Skullcrack City (18 page)

“That’s rumors. I watch the news. That brain thing don’t discriminate. Dealers, NoBu bankers, sickies.”

Bankers? Shit. Our cowboys used to celebrate closed deals at Au Vin. The fire at the bank, maybe the guys outside Au Vin…were Delta and Dr. Tikoshi running clean-up operations? Was anybody knowing anything suddenly too much exposure?

Dara gave Toro’s wrist another rotation. He howled. I imagined Dara’s face was as expressionless as her mask. How long had she been doing this kind of thing?

“So you want us to take you to Kept right now?”

“No. No games. Ask your questions.”

“You ever work with Hungarian Minor?”

“I know him. Never ran deals with him though. Didn’t like his vibe. Seemed like a guy who’s more into, um, special privileges.”

“Like what?”

“He ran with young punks. Always the
young
ones, you know. And I think he had some serious mileage on those knives he was packing.”

“You hear anything about him working for a ‘Dr. T.’?”

“No. Like I said, dude creeped me out. It was kind of a relief when he disappeared.”

“You said ‘no’ but you shook your head up and down. Do you know Dr. T.?”

“No. Is that like some dude’s street name or…”

“Dr. Tikoshi. Do you know him?” Dara reach over and pulled the glowing red tongs from the coals. “Your horns are too big to only be dermally secured, right? Or…no, look at that scar along the hairline. That’s hack work, but I bet that means the plates aren’t screwed in to your skull.” She waved the tongs in front of his eyes. “Maybe I can use this to convert you to a fucking unicorn.”

She raised the tongs to the horn on the left side of his head and hovered.

“Dr. Tikoshi.”

He said, “I’m not afraid of those tongs, bitch. Back when I was The Bully I was branded five times.”

So she broke his wrist.

I flinched when it crunched, but I kept my gun trained on Toro. Dara abandoned the snapped arm and grabbed his remaining healthy limb. He curled his damaged wrist toward his body, but not before I saw the missing fingers on his hand.

“Dr. Tikoshi.”

“Alright. Easy. Listen.” Toro looked around, scanning the sky and his house for something. “The bosses say we don’t even talk about Dr. T. I think he used to work for us, but something went bad. Or maybe he’s working for them again. I think they’ve tried to merc him a couple of times. It’s confusing. So Hungarian definitely wasn’t supposed to be working with him on some side job, and I sure as shit don’t know what they were up to. I only know Dr. T. from the circuit. He did a lot of the more experimental modifications back in the day. He made everybody sign non-disclosure forms and refused to be filmed for
League
or
Oddfellas
. Lots of rumors about him, like he would do whatever you requested, even if he knew it would kill you. But I never met him. My guy was Dr. Shinori.”

“Would Shinori know Dr. Tikoshi?”

“Yeah. I mean, that was one of the rumors—that they were old buddies. Like,
really
old.”

The sound of sirens rang out in the distance. The audio sensors in the light poles would have triangulated the gunshot to this street by now.

“You still have contact with Shinori?”

“No, not for a few years at least. He used to do touch-up work for me when my shit got infected. But he’s still in town, I think, doing plastic surgery out of the Brubaker East offices.”

“Thank you, Toro. I’m going to let go of your wrist now, and if you try to turn and touch me, Mr. Doyle will unload his pistol, which happens to be packed with boiler rounds.”

Toro’s eyes went wide at that, the flesh of his forehead wrinkling against his surgical steel protrusions.

Dara continued. “And if we find ourselves being gridtracked, or discover that Dr. Shinori has been alerted to our interest, the Kept Squad will have your horns mounted over their mantle by midnight.”

I wanted to say something cool, too, but it was my first gunpoint interrogation and I’d just discovered I was packing some kind of jacked-up bullets so the nerves got to me and all I said was, “Enjoy your burnt steak, jerk-ass.”

Dara was laughing as we sped across town to the Brubaker district. “What was that?”

“The ‘jerk-ass’ thing? Or the part where I crashed to the ground and left you without coverage because I got pegged by siding shrapnel?”

“The first one.”

“I wanted to let him know we were serious.”

“But I’d already delivered legitimate threats.”

“Well, the guy shot at me. I figured I deserved to get a jab in.”

“True. You know I broke his wrist though, right? It’s not like the burnt steak was the worst of his problems.”

“You’ve got a point. And why was he making so many steaks, anyway?”

“Probably has mimic whores to feed.”

“What?”

“It’s another Vakhtang ‘benefit.’ Some of these guys will grab a girl off the street and pump her with a super-dose of Hex. Puts her consciousness somewhere in their realm, but her body is still here, alive, and open to suggestion.”

“Jesus.”

“Sometimes we find them dumped after their eyes jelly. Sometimes they get pulled through. If Toro had one, she must have been chained up, or she would have jumped us.”

“If he’s that kind of guy, why didn’t we just kill him?”

Dara’s stern face and the expanding sound of the road rolling beneath us made me think this was the wrong question until she broke the silence.

“I used to think like that, too. But they always find new replacements, and the murder puts heat on us. We’ve found containment and conversion work better. Besides, killing is easy for them. It shouldn’t be for us.” She took a deep breath. “It isn’t, for me.”

Her brow furrowed. I could see her having memories she didn’t want. I changed the subject.

“By the way, thanks for using my real name back there.”

“What do you mean? I assumed S.P. Doyle was one of your false identities.”

“No, that’s my birth name.”

“Not Maria Scharf?”

“You’ve seen me naked. Did I look like a Maria to you?”

She laughed and raised her eyebrows, and then her cheeks lit up bright red. The woman who had broken a bull-man’s wrist blushed, and something about that brought me joy.

“So, what’s the S.P. stand for? It wasn’t on any of your I.D.s and Ms. A. didn’t have time to pull your birth records.”

“Not telling.”

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

“Dara’s not your real name.”

“Well, that’s my first name, but I try not to tell anybody my surname.”

“Let me guess…Dara McBarfshit?”

“Close, but it’s worse.”

“Than McBarfshit? That’s not even a real name. And it’s got barf in it.”

“And shit. But, no, it’s worse, somehow.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Okay—Borkowski.”

“Dara Borkowski? Wow. I don’t…I mean…yeah, that’s one to process. That’s like the sound of an obese flightless bird falling down a flight of stairs into a bowl of porridge. That’s really rough.”

“It’s really Polish.”

“Okay, fine. That was a doozer. Mine’s a lot more Irish, I think.”

“Go ahead. Just say it.”

“S.P. stands for Shenanigans Patrick.”

Dara’s jaw dropped. “No.”

“Yup. Shenanigans, like some Irish-themed mall chain brewpub.”

“So why don’t you go by Patrick?”

“I don’t know. Pat for short. Pat the Bunny. I was a chubby kid. I would have gotten a lot of Fatty Patty. It doesn’t have the elegance of, say, Borkowski.”

“Yeah. Borkowski is like the sound of a Polish guy projectile vomiting. Still,
Shenanigans
…Man, your parents…”

“They were young. I think they thought a name like that would give me character. My mom said they wanted to change it when I started kindergarten, but the paperwork was a bitch, so that’s when I became S.P. And after a while everybody just called me Doyle.”

My parents.

Mom.

“I need to pick up a phone. Now.”

It turned out Ms. A. had decided that my cash was already property of the mission (for lifesaving services rendered, I guess). Dara peeled off eighty bucks from what looked to be a three or four grand stash under her seat, and I used the money to cop a prepaid phone.

The convenience store guy would think I was robbing the joint if I went in there wearing an anti-face rec mask, so I opted to keep my hoodie up and head tilted down, and hope that kept me off everyone’s respective radars. I wondered what would happen if my face appeared on even one camera. Who would track me down first? The Feds? The cops? Delta MedWorks? The bank? Vakhtang goons carrying a cell bomb with my name on it? That fucking one-armed gorilla brain cruncher thing?

Hindsight stepped in to remind me that my mistakes seemed far more egregious now that I was sober and on the run.

The kid behind the counter handed me my change. I didn’t make eye contact for fear of showing my full face, but I could tell he had a lower lip ring and long red hair and his skin had that yellow-white isolation tan you get from pointing device screens at your face all day. He smelled like he was sweating high fructose everything and having twenty smoke breaks a day. Still he was nice enough to take a moment from his grind to offer me some helpful advice.

“Lots of people open up their phones out front and start making calls, but if I was you I’d get to my car and lock the doors first. I was just listening to the news and they said more bodies were found down by the river. No brains. The skullcracker is still out there, man. Shit’s crazy.”

“Thanks, man. Good lookin’ out.”

Back in the car, I locked the door and ripped open the phone packaging.

Three calls in a row. No pick-ups. I finally decided to leave a message, even though I’d heard a strange click right after the beep.

“Hi, mom, it’s me. I’m so sorry I didn’t manage to call you earlier, and I can’t imagine what you must be thinking, but I wanted you to know that I’m alive…and I…I need you to know that whatever you’ve heard, most of it’s probably not true. I’m, uh, I’m in a safe place right now, kind of, but I won’t be able to keep this phone for long, so I need you to call me back at this number as soon as you get this, because I think you need to…well, I don’t want to say more right now, I can’t but…listen, mom…I just love you so, so much, and I’m so sorry for whatever you’re going through right now, but please, call me back. Love you. Bye.”

I wanted to curl up and find some way to not be me and hide from the world I’d made, but I knew Dara was sitting right there. I looked over to her and saw she was the one crying, and that, somehow, was terrifying.

“What is it?”

“They ruin everything, Doyle. Everything.”

She sniffled and rubbed the tears from her good eye with the back of her hand. She started the ignition and we drove through the night in heavy silence.

The thing Toro neglected to mention about Dr. Shinori was that he had a tenuous grip on the English language.

Picture a naked man coated in lard and trying to pull himself up a black silk rope. Now imagine that man has had all of his arm muscles replaced with pudding. And then cut off his lard-laced hands and grease the bloody stumps. Now you’ve arrived, metaphorically at least, at the idea of Dr. Shinori’s English skills. (Which, still, by far, trumped my Japanese language skills, but that’s beside the point.)

So even when Dara and I bum rushed Shinori’s office at the tail end of clinic closing and applied our now classic wrist-leverage/gunpoint persuasion technique, the results were questionable.

“Dr. Tikoshi.”

“No.”

“No, you don’t know him, or no, you won’t talk to us?”

“Draw.”

Shinori pointed with his free hand at a pad of paper on his desk next to a long charcoal stick.

I said, “Maybe we should let him draw.”

“No. He’s smart enough to practice medicine here, he’s probably got more English skills than he’s letting on. This is a gambit.”

I thought of Toro. “I don’t know. It’s not like he’s had the most discerning clientele.”

“You want me to let him loose so he can set off an alarm or grab a gun from his desk drawer? No. He’ll talk. We just need to put on our best listening ears right now.” She turned her attention back to Shinori, bending his wrist beyond ninety degrees. “Dr. Tikoshi.”

“Brainy.”

“He’s smart?”

“No. Yes. No. He buddy.”

“He’s your buddy?”

“No. Long time. Seven three one buddy. Before deal.”

“What deal?”

“No.”

Dara looked at me, shaking her head. Never before had the threat of violence yielded less information. We were setting a new high score with no witnesses.

Dara said, “Give him the charcoal and hold the paper for him. And watch for groin kicks, or headbutts, or whatever he’s thinking this might get him.”

I handed Dr. Shinori the charcoal stick from as far away as I could and then held the pad of paper in front of him.

He said, “Buddy,” and then drew.

He turned the drawing to me—a crude sketch of a man holding a box, with lines running from the box to the back of the man’s head—and I let out a little fanboy noise that I would have found embarrassing if Dara didn’t already know I was a guy with a crooked penis and a name like Shenanigans.