Radiator Jazz

It was another stir fry day in New Tijuana. The streets were choked with the radiator jazz of vehicles that had all arrived at the same time and agreed to create gridlock.

I met Williams in the Cantina Maria, a hole-in-the-wall-hole that specialized in cheap tequila, refugees and local hookers with tight skirts and fake tits. The sweating owner, Hector Lopez, his t-shirt stained with salsa, ushered me toward a corner table.

Williams raised his glass. “Salut, Beckett,” he said and downed his shot before I’d even sat down. Williams was wearing a very loud Hawaiian shirt over which he had to yell to be heard.

“You want some chow. I got some nachos and fresh guacamole coming. Hey, Hector – how about some frosty Margaritas? Look at those gals, over there, Beckett. You reckon those tits are real?” Chances were Williams had also been snorting.

The senoritas at the bar simpered and rotated their cleavages towards the man who held my marker.

“Holy Toledo. I’d love to bury my face in those. Try the chorizo – it’s got a real kick. Mmm. Frosty. No one chills a beer or a margarita like Hector. Man, I love this place.”

I necked an icy cold cerveza. Not because I was enjoying the company, but it was hot and I liked beer.

“You wanted to see me,” I said.

“The militia want you to go to Lost City.”

“And?”

“You’ll have everything you need on when you get there. Take this, it’s a burner”, he said, unnecessarily, and slid a hand held across the unwiped table.

My problem was I couldn’t refuse. The price of my sanctuary in New Tijuana after the Ruination and as a former wet work specialist for Uncle Sam had been to swear an oath to Williams. No questions asked - and I hadn’t asked them 11 times already.

I cold-eyed Williams, but he had already forgotten me, transfixed by a double D senorita sashaying his way with a $500 smile and vaseline in her purse.

The only consolation was the long drive to Lost City gave me time to continue to plot the different ways that I would eventually kill him.

***

I sniffed the air, smelled the carcinogenic tang of a large, dead animal and knew I was back in Lost City.

That morning I had wheeled my big old Mustang into the shade of the crumbling metropolis, through its blank gullies of concrete scrapers and worn pencil towers. It had been a hard drive, navigating the broken suburbs that clung to the coast between the border and Lost City.

Inside the limits, I’d skirted the really dangerous parts of Korea Town and Voodoo Land. That meant driving through the sections that were merely substantially life-threatening.

I breakfasted in an uncaring, anonymous diner, served by a waitress whose tag labeled her “June”. She smelled of sixty and reeked of continual disappointment.

“How’d you like those eggs?” she said on remote. I told her over easy.

“You’re not from ‘round here,” she said with all the curiosity a million same-same orders could generate.

She banged a mug in front of me and slopped hot brown liquid into it. Minutes later, a plate of bacon and eggs slid in front of me like it had just made safe on home base.

I gulped more caffeine and chased it down with bacon, desperate for high-speed protein. I glanced out the vapor-wiped windows, caught a glimpse of congealing sunlight.

The cops arrived. They had likely tagged me with their drones at the city limits and had chop edited my progress, block by block. They slid into my booth.

“Max Beckett?” said one. His face was still tight and swollen from a Puerto Rican vacation and back street cosmetic surgery package.

“Is that a question or an answer?” I said.

The other was younger with a blocky Swedish look. Someone had chiseled his bone structure, too, and it wasn’t God.

He flashed his tin.

“Yeah, I know you’re not the Mormons,” I said.

They were cops but not the upstanding types. Most Lost City fiefdoms employed private police forces to ostensibly maintain law and order. There was no cop on the public purse. That meant law and order was available to the highest bidder.

And justice was largely dispensed on the streets at the whim of the badge holder. The distinction between cop and crim was a grey area that suited Lost City just fine.

“What brings you here, aside from that old fossil fuel burner?” the older cop said.

“I’m just a citizen exercising his right to go about his business. And I love your nightlife.”

“We know you’re with the militia, Beckett. Anything happens that smells, we’re coming for you. Piece of advice: get in that heap of shit and head back to New Tijuana. While you can,” the older cop said.

On some kind of telepathic agreement, they slid out of the booth. The Swede headed for the door, but the older one looked back, ready to hang a postscript.

“Enjoy your very brief holiday. I’m sure we won’t be seeing you again.”

Then they were gone. I think the Swede drank my coffee. I signaled a refill.

I shifted in my seat, felt the hard lump under my armpit. I was glad of the pistol, even if it had been stamped out of cheap Chinese steel on a home-made printer less than 24 hours ago.

My hand-held vibrated. I pulled it. Read. And swore out loud, earning a dark look from June.

Shoals of white burn out drifted through my brain. I clutched the formica tabletop for balance. My head felt like wet, brittle steel with a blind rattle. My brain started spinning hieroglyphic hymns with dead rhymes. Nothing theory collided with matter landscapes and morphed into hatch maggots.

I learned I had taken on a job to kill the man who effectively owned Lost City, the legendary warlord, Kim Sung. If I had any neurons capable of talking to one another they would have said: Get your ass out of there and don’t stop running. That’s the trouble with being a soldier; however suicidal the order, you know you’re going to see it through. But Williams had really dropped me in it this time – this was a mission that should take months to plan. I had days or hours, depending on when I could get my act together.

I paid June with crypto credits and headed out. I looked back. She was gazing at them as though they were Jack’s magic beans.

I gunned the Mustang through a shoal of takeaway containers, set my GPS and cruised through streets filled with make-up meat and cold-eyed scam artists.

**

The bar that held my contact was the seediest, meanest hangout for lowlife in Lost City. The Rasta Saki Bar. I nodded to the junkyard dog muscle on the door and headed inside. The dreadlocked Japanese barkeep changed gears when he saw me.

“Mambo Ahmad,” I said. I dealt him a fifty crypto credit. He didn’t look up, just rolled a joint from one corner of his lip to the other to indicate the end of the bar. I saw a guy who looked like he’d just surfed a particle accelerator. There was a free spot between him and a drunk. I perched myself on the spare, torn vinyl.

“Any man who lusts after her has to be steroid crazy or suffering brain burn.”

The drunk was watching sugar media faces, white-capping from the Babylon box. A news stream was filing, featuring a short, slim, well-dressed smiling Asian man shadowed by a heavily-armed woman in second skin, head-to-toe, black.

The drunk’s statement charged a blue metallic tang into the atmosphere that you could taste on your tongue.

“The smell of fear comes in cheaper places than this, my friends,” he said, looking around, nodding and licking his lips. His face a blur of pixels, his voice threatening fractals of sound.

He was talking about the woman known as Ichiban Ninja. They said no man in Lost City had ever seen her face except Kim Sung.

But I saw something, something that suggested another truth. I said nothing, but inwardly my heart was screaming.

To my right, Mambo Ahmad looked like something that slept in the trees and smelled like it, too. He ordered a shot of spliced black market stem cells and Bulgarian vodka.

I watched as the icy cold liquid hit his system running and could almost see it shock his fibres into a bad nerve tattoo.


“Ahmad? Max Beckett.”



“Keep your voice down,” he said in a whisper.

“I’ve got the latest Arctic Warfare Magnum for you. Best sniper rifle in the world. I’m going to need fifty thousand in crypto credits.”

“When can you deliver?” I looked around. The drunk was searching starscapes.

“Transfer the credits and it’s yours.”

Moments later, Ahmad’s device buzzed. He glanced at the screen and nodded. We left together and transferred a package from his vehicle to mine.

I drove the Mustang toward a hilltop zen garden of ornamental twisted steel cable.

**

I knew the weapon well, used it regularly during the Ruination. I lay down in some scrub with a view of the city skyline and quickly assembled it.

Ideally, I would have had time to sight it properly. This time, I was going to have to rely on its optics and AI for a one-shot kill.

Suddenly, I was bathed in a beam of light.

“Hey, Beckett, no loitering or are you looking for a boyfriend?”

I recognised the cop voice and sarcasm, but this wasn’t a time for debate. I could imagine both had guns drawn.

I rolled into the darkness, pulling the printed pistol from my shoulder holster and hoped like hell it worked. Shots rang out, some ploughed into the dirt alongside me, but the torch beams whipped skyward and two grunts told me I’d scored. The cops were holding their guts when I double tapped both. Then my hand-held buzzed and the world turned on its head again.

**

Next day, I was on top of a scraper about two kilometres from the police checkpoint at Melrose and LaBrea. Every incoming vehicle stopped and every occupant exited for a full ID check.

Four black SUVs pulled up at exactly 8am. A door opened and Ichiban Ninja slid out and scanned. It was almost as if she was looking directly at me. She nodded to someone. The next moment the cross hairs filled and I squeezed the trigger.

**

I strode into the Cantina Maria. Bodyguards were diagonal to where Williams sat. I shot them while they were still pulling. The bar emptied. I sat opposite my paymaster. He slowly placed a beer onto the tabletop.

“Great to see you back, Beckett, and well done,” he said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.

“Thanks to you, Ichiban Ninja is now running Lost City, which means the militia is running Lost City.”

“You made one mistake, though, Williams. You told her you were going to have me cleaned up,” I said.

His eyes widened slightly in surprise. I slid across the hand-held.

“Squeeze that photo wider,” I said. It was of Ichiban Ninja. He did.

“See the locket she wears?” I opened my shirt and pulled out a chain.

“See – half a heart there and half a heart here. Your finest agent – we used to work together, but we were more than that. Much more. She didn’t take kindly to you wanting to double cross me. How’s your luck? I said. I let him dwell on that for a second. Then I shot him in the face.

“Not good,” I said. And left the bar.

I jumped into the Mustang and rejoined the radiator jazz. I kissed my half of the locket.

I was on my way back to Lost City to mend a broken heart