Striper Assassin (36 page)

Tikki still can’t believe he’s real.

41

07-29-54/05:17:30

Cam off, vid off.

If Skeeter had a choice, he wouldn’t even bother putting the wear on his ’effin cybereyes. He and the so very trid-o-genic Asian-featured news snoop Joi Bang, scrod-scarfin’ elf biff mage, stand waiting in the shambles of an office occupied by Gabriella Santini, muck-fraggin’ bink drek News Director for WHAM! Independent News of Philadelphia. It’s a short wait.

Santini lowers her sneaker-clad feet from amid the piles of hard copy, chip carriers, and vid cassettes on her desk, but only long enough to drop a chip carrier into a nearby garbage can.

“Get the message?” Santini asks wryly.

“Yes but—!” J.B. manages to interject.

Santini sneers. “We got ghouls digging bodies out of cemeteries. We got corporates dying like flies. We got a possible cover-up by city hall on a series of mass murders. Nobody cares about tigers. I don’t care about tigers. If you want to report on tigers, even big red and black tigers, give your next chip to the zoological society.”

“Yes but—!”

“Get the hell out of my office.”

“Can I just—!”

“No. Get out.”

* * *

07-29-54/05:41:21

Cam on, close focus and hold on the trid-o-genic features of J.B. standing in the hallway outside Santini’s office. A major event is in progress. The damn bimble-headed biff has been silent for going on twenty seconds. Skeeter records this for posterity. J.B. looks at him as if mildly chagrined, like she might even cry. Skeeter records that for posterity, too.

“Well,” she says, crestfallen, “our story got trashed.”

Skeeter resists pointing any fingers. He could’ve told her what would happen. Man-eating tigers! Cannibal orks! Murdering policlub freaks! But would the dithead elf listen? Oh, no… never. J.B. always knows best. The trid-o-genic news snoop mage has a “Sixth-World sense” about these things.

Right.

“I guess we better find another story.”

That’s the best news Skeeter’s heard in weeks. It’s such good news, in fact, that he jabs a finger right at her:
You’re on!

“Maybe this cover-up thing Santini mentioned.”

Skeeter jabs again: You’re on!

“I wonder,” J.B. goes on to say. “I wonder if the cover-up could have something to do with what Santini said about ghouls digging up corpses? Maybe it is ghouls committing all these cannibal-mutilation killings after all! I mean, that tiger, maybe that was just a fluke! Imagine if the mayor’s in on it! And the police! And the policlubs too! Maybe the entire city corporation council masterminded the whole thing! Why, if we could break a story like that, we’d get a network feed for sure!”

Same story, different day.

Damn bingle dithead biff.

She never quits.

42

“I know a place. A safe place.”

The male says it in English. That’s something they both know. In the dark of the alley, Tikki cannot really read his features. Light and shadow play across his features in a way that makes his expression seem utterly emotionless, impassive as stone. She knows that’s wrong. She can smell it. The male’s worked up about something, excited. She isn’t sure if that’s good or bad, if he means her good or ill, but she’s sure he isn’t half as indifferent or calm as a mere glance might suggest.

Tikki pulls the Kang from the waistband of her trousers and presses the muzzle up under the male’s jaw. He looks at the gun, but doesn’t move. “Get sweet with me again and you’re dead,” Tikki promises softly.

“I won’t,” he says.

If he’s lying, he gives no clue.

Tikki tucks the Kang back into her waistband. The male leads on. Ten blocks over, he pulls up a metal grating set into the concrete walk and starts down a metal stairway as steep as a ladder. She watches him a moment, then follows. Why, she doesn’t know. All she can say for certain is that rational thinking has nothing to do with it.

One minute he’s trying to kill her. Barely twenty minutes later, she’s following him into a hole in the ground without so much as a thought for her own survival. Definitely not rational.

Adama would say she’s gone muzzy. She doesn’t give a damn. This has nothing to do with anyone or anything but her and the male. It’s nobody’s business but hers and his.

Nobody’s.

Is he really a male of her breed?

Could he be anything else…?

The metal stairs lead to a floor of concrete. Two steps to the left, a flight of concrete stairs leads down further into the gloom. The male leads, Tikki follows. The stairs turn right, lead down another long flight. The air gets stale, dry and dusty. The stairway ends at a subway tunnel, leading directly onto a narrow platform that runs like a catwalk along the side of the tunnel.

“I smell orks,” Tikki says quietly.

The male pauses to look at her, then points at the concrete beneath them, and says, “Deeper.”

Tikki nods.

They go along the narrow platform for about a hundred meters before coming to a metal door in the tunnel wall. The male opens the door, leading into a concrete shaft with metal rungs set into one wall. They climb. About four meters up, they step through an opening in the wall. The corridor there takes them into a room.

A strange room. Pipes running along the ceiling and walls suggest it once had something to do with the subway tunnel below. Maybe it still does. Who knows? Tikki concentrates on what’s in front of her eyes. The room is like a den, a lounge, and a bedroom all in one. The combination of functions doesn’t surprise her, but rather the way it’s done. The look of the place. Like a forest at night. Black walls, painted with trees and dense underbrush, rise toward stars and a huge white orb on the ceiling that must be the moon. The bed sits on a low platform almost completely obscured by potted plants, plastic plants, some as big as small trees and treated with chemicals mimicking the smells of real vegetation of the wild.

“You live here?”

“I’ve been… coming here a long time.”

The place smells like him. Tikki scopes the place out, but keeps one eye on the male. She sees all kinds of junk scattered among the plastic plants and odds and ends of furniture: piles of newsprint and hard-copy magazines, a car tire, a headlight, an old keyboard-style deck, a tailor’s form, and other items even more obscure. She stops and looks back at the male.

“Drink?” he says.

Tikki nods.

“Water?”

Tikki nods.

“Good.” The male says that definitely, as if he approves her choice of beverage. Maybe he expected it. Maybe he’s got nothing but water to drink. He brings a plastic jug from the far end of the room and hands it to her.

“You first,” Tikki says.

The male looks at her a moment, then takes a swig. He doesn’t fall over dead, so Tikki has a swig herself.

“What’s your name?”

“Raa,” he says. “Raman.”

“Raa Raman.”

“Just Raman.” He watches as Tikki recaps the jug and sets it down. He stares until her eyes meet his. He seems puzzled. “Back there… in that tenement. You… defended me. Why?”

Why? Because she got stupid. Because she knew the man on the stairs would shoot. Because, in the moment she had to think about it, Tikki didn’t know if this male, Raman, could survive yet another blast from a gun. Because the idea that she had encountered a male of her own kind filled her with such urgency that she simply could not help herself. How does she explain all that? Answer: she doesn’t. “You tried to kill me. Why?”

Raman gazes at her for some moments, then says, “Before. Before I realized.”

“Answer the question.”

“Money. A wetwork contract.”

Why doesn’t that surprise her? If she ever gets over the shock of what he is, she may never be surprised again. “You’re an artist.”

“I prefer… kick-work to killing. But, yes. You’re right, I am an artist. A
technician.
You scan?”

Tikki supposes that the way he ambushed her could be described as fairly artful. She’s still not sure how he managed to take her from above. The male doesn’t look like the sort to master anything as specialized as ceiling-walking technique. A sarcastic smile tugs at one corner of her mouth. “So why am I still alive?”

Now his expression turns confused. “I… do not know… what you are. I’m still… not certain. We seem alike. What are you?”

“You saw what I am.”

“What do you… call yourself?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know.” He lifts both hands to his temples and slowly pushes back his hair. “I was… an orphan. I was raised by humans. For a long time… I thought I was human. Then, when I was young, I changed. One night the moon seemed to burn into me like… like the sun at noon. Like fire. That was when I changed. For the first time. I heard once that… that creatures like us are called Weres. Is that true?”

Tikki nods.

“But we aren’t wolves. Werewolves. We’re tigers.”

“Weretigers.”

“Were…
tigers.”
He says it like he’s thinking about it, unsure of it, then he looks at her. “You’re the first I’ve ever met.”

Tikki puzzles over all he is saying. If what Raman says is true, his confusion is perfectly justified. What bothers her goes beyond that, involves her own personal conceptions. She must have thought about this before—what she is, what she isn’t—but it’s hard to recall what conclusions, if any, she came to.

For a long time, Tikki believed she was a tigress, one that could assume human form. In recent years, she’s wondered if that could be right. She isn’t just a tiger with paranormal abilities. Neither is she human. She’s Were, a Weretiger, and that’s special, but what does it mean? What should it mean?

Sometimes, her bestial side grows so strong she can hardly think at all. It’s been like that a lot lately. She wonders why.

Raman steps closer, so close their faces are almost touching. “I don’t care… what humans paid me to do,” he says, quietly. “This is more important.”

“What?”

“This,” he says. “Us.”

“Meaning what?”

“I… want you.”

Tikki can see that. She can smell it, taste it. The fact of it fills the air and sends a quick tremor up her back. It’s madness. She knows it but she doesn’t care. Her insides are getting warm, really warm, warm and wet, faster than ever before, more than ever before in her life. Like her body has already decided something that her mind had barely begun to consider. She doesn’t like that. It makes her angry.

She puts her hands to his chest and shoves. Raman staggers back a couple of steps. Nothing changes. He’s still there, looking at her, smelling like he does, and the heat inside her keeps growing. Tikki steps up to him and gives another shove. Again he stumbles back a few more steps. She shoves twice more. He stumbles over the steps leading onto the platform of the bed and abruptly sits, as if about to fall anyway. Tikki stands facing him for a few moments, then straddles his legs and sits on his thighs.

“We do this my way,” she says in a voice like a soft, low snarl.

“Yes,” Raman says. “Your way.”

It’s the only way.

43

The telecom bleeps. Kirkland hits the key to answer, but doesn’t look up from the hard copy on his desk till he hears the quiet, familiar voice, “Hoi, Brad!”

“Hoi, old man.”

The face on the monitor could be that of a forty-year-old, but the curly white hair and dark-ringed eyes more suggest the truth. The man’s name is Dominick J. Rustin. He’s an old friend, a twenty-year cop veteran now retired and enjoying a cushy job with a local security corp. The job comes with fringes like discounts on cosmed surgery. “You ready to put in your papers?”

Kirkland sits back in his chair, lights a cig. “I got a few more things to take care of. How you doing, Dom?”

“Let me know when you’re ready. I’ll have you on our payroll in twenty-four hours.”

Kirkland doesn’t doubt it. “What’s doing?”

“You know the Seven Circles Club, Brad?”

“Naw, I live in Trenton now. I just visit Philly on weekends.”

Rustin grins. “Hey, you’re funny.”

Anyone who’s worked Philly Northeast knows the Seven Circles Club. It’s a devo club, for degenerates, big on sex, chips, drugs, violence—and plenty of it. Every month a handful of straight citizens wander in there to mingle with the lowlife and are never heard from again. Several attempts to shut the place down have been overruled by one of the city’s more infamous judges, a man Kirkland and others suspect to be on somebody’s payroll.

“Anyway,” Rustin says, “the club recently put in sec cams to monitor the action.”

“Is that a fact?”

“I guess they wanna know who’s doing deals on premises. Maybe they’re gonna clean the place up.”

“Sure, Dom. Sure.”

“Anyway, you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that some decker managed to tap into the lines.”

Kirkland nods rather than waste words. The drek Rustin is feeding him now comes under the heading of covering his ass. His old buddy’s obviously about to feed him some data on the sly. In all likelihood, Rustin heard about the new sec cameras at Seven Circles through some contact, then got some decker who owed him a favor to penetrate the system just to see what might turn up. Once a cop, always a cop. The beauty of it of course is that data turned up by a citizen with no connection to any law enforcement agency is admissible in court, whether obtained legally or not.