Burn Artist by James Osiris Baldwin

Author:James Osiris Baldwin [Baldwin, James Osiris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gift Horse Productions
Published: 2017-01-18T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

I found the apartments that the elemental had shown me without much trouble. Gold Street Apartments were new, renovated warehouse condos, fancy modern apartments bankrolled by the Mob. They were entirely out of place between the drab public housing towers on one side of the block, and old waterfront factories on the other. Fifteen minutes of note-taking and some surveying was enough for me to decide what to do about him. It involved a pair of binoculars and a sniper rifle.

If I’d marked Kovacs correctly, he was an Arrogant Douchewizard, T.M. Spooks generally come in three varieties: The Crazy Street Shaman, the Secretive Professional, and the Arrogant Douchewizard. They’re the guys - and they’re nearly all men - who wear robes to restaurants, carry carved staves or amulets out on the street, and generally make a scene of themselves at every opportunity. They can be overt, with the robes and Staff of Power thing, or subtle. The subtle kind are those annoying Freemason types who have a nudge and a wink for every bit of ‘hidden’ esoterica, no matter how mundane.

The condos were on Gold Street. I found them by orientating with the three public housing towers and then driving around the nearby blocks until the elemental’s image overlay reality. The setting was almost too good to be true. There was an old disused building right across from the balcony that I’d seen, a gutted factory with no security to speak of. There was no guard patrolling the condos themselves, and I was quite sure that the extent of Kovacs mundane security was a passworded entry into his fancy new apartment building. If he was counting on magical defenses sunk into the foundations, he was kidding himself. The consecration of buildings hadn’t been a standard practice since the 1880s.

I found and disarmed a single ward on the warehouse across the street. There were the usual locks and physical security measures on it - a padlock, which was easily removed with bump keys - and only one bump-proof lock on the door that I had to pick. Once I was in, I took the stairs to the roof and set up, the wind blowing my hair across my eyebrows. It was warm and breezy, and while the wind wasn't expressly in my favor, it was soft enough to not be a huge handicap for a high-powered rifle.

The sniper rifle wasn't a gun I got to use often, but it had several advantages. For one thing, it had completely interchangeable, replaceable parts. I'd never used the same barrel twice on this gun, which was important for not getting done for murder. For another, I had no doubt that Kovacs had festooned himself with magic designed to protect against magical and physical attack - at close range. Wards designed to turn a bullet could only take so much kinetic energy and were nearly all designed with pistols in mind. In addition, the gun was quiet despite its size, and the single, precise crack was rarely interpreted as a threat even within an urban jungle like this one.

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