JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

"Hey," he said in greeting as he came to the steps. The preteens looked a little too young to be in a full-blown street gang; maybe a tadpole gang. But you never knew. The adolescent gang called the Martians-after the god of war-was one of the deadliest in Punktown. "Do you guys know a kid named Brat Gentile? I'm a friend of a friend and nobody seems to know where's he got off to."

"Oh, please, officer," said one of the three, a Choom girl with her spiky hair dyed a metallic silver, her long mouth in a smirk. As young as she was, she'd had her eyelids surgically altered so as to look exotically slanted.

"No, no, I'm not a forcer. I'm a friend of Brat's girlfriend, Krimson. Krimson's gone missing, too."

"I don't know who the hell you're yakking about."

"Brat's in a gang from around here, the Folger Street Something-or-others."

"Snarlers," said one of the two boys seated beside the girl. "The Folger Street Snarlers."

"Snarlers. So do you know Brat?" he asked the boy.

"I'm sure I'd know his face if I saw him. But I haven't seen him or any of the Snarlers in a while." "What do you mean?"

The second boy spoke up. "It isn't just your friend of a friend that's missing, Mr. Forcer. Nobody's seen any of the Folger Street Snarlers for days. "

"Mr. Gentile?"

Stake almost said Genitalia, because it had been running through his mind that Caren Bistro had said that was Krimson Tableau's playful nickname for Brat. Caren had also said, in Janice's classroom, that Brat had a brother whom she had contacted while trying to find out what had happened to her friend. Stake had been grateful to find his phone number listed on the net.

"Who is this?" asked the face on the hovercar's console screen. Theo Gentile appeared to be in his mid-twenties, and wary didn't begin to address the look in his eyes.

"My name is Jeremy Stake, sir. I'm a hired detective. I'm looking for a girl named Krimson Tableau, and I understand that your brother-"

"I don't know anyone by that name!" Gentile snapped.

"I'm told he calls her Smirk. She's your brother's girlfriend."

"I don't know where she is. I don't even know where my brother is! Who hired you?" Stake began to stammer a reply, but Gentile cut him off. "I just got back from Miniosis. You go tell your boss-I don't know anything!"

Theo Gentile disconnected. With a sigh, Stake started up the vehicle and pulled out into traffic. In his earlier cruising he had already established where the local police precinct house was located.

"It wasn't my turn to babysit the Folger Street Snarlers today," growled the beefy forcer behind the counter, not even bothering to look up at Stake. "Why don't you go earn your dirty money, gumshoe, instead of asking us to do your work for you?"

"Gumshoe?" Stake murmured to himself with a disgusted smile.

But a woman at a desk behind the burly officer looked up and said to him, "Eric mentioned something about the Snarlers not being around." Then to Stake: "Want to talk to Detective Moudry, sir? He's had a lot of dealings with the gangs around here."

"Yeah," said the first forcer. "He even took a bullet in the neck from one of the Snarlers. He had to kill the blasting punk."

Stake ignored him, said to the woman, "Yes, please, if it isn't too much trouble."

She got the plainclothesman on the phone, and a minute later he stepped out from some inner office and gestured for the woman to buzz Stake through the security door. Stake followed him back toward his office.

"Yeah," Moudry said, glancing at Stake with a cop's appraising eye. "It's funny. I'm hearing the Snarlers haven't been seen, and a couple of their family and friends are starting to get edgy."

"What do you think about that?"

"I don't think they've all been killed in some big street war; that'd be hard to keep from being noticed. I just been figuring that they're lying low for some reason. Maybe they're keeping their heads down because some other gang is gunning for them. They had a bad scuffle with a Tikkihotto gang called the Morlocks last year."

"It just seems funny to me, because I'm looking for the girlfriend of one of them and she's missing, too. A girl by the name of Krimson Tableau, nicknamed Smirk by her boyfriend."

"Don't know her," Moudry said, opening his door for Stake, "but wherever they're hiding, I guess she must be hiding, too." They both seated themselves. "What's her boyfriend's name?"

"Brat Gentile."

"Gentile," Moudry echoed, doing a search through his computer files. "Hm. I don't have an arrest record for him, but I do have his name here on a list I made of the current gang members." Then a light seemed to come on in some dusty back storage room of the detective's mind. "Ohh, Gentile. Yeah, yeah. I know his brother, Theo. Theo was in the Snarlers himself for years. These kids come and go, so it's hard for me to keep up with all of them. But we got a history, the Snarlers and me."

"The man up front said you got shot in a scrap with them one time."

Moudry waved it away like it was all just part of the game. "That was nine years ago. Javier Dias wasn't even the leader back then."

"He's the current leader?"

"Yeah. Not a total scumbag, as far as these things go. But I had him in not too long ago on suspicion of a warehouse fire. These punks get thrown a bone sometimes for torching places in insurance scams." He punched some keys. "This is him." He swiveled his monitor for Stake to see. An interrogation room vid played on its screen.

The camera showed Moudry standing, sipping a coffee, while a young man sat behind a table with a water bottle in front of him. The camera zoomed in close on Javier Dias: wiry, tightly wound, with a pompadour of curly black hair, and wearing a white leather jacket. When he spoke, he talked out of one side of his mouth and through gritted teeth in an effect that seemed as much like partial paralysis as it did toughness.

"You're wasting your time bringing me in here about this dung, Moudry," Dias said to the detective with familiarity. "Why you got to be harassing me all the time? You still hurting from that slug in your neck? That wasn't me, remember?"

"I remember. And I remember putting a slug of my own through Banshee's skull for it."

"Yeah, yeah, all in the past, right?"

"Exactly. I'm talking about now. I'm talking about the fire in the old Magog Industries warehouse."

Moudry stopped the vid and started to say something, but Stake asked, "Would it be okay if I saw a little more of that?"

The plainclothesman shrugged, and continued playing back the recording.

Earlier, while pretending to adjust his shirt collar, Stake had covertly captured some still shots of Detective Moudry on his wrist comp, thinking that his face-familiar to the Folger Street Snarlers and perhaps their kin-might come in handy. But now, he started taking a new series of shots, from the screen in front of him.

Brat Gentile didn't have an address of his own listed in any current directory, but when going on the net for his brother's phone number Stake had found that Theo Gentile and his wife lived on Folger Street themselves.

On the front steps of Gentile's tenement building, Stake depressed the key for his apartment number until a familiar face appeared on the monitor screen, warier than ever. "What?" it barked.

On his own monitor screen right now, Theo Gentile would be seeing the attractive face of a young man with high cheekbones, who talked out of one side of his mouth and through gritted teeth in an effect that seemed as much like partial paralysis as it did toughness. "Hey man, let me in, quick. It's Javier."

But both the picture and sound would be shot with distorting static. It was not a malfunction, much as Stake hoped that would appear to be the case. He owned a cheap multipurpose scanning device that he had brought with him from his car's glove compartment. He was holding this instrument just below the security system's lens. He had used it numerous times before so he knew its field, as presently adjusted, would disrupt the image with snow and distort the audio as well. Gentile would be able to see his transfigured face-but not too clearly. In addition, he wore a ski hat over his hair and stood close to the lens so it wouldn't be noticed that he did not possess the trademark white leather jacket of the Folger Street Snarlers.