A Motive with a Universal Adapter 01

I took a moment to breathe, to find some kind of center. "What is it you want?"

"I want the whole story, beginning to end," she explained. "You know who killed your friend, and you're going after him. This robbery/homicide, it's a filler story at best—the kind of thing a news anchor uses to bring the viewers down so they stick around for the big feel-good piece coming up next.

"But a story about righteous vengeance? Well, that's got a motive with a universal adapter. Everybody loves a good revenge story. With the right footage, I can name my own price. So, if you want my help, you have to let me tag along and film it."

This little girl wanted to follow me into a war zone armed with a camera and a plucky, can-do attitude. She was going to get herself killed.

"Listen..." I started and then drew a blank. "What was your name again?"

"Abby. Abby Rhoades."

"Listen Abby Rhoades, what's to stop me from just splattering your brains on the sidewalk and taking your camera?" Several nearby pedestrians skirted wide and quickened their pace away from us.

Her back straightened and she hugged her precious camera to her chest. She looked me in the eyes with steely defiance. "Too many witnesses," she finally answered. "You don't need the extra hassle right now."

She wasn't wrong.

"You know there's going to be gunfire, right? If you follow me, you're going to be in the thick of it. And if you get in trouble, I won't help you. If you get hurt, I won't carry you, and if you get killed, I won't shed a tear."

"Agreed!" She stuck out her hand to seal the deal.

I didn't like it, but some media exposure might be just what I needed to restart my stalled-out career. With a heavy sigh, I finally relented and shook her hand.

"Alright, the plate number. Let's see it?"

"Oh, I've already got someone running that down," she revealed brightly. "He'll tell us exactly where the cab dropped off the fare. First you have to tell me how you know who the killer is. But not here. Let's go some place quiet... partner."

"We are not partners!" I growled, falling into step behind her. I lit up another cigarette to steady my nerves as she hurried back the way we came.

Abby paid for a cab ride to the University. She wouldn't let me tell her anything in the car but prattled on and on about clubs and bands and her story that had run on Net 54.

"I have this irrational fear that cabbies are spying on me," she told me after the driver dropped us off behind the Edison Carter Media Sciences building. "Like, anything you say to a cabbie has to get back to someone sooner or later, right? I'm not letting anyone scoop me on this story."

"Do I want to know why we're going in the back?" I asked.

"Well first, security won't like you bringing a gun in here, and I know better than to ask you to leave it. Second, I'm not technically a student here. And third, since all I really need is access to the media lab, instead of a fake student ID, I bought a spoofed facilities key card."

She swiped it through a reader and a heavy door on the rear loading dock unlatched.

Abby commandeered a small teaching studio and flipped on the "On Air" sign so we wouldn't be disturbed.

"While I get the camera set up, you put on some make-up. You don't want to be all shiny under the lights," she instructed.

"I don't care. We don't have to be all professional about it."

"Hey!" Abby wheeled on me with a finger in my face. "I might be a freelancer on a ramen budget, but I am a professional! This is what I do! Capisce?"

"Alright, alright," I offered my surrender with my hands up. "Do what you do... How long until we hear back from your friend?"

"Should be soon," she said and quickly turned back to her work.

I found the restroom and pulled my hair back into a tail before digging my make-up pouch out of my bag. I usually only wear it if the job requires it. I used to work some real swanky corporate security jobs. Not so much recently.

After rinsing my face, I dabbed at my foundation with a sponge. But as I brought it to my face, my hand began to shake so badly I dropped the sponge and had to press my hand to the counter to steady it.

"Hey Rhoades," I called, gritting my teeth. "You're probably a lot better at this than I am. How about you take care of make-up. You can make me as warm or cold or glam or slutty as you want. Whatever you think works best for the camera."

"Really?" she practically squealed.

"Sure."

She assembled a whole caddy of make-up from what was left in the studio and sat down across from me.

"Okay, let's get started. Take off your sunglasses."

"Oh, this is a Kiroshi Optishield... It doesn't come off."

She gave me a bemused look.

"No... Not like 'I refuse to take it off'," I explained. "It's kinda welded to my skull and hardwired to my optic nerves. Trust me, no amount of make-up is gonna fix what's under here."

"Huh. I haven't heard of those. Are they new?" she asked, scrutinizing her reflection in the Kiroshi.

"They're big in Europe."

"Well, that's going to make the lighting tricky, but we'll figure it out... Hey, why do you smell like soup?"

By the time Abby finished with me the woman in the mirror looked cold, merciless, and professional. She belonged in a corporate board room or a law office. I approved.

"Now, tell me about the guys who robbed Talsorian's," Abby prompted me from beside her camera. She had printed several freeze-frame stills from her footage and was jotting notes on the flimsiplast.

The lights reflecting off the Kiroshi played like fairies across the dark room behind her, but they stayed clear of the camera lens as Abby had planned. I sat with my legs tightly crossed and my hands folded in my lap, willing my faltering nerves to hold steady.

"Well, first off, it wasn't a robbery," I told her. "Second, there was only one perp, and third I don't know exactly who he is."

If Abby was surprised by the revelation, she didn't let it show. "Okay, why don't you think it was a robbery?"

"Because the shooter left all of the victims' weapons behind. The Baretta Savage Joe carries would get two or three hundred at a pawn shop. Hoshi Satō's Sternmyer about the same. They'd both be untraceable so they'd bring in a lot more on the black market. I don't know what the other victims were carrying, but their hardware had to be worth at least a few bucks.

"The firearms left behind were worth a lot more than the cash in the register in the middle of a weekday afternoon. Hell, the two weapons he walked in with were probably worth more than the take."

"An addict looking for a hit isn't always rational," Abby countered.

"Maybe not. But look at the ballistics. Savage Joe took two shots from a forty-five in the chest and one in the head. Clean. Precise. Intentional. Hoshi Satō took a full auto burst, probably from a submachine gun. Messy. Disorganized. Random."

"That would suggest two different gunmen."

"Or one shooter with two weapons. The bartender is the most dangerous person in the room. He's already behind cover and you have to assume he has a weapon back there, possibly an alarm. The shooter has to deal with him quickly, but at the same time not give the other targets time to react. So he does them two at a time.

"He walks up to the bar and double-taps his primary target right-handed while strafing the general direction of the bartender with his left. Then he takes care of the other two witnesses the same way. The forty-five hit precisely while the submachine gun careened wildly catching what it could. After the witnesses were down, he put one more round in Savage Joe's head to make sure the job's done."

I paused for emphasis. "This wasn't a robbery. It was a hit."

"I can see how it might have played out that way," Abby nodded. "It's certainly a plausible theory. What makes you so sure you're right?"

"The witness," I said. "L. Nero. The guy in the black suit who called the cops. Did you get a look at the logo painted on the back of his suit jacket?"

Abby cocked her head to the side and thought about it for a moment. "It was like a number eight above a bunch of spikes," she ventured.

"Close. It was a letter 'B' above a crown—the tag of a booster gang called the 'Black Queens' that used to run in City Center. They were small-time hoodlums and wannabes, petty criminals dealing party drugs, shoplifting, and vandalizing the neighborhood. They were beneath the notice of both hardcore boosters and N.C.P.D. The locals didn't so much fear them; they tolerated them."

"Now when you say 'booster gang'..." Abby let the question imply itself.

"I mean a gang that gets off on 'boosting' themselves with cybernetics just to see how much they can take. New, used, stolen, custom, or stock—doesn't matter as long as they can find a ripper-doc to mount it and splice it into their nervous system. I've heard some of the worst gangs will hack a cybernetic right off a living victim and bring it to a clinic still dripping."

"We've all heard those stories," Abby clarified. "But isn't that just kind of an urban legend?"

"I don't know. Look, I'm no expert on Night City gangs. I do know the Black Queens were never that hardcore. But a few years back, they managed to make enough of a nuisance of themselves that the neighborhood finally decided to do something about it. They couldn't afford an Arasaka strike team or anything so elaborate, but this wasn't a tough job. They pooled enough money to hire a bunch of mercenaries to make it look like a gang war.

"I was part of the team they hired. We rolled in at sunset, and by sunrise there were no Black Queens left. Or so we thought. Savage Joe was the man who put the deal together."

Understanding dawned on Abby's face. "You think L. Nero is a Black Queen survivor who discovered Joe Carmichael was responsible for killing off his gang, killed him for it, and then made it look like a robbery."

"Exactly. And he had the balls to call the police himself and stick around to feed them a false narrative... Now, if you've got what you need, tell me where I can find this gonk so I can teach him what an eye for an eye really costs."

"...Right." Abby pulled a cellular telephone from her bag and checked it. "Still no reply." Her face squinched up apologetically.

"Fine, let's go see your friend then. Maybe I can hurry him along."

"Well, see... I don't exactly know where he lives," Abby hedged and I didn't need the Kiroshi's thermograph to tell me her temperature had just shot up. "But I left a message on his machine and I'm sure he'll--"

My temperature shot up too.

"Dammit, Rhoades!" I exploded out of my chair. "You don't even know if he's gotten your message yet, do you?"

"N-no. But trust me, this guy is good!" she held her notes in front of herself defensively. "Here's a printout of the plate if you want it, but Whistler can tell us exactly where the witness got dropped off—he just gets easily distracted and isn't real punctual, but I'm sure by nine or ten o'clock--"

I glanced at the Kiroshi's chrono. It read 20:07.

"Shit! I'm already late for work. This has all been a massive fucking waste of time!" I snatched the license plate photo from her hands.

"Ritz, wait!" she called as I stomped toward the exit.

Just then someone started banging on the door and a voice on the other side called, "Security! Open up!"

Just what I fucking needed. Abby crossed over toward the door and I pulled my pistol.

"Put that away," she whispered. "It's just campus security. They're not dangerous."

"I'd take a campus security job if I could get one, and I'm dangerous," I pointed out, extending the pistol's smart cable and jacking it into the back of my neck. With the software installed in my neural processor, the weapon's circuitry became an extension of my own nervous system.

A readout flashed on the Kiroshi showing I had a full clip and a round in the chamber. With just a thought, I switched the safety indicator from red to green. I kept my finger off the trigger, worried about a withdrawal twitch. Not that I needed to use my finger—all I had to do was imagine squeezing the trigger.

A crosshair reticle tracked across my vision following the barrel as I moved behind the door. Abby swung it open concealing me from view and she tried to bluff the badge.

"Can't you read the damn sign!?" she seethed. "We're on the air in here!"

"No you're not, sweetheart. I checked with the broadcast supervisor before I knocked," the guard responded with bored disinterest.

"Oh, that locks utterly!" Abby bitched with exasperated indignation. "There must be some kind of malfunction."

"No malfunction." The guard wasn't buying it. "You're not signed up for this space."

"Professor Pondsmith said he'd reserve it for me," she tried with a little less bravado.

"Maybe that's what he said, but he didn't do it. Now let's see your student ID."

"Oh... There's been some kind of mistake..." Abby hesitated. "My, um... I think I left my ID back in my... dorm room."

"Uh-huh. Students are supposed to carry ID on campus at all times. So I'm gonna have to ask you to vacate the premises. And by that, I mean I'm gonna escort you and your friend behind the door out of the building. Right now."

So the guard wasn't an idiot. He must have had a cyber-optic with thermal imaging or an audio implant sensitive enough to pick up my breathing or something.

I shrugged, holstered my pistol, and walked out from behind the door. "Suits me," I muttered. "I'm done here anyway."

The guard stood by the building's entrance long enough to watch us walk away. I turned east down the sidewalk, muscling through the crowd toward Old Downtown and a job I might not have anymore. Abby hurried along in my wake.

"Taxi!" she called, waving at a cab going the opposite direction. The driver ignored us rather than try to U-turn in heavy traffic. "Taxi!" she tried again.

"Why are you following me?" I turned on her, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk despite the dirty looks of other pedestrians.

"Because I don't know where you're going or how to get in touch with you again and I'm kind of scared you'll shoot me if I ask," Abby confessed. Maybe she had more common sense than I gave her credit for.

"Deal's off," I told her point-blank. "Stop following me or I will shoot you."

Her crestfallen expression before I turned and walked away was probably calculated to invoke pity, but she'd squandered any sympathy I had. She'd wasted valuable hours I could have used to track down the Black Queens on my own.

In my head, I raged at the bitch for distracting me, for making me think I might be able to avenge Joe's death, for making me think TV might erase the sins of my past at the same time... For making me think that somehow in death, Savage Joe had sent her to me as one last favor.

I convinced myself that I was better off by myself. I didn't need anyone's help. I could avenge Joe and Hoshi on my own.

Of course, to find Nero and the Black Queens, the first thing I'd usually do would be talk to Savage Joe. I didn't know anyone who could track down a taxi by its license plate. But Joe would have. He'd have had their number and they would have owed him the favor. Joe was the first person I turned to whenever life took a cheap shot at me.

And the shots just kept coming. It occured to me that even if I did manage to exact swift and terrible vengeance—and live to tell about it—I still needed to find a place to sleep and a solid job and a source of Lucidrine. I could have turned to Joe for all of that. I hadn't realized how dependent I'd become on him. Or how hard life was going to be now.

But really, what I needed most of all was for Joe to tell me it was all going to work out alright.

A dry sob caught in my chest and I wasn't sure if it was from withdrawal or grief. Until that moment, I had never felt so utterly alone.

Over the omnipresent din of traffic, a car horn blared more insistently than usual—enough so that I looked up to see why. Just ahead of me a cab was blocking traffic. Abby was leaning out the window waving and calling, "Ritz! Ritz, I got us a cab!"

If I could have cried, I would have.

I gave the driver the address of the self-store warehouse that I babysat three nights a week and told Abby she shouldn't have come back for me.

"It's my fault you're running late," she explained. "I don't want you to lose your job."

"Thank you," I murmured and she had enough class not to make me repeat it.

"Here's the way I see it," she started instead. "Your shift lasts what? Eight hours? Nine?"

"Nine," I nodded.

"So give my guy nine more hours to get back to me. While we wait, I'll try some other angles and see if we can find out where the Black Queens hang out. Either way, if I can't get you an answer by the end of your shift, then the deal's off. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough," I concurred, and changed into the wrinkled night-watchman uniform from my bag while the cabbie angled the rearview mirror to try and catch a peek.

We passed through a police checkpoint without incident and looped around the Corporate Center skyscrapers. Abby was looking wistfully up at the Network 54 tower when her cellular phone rang.

"The number is blocked—it's got to be Whistler," she said without accepting the call.

"So... answer it?"

Abby looked up at the cab driver and back at me, her eyes wide and her jaw set. The phone rang again. I cocked my head to one side, held my jacket open and pointed to my pistol. She held up her hands in surrender and thumbed on the phone.

"Ciao, Whistler," she said and held the receiver out from her ear far enough that I could lean in and listen too.

"You know what's harder to sneak into than a heavily fortified mega-corp datafortress?" the voice on the other end of the line asked. "A tiny little datashed with only one way in and out, regimented traffic, and a live sentry on duty. Fottuto taxi corps are the worst!"

The caller was using a voice modulator to hide his identity. It made it difficult to place his accent, but I was pretty sure he was European.

Abby rolled her eyes and shook her head. "But you traced the fare, right?"

"I did, but it's not gonna be cheap."

"Ugh... tentacles again?" Abby groaned.

"So many tentacles, cara mia. You won't eat calamari scop for a year."

"Alright," Abby agreed, "it's a fair price if the info is good."

"Your fare was dropped off in the Upper Marina. I can give you the address if you want... but here's the thing. Seven minutes later another cab from another company picked up a fare at the same intersection using the same credit chip."

"I told you he was good," Abby whispered, covering the mouth-piece with her hand. Then into the phone she said "Good catch, Whistler. But for tentacles, you better have traced the second cab."

"Of course I did. The second cab took your fare to the south side of Japantown."

We were skirting the northern edge of Japantown now, and I nearly told our driver to stop, but before I could the caller added a "but."

"But what?" Abby asked with a hint of exasperation.

"But then he called a Combat Cabb... You know what that means," the voice called Whistler cautioned.

"The Combat Zone," Abby whispered.

'The Combat Zone'—where Richard Night's vision of an egalitarian capitalist utopia went all to hell. After Los Angeles dried up and blew away and San Francisco fell into the ocean, demand for Night City real estate skyrocketed. Night's refined cityscapes and elegant urban planning were abandoned in the scramble to cash in.

Fortune-seeking construction startups backed by mafia investments found it was more profitable to pay the fines than it was to adhere to the building codes. They threw up slapdash projects as quickly as the city corporation could cash their building permit checks.