Stealth nodded and-wonder of wonders-for once the Old One agreed with him. Unbidden, the Wolf spirit lent me his heightened senses. The night vision made everything much clearer in the alley, but that wasn't the sense the Old One wanted me to use. My nostrils twitched and, amid the noxious odors of rotting garbage and thrice- scorched radiator fluid, I caught a very sharp scent.
The Old One forced me to savor it.A large canine, Longtooth. It was here and marked the territory of its kill. It did as its master commanded. It is much like the Murder Machine to whom you speak.
'A cyberpup ran Albion down?' Stealth nodded. 'Foot spurs scraped the wall over there when it lifted its leg to mark its hunting ground.'
'Custom rifle, custom dog. This guy must have some serious nuyen to be dropping on his pastime.' I shook my head. 'If what Braxen said is accurate, he's dusted four. Not likely to stop-as you said, a thrill killer.'
'A dilettante.' Stealth looked hard at me. 'You will pursue this before Raven returns?'
A lingering sense of guilt concerning Albion slowly stole over my mind. He'd been angry when I last saw him and had stalked off into the night alone. That had been months ago, but part of me thought his death was my fault. I knew, realistically, that was nonsense, but I couldn't shake the feeling.
'I knew him. It's personal.'
Stealth extended his left hand, the metal one, toward me. 'Give me some cab fare.'
'I'll drop you at Raven's before I head out.'
'Give me ten nuyen.'
I dug my hand into my pocket. Could Guinness ever check it out, Kid Stealth would surely make its datachip of World Records in ten different categories-all of them lumped under the Homicide heading. I pulled a credstick from my jeans pocket and handed it to him.
'I want to see a receipt and my change back,' I added. Stealth might have had more unsolved murders to his credit than Elvis had imitators, but if I didn't give him a hard time he'd be insufferable.
Stealth took the stick and disappeared it into a pocket. 'Wolf, this one plays at death.'
I nodded. That was about as close as Stealth would ever get to telling me to be careful. He ascribes a lot to the 'a word to the wise is sufficient' school of caring for other folks. Given that the last time he tried to show concern over my fate he shot me in the back, the verbal message did seem more friendly. 'I'll keep you posted, I promise.'
Without so much as a nod, Stealth turned and withdrew into the alleyway. I didn't turn to watch him be- cause the Old One tries to make me laugh at Stealth's cyberbunny hopping gait. In terms of lethality, doing that strongly resembles sucking on twenty packs of nikostix a day for longer than I've been alive. The other reason I didn't watch him is that Stealth was likely to cut up and over to Seventh by using those miracle claws of his to scale a building. Getting my knuckles bloody as the Old One tries to prove we can do that too is really annoying.
The Old One's sensory gifts did come in handy as I directed them back toward the street. As I walked in the general direction of where I'd left the Fenris parked in another alley, I heard someone sobbing. Tears aren't all that uncommon in the sprawl, and more than one Samaritan has been lured into a headache by thinking he was rescuing a woman in distress. In this case, however, the sob wasn't coming from a voxsynth chip, but from the throat of a little gamin of a girl slumped against the alley wall.
The rain had soaked her hair and made it clump into stringy tendrils about as skinny as her arms and legs. She wore a clear plastic raincoat that ended somewhere between her neon green hot pants and her argyle knee socks. Her blouse matched the shorts in color and ended just below her breasts to show off a flat stomach. It also showed off her ribs. As she looked up at me with hollow, red-rimmed eyes I wondered if she was an anorexia poster-child.
I gave her a smile I hoped wouldn't threaten her. 'How long have you known Albion?'
She blinked as I said his name. 'You knew him?'
I nodded. Looking up the street I spotted a diner where I'd eaten before without dying. 'C'mon, let's get out of the rain.' I reached for her arm, but she retreated away from me.
'No way, chummer. I may be griefin', but I'm no flatliner.'
I held my hands up and kept them open. 'Okay, bad start. My name is Wolfgang Kies. I knew Albion and I'm going to find out what happened to him. If you want to help, it'll make my job easier.'
She watched me warily, then nodded. ' 'Kay. Albie mentioned you. I'm Cutty.'
I pointed to the diner and she nodded. 'How long you and Albion been together, Cutty?'
She cut across the street like a zombie hungering for a bumper-kiss. She never noticed the squealing brakes nor did she acknowledge the curses shouted at her. I let the Old One growl at anyone who vented his wrath on me and that generally calmed things. Once across Blan-chard, Cutty headed into the diner and dropped into a booth like a rag doll suddenly stuffed with lead shot.
The waitress frowned at her, but I gave her one of my 'this could be your lucky day, darling' smiles and she relented. 'Soykaf for me. Milk and some soup or something for her, okay?' The waitress snapped her gum, then turned and sang out our order to the ork working the kitchen.
'Third time is the charm. Cutty, how long had you been playing house with Albion?'
Her head came up and I saw a spark of life in her brown eyes. 'A month, I guess.' She blinked twice, then frowned. 'This is October, right?'
'November, but who's counting?'
'Oh, two months, then.'
'Gotcha.' I'd last seen Albion on a very warm July night, which put him with her within six weeks of leaving his friends in the Barrens. 'He was cool during that time? No problems?'
Cutty nodded. 'Like ice. Did some boosting, you know? His thing was fixing stuff, though, and he used to patch decks together before folks would fence them. Made him sort of legit, you know? Then folks started recommending him and he fixed lots of stuff.'
'I get the picture.' And the picture I got was a dismal one. I'd been hoping Albion had gotten himself in solid with some group or gang or specific place that might narrow my area of inquiry. If I had to track every cracked or heisted deck he laid screwdriver to, I'd be looking for his killer long after Kid Stealth rusted away to nothing.
The waitress arrived with our food, and Cutty stared at the clam chowder with the same look of horror you'd expect if the waitress had regurgitated it right there at the table. She looked at the milk as if the waitress was Lucretia Borgia. I compensated for this by regarding the steaming cup of soykaf like it was the Holy Grail and the waitress as if she was the Madonna. Clearly, though, the waitress thought of herself as a different sort of Madonna and I realized the kind of music we could have made together would have beat Gregorian chanting by an ecclesiastical mile.
'Drink, eat. You need the milk to strengthen your bones and the soup will put some meat on them.' I appropriated a bit of her milk for my soykaf, which suddenly made her possessive about the food. I feigned offense, which seemed to please her somehow and made her eat. 'Albion didn't have any steady killtime, did he? Anything that would have made him a candidate for a toxic lead dump?'
She nodded her head as a droplet of chowder rolled down over her pointed chin. 'Just started a caper at the Pacific Northwest Huntsman's Club. Got it through a person he did some fixing for. Steady work that didn't cut into his side biz. Didn't need a SIN for it.'
That last bit would draw Albion like a flame draws a moth. Albion fiercely defended his independence and wanted nothing to do with the system. Like all those who scurry in the shadows, he dreamed of being as big as Mercurial some day, but the chances of that were slimmer than Cutty here. What he didn't know, what few of us without SINs did know, is that it's easier for the society to destroy you than it is for them to even notice you.
'That's a place to start. Do you remember who gave him the job?'
Her wet hair flew back and forth as she shook her head. At least I think she shook her head, but I couldn't see any of her face around the edges of the bowl as she tipped it up to drain it. The bowl came back down and a plastic sleeve came away from her face smeared with the last of the chowder. 'Don't remember.' She looked over toward the counter and licked her lips as she eyed a stack of frosted donuts.
I'd seen bricks with a longer attention span than she had, but I put it down to her being in shock. Our waitress returned and brought with her the donut tray. Cutty selected two big chocolate-frosted fat-pills and I passed, so Cutty took a third in case I reconsidered. I paid the bill and the tip while Cutty watched the credstick vanish almost as hungrily as she'd looked at the donuts.
'With Albion gone, what are you doing for money?'
