Part 16 (1/2)

In the back of my mind the Old One-what I call the slice of the Wolf spirit lairing in my psyche-started to growl. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck p.r.i.c.k up. ”No other links?”

Braxen shrugged. ”You know that sometimes us cops keep 'hobby cases.' ”

”Ones you work on in your spare time, right?” I smiled. ”I have a list of women like that.”

Harry nodded. ”Well, these killings were a hobby case of mine, but my files are gone, just flat vanished.

Someone with mondo-juice hit my corner of the Matrix and wiped them out.”

I straightened up. ”You're going to call a meat wagon for him?”

”Unless you think Salacia and her people want to make arrangements for him.” Braxen looked down at the kid as a wind-whipped plastic bag molded itself to Albion's face. ”The kid should have stayed where he was safe.”

”Amen,” I said to that, knowing that to find out what happened to Albion, I'd be going places that weren't even in hailing distance of safe.

II.

Stealth and I retreated deeper into the alley as the morgue van arrived. The attendants zipped Albion into a body bag glistening with rain. Harry supervised and handed the driver a card. Then he got into his car and followed the van away, taking his headlights with him and leaving us in the dark.

I turned to Kid Stealth. ”He's gone. Give me what you've got because I know you're dying to have me show him up.”

Stealth answered me in a flat monotone. ”Doc Raven will be back from Tokyo tomorrow night. We can give him the scan, let him decide what to do about this.”

”Stealth, let me do some legwork first.” I pointed to the place where the rain had begun to darken the lighter outline of Albion's body. ”The trail will get cold.”

”The killer will be back.” The red lights in Stealth's eyes bloated and shrank. ”He's a thrill killer.”

”What?”

”This is his recreation.” Stealth looked at me for a moment, looked away, then nodded. ”The bullets you use in your Viper1. . . .”

”Silver, drilled and patched with a silver-nitrate solution to make them explosive.”

”Why?”

I hesitated. Kid Stealth hadn't been around during the Full Moon Slas.h.i.+ngs so he didn't know what Raven and I had run into back then. I'd developed the bullets to deal with that mess and I'd kept using them since, just in case. I sensed in his question, however, not so much a desire to know the history of my bullets as to understand the thinking that went into producing them.

”I had them done that way so they would maximize shock and destruction. Bullets are meant to kill and I wanted mine to do the job well.”

Stealth studied me for a moment before answering. ”The bullet used on Albion was designed to make him 1The nice thing about carrying around and using a gun as old as the Beretta Viper 14 was that under most current laws, antiques weren't really considered ”weapons” for concealment purposes. Me, I never saw the allure of these newfangled guns full of computer components and all. Go ahead, rely on Windows Sniper 4.0 if you want to, but I prefer not to need software patches when I'm in a firefight.

die.Back before the Awakening, before magic came back to the world, there were people who would test their hunting skills by using a bow and arrow to take wildlife.” Stealth held his hands before him as if visualizing what he was describing. ”Bows are uncertain. Because an arrow might not cause enough damage, innovative arrowhead designs were created. One type had three or four razored edges that spiraled around the arrowhead like the edges on a drill-bit. It was called a bleeder and was designed to chew up as much of the animal's insides as it could, while leaving a blood trail for the hunter to follow.”

The Old One howled angrily in the back of my mind. ”Stealth, you mentioned a stressed copper jacket with a light bullet and light charge. You're saying Albion was shot with the ballistic equivalent of a bleeder?”

”His wound was non-midline.”

1frowned. ”It still killed him.”

”No. The rifle used was more than capable of putting a shot through someone's eye at a range of at least two hundred-fifty meters. Albion was wounded by design.”

”What killed him, then?”

”He drowned in his own blood. He was coursed to death.”

”Coursed?”

Stealth nodded and-wonder of wonders-for once the Old One agreed with him. Unbidden, the Wolf spirit lent me his heightened senses. The night vision made everything much clearer in the alley, but that wasn't the sense the Old One wanted me to use. My nostrils twitched and, amid the noxious odors of rotting garbage and thrice-scorched radiator fluid, I caught a very sharp scent.

The Old One forced me to savor it.A large canine, Longtooth. It was here and marked the territory of its kill. It did as its master commanded. It is much like the Murder Machine to whom you speak.

”A cyberpup ran Albion down?” Stealth nodded. ”Foot spurs sc.r.a.ped the wall over there when it lifted its leg to mark its hunting ground.”

”Custom rifle, custom dog. This guy must have some serious nuyen to be dropping on his pastime.” I shook my head. ”If what Braxen said is accurate, he's dusted four. Not likely to stop-as you said, a thrill killer.”

”A dilettante.” Stealth looked hard at me. ”You will pursue this before Raven returns?”

A lingering sense of guilt concerning Albion slowly stole over my mind. He'd been angry when I last saw him and had stalked off into the night alone. That had been months ago, but part of me thought his death was my fault. I knew, realistically, that was nonsense, but I couldn't shake the feeling.

”I knew him. It's personal.”

Stealth extended his left hand, the metal one, toward me. ”Give me some cab fare.”

”I'll drop you at Raven's before I head out.”

”Give me ten nuyen.”

I dug my hand into my pocket. Could Guinness ever check it out, Kid Stealth would surely make its datachip of World Records in ten different categories-all of them lumped under the Homicide heading. I pulled a credstick from my jeans pocket and handed it to him.

”I want to see a receipt and my change back,” I added. Stealth might have had more unsolved murders to his credit than Elvis had imitators, but if I didn't give him a hard time he'd be insufferable.

Stealth took the stick and disappeared it into a pocket. ”Wolf, this one plays at death.”

I nodded. That was about as close as Stealth would ever get to telling me to be careful. He ascribes a lot to the ”a word to the wise is sufficient” school of caring for other folks. Given that the last time he tried to show concern over my fate he shot me in the back, the verbal message did seem more friendly. ”I'll keep you posted, I promise.”

Without so much as a nod, Stealth turned and withdrew into the alleyway. I didn't turn to watch him be- cause the Old One tries to make me laugh at Stealth's cyberbunny hopping gait. In terms of lethality, doing that strongly resembles sucking on twenty packs of nikostix a day for longer than I've been alive.

The other reason I didn't watch him is that Stealth was likely to cut up and over to Seventh by using those miracle claws of his to scale a building. Getting my knuckles b.l.o.o.d.y as the Old One tries to prove we can do that too is really annoying.

The Old One's sensory gifts did come in handy as I directed them back toward the street. As I walked in the general direction of where I'd left the Fenris parked in another alley, I heard someone sobbing.

Tears aren't all that uncommon in the sprawl, and more than one Samaritan has been lured into a headache by thinking he was rescuing a woman in distress. In this case, however, the sob wasn't coming from a voxsynth chip, but from the throat of a little gamin of a girl slumped against the alley wall.

The rain had soaked her hair and made it clump into stringy tendrils about as skinny as her arms and legs. She wore a clear plastic raincoat that ended somewhere between her neon green hot pants and her argyle knee socks. Her blouse matched the shorts in color and ended just below her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to show off a flat stomach. It also showed off her ribs. As she looked up at me with hollow, red-rimmed eyes I wondered if she was an anorexia poster-child.

I gave her a smile I hoped wouldn't threaten her. ”How long have you known Albion?”

She blinked as I said his name. ”You knew him?”