Lone Wolf by Nigel Findley Read Free Book Online Page B

like a car being disassembled by an autocannon. The wire informs me that, yes, I could blow the ChipMan off his belt—probably—without doing more than lacerating the rolls of fat he calls a waist. Tempting idea, but maybe I’ll save it for a later date. “Ranger wanted me to deliver the invitation in person,” he says. He looks at the watch on a sausage-sized finger. “You’re gonna be late.” And then he grins, like that’s been the idea all along.
    “Then what you sitting on your hoop for?” I demand. “Let's go.”

6
    We ride the couple of blocks from the Wenonah to the Cutters’ place by the cemetery. Bart’s hog—a 2052 Gaz-Niki White Eagle—is almost ten years newer than my Harley Scorpion, but its owner apparently takes no more care of it than he does of himself. The bloated ork cruises along behind me, the clattering blast of the Eagle’s badly tuned engine fitting perfectly with the percussion part of DB’s “Bloody Day Coming”. We park the bikes out back, then jander into the safe house.
    The “war council” is going down in the basement, and it’s already underway when we swing in the door. There are a dozen or so soldiers there—like Paco, all young, all tough. I’ve worked with most of them before, and get on well with the majority of those. Seeing a couple of fists raised in greeting, I shoot back a chill grin. Ranger’s up front—not giving the briefing, surprisingly—and the look he gives me would strip paint. All the seats are taken, so I lean against the room’s back wall. Bart follows me in and, wonder of wonders, kills the soundtrack.
    It’s a tough little biff named Kirsten who’s giving the briefing. She’s using a portable projection display with a subnotebook computer, throwing an image of the screen display up on the far wall. At the moment, the display is showing a map of the Hyundai pier, a segment of the docks down around Pier 42 where that weird multicorp firefight went down last November. The cross-hairs cursor is settled on one of the “temporary” warehouses across Marginal Way from the piers, right under the Alaskan Way viaduct. (They were “temporary” when the city built them to handle an interim undercapacity in 2034 or so, but the city never replaced them with anything better.) I know the place she’s rattling on about. It’s right in the shadow of the Kingdome, a depot and sometime meeting place for the triad called the Eighty-Eights.
    Kirsten grates on about asset distributions, primary and secondary objectives, but I just tune her out. All that mil-speak comes down to one statement: go visit the Eighty-Eights and frag them up. Simple. No matter what the war boss or his designate—Kirsten, in this case—has to say about it, whoever’s actually leading the raid has total discretion over how to use his “assets” and what to choose as objectives. Much as the Cutters might want to pretend otherwise, the gang isn't an army and doesn’t have anywhere near the level of command and control of a professional outfit like the Star.
    So that frees up my mind to worry about more pressing problems. My continued survival, for one, a subject very close to my heart.
    Ranger would like to see me gutted. That’s obvious and—after the gang council where I dropped him—inevitable. Yet Ranger, like Bart, has to recognize the fact that Blake apparently has his eye on me, for whatever reason. Geeking me without damn good reason would not be conducive to continued good health. Or something.
    Oh, Ranger could easily arrange for someone to scrag me. An up-and-comer inside the Cutters might do it for brownie points with the war boss, and outside talent isn’t that expensive in a buyer’s market like Seattle. But no matter how theoretically unattributable Ranger makes the kill, there’s always the chance the blame will find its way back to him and the word get out that he had me fried. A route that would be a definite risk.
    But there’s a much simpler, much