[NORTH KABUKI – Kabuki Roundabout]

  Thursday | 17 JUN 2077 | 16:00

  [WEATHER REPORT: SUNNY]

  Will made his way through the crowded walking lanes of the Roundabout and listened to Regina describe the stolen Villefort Cortes V5000 Valor (a real mouthful). Something about the gig screamed ‘easy money’ to him, which was a major red flag. Regina, however, was not in a hand-holding mood.

  “Will, if you’re not interested in ten thousand eddies for a simple asset retrieval job, let me know, and I’ll find someone else.”

  “It’s not that. I’m interested. It just seems too simple. I’ll take the job, okay? Just help me understand why the pay’s so good.”

  Regina sighed,“Okay, uh, the Client has a lot of money and nothing else to spend it on. I mean, he’s collecting cars for goodness sake. The gonk that stole it has no idea what he’s gotten himself into. You just gotta put him in the trunk and deliver him to the drop point in the Valor. Client wants this done discreetly, no cops, no media attention. Bonus for bringing her back without a scratch.”

  Will had a nagging feeling in the back of his head, which he ignored and told Regina, “Whatever makes him happy. He’ll have the gonk and the car delivered by morning.”

  “That’s the spirit, Will. Sending you the info.”

  On paper, the gig really did look simple. Raj ‘Razor’ Patel was loosely affiliated with the other scav networks around Night City. His gang, Kali’s Butchers, was made of 9 world-class gonks with zero street cred and budget hardware. The Butchers were a real bottom-of-the-barrel crew that made their money preying on drunks and selling their organs and chrome. Boosting the occasional car from hotel parking garages now too.

  Curious, Will opened up the NCPD’s Bounty page on his external Agent and was immediately greeted by an animated half-naked cowgirl with a double-barreled shotgun. She was riding on a bronco with a speech bubble above her head reading: GETR’ DONE, COWBOY! The words flashed across the screen in a rhythm that was positively seizure-inducing.

  As a cop, Will had been automatically enrolled in Night City’s NCPD Sub-Contractor program when he'd entered into the Academy. All he had to do was scan the fingerprints of any poor gonk with an outstanding warrant for their arrest (or elimination), and the money was transmitted ‘anonymously’ to his account.

  Kali’s Butchers were only under the nuisance category, but the kill order was more implied than explicit. Taken alive, each member was worth a hundred eddies, but dead, they were worth two hundred. Very subtle, Will thought to himself. He studied their profiles, and as far as he could tell, these guys really were just posers. In theory he shouldn’t have a problem catching the target off-guard, and earning a cool ten thousand eddies. With the bonus it would be enough to pay off the bike he had totaled.

  Next, Will studied the report from Regina. Raj was staying at the Hotel Flamingo, a retro hotel that had survived every major disaster in Night City since the 2020s. According to Regina’s sources, the rest of the crew worked out of a Foodscape two miles from the Hotel. Strange. What was the point of that? Raj playing at gang boss, maybe? Will couldn’t decide, but he didn't see anything that would screw this up for him. As long as he didn’t act like nothing would go wrong, maybe he’d get lucky and nothing would.

  When he had finished studying the report he eyed the time. It was still too early to go. Sunset wasn’t until about 8 PM, and it was just after 4. Will dialed his old cop buddy Scott Winter. He picked up on the first ring.

  “I really did think you were dead,” he said.

  “Not for lack of trying, but I’m still here. I wanted to call and apologize for being such a gonk.”

  “Okay, go.”

  “Um, I’m sorry for being such a gonk.”

  “Go on,” Scott said, not sounding angry, but also not sounding particularly forgiving.

  “I broke down, Scott. Couldn’t deal with the way the brass handled things. I stopped caring. About the job, about everything and everybody. I’m sorry for screwing you over.”

  “That’s a good start. The money was a nice touch. What happened? You find Jesus?”

  “Mom would be thrilled if I did, but no, not exactly,” he said lightly. He swallowed before continuing, “I, uh, I tried to kill myself earlier this month.”

  Scott didn’t have a response to that. Will went on, “I kept thinking about that last case, about how nothing I did had mattered, nobody cared. Booze wasn’t helping me forget. I spent the last few months sleeping with cockroaches in the storage closet in a motel. I felt like a bullet was a better alternative than living in Night City. So, um…I pulled the trigger.”

  “You shot yourself?”

  “Tried to. The gun jammed.”

  Will could hear Scott put a hand over the phone (he had never trusted internal Agents) and curse to himself. When the hand came off, he just said, “You know I would have helped.”

  “I know, but asking you for help after ghosting you didn’t feel like an option at the time. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I just want you to know I’m sorry how things turned out.”

  Scott was quiet for a while.

  “I just had the craziest thought, Will.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What if you did all this just to ask me for a bigger loan?”

  Will was caught off guard, and a laugh escaped his mouth.

  “How would that scam even work?”

  Scott chuckled, “I’m just messing with you. It would have been really funny though, and I’d probably be so impressed with the balls on you that I’d give you the money.”

  Will just laughed. It felt good. Scott was joking, it was a good sign. They talked for about half an hour, catching up on things. Everything was going well until Will mentioned he was working at a clinic in North Kabuki.

  “The one off Pinewood Junction?” he asked, sounding concerned.

  “Yeah, what’s up? Something wrong?”

  “Only that it was the site of a huge massacre about two weeks ago. A Ukrainian scav crew was running a harvesting operation alongside some ripperdoc named Charles Bucks. All killed. You didn’t know?”

  “Yes and no,” Will started connecting dots, “I helped clean up most of those bodies. I didn’t know what had happened. Who did it, Maelstrom? Animals?”

  “One merc.”

  Will blinked. “One guy?”

  “Don’t know if it was a man or a woman. Honestly, don’t know much at all. The Commissioner closed the case personally and wouldn’t let our detectives near it. Some people suspect he was covering up his own mess.”

  Jerry Fawlter. Will owed that guy a punch in the balls if he ever saw him.

  “He was a corpo before he took this job,” Will said. “People thought NCPD corruption was bad before, but at least we had cops running the department.”

  When Will finally got off the phone with his old friend, he could sense that things were different. Different in a good way. He had gotten so used to being a screw-up that even a successful apology seemed like a new experience.

  [WATSON NORTHSIDE INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT- Hotel Flamingo]

  Thursday | 17 JUN 2077 | 20:00

  [BREAKING: ARASAKA BOARD OF DIRECTORS KILLED IN TERRORIST BOMBING, YORINOBU VOWS TO PUNISH THE KILLERS!]

  Will stood across the street from what looked to him like ancient ruins from a time long past. The Hotel Flamingo had been a place for lower management corpos to stay for weeks at a time during construction projects. Now, in 2077, most of the neon letters in ‘Flamingo’ were burnt out or flickering. The hotel itself formed a ‘U’ around the parking lot with the front entrance on the right. Each of the room doors were exterior-facing and the upper floors were arranged like a lopsided wedding cake, the ground floor being the longest, the 2nd floor shorter, and so on and so on. It was an interesting design. As for the decor, it had already been close to a century out of fashion when it had been built, tacky, bright colors, presently peeling and stained by smog. Will spotted the Valor in the parking lot immediately. It was hard to miss amongst the various junkers with broken windows, missing wheels, and gang tags. If it had not been for the two men in loose eggwhite colored button-up shirts open carrying DS1 Pulsar submachine guns, Will had no doubt other lowlifes in the area would have already stolen the car.

  Khali’s Butchers somehow looked less impressive in person than they did on paper—pure amateurs. However, Will knew that a bullet fired by an amateur was just as lethal as one from a pro. He was living proof of that fact. So he banished the sense of superiority from his mind and flagged them as threats.

  The streets were quiet, mostly empty on this side of Watson after sunset. Will pulled down his balaclava and made his way to the entrance. The front desk clerk was an older Indian woman currently enjoying a braindance in her chair. After confirming that there were no cameras in the lobby, Will crept inside and accessed the front desk computer with his head down. No security feeds, only two rooms occupied, and over a thousand spam emails selling sex, drugs, and hired muscle. Raj was the occupant of both rooms, one on the 4th floor and one on the ground floor. Puzzling. Peering out the window he saw that the floor on the 4th floor across from the front entrance had lights on. That was his target.

  Will deftly snagged the hotel’s master key off the wall and made his way to the second floor. Quietly he walked the first leg of the hotel’s ‘U’. The balcony walkway was narrow, and the railing was rusted beyond repair, so Will stayed as far back from the edge as he could and kept in constant motion. The second floor’s stairwell to the third floor was just over the spot where the two Butchers were guarding the stolen car. Will could see them, but their attention seemed focused on the distant neon skyline.

  As Will crept up the stairwell, he could hear the two men speaking in heavily accented English. Something about a girl on her way. Perhaps Raj had ordered some company for the night?

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Finally, Will had made it to the final leg of the hotel and the 4th-floor room where Raj was staying. He pressed his ear to the old-hinged door and listened. Raj was moving things around and talking loudly on the phone.

  “-yes, yes, girl is very beautiful. Very young, very energetic. Just like the last girl, screaming very loudly, very scared, no one is coming to help.”

  Will risked a peek through the window, his techgogs zooming in on Raj through missing blinds. He was a thin and sickly figure with a thick black mustache. He was wearing 1970s disco bell-bottom pants and a bawdy shirt straight out of old-Bollywood. Around his neck was a gold-plated chain that looked like it weighed a pound. He continued loudly into the Agent, his ringed fingers gripping it close to his ear.

  “20k upfront, rest of the eddies on delivery. Yes. Very good. My pleasure.”

  Raj’s back was turned from the door, his head down, thumbing the glass almost obsessively. Will tested the ancient doorknob to see if it was locked. It wasn’t, but as he gently nudged it open, the hinges squeaked ever so softly. Will saw the chain lock and shut the door. He could break it open easily, but that might attract attention from the Butchers below.

  Will walked to the next room and checked the doorknob. This one was locked, so he tried the master key and entered quietly. The interior was musty, and the walls were covered in mold. No one had stayed here in years, at least not as a guest. At the back of the room was a window and a fire escape. Perfect. He slid the window up and stepped out carefully onto the fire escape. He didn’t want to put his full weight onto it, so he used the missing bricks from the back wall as handholds until he got to Raj’s window. Moving at the speed of tree sap, Will peeked into the room. What he saw made him numb.

  In the center of the room, a chair was placed atop a large plastic tarp. Will zoomed in, noticed the dried blood, and zoomed back out. This was supposed to be a simple job. A car thief placed in the trunk of the car he stole. Poetic, almost wholesome for Night City. What in the Hell had he stumbled upon?

  Will was considering his options when he heard the sound of a car coming from the parking lot. It was time to move. With one hand, Will pulled up the window, then briefly touched the handle of the kaiken. You’re a professional, Will. Do your job. He ordered himself. His hand grasped the handle of the stun baton, and he wasted no time. He dived into the room, activating his Sandevistan. Raj was doing shots of synth vodka near the front window when the world turned to molasses. Raj was a parody of a Greek statue, his oily skin glistening in the soft red glow of the room. Will took a few steps toward him, then brought the stun baton down hard against the back of his skull before deactivating his cyberware. His body started to crumple in slow motion, then as the effect wore off it sped up almost comically. Will let him fall to the ground, and then dragged him into the bathroom. He turned Raj onto his stomach and zip-tied his hands and feet. Out came the duct tape. Will covered the Butcher’s mouth and eyes, and then checked for a pulse. He was only keeping him alive for the client. If it had been his choice, Raj would be bleeding out in the-

  The tub. Will saw it out of the corner of his eye. The hand. It was sticking out of the tub, bluish and wet. Will could feel himself go numb again as he peered into the tub and saw the girl. The world tilted.

  Mentally, he had to detach himself from the situation. It was too horrible for Will Scrap, so he switched himself off and turned on the crime-scene investigator. He pulled out the external Agent and scanned the victim’s palm. An instant match. Her name was Ayaan Elman and she had been missing since May. Will turned away from the girl and rifled through Raj’s pockets, pulled his wallet, and a few shards. There would be time to investigate later. Next, he went into the room, still cognizant of the car in the parking lot. He was vaguely aware that he would be expecting guests in a few short minutes. He looked over to the wall and saw rows of photos. All girls. All young. He snapped pictures of everything, collecting evidence of the crimes that had been committed here. A wave of nausea hit him and he hunched over ready to puke. That's when he spotted the milspec laptop under the bed. He pulled it out quickly and linked the Agent to it. Easily cracked the system’s ICE in under ten seconds. He copied the files and moved on to the table, and saw the knives. The Agent scanned them, detecting the dried blood on the edges. If he had still been a cop, he would have had everything he needed to build an airtight case against Raj and his crew. That's when a dirty District Attorney would have taken a bribe to drop the case or not even bring it to trial, or the judge would throw it out on a technicality. Best-case scenario? Raj would spend some time in an Arroyo prison cell for a few years before being released.

  Will wasn’t a cop, though. He pulled out his Lexington from his shoulder holster and checked the suppressor. He could now hear footsteps from the balcony walkway. The client hadn’t made any conditions about Raj’s crew being delivered alive, and Regina hadn’t mentioned anything about collateral damage. Will spotted them from the window. They had the girl walking in front, wearing a BD recording wreath. The two Butchers acting as ushers shoved her towards the door. Will undid the chain lock on the door, cracked it, and waited. The girl timidly pushed the door open, then took a hesitant step forward into the room before seeing the tarp and chair. Will could see her body tense up and her eyes widen in horror. They wanted her to know. They wanted her to feel the terror of knowing that she would be killed. Inside the calm, detached crime scene investigator, Will screamed out in rage.

  The Sandevistan activated, and time slowed almost to a halt. Will darted around the girl and had his pistol pressed into the forehead of the first Butcher within a split second. He squeezed the trigger. The armor-piercing round slammed through the Butcher’s skull, tearing through brain matter before exiting the back and sailing into the eye of his partner. They were dead before they could register that they had been shot. A better fate than the one they intended for the girl.

  Will holstered his Lexington as time sped up to normal. He felt drained, his head ached, but no shakes or blood coming out his ears. Kowalski had done good work.

  The Butchers lay dead on the concrete, but Will was thorough. Out came the kaiken. The blade slid through the skin of the neck, a single incision severing the carotid artery for each Butcher. Just in case, he thought. He pulled shards and wallets from the corpses, scanned their hands for the bounty board, then went into the room to check on the girl.

  He stopped at the door as soon as he saw her. She was sitting on the floor, hugging her knees and crying silently. The BD recorder was no longer on her head as Will moved toward her, “You’re safe now. Nobody’s going to hurt you. I’m Wi-here to help, what’s your name?”

  She didn’t look up, “Jazz,” she said in a small voice. Will nodded, “We have to get you out of here. Do you have family I can take you to?”

  “I can’t go home! My mom will kill me if she finds out about this.”

  She sounded like a child, a small scared child. She didn't look older than fourteen. Will swallowed his rage, spoke calmly, “Your mom is going to be happy that you’re safe. That's all that matters right now. You can’t stay here. It's time to go home.”

  “Maybe. Can we please get out of here, now?”

  Will nodded, then motioned her to sit for a moment longer. He went out to the balcony walkway and dragged the bodies into the neighboring room before returning. No one had noticed the suppressed round he had fired. His heart skipped a beat when he noticed that Jazz was standing now, hand on the bathroom doorknob.

  “Don’t.”

  She removed her hand and stepped away from the door. Then, after a second, “What now?”

  “There’s a car down in the parking lot. I want you to walk to it and get in the front seat. Can you be brave for me and do that?”

  “Yeah, I can do that.”

  “Good, head that way, I will be right behind you. I just need to grab something.”

  [WATSON NORTHSIDE INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT- Hotel Flamingo]

  Thursday | 17 JUN 2077 | 22:37

  [NCPD ALERT: CYBERPSYCHO ON RINGROAD IN CITY CENTER]

  The Villefort Cortes V5000 Valor really was a magnificent car. The interior was soft and clean. ‘Jazz’ (real name: Jennifer Martinez) sat in the passenger seat, mascara running down her face from crying. Raj was stuffed in the spacious trunk. It was too good for him, as far as Will was concerned. He programmed the auto drive and added a quick detour to the girl’s home address.

  “Goodbye,” she told him as the car pulled out of the parking spot and vanished down Goldsmith Street.

  Will wasn't done yet. He entered Raj’s ground floor room, and looked around. He found an old analog address book filled with buyer aliases, email accounts, and drop point addresses. Hard copies were unhackable, but still a liability. Raj’s Agent held the gang’s account numbers, passwords, and usernames. His small crew had acquired nearly eighty-thousand eddies over the past few months, preying on the most vulnerable of Night City’s denizens. Will squatted down on the floor, not wanting anything in that place to touch him, then called Regina Jones. She was a fixer, so she had better know how to fix THIS.

  “Will, how’s the asset?”

  “The asset should reach the drop point in approximately 5 minutes. The Client got what he asked for.”

  “Good, good…what’s up?” she asked.

  “Job was less than simple. I need you to open an encrypted account, going to transfer some money to you.”

  She didn’t ask questions, just sent him the link. Will emptied the Butchers’ accounts with the tap of a button. He could hear her cursing in surprise over the phone. He warned her, “Don’t get too excited, this is tainted loot. Our car thief was selling snuff on the blackest corners of the net. Girls. Young ones. Crew’s down three tonight.”

  “Raj is alive?” she asked.

  “Yeah, did what the client asked. Do you think he’s involved?”

  “Not sure yet, but I'm going to find out. Oh, hey, just got a text from the client, the car’s delivered with the perp. Sending you the eddies.”

  Ping.

  Will wasn’t interested in money just yet. “I have the data, all the evidence. I need you to check it out.”

  “I’ll be honest with you, Will, I don’t want to touch this with a ten-foot pole, but the gonks in the NCPD are probably going to screw it up, no offense.”

  “None taken. You’re right,” Will said, a lot calmer than he was feeling. “I’ll send a copy to someone I trust in Vice, but you need to make sure this money goes to the victims’ families. Find out who the buyers are if you can.”

  “I'll handle it, Will. Good work tonight.”

  “I’m going to need to take a week off,” he told her tiredly.

  Regina let out a long sigh, “There really is no such thing as ‘easy money’ in Night City.”

  She hung up, and Will was alone with his thoughts once more. Not far from here, six gonks were sitting around an abandoned Foodscape, possibly looking for their next victim. He was exhausted, emotionally and physically, and yet he knew what he had to do. In a few minutes, someone on the crew might wise up to the fact that their network had been compromised, their illicit funds transferred. The scavs would scatter, some would vanish, and the guilty would go unpunished.

  Will had already decided before he called Regina Jones what needed to happen. He left the room and walked across the street from the Hotel Flamingo and slid into the driver’s seat of the company van that Kowalski was letting him use. He pulled up to the Foodscape after three minutes, set the van to auto drive a 10 mile loop, hopped out, then got to business.

  No obvious security cams on this street. No lookouts. They really had no clue what was about to happen. Will dove through the order window of the defunct Foodscape and rolled as he hit the floor. He walked in on four of the butchers, they were huddled over a large flatscreen watching a bunch of empty broken people swapping bodily fluids. He switched the Lexington to automatic and, without a word or moment of hesitation, emptied his magazine into the mass of degeneracy. Even with the suppressor, the gunshots could be heard from around the restaurant.

  The bathroom door began to open as Will changed magazines through pure muscle memory and was about to fire when he was shot in the back by a shotgun-wielding Butcher who had just rolled out of his bunk to respond to the intruder. The blast was partially absorbed by his old NCPD bulletproof vest, but it still sent him to the floor. The Lexington was sent sliding across the room, stopping at the feet of a very fat Indian man, sweating profusely, and missing teeth. The fat Butcher had a single tarnished gorilla arm, and it was already coming down when Will’s Sandevistan activated, and he rolled aside at the last second. He unsheathed the kaiken and drove it up into the fat Butcher’s unarmored armpit, severing tendons and arteries with a forceful thrust. Across the room, the Butcher with the shotgun was raising it again in slow motion for a second shot at Will. He dodged and ducked behind the fat Butcher, as the shotgun fired, in what must have appeared to be a blur of darkness. Will actually watched the slug floating through the air, inches from making contact. before the Sandevistan died down and time jumped back to normal speed. The fat Butcher’s chest suddenly exploded in a cloud of red. As the Butcher shotgunner started reloading, Will pushed the fat corpse aside and leapt forward bringing the kaiken down hard on the wrist holding the weapon. The shotgun and the hand fell to the ground simultaneously. The Butcher screamed in shock. Will, with the flick of the wrist, thrust the blade into the Butcher’s chest until it pierced his heart. The light faded from his eyes, and he collapsed dead on the floor.

  The whole operation had been a train wreck. He could hear police sirens in the distance, but Will didn’t panic. The next few minutes would be vital. First, he checked his wounds. He noticed that he was bleeding from the back. The vest had saved his life, but it was shredded now. He found his Lexington Power Pistol on the ground and stuck it in his shoulder holster. It was imperative that he not leave any evidence behind. Easier said than done after a brutal and bloody brawl. He walked into the storage closet and gathered the available cleaning chemicals, then emptied the bottles out over the blood stains he could see through his techgogs. He searched the bodies next, grabbing shards and wallets, but leaving the cheap jewelry on the corpses. He grabbed the hard drive of a computer in the back, oldschool wired setup, then stepped out of the restaurant as the van pulled up. He climbed into the back, dumping the items, then returned into the Foodscape with a can of CHOOH2. He doused the inside of the building with fuel, pulled himself over the order window, tossed a lit lighter inside, and pulled down the shutter. Goldsmith Street was nearly empty except for a single Newstand about twenty yards away, where a bored-looking teenager sat completely oblivious to the massacre that had just occurred.

  Exhausted, Will pulled himself into the back of the van and shut the doors. The Auto Drive started and the van headed back to Kowalski’s clinic. It wasn’t too far away, but as the adrenaline began to fade, the pain in his shoulderblades intensified. It was a dumb mistake. The kind that could have gotten him killed. If the gonk had aimed a little higher, he would have blown Will’s head right off. What should have been a quiet sweep turned into a noisy brawl. Next time would be different.

  The van pulled into the garage of the clinic around midnight. Will had just opened the back doors of the van when he heard Doc Kowalski’s tired voice, “We need to talk.”