Wild Cards V Read Free

debits?”
    She looked at little startled, but nodded. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Yes, it does. It’s the only way to keep track, to make sure…” Her voice trailed away, and she turned and went around the bar. She looked down at Sal’s body, and when she spoke again, she voiced a totally different thought. “You know, Tachyon invited me to go on that world tour of his. I think I’ll take him up on it. No telling what information I’ll pick up rubbing elbows with all those politicians. And if there’s going to be street warfare between the Mafia and Kien’s Shadow Fists”—she looked into Brennan’s eyes for the first time—“I would be safer elsewhere.”
    They looked at each other for a long moment, and then Brennan nodded.
    â€œI’d better be going, then.”
    â€œYour whiskey?”
    Brennan let out a long sigh. “No.” He looked at the body at his feet. “Drink brings memories, and I don’t need any tonight.” He looked back at her. “I’m going to be … indisposed … for the next few weeks. I probably won’t see you before you leave. Good-bye, Chrysalis.”
    She watched him go, a crystalline tear glistening on her invisible cheek, but he never looked back, he never saw.
    II
    The Twisted Dragon was located somewhere within the nebulous boundary of an interlocking Jokertown and Chinatown. One of Brennan’s street sources had told him that the bar was the hangout of Danny Mao, a man who had a moderately high position in the Shadow Fist Society and was said to be in charge of recruitment.
    Brennan watched the entrance for a while. The swirling snowflakes that missed the brim of his black cowboy hat caught on his thick, drooping mustache and in his long sideburns. A fair number of Werewolves—they were wearing Richard Nixon masks this month—were going into and out of the place. He’d also seen a few Egrets, though for the most part the Chinatown gang was too picky to hang out in a joint frequented by jokers.
    He smiled, smoothing the tips of his mustache in a gesture that had already become habitual. Time to see if his plan was a stroke of genius, as he sometimes thought, or a quick way to a hard death, as he more frequently thought.
    It was warm inside the Dragon, more, Brennan guessed, from the press of bodies than the bar’s heating system, and it took a moment for him to spot Mao, who was, as Brennan’s source had told him he’d be, sitting in a booth in the back of the room. Brennan threaded his way between crowded tables and the shuffling barmaids, staggering drunks, and swaggering punks who crossed his path as he headed toward the booth.
    A girl, young and blond and looking vaguely stoned, sat next to Mao. Three men crowded the bench across the table from him. One was a Werewolf in a Nixon mask, one was a young Oriental, and the one in the middle was a thin, pale, nervous-looking man. Before Brennan could say anything a street punk stepped in Brennan’s path, blocking his way.
    He was a lean six four or five, so he towered over Brennan despite the cowboy boots that added an inch or two to Brennan’s height. He wore stained leather pants and an oversize leather jacket that was draped with lengths of chain. His spiked hair added several inches to his apparent height, and the scarlet and black scars crawling on his face added apparent fierceness to his appearance, as did the bone—a human finger-bone, Brennan realized—that pierced his nose.
    The scars that patterned his cheeks, forehead, and chin were the insignia of the Cannibal Headhunters, a once-feared street gang that had disintegrated when Brennan had killed its leader, an ace named Scar. Gang members not slain in the bloody power struggle after Scar’s demise had for the most part gravitated to other criminal associations, such as the Shadow Fist Society.
    â€œWhat do you