Tails You Lose (18 page)
As they walked down the sidewalk. Strange Eyes patted down Night Owl's duster, checking its pockets, and then handed the coat to her and gestured that she should wear it. She pulled it on stiffly over her already soaking-wet shirt and followed him around the corner to a Mitsubishi Nightsky limousine with Seattle plates. A door in the back opened, and Strange Eyes climbed inside. Still compelled by the spell he had cast upon her, Night Owl followed.
The door closed with a weighty thud that told Night Owl the limo was armored, and she heard locks click into place. The inside of the vehicle was climate-controlled, but Night Owl shivered as she sat down on the plush suede bench seat that faced the one Strange Eyes was sitting on. Somewhere behind a smoked glass panel that hid the rest of the limo's interior, a driver put the car into gear. The limo rolled smoothly out into traffic, away from the Magic Box.
Strange Eyes sat quietly, staring at nothing and everything. Unlike Night Owl, he was perfectly dry; only the soles of his feet left damp patches on the carpet. He'd dropped the spell he'd used to compel Night Owl to follow him; she could no longer feel the back-of-the-neck tingle of magic at work. But the fact that Strange Eves was sitting alone with her in the cavernous limo interior, without any muscle to back him up, suggested to Night Owl that he was either very powerful or overly confident. She didn't want to gamble on the latter.
She took comfort in one fact: if his goal had been to flatline her, she'd be a corpse already. She steeled her voice and did her best to meet the blank look of those bulging white eyes. "What do you want?"
She almost expected a telepathic voice to accompany his words, like the one that had whispered in her mind when he worked his magic upon her. But it seemed his vocal cords did work independently after all.
"Information." He laid his hands gently on his knees. His fingers were long and narrow, and a band of green stone—a jade ring—was on the little finger of his left hand. "The dragon Chiao hired you to perform a task for him. I want to know what it was."
His English was fluent but slightly clipped; after a moment Night Owl placed his accent: Singapore. His question told her that he wasn't with the Red Lotus, and the fact that Tatyana hadn't recognized him meant that he probably wasn't local. The limo told her he was fronting for someone with nuyen—lots of it. She decided that Strange Eyes must be with a rival gang—one with a vested interest in whatever the Red Lotus was up to.
Spilling the skinny on a run wasn't something a smart shadowrunner did—not if she wanted to continue breathing. But if Strange Eyes was as powerful as he made himself out to be, he just might give the Red Lotus and its dragon master a run for their money. If a gang war broke out, maybe Night Owl would be temporarily overlooked; she could do a fade while both sides dusted it up. With luck, there wouldn't be any survivors left to remember her.
She didn't want to appear too eager to spill, however, so she pretended to stall for time. She dropped the dragon's name as if she'd known it all along.
"How do you know about my meet with Chiao?" she asked. "And how did you find me?"
Strange Eyes slid his long fingers into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a SkyTrain token. "I had a little chat with Wu. He gave me your name." He leaned forward and handed Night Owl the token. She glanced down at it and saw a crust of what looked like dried blood on one side. She rubbed the token against the wet fabric of her jeans, cleaning it. Whoever Strange Eyes was, he'd just paid for any information he wanted, as far as she was concerned. "Chiao hired me to steal a jade statue."
"Who from?"
"Akira Kageyama."
Strange Eyes never blinked, but his posture suddenly stiffened. "Describe the statue."
Night Owl told him about the statue of Fu Shen that she'd boosted from Kageyama's condoplex. When she got to the part about a Chinese character being engraved on the statue's back, Strange Eyes practically vibrated with excitement.
"What did it say?"
"Fu
" Night Owl answered. "Bat."
The frown lines in Strange Eyes' forehead deepened. He turned his head slightly, as if glancing elsewhere while he was thinking, and Night Owl could sense that he was no longer looking directly at her. She shrugged off the wet duster, laying it down on the seat next to her with the star-shaped "brooch" uppermost. She played with the SkyTrain token, keeping her left hand within a few centimeters of the shuriken. It was still pinned to the lapel, but if she could contrive a way to prick Strange Eyes with it, she might be able to take him down. All she needed to do was "drop" the SkyTrain token into the folds of the duster, and that would give her the excuse she needed to pick the coat up. The windows were all tinted ink-black, and Night Owl couldn't see any surveillance vidcams in the limo; she suspected that Strange Eyes wanted to keep this conversation private. That was to her advantage—there wouldn't be anyone looking on when she made her move . . .
The blank eyes swung back in her direction. "Did Chiao say why he wanted the statue?"
It was time to curry favor, to try to get Strange Eyes to relax. Night Owl tossed him another byte of data. "The dragon wasn't interested in the statue itself. Chiao wanted whatever was inside it. The statue was hollow."
Strange Eyes' bulging white eyes bored into her with an intensity that prickled Night Owl's skin.
"What was inside it?" he asked.
Night Owl paused, trying to decide whether to bluff. If she made up something that sounded valuable and told Strange Eyes that she'd have to lead him to it, maybe he'd keep her alive. On the other hand, maybe he'd decide that she knew too much. She let her gaze drop to the SkyTrain token in her hands and frowned at it as she turned it over and over, wishing she could let it make a heads-or-tails decision for her.
Strange Eyes read more into her glance than she'd intended. "A coin," he whispered. "Of course."
Night Owl could hear awe and greed in his voice. She looked up, met his blank stare, and nodded. "That's right," she said, embellishing as she went along. "A lucky coin."
Strange Eyes blinked.
Night Owl could see that she'd startled him—and that somehow, unwittingly, she'd blundered. She was within a millimeter of being flatlined—as soon as he found out whatever else he wanted to know, she could kiss her hoop goodbye. Strange Eyes leaned forward on the seat, his slender fingers curving into the shape of claws.
"It's the fourth Coin of Luck, isn't it?" he hissed. "Where is it now'?"
Night Owl jerked back, pretending to be startled. Her left hand fell on the duster. She dropped her voice to a whisper, as if she were spooked. "I gave the statue to Chiao, but I took the coin out of it first. It's in—"
Strange Eyes had been leaning forward, straining to hear her. Still speaking, Night Owl whipped the duster across the space that separated them. The shuriken's points jammed up against the back of his hand, and should have bitten deeply into his flesh. Instead they merely bent, and the knockout drug inside the shuriken's hollow center flowed out onto Night Owl's fingers, wasted.
Strange Eyes knocked the duster aside with a sweeping motion so fast that his hand blurred. His other hand shot out and found Night Owl's throat.
"That was foolish," he hissed.
Night Owl tried to swallow, but couldn't.
"Where is the coin now?" he asked aloud. Then he added a mental command:
Tell
me
.
As magic forced her lips open, Night Owl knew she was a dead woman. His spell would prevent her from lying. Her right eye began twitching furiously. She had no choice but to speak the truth. "I don't have—"
From somewhere outside the limo came a tremendous explosion. The rear of the vehicle bucked up with a creaking of twisted metal, and Strange Eyes tumbled forward into Night Owl's lap. He sprang away from her as the rear of the car slammed back down onto the ground, and he twisted to look out a window. Even though the glass was heavily tinted, he stared at it as if he could see what was happening outside.
When he threw himself flat on the seat, Night Owl followed his lead. A second later, the side window bulged in and then shattered as something that sounded like a jackhammer hit it. A shower of tinted glass sprayed into the back of the limo, dusting them both like black snow, and then the window on the other side of the car exploded outward. With both side windows gone, the sound of a machine gun outside was suddenly very loud. The armor-piercing rounds that had taken out the windows chewed into the interior of the car, shredding the fabric in the ceiling. Other bullets punched into the sides of the limo, sounding like hammers on steel.
Peering up through a shattered window from where she lay on the seat, Night Owl could see traffic lights and street signs sliding by. The limo was still straining forward, even with its rear wheels blown out. She could hear the
thwack-thwack-thwack
of shredded rubber, the roar of exhaust through what was left of the muffler, and the shrieking of metal on cement as the limo dragged itself along the street by its front wheels.
The bullets were hitting the rear of the vehicle now, no longer chewing up the inside, and Strange Eyes' attention was totally focused out the back window, which was still intact. It was now or never.
Night Owl launched herself forward, grabbing the window frame and hauling herself out of the vehicle. She flipped out the window, bending at the waist, and then tumbled forward and out of the car. As soon as her hands touched the pavement, she tucked into a somersault and rolled away from the limo. Cars veered around her, horns blaring, and then she jumped up onto the curb.
Her luck had changed: she'd bailed in an intersection. The limo was screeching away to her right, and whoever had been shooting at it was to her left. Night Owl sprinted toward a side street, turning her head left at the last moment to see who'd been tossing all the lead. She caught a glimpse of a familiar face: it was the ganger who'd been in the Saab.
Adrenaline pumping. Night Owl pounded down the block and around another corner. She heard the wailing of a siren close by; it sounded like the TPs were only a few blocks away. Behind her, the gunfire suddenly stopped. She heard the scream of tires on cement and an engine accelerating. It roared away in the opposite direction from where she was headed.
Night Owl ducked into the shadow of an alley and stopped to catch her breath as a Tribal Police cruiser flashed by.
It looked as though she hadn't needed to stir the pot: the Red Lotus and whatever gang Strange Eyes was from had already started mixing it up. But Night Owl didn't hold out the hope that either side would forget her any time soon. The Red Lotus had seen her coming out of the limo and would assume she'd tipped Strange Eyes off about Chiao and his interest in the "Coins of Luck"—whatever those were. They'd want their kilo of flesh as payback. Strange Eyes, meanwhile, would assume that Night Owl knew where the coin was. He wasn't about to just let her go, either.
Night Owl pulled the SkyTrain token out of her pocket and tumbled it across her fingers, trying to decide what to do next. It looked as though she'd jumped out of the crucible and into the fire. A coin flip wasn't going to do her much good now. No matter which she chose—heads or tails—she'd get burned.
Alma
boarded the SkyTrain and sat down. The advertisements that lined the platform slid away as the elevated train pulled out of the station, electric engine cycling through its distinctive pattern of three rising whines. She stared at the cellphone in her hand, contemplating the message the rogue Superkid had left on it. Like the I Ching reading she'd cast earlier this morning, the message was disturbing. Her nemesis not only knew about Alma's difficulties at PCI but seemed also to be hinting, with the "sound sleep" crack, that she knew about the beta-test cyberware inside Alma's head.
Alma
had thought that knowledge of the REM inducer had died with Gray Squirrel. Now she wondered if this woman had tortured it out of him before slitting his throat.
The message had been on her cellphone when Alma first checked it at 7 a.m. She had reread it twenty times in the hour and a half since then.
HI AL. HOPE YOU SLEPT WELL. BUT THEN, YOU AND I BOTH KNOW HOW SOUNDLY YOU CAN SLEEP, DON'T WE?
WATCH YOUR HOOP TODAY. THE RED LOTUS MAY COME GUNNING FOR YOU. AND KEEP A HEADS-UP FOR A GUY WITH WEIRD WHITE EYES—HE'LL FRAG YOUR MIND UP FASTER THAN YOU CAN BLINK.
