“Looks can be deceiving.”
“So can little girls who have been surviving on their reputations for too long!”
Okay, maybe he could be that stupid. “I deserve my reputation,” I said mildly.
“Sure you do.” His eyes went roaming again, sliding over the black leather of my jacket until they fixed on the vee of my red T-shirt. “Prove it.”
So I did.
“Damn it, Dory.” Fin scurried up as I walked around the bar and knelt by the still smoking corpse. The owner was a Skogstroll, a kind of Norwegian forest troll, although to my knowledge the closest he’d ever gotten to the land of his ancestors was a PBS documentary. But it meant he didn’t have to bend down to examine the damage the shotgun he kept behind the counter had done to the bar. “That’s going on your tab!”
“No problem,” I said, showing him the contents of the guy’s wallet.
“No way.” He started backing up, but tripped on his beard. “I’m not touching Tiger money! Not if the whole place burned down!”
I frisked the guy, but of course, there was no ID. Assassins didn’t carry it, as a rule. I did find one thing of interest, though.
“Raymond,” I said, with feeling.
“Is that his name?” Fin asked, staring at the book of matches I’d found in the not-so-recently deceased’s coat pocket.
“No. Tell me about—,” I began, when the body started twitching. So he wasn’t just a regular old vamp, who would have been killed by that shot as sure as a human. Dumb as a rock or not, he was a master. Cheung really wanted me to get the message.
Whatever the hell it was.
“Don’t do it, Dory,” Fin warned, his tiny blue eyes worried. “You kill one, and they’ll all be hunting you. That’s how these guys operate.”
“I’m not planning to kill anyone,” I squawked, because the vamp had grabbed me around the throat. So I stuck a knife through his, pinning him securely to the wood.
Fin’s glare intensified. “Dory!”
“Relax, it won’t kill him. I’d have to take the whole head for that.” I sat back on my heels. “And when did you become so squeamish?”
“I’m not! But you don’t want to mess with these guys.”
“I haven’t been,” I said, exasperated. “I had a run-in with his boss recently, but we cleared that up.” Or so I’d thought.
Fin didn’t look convinced. “He sent a master to screw with you for no reason?”
“Let’s find out,” I said, wrenching the knife out.
But even though I’d taken care to miss the vocal cords, it looked like the vamp had lost interest in conversation. An arm sent me skidding on my back into the forest of tables, reducing a few of the battered old pieces to kindling. I leapt back to my feet, but the vamp didn’t press his advantage. He was gone between one blink and the next, out the door and up the stairs, despite the fact that, in vamp terms, sunlight + major blood loss = bar-be-cue.
If I was lucky, anyway.
Fin hopped about, contorting his body to avoid the shaft of light spilling over the old boards. Older trolls could withstand direct sun, and even those Fin’s age didn’t actually turn to stone. But he said it gave him hives.
“And stay out!” he shouted, flipping the door shut with his toe.
I picked myself up and assessed the damage. Other than for some bruised ribs and a jacket full of splinters, I was unharmed. The same couldn’t be said for my cell phone, which had been in my back pocket. I fished out a few pieces of plastic and some metal innards, extracted the memory chip, and threw the rest in the trash.
It could have been worse; it could have been my head. And maybe next time it would be. Because it was a little hard to stop doing whatever was pissing Cheung off when I didn’t even know what it was.
I walked back over and retrieved the guy’s wallet. “You going to tell me what you know?” I asked Fin.
“It isn’t much,” he said, eyeing the fat sheaf of banknotes peeking out of the natty eel-skin cover. “They call themselves Leaping Tigers, and they’re new. The first of them showed up about a month ago, but they operate out of Chinatown, not here. I heard they pretty much destroyed a couple gangs over there, setting up house. They’re bad news.”
Tell me something I don’t know, I thought cynically. “And this house would be where?”
He licked his lips. “You, uh, you gonna need all that?”
I fanned myself with the fat stack of bills. “I thought you wouldn’t touch Tiger money.” He gave me a limpid look and I sighed. “You’re planning to tell everyone I took it, aren’t you?”
He looked pained. “You can take care of yourself better than me. And you
“So give.”
“I already did. Nobody knows where they hole up during the day. It’s like they just vanish.”
“You mean nobody wants to know.”
“That, too. Anyway, they’ve made a big impression pretty damn fast. You’re better off staying away from them.”
“Yeah. But will they stay away from me?”
“Just take care, Dory.”
“I always do.” I fished out a five and tossed the rest on the bar. “Drinks are on him.”
Raymond Lu was a disreputable nightclub owner who had recently become a disreputable snitch. He didn’t have a tiger tat, probably because he wasn’t important enough to deserve one, but his boss just happened to be Lord Cheung. And the last time one of Cheung’s guys had taken a shot at my head, it had been due to my association with Ray.
His club’s logo had been emblazoned on the matches I’d found in the hit man’s coat, so I decided to see if anything interesting was happening. It wasn’t. Of course, that in itself was interesting.
The club usually did a pretty good business, despite being wedged between an acupuncturist and a cut-rate electronics store on a backstreet of Chinatown. Not tonight, though. The jazzy neon sign was dark and the usual bouncer-and-rope combo was missing from the front door.
Instead, a large guy leaned against the dirty bricks, in the process of lighting a cigarette. The glow of the flame into his cupped palm highlighted a familiar craggy face. Zheng-ze, aka Scarface, Cheung’s right-hand vamp and a first-level master with power to burn.
He and his boss were in the process of challenging for seats on the senate, the ruling body for vamps in North America. From what I’d heard, they’d been doing pretty good. I silently cursed and shifted a little closer to the Dumpster that was providing my cover. The fact that Scarface was standing guard duty cut down my chances of getting in by at least half.
A moment later, he finished lighting up and relaxed against the wall. And grinned at me. I gave it up and crossed the road.
“Haven’t you heard that stuff’ll kill you?” I asked as he took a long drag.
He laughed it back out. “You look like shit,” he told me cheerfully, his eyes on the not-yet-faded bruises under the pancake I’d slathered on before leaving the house. “I heard you got yourself blown up.”
“You heard wrong.” Although it had been pretty damn close.
“Good. Once I get the Challenges outta the way, you and I gotta square off.” He showed me some big white teeth. “See who’s best.”
“I know who’s best.”
“That’s the spirit,” he said approvingly. “There’s no sport in it when they just give up and die.”
I ignored that in favor of nodding at the building behind him. “So what’s going on?”
I hadn’t really expected an answer, although I got one—sort of. “Lord Cheung’s trying to clean up his image. He’s jonesing for a senate seat bad and thinks some of his activities might not look too good if they’re brought up in the voting process.”
“I thought combat decided the new senators.”
