The bar was becoming irritably busy for a night mid-week. The usual suited business types were swanning in through the front doors in groups of varying sizes, together with post-dinner couples and other more scrupulous individuals. The corporates typically stopped briefly within the doorway to survey the available furniture before masking their disappointment when none of the booths were available and eventually settling for the leather couches or small tables. The couples would pick the closest free table and sit down, and the more dubious patrons usually headed straight to the bar stools.
The bar itself was a u-shaped bench topped with polished wood and brass beer taps, with a silver foot rail underneath. The bartenders were all in neat black and white uniforms and displayed an admirable sense of professionalism as they lubricated the patrons.
The wall behind the bar was entirely made of glass, displaying a breathtaking panorama of the Needle City’s twinkling nightscape. The view was one of the few reasons Maxwell Forrest chose the bar, that and the fact that he had always drank at Godwin’s. They also had a fine selection of rums and a modest choice of ales, his two staples. He was sipping a glass of Steel’s Five Year, a delicious dark rum distilled on Chalice, from imported ingredients, of course, by the Fassaben Steel Company. Now on his second glass, he was becoming very fond of the drink’s charred-barrel finish, not to mention the smoothness of its rich molasses bouquet.
Maxwell shifted his polished leather boots on the foot rail and brushed his thick cotton trousers with his free hand. The condensation from the frosty beer taps kept pooling on the bar top and dripping onto his legs. His eyes temporarily lingered on the exposed handles of his holstered revolvers. Some people laughed at Maxwell’s outfit. Hell, the group of tipsy teenage girls in the corner had been giggling and pointing at him all night. However, the bartenders had studiously ignored his long leather overcoat, silver buttoned waist coat and pocket watch ever since Maxwell started drinking at the bar. Perhaps it was just professionalism; he was their best customer after all. They did draw attention to his broad, flat-brimmed hat, if only to ask what it was made of, which he never declared. Only once had he been asked about his brown leather gun belt and its cargo. Everyone ignored the large knife on his right hip.
Maxwell glanced at the girl's table, rubbing a hand over his short black beard and openly scowling under the shady protection of his hat. They just laughed harder and pretended to ignore him. He would leave soon. He could find Steel’s Five Year somewhere else.
He took the last mouthful of Steel’s with a hungry gulp, feeling the warmth filtering into his belly. Almost as soon as he replaced the glass on the bar top, a smiling blonde-haired bartender appeared in front of him. With her tight button-up shirt emphasising her admirable chest, her slim face, and mischievous eyes, Maxwell couldn't deny she was attractive, which worried him.
“Hello, sir” She smiled sweetly. “Another rum?”
He paused. He should leave.
“Yeah, ok”, He replied from the comfortable anonymity of his hat’s broad shadow. The bartender nodded and began pouring a fresh glass. She had remembered what he was drinking.
“I like your outfit. Have you been to a party?”
Maxwell stared at her levelly, projecting displeasure, but she continued smiling. God, she must be new, and that's why he didn't recognise her.
“No party tonight, no.”
She nodded and placed his rum down on the bar top with a brown napkin underneath. “So this is your evening wear, then?” Her cheerleader's face held a half smile, playing coy. He could imagine all the other bartenders, the old hands, cringing, urging her to stop, but he didn’t dare look for solidarity when faced with what should have been a poor challenge of his deliberate and callous introversion.
“No.”
She giggled. They didn't usually giggle when he was so short. She stared at him, her eyes flicking between his beard and tired grey eyes. She suddenly brought a slender hand up, touching the corner of her fruit-shaped mouth and lips, shining like the skin of an apple. “I know what you are! I’m studying earth history online, and you're dressed exactly like a character from an old western film. Do you know what those are?”
Frustration with a touch of embarrassment temporarily churned in his guts. “Nope.” He hoped it wasn't obvious; he hadn’t shifted uncomfortably, had he?
“Oh. Well, Westerns were a genre of film back on earth. They would almost always feature a character called a gunslinger…”
Maxwell stood up, drowning the last of his Steel’s “How much is the bill?”
She frowned momentarily before consulting the tab system, probably through her cortical web. “Ahh, it seems your bill has been paid for sir”. He nodded. He hadn’t paid for a drink at Godwin’s for as long as he could remember. He smoothed the front of his overcoat, pulling its length around his body to conceal each weapon.
“Thank you and good evening” He tipped his hat at the woman who was still looking at him curiously, god she looked prettier when she wasn't smiling. He made his way to the big oak doors, shuffling past the crowded tables with the comfortable dawn of tipsiness creeping up on him. He let the poison continue its effect. With one hand on the door, someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to see one of the teenagers from the corner table smiling a pretty brunette smile at him.
“Hey, cowboy man” She giggled. He tried to open the door, but she grabbed his shoulder. “hey! I just want a picture!”
He turned around and gave her a look with so much frost that she seemed temporarily perplexed by the resulting brain freeze. “You already have plenty.”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
He left her giggling as he pushed through the heavy doors out into the 53rd-floor lobby. This level of the Forbidden City Tower was almost entirely bars, and the elevator vestibule was packed with well-lubricated individuals of all sizes and flavours. He ignored the long stares and obvious finger-pointing as he boarded one of the elevators and selected the 31st floor through his cortical web. He shut the doors before anyone else could board, leaving him alone in the small cube. The elevator took less than ten seconds to reach his level. It hadn’t stopped to pick anyone else up which was an unusual luxury he was still getting used to.
The 31st floor was quiet, its white interior plain and lonely. He moved down the corridor, which led to the Matin Tower sky bridge. Soon, the corridor turned to glass as he walked out onto the overpass. The lights and towers of Needle City all around him perforated the darkness. Brightly lit flyers shot above and below the bridge as he proceeded along its transparent length. He gazed upwards and saw the flaring tips of the opposite surface’s towers piercing the night sky, pointing down at him like enormous metal stalactites.
Matin Tower was bright, the walls were warm and ochre in colour, and the floor was patterned with black and white tiles. Just as he stepped up to the elevator that would take him to his apartment, something blinked in his consciousness. It wasn't explicitly in his visual field, more like an unavoidable thought that forced itself into one’s mind. He accessed the notification without any emotion, and it was as he had expected.
He turned on his heel, headed for the nearest flyer station, and soon stepped out into the Chalice night air on one of Matin Tower’s numerous flyer platforms. The city’s usual buzz and hum greeted him in all its boring normality. The air was fresh on the nose yet still warm.
His silver and black flyer was waiting at the first bay; the vehicle was a sleek, straight-edged machine of sharp angles and flat composite panelling. The Maiko had a presence of malicious grace. It was sleek, refined and menacing. A door hinged upwards as he approached and Maxwell stepped into the all-black interior, pulling his coat hem into the vehicle as the door slid closed. He sat back in the personalised comfort of the pilot's seat as the flyer silently pulled upwards and dipped away from Matin Tower and its platform.
A short flight around the sleek structures of various towers and superscrapers brought him to what his cortical web identified as Three Stokes Superscraper. The building was dull grey, now black under night shade and of roughly rectangular design. The slightest twist in the structure meant that the building would have rotated ninety degrees every hundred meters or so.
An alert appeared in his consciousness, and he began cleansing the alcohol from his brain. The world became subtly clearer as the poison was removed from his synapses, efficiently converted to a harmless by-product by enzymes and carried away to his blood. Anxiety began rearing its ugly head, so stopped the process before its completion and then felt guilty for doing so. The flyer was rising vertically, perhaps a meter away from the steel and glass cliff of the Superscraper. Its lights had dimmed to nothing, and its windows were now at maximum tint. Maxwell’s door, on the building side, was sliding back silently, leaving his booted feet perhaps ten centimetres from a fall of a kilometre or so. The Chalice air eddied into the flyer’s cabin, mixing with the cool conditioned breath of the flyers air conditioning. He waited patiently as the ascent continued.
Finally, another alert signalled the imminent end of his journey, and seconds later, the flyer brought itself to a level with a quiet balcony. The space was cut into the side of the building, with no roof and a perhaps twenty square meters floor area. The beige stonework was devoid of any furniture, and a set of doors led into the murky interior of an apartment beyond. A lone, suited figure was leaning against the railing, facing the apartment and staring silently. The man hadn’t heard the flyer ascend behind him and now Maxwell sat perhaps two meters away from the balconies edge, level with the man’s head.
Maxwell slid his right hand into his coat easily finding the smooth handle of his revolver on the opposite hip, his eyes never left the man’s head. His hand closed around the weapon and released it from its holster with a slow draw. The gun was beautiful, modelled off the Janz Revolver - a simple design that exuded raw power; from the long steel barrel to the simple trigger mechanism.
He extended an arm and lined up the weapon’s long silver barrel with man’s exposed head. Firing a gun was about creating a vector, a bridge between the gun and the target, a momentary - yet tangible link between the weapon and the victim.
The weapon discharged with a flash and a deafening metallic retort, sending the man smashing to the floor face down with a wet thud. Red mist lingered in the still air as liquid blood pooled around the man’s now ruined face. Maxwell sighted the man’s twitching back and fired again. The corpse jolted grotesquely with the bullet’s impact. The second shot was to ensure any chest implants lost their supply of blood within the next minute, rendering them inert. He had forgotten the first couple of times.
The flyer’s door slid shut as the smoking weapon was replaced in its holster. The stink of cordite tickled his nostrils. The flyer banked and disappeared into the night, leaving the corpse to bleed and cool in the warm night air. It would disappear before morning, along with any evidence of the murder.