Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1) by Niall Teasdale (e reader TXT) 📕

Blondes get all the fun, but brunettes do it better.’ She stepped through, not bothering to close the door.

‘What do you care? You’re not a brunette.’

‘Not now,’ she called back, ‘but I used to be.’

~~~

Tatsu took her bike on the trip north. It was raining and she was not wearing a helmet, but transport was transport, and it was a long way to walk in the rain. Besides, she had a few stops to make before she tried Yachiyo, which was actually more east than it was north.

She checked out a few gangs in Kamagaya, which was north of Funabashi. Then she went east to Shiroi. Everyone said that Burrell was somewhere else. West of here. East of here. Someone said he had holed up in Yotsukaido, which was pretty much an impossibility because the Hispanic gangs ruled most of the eastern side of the zone.

Finally, Tatsu circled back down to Yachiyo with a heavy heart. Heavy because the Yachiyo 8 Chome Yankees were a bunch of pricks. Every gang had its own peculiar personality. The Funabashi 1 Chome were fairly laidback, even when they were not scared of you folding them into a pretzel if they stepped out of line. You could get on with the Funabashi crowd. Some pretended to be aspiring musicians. Some thought they were the biggest hoodlums on the block. Yachiyo 8 Chome were just foulmouthed louts.

The area had been a fairly nice neighbourhood before the war. Then it had got hit by a bomb or two and there had been the need to house millions of refugees. So, Yachiyo 8 Chome and the surrounding areas had been converted into factories and low-rent apartment blocks for the cheap factory workers the cheap factory owners were expecting. And that had lasted two minutes before the workers were out of work because, whether you thought robots were utterly evil or not, they were more efficient at producing things than humans. And that had been before nanomanufacturing had largely replaced robotic workshops. There had been talk about bulldozing the area and putting in food production factories, but no one had been found to finance the operation.

Instead, the local Yankees had set up shop in one of the old factory buildings. They ventured out primarily to extort protection money from the nearby residents and steal liquor from any shop stupid enough to open nearby. Ridding Chiba of this bunch would have made everyone happy, but they were not really enough of a problem to warrant a raid. They were loud and obnoxious, but ultimately useless. Tatsu’s opinion of Burrell was at risk of dropping significantly if he really was holed up with them.

The factory had a parking lot, though it was doubtful many of the employees had driven to work. Tatsu pulled up in front of the main entrance and climbed off her bike, much to the interest of a fairly young man in a T-shirt and jeans, both of which had seen much better days, standing under the rain shelter over the door.

‘Nice wheels,’ he said, smirking.

‘Yeah, and it comes with a really assertive security system. Messing with her would be… inadvisable.’

‘Sure…’

‘Your funeral.’ He did not stop her from opening the door and walking inside. Likely he was too busy contemplating stealing her bike. She had warned him…

Behind the door was what had been the reception area for the factory. If there had been a counter, it had been stripped out. The room was large enough to allow for two moth-eaten loungers, and it had been redecorated in early Gothic scumbag. Various uplifting messages had been sprayed over the bland, grey paintwork to brighten things up. ‘Death to pigs!’ was prominent, as was ‘Japs Suck Dick.’ They were nothing if not imaginative. Ignoring the two men who were presumably on guard in the loungers, Tatsu headed for the door at the back which would take her out onto what had been the factory floor.

She was not walking fast, so it was no particular surprise when one of the two ran ahead of her, blocking her path to the door. ‘Bitch don’t get to go in there without an invite,’ he said. He was under twenty-five, wiry rather than muscled, and his hair was an orange ridge over his head. Her systems began running facial recognition since his implant returned no identification. As was to be expected, his MedStat colours came back black and orange, indicating that no data was returned from the query.

‘I have an invite,’ Tatsu told him, smiling as she did so. ‘It looks a lot like a police ID.’

‘You’re the police?’ He strung out the o into a couple of syllables. ‘You don’t look like a pig.’

‘I get that a lot.’

‘Pigs aren’t welcome here.’

Tatsu nodded at the nearby wall, the one with ‘Death to pigs!’ scrawled across it in bright red paint. ‘I can tell. If you could read, you’d know I already knew. I need to see your boss, so stand aside. Please.’

His smirk got wider. ‘We don’t let pigs in to see the boss. See, we’re here to make sure he isn’t bothered by the police.’ Again with the stretched o. ‘But…’ His eyes lowered to scan Tatsu’s body from the boots up. ‘You don’t look like a pig, so if you spread ’em for me and act like the good little cock-sleeve you are, I might be able to make the introduction.’

Tatsu laughed and looked down. ‘I prefer it if I can actually feel a guy going in and… you just don’t measure up. Be like getting poked with a pencil.’

‘Bitch!’ He telegraphed the punch really badly. Tatsu redirected it past her face and caught his wrist, extending his arm and, in the process, swinging him around to face the wall. Catching the back of his head in her left hand, she stepped forward and slammed his