Brennan watched the entrance for a while. The swirling snowflakes that missed the brim of his black cowboy hat caught on his thick, drooping mustache and in his long sideburns. A fair number of Werewolves-they were wearing Richard Nixon masks this month-were going into and out of the place. He'd also seen a few Egrets, though for the most part the Chinatown gang was too picky to hang out in a joint frequented by jokers.
He smiled, smoothing the tips of his mustache in a gesture that had already become habitual. Time to see if his plan was a stroke of genius, as he sometimes thought, or a quick way to a hard death, as he more frequently thought.
It was warm inside the Dragon, more, Brennan guessed, from the press of bodies than the bar's heating system, and it took a moment for him to spot Mao, who was, as Brennan's source had told him he'd be, sitting in a booth in the back of the room. Brennan threaded his way between crowded tables and the shuffling barmaids, staggering drunks, and swaggering punks who crossed his path as he headed toward the booth.
A girl, young and blond and looking vaguely stoned, sat next to Mao. Three men crowded the bench across the table from him. One was a Werewolf in a Nixon mask, one was a young Oriental, and the one in the middle was a thin, pale, nervous-looking man. Before Brennan could say anything a street punk stepped in Brennan's path, blocking his way.
He was a lean six four or five, so he towered over Brennan despite the cowboy boots that added an inch or two to Brennan's height. He wore stained leather pants and an oversize leather jacket that was draped with lengths of chain. His spiked hair added several inches to his apparent height, and the scarlet and black scars crawling on his face added apparent fierceness to his appearance, as did the bone-a human finger-bone, Brennan realized-that pierced his nose.
The scars that patterned his cheeks, forehead, and chin were the insigna of the Cannibal Headhunters, a once-feared street gang that had disintegrated when Brennan had killed its leader, an ace named Scar. Gang members not slain in the bloody power struggle after Scar's demise had for the most part gravitated to other criminal associations, such as the Shadow Fist Society.
"What do you want?" The Headhunter's voice was too reedy to sound menacing, but he tried.
"To see Danny Mao." Brennan spoke softly, his voice pitched in the slow drawl that he remembered so well from his childhood. The Headhunter bent lower to hear Brennan over the cacaphony of music, manic laughter, and half a hundred conversations that washed over them.
"'Bout what?"
"'Bout what's not your business, boy."
Brennan saw out of the corner of his eye that conversation in the booth had stopped and that everyone was watching them.
"I say it is." The Headhunter smiled a grin he fondly thought savage, showing filed front teeth. Brennan laughed aloud. The Headhunter frowned. "What's so funny, asshole?"
Brennan, still laughing, grabbed the bone in the Headhunter's nose and yanked. The Headhunter screamed and reached for his torn nose and Brennan kicked him in the crotch. He fell with a choking moan, and Brennan dropped the bloody bone he'd ripped from his nose onto his curled-up body.
"You," Brennan told him, then slid into the booth next to the blond girl, who was staring at him in stoned astonishment. Two of the three men sitting across the table started to rise, but Danny Mao waved a negligent hand and they sat back down, muttering at each other and staring at Brennan.
Brennan took his hat off, set it on the table in front of him, and looked at Danny Mao, who returned his gaze with apparent interest.
"What's your name?" Mao asked. "Cowboy," Brennan said softly.
Mao picked up the glass in front of him and took a short sip. He looked at Brennan as if he were some kind of odd bug and frowned. "You for real? I ain't never seen a Chinese cowboy before."
Brennan smiled. The epicanthic folds given his eyes by Dr. Tachyon's deft surgical skills had combined, as he had known they would, with his coarse, dark hair and tanned complexion to give him an Oriental appearance. This slight alteration of his features, his newly grown facial hair, and his western manner of speaking and dressing all added up to a simple but effective disguise. It wouldn't fool anyone who knew him, but he wasn't likely to run into anyone who did.
And the irony of his disguise, Brennan thought, was that every aspect of his new identity, except for the eyes given him by Tachyon, was true. His father had been fond of saying that the Brennans were Irish, Chinese, Spanish, several kinds of Indian, and all-American.
"My Asian ancestors helped build the railroads. I was born in New Mexico, but found it too limiting." That, too, was true.
"So you came to the big city looking for excitement?" Brennan nodded. "Some time ago."
"And found enough so that you have to use an alias?" He shrugged, said nothing.
Mao took another sip of his drink. "What do you want?"
"Word on the street," Brennan said, his intense excitement buried under his southwestern drawl, "is that your people are going to war with the Mafia. You've already hit them once Don Picchietti was assassinated two weeks ago by an invisible ace who shoved an ice pick in his ear while he was eating dinner at his own restaurant. That was certainly a Shadow Fist job. The Mafia will undoubtedly retaliate, and the Shadow Fists will need more soldiers."
Mao nodded. "Why should we hire you?"
"Why not? I can handle myself."
Mao glanced at his erstwhile bodybuard, who had managed to drag himself to a hunched position on his knees, his forehead resting on the floor. "Fair enough," he said thoughtfully. "But do you have the stomach for it I wonder?" He looked at the three men crowded together on the bench across the table, and Brennan, too, looked at them closely.
The Werewolf sat on the outside and the Oriental, probably an Immaculate Egret, was on the inside. The man they sandwiched, though didn't look like a street tough.
He was small, thin, and palid. His hands looked soft and weak, his eyes were dark and bright. Many street toughs had a streak of madness in them, but even on first sight Brennan could see that this man was more than touched by insanity. "These men," Danny Mao said, "are going on a mission. Care to join them?"
"What kind of mission?" Brennan asked.
"If you have to ask, maybe you're not the type of man we're looking for."
"Maybe," Brennan said, smiling, "I'm just cautious."
"Caution is an admirable trait," Mao said blandly, "but so is faith in and obedience to your superiors."
Brennan put his hat on. "All right. Where're we headed?" The pale man in the middle laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. "The morgue," he said gleefully.
Brennan looked at Mao with a lifted eyebrow.
Mao nodded. "The morgue, as Deadhead says."
"Do you have a car?" the Werewolf asked Brennan. His voice was a mushy growl behind the Nixon mask.
Brennan shook his head.
"I'll have to steal one," the Werewolf said.
"Then we can go to the drive-up window!" the man called Deadhead enthused. The Asian sitting next to him looked vaguely disgusted but said nothing. "Let's go!" Deadhead pushed at the Werewolf, urging him out of the booth.
Brennan lingered to glance at Mao, who was watching him carefully.
"Whiskers," Mao said, nodding at the Werewolf, "is in charge. He'll tell you what you need to know. You're on probation, Cowboy. Be careful."
Brennan nodded and followed the unlikely trio onto the street. The Werewolf turned and looked at Brennan.
"I'm Whiskers," he said in his indistinct growl. "This is Deadhead, like Danny said, and this is Lazy Dragon." Brennan nodded at the Oriental, realizing his initial assessment of the man had been wrong. He wasn't an Egret. He wasn't wearing Egret colors, and he didn't have the demeanor of a gang member. He was young, maybe in his early twenties, small, about five six or seven, and slender enough so that his baggy pants hung loosely on his lean hips. His face was oval, his nose slightly broad, his hair longish and indifferently combed. He didn't have the aggressive attitude of the street punk. There was a reserve about him, an air of almost melancholy thoughtfulness.