Junkyard Cats - Faith Hunter Page 0,26
a half cup. I wouldn’t be making fish stew again in many months, unless I sold some valuable scrap, especially since this problem with Harlan meant I hadn’t gotten my black-market goods. My eyes felt raw at the thought of Harlan. Dead, protecting me. What did Asshole know about Harlan’s death?
My voice rough, I asked, “And Buck Harlan?”
“He went missing two weeks past.”
Jagger lounged back and stretched out his long legs on the bench, crossing his bootless feet, wearing Pops’ socks. It was strange to see a man in my father’s clothes. Jeans, double layers of t-shirts bulging with weapons in a harness. Those socks. Striped bright green, dark blue, and silver—Seattle Seahawks colors. Pops and Little Mama and I used to go to the games. I hadn’t seen a live football game in years. Pops used to keep a can of Skoal in his back pocket, apple blend or vanilla. I could almost smell the flavored tobacco. He used to sing to Aretha’s music. He had a terrible voice. Grief welled in me so fast that tears pooled in my eyes. I turned aside and blinked them away.
All sorts of things were simmering to the surface and making me feel weird.
Without cleaning my hands, I gave Jagger another beer, more of my sweat on the damp bottle. The man could really hold his alcohol—all that body mass meant it took a lot to get him drunk. He removed the top and took a long pull before setting it on the table, his hands smoothing the bottle around and around, his fingers brushing where I had touched it. Foolish, foolish man, that little voice whispered.
“Harlan was tracking down info about an influx of MS Angels back into Louisville.”
I went still. Mara Salvatrucha Angels. They had been the scourge of . . . well, of everything and everyone. MS13 had merged with the Hell’s Angels in a hostile takeover in 2030, creating a biker arm of the international criminal gang. The newly merged gang had swept through large swaths of territory, leaving a path of property destruction and dead bodies in its wake, an onslaught so violent that only the Outlaws had been equipped to counter it. The biker clubs went to war in 2032, in what had ended up a nasty, decade-long internecine conflict, led by a very young Pops and his predecessor. Pops had won and the scattered remnants of the MS Angels had not ended up as his best buddies.
And now Harlan was here, dead, at the hands of a traitor, probably working with the PRC—the enemies of the Gov. and of me. Had the MS Angels found Pops’ famous Little Girl? A sense of foreboding grew, one I tried to keep off my face as I asked, “OMW cleaned the Angels out in 2040, didn’t they?”
“Little known fact. The remnants of the MS Angels allied with the PRC late in the war. And after the war, when the Chinese departed, the Angels started to rebuild. They had Chinese tech and weapons caches. The post-war famine opened up territory. We heard rumors they were expanding again, this time without, or in front of, the People’s Republic of China, but with their own brand of ferocity and violence. Harlan went to check them out.”
Bugger. I didn’t know what to do now. If the MS Angels had taken down Harlan and sent his body to me, that meant they knew who I was and at least some of what I had on site—the post-war military weapons caches for starters. And if the Angels had PRC tech, then . . . might they also have sent the Crawler?
Bugger damn . . .
Panic pattered up and down my spine. On the screen, I watched as the junkyard cats tore into another Puffer. My thoughts still turned inward, I asked slowly, “Do you have a pic of Harlan? A recent one?”
“Why?” Jagger asked, as he peeled a Morphon off his wrist. The chameleon capabilities of the narrow wrist band had matched his skin so perfectly I hadn’t even noticed it until he twisted it off, snapped it flat, and unfolded it. I hadn’t seen a Morphon in ages; I still used an old model Hand-Held. No one had Morphons except the military, the Gov., and a few filthy rich citizens with the proper sat-dishes. The Morphon, like the bike Jagger rode and all the tech on it, was an indication of the deep relationship between the military and the OMW.
Holy freaking bugger. The