It still killed him."
"No. The rifle used was more than capable of putting a shot through someone's eye at a range of at least two hundred-fifty meters. Albion was wounded by design."
"What killed him, then?"
"He drowned in his own blood. He was coursed to death."
"Coursed?"
Stealth nodded and-wonder of wonders-for once the Old One agreed with him. Unbidden, the Wolf spirit lent me his heightened senses. The night vision made everything much clearer in the alley, but that wasn't the sense the Old One wanted me to use. My nostrils twitched and, amid the noxious odors of rotting garbage and thrice-scorched radiator fluid, I caught a very sharp scent.
"A cyberpup ran Albion down?" Stealth nodded. "Foot spurs scraped the wall over there when it lifted its leg to mark its hunting ground."
"Custom rifle, custom dog. This guy must have some serious nuyen to be dropping on his pastime." I shook my head. "If what Braxen said is accurate, he's dusted four. Not likely to stop-as you said, a thrill killer."
"A dilettante." Stealth looked hard at me. "You will pursue this before Raven returns?"
A lingering sense of guilt concerning Albion slowly stole over my mind. He'd been angry when I last saw him and had stalked off into the night alone. That had been months ago, but part of me thought his death was my fault. I knew, realistically, that was nonsense, but I couldn't shake the feeling.
"I knew him. It's personal."
Stealth extended his left hand, the metal one, toward me. "Give me some cab fare."
"I'll drop you at Raven's before I head out."
"Give me ten nuyen."
I dug my hand into my pocket. Could Guinness ever check it out, Kid Stealth would surely make its datachip of World Records in ten different categories-all of them lumped under the Homicide heading. I pulled a credstick from my jeans pocket and handed it to him.
"I want to see a receipt and my change back," I added. Stealth might have had more unsolved murders to his credit than Elvis had imitators, but if I didn't give him a hard time he'd be insufferable.
Stealth took the stick and disappeared it into a pocket. "Wolf, this one plays at death."
I nodded. That was about as close as Stealth would ever get to telling me to be careful. He ascribes a lot to the "a word to the wise is sufficient" school of caring for other folks. Given that the last time he tried to show concern over my fate he shot me in the back, the verbal message did seem more friendly. "I'll keep you posted, I promise."
Without so much as a nod, Stealth turned and withdrew into the alleyway. I didn't turn to watch him be- cause the Old One tries to make me laugh at Stealth's cyberbunny hopping gait. In terms of lethality, doing that strongly resembles sucking on twenty packs of nikostix a day for longer than I've been alive. The other reason I didn't watch him is that Stealth was likely to cut up and over to Seventh by using those miracle claws of his to scale a building. Getting my knuckles bloody as the Old One tries to prove we can do that too is really annoying.
The Old One's sensory gifts did come in handy as I directed them back toward the street. As I walked in the general direction of where I'd left the Fenris parked in another alley, I heard someone sobbing. Tears aren't all that uncommon in the sprawl, and more than one Samaritan has been lured into a headache by thinking he was rescuing a woman in distress. In this case, however, the sob wasn't coming from a voxsynth chip, but from the throat of a little gamin of a girl slumped against the alley wall.
The rain had soaked her hair and made it clump into stringy tendrils about as skinny as her arms and legs. She wore a clear plastic raincoat that ended somewhere between her neon green hot pants and her argyle knee socks. Her blouse matched the shorts in color and ended just below her breasts to show off a flat stomach. It also showed off her ribs. As she looked up at me with hollow, red-rimmed eyes I wondered if she was an anorexia poster-child.
I gave her a smile I hoped wouldn't threaten her. "How long have you known Albion?"
She blinked as I said his name. "You knew him?"
I nodded. Looking up the street I spotted a diner where I'd eaten before without dying. "C'mon, let's get out of the rain." I reached for her arm, but she retreated away from me.
"No way, chummer. I may be griefin', but I'm no flatliner."
I held my hands up and kept them open. "Okay, bad start. My name is Wolfgang Kies. I knew Albion and I'm going to find out what happened to him. If you want to help, it'll make my job easier."
She watched me warily, then nodded. " 'Kay. Albie mentioned you. I'm Cutty."
I pointed to the diner and she nodded. "How long you and Albion been together, Cutty?"
She cut across the street like a zombie hungering for a bumper-kiss. She never noticed the squealing brakes nor did she acknowledge the curses shouted at her. I let the Old One growl at anyone who vented his wrath on me and that generally calmed things. Once across Blan-chard, Cutty headed into the diner and dropped into a booth like a rag doll suddenly stuffed with lead shot.
The waitress frowned at her, but I gave her one of my "this could be your lucky day, darling" smiles and she relented. "Soykaf for me. Milk and some soup or something for her, okay?" The waitress snapped her gum, then turned and sang out our order to the ork working the kitchen.
"Third time is the charm. Cutty, how long had you been playing house with Albion?"
Her head came up and I saw a spark of life in her brown eyes. "A month, I guess." She blinked twice, then frowned. "This is October, right?"
"November, but who's counting?"
"Oh, two months, then."
"Gotcha." I'd last seen Albion on a very warm July night, which put him with her within six weeks of leaving his friends in the Barrens. "He was cool during that time? No problems?"
Cutty nodded. "Like ice. Did some boosting, you know? His thing was fixing stuff, though, and he used to patch decks together before folks would fence them. Made him sort of legit, you know? Then folks started recommending him and he fixed lots of stuff."
"I get the picture." And the picture I got was a dismal one. I'd been hoping Albion had gotten himself in solid with some group or gang or specific place that might narrow my area of inquiry. If I had to track every cracked or heisted deck he laid screwdriver to, I'd be looking for his killer long after Kid Stealth rusted away to nothing.
The waitress arrived with our food, and Cutty stared at the clam chowder with the same look of horror you'd expect if the waitress had regurgitated it right there at the table. She looked at the milk as if the waitress was Lucretia Borgia. I compensated for this by regarding the steaming cup of soykaf like it was the Holy Grail and the waitress as if she was the Madonna. Clearly, though, the waitress thought of herself as a different sort of Madonna and I realized the kind of music we could have made together would have beat Gregorian chanting by an ecclesiastical mile.
"Drink, eat. You need the milk to strengthen your bones and the soup will put some meat on them." I appropriated a bit of her milk for my soykaf, which suddenly made her possessive about the food. I feigned offense, which seemed to please her somehow and made her eat. "Albion didn't have any steady killtime, did he? Anything that would have made him a candidate for a toxic lead dump?"
She nodded her head as a droplet of chowder rolled down over her pointed chin. "Just started a caper at the Pacific Northwest Huntsman's Club. Got it through a person he did some fixing for. Steady work that didn't cut into his side biz. Didn't need a SIN for it."
That last bit would draw Albion like a flame draws a moth. Albion fiercely defended his independence and wanted nothing to do with the system. Like all those who scurry in the shadows, he dreamed of being as big as Mercurial some day, but the chances of that were slimmer than Cutty here. What he didn't know, what few of us without SINs did know, is that it's easier for the society to destroy you than it is for them to even notice you.
"That's a place to start. Do you remember who gave him the job?"
Her wet hair flew back and forth as she shook her head. At least I think she shook her head, but I couldn't see any of her face around the edges of the bowl as she tipped it up to drain it. The bowl came back down and a plastic sleeve came away from her face smeared with the last of the chowder. "Don't remember." She looked over toward the counter and licked her lips as she eyed a stack of frosted donuts.
I'd seen bricks with a longer attention span than she had, but I put it down to her being in shock. Our waitress returned and brought with her the
donut tray. Cutty selected two big chocolate-frosted fat-pills and I passed, so Cutty took a third in case I reconsidered. I paid the bill and the tip while Cutty watched the credstick vanish almost as hungrily as she'd looked at the donuts.
"With Albion gone, what are you doing for money?"
She smiled at me, her eyes growing vacant. "For fifty nuyen I'll do anything you like."
"Yeah?"
She nodded solemnly. "Anything."
"You got it." I pulled out my slender cash supply- figuring she'd find the bills easier to use than a credstick-and laid down two twenties and a ten. "You said anything, right?"
Cutty licked at the frosting in a way she hoped was suggestively erotic. "You pay, piper, and you call the dance."
"Good." Had I a necrophile's taste for skeletal women, I might have come up with something truly inventive for her to earn my money. As it was, I had a more sinister plan in mind. "For this fifty nuyen you're going to sit here and wait for an elf named Salacia to come see you. She was a friend of Albion's before you knew him-just friends, not lovers. Tell her about him." I got up from the booth. "Stay with her and the rest of Albion's family and let them know what happened to him."
Cutty looked up at me and shook her head. "Albion always said you were a weird chummer, but one he could trust. He didn't trust many." "You'll wait?"
She nodded sadly. "I'll be with Salacia, and then you can tell me how Albion's story ends."
I left Cutty in the diner and made my way back to the Fenris. Though he's not much on technology, even the Old One likes the Fenris. Low and sleek, angled except where the flat black body curves neatly around a wheel well or back around a bumper, the car looks like a wedge sharp enough to split the sky from the planet at the horizon.
Even before rounding the corner of the alley I pulled out the remote for the antitheft system. Because this section of town wasn't that bad, I'd set it for only one chirp, with the defenses on Stun. As the car came into view, I tapped the control and got a single chirp back in response as I deactivated the security system. From behind the car two startled kids jumped up and started running down the alley.
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