Stackpole, Michael A - Shadowrun (32 page)

Lynn wore her burnished copper hair pulled back in a ponytail that hung all the way to her shoulder blades. The top of her head came up to my nose. The scent of her perfume brought back pleasant memories of intimate moments that threatened to make me blush. Her broad smile and pert nose accentuated the lively twinkle of her green eyes, and the sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks made her seem happier yet.

She wore jeans and a red-checked shirt with complementary kerchief that meant she was going to try to talk me into going to a neo-Western dance club. After the Ghost Dances had killed so many people and prompted others to go native, things concerning America's Wild West had been downplayed. Time breeds a certain amount of contempt, and this neo-Western club called itself "Oklahoma." Everything had been styled after an ancient musical, which meant the men wore shirts made of tablecloths from Italian restaurants and every other vidiot packed a six-gun with a low-grade laser triggered by revolver blanks.

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Blanche came out from the back of the shop and smiled when she saw me. She and Phil both looked happy and content and perhaps a bit proud that their only daughter was seeing someone from Dr.

Raven's band of heroes—mind you, that's not as good as someone from the corporate boardrooms, but it beats most of the gillettes running around the streets. Their occupation had made both of them plump as gingerbread people, but I've always distrusted anorexic cooks anyway. They'd invested the last twenty-five years in their daughter, and their love for her showed plainly on their faces.

I shook Phil's hand as he came over. His grip, a bit dry from the flour coating it, was strong nonetheless.

"Afternoon, Mr. Ingold, Mrs. Ingold. How are you?"

Phil mumbled something I didn't quite catch as Blanche distracted me. Staring at her daughter as only a mother can when trying to remind her to do something, Blanche's gaze flitted to me, then back to Lynn. I frowned. "What's going on?"

Lynn glared at her mother as only a daughter can do, then looked up at me and sighed. "My parents are celebrating their thirtieth anniversary next week and they wanted to make sure I invited you to the party,
which I would have done a bit later.
They also want you to extend the invitation to Dr. Raven and your compatriots."

Blanche unconsciously clasped her hands together in an attitude of prayer and crushed them to her ample bosom. "That Dr. Raven, such a nice, ah, man."

I suppressed a laugh. Raven is a rare commodity—a Native American elf who's physically big enough to bench press the tower. He's also devilishly handsome— a fact that had not been lost on Blanche Ingold or many of the other women he's met. That was one of the reasons I'd studiously avoided having Lynn renew her acquaintance with him.

Phil looked over at his wife and sighed. "I hope you get that Kid Stealth to come. I've still not thanked him for saving my little girl."

I felt the shiver run through Lynn. Her father put it down to memories of her ordeal, but I knew it came at the mention of the Kid's name. Lynn's very much a pacifist, and Stealth, well, I think he considers violence some sort of performance art. His openings are a splash, and only close after the coroner uses a lot of sutures.

I gave Lynn a reassuring squeeze, then addressed her parents. "I'll see what I can do. Raven and the others are out of town for a while. I hope they'll be back in time for your party. We'll let you know if they can make it."

Lynn's father laughed. "They can come even if they don't call ahead—Blanche, she always makes too much food for parties. I can remember a time . . ."

Lynn slapped me playfully on the stomach. "That's our cue to leave." She kissed her father on the cheek, then grabbed a jeans jacket and brown paper bag from her mother. She kissed Blanche and made her promise not to wait up.

Blanche gave her an extra little hug, then let her go. "Be careful. I worry even though I know you're in good hands."

I slipped my left arm around Lynn's slender waist and guided her through the lobby. "I take it from your outfit you want to go to that saloon you like?"

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She gave me an impish smile. "You're not much of a detective for all the work you've done with Dr.

Raven."

I shrugged easily. "He just keeps me around for heavy lifting and comforting damsels in distress." I narrowed my eyes and tried to figure out what nefarious plan she had brewing in her mind. "If there's a mystery here, I can't solve it. Don't tell me you've been hired by the Yamaguchi-gumi to square dance me to death!"

Lynn shivered eloquently. "You know, my love, that / know how much you hate Oklahoma." She glanced back over her shoulder at her parents. "However,
they
don't know that. I thought perhaps we might catch a bite to eat, then just retire to your place ..."

"Well, my back does need washing . . ."

"My specialty."

"Maybe
you
think so . . ." Lynn blushed and smacked me playfully on the arm.

The awkwardness of her sharing living quarters with her parents had been dealt with before through similar subterfuges. Because her parents had been employed by Fuchi for all of their adult lives, they got a sizable apartment in the employee tower, and it came with cleaning services and child care that made it possible for employees to devote themselves fully to serving the company. The Bakery and other company shops provided anything and everything else the employees might need, and children were encouraged to remain at home—especially if they decided to work for the company as Lynn had.

For a moment my mind drifted back to my younger days on the streets. Born in a tenement with no state or corporate official there to register me, I started early in life as a shadowrunner. No official records existed of Wolfgang Kies, which meant I was free of harassment by the city unless I attracted their attention. It also meant I could never integrate myself with numbered society—like the Fuchi folks—because I didn't officially exist. Whereas legitimate and tracked citizens had a myriad of safety nets built into the system to keep them alive, shadowrunners had to slip through the cracks.

Heading down to pier 59 and the Aquarium park with my arm around a beautiful woman, I looked at the city in an entirely new way. Sure, it was the same, dreary gray sinkhole of concrete. Yeah, street toughs with more chrome than your average kitchen still lurked on street corners and in shadows. They still had the hollow, haunted look of despair in their eyes that they would die with—and that I had worn until not so long ago— but it just didn't seem to matter to me anymore.

Shadowrunning is fine when your life is a dead end, but when you can see a future, it just seems like a childish game.

The Wolf spirit inside me spoke in a harsh whisper.
A
warrior who views war as a game is a warrior who will not see death when it comes for him.

We reached the park and walked to the benches beyond the area where the local wireheads had jacked into the public access systems. Those with datajacks installed, like Lynn or Valerie Valkyrie, just plugged themselves directly into the game tables. Others rented electrode rigs from a ramshackle kiosk to do the
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same.

Two kids were playing some variant of chess in which holographic pieces battled each other—they attracted a small crowd that cheered when a piece died a particularly grisly death. Others did their own things, oblivious to spectators. One guy who wore his purple hair in a spiked mohawk with piglet curls fore and aft seemed familiar, but I couldn't place him immediately. He amused himself by projecting images of city officials and hapless sheep into diagrams from an on-line edition of the
Kama Sutra.
I recognized what he was doing as I had once similarly amused myself on summer days of my misspent youth.

Lynn sat on the bench and opened her bag. She took out an old crust of bread and broke it into small bits. She tossed them out in a haphazard pattern at first. Then, as birds congregated she sowed her crumbs in a way that kept the bigger birds back from where the smaller ones came to feed. She gave me a hunk of bread and frowned disapprovingly as I tossed a large piece halfway between two monster blackbirds.

"Wolf! You're supposed to break it up into smaller portions!" Her pronouncement came as if it were one of the laws of the universe that I'd missed somewhere in my meager schooling.

"You want to run that by me again, with the help files active this time?"

She rested her hands in her lap, which prompted one bold sparrow to light on her knee and pick at the crust she was still holding. She laughed, then composed her face and turned to lecture me. "You have to use small bits because, as my mother taught me, birds that fly away with your food in their mouths take your prayers to heaven with them." She nodded once as if that answer explained everything, then started scattering crumbs again.

I opened my mouth to ask a question, then stopped. Over the years I'd been with Dr. Raven I'd had the gaps in my knowledge of the world filled in, for the most part. Ever since the Awakening—when magic again appeared in the world—the God Lynn and her family worshipped had lost lots of ground. Still, with all the things I'd seen in Raven's company, and even though I seriously doubted her God existed at all, I couldn't discount the possibility she was right. Weirder things had happened.

"Sorry," I muttered. "I just can't resist watching two dinosaurs fighting over bread."

Lynn rolled her eyes to heaven and tossed a little novena to a wren. "You're not going to try to convince me that birds were once dinosaurs again, are you?"

I quick-scattered a rosary's worth of crumbs in a wide arc, then brushed my hands clean on my thighs. "I double-checked all that stuff I mentioned last time. Deinonychus is the name of the dinosaur that had a wrist joint that looks the same as the wing joint in the Archeopteryx, and the Archeopteryx has feathers and wings, hence is seen as the first bird. See, dinosaurs and proto-birds had this common ancestor in the Jurassic period. .."

She frowned. "Why would I remember deinonychus as a word?"

I shrugged. "It was a particularly bloodthirsty carnosaur. It ran fast and had this nasty, sickle-shaped claw on each of its feet that it used to disembowel..." As I hooked my right hand over to represent the claw, I saw her pale just a bit, and suddenly I realized why she knew the word.

I reached out and hugged her to me. "I'm sorry. Forgive me."

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She kissed the side of my neck. "Nothing to forgive— you didn't mean it."

But I did it anyway.Lynn had first heard the word deinonychus when I clarified why Kid Stealth ran with such an odd gait. During her rescue she'd seen only glimpses of him and never got a good look at his titanium legs. She'd actually seen more than she knew, and put the weirdness down to the dope in her system. When I explained how Stealth had chosen legs styled after those of a deinonychus, she asked me to stop, but she still dreamed of him for the next couple of nights.

She pulled away from me and set about feeding the dinosaurs again. Her smile returned and she passed me another piece of bread, but I shook my head. "Lynn, there's something I have to tell you about me." I faltered. After seeing how she reacted to the mention of Kid Stealth or anything that might remind her of violence, there seemed no easy way to tell her about the true Wolfgang Kies.

She brushed her hands off and cupped my jaw in them. "Wolf, I know you've been forced to do things you're not proud of. I know you've killed people and things while working for Dr. Raven, but I also know you did that to help others, like me. I cannot and will not let that drive a wedge between us—that's a decision I made the first time I agreed to go out with you."

She pressed her fingertips to my lips to stop me from saying anything. "I know you, perhaps better than you know yourself. I know you're a good man, a strong man, and I know I love you. There is nothing you could say that would change that or make me think any less of you."

I sat there stunned for a moment or two as I realized the true depth of her feelings for me. Somehow I'd assumed there was no way she could feel the same way about me as I felt about her, but that proved to be a fallacy that exploded with the greatest of ease. Still, she didn't know about my lunar mood swings, and that revelation would sorely test the strength of her convictions.

I started to speak, but something caught my attention above and beyond Lynn's head. Two hollow-eyed kids came around the corner of the trode kiosk, then ducked back when they saw me. Alarm bells immediately went off in my head because even though they'd washed off most of the jack o' lantern makeup the Hallo-weeners affected, their jackets were black and orange— Halloweener colors.

"Are you done feeding the birds?"

Lynn immediately caught the concern in my voice. "What is it?"

I looked around and saw more potential Weenies loitering in the background. "Gangers. I don't like it."

She sighed with exasperation to cover her nervousness. "Wolf, this
is
a public park. They have the right to use it."

I nodded. "True enough, but this just doesn't feel right."

Again she tried to play it light. "I think you just want to get me back to your place ..."

I stood and held my hand out to help her up. "No denying that. Why don't you scatter the rest of the bread in one huge papal audience, and let's get out of here. We'll keep it natural, as if nothing's wrong ..."

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"Wolf, you're scaring me." She crushed the bag, then up-ended it and let the crumbs spill out. "Let's go, if we must."

The fear in her voice gave way to anger. I knew it wasn't directed at me exactly, and I immediately focused my reaction to it on the Weenies who had started to follow us. At the same time I wanted to kick myself for having left my Viper behind3. The situation that appeared to be shaping up was not one in which I wanted to be unarmed.