The Bridge Chronicles Trilogy by Gary Ballard

of idiots, and leave me the fuck alone. And what does this little bastard do? He gets this all over me!” Bridge indicated the blood on his hands before wiping them off as best he could on Kira’s pants. Bridge ceased ranting and stood, buried in thought.
    “Stoney, can you deal with this body for me?” Stonewall nodded. “And take these bastards, find out what they were looking for, who they told, who they’re working for. Anything you can.” The ex-footballer nodded again. “If I’m going to be in this, damnit, I’m not doing it without knowing all the particulars. Do what you gotta do. You won’t hear me crying, got it?”
    “What do you want me to do, boss?” Aristotle asked with earnest concern.
    “Go home. Your bill is already past due.” Aristotle started to protest. “If I need you, I know where to find you. But these guys aren’t going to be scared off by a big black man, which means you stick around, you’ll have nt u’ll to do a lot more of this.” The bodyguard looked hurt but agreed. “Help Stoney move these guys out of sight, then get home and stay there.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “What I do best. Cover my ass.” His confident smile was anything but.
    Bridge caught a passing cab a few blocks over, took it three blocks in one direction, hopped out and caught another cab going the opposite direction for eight blocks. He got out of the cab at a corner terminal. Called street terms, these kiosks were found every few blocks in LA, offering cheap GlobalNet access, banking, news sheets, driving directions, tourist information and food delivery services. Bridge used an old backup hacker ID to access the GlobalNet and called Angela. He crouched low beside the term, the cord to his interface jack stretched perilously. Memories of teenage street hacking came flooding back, years of nickel and dime hacks riding the Net while keeping meat vision lookouts for the cops. He constantly searched for pursuit. His paranoia was likely misplaced, since the ID he’d signed in with wasn’t tied to the Bridge name at all, but he hadn’t survived this long by being careless. And if the Bridge ID was already hot as he suspected, this one would be burned once he was done.
    Angela returned the request with a physical presence, projecting her avatar onto his vision. She appeared as a wispy ghost, beautiful blonde angel with demon horns and gossamer wings floating in mid-air on the street in front of him. “What’s wrong?”
    “Why do you think something’s wrong?” Bridge put on his best fake smile.
    “Because you haven’t used B#rTman in ages, which means you don’t want somebody following your trail. Now what’s wrong?”
    “Kira’s dead.” The ghost chewed on that for a moment. “He was trying to give me something, said somebody was after him for it. Bunch of guys shot him and tried to shake me down for something Kira had. We took care of the guys…”
    “Who’s we?”
    “Never mind that. I’m alive, he’s dead and I need to know what he was working.”
    “Nothing major.” Bridge frowned doubtfully. “No really, nothing big. We were messing with some pedofarms, but nothing that would get him killed. These guys, they look like organized muscle?”
    “They weren’t cheap. Good clothes, cybershades, laser-sights, big guns and the like.”
    “As far as I know, nobody he was working on was connected like that. Where’s the body?”
    “It’s being taken care of.”
    “So I shouldn’t tell his mom, then?”
    “Not unless you want it tied to you.” She shook her

    “Here it comes.”
    “Look, I just need a place to crash for a few days, ‘til I can get this sorted.”
    “Don’t you have any friends?”
    “When did I ever have friends I could impose on like you?”
    She sighed angrily. “Few days tops. And I better not get any heat over this, or it’s your ass.”
    “The first sign of heat, I’m gone. I promise.”
    Her scowl was an accusation. “Save it. I know what