Life is different when you are used to sleeping with your girl. Sure, we get into and out of bed at different hours, but usually we spend a few hours snuggled together. I slept like drek. I woke to screams a few times, decided they were cats screwing in the alley and went back to sleep.
Showered and shaven, I pulled out my best suit (that was actually quite nice, a benefit of a former life) and started to get dressed. When I had my slacks and shirt on, there was a knock a my door.
"Gilette, it's the Police, Open up." Frak.
I walked to the door as they continued to pound. I opened it, and greeted the officer, a brutish looking human with thinning hair. "Why hello, Officer Renyolds. So good to see you."
"Cut the shit, Gillette. You know why I'm here."
I shrugged my shoulders. "I dunno, you are going to escort me to my job interview?" I looked at the bag full of felony that happened to be under my leather jacket, I could barely see the shoulder strap, and hoped Renyolds didn't.
"Don't be a smart ass." He gave the room a look over. "There's been some criminal activity here in the Barrens. I know, a shock, right?"
"And I happen to be the only registered Felon in 5 blocks. Again."
He walked to me and stuck two fingers in my chest. He was a big guy, and 20 years ago I wouldn't have screwed with him. Now he was tired and fat. A pencil pushing bully that always rode us felons when a big crime went down around this part of the barrens. "Where the Drek were you last night?"
"What time?"
"Don't get smart with me, arsehole. I can drag you to lock up just to stick your ass into a line up."
I backed down. I had to play the tough guy, but I didn't need this. "Look, man. I was here all night. Not like there are any cameras around to prove it."
"Where's your stripper? Will she confirm where you were?" He generally only disrespected her when she wasn't around. Usually I let it go becaue I know he's trying to get a rise outta me, but this time it burnt.
"She left for her sister's house a couple days ago." My voice was controlled, but inside I steamed.
"That's awful handy. The one girl who keeps you straight goes outta town and no one to confirm your whereabouts..."
"Look, I don't even know what the hell you are talking about."
"Some drekhole torched a block of the barrens last night. It was supposed to look like two guys were trying to plant a listening bug, but our fire investigator had seen one of the same devices used just last week, so he knew as soon as he saw it. Lucky us."
"Still don't know what the hell you are talking about. I watched Commander Kaos and drank Zoomas until I passed out last night about... it was the one when Kaos goes to the Moon base and finds the Zombie virus... Maybe 10ish." In my retinal display I could see the schedule for Trideo Channel 476, and knew all the Commander Kaos shows by heart.
He looked around the room as he thought. I was well dressed, talking about a job interview. I was putting on a nice jacket. The house was WAY cleaner than any other place in this part of the barrens. It all added up to me mending my ways, but he still had to be an ass.
"I have a strange feeling you had something to do with this, Gillette."
I buttoned the top button on my jacket. "I"m reformed man. I don't run the shadows, I haven't shot anyone since... Well a long time. It was just me and the commander, last night."
He turned and walked to the door. "If I get so much as a tingle that you are stirring drek here, I'm gonna drag your ass in and find something to charge you with."
After he left, I sat on the arm of our couch for a few minutes. I mulled the situation over in my head. He was basically a good cop, if a bit misdirected. At least my sources said he was clean. Hopefully he'd quit looking my way for a while, at least until Ann got home.
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The drive to Loki's flat didn't take that long, and I listened to the somber crooning of Emile Beretta's retro-trip hop. It was slow and depressing, not exactly helping my mood, but totally matching it.
Coincidentally, I had a Beretta Firecat in a in the waistband holster that hid inside my tucked in shirt. It was a small gun that I'd loaded with explosive ammo so it packed a punch way more than it should have. It wouldn't be much use against any real armor, but against street trash it would still do ok. The troika rode in it's cyber arm sheath and I had the Belt sword on. Part of me hoped for an easy time, the rest of me craved some violence.
The belt sword looked like any of the current breed of polymer belts. It didn't buckle, you just pulled it tight and hit the button. Magnets in what should be the buckle area held the belt in place. If you grabbed the buckle area and hit the button three times while pulling it from your waist band, as it became free from the belt loops, it straightened and became rigid. The edge of the belt was designed so that when it was activated, the edge curled from it's rolled position, exposing the Monofilament edge.
Suddenly you had a 30-some inch sword at your beck and call, seemingly from nothing. I had bought it over seas. It was tech that never caught on, as most folks into swords liked steel, or at least metal. I liked swords, but I didn't have the job where I could open carry a Ferrotitanium Fujitsu Neo-Ginunting on my hip. I owned one, but the only action it saw was when I practiced with it.
I grabbed my pack and exited my car. I locked it, and walked to the door of his building. I used my comm to ping him.
The door buzzed, and I stepped into the elevator. With apartment buildings in this area, the main floor was saved for commercial space. In this case a Moody's Formal wear shop. To access the apartments on the other 47 floors you took an elevator. In most other buildings it would be an entry door, but in this place it was directly into an elevator.
The elevator dinged at the 31st floor. I walked down the hall, and turned left. Loki's door was painted with neo-tribal glyphs and Amerindian symbols. I think there was even a magical rune in there somewhere.
Overall, it had the effect of being hard to look at. I didn't know if it was intentional or not, and I had never asked.
I knocked twice and the door opened. Once inside, my eyes adjusted to the darker light level without needing to change settings. The place was like a Compu-shack had blown up and filled the one bedroom hovel with electro-mechanical shrapnel. You only knew you'd passed the bedroom when there was something that looked relatively soft on the floor, instead of parts, part bins, or wires. I walked by what passed as his bedroom and into the main room. He sat in a magnificent captain's chair, a handful of trid monitors in front of him, and no less than 6 decks on some sort of tiered computer desk. The tangle of wires in the rear of the station giving me a headache, and I wasn't a tech head.
"This place never ceases to amaze me."
Motors whirred as the captain's chair turned to face me. Loki sat, half naked and smiling. The top half this time, thank the maker. He was a dwarf, so he wasn't exactly fat. In fact, I knew he packed a punch, but he still had a bit of a ponch. It was just funny to see that, in at least his case, the copious hair on his face and head didn't extend to the rest of his body.
"Chummer, do you wax?" I asked smiling.
He laughed. "Your mom likes me bare..." He patted his crotch.
"Oh gods," I threw up my hands. "Too much Info." We both chuckled, and I moved some circuit boards so I could sit on the corner of what was probably a couch. "What do you have for me?"
"I threw together some listening devices. Pretty amazing if I do say so myself. Probably going to start selling these. They have batteries for a few days. They cover like a thousand square feet each, and and using a pretty complicated algorithm can listen in on both ends of a handheld commlink if someone uses one near them. Head comms are a no go, unless their end is vocalized. They listen passively, and then when they don't hear anything for an hour, they burst transmit the info to me, including the Comm numbers for any used near them." He handed me three devices that were smaller than UCAS half dollar coins. "They have peel and stick geko-glue on the back, and aren't metallic."
"Pretty wiz, chummer. This enough for his flat?" He turned back to his control station and clicked a few buttons.
A file recieved icon flashed on my image link. "Yeah, I just sent you the file on the building. His place is big, but it doesn't have that many rooms, you'll understand when you get there. They will do fine. I marked where you should stick these, and where good emergency exits are. There is a vacancy on the floor he lives on. I 'Leased it' it to a Wayne Chmmernifski this morning. You can say you are there to see him." He handed me a mag card. "This will get you into Mr Chummernifski's place." Maybe you are his aide, or something?"
"I brought that Fake SIN for Kabe Mifune, the media guy cover. It should work."
"Yeah, I think it will." He punched a few keys, and I noticed my SIN got pingged on my commlink. "Oh yeah, that's good. Some of my better work." He turned back to me, and we both smiled.
"I hate having to do this, omae."
"I know, but there's no faster way to find this out." I shrugged, the corner of my lip pulling back in an uncomfortable rictus. "Well, I guess there is, but in a lot of ways, that guy had it coming. He was street trash. Just don't make it a thing, and getting Ann back won't make a stain."
I extended my arm out to my best friend. We shook hands. "You have always kept me on the straight."
"You started it by keeping me alive. We work well together, I just want to keep working together."
"Guess I should go." I said turning.
"Hold up." He hopped out of the chair and walked to a heroically messy closet. After a few long seconds of archeological excavation, he produced a worn real leather messenger bag. "This baby was stolen from a high level Johnson, one of those black ops types. It has a faraday built in, as well as a concealed bottom holster that has a Fichetti Pla-nB in it. It's loaded with caseless flechette so ballistics is basically impossible. No shell casing, nothing left behind, and the ceramic flechette won't have any ballistic info for the cops, not like a bullet would." He handed me the bag.
It was weighty and reeked expense. The way he had it just laying in a closet is one of the things that always amazed me about the remarkable Dwarf. I sling it over my shoulder, and practiced drawing the small gun from the hidden holster. It was a little odd, but the magnets hoding the flap closed was easy enough to navigate. The small pistol was a matte grey and I ejected the magazine and worked the slide, pressing the Unload lever as I did. I caught the round as it dropped out of the grip.
On a normal pistol the casing has to be ejected, so unloading it once it's loaded is as easy as working the slide, but with caseless ammo, there is no case and no opening for anything to come out. When you hold down the unload button, working the slide pulls the round out of the chamber and into where the magazine resides, and out of the weapon. Quickly, I field stripped the little pistol and examined it, placing the parts on the corner of the couch. It was nicely put together and as clean as any of my guns were. One of the few habits I'd taught my diminutive friend that'd actually stuck.
I put the little gun back together and put it back into the bag's holster. It hadn't taken but a couple minutes.
"If you take 123rd to Durrant, traffic is pretty light, you should get there so you just see him leaving his apartment. Good luck chummer."
We shook hands again, and I left. The elevator took it's time, but eventually deposited me at the ground floor. Once in my car, I pulled up it's navmap onto my retinal display. Uncomfortably, I pushed my self to almost a standing position and reached into my waistband, retrieving my little Beretta. I stuck it into it's holster under my seat. If I got stopped, the Fichetti would be harder to detect, even if I would give up a little firepower.
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Traffic was as Loki said it was, and just as I slipped my maglock into "Wayne's" apartment I caught Johnny as he strode down the hall. He had his face in a tablet, swinging his off hand wildly as he carried on an animated conversation on his commlink and didn't even look in my direction. I activated my video recorder, and captured a few seconds. As I closed the door, I mentally uploaded the file to Loki's server.
'He's out of the building, stand by.' Loki's voice crackled in my head. A few seconds later Loki spoke again, "He just got in a Nissan Grandeur Limo... and it's pulling away. Good to go. I own the cameras, you are clear."
I opened the door and walked down the hall. I slid a Maglock spoofer into the lock an waited. The lights across the top turned all green and the door opened. I was glad he'd opted to go with the older but arguably more secure wired maglock. Otherwise I'd have had to try to crack it wirelessly, and when I'd failed, I would have had to let Loki have his way with my ego.
I opened the door, stepped inside and closed it again. Thick tan carpet was underfoot, and looked like it cost more per square foot than I made in a month. It was also the cheapest thing in the whole place. The apartmemt was an open concept affair. Basically, one large room, seperated by strategically placed neo-industrial furniature and massive etched glass plates hanging by wires to separate areas like the toilet and a strangely lady like changing area in the bedroom, complete with a real Japanese silk changing screen.
I cued up Loki's map, and dutifully placed the bugs in the places where it told me. The three bugs seemed a little over kill in a room this open, but when evesdropping, is there such a thing? My gloved hands struggled with the little paper backing of the geko glue, but man if that shit ain't amazing. It stick to the bottom of his leather and titanium sofa as easily as it did to the inside of the stove hood.
'I'm getting a good feed. I can hear you walk around, which is pretty damn impressive on that carpet. I'm definately selling these.' Loki sounded happy with their quality, and hopefully these little bugs would provide us some useful information. 'Oh shit, You need to find a place to hide, I don't know how I missed it, but he's at a jog and headed to the elevator. Must have happened when I was listening to the bug.'
I looked around the apartment. It was 5000 square feet of extravagance where you could see every corner from the door. By said door, I could see a worn attache case. Likely the object of his return. I ran over to it, and rifled through.
'90 seconds.' There were file folders full of pages. Each file was a seperate company; some large and some small. Inside the files were pages of names and personnel files on various people on them. It was strange that he had used paper, but in this day and age, that which is on paper can be hidden, while that which is in the matrix cannot.
'30 seconds.' The last file was titled Order Forms and held a blank page where you could fill in fields like height, age, hair, race, meta-type, special kink, and others.
I closed the case and hurriedly looked around the room again. Quietly, I ran to the other side of the room. I could hear the door open.
"Malakai, I know you are just a middle man, but Omae, I was just a middle man once too." There was some shuffeling, and my retinal display sprang to life, a live feed from the apartment's cameras popped into my vision thanks to Loki. I slowly reached into my bag, retrieveing the small pistol, wishing I had a silencer. On my screen I saw the lean man from the hallway in the same power-suit walk by the case, and toward my position behind the silk changing screen I'd ducked behind. He smoothly veered right and walked to the bathroom area. The sound of a bladder being emptied filled the space.
"I know, I know. But I'm telling you, you gotta take chances. Levi is in control here, but you can still make a play. There is plenty of room where you are." The flow of urine stopped, and the toilet flushed as he stepped away. I could see him washing his hands in the clear sink, and dry his hands on the stark white towel handing from the bar.
"Yes. We have some quality merch, we just need to find markets, that's where you need to be."
He was walking slowly, looking absently around his place, and finally his eyes fixed on his attache. "Look, Mal, I gotta jet, Tony's waiting down stairs, I had to run back by the house to grab some files, but I'll head over to the Margarita for lunch." A pause. "Ok, via con dios."
He knelt and opened the case, just as I had. He looked in, and then looked around for several long seconds. I stopped breathing, switching to my internal air tank. He seemed satisfied and stood, case in hand. The lock clicked behind him and I started breathing again. I could see the meter for the air tank in my display ticking back up from 94% with each breath I took.
'He's in the Limo again and moving. Sorry about that, mano. Totally my bad.'
I spoke subvocal as I walked down the richly appointed hallway, 'Null sweat chummer, you just owe me some new drawers.'