Harbinger

17: TOAD HALL

The Mexican War Streets was a housing development that had been built a century ago on the North Side. The brick town houses weren’t cookie-cutter copies of one another but were all of a similar style, so that every building was slightly different from its neighbor. What all of the houses did have in common was a narrow window over the front door with the house number painted in gold leaf. The district had only a handful of streets running parallel to one another, starting at 1200 and going up.

In the photo that Knickknack had given Mokoto, the house number of 1225 was clearly painted over his head. It took Tommy only a few minutes on a hoverbike to find the right building.

There was a dusty boot print by the doorknob of the red painted door. The century-old jam had splintered under the force.

Tommy glanced about as he dismounted his hoverbike.

The North Side used to be one of the more heavily populated neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. It was nicknamed Chinatown because of the number of “Chinese” who lived in the area. Most of the population, though, hadn’t been human. The gutters had run with blood as the elves had gone door to door, killing any nonhuman that they found. Tommy had managed to get most of the half-oni to safety, but the true bloods disguised as humans had been wiped out.

It meant that the area had been nearly deserted for weeks. It was unlikely that anyone had seen or heard the front door of Number 1225 being kicked in.

The foyer had been painted white. Someone had been hit hard enough to spray the wall with small droplets of blood. Stairs led up to a second floor. A bloody handprint marked the wall at the top of the steps, as if someone going up had steadied themselves.

Tommy shook his head. Why run up the stairs? That would trap you in the building with whoever kicked down the front door. Someone had gotten wise — the back door was hanging open at the end of the long hallway.

He pulled the bandana off his ears. They twitched back and forth as he listened closely. The house seemed empty. He could only pick up the distant rumble of traffic. He pulled his knife and cautiously went through the front door.

Tommy had never been in the home of a pure human. He hadn’t been sure what to expect.

Not this.

The room to the left of the foyer had been painted brilliant red. “Toad Hall” had been spelled out on the far wall in big mismatched letters stolen from store signs, mostly from closed McDonalds. The archway into the room was half blocked off with wood from shipping pallets, and the entire space had been filled with colorful three-inch-diameter plastic balls. The connecting windowless room had been painted with a big gleaming mural of a starscape of planets, stars, and rimfire done in ultraviolet paint on black. Every inch of floor was covered with couches or mattresses, like a big sleeping pit, except there were no real sheets or blankets. Tommy couldn’t think of any reason for the dark bed-like area except for sex, but it seemed too public.

He paused in the foyer, listening, as he puzzled over all the scents washing over him. Did human houses always stink this bad? The smell of garbage was the strongest, coming from the kitchen. From where he was standing, he could see that every counter was covered with unwashed dishes and several big overflowing black trash bags sat on the floor. This was nearly as bad as a whelping pen. Did true humans actually live this way? His aunts would beat these people with a wooden spoon for not keeping the kitchen clean.

Under the stench of standing dishwater and garbage, he could pick out the smell of death. It wasn’t strong enough for a full dead body to be rotting in the heat, but definitely something had died in the building. Then there was another, faintly sweet flowery smell that he couldn’t place.

The stairs were as old as the house and would probably creak and groan as he climbed them. Was anyone hiding upstairs? All his senses said no. He climbed the steps as quietly as he could but they still seemed dangerously loud to his sensitive ears.

At some point in the past, the second floor had been made into one big room. He couldn’t imagine why. The space had been divided down into “rooms” via clotheslines strung above eyelevel and draped with old blankets, American flags, and sheets. It seemed as if the girls had claimed this area. Each fabric-defined cubby was stuffed to the brim with the most unlikely items. A massive stuffed giraffe. Photo collages. A sex blowup doll. A stunning number of shoes. Frilly clothing. A small shrine to something called “Lemon-Lime” with posters proclaiming “Blast it all” and “Prince Yardstick Rules” and bobble-head elves. Mismatched chairs. Road signs. Street signs. Stop signs. It seemed as if the girls would loot anything that they could carry away, even if they had to pry it up.

In the corner farthest from the stairs, there was an oddly placed door. Someone had run to the doorway but had been killed before they reached it. The body was missing but the blood spray on the wall beside the door indicated that an artery had been hit. The person had collapsed onto a mattress and bled out. The stench of death was coming from the blood soaked into the bedding.

Where were they running to?

Tommy opened the door. Someone had knocked a hole into the neighboring townhouse via the shared wall. The connecting building had been gutted and set up as a giant three-story trampoline pit. The front door and first-floor windows were boarded over so that the door between the houses was the only way in and out. It was unlikely that the work had been done this summer, not with the war going into full swing. Toad had expanded into the second building long ago, before Knickknack and the other Undefended moved in with him.

More and more Toad seemed like a giant child instead of an adult male.

The flowery scent was even stronger in the second building, despite all the second- and third-story windows being wide open. Tommy followed the smell down to the basement door. There were respirators hanging by the door.

What in the world did Toad have in the basement?

Tommy fitted one of the respirators over his face and opened the door.

The basement was filled with glowing plants in long raised wooden planters. Tommy recognized the gleaming gold flowers from running medical supplies for his father. Saijin was used by both the elves and the oni as an anesthetic.

How the hell did Toad figure out how to grow saijin?

The oni had long complained that the drug needed to be smuggled in from Onihida as they hadn’t been able to get it to grow in Pittsburgh. They had tried everything. What had Toad done differently? Tommy went down the steps to investigate closer.

Big industrial-sized grow lights, like the ones marijuana farmers used, hung from the rafters. The oni had tried those and failed. There were containers of various fertilizers set under planters, but the oni had used those too. There was a homemade computer-controlled watering system, but it seemed only to turn the faucet on and off with a timer. The water flowed through plastic tubing with tiny holes drilled in the bottom.

The only thing different from the failed farms that Tommy had seen in the past was that Toad had affixed ceramic tiles onto the wooden planters. The tiles were etched with a spell that gleamed faintly as a sign that the magic was active.

Tommy had seen something like the tile before. Lord Tomtom had dozens of oni true bloods disguised as humans working on Tinker’s gate. Most of them were carpenters who knew how to work ironwood, but a few had learned the rudiments of electrical wiring. After Tinker melted down Turtle Creek, some had come to Chang’s restaurant in Oakland, carrying what they could quickly salvage before the entire valley turned into a weird, cold blue soup. One had a box of ceramic tiles printed with a spell. Aunt Flo had chased them out, saying that the elves would track them to the restaurant. The tiles had been left behind. At some point the little ones got into them and were playing with them in the backrooms.

Then Malice had leveled the restaurant. His family had taken what survived — clothing, pots and pans, and dishes — and fled. Again, the tiles were left behind in the chaos.

Knickknack was a college student. A smart boy. Had he gone to the restaurant looking for Mokoto and found the tiles instead?

Tommy realized that the edges of his vision were going white. He stumbled upstairs and slammed the door shut. No wonder Toad had set the farm up in a separate house. One flower was safe but not a basement full of them.

Tommy backtracked to the door on the second floor of the first house, taking deep breaths to clear his mind.

Who had attacked Toad Hall?

It didn’t feel like an oni attack. The oni would want the women unharmed and the men rendered harmless fast. They wouldn’t have wounded a woman and a man wouldn’t have left the foyer alive. The time of day was odd too. The oni would have would attacked late with the cover of night, long after even the night owls had gone to sleep. Based on what lights were on in the house, it would have been easy to see that at least one of the Undefended had been on the first floor, awake. Also the oni wouldn’t have ignored the door to the second building, even after capturing the humans. The oni would have searched, found and taken the saijin. It wasn’t hidden and it was worth its weight in gold.

The elves had searched the North Side earlier in the summer, killing any disguised oni that they found. The sidewalks had been stacked with dead. More than one half-oni had been caught up in the search and executed. Tommy hadn’t heard of any new searches. The elves wouldn’t have left the second building unsearched, and they too would have taken the saijin. Ditto for the tengu.

That left a city full of humans as possible attackers.

The streetwalkers had little of value beyond the saijin. Secondhand mattresses. Worn linens. Thrift-store clothes. Theirs was a plastic and cardboard existence.

Tommy climbed the narrow, creaking stairs to the third floor in search of answers. The top floor had three proper bedrooms. By the musky male scent that lingered in all of the rooms, this was where the boys had been sleeping. Unlike the girls, the boys had actual furniture. Dressers. Desks. Beds with headboards and frames to lift the mattresses off the floor. Like the girls, the boys had posters, photographs, and stolen signs covering the walls.

One of the rooms had shelves built out of cinder blocks and wooden boards. Whatever had sat on the shelves was gone. A cork board had been hung over the desk. Push tacks still held down torn corners of paper, evidence that someone had ripped down everything pinned onto the board. The desk was cleared but the dresser still had some clothing.

Tommy knelt down beside the bed. His family hid things under their pillows and mattresses and in among their blankets, as their beds were the only private space in the warren. He was guessing in a houseful of streetwalkers, the lack of privacy would be much the same. A quick search of the bed uncovered a phone and a familiar T-shirt. It was one of Mokoto’s favorite shirts. It had been tucked under the pillow and still held his scent.

This had been Knickknack’s bedroom.

Tommy scanned the room. Everything that a person would need while in hiding hadn’t been taken: the clothes, the bedding, the phone. Someone else had stripped Knickknack’s room. What did a streetwalker have that was so valuable? Why had they taken everything pinned to the bulletin board?

He thought of Tinker’s war room at Poppymeadows. She had lists, maps, and pictures taped to the walls of the dining room. Oilcan had something similar at his enclave, tracking the work on their nightclub. Was that how crazy smart people tracked what they knew?

Someone walked onto the back porch of the house and into the kitchen.

Tommy froze. Knickknack’s bedroom was on the third floor with only one way down to street level. A single person was easy prey for Tommy’s mind-clouding abilities. If he had to deal with more than one attacker while trapped on the third floor, things could get hairy.

He tucked away Knickknack’s cell phone and listened closely.

The person in the kitchen opened the refrigerator and clinked together glass bottles. Tommy’s keen ears caught the unmistakable hiss of a beer being opened. The cap fell to the kitchen floor with a quiet jingle. There were no other footsteps to indicate there was more than one person.

Tommy reached out with his mind. The person was attempting a fearless swagger while filled with nervous fear. Tommy pulled his bandana back on just in case “one” became “many.” Feeding the illusion of the peaceful silence of an empty house into the mind of the person in the kitchen, Tommy started down the creaky stairs.

Toad was standing in the back doorway, drinking a cold beer while eyeing the dim hallway to the foyer. He was an ugly guy even to Tommy’s half-oni standards, his face too wide and his eyes bulging slightly. He wore loose cut-off jeans shorts, a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt, and red flip-flops. Watching Toad trying to psych himself up to go deeper into the house, though, it was easy to see that his “appeal” was his personality.

“I am one with the force and the force is with me. I am one with the force and the force is with me. Deep breath. Ghost in. Ghost out. Ninja style.” He made some karate-like motions with his hand, nearly dropping his beer. Despite his brave words, he continued to hover in the doorway. “Oh, Joyboy, if you got yourself killed being a drama queen, please don’t haunt me for this. I told you to run, not stand and be a mega bitch.”

Toad tried to press his hands together into a prayer but the attempt was ruined by his beer. He muttered a couple of curse words as he tried to decide what to do with the half-full bottle. In the end, he chugged the contents and then put the glass bottle on the floor with a loud clink. He pressed his hands together, whispered a prayer, and bowed. He wobbled while bowing; apparently it hadn’t been his first beer of the day.

Tommy wanted Toad away from a quick exit before he braced the man. He was guessing that Toad had come back because of the saijin-filled basement. It meant that the man probably would head upstairs to the connecting door on the second floor.

It took several minutes for Toad to gather his courage; he mostly jogged in place while huffing and puffing. His flip-flops squeaked loudly with each step. Tommy shook his head; it was a crime scene, not a prizefight.

Toad eyed the refrigerator as if considering another beer to boost his courage and then — finally — slowly headed upstairs. Tommy erased himself from the other man’s awareness even as Toad passed inches away from him. Tommy followed Toad up the steps. The man headed straight for the saijin but staggered to a stop at the pool of blood.

Tommy dropped his illusion and grabbed Toad. He slammed the smaller man against the wall.

“Tommy!” Toad cried in surprise and slight relief. “Shit! Where the hell did you come from? What are you doing here?”

Tommy ignored the questions and asked his own. “What happened here?”

Toad worked his mouth while his eyes flicked right and left, trying to come up with a reasonable lie. “I–I-I don’t know. I wasn’t here.”

Tommy bounced Toad off the wall. “Yes, you were! You ran! You told the others to run! What happened?”

“S-s-s-some guys broke the door,” Toad stuttered. “I don’t know who they were. Jonnie sold me out. That’s all I know.”

“Jonnie?”

“Jonnie Be Good. He’s an ambulance driver. If he knows that you’re cool, he’ll sell you drugs on the side.”

Tommy knew the slimewad in question. The man was local born and raised. His real name was Jurek Beiger. He was slightly older than Tommy. When he was younger, people called him Jerk Booger. Jurek remade himself after going off-world for college and washing out. He came back with his ears surgically pointed and enough medical training to be an EMT. He grew his hair long, dressed in elf hand-me-downs, and told people that his name was Jonnie Be Good. Since most of the kids Jonnie’s age had left Pittsburgh, the new generation took him at his word. Elves didn’t lie, after all.

Tommy knew that Jonnie sold drugs in Oakland to college students but Jonnie was a cowardly little shit. He’d run back to Pittsburgh because he couldn’t take being a little fish in a big pond.

“He knew about the saijin in the basement?” Tommy guessed.

Toad nodded unhappily. “I needed to get seeds off of Jonnie to grow it. I tried once or twice before I got Knicknack to help me with the planters. I knew the elves would pay dear for it — or the college students trapped on Elfhome who are desperate for any kind of escape. It’s a sweet trip — breathe it in and it’s all good. Jonnie, though, is like duct tape; it’s nearly impossible to peel him off once he gets stuck to you. He’d show up with little bribes to get in the door. Hash brownies. Moonshine. Whippets. If you passed out while partying with him, though, you would wake up royally used. It didn’t matter who you were. He’d poke himself in any unprotected hole. I think the only one of us that he hadn’t screwed was Knickknack. At least Jonnie is superhot, so most of us don’t mind. Much. The whole reason he comes here — a house full of illegal immigrants — is that we can’t do shit if we’re pissed off that he rapes us while we’re passed out.”

They could kill the bastard. Tommy knew it was easy for him to consider killing someone but in truth it wasn’t so simple. His aunts and cousins needed Tommy to secretly kill the worst of Lord Tomtom’s warriors who used them too roughly. Only Tommy could quietly kill an adult male oni and ditch the body without getting caught.

“You’re saying Jonnie was responsible for this?” Tommy pointed to the pool of blood.

Toad nodded for a few seconds, like once he started, he couldn’t stop. “I wasn’t here. I mean, I was here when it started but I got out. I’m not sure what happened after I left. I heard gunshots and I just kept running.”

“Who was here when you ran?”

“Everyone. It’s all been so crazy. The Wyverns going house to house, finding hidden oni that they chop up and leave stacked on the sidewalk. Your surly neighbor turns out to be from another planet that you never heard of. Giant dragons fighting wooden attack helicopters. Where the hell did the elves get those? Then one night none of your people showed up to work Liberty Avenue. It was like your entire stable dropped off the face of the planet. It was just us with no idea what happened to Motoko and Babe and all your girls. We freaked out. We packed up for the night and went home, scared shitless. If something took out your stable, what was going to happen to us? Knickknack was out all night, asking around, trying to find out what happened to you. No one knew anything.”

Mokoto and Babe had been busy alongside Bingo, shifting their people to the William Penn Hotel after the Wyverns raided their old warren. They had sat tight, waiting to find out if Tommy could clear their name by finding Jewel Tear. That had taken him days and he returned just hours before the train derailment. His family had stayed hidden until he’d managed to rescue Oilcan and help kill Iron Mace and Chloe Polanski. Sometime during that time, the Undefended had been attacked. September had been hotter than normal but based on the smell, the blood pool had been festering at least a day.

“How long ago were you attacked?” Tommy said.

“Night before last,” Toad said. “It was getting to be the time that we normally head to Liberty Avenue. None of us had made any money since your stable disappeared. We were trying to decide if it was safe. Me and Knickknack didn’t think it was a good idea but the girls have us outnumbered and they’re all into elves like you can’t believe. They act like the royal marines are a candy shop on feet. Personally I’m not into heavily armed redheads.

“While we were hashing it out, Jonnie suddenly showed up. He rang the doorbell and was yelling for us to let him in. There was something weird about it; he was being too loud and too pushy. Usually he’s all careful to be nice until he’s in the door and we’re all high as a kite. What’s more, Jonnie kept going, ‘Hey, Knickknack, are you in there?’ like they were best friends or something. There’s a good reason why Knickknack is the only one of us that Jonnie hasn’t screwed over: He really hates the man. What Jonnie didn’t know was that Knickknack had put a camera up on the roof so we could see the entire street. Jonnie had a bunch of guys with him. Big guys. I was like, ‘Run! Hide!’ and I took off. Before I could even get out the back door, I heard Joyboy shouting insults at Jonnie. The stupid little boi bitch! The front door got kicked in. Everyone was screaming. Then there were gunshots. I just ran.”

The invaders had taken the dead body, everyone who witnessed the murder, and everything in Knickknack’s room — but not the drugs. It had to mean that Knickknack had been the target of the raid.

Downstairs, the front door creaked open and several people entered the house, their bootsteps echoing up the stairwell.

Tommy whispered a curse. In cornering Toad on the second floor, he’d cornered himself. The stairs were the only exit but the newcomers were already in the foyer at the bottom of the steps. Tommy’s father could have clouded the mind of a full army, but Tommy could only control one person completely. With each added person, his ability frayed.

“No! No!” a female cried out in Elvish from the street. Her voice got louder as she neared the front door. Her Elvish was really bad, marking her as possibly a human, possibly someone from off-world. “You just can’t walk into someone’s house.”

“The door has been broken down,” a male with a Fire Clan accent replied in fluent Elvish. “There might be hostiles inside — stay back.”

All the Wyverns had gone east with Prince True Flame. The only Fire Clan elves in the city were royal marines. Judging by the number of heavy bootsteps downstairs, an entire squad had just flooded into the house. Were they searching the North Side for hidden oni again? All they were going to find was Tommy.

None of the windows on the second floor were open, despite the oppressive heat of the last month. It probably meant they were all painted shut. Had there been windows open on the third floor? Could Tommy get to the third floor unseen? Maybe, if he shoved Toad down the steps as a distraction.

“Why is this room filled with balls?” a male voice asked. By the sound, the elf had stepped into the thigh-deep sea of balls that took up the front room.

“Eeewww, so much garbage!” a third female voice from deep in the kitchen called out in Elvish. “Look at all the dirty dishes! Are we sure this is a human’s house? This looks like that oni whelping pen!”

Someone open and closed the refrigerator several times before a male voice called out, “Does the light in the cold box stay on all the time?”

“Wait! Just wait!” the woman said. “We can’t just dance into people’s homes. Someone might still be home! Hello? Peanut? Chardonnay? Hello?”

“Who is that?” Toad whispered as if Tommy should know.

“Dance?” A male echoed the woman in a puzzled tone. “We are not dancing. Are you sure that you’re saying that right?”

“Is that Red?” Toad whispered and then called out before Tommy could stop him, “Red? Is that you?”

Mokoto had showed Tommy a picture of Red. She had been the tall, busty redhead who showed up at Poppymeadows during his meeting with Oilcan, surprisingly pretty and young to be a streetwalker. What was the name that she used? Olive Branch? It wasn’t her real name but it was probably safer to call her Olive Branch than use the nickname that she used as a whore.

Tommy had watched Tinker and Oilcan grow up at the racetrack. He’d known them enough to trust them. He didn’t know Olive Branch. He didn’t even know her real name. He didn’t trust her. With twenty marines at her beck and call, though, he couldn’t hide. He made sure his catlike ears were covered before the first marine reached the top of the stairs.

He was glad to see that Olive Branch was close behind the royal marine leader. She was in the same blue gingham sundress that she had worn at Poppymeadows. The only addition was a rifle slung across her back.

Olive Branch spotted Tommy and her eyes went to his bandana, then to the red-coated elf beside her. “This is one of Tinker domi’s people.” She pointed at Tommy. “He can be trusted.”

She said nothing about Toad as she scanned the room around them.

Tommy felt surprise and then relief go through him like a bolt of electricity. He hadn’t dared to hope that she was a clever girl but she had no doubt realized that as a half-oni, Tommy was in immediate danger from the marines. He wasn’t about to correct her about Tinker vs. Oilcan. The marines nodded and focused their attention on Toad.

Mokoto said that Toad could talk his way out of anything. Toad grinned and blushed and scratched his head in a way that seemed natural and endearing, but Tommy could smell the nervous sweat pouring off the man.

“Hey, Red!” Toad said in passable Elvish, focusing not on the girl but the tall marine beside her. “We’ve been worried sick about you! You just disappeared off the streets and no one knew where you lived.”

“Yeah, well, shit happened,” Olive Branch said in English.

Downstairs, the royal marines seemed to be thoroughly exploring the room filled with balls. A female voice explained that it was a play space for human children, often found at restaurants geared toward families on Earth. The information suggested that the female had been raised off-planet and could be human. Her Elvish sounded like Wind Clan with an odd foreign lilt to it. There was another person moving around downstairs other than the female who was also explaining the ball pit; they carried a radio playing the local elf fusion music station. Who had Olive Branch added to her marine escort?

Olive Branch pointed at the congealed blood pool. “Who was killed here?”

Toad puffed up his cheeks as he shrugged, looking even more toad-like. “I think Joyboy was shot. He was being Joyboy like usual — drama queen on overdrive. I don’t know if he was killed. Maybe he was only winged.”

Olive Branch shook her head. “No. Too much blood. Whoever was shot bled out like a stuck pig. Joyboy is dead; I just identified his body at the morgue. He had been shot, so this was probably where he died. What happened to Peanut Butter and the others?”

Tommy would have thought she had nerves of steel the way that she moved on past the murder, but there were tears shimmering in her eyes.

“Oh, God, Joyboy is dead?” Toad looked shell-shocked. “I was sure he was but I didn’t want it to be true.”

“Toad,” Olive Branch said with cold steel in her voice. “What happened to Peanut Butter and the others?”

The man seemed close to breaking down. He repeated what he’d told Tommy but slower, stumbling in places.

Olive Branch held up her hand, stopping Toad when he got to the information about the camera that Knickknack had installed. “A camera? Was it recording?”

“Shit! The camera!” Toad patted his pockets to find his phone. “Yeah. Hold on. Let me find it.”

Tommy stood mystified as Toad fiddled with his phone. He knew that off-world phones had more functions than those normally found in Pittsburgh, but he didn’t realize that you could link them to security cameras.

Toad found the recording and rolled it back to the night before last. “Yeah, yeah, see? There’s Jonnie pulling up and then the guys are in the van behind — Hey!”

This was because Tommy had snatched the phone out of Toad’s hands. Olive Branch leaned in close to watch the video with Tommy.

The camera had been positioned so that it could see the street for fifty feet on either side of the front door. Jonnie arrived in a pickup with a lift kit that raised the vehicle to stupid heights. The paramedic waved to a van that parked behind him as if it had followed him to Toad Hall. Six men got out of the van and glanced around as if looking for possible witnesses to what was about to unfold.

The camera had a microphone and it picked up Jonnie shouting to the Undefended as he rang the doorbell and then banged on the door. The men from the van kept tight against the wall, flanking the front entrance, so they were hidden from anyone within the house using the spyhole mounted on the door.

No wonder Toad ran once he saw what was outside his front door.

The camera picked up Toad’s shouted warning and then someone cursing out Jonnie. One of the hidden men lost his patience, took a running start, and kicked open the door. Jonnie drifted backward, seemingly startled by the violence. After the men poured into the building, there was screaming and gunshots. Jonnie ran to his pickup and drove away. The house filled with frightened screaming as a man shouted, “Shut up!” over and over again. Minutes later Knickknack and six women were herded out of the building. Their hands were tied and they were gagged. A body wrapped in a blanket and stacks of books followed.

“They’re still alive,” Olive Branch murmured. She shook her head as the van drove away. “You can’t see the license plate.” She backed the video up to where the six men had flanked the door and paused it. She showed the image to Toad. “Do you know any of these men?”

“Just Jonnie Be Good.” Toad pointed at the paramedic.

“Jonnie Be Good?” a woman echoed from downstairs. “That gobshite? May the Lamb of God stir his hoof through the roof of heaven and kick him in the arse down to hell. That one is all hands and won’t take no as an answer.”

“That’s Jonnie, alright,” Toad said.

“Where can I can find him?” Tommy intended to flee whatever circus Olive Branch had following along behind her.

Toad blew his breath out and spread his hand. “He always comes here. I don’t know where he squats.”

“I can find out where the little gobshite lives,” the woman downstairs called. “He works for the city. Anyone who works for them needs to provide a real address within the city limits; it’s some old rule from before the first Startup. I know an old geezer who works over in their HR that owes me a favor. I’ll give him a ring and see if he can give me Jonnie’s home address.”

Whoever Olive Branch had picked up, they had better access to information than Tommy and perhaps even Oilcan. Tommy couldn’t cloud the mind of six men during a fight. Perhaps it would be better to stick with Olive Branch and her marine escort.