NOVEL SIMPLE Issue 20 – Eventful Earnings
The elder actually led this round, and turned over his cards.
3C, AH. The woman sitting next to him was narrowly triumphant as she saw this. “Three threes, Ace high,” I pronounced calmly, aligning the cards momentarily.
5H, 4D.
“Five and four. Straight is high,” I announced, turning to the last vampire at the table, an auburn-haired sort who dyed his thick hair and affected a light mustache and beard.
He sighed and turned over his cards. JD and 2C. “Jack and two. Two pair, Jacks and Threes.” I pulled the cards, matched them, then sent them back. “Straight takes the pot.” I smoothly pushed the stacks of chips towards the woman, then collected the cards smoothly once more. They all watched them almost leap perfectly into my hands, fascinated despite themselves at such dexterity.
“Will there be another round?” I asked, looking at the distribution of chips. The elder was the only one who could continue, and the woman would run him out of money in two streets by bidding to the limit.
“We shall call it a night here, I think. I thank you for your work, Miss Dealer.” He still gave no hint as to what they intended as I gathered up the cards, pausing a moment as I sprayed the used cards towards the nearest trash bin, and for the fifth time tonight, the cards burned away as they descended into it. “You are remarkably good at your trade for your age,” he noted, testing me.
“Thank you, sir. You are all skilled players. It was a pleasure to watch.”
And then the eight Red Eyes rose up, looked left out the window, very intensely, and I decided it was time to get out of the way.
I stepped back smoothly, next to my case, and right next to the Drinker who’d come up behind me to stop me from getting away.
A line of rappelling men slid down over the windows and let loose with full-auto... and, I noticed, silver ammunition.
Distracted by my sudden movement, the vampires didn’t react to the men quite quickly enough, and the roaring sounds of gunfire, bullets chewing into flesh, and thwopping and tearing apart the furniture and surrounding ornamentation soon took their minds off of me.
Nobody was of a mind to follow what I was doing as I ducked and covered, scrambled and moved with great energy and speed.
The Drinkers were trying to return fire, but three of the vampires were already down, and the other two had been wounded. Grenades were pitched in and exploded in bright silvery mist... holy water with dissolved garlic in it, which would thwart their shape-changing.
Well, my goal wasn’t to get away; it was the briefcases over there with the real money in them!
I also realized that I would have a bit of a problem. The shooters coming in wouldn’t see any heat signature coming off me, I didn’t have a shadow right now, and their toys wouldn’t be picking me up. They would automatically consider me a vampire, especially if I went up the walls or something.
That was freaking hilarious!
Whatever. I slid across the floor as my blouse suddenly went all black and a filter moved down to cover my lips. I stuck to all the briefcases as I passed them by, and was suddenly on the floor behind the bar, where a beefy Drinker was cowering from the automatic fire and coughing, tears coming from his eyes as the holy water garlic mist ate at them.
He looked at me in astonishment as I popped the locks, stuck my hand inside, and all the money inside was Prestidigitated into my Deeppockets. Click, take, click, take... I emptied out one briefcase a second and stacked them up next to me as he stared, so distracted he actually forgot he was in a firefight for his vamp-slaved life.
Some AP rounds blasted through the bar’s stone façade, hitting him and making him grunt, but since they weren’t silver the injuries auto-healed with great speed. He bellowed as he came up shooting, and at least five rounds caught him in mid-air as his leap took him off the ground. The armored men, obviously expecting a display of strength, their rifles glowing with psychic charges, took care of the vampires, and my extra fun and Karma, at the same time.
Damn, I’d been waiting to pull off some tricks, and I was pre-empted by vampire hunters who were ready to shoot me? What was this, the comics or something?
There was gunfire from upstairs as I slid from the left side of the bar to the right, crouched, and prepared to jump.
“Where’s that card dealer?” shouted a familiar voice.
My expression under my mask got a little weird. Chopsaw’s men were hired to take out some vamps?
Whatever, I was going to have to cut into their incidental profit margins. Which was all fair, because they were cutting into mine! That blonde’s diamond earrings were worth quite a bit, and the elder’s cufflinks had to be worth at least twenty k...
The bracing on the ceiling should be about right there...
I leapt up, and barrels snapped up to follow the blur of darkness. Eight Red Eyes were looking in every direction as the gunmen oriented on the motion.
I hit the ceiling, the tiles compressed and hit the support beam. I pushed, and was descending as the guns came up, twisting to avoid the streams of bullets coming from five directions in professional three-shot bursts, hitting the floor between two of the men, anchoring myself for perfect footing, and launching myself towards the shattered windows they’d arrived through.
There was an art to that, of course, as I had to get out of their line of fire really fast, so I hit the window on the down arc and dove for distance.
Here was where extra days of waiting to do this shit paid off. I Repulsed the air in front of and to the right of me, and air pressure decided that it had to fill the gap. My plunge from thirty stories up accelerated, even as I was yanked abruptly sideways.
The whining shot from the overwatch sniper the Eyes were looking at across the way missed wildly at my maneuver, a flash of light spinning off the façade of the hotel above and behind me, and as the shooters came to the window, I was peeling around the side of the building, much further down than they expected.
Power-gliding for fun and profit.
I reversed the effect, Repulsing the air above me, and air pressure billowed up beneath me, averting my downward momentum, turning it into a level glide across frictionless air as it streamed up past me and pressed on my heels.
It was a weird way to fly, but it wasn’t anti-grav of any kind, so why the heck not make use of it?
Huh, was I gonna have to get paraglider wings or something to make this more effective? I hoped not.
I angled my glide down one of the connecting streets, aiming for half a mile down at speed, then stopping the pressure from behind, tumbling over in midair, and flicking up a Featherweight to stop all my momentum a foot from the ground.
Seeing someone come down out of the sky was probably an unusual event in some places, but only generated brief interest from a couple passing cars and pedestrians, who looked at me with rather more envy than surprise.
They didn’t have cameraphones yet, or I’m sure they would have been trying to take my picture, too.
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The Mountain came up the steps of the fire escape with the surety of someone who couldn’t be stopped in what he was doing. The man covering the stairs there blanched when he saw who was coming up.
“M-Mister Hill!” he bleated loudly, getting everyone’s attention. “What are you doing here?!”
“Backup,” he declared, looming up before the man, who swallowed. “You’re one of Chopsaw’s crew. What are you doing here?”
“Got hired to take out a party of vampires and their Drinkers, Mr. Hill, sir!” the man babbled promptly.
“Mmm.” The Mountain reached inside his very large trench coat, pulled out a fat cigar, and then pulled out a long match, which he struck off against the side of his face nonchalantly to light, and worked the stogie for a few seconds.
There was a feral scream, and the closed door exploded open. Unfortunately, it ran right into The Mountain standing there, bounced back off him, and he backhanded it back the way it had come, taking the wounded vampire there with it in shock back down the hall.
The three pursuing shooters unloaded silver rounds into the formerly handsome Afrospanic fellow with expensive cufflinks at point-blank range, and soon enough he stopped writhing and screaming.
“Got some holy water to hose them all down, Chopsaw?” he asked idly, recognizing the man in the lead.
“Hill? What are you doing here?” the other merc asked alertly, eyes darting around. “Did this job get double-sold?” he added hastily.
“Naw. I was hired for back-up for a heist, in case things went bad. Was right below in a room there, ready to come up through the floor when I heard the shooting.”
“A heist?” Chopsaw looked around sharply. “Someone was robbing these bloodsuckers?”
“A-yup. And by your expression, they got away clean, too. Don’t mind me.” He turned around and strode back down the stairs, waving over his head. “A good night’s work all around.”
---
Chopsaw stared after The Mountain, and swore under his breath. “Loot fast, let’s see what we missed!” He knew there was some expensive artwork in the upper floor of this penthouse, and their source had indicated the location of the safe, but they didn’t have a lot of time overall.
Right now, all the true vampires were being hauled to somewhere the morning sun would hit them, and hosed down with holy water that would reduce them to sludge regardless. The sun would finish the job to ash.
Those looked like expensive cufflinks...
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There was an article in the morning news about how a pawnshop in the Stroll area had been broken into, there had been some sort of altercation, and the owner had died. A lot of valuable inventory seemed to have gone missing.
What the news report didn’t indicate was that there was a secret chamber that held the kinds of materials used only by undead and necromancers in extremely unclean rituals, along with books with codes that, once cracked, concerned at least forty-three missing person cases, mostly younger women who had been working the street.
Dispensation of the remainder of the inventory went to the pawnshop owner’s heirs, but certain people much Higher in the sky were now tracking who did what with him, although they fully expected that any ties had been cut completely.
The news of a wealthy socialite going missing didn’t make the local papers at all, and nobody noticed the shooting, missing glass in the penthouse windows, or pretty much anything having happened. When the penthouse was put on the market a few weeks later, there was absolutely no sign of any violence having occurred there whatsoever, and it sold quickly, prime real estate in the City of Angels.