Metrophage | Page 6

gone a couple of days now. Left quick, too. Didn't touch his holo stuff."
"I don't suppose you have any idea where he went?" asked Jonny.
"I'm afraid he neglected to leave a forwarding address. A shame too, so close to Thanksgiving and all."
The band's volume jumped abruptly as they broke from the song into a tense, rhythmic jam. Saint Peter, the guitarist, stood at the edge of the stage between soaring liquid-cooled stacks of Krupp-Verwandlungsinhalt speakers. Eyes squeezed shut, shoulders loose, Saint Peter pumped walls of noise, his myoelectric left-hand racing like a frantic silver spider up and down the fretboard. As he played, a pattern of light glinted off the chrome hand, marking its progress through the air. Then, just as the jam reached its peak, the song died; the porn faded and the lights dimmed. "Brown-out," said Random. He casually threw a switch under the bar and the power returned. "Tell Sumi gracias for the watts, he said.
Jonny nodded. "Did you hear that Easy had another Flare Gun Party?" he asked.
"No, who got burned?"
"Raquin."
Random raised an eyebrow in sympathy. "Sorry, man," he said. "Although, I must admit, I'm not entirely surprised to hear he's been up to something." He took a long hit from a hookah next to the cash register. "Looking for Easy Money seems to be the hot new game in town. Last night the crowd was so thick I had 'em line up and take numbers. Of course, Easy's not the only one who seems to have captured the public's imagination." Random smiled at Jonny. "You appear to have developed a bit of celebrity all your own."
"Me?" Jonny asked guardedly. "Who's been asking about me?" Random shrugged. "No one I knew." The bartender winked conspiratorially. "Come on, boy-o. Whose ankles have you been nipping at?"
"I am pathetically clean." Jonny said. "Tell me about them. Anything you can remember."
Random stuck two nicotine yellow fingers into his shirt pocket and pulled out a glicene envelope of white powder. "Pure as Mother Mary and twice as nice," he said, giving the envelope a light kiss. "Interesting lads. They didn't try to pay off in crude cash." He dropped the envelope back into his pocket.
"Smugglers?" asked Jonny.
"Could be, only what's a smuggler lord doing shooting for small shit like Easy Money? Or you for that matter."
"Who knows," Jonny said. He took a long gulp of his drink. "Maybe he's decided he's in the wrong business."
"Hell," said the bartender, "everybody in Last Ass's in the wrong business."
Random set down the glass he had been cleaning and said, "Weather." His eyes shifted. "Junior senator on the Atmospheric Management Committee announced they can clean-up the mess left by the Weather Wars. Says they ought to be able to stabilize weather patterns over most of North America in three to five years."
"Didn't they announce that same program three to five years ago?" asked Jonny.
"At least." And with that, Random gave Jonny the other half of the smile and moved on to other customers.
Swirling the dregs of his beer, Jonny turned and studied the noisy crowd moving through the bar. He searched their heads for a sign of goat horns grafted above a thin face, inset with darting, suspicious eyes. Or arms thick with tattooed serpents, like the stigmata of some junky god. Easy Money always stood out in a crowd which, Jonny supposed, was the idea. If Easy was around, he should not be hard to spot.
Jonny had met Easy while they were both in the employ of the smuggler lord Conover. This was just after Easy had made a name for himself with his first Flare Gun Party.
The party had become something of a legend with the pushers. It went like this: Easy Money, a human parasite with the unerring ability to detect the softest, most vulnerable part of his prey, had acquired a contract to kill the leader of the Los Santos Atomicos gang. Beginning with a philosophy that later became his trademark (like the hourglass on the belly of a spider) Easy reasoned that gang retribution being such a swift and ugly thing, eliminating the entire gang would be less trouble than the removal of any single member.
It was well known to those who, like Easy, always kept a metaphorical ear to the ground, that the Los Santos Atomicos gang's particular vice was free-basing cocaine. Easy located their safe-house with information from a rival gang. He also found that the Los Santos Atomicos liked to buy the ether they used to treat the coke, in bulk. They kept big tanks of the stuff hidden under the floor.
As he was fond of saying, from there it was easy money.
Like some stoned Prometheus, Easy brought fire to the Los Santos Atomicos in the form of a red Navy signal flare which he fired