“Hey, Boo,” Original Cindy said as Max came up.
With a tired-ass smile, Max took a seat and Sketchy poured her a beer.
Herbal said, “Ah, how goes the battle, my sister?”
Max forced the smile to brighten. “Why it’s all good, my brother.”
Herbal smiled and nodded, convinced he had a convert; Sketchy handed Max the beer with his trademark stunned-baby-seal expression.
“You up for some pool, home girl?” Original Cindy asked Max, giving her a sideways look.
Sketchy shook his head and even Herbal’s eyes narrowed in warning.
“O. C.’s a shark, Max,” Sketchy said. “Watch your ass.”
“My brother speaks the truth,” Herbal said. “Our sister has already made poor men of us both.”
“Yeah, but it’s still all good, right?” Max glanced toward Original Cindy.
With a shrug and no chagrin, she said, “What can I say? Original Cindy’s better with balls than these boys.”
Sketchy thought about that, while Max grinned and said, “Well, bring it on, girlfriend, bring it on.”
Leaving the guys at the table, the two young women — though familiar sights around here, they were followed by every male eye in the bar, and a few female, too — sashayed over to an empty table.
Though her analytical ability and enhanced eyesight gave her an advantage, Max still lost three straight games to Cindy.
The encounter with the private detective had been replaying in her mind ever since leaving the Laundromat. Jam Pony paid peanuts, and her bankroll from Moody had been eaten up by travel expenses and the cost of living, not the least of which was paying off that cop at squatter’s row. Now she needed a cool k, in less than twenty-four hours... and she had no idea where she was going to get it.
“Had enough, girl?” Original Cindy asked, leaning on her cue.
Max nodded slowly and they headed back to the table.
“You okay, Boo? Your mind’s on some other planet.”
“Just a little distracted.”
They reached the table, where Sketchy and Herbal sat before an empty pitcher, with the slightly buzzed expressions to match.
“Somethin’ Original Cindy can do?”
“Just workin’ out some private stuff.”
“Well, you call me in off the bench, girl, when the game goes into sudden death.”
Max smiled at her friend... maybe her best friend. “Yeah?”
“Hell yeah!”
Snatching up the pitcher, Max said, “My turn to buy,” and moved off toward the bar. She was almost there when two guys in the far corner triggered her peripheral vision. Crash wasn’t crowded at this hour, and two guys confabbing so far from everybody else in the place put them on Max’s radar.
With a seemingly casual sideways glance, she focused in and watched as a wad of cash passed between them... also a package the size of a fist, wrapped in brown paper, passing the other way.
Drug deal.
Max had an instinctive dislike of hard drugs — possibly linked to the medical tampering she’d been subjected to — and suddenly, an inner smile forming, she knew exactly where the money for Vogelsang was going to come from...
She had always been that kind of thief. Moody had made sure to send her after unsavory types; something about crooking a crook just... sat better with Max. This would be like ripping off the Brood, only minus the acrobatics — easy, profitable, and stealing from guys who weren’t exactly model citizens, anyway.
The bartender gave her the pitcher, she paid, and hustled back to the table, her smile wide and genuine.
“Nectar,” Sketchy said, accepting the pitcher as if an award for Best Bike Messenger 2019, and started sloshingly filling glasses.
“Just say no,” Max said, holding up a hand to block Sketchy from pouring her another glass; her peripheral vision still trailed the drug dealers, who were on the move.
So was she.
“Gotta jet,” she said.
Original Cindy looked at her with only partly feigned outrage. “Yo, Boo, you just got here! What can be more important than kickin’ it with your homeys?”
“Just remembered an errand I’ve got to run... for me, not Normal.”
“Take care, my sister,” Herbal said, in benediction.
“Catch ya in the mornin’, girl,” Original Cindy said, picking up on Max’s distracted gaze but unable to latch onto whatever Max was trained on.
Sketchy saluted her with a beer glass but said nothing, having just moved into a nonverbal state.
The two drug dealers split out different exits. Max tailed after the one with the cash — dealing the drugs was a line she couldn’t cross.
Outside, the light was little better than in the bar, and Max couldn’t tell much about the guy except he was tall, and so skinny he seemed lost in that expensive brown leather jacket; also, he had short brown hair, big ears, and walked with a definite slouch. Except for the short hair, from this distance, he could’ve been Sketchy.
She stayed with him for several blocks, on foot, on the opposite side of the street, hanging back enough to keep the guy from making her. The brown leather jacket kept moving, and half a dozen blocks melted away, as he led her into a seedier side of the city than she’d yet seen as a messenger. Max was still more than a block behind him when three figures emerged from the shadows and planted themselves in front of the guy.
They obviously planned to rip him before she did — and that pissed her off!
As she crept forward, she watched two of the interlopers move to either side of the dealer, leaving the third facing their mark. These were wide, tough men, buzz-cut white guys in muscle shirts who’d pumped themselves into brawny animals — blocky torsos with arms, legs, and no necks, possibly part of a local neo-Nazi group, the Swatzis, known to loot dealers and then peddle their own shit through intermediaries to minorities... making money off their idea of homegrown genocide.
The apparent leader, positioned in front of the dealer, stepped forward. Trimly Satan-bearded, he was smaller, still muscular, though he probably depended more on his brain than his brawn. Plus, there was that nine-millimeter auto in his hand...
“Give up the money, lowlife, and you just might limp away.”
Traffic was nil; Max didn’t even have to look both ways when she raced across the street in an eyeblink, and sprang high; she came down in the middle of the four men as if she’d fallen from outer space, poised with catlike grace in a battle stance.
Their mouths all dropped open at once.
One at a time, she closed them.
Starting with the devil-bearded gunman: she decked him with a left, the automatic flying out of his hand and clattering to the street; then she spun, taking out the nearest would-be Nazi with a sweeping kick. Down low, she swung an uppercut to the dealer’s groin, and, coming up, headbutted the last Nazi and watched him teeter, then tumble to the sidewalk, as unconscious as the cement that received him.
The scrawny, big-eared dealer rolled on the ground, his hands clutching his jewels. The Nazi she’d kicked to the pavement struggled to his knees in time for his face to halt a flying kick from Max. He, too, fell unconscious, his face a bleeding, broken mess. Scrabbling in the street to find and snatch up his pitched pistol, which he managed, the gunman turned, grinning, raising the automatic as he came.
Just as he leveled the gun, Max dropped and rolled toward him, exploding out of the roll with a vicious blade of a left hand that chopped the gun from the man’s hand, then sent a chop across the bridge of his nose, which broke it, leaving him bloody and unconscious on the sidewalk near his buzz-cut companions.