I didn’t see anyone inside, which was strange. Wei had almost never left it. He couldn’t without someone sneaking in or robbing the place. Except for the guy in the corner, though, I didn’t see or hear anyone at all.
I headed down the rows of rooms to the stairwell, and made my way down to the basement level. Another dreg lay huddled in the empty space where an ice dispenser had once sat, one cheek pressed to the filthy floor. I saw him breathing, but scaleflies made lazy circles in the air above him like they were waiting for him to die or something. He didn’t move at all, even when I passed right by him.
The place had gone downhill, and given what a pit it had been before, that was almost impressive. The overhead lights flickered as I passed underneath them, making the place look even dirtier and creepier than it already had been, and the hallway was strangely quiet.
I passed by a door that hung partway open, and looked inside to find an empty room. Clothes lay strewn over the bed, and the air had a sour sweat smell. Someone had been there, but they’d gone and left their things with the door hanging open.
Something wasn’t right. I checked the room number on my 3i, and hurried my way to the door marked 39B. I gave it a knock that triggered a flurry of activity on the other side. Someone got up, and knocked something over. Stuff clattered to the floor as someone else cursed. There were overlapping footsteps as things were hidden and stashed. Then someone approached the door and pulled it open a crack.
A dirty, pockmarked face glared down at me with a frown that formed pits in his hollow cheeks. I could see his pupils were dilated, and his eyes jittered in their sockets. Whatever he was on, he looked crazy with it. A bead of sweat trickled down the side of his face, and the barrel of a gun poked out from the gloom to point at my chest.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.
“What do you mean, ‘who the fuck am I’?” I asked back, trying not to let on how nervous the gun made me. “I’m Sam. We talked on the phone.”
“You alone?”
“You see anyone with me?”
The creep glared at me a minute longer before glancing up and down the hall and conceding that no, he didn’t. The door opened just enough to let me in.
“Can’t be too careful,” he said. “Ain’t safe these days.”
“Safe from what?” I asked as I stepped inside.
“They knock,” he said. “Always knock. Not here. We dangerous here.”
As a kid, I’d lived in Wei’s Hotel and I’d worked for him, cleaning the rooms. I knew the layout of each one, but I’d never seen anything like what I saw when I stepped inside. The walls were almost hidden behind stacks of boxes of all different sizes, and the floor had accumulated a visible layer of dust and grime. The bed had a metal footlocker stuffed underneath it and several automatic rifles had been propped in a row against the wall next to it. The end table’s surface was piled with empty shine bottles, shot glasses, and several ashtrays that were all full. One had fallen on the floor and lay facedown in a scattered pile of butts and ash. The overhead light had been covered in red cellophane, giving the whole room a crimson tint.
It smelled as bad as it looked. The pockmarked guy stepped back, kicking a stray empty bottle by mistake and sending it spinning into a pile of boxes. The toilet’s privacy curtain flew open, and a second guy, a shorter, uglier man with long, stringy hair and a United Defense Force tattoo on his neck, stepped out. A bent cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth, sending a stream of smoke up toward the ceiling. He looked like he’d taken a double dose of whatever his friend had taken. His eyes looked ready to jump out of his head.
“You Sam?” he asked.
“Yeah. You got the stuff we talked about?”
“I got it,” he said. “You got the money?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s see it.”
“Let’s see the stuff.”
He smiled, exposing yellow teeth and causing cigarette ash to sprinkle down the front of his shirt. He turned to the footlocker and hauled it out into the middle of the floor, then unlatched it and opened the top. When we both leaned over it, I could smell some chemical stink on his breath, and in his sweat.
Inside, several pistols had been arranged, along with boxes of ammunition. There were grenades, knives, and other, nastier stuff like flechette pistols and single-round shotguns with flesh-eating bullets. Part of the trunk had been devoted to more high-tech toys. I spotted a few Escher Field tablets, a graviton gun, canisters of the muscle paralyzer Red Light, and a haan nutrient reclamation wand capable of reducing a human being to a blob of edible jelly in seconds.
He took out two pistols, and began stacking boxes of ammo on the floor next to them, one, two, then three.
“Where’s mine?” I asked him.
The guy took a palm pistol from the locker and handed it to me.
“Fucking peashooter,” he said.
The last time I used a gun, which was also pretty much the first time I used a gun, I’d had to shoot a man in the chest. It wasn’t like he didn’t deserve it, and it wasn’t like I had much of a choice, but I never forgot the way the blood burbled up from out of that hole, and the way the life had gone out of his eyes. I didn’t want to shoot anyone else.
“What if you have to defend yourself? What if you have to defend Alexei?”
I took the pistol, feeling the weight of it in my palm. He laughed as I slipped it into my pocket.
I didn’t ask him where he got the stuff. I didn’t have to. Some of the stuff they could get from other arms dealers, and some, like the Escher Fields, were probably just stolen. Some of it, though, like the graviton gun and the canisters of Red Light, was security issue only. The nutrient reclamation wand they could have only gotten from a haan. It meant these two either killed security officers or else they’d actually made a deal with them. Either way, they weren’t people I wanted my name coming back to.
“You’re pretty sweet,” he said near my ear. I turned with a start, and swatted his hand away as he brushed my hair.
“Hands off, asshole.”
“Tell you what,” he said, smoke drifting from his mouth. “I can’t float all of it but go behind the curtain with me and suck my dick, you can have the gun for free.”
His friend laughed behind me.
“Let’s just get this over with.”
I took my Escher tablet from my pocket and activated the field, which jumped forward into the air in front of me to reveal an empty storage space on the other side. I put the guns and the ammo in, keeping the palm pistol in my pocket.
I grabbed Dao-Ming’s cash card, ready to settle up when the guy dropped another box down between us. The cardboard container, a squat rectangle the size of a cinder block, had been sealed with packing tape.
I pointed at the box. “What’s that?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s that’?” the guy asked. “It’s the rest of your stuff.”
“I didn’t order anything else.”
“Yeah, well, your friend did,” he said. “And I got it for you so you’d better be planning on fucking paying for it.”
I crooked my neck, bringing up the 3i tray, and brought up Dao-Ming’s contact icon. She answered right away.
What the hell, Dao-Ming?
Sam, don’t get upset. The box is for me. The extra cash is on the card, and there won’t be any—
How the hell did you get in touch with them?
It isn’t important.
Yeah, Dao-Ming, it kind of is. How the fuck—
“Hey,” the guy with the cigarette snapped. “Quit jerking us around and pay up.”
This isn’t over, I told her.
My mind raced. For her to have known how to contact them, she had to have somehow monitored me, spied on me. How? Half of the setup had been word of mouth, talking to street contacts. How did she—