Wild Cards V Read Free Page A

want?” The Headhunter’s voice was too reedy to sound menacing, but he tried.
    â€œTo see Danny Mao.” Brennan spoke softly, his voice pitched in the slow drawl that he remembered so well from his childhood. The Headhunter bent lower to hear Brennan over the cacophony of music, manic laughter, and half a hundred conversations that washed over them.
    â€œâ€™Bout what?”
    â€œâ€™Bout what’s not your business, boy.”
    Brennan saw out of the corner of his eye that conversation in the booth had stopped and that everyone was watching them.
    â€œI say it is.” The Headhunter smiled a grin he fondly thought savage, showing filed front teeth. Brennan laughed aloud. The Headhunter frowned. “What’s so funny, asshole?”
    Brennan, still laughing, grabbed the bone in the Headhunter’s nose and yanked. The Headhunter screamed and reached for his torn nose and Brennan kicked him in the crotch. He fell with a choking moan, and Brennan dropped the bloody bone he’d ripped from his nose onto his curled-up body.
    â€œYou,” Brennan told him, then slid into the booth next to the blond girl, who was staring at him in stoned astonishment. Two of the three men sitting across the table started to rise, but Danny Mao waved a negligent hand and they sat back down, muttering at each other and staring at Brennan.
    Brennan took his hat off, set it on the table in front of him, and looked at Danny Mao, who returned his gaze with apparent interest.
    â€œWhat’s your name?” Mao asked.
    â€œCowboy,” Brennan said softly.
    Mao picked up the glass in front of him and took a short sip. He looked at Brennan as if he were some kind of odd bug and frowned. “You for real? I ain’t never seen a Chinese cowboy before.”
    Brennan smiled. The epicanthic folds given his eyes by Dr. Tachyon’s deft surgical skills had combined, as he had known they would, with his coarse, dark hair and tanned complexion to give him an Oriental appearance. This slight alteration of his features, his newly grown facial hair, and his western manner of speaking and dressing all added up to a simple but effective disguise. It wouldn’t fool anyone who knew him, but he wasn’t likely to run into anyone who did.
    And the irony of his disguise, Brennan thought, was that every aspect of his new identity, except for the eyes given him by Tachyon, was true. His father had been fond of saying that the Brennans were Irish, Chinese, Spanish, several kinds of Indian, and all-American.
    â€œMy Asian ancestors helped build the railroads. I was born in New Mexico, but found it too limiting.” That, too, was true.
    â€œSo you came to the big city looking for excitement?”
    Brennan nodded. “Some time ago.”
    â€œAnd found enough so that you have to use an alias?”
    He shrugged, said nothing.
    Mao took another sip of his drink. “What do you want?”
    â€œWord on the street,” Brennan said, his intense excitement buried under his southwestern drawl, “is that your people are going to war with the Mafia. You’ve already hit them once—Don Picchietti was assassinated two weeks ago by an invisible ace who shoved an ice pick in his ear while he was eating dinner at his own restaurant. That was certainly a Shadow Fist job. The Mafia will undoubtedly retaliate, and the Shadow Fists will need more soldiers.”
    Mao nodded. “Why should we hire you?”
    â€œWhy not? I can handle myself.”
    Mao glanced at his erstwhile bodybuard, who had managed to drag himself to a hunched position on his knees, his forehead resting on the floor. “Fair enough,” he said thoughtfully. “But do you have the stomach for it, I wonder?” He looked at the three men crowded together on the bench across the table, and Brennan, too, looked at them closely.
    The Werewolf sat on the outside and the Oriental, probably an Immaculate Egret, was on the