“Who could have killed that idiot of Rubero?” Satori asked once we were back.
“Only the cartels skin their victim alive,” his partner calmly replied. “The eyes thing is a Janeiro’s trick.”
“I’d bet that Rubero’s boss caught him red-handed,” I said. “And he had sent gangsters to watch the slightest gestures of the mercenaries hired to cover the tracks. They won’t let us get away with it…”
Meditative, Satori finally reminded us of an obvious idiom far too often ignored by the sapiens: “The cat’s right. We’re toast if these guys in the car have identified us.”
“Fuck! And what about Jordan Belfort?” Ali interjected by gesturing at the banker, curled up with the protoxide inhaler duct-taped on his face.
Ada believed it was clever to drop him off at the nearest metro station as the Chrysler had rejoined the wet asphalt of Chinatown. Looking for the metro line, we were on our way to the Bay, controlled by the Yakuza but maybe the safest place we could think of, when the red Nissan from Trump Business Tower was spotted again by Satori’s program.
“Again? Who are these guys? That’s not the Janeiros!” the techie noticed.
My partner proposed to immediately throw the suit through the back doors. Ada then evoked her regret for having allowed this idea to germinate in her friend’s deranged brain. A heated discussion ensued before Satori intervened.
Alas! The situation deteriorated violently. Arriving at an intersection, the other car—the Peugeot from Rubero’s apartment—resurfaced and hit us on the left wing. The minivan staggered under the impact, before overturning, the four wheels in the air.
“Santa Madonna. Why is all the city tailing us, tonight?” calmly asked Ada before taking Ali by the arm.
I managed to evacuate the crushed wreck by the broken windshield. Honking echoed from the perpendicular avenue. Six bearded men in black suits came out of a red Nissan.
“Oh. The Undzer Shtik,” Flatline commented before opening fire with her sniper rifle, forcing them to hide behind a taxicab in service.
“The what?” Ali asked.
“The Jewish Mob?” I reacted. “They’re in Babylon, now? This is a true gang epidemic!”
Other shots also came from the rear. The Peugeot had parked on the sidewalk, overturning the newspaper machines. Five mobsters with shaved heads and tattoos-covered bodies pushed the bystanders to make their way to us.
“The Janeiros have joined the game…” Ada pursued before, this time, pulling the banker out of the van as she would with a weed. Ali then grabbed him by the tie to put him under cover. But the two groups of thugs were getting dangerously close and Satori was still inside. “Save us time,” ordered Flatline with a firm voice while throwing a pair of incendiary grenades at us. “Big-Brain is stuck by the dashboard.”
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Bullets ricocheted against the steel studs or sunk into the tires’ rubber. On the sidewalks, the crowd dispersed in the rain, opening a shooting window for both the Janeiros and the Undzer.
“Hurry up!” the techie whined. “I can’t feel my legs!”
“You never did, idiot!” Ali said, removing the grenades’ pins with her teeth. “You’re paraplegic!”
The last member of the family finally recovered, we could retreat into an alley littered with trash where roamed rats as big as me. Behind us, on the avenue, the chaotic shooting continued between the two gangs. A television helicopter was the first to fly over the scene. It was immediately followed by the vans of an NBPD detachment escorted by surveillance drones. Their blaring sirens deafened us.
On the shoulders of his partner, Satori asked for a break to order an extraction from his portable terminal which he plunged into a public outlet. It allowed me to catch my breath and the two humans to reload their weapons.
“I wonder why are the Jews here...” Ada questioned, a shiny ammo at the corner of her lips.
“Well, I’m their banker…” cried the corpo, sweating in copious amounts.
“You’re fucking what?” Flatline let go; this time almost losing her legendary calm.
Unbelievable! There wasn’t a single suit not involved in money laundering within this city.
Ignoring the civilians, the police quickly intervened with asphyxiating riot gas. The latter forced the mobsters to entrench themselves in our back alley.
“Get the hell out of here! It’s already full!” yelled Ali, firing at will.
The gangsters’ retaliation passed over the shoulders of my partner, quickly calmed down by Ada. The mercenary had the same idea as me: “Abandon the banker here. They’ll leave us alone.”
Khelil also did the math. Taking advantage of Flatline being too busy looking after Satori and my associate reloading her weapon, he turned around to join his comrades despite the arrival of a police drone. We couldn’t react in time as another salvo of automatic pistols forced us to lie low in front of the emergency exit of a building. Alas, our burden of the evening hadn’t had the same reflex. Before the flying police spy dropped a new gas grenade, he lay face down.
“They shot him!” I meowed. “The police... the Janeiros... even the Undzer! They turned him into a colander!”
“Who cares?” Ali grunted. “If they have filters up their nose—or masks, they will show up any time soon and turn us all into homicide statistics!”
“Time is running out,” Ada said. Her visor split and slid up over her helmet. “Do you have anything, amore?”
“This drone scrambles all the communications!” replied the latter by furiously tapping the mechanical keys on his wrist. “I can’t ask for help on the web! The local servers are fried!”
On one side of the alley, raging mobsters emerged from a cloud of tear gas. On the other, the flashing lights of a newly arrived NBPD vehicle were shining. A robotic voice transmitted through speakers ordered us to surrender. Ali decided to shoot at the drone dropping static charges from the balconies over the electrical wires. The police responded by firing without any warning as the gas started to sting my eyes.
I gasped for air. We were in big trouble.
Putting her rifle to the ground, Ada entrusted her boyfriend with rag legs to my sapiens. With her studded boots, the solo violently pushed us inside the building and slammed the emergency door before we could turn back.