Striper Assassin (10 page)

The garage ceiling is low, spanned by massive concrete struts and further supported by concrete columns. Arrays of florescent lamps affixed to the ceiling between the struts cast a stark illumination. Aisle after aisle of waiting automobiles march off into the distance. Tikki stops the Rapier, pulls a small knapsack off her shoulders. She takes out a Toshiba SC-701 graphic transceiver, and turns it on with the touch of a finger. The display comes to life with colored geometries, giving her a detailed schematic map of her current location. The entire city is chipped into the transceiver’s memory. The little red blip on the display shows the location of a particular car, a heavy Nissan Ultima V limousine, used by a member of the local yakuza. Tikki has previously attached a Toshiba SCA-7234 transponder to the car, which now communicates directly with the transceiver in her hand.

She likes to be prepared.

Soon, her target arrives via elevator with a pair of male companions. Tikki watches them through the rows of parked cars. They glance around idly, but give no indication they suspect that a hunter is watching, gauging their movements. Waiting for the moment to strike.

Taking human animals in the city is little different from taking other kinds of animals in the wild. The successful predator chooses her moment with care. A strike that fails to kill is worse than no strike at all because it alerts the prey to the hunter’s presence. The prey must remain unaware until the final moment, when death comes crashing down with jaws of steel to crush and snap its neck.

The Nissan rumbles to life and rolls toward the garage exits. Tikki starts the Rapier and follows.

The moment of death draws near.

* * *

The limo takes the Franklin Bridge over the Delaware into Camden, Inc., where the night burns in garish neon and simmers with flashing strobes. The procession of dazzling megawatt façades begins. The names of the casinos and nightclubs rise up five, ten, fifteen, twenty stories: Polichrome Palace, Ritz Royale, Dragon’s Loft, Rage of Mages, Four Aces, Glistening Underling, Silk Refuge. The streets widen into boulevards. Laserdis adverts arch out over the streets. Econocars vanish among a tide of gleaming limousines and posh executive sedans. Crowds in glittering Prestigewear and the mirrored fashions of NeoMonochrome flow ceaselessly along the sidewalks and through fantastic entrance ways of glaring, flickering light.

Police are rarely seen. Yakuza run the city corporation and yakuza provide security. Standing on every corner, strolling along every block, are two or more of their
kobun
in special red, orange, or yellow jackets. Heavily armed back-up waits in marked security vans on various side streets. The ordinary citizen is treated with a respect usually accorded only to kings and queens, while disruptive individuals are dealt with immediately and without reference to any court. Incidents of violent crime are generally few and far between. All this makes Camden an interesting place to be. Especially interesting for a hunter.

The Nissan pulls up at the Gingko Club. Tikki’s target comes here once or twice a week. She’s scoped the layout previously. The name of the place refers to the nut-bearing gingko tree with fan-like leaves. The tree is Chinese, the name Japanese. The club is owned and operated by the local branch of the Honjowara-gumi yakuza. No surprise.

This is where it will happen.

The main entrance is closely guarded. The doormen use a Fuchi SecTech-7 scanning system to catch weapons on the way in. Tikki knows ways past such things. In fact, she’s got a black box from a specialist in San Francisco that would probably walk her straight through, hardware and all. She’s got other options, however, that offer higher probabilities of success.

The moon rises full and white and brilliant against the dark canopy of the night. Tikki grins just to see it. There’s something about a full moon that makes her feel wild and free and even a little crazy. It’s a hunter’s moon, a moon to kill by.

She steers the Rapier into the dark of an alley.

The rear door of the Gingko Club is solid metal and faces a small parking lot lit by orange spots. Tikki waits for a parking valet to head up toward the front of the club, then steps up to the back door and pounds on it with her fist.

Not a security cam in sight.

The intercom beside the door squeals. “What you want!” a male voice demands.

“Red Bullets!” Tikki says, giving the name of the local yakuza patrol. “Open up!”

A moment passes. Something inside the door clangs. An Asian man smelling of fish and wearing a stained white apron pushes the door open and looks at Tikki, first frowning as if annoyed, then going wide-eyed, and with good reason. The muzzle of her Kang automatic is right in his face. She has goaded him into error, just as planned. Only three nights ago she saw a Red Bullet patrol stop here for a quick bite to eat. Bang, shout, and the door opens.

Tikki motions with a finger: Out, step out.

The man obeys. She motions him to her left as if to walk him away from the door, then slams the barrel of the Kang across the rear of his head. The man crumbles.

Good prey.

Very good.

* * *

A short hallway takes her to a red door. She steps through and into the rear of the club. The music is loud and asynchronous, led by a bamboo flute and a geisha’s keening intonations. Simulated rice-paper screens divide the place into squarish spaces for dancing and broad corridors lined with silk-curtained alcoves. Laserdis ideograms, swords, flowers, and other images of feudal Japan wax and wane, blossom into view and then fade like phantoms throughout the shadowy space.

Trid screens everywhere provide a murmuring undertone that extols the many virtues of the Honjowara-gumi. Yaks are very big on image. Many maintain official offices, publish brochures and newsletters, hold press conferences, produce their own cable shows, and even own banks.
Kambu atsukai,
the lower-ranked executives, have been known to invite local citizens to their offices for tea merely to encourage a favorable public image.

Triad bosses rarely attempt to seem so benign.

In search of her prey, Tikki moves through a crowd of dancers. Those who notice give her odd looks. She isn’t dressed to the mode. Neither is she wearing her usual streetside costume. She’s dressed for a hit. Mirrorshades conceal her eyes. A strip of black silk covers the lower half of her face. A long dark-blue duster obscures the rest, all but her soft-soled black boots.

She works her way toward the front of the club, but somehow misses her mark. The place is like a maze, with people constantly moving, changing places. She’s certain her target must still be here. He stayed for hours any time he’s ever come here in the past. She backtracks, covering old ground, and abruptly sees him coming right at her, approaching through a swirl of dancers. The man is a heavyset Asian male named Saigo Jozen, the next yakuza sub-boss targeted for assassination. Moving with him through the crowd is a group of two males and three females. The males all wear the lapel pin of the Honjowara-gumi. Emerging from the press of a dance space, the group forms into three couples.

Tikki slips a pair of fleshtone ear plugs into her ears, then opens her long duster and brings up the twin SCK-100 submachine guns slung from her shoulders. Saigo never sees what’s coming. One moment he’s grinning at the woman on his arm, laughing with his companions, and in the next he’s twitching and jerking under the massed assault of Tikki’s SMGs.

The distinctive staccato clattering of the SCKs slashes through the music and the noise like razor-tipped claws. As Saigo’s face and chest turn into a mass of blood and gore, Tikki widens her field of fire. The five people nearest Saigo jerk and crumble. Blood sprays the air and spatters over the floor. People scream and fall. Saigo is lying in a puddle of blood and gore but still is not dead, not quite. He’s making feeble efforts to crawl away over the body of a dead woman. Tikki gives him another burst, but the man keeps moving. She empties the SMGs into him.

That finishes him.

Adama will be pleased.

She tugs at the strap slung from her left shoulder and drops one of the SMGs to the floor, rams a fresh clip into the other one and snaps the bolt. People are fighting to get away from her now, struggling against the press of the herd to escape the deadly menace of the hunter. It’s good, very good—not quite as close and personal as she likes it but very good all the same. Good and bloody. The screams of the prey echo in her ears, and the scents of terror and death swarm lush and hot into her nose.

A door opens in the red wall between two alcoves. Tikki points the SMG and fires. Even before the man in the dark suit can pass through the doorway, he staggers back and falls. Tikki dips into her duster pocket and pulls out a compact grenade. Concussion effects can be deadly at close range. She pulls the pin and lobs the grenade up the corridor paneled in mock rice paper. Two more men, fighting against the crowd and coming toward her from that direction fall flat to the floor in the wake of the detonation, along with others.

The blast sends people screaming toward the rear of the club. Tikki lobs another grenade in that direction, then drops a smoke bomb at her feet.

Smoke swirls up around her.

A heavily built man holding a gun up over his head comes crashing through the paper screen along the right of the corridor. Pointing the SMG, Tikki fires, smearing the man’s front with red, tearing holes in the rice-paper screens, and finishing off the magazine. Even as the man goes down, she drops the SMG and pulls the Kang. More screams arise from the next corridor over, and that’s good. Incidental casualties are greatly desired, an integral part of the job. Tonight, it’s open season, a hunter’s dream come true.

A primal grin flashes across her features.

Prey is everywhere.

* * *

“Good. Very good.”

The throbbing rhythms of the multi-snythlinked band inside the Devil’s Roost make mere spoken words hard to hear, but Tikki sees and hears enough, and smells enough, to guess at what Adama says. He gives a long smile of satisfaction. A wolfish light shines in his eyes. The familiar rhythm of his words, “Good… very good,” resonates clearly in Tikki’s ears. More than that, the man’s smell fills with pleasure. He fingers the bright brass cap of his walking stick, then motions Tikki nearer.

“Hong Kong appreciates your efforts,” he says, smiling, adding a little flick of his fingers as if brushing away the competition like a fly. “So do I.”

Tikki nods.

The mention of Hong Kong brings to mind Adama’s alleged ties with the Green Circle Gang, that particularly vicious arm of the infamous 999 Society ruled over by the Triad leader Silicon Ma. Pleasing someone like Ma is a good thing. His connections in North America might be limited, but his influence is growing and his power throughout eastern and southern Asia is pervasive.

Adama remarks that he is ready to start Tikki on her next hit. She wants to hear more, but before Adama can elaborate, his five glamorous female companions return from their trip to the lavatory. The females smell of fresh perfume and various hygiene products. Adama smiles broadly and invites them to rejoin him in his booth.

“Who will be my Leandra?” he asks.

One of them, a luscious redhead, croons with pleasure.

* * *

The town house is quiet, for the moment. The only light is that sifting through the drapes and curtains, a dusky gray suffusion that glows subtly against the darker shadows of the rooms. A human might have trouble seeing. Tikki can see just fine.

She lies in the ground floor entrance hall. For her, now, in this place, there are no doubts or uncertainties. She is
Were
and back in her true form, and has made this place her own.

Anyone who enters would immediately recognize her power. She lies in a hazy shaft of moonlight that enters through the skylight above. Mere skin has transformed into a dense, shaggy coat of red and black, the color of blood and the night. Her forelegs are heavy with muscle, her paws the size of a troll’s. She could crush a man’s skull between her teeth, or lay him open from shoulder to groin with a single pass of her claws. She knows that because she’s done it, that and more. She’s even fought a troll or two while in her natural form, and always come out the victor.

Now, she flicks an ear and idly curls her tail, then yawns, stretches, and rises to inspect the house.

No one could get into the town house without her noticing at once, but that isn’t what draws her to her feet again. It’s the character of the air, which takes on the color of what she’s doing and thinking. If Tikki just lies around, the air takes on a lax quality. If she’s up and moving, looking, listening, testing the air, the atmosphere assumes a wary character, a scent like vigilance, suggestive of muscle like spring-loaded steel, of a strength and power that few creatures in the world would dare to confront.

When she does a job, such as guarding a place, Tikki likes to do it right. That means even the air should smell right.

She pauses to rub the side of her face against the corner of a hallway. That leaves traces of her own body scent, strong traces, to better color the rest of the hall, which already smells like her. Places she defends should smell like her. In that way, she makes them hers, her personal territory, one she generously allows others, such as Adama, to share.

Adama is of course a male, a human male, but still a male, and she doesn’t mind sharing territory with an amiable male. With the right sort of male, she might offer to share much more, if she felt so inclined.