Night's Pawn Read Online Free PDF Page A

shrug, and hurried to follow her friend.
    Chase watched the pair until they hung south on Tenth Avenue. The brunette gave him another half-glance as they turned. He waited a few moments for his pulse to come down enough to catch his breath. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
    Sighing, he turned and crossed the street, hoping to put distance between him and them. The last thing he needed was involvement in some incident in Terminal. He was carrying the wrong IDs for such troubles.

    Not that he didn't deserve them, he thought. He'd spent too long wearing dark suits in the middle of the desert. The corporate liaison life had fogged his brain. Maybe there was still some nerve gas left in Tel Aviv and he'd gotten a lungful. His mental flagellation complete, he decided to frag security and get a drink.
    At this late hour of the afternoon, the check zone between Terminal and the Lower Westside was calm and quiet, letting him breeze through easily on his resident pass. He moved angrily, making the street-sellers bypass him for more hospitable-looking marks. He crossed Eighth and went underground, grabbing an "A" Express toward downtown. The evening work cycle was just beginning and the rush-hour migration begun. He hopped out at East Fourteenth and hiked the rest of the way.
    It had been nearly six months, but he was sure his destination would be exactly where he'd last seen it. All kinds of troubles had failed to move it for all these years, and he couldn't think of much that could. The alley looked about as he remembered, except for a couple of newcomer cats rousting some rats near a pile of fiber cases. They watched him scornfully as he passed. Brave souls.
    A fresh piece of scrawl gleamed at him from the loading dock, something in German about causes, effects, and sexual organs. Policlub stuff, no doubt; it was tough to avoid the drek.
    The stairs next to the dock were as trash-strewn as ever, but there seemed to be no new stains. He stood at the bottom, for the thousandth time reading the No Entrance sign on the steel door. After a moment a cheap, weather-beaten speaker tacked onto the door frame squawked, "What?" Chase knew the voice to be much deeper than the speaker allowed.
    "Open the door. I gotta take a piss."
    The speaker gave a distorted chuckle that sounded more like a bark, then Chase heard the electronic locks slip aside. The door had only just begun to swing open before he'd slipped inside. His low-light optical system kicked in as he entered the darkness and patted the arm of the man who'd let him in. "William, mi amigo , you look like hell."
    The ork smiled, a sharp, gap-toothed monstrosity that forty years ago would only have been possible in fairy tales. "It's what I get paid for."
    Chase tapped the ork hard on the shoulder, and knocked him back a half step. William chuckled. "You're a nasty critter for an old man, Church."
    Chase shrugged expressively and continued on. Drek, he thought. He'd forgotten that around here they knew him as Church. Too many places, too many names.
    The ork called after him. "Teek already knows you're here, so don't try sneaking up on him."
    The short corridor led him to the slightly raised area that bordered half the place. There was really only one room, but it had been divided up with partitions and sound-dampening wall sections. If customers wished, they could sit in the main area near a stage that occasionally presented live acts, but more often displayed cheap, sixty-four color holograms of some exotic dancer. The more select could pick the raised area or else a sectioned-off area where they might pass the time. Without fail, midnight or midday, there were always people there. It was a biz club, which meant that anyone present was quite obviously in the biz. Chase wasn't in that line of work anymore, but came anyway.
    In the last few years, Manhattan had become the place around which Jason Chase revolved, the site of his brightest as well as darkest days. Those who knew him, and who he