I did but it was well hidden because as long as I had it, I had a chance to live.
It wasn't going to go public until I was good and dead. It was that sort of information: wasn't going to expire any time soon.
Me, I had decided years before that I wasn't going to be taken alive. Not if I had a choice, anyway. One of my pants pocket contained an autoinjector full of ricin. Illegal as hell but arrest was the same as capture for me, to be avoided at all costs, so wtf.
The elf got a stricken look on his face. He looked at the bruisers and their eyes narrowed before they headed for the door. In seconds, all three of the big boys were gone.
It could have been anything but I was sure something was going on outside and I was afraid I knew what it was.
'The password,' the elf demanded.
'Hogwarts,' I said. I'd loved those books when I was a kid.
Where the elf pulled that pistol from, I couldn't say. I would have sworn there hadn't been any place in his clothes lumpy enough to hide it, but there it was. 'I told you to come alone.'
'I did. What's going on?'
'One of my people is not responding.'
Raising my hands to the level of my shoulders, I said, 'No clue. I came for the kid. You got your file, I got the kid, I just want to go get my money.'
For a few moments, I stared down the muzzle of the pistol the elf held on me, wondering if this might be it, finally, after all these years. My knees shook.
Geez, I'd been targeted by robocannon and I can't tell you the number of times I ran down a corridor dodging bullets. I was younger then.
For sure, I thought I wasn't going to get any older, but the elf displayed that slack-faced expression I had come to recognize. The ruffie had started to kick in.
Time for my secret weapon.
If you practice long enough, you can learn to walk quite normally with something not too large-or with too many sharp points-clamped between your butt cheeks. People doing a pat-down don't usually cram a hand in there.
I let the little metal tube slide down my leg as I turned off my eyes and ears for a moment.
The flash-bang exploded when it hit the floor.
Immediately, I turned the gain back up on my eyes and I reached out my hand and took the pistol from his hand.
'What is it? What's out there?' I said, as I jammed the muzzle up under the elf's chin.
'Ghouls. Maybe two dozen.'
Crap. I hadn't thought anyone could get ghouls to do anything, but apparently the Humanis people were not only able to get over their aversion of meta-humans enough to use them as operatives but had found some way to convince ghouls to cooperate.
Maybe it was just a matter of making sure the ghouls had plenty of meta-human flesh to chew on. Ghouls liked that.
I thought about shooting the elf but why attract attention? At least, any more than the flash-bang already had.
So I kneed him in the groin and jabbed my fingers into a nerve nexus under his right arm. Dropped him like a rock. Nice thing about the martial arts is that they never go obsolete.
Dropping the pistol into one of the pockets of my pants, I snatched the secretary out of the elf's other hand and stuffed it into another pocket. Another chunk of change to me for preserving Ares' data.
I reached inside my waistband and pulled out two bundles of black plastic. Harnesses. Memory plastic.
Each bundle had a fist-sized disk of metal in the middle and I held one of those disks to my chest and pulled the slider on the side downwards.
The bundle undid itself and legs reached out like a startled spider, then wrapped themselves around me, making an effective harness as the plastic folded itself into the pre-programmed shape, the 'legs' gripping each other in the middle of my back.
The kid had just stood there and watched as I had disarmed the elf and done the harness thing, but when I took the first step toward him, the kid turned on his heel and ran for it. Since I was between him and the hallway door, he had no choice but to head for the darkness and gloom of the kitchen.
I stepped up the gain on my eyes so I could see the doorway on the other side of the kitchen that either led into a bedroom or to a hallway that led to the bedroom. I had no idea if there was a back door to the place, but the kid didn't even know whether the kitchen was a dead end or not. Not that he had much choice.
He also didn't have much in the way of legs. Given a bigger start, he could have gotten away. No way my old legs would have been able to keep up with him but he was close enough that I only needed two steps to reach him.
I put the disk of the second harness in the middle of the kid's back and slid the switch. In a fraction of a second, I had him by the harness.
My old fingers almost let go, though. I think if the kid hadn't been startled by the flapping black legs whipping around him, he might have been gone and away. As it was, I held on by my fingertips and hoisted the kid off his feet.
I mentioned that I had seen the kid once before, when he was a year old. Needing a place to hide out I had hunted Donna up. Big surprise for her. Stayed with her for two days, until I could use my contacts to set up a new hidey-hole.
One of those days, she hoisted the kid out of his crib and handed him to me, telling me to hold him for a second while she changed the sheets.
I am not a kid-person. Didn't know what to do with my fellow kids when I was a kid and hadn't had anything to do with them afterwards.
Didn't know what to do with this kid, either. His face was screwed tight and he expressed his unhappiness with the general state of the universe by howling at the top of his lungs. If I had not been distracted trying to turn down the volume of my ears, maybe I wouldn't have gotten nailed, but the bugger planted a bunny-suited foot right in my huevos.
I almost puked then.
Now, ten years down the road, the little bastard cow-kicked me again, square in the nuts.
I almost puked.
But I didn't have time for that.
Ghouls. Elves. God knows what else.
Time for the escape plan.
I clicked the disk of the kid's harness onto the disk of mine. They were made to mesh and once they clicked, the kid was not going anywhere without me until I reached between us and hit the release.
His feet hammered on my knees and thighs.
Old muscles and bones don't like that. These days, I bruise just by thinking about it.
That's one of the places where I had not planned well. I should have had something to put the kid out but I didn't.
So it wasn't a perfect plan. Sue me.
Rather than going out the front, I turned toward the rear stairwell. Paulie would have another car at the end of the alley between 4th and 3rd. All I had to do was get to it.
The stairwell was pitch dark. I generally approve of efficiency, but if the elves had taken out the lights in this stairwell, too, I thought maybe they were overdoing it a bit. Still, that's what light amplifiers are for. I cranked up the gain on my eyes.
And the biggest, ugliest, droolingest ghoul I had ever even heard of was there, halfway up the flight of stairs. Apparently they can see in the dark, too. Or at least this one could.
That damned elf hit me from behind right then.
You know, when a man takes one in the nuts, he should lay on the floor for a while and pray for death.
Instead, that elf either had cast iron balls or some pretty good painkiller implants.
