The bar smelled like piss and sour vomit, the lighting was unflattering to even the most beautiful people and the furniture had seen better days about sixty years ago. What The Dragon’s Breath lacked in décor, smell and lighting, it made up for with a discrete staff and an almost guaranteed privacy. The owner, Owen Meany, a hunchbacked and warped old man, had paid the right people in the right places to ensure that the badges kept their noses out of the place and he paid other people larger amounts to make sure he knew exactly which important personages might have cause to visit his establishment unannounced. Disappointed he hadn’t been born with precognitive abilities, Owen had decided to augment his senses with copious amounts of cash distributed to the right places. The owner of The Dragon’s Breath frequently knew his guests would arrive at his doorstop long before they themselves knew. He used the knowledge he’d paid for to ensure that no undue violence occurred at his bar and that those with too inquisitive of natures felt unwelcome enough to leave within minutes of their arrival. His additional partnership with the Cobras, a Hmong organized crime ring that had evolved from the street gangs of earlier years, was often enough to deter any activities that might be bad for business. What happened at The Dragon’s Breath stayed at the Dragon’s Breath - and no blood was allowed to be spilled aside from the occasional raucous bar fight he allowed to take place. Boys will be boys, he’d mutter as he calmly put away the more fragile object in his bar. Ya gotta let them blow off steam sometime. More often than not, once the bottles of liquor had been put in a safe place, Owen would be seen joining in the brawl, a gleeful smile on his face as he beat the regulars into a bloody mass of hair and bruises.
I had authorized a few extra creds when I paid for my drink shortly after I’d arrived, about five times more than the cost of the drink. Owen smiled and made a mental note to himself to make sure that I was kept informed about any casual visitors outside the normal riff raff that frequented his bar; and to keep me in mind even if some of his colourful regulars were scheduled to arrive.
I needed time to be alone and think about what had just happened to me. As far as I knew I hadn’t made any enemies recently, but I couldn’t rightly rule out the fact that I may have engendered a simmering need for revenge in someone I had long decided to delete from my mental files as “not worth remembering”. A few carefully timed drinks in a safe place might jog the old trash bin of my brain and help me figure out who might be willing to spend the cred to hire some goons to gun me down. I hadn’t recognized any of my attackers, but that didn’t mean a damn thing - I’d never even glimpsed at the sniper who’d gunned down Virginia and, for all I knew, it was the sniper who had a beef with me.
I mentally ran through all of the jobs I’d done the past few years, both in the shadows and out in the open. In most cases, I’d been very discrete about my activities and it was rare for me to even have made contact with the people I was hired to steal from, thwart or occasionally kill. Never real interested in being the focus of someone’s retribution, I generally eliminated most of the evidence of my involvement with a particular run. Whenever possible, I made sure that the Johnson hiring me was the only person aware of my culpability in matters of the shadows. If I could control even that aspect of my professional life, I would even hide my identity from my employer.
Even after nursing my drink for the better part of an hour, I couldn’t think of anyone that I had pissed off enough to make them want to kill me. The people who might want me taken out for purposes of revenge were already dead - I’d made sure of that - and I never took on a wet job if the mark had family; it was a conscious decision to not become embroiled in a blood debt due to a brother or sister who felt that the world’s balance would not be met until I was dead myself after killing their loved one. Most of the marks I’d been paid to retire since I started working the shadows were the type that most people didn’t mind seeing dead and there was rarely any love lost when they ended up in a body bag at the end of an alley.
It wasn’t as if I took on much wet work anyway. Some people like to kill other people. I only kill for a bounty when I think that the tenuous balance between law and chaos will stabilize once again because of my actions. I heard in an old retro-90s song one time some lyrics that essentially summed my attitude towards killing people, Some people should die/That’s just unconscious knowledge. The people I killed weren’t givers, but takers. Eventually they took more than their fair share, be it money, other lives, liberty or happiness and someone would take umbrage to the constant taking without returning to the world. That’s when a message would be left in my electronic drop box, or in an old-fashioned text email. If the money was good, I’d take the job. If not, I didn’t enjoy killing enough to work for peanuts.
I couldn’t think of anyone I had killed that would justify taking out a contract on me, so I turned my attention to the jobs I’d taken, working backwards through the years to see if anything from the past might come back to haunt me. I hadn’t fragged and jobs since I first started working the shadows and I’d grown careful about which gigs I took since those initial disasters - not only to keep my skin intact, but because I was a perfectionist who hated sloppy work of all kinds, especially when my name was associated with that work. I eschewed riskier ventures and rarely accepted a job before I researched the risk/profit margin. The less chance of success that I felt I would have with a particular job, the less likely I was to take it. There were times when I’d blushed at the vast amount of money somebody was offering me for some particular work, but cred is no good to me if I end up a corpse in the process, so I always skipped those offers. Unless I was reasonably certain of success, I burned the message and sent my “uncle” a thank-you note for the kind gift, but that I really couldn’t accept it. The Johnsons knew what I meant and would move onto the next chump they could find unless, of course, they’d already found one before I could respond.
That said, I didn’t have many unhappy customers since the days I’d first stumbled into the shadows looking for some easy cred. Unless I had been misled about the results I’d produced when cred showed up in my account, I hadn’t done anything wrong, professionally, to justify killing me. You might think that the persons representing the side I was taking intel, secrets or bodies from might want to eliminate me, but they knew it was just business. While I was fair game for killing during a particular run, it did them no good to kill me after I delivered the goods to the other Johnson. Killing me would roll back the hands of time and there was nothing personal about the work I had performed. In fact, if I made a successful run against someone, they often looked me up afterwards to make on an offer for their own interests, not infrequently against the very corp or person that had hired me to infiltrate them just weeks before. Everyone knew it was part of the game and it seemed senseless to kill off a professional who could produce results just because you were displeased with that particular loss.
As far as the small-time gangs that worked the city, people who didn’t care so much about retaining professionals in the shadows - I had made sure that I’d greased the palms of most of the bangers near my office and home. They enjoyed the crates of Nuke Shack soyburgers, among other tasty treats, that I’d leave at their headquarters. More often than not, the miscreants and guttersnipes would pause the mugging they were in the middle of to pleasantly wish me a good day. I had no enemies there either - most thought of me as their big sister.
Besides, the attempt on my life, while shoddy and unprofessional, was much better organized than the street kids could ever put together. Besides, sniper rifles were far out of their income range and many of the bangers preferred the close, personal touch a vibroblade or shock-stick would give them. Some refused to use any tools but their hands and steel-toed boots; anything more took away they pain they felt when they doled out the pain themselves.
Thinking harder, I couldn’t rule out the Cobras or the White Knights (a white supremacist skinhead group that had decided it was easier to kill non-whites by giving out drugs than it was to stomp people and had organized accordingly). Both groups were still in the infant stages of establishing an enforceable code of conduct for their members and I was far from being on friendly terms with either group. Still, the job tonight hadn’t felt like either group’s work and I was puzzled as to what I might have done to draw either group’s attention. I generally steered clear of their activities and could think of a damned thing I might have done to irritate either the Cobras or the Knights.
After eliminating all of the reasonable possibilities, I was left to consider the fact that it might have been an accident. There was always the chance that the goons who’d burst into my office looking to have me pushing up daisies tomorrow morning might have made a mistake. Fantastic as it might be, there might have been a royal frag-up of intended targets and I’d just managed to be caught in the crossfire when the person they’d really been shooting for was someone else entirely. However, as overconfident and unprofessional as the boys had been when they killed my secretary, it didn’t feel as if I had fallen victim to misidentity. I had only intuition to make this judgment on, but the two guys I had encountered seemed pretty sure about who they’d come to toss bullets to. There was no surprise in their eyes when they saw me until the bullets connected with their bodies. They knew I was, even if I didn’t know them.
While I was puzzling this out at my table in a darkened corner of the bar, the door opened up, letting in a flurry of white crystal snow. Out of the dark night entered a well groomed man in a trench-coat and a suit. He paused in the entry way and scanned the room, obviously looking for somebody in particular. While Owen appeared a little shocked that he’d be receiving a guest of a certain caliber without advanced notice of that person’s arrival, I was less surprised by the suit. Nor did it surprise me terribly when his surveillance of the room ceased as his eyes fell on me.
The suit walked up to Owen’s bar and ordered two drinks. It was obvious who the second drink was for as the suit gestured in my direction with a slight tip of his head, followed by Owen’s nervous glance in my direction. It was certain that Owen had already tapped the call button on the floor under his bar that would send a message to the Cobras asking for a little muscle and metal, just in case things got out of hand; he hated surprises, which is why he’d doled out so much cred of the years to make sure he didn’t experience any of those unexpected guests that might cause problems. Obviously, one of his contacts forgot to keep him in the loop.
Owen poured the drinks the suit had ordered and passed them across the bar. He’d taken his time with serving the man to give the reinforcements time to make it to the bar. The man in the trench coat brushed the snowmelt from his shoulder and patiently waited, a permanent partial smile fixed on hi mouth. He paid Owen with a cred stick I was certain would lead to an untraceable account about five seconds after the suit walked out of the door and I hoped Owen’s cred processer was online and fully functional this evening, otherwise the drinks would end up being on the house.
As expected, the suit walked directly up to me as Owen shrugged his shoulders behind him as if to say, Sorry chummer. If I would have known about the corp man, I would have told you. I closed my eyes in response. Nil perspiration, my friend. No grudges. Owen visibly sighed with relief.
The suit stood in front of me as I stared at him, daring him to speak. His perpetual smile broadened and he set the drinks down on the far side of my table. I didn’t bother resting a hand on my gun - if this corp man wanted me dead, it was highly unlikely that I would walk out of this place alive even if I did get a few shots off before the shooting started. He’d have corp security along covering all exits to the place, including those that Owen thought only he knew about.
Besides, I could tell that this was a business call. As much as I didn’t like the timing or the arrangements, Mr. Johnson was about to make me an offer. Unlike most of my offers, however, I had the strong suspicion that this was an offer that I wouldn’t be able to refuse.
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