Hunting Mink Read online

  Coming in low and behind, Cygnus swept over the roof of the trailing car, drew back a fist, dropped lower over the hood, and slammed her fist down and through the sheet metal. Then she felt around for anything that felt like a cable and yanked it out through the hole she had made. The car’s engine gave a cough and died, and Cygnus powered ahead to the next car.

  The occupants had seen what she had done to their opponents and, being typical of the criminal fraternity which seemed to flow into New Millennium, they started concentrating their fire on the leggy blonde in the barely-there costume. Nine-mil slugs felt like gnat bites to her, but they were annoying. She lifted a little, flew over the top of the SUV, lifted both arms, and caved in the roof over the driver. The car wobbled alarmingly, swerved hard left, and turned over, tumbling down the street for a hundred yards, scattering safety glass fragments as it went, before coming to a stop on its side.

  With a sigh, Cygnus checked over her shoulder to be sure the cops were handling the first car without trouble, and then she flew over to see if anyone in the second was still conscious. It was not entirely impossible that she had killed someone in there, but with the way things were shaping up this weekend, she thought she could probably handle that. At least until she had time to think about it. Dropping onto the car’s side, she reached down and yanked the rear door off its hinges, tossing it aside before looking in.

  ‘Anyone still–’ She stopped as a hailstorm of lead came up from the interior and hammered into her chest. Jacketed slugs flattened against her large breasts, pancaked entirely against her sternum. She closed her eyes and waited for the bullets to stop, and then looked down at the bleeding man, lying on top of his colleague, as he tried desperately to find another magazine. ‘Are you entirely demented?’ Cygnus asked him. ‘Maybe the blow to your head has eradicated whatever sense you had. I’m fucking bulletproof, you moron!’

  The gunman tossed his gun aside and coughed. ‘Amerikanskiy suka,’ he half-mumbled.

  Cygnus reached down into the car, grabbed the man’s jacket, and yanked him up and out. Then she punched him in the nose. ‘I know what that means, mudak.’

  ~~~

  Twilight watched the grenade bouncing down the corridor toward her, closed her eyes, and sighed. There was the sound and the light, and she felt the floor vanishing from under her feet, but it was dark in the corridor and she was just a mass of shadow: gravity was not an issue.

  ‘Yeah,’ Andrea said, ‘but now we have nothing to walk on.’

  ‘I should cut his head off for the inconvenience,’ Twilight replied, looking down to where the grenade’s owner was picking himself up off the carpet. He had, apparently, misjudged the effect of letting off explosives in a confined space. Flicking out a hand, she tossed a pair of shadow darts into his chest and watched as he fell, curling up on the floor.

  ‘I can’t hear any more gunfire,’ Andrea said.

  Taking a short port and a very long step to where there was solid ground, Twilight bent to check her latest victim’s pulse. Not exactly strong, but it was there. ‘Might be he was the last. This is the last corridor and we’re close to the end.’

  Twilight moved down to the last door because there was a dim light showing under it. It was nowhere near bright enough to stop her, but it indicated that someone was probably in there. And the door being unlocked was another sign, so Twilight opened it and her shadows flowed into the room beyond, killing the light as they went.

  ‘That’s far enough!’ The voice was male, and it sounded desperate. ‘Come any closer and they get it!’

  There were four people in the room. The owner of the voice had a handgun, a .38 Special, and a wound in his left shoulder. From the way he was holding his left arm, it was basically useless, but he was waving his pistol at a woman and two kids, a boy and a girl, huddled together and sobbing in the way kids do when they knew what fear is. What had taught them that was not Twilight’s immediate concern.

  The shadows pulled back and Twilight stepped out of them. ‘If you kill them, I’m going to make sure you spend your entire time in prison eating your meals through a straw. And you know you can’t stop me, so it looks like we have something of a stalemate.’

  ‘That’s right, so you stay back.’

  ‘Except that you’re bleeding. I can smell it, taste it. You’re bleeding out. Maybe fifteen minutes, probably less. You must’ve been hit before I entered the building.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, all I have to do,’ Twilight said, her voice getting softer as she went on, ‘is wait. I wait for you to fall over and the only person who gets hurt is you.’

  The gunman blinked. ‘It’s going to be a lot less than fifteen minutes,’ Andrea said.

  ‘Look, Marco,’ Twilight went on, and the gun shifted, pointing at her, which was better.

  ‘How’d you know my name?’ Marco asked.

  ‘I know a lot of David Tonaldo’s people. I used to watch him pretty closely. He was the only real game in town after Ghostfire died.’

  ‘Then that bitch came and it all went to shit. Jonny’s in prison. We tried to get Tonaldo’s son in. We practically begged him to come in and take over his father’s empire. He’s family… Someone got to him. He just vanished.’

  ‘David Junior is in Italy, with Lena, and quite safe. I arranged it. Got him and his family out over a month ago. He’s helping Lena handle something for me. He never wanted any of this, and I’m seeing to it that he doesn’t need to worry about it. If we don’t get some paramedics to look at you soon, Marco, you’re not going to have to worry about it either. Give me the gun.’

  ‘Well… shit,’ Marco said, and then he lowered the pistol, letting it hang from one finger for Twilight to take.

  ‘That’s a win,’ Andrea said.

  Twilight stepped forward and took the revolver from Marco’s hand. ‘Yeah,’ she replied silently, ‘this one worked out okay. Not sure about some of the others I took out on the way up.’ She stepped over to the window, looked out, and yelled, ‘We’re clear. Get some paramedics up here, pronto.’

  ‘They decided to start a war,’ Andrea said. ‘In a war, there are casualties. Hopefully, mostly among the bad guys.’

  ‘You know I’m supposed to be the one coming out with that kind of line, right?’

  ‘I know. Thinking like you is the only way I’m going to get through this, so I figured I might as well supply the platitudes.’

  ‘And there I was trying to be reassuring.’

  ‘Nights like this, reassurance is kind of pointless. What’s the next disaster we need to deal with?’

  San Francisco, CA.

  Chinatown was still busy at two in the morning. People walked the streets, hopping between the drinking establishments which were still open, as well as a few less salubrious entertainment venues. The Nine Kings tong ran plenty of places outside their supposed home turf, but they still had many of their more prestigious operations here, and for those who knew what to find and where, almost any form of vice could be obtained in those houses.

  Mink was only interested in one fairly nondescript building located in a back alley off Clay Street. It looked like any number of apartment buildings in the area, and there were actually apartments on the upper floors: six of them, all occupied by members of the tong who acted as security for the activities on the floors below.

  Getting in was fairly trivial. Mink located one of the apartments where the resident thug was on duty or otherwise out, cut the window glass to get to the catch, and slipped inside from the fire escape. She was not worried about her intrusion being discovered, not with what she had planned.

  Her high-heeled boots were silent as she stepped out of the apartment and into the corridor beyond, senses straining to detect any sign of life around her. She paused outside a door, listening. Three male voices. They were playing cards and it seemed a shame to interrupt them… for now anyway. Mink moved on down the corridor to the stairwell at the end where she stopped again to listen. Silence; not
an unsurprising situation given that the front door was closed and locked. Smiling, she started down the stairs.

  The upper floors were used to handle distribution and were empty now. Picking the locks on a couple of offices took little time and netted a complete list of the current street vendors selling the new drug which was carefully photographed using the micro-camera she carried tucked inside her costume. They were starting to ship outside the city, it seemed: there were dealers listed in San Diego and Los Angeles, but the records indicated that the new drug had only begun shipping there within the last week. That definitely suggested that this was the primary distribution point, but she was pretty sure it was more than that.

  She heard a boot scrape on concrete as she got to the top of the last flight of stairs. There was someone on the floor below, almost certainly a guard and likely the one who now had a hole in his window. She took her rope dart, with its odd metallic cord, from where she carried it as a belt around her hips, looping the end of the rope around her left hand and letting the silver dart hang on a couple of feet of cord from her right. Then she moved down, twirling the weapon slowly as she descended.

  The guard spotted her as she set foot on the floorboards at the bottom. His eyes widened: every member of the Nine Kings tong knew Mink, at least by description. They both feared and hated her, and for good reason given that whenever she came calling, they knew their criminal career was, at minimum, about to take a severe downturn. He went for his gun, which told Mink he was not too high up the ranks: the more experienced of them knew not to try shooting at her. He was maybe five yards away and she turned, spinning as she stepped closer, and then set her dart loose. It punched through his jacket and shirt, and into the flesh of his right bicep. It was hardly a lethal strike, but the man’s eyes rolled back and he was slumping to the floor even as Mink yanked her weapon back. The dart only carried a couple of doses of the drug, but it was effective. She stepped over the sleeping guard and into the lab he was supposed to be watching over.

  It was very high-tech for something hidden away in a ratty apartment block basement. Benches with various types of chemical apparatus occupied the back while machines of some sort took up much of the room nearer the door. Mink figured these were automated processors of some sort: they had industrialised the production process.

  There was a burst of rapid-fire Cantonese from the back of the room: someone was asking why the guard had entered the room, and whether there was a problem. Mink started through the machines and a second later, a head appeared looking down toward her. She almost smiled: a Chinese man with buck teeth and bottle-bottom glasses working in a drug lab?

  ‘You cannot be here! Why are you here? You must leave now!’ All in Chinese, all spoken with words that tumbled over each other. The man was in a lab coat, working away in front of various kinds of glassware and Bunsen burners. Mink’s dart whipped out, smacking the chemist on the side of the head and knocking his glasses off. ‘Yah! What do you want?’

  ‘Not from around here, are you?’ Mink replied.

  ‘You are an Ultra. You cannot be here.’ The word he used, Guàiwù, meant monster or freak and it was the commonest Chinese word for Ultrahumans. Mink found it offensive, even if she was not one.

  ‘My name is Mink, and I’m not an Ultrahuman, but I don’t like that word.’ Her dart flicked out again, and glass shattered in a wide arc over the workbench. Flames burst up as the chemist burst into angry shrieks. He turned hard eyes to Mink which widened as he saw what she was pulling from her costume. She smiled at him, pulled the pin from the small grenade she was holding, and said, ‘Run.’

  Mink followed him at walking pace as he ran for the door. The fire on the workbench was really starting to set in, but she wanted the lab thoroughly trashed, so she tossed the grenade back in and closed the door behind her before dragging the sleeping guard toward the stairs. The explosives were not powerful in themselves, but the incendiary filling would make the room into an inferno pretty quickly and she did not want the man caught in the flames, even if he probably deserved that fate. The guard began to stir and she dropped him. If he was awake, he could run, and she had better places to be, like out of here. She hit the stairs as a dull thump announced the detonation of the grenade.

  The chemist had got to the top floor. You could tell that because of the running feet on the stairs above. Mink turned for the back of the building where there was another door onto a narrower alley. Her dart swung up, the cord extending as it flew, to loop around a pole fifteen feet in the air. She jumped and the line snapped back, propelling her upward to catch the pole, swing up and balance on top of it in a smooth, practised action. Another jump powered by the strangely elastic rope and she was catching the edge of the roof, and then up onto it, and then there was no chance that anyone was following her.

  Another successful operation. Another job done with no one spotting Mink aside from the bad guys, and she did not care about them. She wanted the criminals to know who had destroyed their lab. It was everyone else that Mink hid from.

  New Millennium City, MD.

  ‘They’re calling it the Red Weekend,’ June said. She was perched on one of the sofas in the lounge with the big TV showing ACPN, a network which specialised in live and recorded crime reports. Their helicopters had been very, very busy. The cushion June had been cuddling for most of the night now lay beside her because her housemates were home, unharmed.

  ‘That’s… unoriginal,’ Andrea said. She was slumped on the other sofa, still in most of her costume. The mask was gone and Twilight was taking a well-deserved rest in the back of Andrea’s mind. ‘I think it was more orange and black, personally.’

  ‘Do you think it’s over?’

  ‘Hard to tell.’ Penny was belting her wrap around herself as she walked out of her bedroom. Glasses perched on her nose, she was now far from the shape of the stunningly attractive Cygnus, and oh so glad of it. ‘Things have cooled off out there, and I’m hoping we get some sleep now, but they might kick off again later. Pretty sure we haven’t locked them all up. Also pretty sure the ones we didn’t get weren’t all killed by the others.’ She dropped indecorously onto the sofa beside June. ‘Did we lose anyone?’

  June gave a little grimace. ‘David Chou. He was shot six times trying to save a hostage. They declared him DoA at the hospital, but I think taking him there at all was wishful thinking.’

  ‘Oh,’ Penny said. She did not like the leader of the Walter Knights: he had refused to train Cygnus when Penny had first got her powers, but then she would never have met Bobby Lee if he had said yes… ‘The hostage?’

  ‘Skadi was there. Chou refused to let her help, made her wait outside, but she took the guy out with one arrow after Chou was shot.’

  Penny closed her eyes to stop herself rolling them. ‘I’m having a lot of trouble stopping myself making comments about poetic justice.’

  ‘I’ll make them for you. Chou was the only hero hurt, that I’ve heard of, but three cops are dead, another twenty or so injured. It’s been a bad night. I was worried about you. Both of you. Hell, I was even worried about Dom and Skadi.’

  ‘We were in absolutely no danger,’ Andrea said. ‘Neither was Dom. None of the goons out there were armed for Ultras.’

  ‘Skadi nearly got herself shot,’ Penny said. ‘I ran into Dom at one point. She had to rescue Skadi when some guy got the drop on her. Red gave her such a chewing out for not being more careful.’

  June really tried to keep the grin off her face. ‘Oh. What a shame. Not that I want her getting shot, and the make-up sex is probably going to be wild, but I can’t feel sorry for her getting yelled at.’

  ‘Don’t see why you should,’ Andrea said. ‘She stole your girlfriend. And when you two finally stop pussyfooting around and get on with it, I hope you remember it was Skadi that made it possible.’ She knew she had hit with that one when both Penny and June blushed.

  ‘How’s Jacob?’ June asked, hoping to deflect the conversation.

>   ‘The UID were helping the NMCPD. I ran into Jacob and Heather at an apartment block siege.’

  ‘I saw that on ACPN. How many did you take down in there?’

  ‘Twenty, twenty-five. I stopped bothering to count.’

  ‘And three hostages rescued.’

  ‘Yeah… That was a good one. Mostly it was just scaring or beating assholes. Jacob seemed to be doing okay. I’ll call him when I can think straight. I’d imagine he’s in bed by now. I sure hope so.’

  ‘You should get some rest yourself.’

  ‘We all should,’ Penny said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Andrea agreed, ‘but I don’t think I can move.’

  ‘Oh. Uh… maybe I shouldn’t have changed back. With super-strength, I might have been able to crawl to bed myself.’

  June looked between them. ‘Well, I’m not carrying either of you.’

  ‘Meany.’

  San Francisco, CA.

  Detective Damian Inman looked up at the apartment building in Chinatown and shook his head. ‘Robson, do you hate me for some reason?’ he asked wearily.

  ‘No, sir,’ Robson, the patrol officer who had called in Narcotics and Vice, replied. He sounded a little perplexed. ‘I went in with the firefighting team and we found what looks a lot like a drug lab in the basement, where the fire started, and I figured–’

  ‘Look up at this building and tell me what you see, Robson.’

  ‘Uh… It’s a three-storey building, brick construction. Signage in Chinese–’

  ‘Exactly. It’s a drug lab in Chinatown. So if I even walk into this building, TAATF will chew me out. They’re on their way already, you can put money on it. I’m amazed they didn’t get here before me. Anything related to the tongs is theirs.’ Inman sighed. ‘How did the fire start?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Out with it, Robson.’

  ‘One of the ones we caught says he saw Mink.’

  Inman’s face darkened. ‘Mink… He’s sure?’

  ‘It sounded like her, but the description was a bit… basic. Short black hair, some sort of mask, and there were a lot of comments about breasts.’