Shadowrun 44 - Drops of Corruption

  SHADOWRUN

  Drops of Corruption

  1

  The crowd never parted for Quinn Bailey. He knew people who could make others veer out of their way with a glance, or with a heavy stride. But he was too short, too light, too friendly looking to intimidate people. He had learned to work with his appearance, sliding between people, bobbing and weaving around the shifting mass on the casino floor.

  He smiled at everyone. In return, he got hostile stares, puzzled glances, downcast eyes, and, on rare occasions, smiles. Bailey grinned and nodded at them all, enjoying the sight of them losing money.

  He loved gambling. Not the gaming part of it—he never played because he always lost. What he loved was the concept of it, the whole idea of putting up a neon sign and having hundreds, thousands of people lining up to give you money, and all you have to do to keep them happy is give some of the cash back to one of them. It’s the perfect business—you don’t have to manufacture anything, you don’t have to sell anything, you just have to rearrange the distribution of cash among a large group of people and make sure you keep a big pile for yourself.

  A few meters away bells rang, lights flashed, and a bourbon-scraped throat let out a raspy whoop. Dozens of coins clinked into a metal cup. Most of them were tokens good only for another pull on the machine or some other bet inside the casino, but it was a win, and a hundred jealous eyes watched the gleeful man scoop coins out of the cup. Then they turned back to the machines in front of them and gave their levers a vengeful pull.

  There was no one at these machines whom Bailey wanted to see. If he was going to get anything done tonight, it would be at the tables. The people who were simply hoping luck would go their way didn’t have much to offer him, but those working their opponents, or developing a system to beat the house, or even those just trying to drink their friends under the table had a chance of being useful. No guarantee—not by a long shot—but at least a chance.

  But then there was an obstruction, like a boulder with a blue blazer. Bailey took a step to his right, and the rock moved with him. Then it spoke.

  “How are you this evening, Mr. Bailey?”

  Bailey sighed to himself. “Fine. Wonderful, in fact, and thanks for asking. But I believe I just saw my Aunt Gertie near the baccarat tables, and she’s not supposed to gamble with her pill money, so if you’ll excuse me . .

  The security guard was not amused. The expression on his flat face did not flicker.

  “I’ve been asked to remind you that the Gates Casino is open to almost anyone in the metropolitan area. It’s a policy we’re proud of.”

  “And well you should be,” Bailey said.

  “But, of course, we need to protect ourselves. Which means there are some people—people management thinks are potentially dangerous—whom we don’t admit. For the protection of the casino.”

  “These people sound like trouble. I feel much safer knowing that you don’t admit them. Thank you. Keep up the good work!”

  “I’ve been told to tell you you’re not on that list. Yet. But some people you know are on that list. And if you keep coming here, and we know you keep associating with the people we’re concerned about, we may have no choice but to put you on that list.”

  “Well, that sounds dire indeed. I’ll do everything in my power to prevent you from making such a drastic move.” “The management is quite serious about preserving casino security.”

  “I have no doubt.” Bailey knew where this conversation needed to go, so he steamrolled the guard’s attempts to say anything else. “Which is why the management has never, ever had anything to do with anyone of a questionable nature. Especially for, I don’t know, the purposes of cleaning up some soiled money. The thing is, I’m serious about what I do, and the people with whom I associate are serious about what they do. We’re all serious people. Look, I can even make a serious face. See?” Bailey furrowed his brow and made his mouth a horizontal line. “So you do what you have to do, and I’ll do what I have to do, and your bosses will do what they have to do, and if what they have to do makes me mad enough, well, then, I’ll just have to shoot them, but we’re not to that point yet, so why worry about it? Let’s all just enjoy our evening, shall we?” Bailey wanted to think his display of wit and logic persuaded the security guard, but the more likely explanation was that, having delivered his message, the guard no longer cared to deal with Bailey. The boulder moved aside, and Bailey continued on his way.

  The rows of slot machines gave way to felt-covered tables, and the pace of the action changed. Rather than bleeding their money away coin by coin, the gamblers at the tables paused, pondered, deliberated, placed a series of small bets, won a few, until the moment came when they placed a large bet and a more skilled gambler (either another patron or the house itself) relieved them of their money, and in an instant they lost two or three times as much as the slot machine gamers spent in an entire night. Bailey made a mental note of the gamblers with the largest stacks of chips in front of them, so that he could to talk to some of them later when they were away from the tables.

  He saw at least three more security guards watching him closely as he flowed through the crowd, and he felt bad that he wasn’t really giving them anything to see. Maybe he should lift a few chips from someone, or slip a knife in someone’s back, or run back to the slot machines, find a little old lady, and punch her in the face. Preserving one’s reputation sometimes required effort.

  However, while getting thrown out of a casino (or bar or any other establishment) had its fun side, business had to get taken care of first. If all went well, maybe he could start a fight in an hour or two.

  Beyond the gaming tables a broad archway flashed red and purple. The room on the other side was dim, though with plenty of black light—Bailey could see some of the ultraviolet tattoos on the faces of the patrons from here. Beyond that archway were the finest virtual reality rigs money could buy. Beyond that were the famed back rooms of the casino, the ones that management swore up and down didn’t exist until you paid them enough money and promised to be discreet. In those rooms, just about anyone with a halfway decent datajack could experience any sensation the world had to offer.

  Bailey didn’t plan to go within twenty meters of the archway. The young corp drones who typically hung out there were useless to him, and the addicts in the sim-sense rooms were even worse. At least, he thought, the rooms kept many of the people he wanted to avoid concentrated in one place.

  Ahead of him, at last, was one of the casino’s half-dozen bars. Half the crowd was energized, on their first few drinks of the evening, steeling themselves for a night at the tables. The other half had just returned from the tables, where their alcohol-dulled nerves had helped them lose their entire night’s stake, and all they had left to do was drive themselves the rest of the way to sullen intoxication.

  He scanned the tables. He saw two of his men right off the bat—Shivers and Boone, both with full tables, following their instructions perfectly. Bailey noticed that when he gave orders that involved drinking, they were obeyed far more often than orders involving, say, orks.

  He approached Boone’s table first, sauntering over, plotting a course a little to Boone’s right, watching the bar, waiting to be noticed.

  . I don’t know how many drugs he was strung out on, but he couldn’t even move his legs, while his upper body was just, you know, whirling, throwing random punches at anything he could reach, then scratching at the floor, clawing himself forward a half meter, then looking for someone else to hit. When no one else was in range, he’d give himself a few punches in the gut. I mean, he was gone, and—hey, is that Bailey? Quinn! Over here!”

  Bai
ley, assuming an expression of surprise, turned to Boone. “Cal? Hey, good to see you. What’s going on?”

  They went through a process Bailey had been through a hundred times. Boone introduced Bailey to his friends. Bailey ordered a round of drinks for everyone. Bailey talked for a minute or two, then slowly pulled back from the conversation and just listened and watched.

  He watched the body language of Boone’s friends, checked to see how confidently they held themselves, how hungry they were for attention, how well they held their liquor. He listened, too, but what they said was usually less important than how they carried themselves. Still, he could often identify the suck-ups and the wallflowers in as little as a sentence or two, so paying attention to the words could be helpful.

  Most of the time, Bailey didn’t come away from these conversations with much of anything. Sometimes he found a two-bit thug who might be useful as muscle on some future job, but most of the time it was just wannabes and hangers-on, two groups Bailey had little use for. This table was no different—he was sure Boone had tried to put a credible group together, but good talent was hard to find. And Boone hadn’t found any.

  It took Bailey about thirty minutes to make his final judgments about the group, and another five to smoothly extricate himself from the conversation. Then he was on his way to Shivers’ table.

  Unlike Boone’s table, the first sign at Shivers’ was encouraging. Shivers was sitting back in his chair, one hand on his drink, the other hanging loosely over the chair’s back, not trying to impress anyone with war stories. His thin lips shaped a grin barely this side of a sneer, a wavy lock of his light red hair dropping down near his left eye. The five people sharing the table with him spoke loudly and laughed even louder—Bailey had heard them several times when he was at Boone’s table. As he approached, a casino floor manager was walking away, shaking her head. She’d undoubtedly delivered the fourth or fifth request of the evening for the group to keep it down, and for the fourth or fifth time she hadn’t been well received.

  Bailey hoped they weren’t already too far gone for him to make a good evaluation.

  Shivers didn’t bother to put on a show of noticing Bailey like Boone had. He’d spotted Bailey the moment he walked away from Boone’s table, and waved him over when he got within a few meters.

  “Evening, Jimmy,” Bailey said.

  “Quinn,” Shivers answered with a slow nod. “Win anything?”

  “Not playing.”

  “Drinking?”

  “Just water.”

  Shivers cocked an eyebrow.

  “Still have some work to do before the night is over,” Bailey said. “Need to stay sharp for a little while longer.”

  “Pity.”

  Bailey shrugged.

  “Join us?” Shivers asked.

  “If you have room.”

  Shivers motioned toward two of his companions, who slid their chairs away from each other. “Always room for one more,” he said.

  Bailey sat down and went to work. He dismissed the kid next to Shivers almost immediately. A decker, with a gaping jack on the right side of his head. He had shaved all his hair and painted a red-and-white target on his scalp, with the jack in the bulls’-eye. His eyes looked dull, meaning either he’d had some work done on them or he was using as well as drinking tonight. He talked high and fast, slinging around thick slang. He might have some skills, but he was too eager, too anxious for a fight. Bailey had enough hotheads to deal with already.

  He couldn’t accept or dismiss the others as quickly, so he settled himself in to listen.

  “It’s a pit. It’s a fraggin’ coal pit,” said one of Shivers’ friends, a rotund man with a black-and-white striped goatee.

  “It’s not!” insisted a red-haired woman to Bailey’s right. “The mine’s all run out, these days. It’s just a quiet village—lovely, really.”

  “If there’s no mining, that means it’s a ghost town. No money. Slagheap.”

  “There was going to be a story here, wasn’t there?” interrupted an older man, an elf with bushy brown sideburns nearly down to his chin. “You can teach each other geography later.”

  The woman smiled at the elf, while the rotund man just shrugged. But they listened to him. Bailey took note.

  “As I was saying,” the woman said, “I was in Standburn, where I grew up, visiting some of my old mates. They told me some corp had been sniffing around, thinking there may be coal or something else still left in the ground, might buy up the whole fraggin’ town. We run through the usual options—buying up as much land as we can, so we can make a profit selling to the corp, burning the whole town down to leave the corp with nothing—then we get creative.”

  The others around the table nodded.

  “We don’t want bleedin’ corp money, and we’d like to avoid burning down our village unless it’s truly necessary. We think for a time about what we want, and the first thing we want is the corp out of our town, always and forever. Not likely that’ll happen, though, is it? So we move to the next best option—make them nervous.” “What corp was it?” said a muscular man with a metal plate over the left side of his scalp.

  “McKinney Mining,” the woman said, and everyone around the table immediately nodded in recognition.

  “Bastards, all of them,” the muscular man said. His Scottish burr grew thicker around the words.

  “True. Which is why we decided to do what we did. Simple hex was all—smoke cloud spell with a special trigger set into the mine, waiting for the first steam shovel to hit. The tricky bit was getting the cloud just right. Ordinary smoke wouldn’t do it.”

  The older elf saw it right away. “Gas,” he said. “You wanted a gas cloud.”

  The woman grinned. “Dead right. Best-case scenario, they blow themselves up. Worst case, they kill a canary and then get all panicked for a time. Either one is fine by us.”

  “How did it work in the end?” the muscular man asked.

  “McKinney bought the whole town, moved everyone out, and started digging.” The woman grinned wickedly. “Then they blew the entire bleeding town apart.”

  Most of the table laughed. The elf and the rotund man, though, looked skeptical.

  “You created enough gas with a smoke cloud to blow up an entire town?” the rotund man asked.

  “Small village,” the woman replied.

  “I don’t care how blessed small the village is. Most spells of that sort can’t even blow up a single building, much less level a whole town.”

  “Just because you can’t do it isn’t reason enough to say anyone can’t do it,” the woman insisted.

  “Fine. Fine. You and your mining-town friends were the most powerful mages in Europe. Bloody amazing that you wasted your time and talents on pranks, when you easily could have been ruling any of several small nations.”

  The argument was off and running. The others at the table chose sides, based more on whom they were sitting next to rather than any logic from one side or the other. They had strong liquor in their veins, they were in a bar, and they couldn’t see any reason in the world not to get into a good fight.

  All except the elf. Bailey had been watching him since the end of the woman’s story, and it was clear the elf recognized the conclusion for the complete and utter bulldrek it was. But he didn’t say anything, didn’t get into the argument that his large companion was eager to rush into. He didn’t seem to see much point in this particular fight.

  Good judgment and discretion were things Bailey often found immensely useful. The elf was clearly the person to watch at this table.

  He leaned over to Shivers, who yelled an occasional remark into the fray supporting the woman, but was otherwise staying out of the argument.

  “You don’t honestly believe her story, do you?” Bailey asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Shivers said flatly. “She’ll appreciate my support.”

  Bailey looked back at the tight black outfit the woman was wearing, trying to discern the curves of her
form in the dim light of the bar. From what he could perceive, all the lines and angles seemed to be well placed.

  “And how appreciative will she be?” Bailey said.

  The left corner of Shivers’ mouth twitched. On him, that passed for a smile. “Very.”

  Bailey nodded his approval. “Fine, then. So I know why she’s here tonight.”

  Another mouth twitch. “I didn’t bring her here for you.”

  “Clearly. But what about the elf?”

  “Bannickburn.”

  “Right. What’s his story?”

  “Don’t know much,” Shivers said. “Originally from the Scotsprawl, hasn’t been here long. Seems a little rootless. Not sure why he came, what he’s up to.” “Probably came running from something, then,” Bailey said. “Him and half of the rest of this city.” Probably a little desperate, Bailey thought. That’s another thing I can use.

  “Did you bring him here for me?” Bailey asked aloud. Shivers snorted. “Hate to say it, but evenings I’m mostly doing things for myself. Even the nights when you’ve given me homework. I brought him because he’s a friend. But you can look him over all you want.” “Kind of you.” He ignored, like he always did, any attempts by Shivers to get a rise out of him. Shivers reflexively rebelled against anyone who attempted to exert authority over him, and Bailey, like the parent of a teenage child, had learned to let certain things go.

  He returned his attention to the larger conversation, sitting back in his chair and waiting for the right moment. When dealing with a Scotsman in a bar, he liked to stick with the sterotype; there was one sure opening to get on his subject’s good side, and he was certain the moment for it would arrive shortly.

  Bannickburn finished his drink, then glanced at the bottom of the cup, swirling the ice around, apparently hoping to catch a glimpse of a few drops of alcohol he might have missed. When he looked up, Bailey could read the disappointment in his face.

  Bailey let a few more moments pass, allowing an additional touch of thirst to build in Bannickburn’s throat. Then he stood, his own empty glass in his right hand. “Need another?”