Preying for keeps

4

"Cutting and running, eh?" the driver of the gypsy cab asked him maybe thirty minutes later.

For a moment Skater froze, halfway into the vehicle parked at the curbside. The trickers hustling the corner under a working street light only a few meters away took his indecision as possible interest. Dressed in a variety of street synthleathers and revealing lingerie, both sexes came at him, some entreating and some abrasive in their challenges.

"Get in, chummer," Kestrel said. "No big sweat that I know part of the score."

Skater dropped into the cab's vinyl-covered back seat only a step ahead of the most aggressive of the street hustlers.

A thin girl with spiky blond hair who'd found expression through synthleather and piercing pushed her palms and face against the window streaked with road grit. She leaned forward, spilling meaty breasts out of her white top, and dragged her tongue across the glass, leaving a twisting path of gleaming saliva that picked up the rainbow of colors from the neon advertising on the buildings. The earring piercing the tip of her tongue clicked hollowly against the glass.

"She's not shy, is she?" Kestrel said.

"No." Skater's hand circled the Predator's butt. "She's not." He kept watch on the pack of sleazers, ignoring the wet kisses the blond mouthed at him. Others wore neon body paint and looked like glimmering pools of perversion moving in the distance.

"Hang on." Kestrel warned. The big powerplant roared under the hood and he swerved the vehicle out into the street, cutting off a midnight blue Chrysler-Nissan Jackrabbit. A horn screeched loudly in their wake, and the blond tricker gave Skater the finger and a string of obscenities.

Skater tried to relax. It was no use. The cab's back seat was cramped and stank of urine. Smashed fast-food containers covered with days old muddy footprints decorated the floorboard. A bulletproof and bombproof sheet of plastic separated him from Kestrel.

The cab knifed expertly through the traffic. "You didn't answer my question." Kestrel said through the speaker.

Skater grinned without humor. "I'm running."

"You got a funny way of showing it, chummer." Kestrel indicated the sprawl all around them. "You show up smack dab in the middle of Seattle with a lot of muscleboys looking to frag your hoop. For the nuyen you're paying me I'd have met you in Hell's Kitchen."

"You heard?"

"About the elf crate?" Kestrel nodded. "You didn't know the yaks had bought into the action?"

"No."

"Surprise."

"No drek." Skater shifted slightly in the seat, tensing. Kestrel was a street fixer, buried so deep in the web of crime and clout that most people didn't know about him-unless he wanted someone to.

Kestrel was dark and thin with hooded eyes. An angular scar, turned gray-white with age, lay like a private's chevron across the bridge of his hooked nose and leaked down onto both cheeks. His face was long, forgettable. He wore a baseball cap advertising the Seattle Timber Wolves combat bike team and a maroon tee shirt.

"So what's the plan?" Kestrel asked.

"Run," Skater said, "and don't look back."

"Then why you still here, chummer?”

Skater ignored the question. "What else have you heard about that elven freighter?"

Kestrel shrugged. "Scan's pretty tight on that. People are looking for you, omae, and spreading a lot of nuyen around while they're at it."

"Like who?"

"Word I get is they're working for Masaru Doyukai."

Skater ran the name through his mind. "Never heard of him."

"New boy in town," Kestrel replied. "Straight from the heart of Japan. Looking to make his way up quick. One of Shotozumi's godsons or some drek like that."

The name of Hanzo Shotozumi was known to every runner on the street, and it was one feared by all. He was numero uno crime boss of Seattle, the man who'd forged the yakuza into the biggest, strongest, and deadliest crime organization in the sprawl.

"You don't know for sure?"

"No reason to. You want, I'll look him up. After tonight's action and the way he's leaning so heavy on everybody, I'll know him by morning anyway."

"I'll be long gone by then."

Kestrel nodded. "Good plan, kid. I always said you had a head on your shoulders. Nice to hear you're thinking of keeping it there."

"Why would Shotozumi be interested in an elven freighter?" Skater asked.

"No vendettas that I know of. Only thing I scan is that they were after some prize it carried." Kestrel glanced into the mirror. "What were you doing there?" Skater met the man's gaze but said nothing. Shaking his head. Kestrel reached for the pack on the dashboard and knocked a cigarette loose. He jammed it between his lips, gaze locked on the street ahead as he drove. "Kid, look… Much as I hate to admit it, I owe you. The day those Disassemblers hit your mom's place and killed her, they damn near killed me, too. If you hadn't gotten there, maybe they would have. You hear what I'm saying?"

"Yeah."

"Then, when you went after those trogs and evened the score, who helped you when you almost bought it?"

"You." The fixer had also worked out financial arrangements with the street docs who'd put Skater back together, this time with the addition of some wiz cybernetic enhancements. Revenge hadn't come easily, or without cost.

"Damn straight." Kestrel gave the accelerator a tap. "I'm not your nursemaid or even close to any kind of guardian angel, but I owe you. I'll nose around a little, do some digging, maybe find something out. You can call one of my message drops time to time and I'll let you know what kind of heat you're facing here."

"Sure," Skater said. "Problem is, I don't know for sure what we were after. Some kind of bioresearch supposed to be worth millions."

"A fragging pig in the poke?”

"I had an inside line."

"And the inside person? You trust him?"

Her, Skater silently corrected. "I did."

"Happens," Kestrel said. "You live life to figure out the people you can trust. If you're lucky, you survive the ones you're wrong about."

"You discover anything about this mess, you get a finder's fee."

Kestrel nodded.

"Where's my credsiick?" Skater asked. The fixer also ran some of the best money-laundering schemes in the business.

"Under your new name down in the Cayman Islands. Some of it's still on the way, but it'll all be there by morning, long before you get there." Kestrel placed a small leather pouch into the vault pass-through mounted in the seat. With a wicked hiss, the vault shunted back toward Skater and opened with an electric pop.

Skater took out the ebony credstick and looked al it. Kestrel told him the SIN was in the name of Walter Dent.

Skater hit the doorlock and opened it as the light turned green, stepping out onto the curb. "Thanks, Kestrel." He kept moving, closing the door before the fixer could say anything else. He let the shadows take him, wishing they could drown the memories, too, because now those memories wouldn't turn loose, suddenly sharper and more insistent than ever. He couldn't quit the city without knowing why Larisa had betrayed him. It couldn't be love he felt for her, he knew. It was the attraction of the moth for the flame. And maybe a way of evening the score between them. She'd left him without reason, leaving him to feel like he just didn't make the grade. But he’d never sold someone out. He was better than that.