city blues 02 - angel city blues (30 page)

One of them made a go at the pocket of my windbreaker, attracted no-doubt by the bulge caused by my phone and the Turing Scion.

I didn’t check to see who it was. I just grabbed the questing hand, rotating it away from my pocket, and into a wrist lock. I twisted hard, and jerked downward, eliciting a cry of pain and bringing the would-be pickpocket to his knees.

I released my grip and kept climbing, not looking back as his buddies scrambled to keep him from tumbling down the steps.

I listened for the sound of one or more of them pounding up the stairs after me. They didn’t.

I wasn’t too worried. These were wealthy tourist kids, playing at being street punks. I could see it in their eyes. They lacked the hard and predatory edge of true sidewalk soldiers. When their little role-playing vacation was over, they’d go back to school on Earth, or to cushy jobs somewhere in the big money arcologies.

There was a good chance that they’d work each other up to a real fighting anger by the time my business in the club was settled. They’d probably be lying in wait when I came back down the stairs. I might have to teach them a lesson about talking to strangers in bad neighborhoods. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be necessary to hurt them too much in the process.

As I stepped through the doorway at the top of the stairs, I passed through some kind of acoustic suppression field that was apparently in place to keep the club noise from bleeding out onto the street. The field was clearly necessary, because a wall of sound slammed into me like a punch in the face.

Most of the tables in Glass Planet were empty. What the club lacked in patronage, it apparently tried to make up in raw decibels. I’ve never been a fan of the atonal snarl that substitutes for melody in psycho-rock. And I’m frankly not crazy about the idea of subliminal audio cues polluting my musical selections or my subconscious mind. But the soundtrack in this place was so loud that it surpassed my usual dislike of the so-called music genre. It was cranked up into the realm of assault with intent to deafen.

I took the nearest empty table to the door, settling into a chair with its back to a wall and trying not to flinch with each pulse of the song.

A rectangle of the tabletop was a photo-active data pad displaying a drink menu. I couldn’t figure out how to switch the language to English, so I browsed through images of drinks until I found something that looked more or less like scotch on the rocks. I thumbed the order icon, and settled back into my chair, trying to ride out the audio barrage until my drink showed up.

Despite the general lack of customers, it took nearly ten minutes for the waiter to arrive. He was lean and compact, with nondescriptly handsome Asian features, offset by flint-hard eyes. He had the look that the tourist kids on the stairs had been lacking—that finely honed edge of intensity that comes from being equally comfortable with questionable deals and acts of sudden violence.

He set a drink on my table, and waited for me to pay.

I hadn’t bothered to exchange my cash for yen, but I knew from the digital brochures that Euro-marks were acceptable currency all over the colony. I held out an
€m
50 bill, about five times the cost of the drink.

The waiter reached for the fifty, but I didn’t let it go. We each held on to one end of the bill.

I leaned toward him, practically yelling to be heard over the music. “Are you Sato?”

He gave me a bland stare. “Wakarimasen.”

I didn’t speak Japanese, but you hear a smattering of it around the Zone sometimes, and I had picked up that particular word a long time ago. It translated literally as ‘I’m not sure,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ Contextually, the meaning was closer to ‘I don’t understand.’ As in, ‘
I don’t know you, asshole, so I’m going to pretend not to speak your language
.’

I let go of the fifty. “That’s funny… My friends tell me that your English is better than mine is.”

That was a calculated bluff. I had no idea if Sato spoke English, assuming that this was actually the right guy. Dancer had never gotten around to discussing Sato’s language skills, so it was entirely possible that the man’s ‘wakarimasen’ was genuine. He might not understand a word I was saying.

The waiter kept the bill in plain sight, as though he hadn’t yet decided whether or not to accept it. He reached over to the menu pad, and did some rapid finger work on several of the icons.

The decibel level at my table instantly dropped by about ninety-percent, displaced by a low pitched humming sound and a continual shush of white noise. The same kind of active acoustic suppression that was in use on the front door, or so I assumed.

“Who are your friends?” the waiter asked.

I pretended to examine the drink. “It might be better to stay away from names.”

“Okay,” the man said. “Then we start by staying away from
my
name.”

I took a short sip of the drink; definitely not scotch.

I nodded. “That sounds like a good idea. No names.”

He shoved the fifty into a pocket. “What can I do for you, Mr. No-name?”

“I’m looking to indulge my hobby,” I said. “I like to shoot at things.”

That brought me a very hard look. “What
kinds
of things?”

I shrugged. “Mostly people who shoot at me first.”

“That happens to you a lot, does it?”

I took another sip of the not-scotch. “I wouldn’t say it happens a
lot
. But definitely more often than I like.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” the waiter said. “I don’t talk to cops.”

I shook my head. “If I was a cop, you’d already be screwed.”

“Why is that?”

“A friend of mine did a little snooping in the local cop-shop’s suspect database. Somebody answering to the name of Sato is the presumptive perp in about a half-dozen illegal weapons sales. That, as they say, is the
bad
news.”

“So what’s the
good
news?”

“The good news is that the cops aren’t planning to come after you—or rather,
Sato
—anytime soon.”

“How do you know that?”

“According to his police file, our Mr. Sato never deals in heavy weapons. And he doesn’t sell in quantity; just an occasional handgun or flechette pistol. Nothing fully automatic, and nothing that could poke a hole in the habitat shell. Basically, he hasn’t pissed off the local police enough to attract serious attention.”

“Let’s say that’s true,” the unnamed waiter said. “You could
still
be a cop.”

“So could
you
,” I said. “For all I know, that file could be a trap, planted in the police database to lure idiots like me into trying to buy black market weapons.”

The man who might be Sato gave me a half smile. “I’m not a cop.”

“And neither am I. I’m just a plain old gaijin with enemies. If they start shooting at me, I want to be able to return the favor.”

“I don’t sell guns,” the waiter said. “But I can bring you a
sandwich
from the kitchen.”

He put an odd emphasis on the word ‘sandwich.’

“Fine,” I said. “Bring me a sandwich. How much will it cost?”

“That depends. How many
pickles
do you want with it?”

Pickles, I assumed, were bullets. I shrugged. “Why don’t we say thirty? And make sure the mustard is
spicy
.”

I hoped he’d interpret this last bit to mean that I wasn’t looking for a low-caliber pop gun. I wanted a weapon with decent knockdown power.

The waiter rubbed the side of his face. “One sandwich, plus thirty pickles... That’s going to run you about fifteen-hundred.”

I did some quick mental inventory. I was carrying about two-thousand marks. This little investment would put a major dent in my operating capital, but my client was wealthy and this was a business expense after all.

I nodded. “If the mustard is spicy, you’ve got a deal.”

The waiter walked away, moving in the general direction of the bar.

I sat with my back to the wall, keeping an eye on the door, and enjoying the blissful near-quiet of the acoustic suppression field.

I took another sip of my drink. It wasn’t scotch, bourbon, sake, vodka, or gin. I didn’t know what it was, but it was pretty good. I considered ordering another one, but that was probably not such a great idea. Better to nurse this one until my business was concluded, and then leave with a clear head.

The waiter was back sooner than I expected, carrying a thermofoil pouch of the sort used to keep takeout food at suitably hot or cold temperatures. He set the pouch on the table with a clunk that spoke of something more solid than bread, condiments, and pickles.

“Perhaps you’d like to visit the men’s room, and then pay for the sandwich on your way out.”

I stood up and took the pouch. “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

The waiter gestured toward a door in the back corner of the club.

I started in the indicated direction, receiving another sonic punch to the head as I left the perimeter of the table’s acoustic suppression field. Damn. I’d forgotten about that. I could almost feel my eardrums start to whither under the onslaught.

Maybe I didn’t actually
need
a gun. Maybe I could carry around a recording of this pseudo-melodic train wreck, and use it to paralyze my enemies with ear-shredding racket.

No… A recording wouldn’t be directional enough. Too much chance of traumatizing innocent bystanders.

The stalls in the men’s room were equipped with full enclosure vid-screens. As I latched myself into the second cubicle from the end, the walls came alive with windows displaying the many scenes available for my excretory viewing pleasure.

Feed the door five-hundred yen, and I could do my business surrounded by the rings of Saturn, or the pillars of the Parthenon, or the peak of Mount Fuji under a flawless sunrise. There were also a few dozen porn options available, ranging from basic strip shows, to some truly dark permutations of the eroto-sadism fetish that appealed to certain Japanese subcultures. I selected none-of-the-above.

The toilet had several odd attachments that I’d never seen before. A few were clearly intended for hygiene operations, but some were so improbable in configuration that I didn’t even want to guess their purposes.

The thermofoil pouch contained a 9.6mm Nambu-Sendai semi-automatic. Compact, but powerful. The frame, slide, and grips were gray carbon-plastic laminate. I jacked the slide back. The exposed section of barrel seemed to be titanium, or maybe tungsten.

I released the slide. The action was smooth. The parts were well-machined, and properly lubricated.

It looked like a military sidearm, but I didn’t know enough about the Japanese armed forces to be sure.

There were three ten-round magazines, each loaded with frangible ceramic rounds: designed to punch through human flesh and flimsy obstacles, but shatter on contact with hard surfaces. A good choice on a space station, where poking a hole through the wall could leave you sucking vacuum.

I slid a clip into the magazine well, racked a round into the chamber, and flicked the safety on. The weapon fit into my belt at the small of my back, where my windbreaker would cover it nicely. The two extra magazines went into my right front pocket.

Assuming that the Nambu worked properly—and based on Sato’s police file, I had every reason to believe that it would—then the waiter had delivered on his end of the bargain.

I pulled out my wallet, peeled off fifteen-hundred marks, and folded the bills into the foil pouch.

When I had gun and clothing arranged to my satisfaction, I unlatched the door of the stall and walked back into the auditory anarchy of the club.

The waiter was still standing by my table when I returned. I stepped into the acoustic suppression field, and handed him the foil pouch. “I already ate the sandwich. The money’s in the bag.”

He opened the pouch and inspected the contents. “Was the mustard spicy enough for you?”

“Just the way I like it.”

He nodded, shoved the pouch into his pocket, and walked toward the bar without another look in my direction. Our business was officially concluded.

Not surprisingly, the three wannabe’s were waiting for me on the street. They surrounded me the second my shoes hit the sidewalk.

The one directly in my path gave me his best menacing sneer. “Hey, fuckface… We’ve got unfinished business…”

I had the Nambu out and centered on the bridge of his nose before the last syllable was out of his mouth. I thumbed the safety off with an audible click. “Let’s take care of it, then. If there’s one thing I
hate
, it’s unfinished business.”

They were gone so fast that they practically left holes in the air, vanishing down the street in a flurry of receding footfalls.

I tucked the automatic out of sight almost as quickly.

I didn’t particularly enjoy threatening teenagers with guns, but these boys needed to understand that not all trouble is make-believe. The sooner they learned to spot the real thing, the more likely they were to make it home alive.

CHAPTER 24