Cyberpunk

Ralfi, it looks like you’ve got some explaining to do.”
    “It’s this last batch of product, Johnny.” He sighed deeply. “In my role as broker—”
    “Fence,” I corrected.
    “As broker, I’m usually very careful as to sources.”
    “You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.”
    He sighed again. “I try,” he said wearily, “not to buy from fools. This time, I’m afraid, I’ve done that.” Third sigh was the cue for Lewis to trigger the neural disruptor they’d taped under my side of the table.
    I put everything I had into curling the index finger of my right hand, but I no longer seemed to be connected to it. I could feel the metal of the gun and the foam-padded tape I’d wrapped around the stubby grip, but my hands were cool wax, distant and inert. I was hoping Lewis was a true meatball, thick enough to go for the gym bag and snag my rigid trigger finger, but he wasn’t.
    “We’ve been very worried about you, Johnny. Very worried. You see, that’s Yakuza property you have there. A fool took it from them, Johnny. A dead fool.”
    Lewis giggled.
    It all made sense then, an ugly kind of sense, like bags of wet sand settling around my head. Killing wasn’t Ralfi’s style. Lewis wasn’t even Ralfi’s style. But he’d got himself stuck between the Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum and something that belonged to them—or, more likely, something of theirs that belonged to someone else. Ralfi, of course, could use the code phrase to throw me into idiot/savant, and I’d spill their hot program without remembering a single quarter tone. For a fence like Ralfi, that would ordinarily have been enough. But not for the Yakuza. The Yakuza would know about Squids, for one thing, and they wouldn’t want to worry about one lifting those dim and permanent traces of their program out of my head. I didn’t know very much about Squids, but I’d heard stories, and I made it a point never to repeat them to my clients. No, the Yakuza wouldn’t like that; it looked too much like evidence. They hadn’t got where they were by leaving evidence around. Or alive.
    Lewis was grinning. I think he was visualizing a point just behind my forehead and imagining how he could get there the hard way.
    “Hey,” said a low voice, feminine, from somewhere behind my right shoulder, “you cowboys sure aren’t having too lively a time.”
    “Pack it, bitch,” Lewis said, his tanned face very still. Ralfi looked blank.
    “Lighten up. You want to buy some good free base?” She pulled up a chair and quickly sat before either of them could stop her. She was barely inside my fixed field of vision, a thin girl with mirrored glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag. She wore black leather, open over a T-shirt slashed diagonally with stripes of red and black. “Eight thou a gram weight.”
    Lewis snorted his exasperation and tried to slap her out of the chair. Somehow he didn’t quite connect, and her hand came up and seemed to brush his wrist as it passed. Bright blood sprayed the table. He was clutching his wrist white-knuckle tight, blood trickling from between his fingers.
    But hadn’t her hand been empty?
    He was going to need a tendon stapler. He stood up carefully, without bothering to push his chair back. The chair toppled backward, and he stepped out of my line of sight without a word.
    “He better get a medic to look at that,” she said. “That’s a nasty cut.”
    “You have no idea,” said Ralfi, suddenly sounding very tired, “the depths of shit you have just gotten yourself into.”
    “No kidding? Mystery. I get real excited by mysteries. Like why your friend here’s so quiet. Frozen, like. Or what this thing here is for,” and she held up the little control unit that she’d somehow taken from Lewis. Ralfi looked ill.
    “You, ah, want maybe a quarter-million to give me that and take a walk?” A fat hand came up to stroke his pale, lean face nervously.
    “What I want,” she said, snapping her fingers so that the unit spun and glittered, “is work. A job. Your boy hurt his wrist. But a quarter’ll do for a retainer.”
    Ralfi let his breath out explosively and began to laugh, exposing teeth that hadn’t been kept up to the Christian White standard. Then she turned the disruptor off.
    “Two million,” I said.
    “My kind of man,” she said, and laughed. “What’s in the bag?”
    “A shotgun.”
    “Crude.” It might have been a compliment.
    Ralfi said nothing at