So he did not lie to himself as he opened his laptop, plugging the flash drive with his reports into a USB slot; he did not tell himself that what he was doing was excusable. Scrolling through months of his records until he found a notation and phone number he was looking for, he did not say to himself, No, murder is not my beat, but Dreamer is. And I am investigating a possible Dreamer connection. There was no need to lie to himself about what he was doing. He was ignoring orders and doing what he thought was best. So he placed a call, asked a few questions, bartered a deal, hung up, sent a text, and waited. When his phone chimed a moment later, he flicked to his inbox and read the reply to his message.

from bnie:omfg so koolwhen/where?

It was hours before Francine would arrive. He pictured the traffic at that time, estimated how long it would take to get to West Hollywood and make the swap, special k for opium, texted back.

midnightdenizone

LOOKING AT THE BODIES, IT WAS EASY ENOUGH TO SEE WHAT had happened. Someone who was familiar to the dead men had been admitted. He, and, this being a crime that involved multiple bodies, none of them wearing a wedding ring, the murderer was most assuredly a he, entered, carrying an easily concealable automatic weapon that fired standard NATO 5.56 × 45 ammunition. At least one of the cartridge casings on the floor showed the telltale scratches left when an already poor weapon is converted to full automatic. Forced to venture a guess, I’d have said he used one of Olympic Arms’s nearly infinite variations on the AR-15. An LTF with the stock removed seemed about right.

Whatever easily procurable piece of mass-produced, consumer-grade ironmongery he had concealed upon his person, once inside he engaged in conversation. Had a soda. A Mountain Dew. His conversation was with a young Korean American who may have been a fan of the Black Panther comic book character or may simply have had a taste for very expensive designer T-shirts with superhero motifs. Regardless, the conversation between the two turned argumentative, sufficiently hostile that the other young, pasty Asian men in the room made a conscious effort to turn their backs and focus on their computer monitors. Which was the pose they were all essentially frozen in when the man who had entered so genially lost his shit and pulled his weapon from his backpack or messenger bag and sprayed the room. Putting several rounds in the Korean American’s face while shooting the others in the back.

Or something similar.

In any case, they were all dead. Someone with a personal issue, and poor anger control, had done the deed. Murder is an acquaintance event; best always to assume the motive is personal. Or money. Or both. This looked, with very little effort invested, like a both scenario. Personal issue, involving money.

Oh, the humanity.

The only mystery I was concerned with was the absence of the travel drive that I was told would be sitting at a corner workstation. The most obvious scenario was that the same man who had executed his acquaintances had taken the drive. The fact that Lady Chizu wanted the object was as much indication of its value as one needed, but the fact that someone else might be willing to kill for it was fair evidence that the value was a known quantity. Something of a complication, but not at all outside the terms of my contract. Regardless, there was far too much valuable gear on hand for simple robbery to have been at the root of the evil deed. No, it appeared someone had come here with a clear purpose, to get the drive, had been denied possession of the drive, and had opened fire and taken the drive.

What I knew of the drive myself was slight:

It was wanted by Lady Chizu.

It was a Western Digital travel drive decorated with a red biohazard sticker.

It would be at the corner workstation by the ladder.

If, by some chance, it was not made available to me at my first request, I was to take it.

And I was to exact a mortal price from anyone who interfered with Lady Chizu’s wishes on this matter.

Clearly I needed to find whoever had taken the drive, retrieve it, and do my client’s bidding.

I began this process by climbing the ladder and poking my head in the cubbyhole it led to. I ignored the Benelli 12-gauge M4 that had been left there for the obvious purpose of being shoved through the mouse hole cut in the bottom of the three-inch-thick Plexiglas screen at the other end of the cubbyhole. I was already carrying what I considered a perfect balance of firearms and other lethal bits of steel, alloy, and ceramic upon my person. A tactical automatic shotgun would have thrown it all out of balance. Besides, the weapon wasn’t nearly as compelling as the Mace four-channel DVR sitting next to it.

Surveillance technology had reached a point where it was rarely more difficult to master and operate than your average HDTV/digital cable box/Tivo/surround sound/universal remote setup. True, craning my neck to the side to get a clear view of the readout while I tapped various buttons wasn’t terribly comfortable, but it still took me only a few moments to determine that the 500-gig hard drive had not been erased. Someone had thoughtfully left a spindle of disks on top of the recorder, so I slipped one inside the Mace’s integral CD burner and set it to record the most recent two hours of activity. Assuming the motion-sensitive cameras outside had not been installed and calibrated by an idiot, they would not have been activated by the horde of rats in the alley, and one disk should provide me with two hours of high-quality time-lapse video, including the mass murder.

I took a few pictures of the room while the disk burned, used the forked tip of my Atwood Bug Out Blade to dig a spent round from the thick four-by-four leg of a homemade worktable, and was studying the blood spray on a Chasm Tide poster that covered half of the rear wall, when both the deadbolt and the knob on the outer door were blown out in rapid succession, leaving behind two neat, soup-can-size holes. I had just time enough to regret not closing the door of the inner security cage before the outer door was kicked open to allow three large men in khaki pants and black short sleeves to crouch and scuttle into the room, one sweeping the barrel of a Remington 870 across the space, two of them with their cheeks pressed tight against the stocks of their shouldered Tavor TAR-21s, proceeded by lasered red dots that skittered over the walls.

I immediately went slack-jawed, twisted my neck to an awkward angle, allowed a bit of drool to escape my mouth, and screamed: “Ratfuck! Ratfuck!”

This drew their attention, the laser dots racing to draw a bead on the middle of my chest. But every bit as professional as they appeared to be coming through the door, they didn’t spasm and smear me over the wall. Instead, smoothly and without verbal communication, the two TARs took flanking positions as wide as the room would allow, pinning me in their theoretical cross fire and leaving a wide safe-angle down which the Remington could approach me. Which he did, after first switching on the halogen lamp slung under the barrel of his weapon. I felt certain, with the door now disabled, that his chambered round would be buckshot. It hardly mattered; at this range the compressed copper dust of a door-breaching cartridge would punch one of those soup can holes in the middle of my face.

So I continued to drool, adding a slight twitch.

“Ratfuck!”

The halogen swept me up and down, freezing on my stiffened neck.

“Sleepless.”

A voice from one of the TARs.

“What is he doing here?”

The man with the Remington came closer.

“What are you doing here?”

I spun my eyes, clacked my teeth, let spittle fly from my lips.