Honor

“It’s easy to disappear on the streets.” Her tone was cold but I could see a sharp intelligence shining out of her dark gaze.

“It is. It’s also easy to go missing from the streets and have no one realize you’re gone.”

The girl bit down on her lip and looked up at Stark like maybe he would be her lifeline. The tattooed hacker touched the mark on his forehead and muttered, “You’re a goddamn girl” while shaking his head. Seeing that Stark wasn’t going to be any help, she turned her attention back to me.

“Look, I’ve been living on the streets and on the run since I was just a kid. I know the rules in a place like this and the top one is look out for yourself first. When I heard Nassir Gates was looking for whoever helped someone get inside his new club, I knew enough money and big enough threats were going to get passed around that my name was going to come up. I just figured I would have some fun on my way here.”

Stark grunted. “You stole all my shit.”

She tilted her head back at him and grinned and I could see that she was probably a stunner under all that dirt and grime that covered her from head to toe. I could see that Stark saw it as well. Suddenly he took a step back from the chair like the girl occupying it was toxic.

“You had great stuff. There’s nothing like a guy that knows his processors.”

“If you were going to come in to see Nassir anyway, why did you jump me? Why did you punch me in the face and hit me with a lamp?” Now Stark sounded like a petulant kid.

She lifted up her shoulders and let them fall. I tried not to grimace at the cloud of dust that her move released. “You grabbed me. I don’t like to be touched.”

He barked out a swearword and his entire face flushed red. “You broke into my home and hijacked all my stuff. Of course I grabbed you.” He sounded so exasperated that the entire thing would’ve been hilarious if I had more time and any kind of patience at all. “You don’t need me anymore, do you, Gates? I need to get out of here.”

I shook my head and told him to go, which left me alone with the girl. Her demeanor changed when we were alone but there was still a defiance about her that reminded me of my favorite ex-stripper. This girl was filthy. She smelled bad. She was obviously trying to downplay her gender, and yet she couldn’t help but radiate confidence and her own kind of feminine power. It was the fight that always appealed to me.

“Tell me who the guy really is and I’ll make it worth your while.”

She snorted at me and scooted to the edge of the chair. “Are you kidding? The stuff I jacked from your tattooed friend will feed me and put a roof over my head for a few months. I just want you to leave me alone and forget what I look like and any part I played in Tyler messing with your club.”

I leaned back in my chair and considered her for a moment. “Agreed . . . and you called him Tyler. Is that his real name?”

She threw herself back in the chair and I tried not to wince. I was going to have to hose the thing down when she was gone or maybe even burn it.

“Yeah. He’s a friend of a friend. I know a few squatters and some gutter punks that like to come in and out of town on the trains, and one of them tracked me down saying he had a friend that needed help. I only mess around for people that really seem to need it. Kids on the run from shitty parents. Kids getting bounced from foster home to foster home because the dad had grabby hands. Occasionally I get a rich kid a fake ID, but that’s only if I’m in dire straits. Anyway, my buddy says he knows Tyler from some shows and the kid has it really rough at home.”

She was talking so fast it was almost hard to keep up with her, but I noticed she’d referred to my interloper as a kid, making me wonder how old she was. She looked like she couldn’t be more than sixteen or seventeen.

“The dad’s a bully and the mom’s long gone. My buddy says Tyler has a couple sisters at home and the dad has been creeping on them in a totally unparental way, so he asks me to help the guy out. Says the kid just needs a decent job where he can earn some money and move himself and the sisters out of the house. So he brings the kid around so I can make him an ID. Only when he brings the kid around, I realize real quick that he isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. If I made him documents with a different name, he was gonna get busted in five seconds, so I found someone with a similar name and borrowed their identity for him.”

“Tyler Finch is his real name?” I was a little confused by her story, mostly because she told it like the words couldn’t get out of her mouth fast enough.

She shook her head and the stench of unwashed human and the sour smell that simply was the Point, which permeated anyone that survived on the streets here, hit me right in the nose. I must have made a face or indicated my distaste in some way because she grinned and it was all kinds of twisted and sharp.

“When you sleep under a bridge or behind a Dumpster, people treat you like the rest of the discarded trash that litters the ground. When you look like shit and smell even worse, the probability of anyone grabbing you and trying to make you do things you don’t want to do goes way down.” One of her feathery eyebrows winged up in a haughty look. “And no, his name was close, but I can’t remember it exactly. It sounded like Finch. I can’t tell you where he is because I don’t know. I did my job, took the two hundred he paid me, and forgot about him until I heard you were looking for someone that manipulated an ID to get a job in your club. I knew it had to be Tyler.” She held her hands up and shrugged at me. “I obviously don’t own a computer, so it’s not like I could have scanned his info in a file I can just e-mail to you.”