FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The first snow had broken and I was looking for a streetwalker I didn't know the real name of. I called the number she left me and the line had been disconnected. All I had were Vincy's photos to describe the woman I was looking for. I drove back into the dirty brackish streets of Skyscraper Harbor, figuring it'd be the place to ask. The dark streets between the tenement high rises that were once high-income condos were home to all sorts of illicit activity. I would've liked to say the working girls there were disappointed that I wasn't partaking in them, but that'd be a lie.

No one knew Cheri here. They didn't know who she was even when I showed them the photos. It wasn't until I made my way closer to the old Fishery District that I had my first whiff of a clue.

"Yeah, stuffed animal lady? What's she got that I don't?"

"That's not why I'm looking for her, she's in trouble."

"Sure, honey. I know the type. Get all sweet on a working girl and she's your favorite. Think you can save her from the street life, call her Roxanne. Why don't you stop playing with dolls and pay for a real woman, hm?"

"I just need to know if you've seen her."

"I might know who's seen her, but I'd need a little something to jog my memory."

I pulled a fifty out. The woman took it and smiled. Her eyes were natural, her teeth were replaced with something silver, her soft off-white fur couldn't hide the dark circles under her eyes or the bony look of a lifestyle unkind. I wondered if that's how I was starting to look.

"You ever been to Old Maui?"

I had. It used to be one of the sailor bars, but now it was something else. Still a bar, just, there weren't as many old sailors to keep it floating.

"Ask for Salty Jack if he's working the bar there. He might know where to find her."

That was easy enough.

The snow wasn't building up yet. It was still too warm for it to stick. It just swirled in the air and made the streets wet, but it was too light to be rain. It wasn't the kind of night I wanted to be out playing gumshoe again, but here I was, my knees and elbows aching, my bruised knuckles on fire. I parked a little ways away from Old Maui, noting the rows of import motorcycles in front of the place. I opened my glove box and pulled a speedloader of tarnished copper-jacketed hollowpoints with shiny nickel cases and put the whole thing in my pocket, patted my slick-front plate carrier through my shirt, and headed inside.

The place had a little stage and did a little show sometimes. Tonight some too-loud cover band was making a racket. I tried to ignore them as I made my way past the crowd, around the tables, to the bar at the back. First order of business, I ordered a shot. After that was when I'd try and get the bartender's attention.

The screeching accordion almost made me wince, and I got bumped into more than a few times. Everyone seemed friendly enough, the dogs and cats and ferrets and a mouse or two all meshing together, trying to get laid or have a good time, showing off their biker patches.

Eventually, I got the Bartender to lean over.

"Are you Salty Jack?"

"Fuck you, you salt-n-cinnamon bitch."

There was an awkward beat. "I'm looking for someone. She might be in some trouble."

"You a cop?"

The person sitting nearest looked over. He sipped at his tall beer that was too much head.

"Was. Have you seen this girl?" I held up the photo. He took it from me.

"Might have. What do you want her for?"

"She's in trouble."

"With you?" He lifted just one of his eyebrows.

"No. With a fox."

"I see. Jealous kind. She's a whore, man. That means-"

"I know what it means. This guy, he's a fucking psycho, he's going to kill her."

I had the attention of the men around me. I didn't want to ruin anyone's night but Vincy's.

"I just need to know where to find her," I insisted.

"If she wanted you to find her you'd have already found her. Now get your sad, sorry, old ass out here."

I sighed, took the photo back, and returned it to my breast pocket. "Fine. Just, bring me another. A double. Then I'll be gone."

The liquor made me shake. I put the glass back on the bar top. I had a few options here. I could act like the coked-up action hero I wanted to be and haul this guy's smug face over the counter, or I could leave with a net loss of sixty five dollars and not be any closer to finding Cheri. At least these people seemed to know her. I was getting on a warmer trail. I just needed to--

"Excuse me."

I unclenched my fist. I hadn't even realized I was tensing up like that. I turned around to lock eyes with a young, pretty, flop-eared dog. He was dressed pretty skimpy, with those tight pants and the midriff-baring shirt under a leather vest. His arms and legs were as thin as the pole on the stage.

"I heard you talking about Cheri."

So much for my poker face. "Yeah. I need to find her, she's in trouble."

"Let's blow this popsicle stand and have a word. Maybe two. Maybe more."

Back out in the cold. He'd wrapped himself up in a duffle coat that was too big for him. "Cheri's a friend. You said she's in trouble with some guy? I can guess who. I don't like him. He's a real prick."

I pulled out two cigarettes, and offered him one. He shook his head, so I just lit mine. He turned off the street into an alley, and I followed with little protest. The darkness enveloped us, and only a buzzing, flickering light a few meters off backlit his silhouette and the fog of his hot, pina colada breath. He stopped and turned to face me.

"What's the deal?"

He shushed me, and reached up and took my cigarette. He pushed against my chest, and looked me in the eyes as he took a drag and pushed it out his nose.

"Are you trying to roll me, or flirt with me, pup?"

"I wouldn't mind advertising my business a little with you, but you're in a hurry. You see the light on in the fifth floor, the old Neptune Inn?"

I let my eyes wander that way. Brick building. It used to be one of the most luxurious hotels in the old docks, but got bought out and renovated into apartments during the tech boom. There was a light on near the top when most of the others were out. "I see it."

"Kiss me."

"Oh come on-" but I was cut off by his nose bumping mine, then his head tilting, his mouth parting. I looked around while our lips were locked, but he kept trying to demand my attention. I didn't know the game he was playing, not that it was unwelcome. This was certainly better than starting a fight in a biker bar.

"Not bad. You need to relax a little. So tense."

"I'm not used to this. I mean, in my line of work, all the cute guys are trying to kill me."

"Unfortunate. I'll see you around, Pops. Tell Cheri I said hello. She told me she'd be working late tonight, up in that room with that fox."

It was a minute or two later that I was up on the fifth floor, breathing in the dirty, musty scent of neglect and the smell of Cheri's perfume and some cheap cologne. That sowed the first seed of doubt. Vincy wasn't a cheap man, nor did I even know him to wear any cologne at all. There was a creaking bed, moaning, a gruff voice that I couldn't make out. I clenched my teeth when a board creaked under my heel as I approached. They apparently didn't hear it.

I gripped the doorknob and turned it just enough to feel if it was locked. It was, so I backed up from the hallway. An old residential building like this likely didn't have any sort of reinforcement around the door, so I wound up my good leg and drew my revolver.

The door gave way on the second kick, and I burst in, revolver pointed at the bed. Cheri was there alright, but she was on top of the entirely wrong kind of fox. It wasn't Vincy at all, just some chump who I'd never seen before, whose face was scrunched up in a ridiculous mix of shock and pleasure.

Cheri turned to calmly look at me. Her hair was disheveled but her makeup was pristine. She seemed to smile as she straightened up on top of the guy. By then I'd lowered my gun.

"Ah, Pops, great timing," Cheri laughed.

"Just who the fuck are-" His question was cut short as Cheri grabbed a pillow and shoved it over his head. In one smooth motion, she produced a large chromed handgun and shoved it into the pillow and pulled the trigger twice. The fox under her hadn't even had the chance to struggle. Poor bastard didn't even realize what happened. All I could do was jump back and shout.

"Jesus, Cheri, you just killed a man!"

She slid off him, leaving his naked corpse there on the bed with the blood slowly seeping into the linens and still wet. She reached down to his trousers on the floor, picked them up, and fished out his wallet. "I was planning on it anyway. I just needed this keycard." She held up two crisp bills. "That asshole didn't even have the cash on him to cover my rate."

"You just blew that guy's brains through the floor while you were sitting on his dick, and that's what you're concerned about?"

She threw the wallet on the floor, and pointed the gun right at me. "Yeah, I did. Lose your taste for killing after all these years?"

I tensed up. My revolver was still in my hand, but she had the bead on me, even if she was aiming from the hip. She was only five feet away, and the hammer on that gun was cocked. She'd blast me twice before I could even level my barrel. My lips curled. "What are you talking about?"

"If the files weren't lying, and I know they weren't, you're actually just the kind of man I need to make this job easier on me. I read your dossier, Petty Officer Van Grantze, quite a read for just one term."

"God damn it, is there anyone who doesn't have my god-damn file?"

"Don't worry, I have the clearance."

"Quit yanking my chain and get this shit show over with."

She lowered the gun, just a little. I was still tense. "Alright, Pops. Here's the deal. There's a chop shop across the street there, but not for cars. It's for people with cyberware. People like me, and my friends, and maybe some of your friends. Only, they don't ask nicely, and the repossessions are pretty gruesome, and they have friends in the meatpacking industry, too."

"So you're going to kill me and sell my organs?"

"Maybe. Or maybe you can help me while I get into their files and blow the whole place sky high."

"Is this a vendetta? Or are you some kind of Fed?"

"That's insulting. This is professional."

She dressed quickly. It was the same outfit I'd always seen her in. We left the room as it was, and she pulled me just next-door to it. There, she opened a conspicuous silver briefcase and pulled out two halves of a carbine and slipped them together. She rolled her big glowing eyes towards me.

"I'd planned for this to be solo, but here." She produced a sawnoff pump shotgun, and handed it and a cheap elastic bandolier to me. Then, she sauntered up and slapped a pink ballcap on my head.

"What's that for?"

"When we go loud, click the bill. It's lined with LEDs, for the cameras. I usually wear it just in case, but my jacket's usually plenty." She slung her carbine and picked up the briefcase.

"You really have this kind of thing down, don't you?" I slid open the shotgun just enough to confirm it was chambered. The finish, worn down to white steel in many places told a story of being rode hard and hung up wet. I sympathized.

"Like I said, I'm a professional."

It was finally getting through my thick skull that this feline wasn't just a prostitute. She had something else going on, apparent in the way she walked without a sound despite her built-in stiletto heels, the way she held that short-barreled carbine, the way she stuck close to that wall. The cyberware chop-shop was fronted as a garage, or a run-of-the-mill automotive chop shop, with a yard full of derelict machines, but the fact that there was a doorman just behind the fence that we could both hear and smell confirmed that the place wasn't a normal shop.

Cheri inserted her stolen keycard and the gate buzzed and clanked as it unlocked. In just a second she threw open the gate enough to slip through, and clocked the doorman square in the neck. I swept the yard, shotgun at the ready, but no one else was outside. From time to time I peeked down as she strangled the poor bastard with her gun.

We formed up on the side door to the shop and switched on the lights on our clothes. It was a manual lock, but I had a 12 gauge skeleton key. I fell into my training, and apparently she did the same. Textbook, really, except I was in a wet, disheveled suit and she was in a short skirt and a cropped jacket.

I blasted the door's lock and worked the pump, pulled back and shoved another shell in the shotgun's tube. She pushed in immediately, and I followed just behind her. Those poor bastards in there didn't even know what hit them. Half of them hadn't even drawn their guns before she swept the whole floor with excruciating automatic fire. There was shouting, screaming. I let the shotgun dangle at my side and picked up a dirty stockless rifle from some dead man's hands.

We formed up on the next door she indicated, she held up her hand for me to wait. Footsteps. I could barely hear it for my ears ringing. The door burst open on its own accord as some kind of bear with a shotgun pushed through, followed closely by a dog in a track suit and another greasy dog. Cheri fired first, one controlled burst per target, mechanically moving from one to another in the time it took for me to dump five rounds on just one target.

"That hallway's a death trap," I tried to warn the cat as she wordlessly turned and began down the stairs. She didn't stop. I didn't have much of a choice but to follow her. How many people were still here this late at night? Did they have a whole crew here?

We ended up downstairs. Somewhere along the way I'd gotten in front of her again, and lucky me, I was randomly selected to be a winner. The prize? Getting punched across the god-damn room by a bear that must've had two feet on me and had an arm that looked like part of a construction machine. Cheri managed to slide past him, and as he turned to chase her I weakly lifted the rifle in my arms and worked the gritty trigger. The bear shook and prattled with the shock of the seven-six-two, but still managed to straighten up and turn towards me with a wrinkled sneer crossing his face, and oh boy, he had teeth.

I pushed myself to my feet and managed to limp aside as he stepped toward me. I managed to bring the rifle to bear, but the bear didn't seem to like this. He grabbed it and pulled the muzzle upwards and I fired into the ceiling. I caught another speeding truck-fist to the gut. He slammed the gun against the wall as hard as he could, bending the barrel and making the dust cover and other miscellaneous parts fly off.

I was wracking my brain trying to figure out how to beat this guy. He was tanking bullets and doling out hits I wouldn't like to take on a good day. I was hurting and huffing, trying to catch my breath, trying to get back to my feet. My collar got tight. He wrenched me up off my knees and pounded me against the wall. Maybe it was my imagination, but I saw him wince as he did. His auged arms ended at his shoulders. The gruesome scars that went uncovered by his tanktop weren't the mark of an experienced surgeon. The way he was handling me, the way he pulverized that gun, and the look of his arms all added up that this was a back-alley jailbreaking job.

I got hold of his arm with both of mine. He laughed, and raised his free hand. One cold hit to the head was all that I'd need to die in this dingy basement, but I wasn't planning on it. Right as he wound up, I pulled my knees up and jammed my feet against his ribs and kicked. His eyes got big, and all of the sudden he let me go. I heard a terrible wet noise just before he screamed.

I groped blindly to the side, and felt the sharp metal of the rifle's sights. With one hand I whipped it over his busted shoulder square against his head. The blood running down his face gave me just enough time to get up and slam him again, square on the shoulder.

I kept slamming him with the pistol grip of the gun until it broke off, and then with the shattered plastic. Eventually he got his other arm up to catch it, but I'd still had one secret in my belt. I reached down for my revolver, pulled it out, and jammed it in his mouth. I yanked the trigger. His eyes bugged out. Blood poured around his teeth and over my fist. He was still twitching when he hit the ground, so I put another right between his eyes and made an abstract portrait with the contents of his skull.

I limped into the next room to try and find Cheri. She'd been considerate enough to leave me a trail of breadcrumbs, or, in this case, bullet casings and bodies. Halfway through, the pain was getting unbearable. I knew I'd need a pick-me-up to get out alive. Just one syringe. It jammed into my thigh. I hardly felt it. There wasn't time to let it kick in. Cheri was ahead of me. I heard the echoing gunfire. It was rattling like my lungs were. Were my bones broken? Was I just making this worse? I could still breath, so I didn't have a punctured lung. I could still walk and hold a gun. Cheri was just ahead. Maggie was waiting at her house. I couldn't die down here. It wasn't like anyone would ever find me if they did. My organs weren't worth much, though. My lungs were trashed from smoking, liver shot from drinking, among other things. But they had to have some way to get rid of the bodies. I didn't want to find it. I was happy my nose was too full of blood to smell anything else.

I pushed through the unlatched door. Cheri turned and leveled her carbine at me. I didn't even wince. I was too tired for it, even as I could feel the barest hint of the stims starting to kick in.

"It's you."

"You don't sound relieved," I managed with a lopsided smirk.

She handed me the rifle. "One second. Cover me while I dig in here."

I cradled it in my arms and peered around the room. The basement windows were boarded up. There were piles of scrapped prosthetics and three or four corpses. Garbage bags sat swollen next to a steel door.

The police would be arriving soon, no doubt. It'd only been a few minutes. It'd take them maybe ten, maybe fifteen more minutes to get their chopper going. We needed to hurry. Cheri's claws clacked on the keyboard as she worked. Very little would be kept on the SSD, it was probably all on the cloud. She needed credentials, she needed to back it up, and then she needed the drive.

I needed to keep anyone from stopping her. Tense minutes dragged on before I heard screeching tires through the boards.

"Cops?" she asked.

"Can't be. Too soon." They must've phoned in reinforcements. I peeked at the plastic window on the gun's magazine. Twenty three shots. My pulse was picking up. My blood was hot. My face wrinkled. The hallway stretched out before me. I could hear boots at the end.

My knuckles were white. I could run out and meet them. No, that was stupid. I clenched the gun. It was automatic. I could just wait until they were all in the hallway. They'd be working their way down, slow, expecting an ambush just about where I'd been clocked. I'd wait.

Cheri was agitated, bouncing from one foot to the other. She laid the pistol from earlier on the desk and kicked the chair away. I couldn't see the progress bar, but her eyes told me we were close.

Suddenly, the doorknob turned. A weasel in a mask leveled a rusty shotgun at Cheri, but before he could pull the trigger, I grabbed it and jerked the barrel skyward. My head met his and I pushed him back through the doorway, and he relinquished the shotgun. In one hand I held the carbine up and held down the trigger. The surprised, untrained team was caught out in the open. What a mess.

Cheri unplugged the computer and smashed the back open. She ripped out the solid state drive and shoved it in her jacket.

"We're golden."

"We can't go back out that way," I told her, gesturing the shotgun down the hall. Just as I did, a burst of gunfire ripped down it from the other side. I slammed the steel door shut and locked it.

"We weren't going to." She climbed up on a table. With the back of the pistol she busted out the glass, then jammed her hand against the plywood covering it. She grit her teeth and pulled herself up. The board relented, cracking the whole time, and let the freezing rain in on her face. It snapped in half, and she busted the rest out like I never would've been able to without an ax and some leverage.

While she climbed through I pushed the shotgun between the door and fired down the hallway without looking. The subsequent strings of fire were what we needed to ensure that they wouldn't burst in. I handed her the shotgun and the empty carbine and jumped up and pulled myself through the window onto cold, wet, slushy gravel.

We ran. I was hurting, but I kept up by the grace of stimulants. A sentry shouted. Cheri daintly waved the shotgun and fired it one-handed without even wincing at the recoil. We took a long way around, crossed the street further away, looped back to the Old Neptune, recovered her briefcase. Then, by the time the Greater Anchor Metro PD arrived, we were miles away.

The rain was beginning to turn to snow as we stood in the alley and I leaned against a dirty brick wall where the paint had long ago fallen away. I lit a cigarette to take the edge off. Just because I'd dosed didn't mean I was suddenly immune to the beating I took, it just meant I'd ideally make it home to pass out on my couch instead of doing so there in that basement. Cheri pulled out her own cigarette and leaned in close. She pushed the tip of it to mine and sucked the fire down it before she stepped back. Even after all that, not a hair of hers was out of place. She wasn't tired or roughed up. Her makeup was still perfect. Her eyes were still sharp. Her smile was still piercing. As she leaned against the wall next to me, she was the same as the night before in the gentle ambient light of the city bouncing off the clouds.

Still, I couldn't help but look at her and see something different. She wasn't a victim. She was stronger than I was. She was deadly accurate, fast, and quiet. She knew how to fight, not just like she'd been extensively trained, but like she'd been kicking doors down for the better part of a decade.

"You were pretty hot back there," I said, flatly. She laughed it off.

"Same to you, pops. You still got it. That would've been some work to do by myself."

I ran my tongue over my busted lip. "Now what?"

"I'm going to follow these leads."

"What are you? Some kind of James Bond spy? Who do you work for? If it's not the Feds, not the CIA or FBI, then who?" I finally spat it out.

She looked at me. She pushed herself off the wall as a big, broad grin grew across her face from one side to the other. She picked her pink cap off me and put it on her own head. For a second she looked me up and down, like she was going to push herself against me and kiss me or kill me. Instead, she blew smoke in my face and turned around.

"The past is a yawning maw, Fran." She started to walk away. I watched her slip off into the brighter colored lights of the main street. The real world slowly asserted itself as the wind whipped snow against me and I heard the loud techno-pop of a nearby club ramp up.

She left me there in the dust and the debris and all I could do was whistle.