our plants in India, and we needed to do some damage control before the media could—
Someone brushed up against me, blocked my way. The crowd snaked past. Bodies without souls or purpose. I lifted my head to see who wanted a piece of me.
Skellar.
I was too tired to be surprised.
“Just what kind of game is your brother playin’?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?”
The crowd had thinned. Only a few stragglers remained and none of them were listening to us.
“Maybe you’re just as bad as all the other ’sitters and maybe you’re not, I don’t really care,” he said. Maybe that was his way of apologizing for letting one of his mugs fry my hand. It still didn’t make up for his snake-pit interrogation tactics. “But your brother is in trouble with some nasty Uptown boys—”
“Look, we’re not afraid of you or your mug buddies.”
“I’m not talkin’ ’bout mugs. These guys make us look like Girl Scouts.”
I grinned. It was about time Skellar realized his team wasn’t so tough.
“You ever seen this woman?” He spun a hologram in his palm. I watched as a dark-haired beauty in a lab coat checked her makeup, then glanced over her shoulder to talk to someone I couldn’t see. I thought she looked familiar at first, something about the way she held her head, maybe a glimmer in the eyes. But I’d never seen her before. At least that was what I thought until I heard her voice when the audio kicked in.
Still, I couldn’t quite place her.
I shook my head. “I don’t know her,” I said.
“Well, this girl, Ellen Witherspoon, she went missing ’bout three days ago. She was workin’ on some pretty important stuff. These people are lookin’ for her. Gotta lotta money too. They’ll pay almost anything to find her. And your brother was the last one to see her.”
“You think Russ is involved in this?”
“Maybe. Don’t really matter what I think. It’s what they think that matters.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“The way I see it, she mighta jumped. And she’s got some mighty important information that this Uptown crowd needs.” He paused. Looked around. “Word has it there’s a new game in town.”
“New game?”
“What you guys got down at Fresh Start is nothin’ compared to what’s comin’. You’ll be outta business in less than a year when this stuff hits the streets.”
He just walked away then. Didn’t ask me any more questions. Didn’t ask to look at our Stringer records to see who had jumped in the past two weeks. But it didn’t really matter.
Because I suddenly knew the answer.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Chaz:
I think I always liked breaking the law. Even back before I got my magic Get-out-of-Jail-Free card, the tattoo that lets me break more laws than the mugs can invent. Sure, I wanted to be a musician, to spend my days and nights immersed in the jazz clubs that ring the city, to breathe in the smoke and the stench of liquor, to watch the world around me rot, even as it regenerates. I wanted to laugh and tell stories and philosophize about life with other burned-out, jive-sweet musicians on the street corners while the sun slid over the horizon. I wanted to watch the color bleed from society, drop by bloody drop, until there was nothing left.
Nothing left but the painful need for redemption.
But instead, the family wanted me to donate my musical ear, wanted me to sort through the myriad languages and dialects, from ancient to new, so I could converse with Newbies, until they adjusted to the newspeak of the day.
I wanted to run away, to live on dimes and nickels and drink in the pure music of jazz night and day. Instead I settled for a warm bed and a billion dollars and a saxophone that saw the light of day about once a month.
For all my tough talk, I sold out. I’m no rebel.
But that Get-out-of-Jail-Free card still comes in handy from time to time.
Like when I was twenty-three and my fiancé, Jeannie, died in that car wreck and jumped to some obscure, unknown life. I went after her. I broke every code in the Right to Privacy Act. I hunted down her files, hacked through the firewall into her personal records, found her new identity and her new life. If Skellar or one his buddies ever finds out what I did, they’ll either cage me or kill me.