Preying for keeps

5

Skater got a once-over from one of the two bouncers working the main door to SybreSpace. He slotted his new credstick for the cover charge.

"You have a nice time while you're with us," the bouncer ordered in a gravelly voice as he popped the Wilkerson razors back into hiding. "And be nice to the working girts."

SybreSpace was still one of the trendiest bars in the sprawl, with a long history as a notorious hangout for deckers and wannabes. Others came for the music, which changed abruptly from style to style, depending on which dancer held the main stage.

Skater made his way to the bar, pushing through the packed bodies and haze of cigarette smoke that only partially blunted the scorching neon veins that made various Matrix-like designs pulse on the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Shielding his eyes, Skater spotted a bartender he knew and headed for the decorated bar lit up with glaring neon cubes and polyhedrons that whirled and spun, then exploded in myriad colors, only to be replaced by others. After a brief wait, he reached the head of the line, book-ended between two frazzled waitresses yelling drink orders.

"Can I get you something?" the bartender asked. He was slim and innocuous, but Skater knew for a fact that the guy's left arm held a Fichetti light pistol cybergun.

"A draw," Skater said. He didn't drink, a holdover from his upbringing on the Council lands, and from a personal belief that a shadowrunner had to stay sharp. Except for Shiva and Duran, who did indulge but never on the job, and Trey, who relished the occasional glass of vintage port when he could get it, no one else on the team drank either.

The bartender drew the soybeer into a thick glass, expertly moving the foaming head to the top in a smooth flood of amber.

Skater slotted his credstick, adding a twenty percent tip. This wasn't the Barrens, after all. "Something else."

The bartender went on filling orders for the waitresses, but he glanced back at Skater without missing a beat. His eyes narrowed only slightly, though the broad smile never faltered. "And that is?"

"Is Aggie working tonight?"

"Yes." The bartender sat a trio of drinks on one of the waitress's trays while she complained to the other one about the troll at a back table who was pinching her ass hard enough to leave bruises. "So are a half-dozen bouncers, omae."

"No problem." Skater took his drink and headed back to the shadows that extended just beyond the multicolored lights spilling from the main dance stage onto the floor. The crowd was already lathered up, shouting and hooting their encouragement to the stripper working her way out of her G-string with teasing abandon. She used the mirrors behind her and the gray fog from the stage filters to prolong visual frustration.

Memories came unbidden and started tumbling into Skater's mind. He'd first seen Larisa in the bar while discussing a possible run with a guy Archangel knew. From the very first Larisa Hartsinger had captivated him with her beauty and her dancing, then with her personality. He pushed the memories away with effort and some repressed pain, focusing on the task at hand.

Skater hugged the wall and stepped into the short hallway running to the back rooms. The overhead track lighting was intentionally dim so the dancers could come and go among the crowd without being seen.

He stopped at the second door on the left and let his knuckles find a rhythm on the reinforced wooden surface.

"Who is it?" a husky contralto demanded.

Skater hesitated only for a minute. "Aggie, it's Jack. I need to talk."

"Don't waste your time, chummer. She ain't here."

"I figured that. I need to know where she is."

There was a pause. "Why come to me?"

"Got no one else to ask, and I need to find her."

"Slot it. Jack, people are looking for you. The kind of people where you end up dead and turned to lawn mulch before you can blink your eyes."

The old-fashioned peephole in the door darkened briefly.

"Larisa may be part of it. I need to know."

The door opened and Aggie ushered him in. She was tall and slender, with an overall bodymod that threw every luscious curve into the danger zone. A turquoise negligee overlaid a foundation of black lace undergarments that were shadows under the gauzy material. Her dark hair was hacked off at shoulder length but remained full, accentuating the Amerindian cheekbones and jawline.

Despite the pressing urgency, Skater found making small talk difficult. Before he'd taken up with Larisa, there'd been nights with Aggie. They'd had fun and the sex had been good, but never the magic that had fired him with Larisa.

The dressing room was small and spartan. Besides the vanity and the stool before it, there was only a loveseat and a coat rack.

Aggie smoothed her makeup on with practiced strokes, easily enhancing all her best features. "I don't have time for a lot of jaw." She made a moue of her lips and applied fiery red lipstick that held a neon glazed afterglow.

"Larisa," Skater prompted. The sounds coming from the main room had quieted.

"If she wanted contact with you, she'd have called."

"Aggie, this is serious."

She ignored him, quickly slashing on a pair of very arched brows. "Have you tried calling her?"

"I need to see her."

"Oh?" Aggie raised one of her new eyebrows. "You mean Larisa didn't give you her new number?" She closed her make-up case and dropped it into the slim purse silting on the vanity. "What a surprise."

"You know they're looking for me," Skater said. "Maybe for Larisa, too."

Aggie's eyes trapped Skater's in the vanity mirror. "You mean somebody other than you?"

Skater let irritation sound in his voice. There'd been a little residual animosity between them after he'd started seeing Larisa, but no big drama. "I don't have time for games," he growled.

Spinning to face him, face darkened by anger. Aggie snapped, "Don't you? Everything's a game to you. Jack. You play hard, and you're one of the best, but it's all a game. Including Larisa. Get the hint, chummer: she doesn't want to see you. You didn't lose. Exactly. She's just not going to play anymore." Her voice softened. "Can't say I blame her. There's no use in hanging onto something that's not yours to have. She learned, just not soon enough."

"She set me up," Skater said in a low voice.

Aggie gave him a hard, doubtful look.

'Tonight," he went on. forcing her to hear. "A piece of action turned dirty and got one of my people killed." It was as much as he'd ever admitted to someone outside his own circle that he was involved in any kind of shadow biz. With one exception. "Larisa fed me the scan, cut herself in for a piece. I agreed because it sounded doable. Somewhere in there, the yakuza got double-crossed, either by Larisa or someone she knows. I want to know the score."

"And you think Larisa sold you out?"

Asked bare-faced and bluntly. Skater couldn't answer right away. "I don't know. I need to find out. If she didn't, she could be in danger."

Aggie's laugh was harsh and brittle. "You don't believe in anybody, do you?"

Skater didn't reply.

'Tell me." the dancer said, "when you get up in the morning and look in the mirror, do you ever believe the guy you see standing there?"

"Sometimes," Skater replied honestly.

"You don't even know yourself. How the hell can you expect to know anyone else?"

Skater was confused by the logic. "I need to see Larisa."

"Maybe she doesn't need to see you." Aggie tumed and shook a long, gold tipped black cigarette out of a pack and lit it. Smoke curled around her head. "She loved you. Jack. More than anything or anyone. I didn't think she'd ever leave you, no matter what kind of life you lead or the way you walled yourself off from her. Whatever you did to hurt her, it must have been bad."

"I didn't do anything to her," Skater said. He'd asked himself for months what it could have been, replayed every conversation he could remember. None of it seemed enough to drive her away. "What did she tell you?”

"Nothing. But we noticed you didn't come around anymore and Larisa didn't smile as much. A month later she couldn't hide it any longer, and we figured you'd left because of the baby."

Skater felt like he'd been juiced with a double string from a Super Shock taser. "Baby?"

"Yeah, a baby-" Aggie heid out her hands to measure dimensions angrily. "You know, about this big, pink and round. Cries a lot." She stared hard at him.

Skater flipped the possibility around inside his head, but it wouldn't stick to anything, like the inside of his skull was gel-coated.

"Spirits," Aggie said softly. "You didn't know."

"No." Skater felt battered and empty, all the anger he'd been holding onto to keep him moving suddenly blown out

"We all figured you'd found out she was pregnant and decided to make tracks."

"I wouldn't have done that."

"You sure?"

Skater made himself answer honestly, more for himself than Aggie. He needed truth now. "No."

"Yeah. That's what I thought. Maybe that's what Larisa thought, too." She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray curled up inside a ceramic rock lizard. "You get to know them, guys are pretty much the same once you scratch that thin veneer. We tried to get her to see a street doc about eliminating the problem. But she refused. She had a nice nest egg set aside, and she was picking up more from new customers after you stopped coming around."

"Like who?"

"A connected guy named Synclair Tone." Aggie's voice and expression intimated scorn. "He's a Mafia guy who came up out of the Barrens. Still got the gutter written all over him, if you know where to look. He's cheap flash in a Vashon Island suit, but he's got mucho dinero backing any play he makes. And he liked Larisa a lot."

The knowledge soured inside Skater. From Aggie's expression he knew she'd intended it to. He forced himself to get around it. "Who's Tone with?"

She shrugged. "You know how these guys are, Jack. Keep the mystery intact and they figure a girl will throw herself at his feet."

Had Larisa? He told himself he didn't want to know, but that was a lie. "Is it possible Tone's tied in with the yaks somehow?" Skater knew the Seattle Mafia and the yakuza were virtually at war, but he also knew the yaks were deep as drek in all this. No matter how unlikely, this Tone slag just might be stupid enough to try playing both ends against the middle.

"Not that I ever knew."

"Was Larisa?"

"No. The yakuza have a positively medieval outlook on women. She knew that. She stayed away."

Skater struggled to make sense of everything, but it wasn't happening. There was only one course of action he could pursue. "I need to see Larisa."

Someone knocked on the door. "Five minutes, Aggie."

"Coming," she yelled back.

"Don't be late or you'll get docked. Chloris got those suckers drooling and they ain't gonna wait long." Footsteps moved away from the door.

"I need to see Larisa," Skater repeated.

"Can't help you." Aggie gathered up her purse, something Skater knew she'd never take out on the stage.

"Maybe she's in trouble."

"And maybe she's not. Did you think about that?" Aggie challenged. "Maybe she sold your fragging ass down the river for a credstick so she could get you out of her system. Just so you'd be gone."

"I need to know how it was. For a lot of reasons. If I'd known about the baby, maybe things could have been different. But I didn't."

"Oh, hell. Jack, who knows if it was even your baby? There were other guys before you, maybe even during you. There can't help but be in this line of work. Frag it, they're in your face all the drekking time."

"It's not about the baby," Skater replied softly. "Not all of it. I didn't leave Larisa. She left me. No warning, and no reason why. She stayed in touch occasionally, even put me onto this piece of action tonight. I want to know why."

"What if she did?" Aggie demanded. The room's dim lights made her pinched features more severe. "Are you going to hurt her?"

"No." Skater knew it was the truth as soon as he spoke out loud. "When I know, one way or the other, I'll chill it and move on. Revenge is no piece of biz to buy into, unless it's not your own emotions burning you up. It's for my own mind." He hesitated just a beat. "Like I told you, Larisa could be in danger, too."

For just a moment, indecision warred in Aggie's eyes. Then she shrugged, apparently making up her mind. "I'll call her. She can decide."

It wasn't what Skater wanted, and he searched for more words to offer.

Aggie read more into his reluctance to move. "Unless you're going to try to stop me." He fingers had drifted into her purse.

"No," Skater said, stepping aside. If Larisa ran from her doss, or didn't want to see him, that was an answer as well.

"Public telecoms are outside."

Skater opened the door and followed Aggie out. She walked down to the end of the hall where there were a couple of telecom cubes.

The music had changed to thunder out in the main lobby. It took Skater a few moments to recognize it as a popular biker thrash tune the Seattle Timber Wolves used as their theme song in combat matches.

Aggie tapped in a number on the keypad, then the two of them stood waiting for the face of Larisa Hartsinger to appear on the visual pickup. 'That's strange." Aggie pushed the Disconnect key. "No answer. No message. Nothing."

But Skater's attention was already elsewhere, drawn by movement he caught oul the corner of his eye. He'd sensed the two men stalking him even before he spotted them down at the other end of the hall. For a moment he wondered if they'd somehow recognized him.

Something told him the men were neither yakuza nor Lone Star or any other kind of blue crew. But his senses stuttered over the hard edge they broadcasted with their presence.

"Friends?" Aggie asked.

"No," Skater answered.

She crossed her arms over her breasts and kept her eyes on Skater, but he knew she was checking out the two figures down at the end of the hall. They were clearly visible as an elf and a troll, "Damn you, Jack Skater. This was a good place to work."

"Still could be." Skater didn't offer any misguided hope. He still didn't know how deep a hole he was in.

"I think 1 recognize one of those guys," Aggie said. "That elf come up from the Barrens with Tone. If Larisa is with Tone in this thing, she's in way over her head. She'd never stand for someone flatlining you. Especially here."

Skater dropped his right hand into his duster pocket and gripped the Predator. His nerves were taut as piano strings and stretched thin as monowire, and he knew one wrong move would bust out the sturm and drang waiting between them. He used the reflection trapped in the dark Plexiglas over the bulletin board at the back of the hallway to keep watch over the two men. Neither of them appeared interested in closing in at the moment.

"Find her," Aggie said. "And get her out of this drek-if you can." She gave him the address.

He repeated it after her to be sure he got it right. The number was in the wealthy Bellevue District. If Larisa was living there these days, she'd certainly made her way up in the world.

Gently, Aggie touched his face. "And get yourself the hell out of there if you find out she's in too deep. I always hoped you were different than the other guys I've been with."

Before Skater could even say thanks, she was gone, turning into a swivel-hipped simsense wet dream on her way to the stage. Lust-filled applause and catcalls greeted her arrival.

He took advantage of the momentary confusion created by the music and the loud noises of the crowd to move quickly toward the club's rear exit. He didn't have to turn and look to know the two men were coming after him, closing in rapidly.