I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for:

If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, thought, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I'd had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on the lathe, and then load then myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I'd had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers -all very tricky. But I knew they'd work.

The meet was set for the Drome at 2300, but I rode the tube three stops past the closest platform and walked back. Immaculate procedure.

I checked myself out in the chrome siding of a coffee kiosk, your basic sharp-faced Caucasoid with a ruff of stiff, dark hair. The girls at Under the Knife were big on Sony Mao, and it was getting harder to keep them from adding the chic suggestion of epicanthic folds. It probably wouldn't fool Ralfi Face, but it might get me next to his table.

The Drome is a single narrow space with a bar down one side and tables along the other, thick with pimps and handlers and an arcane array of dealers. The Magnetic Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn't relish trying to get out past them if things didn't work out.

They were two meters tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They'd been lovers for years and were bad news in the tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male.

Ralfi was sitting at his usual table. Owing me a lot of money. I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head on an idiot savant basis information I had no conscious access too. Ralfi had left it there. He hadn't, however, came back for it. Only Ralfi could retrieve the data, with a code phrase of his own invention. I'm not cheap to begin with, but my overtime on storage is astronomical. And Ralfi had been very scarce.

Then I'd heard that Ralfi Face wanted to put out a contract on me. So I'd arranged to meet him in the Drome, but I'd arranged it as Edward Bax, clandestine importer, late of Rio and Peking.

The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension. Muscle-boys scattered through the crowd were flexing stock parts at one another and trying on this, cold grins, some of them so lost under superstructures of muscle graft that their outlines weren't really human.

Pardon me. Pardon me, friends. Just Eddie Bax here, Fast Eddie the Importer, with his professionally nondescript gym bag, and please ignore this shit, just wide enough to admit his right hand.Ralfi wasn't alone. Eighty kilos of blond California beef perched alertly in the chair next to his, martial arts written all over him.

Fast Eddie Bax was in the chair opposite them before the beef's hands were off the table. 'You black belt?' I asked eagerly. He nodded, blue eyes running an automatic scanning pattern between my eyes and my hands.

'Me too,' I said. 'Got mine here in the bag.' And I shoved my hand through the slit and thumbed the safety off. Click. 'Double twelve-gauge with the triggers wired together.'

'That's a gun', 'Ralfi said, putting a plump, restraining hand on his boy's taut blue nylon chest. 'Johnny has a antique firearm in his bag.' So much for Edward Bax.

I guess he'd always been Ralfi Something or other, but he owed his acquired surname to a singular vanity. Built something like an overripe pear, he'd worn the once famous face of Christian White for twenty years

- Christian White of the Aryan Reggae Band, Sony Mao to his generation, and final champion of race rocks. I'm a whiz at trivia.

Christian White: classic pop face with a singer's high definition muscles, chiseled cheekbones. Angelic in one light, handsomely depraved in another. But Ralfi's eyes lived behind that face, and they were small and cold and black.

'Please,' he said, 'let's work this out like businessmen.' His voice was marked by a horrible prehensile sincerity, and the corners of his beautiful Christian White mouth were always wet. 'Lewis here,' nodding in the beef boy's direction, 'is a meatball.' Lewis took his impassively, looking like something built from a kit. 'You aren't a meatball, Johnny.'

'Sure I am, Ralfi, a nice meatball chock-full of implants where u can store your dirty laundry while you go off shopping for people to kill me. From my end of this bag, Ralfi, it looks like you've got some explaining to do.'

'It's this last batch of product, Johnny.' He sighed deeply. 'In my role as broker - '

'Fence,' I corrected.

'As broker, I am usually very careful as to sources.'

'You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.'

He sighed again. 'I try,' he said wearily, 'not to buy from fools... This time, I'm afraid, I've done that.' Third sigh was the cue for Lewis to trigger the neural disruptor they'd taped under my side of the table.

I put everything I had into curling the index finger of my right hand, but I no longer seemed to be connected to it. I could feel the metal of the gun and the foam-padded tape. I'd wrapped around the stubby grip, but my hands were cool wax, distant and inert. I was hoping Lewis was a true meatball, thick enough to go for the gym bag and snag my rigid trigger finger, but he wasn't.

'We've been very worried about you Johnny. Very worried. You see, that's Yakuza property you have there. A fool took it from them, Johnny. A dead fool.'

Lewis giggled.

It all made sense then, an ugly kind of sense, like bags of wet sand settling around my head. Killing wasn't Ralfi's style. Lewis wasn't even Ralfi's style. But he'd got himself stuck between the Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum and something that belonged to them - or, more likely, something of theirs that belonged to someone else. Ralfi, of course, could use the code phrase to throw me into idiot savant, and I'd spill their hot program without remembering a single quartertone. For a fence like Ralfi, that would ordinarily have been enough. But not for the Yakuza. The Yakuza would know about Squids, for one thing, and they wouldn't want to worry about one lifting those dim and permanent traces of their program out of my head. I didn't know very much about Squids, but I'd heard stories, and I made it a point never to repeat them to my clients. No, the Yakuza wouldn't like that; it looked too much like evidence. They hadn't got where they were by leaving evidence around. Or alive.

Lewis was grinning. I think he was visualizing a point just behind my forehead and imagining how he could get there the hard way.

'Hey,' said a low voice, feminine, from somewhere behind my right shoulder, 'you cowboys sure aren't having too lively a time.'

'Pack it, bitch,' Lewis said, his tanned face very still. Ralfi looked blank.

'Lighten up. You want to buy some good free base?' She pulled up a chair and quickly sat before either of them could stop her. She was barely inside my fixed field of vision, a thin girl with mirrored glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag. She wore black leather, open over a T-shirt slashed diagonally with stripes of red and black. 'Eight thou a gram weight.'

Lewis snorted his exasperation and tried to slap her out of the chair. Somehow he didn't quite connect, and her hand came up and seemed to brush his wrist as it passed. Bright blood sprayed the table. He was clutching his wrist white-knuckle tight, blood trickling from between his fingers.

But hadn't her hand been empty?