The diary of Walker, Elven Face, Spoilers for fast food fight. Options

[FuelDrop]

I’m starting this diary on a hunch that it’ll help me connect some dots in the near future. I’m not sure why I think that will be necessary, but provided no-one finds this thing then no harm done.

17/10/2070. First entry: Hostage rescue at McHughs.
I’ll be honest I’ve had a bit of a stingy run of jobs lately, with Knight Errant taking over the Seattle contract and actually being competent. Hopefully that won’t last too long. So when I got a call from Last Chance telling me that one of his fellow street-docs was in a bit of a bind I figured “Why not? It’ll help pay the rent… right?”
The client’s name was George Hampton, a Shaman who’d fallen behind on his protection payments. The local muscle had taken his daughter as a hostage, and he couldn’t afford the ransom. To be honest, if it hadn’t been for the young girl’s life hanging in the balance I’d have walked out right then and there. I’m not a charity, after all!
This was also when I got to meet my partner for this job, a dwarf with more muscle than brains who went by the name of Elas. A quick description: Short, Bearded, Reeking, and packing a sawnoff shotgun under his armoured jacket. I seemed to recall something about this guy being trouble, but with the fast turnover of rookie runners in this city I couldn’t be certain it was this guy the rumors spoke of. Best to assume it was, just to be on the safe side.

So we take the job, despite Elas’s suspicions that our employer wasn’t going to pay up. Seriously, if the meet takes place in the guy’s place of business, and the purpose of the job relates to his inability to pay protection, what kind of moron would he have to be to then try and stiff the runners their payment? We literally know where he lives! Our first lead is a guy named Vic, who tends to hang out at the local McHughs. Normally I’d ask my rigger buddy Yagar to stake the place out for me with a couple of discreet drones, but considering the shoestring budget we were working for I’d probably have ended up losing money. Anyway, time was of the essence.

So we park our vehicles a bit up from the McHughs and walk the rest of the way. Elas has a roadmaster which I swear he lives out of, explaining his lack of basic hygiene.
Note to self: Never set foot in that vehicle. Ever.
The entrance to the McHughs contains our first obstacle. A metal detector. Now I tend to travel fairly light, with a streetline special and a silenced Colt America in a shielded holster being my default loadout. Elas, on the other hand, was packing a sawnoff shotgun and more likely than not some heavy duty combat ‘ware.
Luckily, sabotage is one of my many talents.
I pretended to trip as we reached the metal detector and snagged a few important-looking wires as I stood back up. It worked, and we got into the place without setting anything off. Our target was sitting at a corner table, wearing a fairly nice suit and eating a burger. Kind of a pity he’d let so much grease dribble down his chin, as it ruined the whole ‘professional mobster’ look he had going. We ordered to avoid suspicion, Elas grabbing the biggest and greasiest Beast burger on the menu while I elected for a slightly less stomach-churning salad. In retrospect I doubt that anything on that menu wouldn’t give you a bad case of every food-related ailment known to medical science.
I begin my approach on the target, casually asking if there was anyone sitting with him and would he mind if I joined him. Most guys wouldn’t complain about an attractive young lady showing an interest in them, but tonight my charms fell completely flat and I was rudely dismissed. I did notice that every member of the McHughs staff showed an unusual amount of interest in the exchange, and several reached for concealed weapons before I backed off. Not a complete loss, then.

As Elas and I sat down and began plotting over our comms for a new angle of attack one of the other patrons walked up and pulled a gun on our target. He barely managed to get a shot off before Elas dropped him with a blast from his sawn-off… so that when the staff looked up all they saw was a dwarf with a shotgun and their buddy (I found out later that about ¾ of the staff here are related. I should have realized, half of them looked imbred) clutching his chest where he’d been shot.
There was no way this was ending well for us.
The fight that followed was mercifully brief. Elas may look like he can’t count above ten but that dwarf knows how to mess things up. The only survivors were the civilians (a father, his daughter, and a student, all of whom had the good sense to hide beneath their tables with their arms around their heads and wait for the noise to go away), the security guard, and Vic himself, and the latter two only made it because I was loaded out with stick-and-shock. One quick interrogation later and Vic had told me everything, from the girl’s location to his family’s antics about the local businesses. Some cunning redirection made it look like we’d been hired by the guy who started the fight (Vic was too shocked at being shot to remember exactly how things had played out, and considering the mess Elas made of the rest of the staff no-one was still breathing to contradict us), and to play the role up to the hilt we left with the girl (Moxie) as a hostage rather than a rescued victim.

Our client was very happy that we got his little girl back, and most appreciative that we’d managed to divert suspicion away from him in the process. I managed to wrangle some extra cash out of him for the information about his woes being more malign than a mere run of bad luck, and we parted on good terms. It may take a bit of digging, but I’m sure I can find someone who’ll pay good money for the rest of the information Vic graciously provided.

Final memo: Find new brand of temporary hair dye.