2 cobra 2

 first part of a 2 part episode

Chapter 2

 

“So, was Kenichi amenable to being leaned upon by the government?” I asked Tarquin. He was enjoying some more of my brandy, after being fed by Willow and Auntie, who had, together, pulled out all the stops with honey-glazed pork roll stuffed with apple, onion and thyme stuffing made from scratch by my lovely wife, not out of a packet, accompanied by roast potatoes, parsnips, baby carrots, and a leek and onion lightly peppered sauce which was to die for.  This was followed by apple pie, which was topped with some confection of flour and oats which melted in the mouth.  We had drunk a rather nice German hock with dinner, which, Willow told me severely, as a white wine,  was more appropriate to go with white meat like pork than the Tuscan red I had been considering.  You live and learn. And if I was to  make my way with our up-market neighbours in Queen Anne, I had to learn the annoying things like which cutlery to use and which wine to drink. And it did go very well, a nice light wine which complemented the meal.

Tarquin sighed in irritation at my question.

“You know the answer to that, don’t you?” he replied, pained. “Don’t make me think of it; the sour feeling in my belly does not go well with your excellent brandy and Mrs. Willow’s crumbletopped apple pies.”

He was having a second helping, with clotted cream. Willow did her own cream clotting.

Willow inherited her cooking skills from her auntie, and she could charm a congressman.

Though why one would want to do so beats me.

Tarquin sighed, and told me anyway, despite his sour feeling.

“He sneered in my face, and said that one button man who got lucky wasn’t going to scare him.”

“I’m insulted,” I said. “Button man, really? A common button man wouldn’t have cared about his family.”

“Apparently he doesn’t rate explosives for a professional hit,” said Tarquin. “He believes that it is merely coincidence that his nephew’s wife and children are unharmed. Not as well off as they once were, of course, with the excuse for the CalPol to walk all over them.”

I always snigger at the nickname of the California Patrol. In England, Calpol is a pain killing medicine for children and helps them get to sleep. They call it Tylenol here. Tarquin gave my smirk a quizzical look, but went on.

“Your ten percent of assets associated with Akira would be considered a nice little nest egg by anyone’s standards; we got lucky, and he had his real accounts out and had not had a chance to put them away,” he told me. “Half of California got closed down in one move.”

It couldn’t happen to a nicer place.

“And so we are talking....” I tailed off.

“You should clear something in the range of six zeroes, maybe seven,” said Tarquin.

I dwelt, briefly, on my new bank balance, realised that if it was even close to seven, I would never need to work again, even if we had a dozen kids and put them all through private schools. Still, I’d be bored if we did that, so I returned to the issue in hand.

“Kenichi,” I said.

“Yes; he will have to go,” said Tarquin. “My bosses want him killed in his own home. Sorry.”

“Ah, and no doubt they are so sorry, not sorry,” I said.

“They see you as an asset, not a person,” said Tarquin, apologetically.

“That’s all right, I see them as a cash machine, not people,” I said.

“If you get a certain kill, I’m not about to quibble on how you do it,” said Tarquin.

“I can do it,” I said. “But there’s only one way to handle it.”

“Oh, no,” said Willow. She had one hand to her mouth, the other gripping her glass almost tightly enough to break it, and her expressive smoke blue eyes were full of fear.

She’s very fast on the uptake. I kissed her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I will need to become one of Kenichi’s trusted bodyguards.”

“Obviously,” said Willow, dryly. “A piece of cake, no doubt.”

She had taken possession of my hand and was almost breaking it.

“Tarquin is going to have to hire a not very efficient button man whom he doesn’t mind becoming collateral to perform a clumsy sort of hit on Kenichi,” I said.  “And I’m going to have to second-guess him and save Kenichi from certain death.”

“Without knowing exactly what’s going to happen,” said Willow. Her tone was dry enough to bring thoughts of the Great Western Desert Bowl to mind, where they over-farmed the land without having learned the lessons of history from the Dust Bowl years.

“I’m sure there’s a street gun who has predictable habits that Tarquin has found inconvenient enough to want rid of him,” I said, soothingly.

“We shall be discussing this at length when we are alone,” said Willow.

I winced.

Tarquin gave me a knowing smirk.

“No, you don’t know,” I said. “She won’t lecture me, or scream at me, she’ll make me fill out a risk assessment form.”

Tarquin was the one to wince now.

“Let me know if you plan to go through with it,” he said. “I have an appointment.”

He’s never left so hastily.

Willow raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, there’s risk,” I said. “But if he picks a hired gun who is predictable, that reduces the risk by a considerable factor.”

“Go on,” she said. Her voice was level. Level at about absolute zero.

“I am fast, smart, and very, very good,” I said. I considered adding a facetious comment about being good with all my weaponry, but I was in enough trouble that I did not want to contemplate getting my lengthy body onto the rather short sofa.

I wonder if that was why Willow chose that suite, as an inducement not to annoy her? I discarded all flippancy, and took her hand.

“My Neon Flower will be monitoring everything in the street cams,” I said. “And by drone. And I am sure you can find out who the poor mug subcontracts to for the driving.”

She brightened.

“If it’s rigged, I can schmooze my way into the electronics and, er, divert it a little.”

“There, you see, I knew you’d come up with an improvement on the plan,” I said.

She started to smile, then frowned.

“You and your silver tongue,” she said.

I’m afraid I smirked.

By the time we’d retired to the bedroom, and made love several times, she was ready to hug me without any tears and accept that I do know what I’m doing.

She and Auntie are so protective of my interests, it’s kind of touching, but at times, a little wearing.

 

 

oOoOo

 

Tarquin picked some chummer who calls himself ‘Werewolf.’ Now, I have nothing against the theoretical concept of people infected with lycanthropy – if it existed – but I do have a lot against Neonazis, who, for some reason, find the concept of werewolves fascinating. Werewolf hung out with a button man known as Neon Nazi, who didn’t even try to hide it. Both were chromed to the gills. I had run against Werewolf before, on an extraction job. That is, my job was to extract a young woman – she was the one who hired me – from her daddy’s corporate security. Daddy had word of her attempt to run away with the lad he disapproved of, and hired Werewolf to stop her by any means.

Poor naive sap.

Werewolf’s idea of stopping her by any means was to burst into her apartment and hose her down with his H&C fully automatic machine pistol. I arrived in time to see her body scooped up by the corp cops. I faded out. I sent her fee to her boyfriend with an anonymous tip-off to flee town.

Even if Daddy did not have him hit, Werewolf might just have decided his head was worth a bonus. He had no idea that he wasn’t going to be paid for what was, essentially, a failed mission.

I try not to let my emotions rule me, but I hated werewolf for snuffing out a beautiful young life just because he could. There was a bounty on him from her father which was still in operation and I only did not collect it then because I was afraid I would let it become personal; and because a certain girl called Willow had been forcibly addicted to the Pleasure Dome ^TM  and Auntie was upset.

And life was a bit busy after that. Well, you read about it in my first volume of memoirs.

Two and a half years later, I could happily take down Werewolf and his chummer without getting emotional about it, but with distinct satisfaction.

Some scum and lowlife ask to enter the death rate statistics.

Werewolf’s idea of taking down a Yakuza boss was with a drive-by shooting. Now, there are trid shows of heroic guys leaping at a victim to save him, but in real life, these dudes are more likely to be shot by his bodyguards and distract them from the real threat. I took a job with a well-known delivery firm, contracted out the delivery to a few people who could do with the money, because it wasn’t the fault of the supposed recipients of the parcels that I intended to wreck the delivery truck.  I figured, so long as they got the parcels, all was good, and I had a bona fides job and reason to be out and about with a job in a truck so familiar as to be essentially invisible. Then I lurked in the neighbourhood where Werewolf planned his hit.

How did I know where he planned his hit? Because nine out of ten street shadows are predictable. And the ones who think that the business end of a semi-automatic is the best solution to any problem are more predictable than most. It did not take much digging.

Werewolf asked online what amusements were likely to be visited by Kenichi. He discovered that he liked opera and usually paid to see the dress rehearsals privately in the afternoon before a new performance goes on. Using this information counts as subtle for Werewolf.

Now, Werewolf is a hasty sort of fellow.

I’d plan a hit after the performance when my mark was relaxed and mellow, and his bodyguards perhaps a little disoriented from two hours of darkened auditorium and possible boredom from whatever offering was before them.

I checked the news for the performance.

The opera in question was a modern one, ‘The Divorce of Figaro’ by Luca Moreni, an avant-guarde and progressive composer. I might have gone to see it had it been written by a comedian, who could write in the spirit of Mozart and Rossini, even if the skill was not in the same class, but I’ve been to a Moreni opera. I think it was about the rights of transhumans but I lit out of there with a migraine from the music and the heavy insistence of the rhetoric. I hate being preached to.

But likely the bodyguards would be bored and I could not fault that. I like my music singable and I suspect so do most people. Clever music... well, look at the classics. What survives is what most people like, because bums of critics on seats does not indicate a box office success.

Again, if I was doing the hit, I’d get a job as a stage hand, and rig some pyrotechnics in his favoured box. Or fix a pin in its lining with something like ricin or thallium on it, where his death might even be put down to a common cold turning to pneumonia. Of course thallium is easy to treat if you figure out what it is, so that’s riskier.

But Werewolf would pick his entry into the opera house, and would just have his buddy drive by so he could hose Kenichi down.

You could say it has a kind of naive charm, but only if it was in fiction from the pen of a twelve-year-old. I could have expected it from my remedial class when I was teaching last year, and for somewhat sheltered upper class kids such laxity would be acceptable. But for a professional? During rush hour, which was about when the performance ended, or worse, at lunchtime when it started, with a heap of witnesses? The ignorance, stupidity, carelessness, and sheer downright idiocy of the average street shadow never ceases to amaze me. But hey, if given a gift, why not accept it?

So there I was, in a delivery truck, lurking outside the opera house, waiting for a flashy Chrysler Cheetah to appear.

Why a Chrysler Cheetah? Because Neon Nazi owned one, and was so proud of it that he never thought about the consequences of using a known car to total someone.  The egoes of some street shadows outweighs their sense of self-preservation, and the idea that they are somehow street heroes.

They’re fooling nobody but themselves.

And first of all, the limo arrived bearing Kenichi... a stretch Rolls Royce Kaga. Now that Mitsubishi owns Rolls Royce their top limo is named for the traditional litter for nobles, of course. It’s a                                                                                  nice car in its non-stretch version, quiet, fast enough to make a decent time of travel, and out of the price range of most shadows, which makes driving less fast away from a scene less suspicious than jamming down the accelerator. The car hummed up to the theatre door.

And then I heard the screech of wheels taking a corner too fast.

I put the truck into gear.