Reboots: Diabolical Streak Read online

  The Boggart sat there for a few minutes, staring at the wall and catching his breath. The adrenaline had finally worn off, and he felt like he was another couple of hundred years older. Tiredly, he fumbled under the sink until his fingers wrapped around a roughly cylindrical object. Thanks be for small favors. A small bottle of single malt scotch was taped and stashed under the sink. Uncorking it with his teeth, Humph took a belt from it. And then another. In a few moments, the bottle was half empty, but the Boggart didn’t even feel a buzz, just a marginal relaxation and warmth spreading from his middle outward. Adrenaline—or whatever it was in his system that passed for it—had eaten most of the effect. Now I can think.

  The absolute last thing that the Boggart expected was for the landline phone to ring. It took him a moment, but he realized that it wasn’t his comm unit. That’s when the stab of fear hit him, for the first time. It was the phone line for the safe house; all these rooms had an old-fashioned phone, the sort of arrangement that someone who didn’t want his conversations out on the airwaves to picked up by anyone with the proper equipment appreciated. No one, not even Jim and Fred, had this number. The line kept ringing, persistently. Slowly, the Boggart picked up the receiver for it, his mouth dry before he breathed, “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mr. Boggart.”

  Humph put some steel in his voice. “Who is this?”

  “I represent parties that are interested in offering you a one-time-only deal. It will not be repeated after this communication, and there will be no junctures for future communication.” The voice had been run through an anonymizer. Every possible inflection had been taken out. Robots sounded more human than this.

  “What’s the deal?” Caution was in order here. Whoever it was had somehow tracked him down and knew where he was and that he had Harry. That in and of itself was no mean feat; Humph was pretty damned good at what he did, and no one should have been able to find him here at this safe house. Which meant whoever it was probably had the ability to do whatever he said he could do.

  “Give us Mr. Somerfield. You’ll be able to walk away from this, free and clear, and be given a very large remuneration for your troubles thus far.”

  Humph was silent for a moment, weighing the offer. “And if I don’t give him to you?”

  “The alternative will be…unpleasant.”

  That means they’ll kill me. Humph thought it through. The kid was nothing to him; he didn’t know him, and it wasn’t like he owed him anything, much less his life. Whoever was after the kid was serious about getting him; they were willing to kill, but also willing to throw large bundles of money at the problem if that’s what it took. This case had already turned out to be more of a headache than it was worth; if he took this deal and whoever was offering it kept their end of it, he could get away clean with a stack of cash. It was a good play; even if the other side didn’t honor their arrangement, he still had a better shot of living through the situation if he didn’t have the kid around.

  There was another voice, no less clear, that told him he wasn’t going to take the deal. These pricks had tried to kill him, as a matter of course. Humph usually didn’t let little things like that slide. Attempts on his life pissed him off, if nothing else. It was bad for business, too; no use letting it get around that just anyone could decide to take him down. The more he thought about it, the more he decided that he wanted to find out why someone had figured bumping him off was a good idea. Besides, he had taken a job; he’d signed on the proverbial dotted line, accepted the first payment. Once he was bought, it was a point of honor with him to stay bought. He wasn’t just “a Boggart,” he was “the Boggart” for a damned good reason; when he took a job, it got done, no matter what.

  “The answer is no.”

  “Very well.” The line disconnected with a click.

  The Boggart sat there wondering if he had just made a huge mistake; in any case, it was too late now. He was going to have to follow this line to the end.

  ***

  He tried the office again. Nada. A very, very bad sign. A sign that the Boggart and his firm had both been set up. He turned on the vidscreen, keeping the volume low, and keyed in the Crime Channel, which showed rolling live reports of criminal activity based on your area. Immediately he knew that all of his fears were justified.

  “…a heinous deed has taken place not more than two hours ago. We’re here at the scene where the police are busy interviewing witnesses and sending in crime scene investigators. It appears that we have another in the latest rash of Para-on-Human violence; a local Boggart has been implicated in the kidnapping of one Harry Somerfield, the heir to Somerfield Botanicals. From what our sources have divulged, the Boggart in question stormed Mr. Somerfield’s room, killing two of his security detail and subduing two others before abducting him. Police state that the office which is the Boggart’s only known address has been raided, but there was no sign of where the Boggart, Mr. Somerfield, or any accomplices are. Police ask for the help of the community for any information—”

  Humph shut off the vidscreen in disgust. Well, fuck. There was no doubt about it now; he was being framed, and the setup had maybe been in place from the get-go, somehow. This sort of frame job didn’t just happen in the blink of an eye; a not-so-insignificant amount of prep work had gone into this. Those goons had been trying to kill both of them, not to mention the snipers that had done their level best to make mincemeat out of Harry from the opener; no way were they part of any “security detail.” The newsfeed didn’t bode well for Fred and Jim, either; if the cops had them, it would have said so. They were probably either dead or taken by whoever was behind this cluster. Maybe, maybe, they had gotten away, but if they had, they were in the wind and might as well be dead, for all the help they would be; the “lifeguard’s rule” of “you have to save yourself first” was one all three of them knew well. Everything was swirling around in his mind, and the Boggart was getting more and more pissed off with each passing second. It’s time for some goddamned answers. He took another quaff of whisky, then stood up and stomped over to the bed. Harry was just starting to come to.

  The Boggart roughly yanked Harry up, pinning him against the wall. He caught movement in the corner of his eye, and leaned out of the way as Harry swung the empty bottle at his head. He swatted it out of the playboy’s grasp, then gave him another light slap. “Only one sheet in the wind’s eye instead of all three now, huh? It’s time to talk, Harry.”

  Harry’s eyes went wide as they focused on Humph’s face. “Hey, wait a minute! Who are you? Where’d the other guy go? Are you one of the guys trying to kill me?”

  Humph realized he was wearing a different face than the one that Harry had met him wearing. Whoops. Well, this ought to finish sobering him up. He smiled…and then allowed his face to show, dropping the glamour. In the time it takes to blink an eye, Harry went from looking at the face of a boringly average human male to one that had a slightly feral cast, was black as coal, partially covered with short bristly fur, and had very sharp teeth in its smile. “Hi there, Harry. I’m the guy that saved your bacon back at the hotel. Meet the real me.”

  Harry’s knees buckled; he only remained standing because Humph was holding him against the wall. “Wh-who are you? Why w-were you after me?”

  “My name is Humphrey; just call me Humph. I was hired to find you by a tight-ass named Bevins; he seems to be under the impression that your mother cares about your half-in-the-bag ass and wants you back.” He let one hand off of Harry, putting up his index finger with the claw at the end of it rather close to Harry’s nose. “Now that we’re properly introduced, I’ve got some questions for you, Harold. I’m tired and more than a little pissed off, so I’d strongly suggest that you answer truthfully and quickly.”

  Harry, eyes still bugged wide-open and glued on the tip of Humph’s claw, nodded vigorously.

  “Good. I’m glad that we understand each other. First things first: Do you know those goons in the suits, the ones that were trying to
shuffle both of us off this mortal coil?” Harry shook his head, meeting Humph’s eyes. “All right. Do you have any clue as to why somebody would want to kill you?” Harry gulped audibly and shook his head again. “Strike one, asshole.” Humph slammed him against the wall, hard, and then brought the claw back up. “It’s your neck on the line, get it, jerk? More importantly, it’s my ass, too. And I’m not in any particularly big hurry to get scragged. So, let’s try this again. Why are there some heavily armed lugs trying to kill us?”

  Harry shook his head again, holding his hands up in front of himself defensively. “Honest, I don’t know! I don’t know why somebody would want me dead!”

  “Then why are you on the run, chump?”

  “On the run?’ Harry looked at him quizzically. “I’m not on the run. Who told you that?”

  Humph pushed him back up against the wall again. “I’m asking the questions right now. If you’re not on the run, why the prepaid cred cards, switching hotels, and all the trouble?”

  Harry started shaking like a leaf in the wind, and tried to make appeasing gestures with trembling hands. “All right, all right, take it easy. It’s just kind of my thing. With that moron Bevins always snooping around for Mother, it’s hard for a guy like me to have fun. Especially my kind of fun.” He shrugged, looking sheepish. “So I sneak out a couple of times a month to go slumming. I use those cards and stuff to keep Bevins from reporting back exactly what I’m spending my money on; I’d get cut off if Mother knew that I was still doing it. As for the hotels, a lot of the establishments on this wretched mudball are rather draconian when it comes to their policy on escorts—”

  “Okay, save it. I don’t need all of the gory details on what you do between the sheets.” There’s something more to this, there has to be. I’ve gotta keep digging. “You’re a rich kid, so kidnapping and ransom might’ve been a good fit if it weren’t for the fact that they were trying to carve you up the same as me, earlier. And this is too elaborate of a setup if someone was just trying to bump you off as part of a corporate rivalry deal. You must have pissed someone off somewhere down the line. Welched on a bet, or more than one? Got debts? Hit on the wrong man’s girl?”

  “Seriously, I don’t know! The worst trouble I’ve been in is getting thrown in the drunk tank a few times and wrecking a few hotel rooms!”

  The Boggart frowned. Something had to start adding up. “What about Bevins? He’s got a part in this, somehow. He hired me, set me on you. Someone would have to know that he did that, then get the cops to go along with the frame job. That takes time and money.”

  Harry looked around, searching for how to answer when his face went still; something had clicked for him. “Oh, god. They found out. That contemptuous bastard found out.” He was talking to himself at this point. “But no, there’s no way Mother would ever…would she? Let him kill me?”

  Humph shook Harry. “Would you like to share with the class, sport? I don’t like being held in suspense.”

  He looked at Humph again, his jaw somewhere in the vicinity of his ankles. “I-I stole. From the company. Well, one of the companies; just a small branch that no one pays attention to. I thought that no one would notice.”

  “You were skimming from your mother’s company?”

  “Hey, I’ve got needs! And Mother could cut off my allowance any time she feels like it. It was just for some extra walking-around money, honest!”

  Humph sighed heavily. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to let go of you, and you’re going to sit down on the bed and behave. You’re not going to do something stupid like try and run, right? It’d turn out painful for you and exhausting for me. Know this; people in this neighborhood ignore screams on general principle. OK?” Harry looked longingly at the door, but then nodded in resignation. Humph relaxed his grip on him, and he gloomily plodded the two steps over to the foot of the bed, sitting down hard. Humph took two steps of his own over to the sink, sitting down next to it and retrieving the bottle of single malt. He took a long pull from it and waited for several long moments before he started speaking. “So, let me put all of this together. You’re unhappy with whatever exorbitant amount of money that you get from your ma, so you start stealing a little extra on the side. Bevins finds out, tells her, and waits for you to go on one of your little trips. He hires me under the pretense of finding you to bring home, while he sets up an ambush to kill us both and pin the blame on me. That sound like the size of things?” He took another drink before passing the bottle to Harry. Harry shrugged disconsolately before accepting the whisky.

  “I don’t think Mother would ever try to have me killed. She’s been disappointed in me before, but this…”

  “No, there’s something more to this. I don’t buy it; it’s too much trouble for a punk like you, especially for what would probably be a trifling amount to your sort. How much did you steal, anyways?”

  Harry swallowed a mouthful of whisky, coughing roughly. “Just a couple of mil. It was for kicks, mostly.”

  “Yeah, that’s not enough for this kind of trouble. There’s something else going on.” He held his hand out for the bottle, taking another drink. “I knew I shouldn’t have taken this damned job; however hard up we were for money before, we sure as shit are worse off now.”

  They sat there in silence for a long time, passing the bottle back and forth between the two of them. Harry was the first one to speak, almost sheepish. “So…Humph, right?” The Boggart nodded. “What are you going to do?”

  Humph took another long drink, finishing off the bottle. “My office is torn up. Both of my partners are either dead, snatched by the goons, or on the run. You and I have all sorts of trouble on our heels, from cops with itchy trigger fingers to thugs in suits with expensive toys. And we have next to jack and shit in creds or other resources.” He stood up, dropping the empty bottle in the sink. “I aim to get to the bottom of this barrel of crap, and figure out who exactly dipped me in it. The who and the why of it, Harry. And you’re going to help me.” He held out his hand. “And to start with, you can hand over your wallet.”

  ***

  So far as resources went, things were looking up. One compartment of Harry’s wallet was stuffed with prepaid credit keys; when the Boggart asked why there were so many, he had just shrugged and said, “When they get down to a couple hundred, I just stash them in the pocket and forget about them unless I need to pay a cab. Then I just give him the whole chip. Easier that way.”

  Everything besides the cash wasn’t looking so hot. Humph only had a couple of disguises with him, all still in the van-pod. He could scrounge and come up with stuff on the fly if he had to, but he usually liked to have more options, especially if he was going to be heading into unknown territory. He didn’t have any of his usual array of gadgets that might help him out, either; stuff that Jim and Fred had bought off the shelf or doctored up on their own. Humph was used to working without them, but some of those gizmos could be mighty handy. His silver knuckles were still in his coat; you never knew when you’d be running into trouble involving Weres. Lastly, there was the ammunition for his revolver. He only had two speed loaders on him for the Webley-Fosbery; one that was regular plain-jane hollow points, while the other held specialty rounds. Humph had personally hand-loaded that last set; he called them “all-sorts” bullets. “They have a little bit of something for everyone.” They came in handy when he was dealing with some of the more exotic denizens of this universe. There was a little ammo stored at the hideout, but they probably wouldn’t be able to buy much ammo while on the run; all of the government-owned gun shops would be on the lookout for them, and everyone else would be looking at the two of them like they were steak dinner due to the reward that was no doubt attached for turning them in. Well, Humph, anyway. For Harry…well, if Humph’s gut instinct was right, there was a bounty on Harry, not a reward. That’d be something for headhunters, though; maybe a few dirty cops moonlighting as button men thrown in for variety.

  And they w
ere going to have to get out of here pretty quickly. It was unlikely that the goons after Harry would mount a daylight raid on this place, but the clock was ticking.

  He counted up the credit keys again. Must be nice to be rich. Humph had an application on his comm unit that let him scan keys for the total still on them; it was useful in his line of work. And Harry was an even bigger chump than Humph had thought. Most of those keys had not a couple hundred but a couple thousand. Harry must have left a lot of satisfied cabbies in his wake. That would pay for a lot of low-rent rooms, food-cart meals, and transport. He wondered if Harry had ever been on commuter transit. And if he could be trusted to keep his trap shut about the heat, the smell, and the crowding.

  Well, for now, they still had the van-pod. After he knew what they had to work with—and Humph had confiscated most of the keys so even if Harry pulled a runner and got away, the Boggart would still have some resources—it was on to the next stage. Because they couldn’t sit in this room, eating roach-coach meals and staring at the vidscreen, forever. Sooner rather than later, Harry would get over being scared of the Boggart, and start bitching because he’d never been in a capsule hotel before. And after about an hour of the rich bastard’s whining, Humph probably would kill him.

  Humph had gone through his address book—he was old-fashioned; he actually kept his contacts in a little, physical notebook, though it was digital storage rather than paper pages—about twenty times before he finally decided which favor he was going to call in. After a good long ponder, and checking things as best he could without triggering any alerts, he decided that it was probably safe to use the van-pod one last time. He’d have to ditch it after that though. Harry balked at the prospect of riding in it again; apparently he had been sick in it during their first trip. Tough luck, Harry. Humph made the concession of placing some old newspapers on top of the mess before he shoved Harry in. He then changed faces again before starting the cantankerous vehicle up.