“Right, exactly.” He snorted a little laugh. “I saw baseball as a game for people, not machines, and my father agreed. He works for the company that owns the team, so he’s been able to adjust all the records that show how much work was done on me and the league thinks I’m just like everyone else. But I’m not. Now you know my secret, so my career is over.”
“And you know mine.” I gave him a quick grin. “I’ll trust you if you trust me.”
“That’s it?”
“Is there something more I should want?”
“I think so. I mean ..." Jimmy ran a hand back over his close-cropped hair. “Whenever I thought about what would happen when someone learned my secret, I figured they’d want money. Baseball makes billions.”
I stepped forward and clapped him on the arms. “Yeah, but like you said, it’s a game for kids and those who can still take joy in kid things. Consider me a big kid. I’ve got no use for money. I’d rather have a friend.”
“Yeah, kinda more precious than money, isn’t it?”
“It’s a supply and demand thing, I think.”
Jimmy stooped, picked up his bag, then draped an arm over my shoulder. “So, pal, food?”
“And women?”
“Works for me.” Jimmy smiled and tossed me a wink. “Nice to know I have a friend who thinks of everything.”
Fair Game
I
It looked like the prayers hadn’t helped after all.
The mouth of the alley didn’t boast much of a crowd. The onlookers had all seen a dead body before. As this one had all its parts and wasn’t anyone famous, the gawkers had nothing to stare at. The fact that most of them were allergic to the strobing blue lights on top of the Lone Star cruiser knifed across the sidewalk and shining its headlights on the manmeat also helped thin the rabble. No one lingered in my way as I crossed the curb, squeezed by the cruiser and into the alley.
The ork cop looked up at me, raindrops streaking white in the headlights’ glare. “Know him, Kies?” Harry Braxen blinked and narrowed his eyes against the warm rain. “Take a good look.”
I didn’t need more than a second. His pink eyes staring up at the gray Seattle sky, the albino looked more like a wax statue than the remains of a human being. His white hair had been sheared into a mohawk, and the rain failed to wash the glued spikes down. His lips had never been that colorful, but their unhealthy blue blended nicely with the grayish pallor of his skin and the mists coming in off the Sound.
“You knew him too, Braxen. You saw him in the Barrens the day Reverend Roberts did the martyr dance.” The same day I told a little boy to say his prayers so the albino would be okay. “His name was Albion. I don’t think he had a SIN.”
Braxen made a note in a small notebook. “Any guess why he got it?”
“Why?” I shook my head and reached instinctively for the silver wolf’s-head pendant at my throat. “Not a clue.”
“Determining how he got it is simple,” offered my shadow. Inching forward to squat down on birdlike titanium legs, Kid Stealth pulled aside the wet newspaper pages covering Albion’s windward flank. He revealed a hole in the side of Albion’s washed-out Mercurial t-shirt. Despite Braxen’s weak protest, Stealth used his metal left hand to rip the t-shirt open and point out the bluish hole in Albion’s chest. “Entry wound, .30-06 with a light bullet and light charge. Stressed copper jacket, I would assume, designed to fragment on impact.” 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 toy maker.”
“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.”
“What investigation, Kies? This kid’s got no SIN. He doesn’t exist as far as the system is concerned. He isn’t even a statistic.” 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 Belmont. 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 Viper[28]. . . .”
“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 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.”
I frowned. “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.
The Old One forced me to savor it. A large canine, Longtooth. It was here and marked the territory of its kill. It did as its master commanded. It is much like the Murder Machine to whom you speak.
“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 because 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 Blanchard, 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?”