2

I parked my Americar beside the Dumpster in an alley just off Randall Avenue, swiped my keycard through the maglock on the back door, and climbed the narrow staircase to the second floor. I approached the door to number 5 and looked for the telltales I'd put in place when I'd left. All were where they were supposed to be. Again I waved my keycard, then diumbed the secondary maglock I'd installed the day after I'd moved in {right thumb, of course). The circuitry hummed for an instant as it decided whether I was me. Then the bolt snapped back and the door swung open.

As soon as the door was shut behind me, I peeled off my duster and tossed it toward the nearest chair. Midsummer in Cheyenne is hotter than hell (but it's a dry heat, yeah right)-much too hot to warrant anything more than shirtsleeves, let alone an armored coat. But I'd rather be slick with sweat than drenched with blood; call it a character flaw. Since I'd left Seattle, I'd made it a point-bordering on an obsession-never to leave my doss without at least some armor between me and any high-velocity ordnance that might be directed my way.

I crossed to my "office"-a small desk wedged into one corner of me tiny, two-room apartment-and slumped down in a swivel chair that was probably older than I was. I flipped my telecom out of standby mode, and waited while the drek-kicked flatpanel got the idea.

Finally the ancient system came grudgingly online. I slotted the certstick Sharon Young had given me and checked the balance-more from a sense of completeness man because I expected any jiggery-pokery; there's no percentage in stiffing someone on an advance. The numbers came up just the way I'd expected them to: 4,000 nuyen in certified funds. I hit a couple of keys, and my telecom happily transferred the cred from the stick's microchip to my account in the Cheyenne Interface Bank. That made my account… well, pretty close to 4,000 nuyen, if you wanted to be picky about it. Of that, I earmarked 800? for rent, to be siphoned out of my account whenever my landlord got around to it. (I'd already made the mistake of bouncing one transaction off him. Big mistake. My landlord was a big, bad, bald ork with a sunburned pate, creased as though someone had wrinkled it up and then tried to flatten it out again. Everyone called him "Mother" and left it at that-probably because anyone who tried to go any further was too busy spitting teeth to finish.)

Banking duties finished, I pressed the keys to display my mail. One message in my default mailbox, the one I use for biz. I thought I knew what that one would be, particularly when I saw that the Matrix code was Cheyenne. Two messages in my private inbox. Since only three people have the passcode, it wasn't tough to guess about those either.

Business before pleasure, unfortunately. Another couple of keystrokes, and the biz message flashed up on the screen. I recognized the digitized image at once. Jenny was her name, troll and proud of it, Amerind and even prouder of that. She wasn't quite a fixer, but she did occasionally broker "consulting" contracts for people she liked. For some reason I had yet to fully understand, she really liked me.

I kicked the replay up to double speed, and let my mind drift while Jenny yammered through her message. I knew what it was about, a contract she'd tossed my way a week back as a favor, to help me make my rent. Everything had come out the way the contractor wanted, and Jenny was gushing with overspeed praise. I slipped the replay back to standard speed when it seemed that Jenny was winding down.

"… And if you want to talk about it some more, why don't you come visit some time?" she was saying, with a bedroom smile that would frighten small children. "Our friends will be putting the credit transfer through tomorrow." Her smile grew broader until I thought she'd swallow her ears. "Catch ya later, Bernard." And the screen went blank.

I couldn't help but chuckle. "Bernard." I don't know where it had come from, but the term had swept its way through the shadow underground of the Sioux Nation over the last couple of weeks, a kind of trendy substitute for "chummer" or the Japanese "omae." So far it wasn't in common parlance-not yet-but the local shadowrunners and wannabes had cottoned onto it as a kind of lodge recognition signal.

Shadowrunner. It was to laugh. Jenny would drek her drawers if she ever met a real shadowrunner. (Christ, I almost did my first time.) The kind of biz she brokered might be considered "shadow contracts" if you really stretched the definition of the term, solely because they were mildly illegal, or perhaps extra-legal. All of them were a far cry from the media-fed vision of balls-to-the-wall shadowrunners, tweaking the noses of the megacops while dodging a fusillade of bullets. Been there; done that; too rough; pave it.

Let me tell you about the "run" I'd just completed for Jenny. There was a midrent co-op apartment block on the edge of Cheyenne's downtown core-the Avalon-that had been having problems with chip dealers running their business out of one of the penthouses. Activity all round the clock, disreputable types coming and going, chipheads in the lobby, and all that drek. The renters' council had tried to evict the suspected chipmeisters… and had been told, in no uncertain terms, that if they filed the necessary papers, their knees, elbows, and other body parts would come into conflict with blunt objects in the hands of hired bone-breakers. The cops couldn't move against the dealers because there was simply no proof. The residents knew what was going on, but they couldn't bridge the gulf between knowing and proving.

Enter Dirk Montgomery, stage left, riding a white charger. My contract-my "shadowrun," if you will-was to roust the chipmeisters and get them out of the building. No constraints on how I was to go about it, no questions asked, results being the only things that mattered.

Jenny, I think, expected me to confront the chipmeisters directly, possibly over the iron sights of a big fragging gun. (God knows where she'd built up her exaggerated, romanticized image of me…) In the old days, maybe she'd have been right; maybe I would have taken the direct route. But things have changed. These days, I prefer "social engineering" to hanging my hoop out in the wind.

So how did I handle the chipmeisters? Simple. I staked out the apartment building and identified the dealers' major clients-secondary distributors, mainly, rather than the guttertrash users. Once I had lines on most of them, I sent each one a personal message by registered e-mail, politely informing them that I had reason to suspect that the person they were visiting so regularly at The Avalon was involved in the illegal chip trade-all "for their own good," of course. The kicker was that I CC'd each letter to the Cheyenne vice department.

The upshot? The secondary distributors stopped visiting, and within a couple of days the chipmeisters had moved on. "Shadowrun" complete, zero exposure-just the way I liked it these days.

What? No gunplay? No hashing it out with corp sec-guards? No exchanging friendly volleys of small-arms fire with Lone Star troopers?

Well… no. By choice. You could say I'm getting old, slowing down. I'd say I'm getting smart, wising up. There's a lot to be said for subtlety.

I'd never had any desire to prove I was the baddest, steel-hooped motherfragger ever to walk the streets. Not only did an acquaintance of mine-maybe a friend, depending on your definition-have a lock on the title, in my biased opinion, but experience told me too many people got themselves rather dead trying to go that route. Better a live rat than a dead juggernaut, I'd always figured.

And anyway, you needed edge to get out there on the street. Juice, jam, fire, whatever you wanted to call it. You had to have the moves and the instincts… and when the drek came down, you had to trust those instincts. Did I still have the instincts? Over the last year, I hadn't trusted them enough to find out. And, out there in the shadows, that would have made me a walking target.