Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

That left the fallout from the fight, which was equally predictable. Despite numerous passersby and even one or two blatant spectators, there were suddenly no useful witnesses. The man Carl had managed to hurt badly enough that he couldn’t run away remained steadfastly silent about his reasons for the assault. The site manager refused to let Carl question him alone, and cut short even the supervised interrogation on medical grounds. The prisoner has rights , she iterated slowly, as if Carl weren’t very bright. You’ve already hurt him badly.

Carl, still oozing blood from a split cheek and guessing at least one of his fingers was broken, just looked at her.

These days, he notified the site managers after the event.

“Looking for an old friend,” he told the waitress when she got back with the machine. He gave her the COLIN wafer and waited until she’d swiped it. “Name of Rodriguez. It’s very important that I find him.”

Her fingers hovered over the punch pad. She shrugged.

“Rodriguez is a common name.”

Carl took out one of the hardcopy downloads from the Bogotá clinic and slid it across the bartop at her. It was a vanity shot, system-generated to show clients what they’d look like when the swelling went down. In real time, that soon after surgery that cheap, Gray’s new face probably wouldn’t have looked amiss on a Jesusland lynching victim, but the man smiling up out of the clinic print looked uninjured and pleasantly unremarkable. Broad cheekbones, wide mouth, an off-the-rack Amerind makeover. Carl, eternally paranoid about these things, had Matthew go back into the clinic dataflow that night just to make sure they weren’t trying to fob him off with an image from stock. Matthew grumbled, but he did it, in the end probably just to prove he could. There was no doubt. Gray looked like this now.

The waitress glanced incuriously down at the print for a moment, then punched up an amount on the wafer that certainly wasn’t five soles. She nodded up the bar to where a bulky fair-haired male leaned at the other end, staring into a shot glass as if he hated it.

“Ask him.”

Carl’s hand whipped out, mesh-swift. He’d dosed up that morning. He hooked her index finger before it could hit the transaction key. He twisted slightly, just enough to take the slack out of the knuckle joints. He felt the finger bones lock tight.

“I’m asking you,” he said mildly.

“And I’m telling you.” If she was afraid, it didn’t show. “I know this face. He’s in here drinking with Rubio over there, two, maybe three times a week. That’s all I know. Now, you going to give me my finger back, or do I have to draw some attention to you? Maybe notify camp security?”

“No. What you have to do is introduce me to Rubio.”

“Well.” She gave him a withering look. “You only needed to ask.”

He let go of her and waited while she completed the transaction. She handed back the wafer, beckoned, and walked casually along her side of the bar until she was facing the blond and his shot glass. He tipped a glance at her, then sideways at Carl as he joined them, then back to her. Spoke English.

“Hey Gaby.”

“Hey Rubio. See this guy here?” She’d switched to English, too, heavily accented but fluent. “He’s looking for Rodriguez. Says he’s a friend.”

“That so?” Rubio shifted his weight a little to look directly at Carl. “You a friend of Rodriguez?”

“Yeah, we—”

And the knife came out.

Later, when he had time, Carl worked out the trick. The weapon had a cling-pad on the hilt, and the blond guy had probably pressed it up against the bar within easy reach as soon as he saw the waitress talking to the stranger. Carl’s careless approach—a friend of Rodriguez, yeah right —just closed the circuit. These two were Gray’s friends. They knew he’d have no others.

So Rubio grabbed the knife loose and stabbed Carl in the same blunt rush. The blade winked once in the low light as it came clear of the bartop shadow, ripped low through Carl’s jacket, and slugged to a halt in the weblar beneath. Gene-tweaked spiderweb mail, expensive stuff. But there was too much rage and hate behind the thrust to stop easily, and it was likely a monofil edge. Carl felt the tip get through and slice into him.

Because it wasn’t really unexpected, he was already moving, and the weblar gave him the luxury of not having to cover. He hit Rubio with a tanindo move—palm heel, twice, short, stabbing strikes, broke the man’s nose, crushed his temple, sent him sprawling away from the bar to the floor. The knife tugged loose again—nasty, grainy intimacy of metal in flesh—and he grunted as it came out. Rubio twitched and rolled on the floor, possibly already on his way to dead. Carl kicked him in the head to make sure.

Everything stopped.

People stared.

Beneath the weblar, he felt blood trickle down his belly from the wound the knife had left.

Behind him, Gaby was gone through the kitchen doorway. Also pretty much expected: his source had said she and Gray were close. Carl scrambled over the bar—savage flash of pain from the newly acquired wound—and went after her.

Through the kitchen—cramped, grimy space, gas ranges with blackened pans left to sit and a door to the outside still swinging wide with Gaby’s passage. Carl caught a couple of pan handles as he shimmied the narrow clearance, left clatter and clang in his wake. He burst through the door and out into an alley at the back of the building. Sudden sunlight blasted his vision. He squinted left. Right, and caught the waitress sprinting flat out up the hill. Looked like about a thirty-meter lead.

Good enough.

He took off running.

With the combat, the mesh had kicked in for real. It flushed him now, warm as the sun, and the pain in his side dropped to memory and a detached knowledge that he was bleeding. His field of vision sharpened on the woman running from him, peripherals smearing out with the brightness in the air. When she broke left, out of line-of-sight, he’d closed the gap by about a third. He reached the turn and hooked around, into another back alley, this one barely the width of his shoulders. Unpainted prefab walls with small, high-set windows, stacked sheets of construction plastic and alloy frames leaning at narrow angles, discarded drink cans on the dirt floor. His feet tangled momentarily in a loose wrap of polythene from one of the frames. Up ahead, Gaby had already ducked right. He didn’t think she’d looked back.

He reached the new corner and stopped dead, fighting down the urge to poke his head out. The right turn Gaby had taken was a main thoroughfare, paved in evercrete and loosely thronged with people. He squatted, dug out his Cebe lenses, and peeked around the corner at knee height. With the relief of not having to squint in the harsh light, he picked out Gaby’s fleeing form amid the crowd almost at once. She was glancing back over her shoulder, but it was clear she hadn’t seen him. There was no panic-stricken bolt, only a deep-drawn breath, and then she started to jog rapidly along the street. Carl watched her go for a few seconds, let the gap open up to a good fifty meters or more, then slid out into the street and followed, bent-kneed to keep his head low. It earned him a few strange looks, but no one spoke to him and more importantly, no one made any comment out loud.

He had, he reckoned with meshed clarity, about ten minutes. That was how long it would take news of the fight in the bar to reach someone in authority, and that someone to put a chopper into the air above the rectilinear streets of Garrod Horkan 9. If he hadn’t found Gray by then—game over.

Three blocks up, Gaby crossed the street abruptly and let herself into a single-story prefab. Carl saw her dig the matte-gray rectangle of a keycard out of her jeans and swipe it in the lock. The door opened, and she disappeared inside. Too far off to make out a number or name panel, but the place had hanging baskets of yellow-flowered cactus out front. Carl loped up to the near end of the ’fab, slipped into the alley between the building and its neighbor, and circled to the back. He found a bathroom window left open, levered it up, and heaved himself over the sill. Vague pain from the stab wound, sliced muscle moving against itself in a way it shouldn’t. He narrowly missed stepping into the toilet bowl, hopped sideways instead and crouched by the door, grimacing.