The sirens were close now, but it sounded like they were lost. The wail would rise as they shot up Victory, then fade as they missed the turn into the neighborhood. They’d circled, then miss it in the other direction. Stupid macho cops wouldn’t let the cars drive themselves.

I holstered the mag-gun, limped back to the front of the house and found the pulsegun in the dirt, in the dark. It was still set on strafe, so I torched everything along the side of the house out to where I’d been in the alley. There was a lot of DNA to clean up. I didn’t have a file — that I knew of, at least — but leaving a reference sample is the first step on a long, dark road.

I kicked the pulsegun over to broad spectrum, dropped the power and swept the front yard and porch. Organics in the dirt caught fire and flamed up, and the paint on the house bubbled and split. The inside was glowing cheerily.

Rounding the corner, I found Chet, tightened into an impossibly tiny ball and shaking violently. I nudged him with my foot. “C’mon. We’ve gotta get going.”

He gave a small squeak, half way between a whimper and a cry, and went right on shaking. He looked like a duffel bag full of nervous dogs.

I squatted next to him, laid my good hand on his back and said, “Chet. We’ve gotta go now. The cops are coming. Danning got away. Chet. Chet?”

He responded by losing control of his bladder. At least he was starting to relax.

I holstered the pulsegun, picked the Magnum up off the ground and stuck it in my belt. I grabbed my dangling left wrist, swallowed hard and gave the arm a sharp tug, popping the shoulder back in place. The world swam unsteadily — everything turned a murky gray — and I sat down on Chet and put my head between my knees for what seemed a very long time. The sirens swelled, very close now. It sounded like they’d found the neighborhood and were trying streets at random. I could hear tires squealing as they took corners.

I stood, grabbed the back of Chet’s shirt and started dragging him towards the car. Halfway through the neighbor’s yard, I pulled the pulsegun back out, lit up the side of the house and kept on going.

The cops swung wide as they came around the corner and slammed broadside into a parked car. The driver accelerated away, lit the floods as he came up to Danning’s house and bounced onto the curb. I pulled Chet back behind the trunk of a leafless tree, deep into the shadows cast by the lights, and hunkered down.

The driver jumped out, drew his gun and made two-fingered chopping motions at his partner. The partner unholstered his gun and rolled his eyes.

My car was across the street and I keyed the combination to unfold it and pop the hatch in the back. Getting over there unnoticed would be tough dragging Chet and casting shadows. I could leave him here, but after they figured out what happened at the house, they’d canvass the neighborhood, find him and start asking unfortunate questions.

I could kill the cops, but that would bring a lot of heat down and there were already too many goddamned unknowns for my tastes.

I could hit their car with the pulsegun, but they’d return fire as soon as they got up off the ground and I’d be stuck half way across the street, lugging catatonic office help.

Or I could wait until Danning’s next door neighbor stuck an old-fashioned chaingun out of his window and put lots and lots of holes in the partner.

The muzzle flash was visible even over the floods, angry red flame tearing through the blue-white of the sodium lights. The cop jerked and twitched, not so much keeping his balance as being held up by mass with a vector that gravity did not approve of. He danced, almost, propelled backwards and away, towards his car. Light shone through him, his chest more a memory than a wound. One of his legs finally folded — or was severed — and he went down, his body collapsing into a loose pile of scrap. He wouldn’t weigh in at his autopsy at any more than two-thirds of what he was when he got out of the car.

There are lots of reasons to not like cops — I’ve got a few — but I can only think of a couple that would prompt someone to ambush emergency responders like that:

The guy with the gun could an be unlicensed drug dealer and has heard perhaps too many of the horror stories that come out of federal tax prison. Or he’s a member of the civil defense section of some unacknowledged autonomous zone and way too enthusiastic about his job. Or maybe he’s completely, clinically insane, and the little firefight next door put him on an edge that the meds wouldn’t bring him down from. Or, hell, he could even be a Republican, one of the last few, hoarding guns and waiting for the black hovers to come.

Or maybe he’s involved in this whole thing somehow. There was a hell of a lot going on here that I didn’t know anything about, and it seemed appropriate to be a little paranoid.

The chaingun continued to scream at the mushy pile of what was left of the cop. The driver gaped for half a second, raise his gun to return fire, and then lowered it and dove behind the car as the muzzle swung towards him. Lead bullets won’t do much to modern armor plating, but it sure made a hell of a racket and brought a hail of hot metal scrap down on anything within a radius of a hundred meters.

Good enough. I adjusted my grip on Chet’s shirt and dragged him out into the street. The cop had rolled himself under the rear bumper of his car and was screaming to himself — to his implant, and to his dispatcher — “I need back up! Officer down! Back up! Godammit!”

Air support would arrive in a couple of minutes. I squatted over Chet, put my hands under him and sort of rolled him the last few meters. I heaved him into the back, slammed the hatch shut and opened the far door. I leaned into the car, but stopped and took one last look at the cop.

“I don’t care if I’m out of my jurisdiction, you asshole! I need back up! Officer down! All over the place!” he wailed. “All right! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean ‘asshole’! Please!”

I ducked into the car and the engine started quietly. As casually as possible — just out for a drive, maybe headed up the coast — I backed down the street, around the corner and out on to Victory, pointing east.

A couple of hovers came in low, the thumping engines buffeting the car as they passed. I switched the dash to rearview and watched them slow and grind the air over Danning’s neighbor. Rounds sparked off the bottom of the lead plane and it responded with a missile that sent a tower of greenish-white flame into the sky. The video damped the intensity to keep from blinding me, but shadows suddenly shifted, swinging around to flee the explosion.

So much for leaving a DNA trail.

I put the car on autopilot — current heading, no destination — and reached around behind me, fumbling at a box I kept in the back. Chet moaned slightly and I ignored him. My ribs screamed, threatening to do unhappy things to my lungs if I didn’t just sit straight. Where the hell were they? First goddamned thing I was going to do tomorrow was organize these goddamned supplies.

There. I found a couple of pain patches, peeled them open and slapped one on each carotid. I also popped a stim and crushed it with my teeth. My ribs reluctantly quieted and the world sharpened up a bit.

At the bottom of the box was a traction vest. I struggled out of my overcoat, let it fold up behind me, and pulled the vest on over my head. It inflated and pushed my ribs back to somewhere close to where they belonged.

My nose was a crumpled mess, blood flowing freely down my face and into my lap, and a dark black bruise, the rough shape of an end table, was rising on the right side of my head.

I took a deep breath, pressed both hands against the sides of my nose and snapped it back in place. A sharp spike of pain made it past the drugs, but they quickly beat it back into my unconscious, where it would fester and give me bad dreams.

Chet whimpered again and I found a trauma-level commuter patch in the box for him. He wouldn’t unfold enough to let me at his neck, so I just stuck it on a forearm. His breathing slowed and evened out. His next check was getting docked whatever it cost to get the stench of urine out of my car.

Up ahead, the stutter-flash of a fire truck’s lights appeared out of the post-midnight L.A. glare and the scoot let off a small beep and pulled over to the side of the road. I tapped the dash, and the faint whir of the engine shut down. I needed time to think, and a moving vehicle is no place to be drunk and aroused.

I pulled a bottle out of the small dry storage compartment in the back, next to Chet. I’d gotten the commuter scoot — hatch and trunk, mini-fridge, full seat recline, media console and ‘plant feed, catheter — for stake-outs, but managed to use it mostly as another place to keep booze as close as possible. I took a hard pull, the alcohol washing away the sharp metallic taste of my own blood.

Half a dozen emergency vehicles shot by, headed to the remains of Danning’s neighborhood. They were early. The fire department’s contract with the city only requires a fifteen minute response time, and they could use any leeway doing whatever they saw fit. Quick response was a profit opportunity. The trucks would pull onto Danning’s street, conduct a spot auction, and start putting out the house of the highest bidder. Ten, eleven minutes from now, they’d start on whatever was still burning. Danning’s place — whatever was left of it — and all his worldly possessions were about to become a sticky puddle of plastic and ash.

That was good news, at least. He was out on the street with just the shirt on his back, and that had a bullet hole in it. His back had a bullet hole in it.

But Jesus. He had kicked the shit out of me. That shouldn’t have happened. Danning was a tubby, sad little man, not much of a threat to anything other than a bucket of something that was supposed to taste like chicken. Me, I’m a paid killer. I’ve ended the lives of more people than I care to remember. You put the two of us at odds, where I’ve got guns and he’s got an ottoman, and it should take me longer to transfer my fee than do the job. Even if he did have a warning.

And even if a couple of cops were on a little extra-jurisdictional field trip to his house. And even if his neighbor was waiting to ambush the cops. Maybe. Or not.

This had gotten complicated.

I took another drink. You’re not supposed to when you’re on painkillers or stims and especially not when you’re on both. But the stim was only making my senses alert, not my brain, and the patches just kept me from curling up next to Chet and crying. They were keys to doors, letting me open and close them as needed. The booze, though, was — delicately put — a cognitive aid. It marched through my bloodstream, looking for my brain, to give it a good punch in the gut.

Danning only had a few options: run, hide, fight.

Fighting — the volume and scope of drugs I was on notwithstanding — probably wasn’t a good choice. Unresponsive didn’t have the resources he claimed, because otherwise Danning would have been under protection, or at least armed with something other than furniture. With the jump he had on me, I should rightfully be a very surprised corpse; arms and legs and a torso and a hollowed out head. But I’m not. So fighting back isn’t in play.

Hiding wasn’t a good idea either. If he knew I was coming, then he knew who hired me and knows what kind of money and power is lined up against him. Finding one person out of eighteen million isn’t all that hard if you give the right people the right incentive. Danning was near as you could get to an invisible man, but that’s just because nobody had ever had a reason to find him. I could drop twenty percent of what Koizumi was paying me and he’d turn up in a couple of days.

So he was running.

He’d need to get to medical help soon, but couldn’t afford to do it anywhere near L.A. — it would go out on the local police feed and I’d be able to find him before the sun came up.

He could go to Unresponsive — or Unresponsive could go to him — but there was something strange going on there, something I didn’t understand. If Unresponsive was so keen on protecting Danning, why not run before tonight? Why not get him across the border into Canada and let the Canadian military do the protecting for him? If he already knew so much about this job — that Koizumi had hired me, that Danning was the target — then he also knew where I can and can’t go. An incident in Quebec back during the Separation put my DNA on file with the provinces, and any scanner in the country would bring the entire weight of the government down on me. Canada had assumed all of Quebec’s absentia judgments when they let them back in, and it put half of North America out of my reach.

The thought that Unresponsive didn’t help Danning and he beat me fair and square nosed up out of the fog, but it was just too depressing to consider so I consciously ignored it.

No friends, no money, no resources. He didn’t even have a car. Any of them might be stashed away somewhere, but as long as his implant was ID’ing him as Roland Danning, he wasn’t going to be able to get at them. Roland Danning didn’t officially own anything that wasn’t currently on fire.

He was screwed. I took another drink and relaxed a little. The night had been far and away the worst of my career, a near-complete disaster, but at least now I knew what I was up against and would be able to find him and finish the job. Danning was out there, somewhere, probably hiding in an alley, trying to stop the bleeding. Maybe he was getting woozy already. He didn’t have anywhere to go, and no way to get there even if he did. It’s not like he could get up and… fly… away.

Oh, shit.