[WATSON NORTHSIDE INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT- LERU STREET]

  Tuesday| 29 JUN 2077 | 20:25

  [JINGUJI SUMMER COLLECTION OUT NOW! DON’T MISS OUT ON THE HOTTEST DEALS IN NIGHT CITY!]

  Rest. No time for rest. Will forced his eyes open. At some point in the fight, his techgogs had fallen off. It hurt to move, but he reached a hand to his head and pulled off the balaclava and took a deep breath. More work for his toxin binders, sure, but it felt good to breathe without the cloth over his face.

  Jamal and Rico stood over the body of the Punisher Will had killed. Slim. They were staring pretty hard as if rating his work. After a long time, Rico commented, “Not bad for a runt.” Will took it as high praise. “Your choom had some pretty nice chrome. Not cheap.”

  Jamal walked over to Will and offered him a hand. It was awfully nice of him to give Will the benefit of the doubt that he could stand up. Will took the hand and let himself be pulled to his feet. It was all he could do not to fall over and succumb to his many wounds. His back and shoulder felt like someone had beaten him repeatedly with spiked baseball bats. He had more than a few bullets lodged in his body, shallow penetration, but still unnerving.

  “I think I owe you chooms more than four hundred eddies after this,” Will said weakly.

  Rico Handsome looked like he was about to laugh, “Choom, I’m not going to stop you from paying me extra, but I would have popped that gonk’s head off for free.” Jamal nodded in agreement.

  “Even so,” Will said as he took a few steps towards the mostly undamaged body of Sledgehammer, who must have possessed an expensive Berserker OS to have survived twenty rounds of armor-piercing ammo to the head at close range, 9mm or not, and just… restart minutes later. He fished around in the headless man’s pockets and pulled out the credchip, looking it over. The LED readout showed twenty-five thousand eddies. Will tossed it to Jamal.

  “Came from the Voodoo Boys, so you might want to get it checked first before you deposit your shares.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m not worried about-” he stopped as he read the readout. “You serious, right now?”

  Rico came over to Jamal, looking curiously over his shoulder. “How ‘bout that. The kid came through.”

  There was no such thing in Nighty City as ‘easy money’, but Will put a high price on saving his skin. He wasn’t about to go all cheapo on his new chooms now.

  The two massive Animals got to work loading the cargo from Big Red’s storage unit. They finished in about fifteen minutes. While they worked, Will had pulled out a first-aid kit from the back of the cargo van and given himself an airhypo stimulant to keep moving. He cleaned and bandaged what he could, but left a brief text for Doc Kowalski to wait up for him. He was going to need more than just stitches. His Dynalar Sandevistan operating system was busted. Not even his nanosurgeons were going to fix that.

  “That’s about it, choom.” Rico’s demeanor toward Will had changed somehow. It felt like Will had gone from a source of amusement to someone worthy of respect.

  Jamal walked over and put his on Will’s shoulder. It gave him the faintest flashback of his father doing the same when he was five years old. “Scrap, you going to be okay? Want us to take you to a ripperdoc?”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll see one after I drop off the truck.”

  “Call me the next time you need a truck loaded, choom,” Rico said.

  After they had left, Will programmed the Auto Drive on the cargo van to drop itself off at Kowalski’s Clinic. Then, he climbed painfully into the truck cab and punched in the address of the Ebunike Docks. He had every intention of going over what he was going to tell the Twins once he arrived during the ride, but he fell asleep once the truck's wheels started rolling and didn’t wake up until an oversized hand knocked on the driver's side window. “I’m awake, give me a second,” he said. His head was throbbing, and little electric zigzag lines floated across his vision as he lowered the window. “Here to see the Coleman brothers…again.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Try not to fall asleep on the way over.”

  “Uh, yeah. Good idea.”

  It was 9:00 PM on the dot when the truck stopped at the accommodation ladder. Mick and Don were watching with expressions Will interpreted as disappointment. He wondered if they had been expecting Big Red to be driving the truck back instead of him. What was he going to tell them? What was he going to leave out? For the first time that day, Will didn’t have a plan. He’d have to wing it.

  “Mr. Scrap,” Don said as Will stepped down from the truck cab. “You look like you’ve had a rough day.”

  “I’ll live. There’s a lot to talk about. Managed to get your cargo back, too. How about we go somewhere private?”

  Mick opened the back of the truck, his cybereyes lit up as he gave the contents a quick scan. “Looks like everything, Don.” Before hopping down and joining his brother. The two led the way up the steps. Will had to lean hard on the railings to keep himself moving upward, but he made it without falling apart—a small win. Soon, they were back in the galley, where a cold can of Real Water was offered and accepted. He hadn’t realized how dehydrated he was until the liquid touched his lips. There was no savoring it. The water poured down his throat steadily, then he crushed the can and tossed it in a wastebasket.

  “Some of this is going to be hard to hear. There are things that you need to know, however. I can give you the short version now and write up a full report for you if it’s any easier.”

  Mick looked Will in the eye carefully, “We just want to know what happened to our friend. The rest can wait.”

  How would he want to be told if his own friend had betrayed him and been killed and almost chopped up into little bits? Will wasn’t sure, so he decided to tread lightly. Tell the truth, but pull the punches.

  “Big Red owed a large debt to Michael Gutierrez. You knew that. What you didn’t know was that he was stealing from you and selling your property to a small Somalian crew run by a fixer named Ringer. They made a deal for the contents of your truck. Twenty-five thousand eddies, enough to get him and his output to Chicago.”

  Will’s mouth was dry again. He needed to get to the point. There was no gain from putting off any longer. So far, Don and Mick had just listened stone-faced and patient. The deserved to know what had happened to their friend.

  “It looks like he was planning on double-crossing Ringer and giving you your cargo back, but…things didn’t go to plan. There was a fight. When I found him, he was surrounded by four bodies he’d bludgeoned to death with his bare hands, bleeding out from shrapnel from a grenade. I don’t know how, but he was still alive when I found him. He gave me this.”

  Don took the cell phone, hands shaking and with watery eyes. “Damn it. We would have given him the money. He knew that!” He shook his head as he opened the cell phone.

  “There’s a drafted message he was going to send you on there. He had set up a trap for the scavs for when they showed up. Does the name Miranda mean anything to you?”

  Mick gave out a sardonic laugh. “His mom. She used to beat the snot out of him when he was a kid. He named the auto-turret after her when she died. Think he liked that gun more than he did her.”

  Don cut in, “You said something about an output of Red’s?”

  Will nodded, “Originally thought she was the Miranda in the message.” That assumption had nearly cost Will his life. His hand drifted to the bruises over his heart. “She’s waiting for him at the No-Tell Motel now. I was going to reach out to her and let her know what happened, but I thought I should let you know first.”

  “I’ll handle it, Will. You’ve already done more than we expected you to,” Mick said sadly. Will thought that was probably the right decision. It’d be better to hear it from someone who knew and loved Big Red than from a stranger. Will had more to say.

  “Red wasn’t perfect, but I truly believe he tried to right the wrongs he had done. If I had been a half hour earlier, I might have been able to stop him and let him know-” Will cut himself off. He wasn’t sure he should tell the Twins about paying off Red’s debt to ‘Super Loco’ Gutierrez. He didn’t want them to get the wrong impression.

  “Let him know what?” Don asked, almost pleading.

  “Well, I knew Gutierrez wasn’t likely to talk unless I made it worth his time. He didn’t have Red’s best interest at heart, so I bought Red’s debt from him. Figured I could find him and talk him out of the plan. He’d be easier to convince if he didn’t have that hanging over him.”

  The Twins were quiet for what felt like a long time. Mick broke the silence. “You didn’t have to do that. It wasn’t in the job description.”

  “The important parts rarely are.”

  Truer words had rarely been spoken in Night City.