Stackpole, Michael A - Shadowrun (25 page)

I shrugged. "Truth is open to a lot of interpretations. The only truth I care about was the round-tripper you notched in the eighth. It gave us the win, puts us in the pennant hunt."

"But you know."

"Your secret? Yeah, I know." I nodded slowly. "When you didn't strike out, I saw the surprise on Clark's face—for all of a second—and I realized we're a lot alike. What you see now is the real me, but what you saw the night Thumper died, that's part of me, too. A secret part of me. Not even Val knows about it, nor Lynn. It's me when I'm being
natural."

I smiled up at him. "You're a
natural,
too. You're not what people expect. You may load the software so it can be verified, and you've had that much work done on you, but you're not using wired reflexes to hit or field. You're just you."

Jimmy's face hardened. "Ever since I was a kid I was in love with baseball. It's a game for kids and folks who can still take joy in the things that kids take joy in."

"Instead of those who slot Kidjoy 1.3?"

"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

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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 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.

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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."

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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
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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.

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."

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Stealth extended his left hand, the metal one, toward me. "Give me some cab fare."