James Baldwin - Burn Artist

Exasperated, I lined up the shot, exhaled, and was about to squeeze the trigger when the blonde sat bolt upright and put her back between me and Kovacs. My face ticced. She bent down toward him, ass to the window, while the brunette got up against him around her girlfriend and started to kiss him.

“Oh, for fuck's sake…” Shooting a mafia contractor like Kovacs would attract the NYPD just long enough for them to figure out his identity and then blow it off in favor of pursuing other, livelier criminals. Shooting two women along with Kovacs was the basis of a major investigation, complete with media circus and grieving families. They wouldn't stop until they'd followed the trail all the way back to CelTech and my boss, and if Homicide turned up on Rodion's doorstep, he would be greatly displeased.

I peeled myself away and sat back on my rump, rubbing my eyes, and just left my face in my hands for a while. It was dark in there. Dark was nice.

After I’d done my best to scrub the imagery from my mind, I had another look down the line of sight. They were so tangled up that it was like trying to aim at a jellyfish swarm. There was no way that I was going to get a clear shot for at least half an hour. I settled for rolling over onto my side, where I drank my cold coffee in surly silence and waited for my target to finish disporting himself so that I could do my job and get home, hopefully before five am.

Now and then, I rolled back and peered through the scope, regretting it more each time I looked, but there came a point where they finally seemed to be wrapping up… and that's when I regained my focus. It was possible to take the shot tonight, but that was reliant on the women being gone.

Naturally, pair of them got under the covers and snuggled up together. Of course. If I was going to take the shot, there would be witnesses to the actual death, but my chances of escape were good. When the women lay down and Kovacs sat up, the back of his head facing the window, my eyes narrowed as I found my will, centered within the stillness of my mind, and fired.

There was a dull crack through my earplugs. The bullet hit the glass and… stopped. A vivid, bright violet pattern flared across the window, an intricate alien geometry visible from my position across the street. Kovacs jumped to his feet wildly, lighter and everything else in his hands thrown up and away with shock. I felt the backrush of energy even as I yanked the rifle back and down, rolled with it, and scrambled away with my bag and the gun.

I hadn’t missed. The line of sight was perfect. I knew a ward when I saw it… but the shockwave of energy, the taste of the magic was not the same as the curses and the fire elemental trap, I was sure of it. It was stronger, deeper, more powerful… richer, for lack of a better term. And darker, much darker. The magic left a bad taste in my mouth, though I couldn't have said why. The magical backlash had a smell, too: an awful rotten, putrid sugary smell, like five-day old meat left in the trash.

Choking back bile, I ran down the stairs and onto the street to find someone standing outside my car. He looked up in alarm as I burst out of the warehouse. There was someone inside the cabin, fumbling inside the steering column. As if the night couldn’t get any better, some asshole was trying to steal my rent-a-car.

I leveled the sniper rifle at the lookout and locked the bolt in place with a loud ‘snak snik'. “Hey!”

The lookout shouted as he turned tail. The guy inside the car hit his head on the way out, and the pair of them both stumbled away, gawping, as I threw my gear, got inside, and slammed the door. I jammed the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing. The piece of dog shit had cut the ignition wire.

Sweating, trying not to fumble, I got a flashlight and had a look to see how far he'd gotten on hotwiring my ride. Genius here had cut and prepped the battery wire, but not connected the ignition. After a headcheck to see if anyone had followed me out, I set about finishing the job. It was times like this I wished for real eldritch might. In my fantasies, I spoke a word of power and the car would surge to life. In reality, I was trying not to let the sweat from my forehead drip onto the wires as I fucked with them in the near-darkness, flashlight clamped between my teeth.

I heard a shout, and then the triple rapport of a handgun going off around the corner of the warehouse, followed by return fire from the would-be car thieves. I ducked instinctively, dropping the wires, and then came up again to finish wrapping them. They were almost done, so close to being done…

In the rear-view mirror, I saw Kovacs – barefoot and in a bathrobe – running down the road with both of the women he'd been fooling around with. The blonde was now back in her jeans and tank top and toting a hunting rifle; her girlfriend had a pistol and was wearing nothing but lacy pink panties which were in stark contrast to her dark olive skin. Now I could see them up close, I was fairly sure they were Sicilians. Mob molls.

Finally, I touched the wires together, and the car roared to life. The noise and sound drew fire: my rear windshield took three, four, five plugs before it burst in across the back seat with an explosion of glass rubble. I put the car in gear and floored it, fishtailing a little before I threw the handbrake and roared off down the road. Straight down the road, and only straight, because I tried to turn the corner and realized I'd forgotten to break the steering lock.

“God dammit!” I struck the wheel as hard as I could, screeching to a halt in the middle of the road while the three musketeers ran up the pavement behind me, guns blazing. I jammed the key in the ignition and turned it until I could control the wheel, but by then, they were on me. The blonde sighted down like a hunter behind me, and I barely got down and against the driver’s side door as a round blew through the cabin and smashed my front windscreen as efficiently as it had the rear. Half blind and navigating mostly by feel, I backed up at full speed to scatter them, then floored it and tore off forward again. I swung around the next corner, checking back to see where my pursuers were headed. They were still on foot, and only the rifle now had enough reach to nail me. I saw the woman aim and fire, but no bullet came for me. She dropped the muzzle and began to mess with the bolt. It had jammed.

I drove further and faster than they could run. Once it was safe to get a breather, I pulled over into a dark alley and allowed myself the luxury of hyperventilating for several minutes, shaking my hands and rocking in the throes of overstimulation. That activity burned itself out into tics and grimaces of pent-up frustration by the time I pulled my gear over and broke up the gun, filed the barrel, and stashed the rest behind the back seats. Rodion wasn’t paying me enough for this shit. I was out and alive, but if I wasn’t pulled over tonight, it would be a miracle.

Barely thirty minutes later, the tell-tale red and blue begin to strobe behind me. I slowed the car of my own accord with a sigh, pulling over to the side of the road so that the cops could catch up to me. So much for miracles. It was times like these I remembered why I was an atheist.

By the time I got home – exhausted, sweaty, and six hundred dollars poorer after bribing the cop who pulled me over – the last thing I wanted to think about was the party I was supposed to be preparing for tonight. But think about it I did, because it was at least as important as the issue with Maslak… at least as far as the Organizatsiya was concerned.

My Avtoritet was hosting his birthday bash at The Russian Tea Room, which I personally thought was in poor taste. For one thing, most people in the Organizatsiya were Ukrainian or from the countries south of Russia – Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan – and were emphatically not Russian and even more emphatically not Moskvichi , people from Moscow. I imagined that visiting the Tea Room as a Ukrainian was a bit like going to a Confederate-themed restaurant as a Black person: not particularly dangerous as of 1986, but full of disquieting reminders of the past. The overwrought Imperial theme was tacky for someone who’d grown up angry on stories of national revolts, genocide, and the suppression of our language and literature.