Work Text:
2003
"What do you want," the woman says. She does not look up from her laptop screen as he approaches through the maze of plastic-wrapped dry-cleaning.
Her name is Suzie Kang. Her official record is some petty theft and moving violations. She's in her mid-thirties, same as him, but to look at her you'd think she was a teenage mall goth: laden with chunky plastic jewelry, orangey streaks bleached into her black hair, pink shadow smudged over her eyes, shirt falling off one soft shoulder. A half-smoked cigarette hangs between her acrylic-tipped fingers.
Lassiter places the printout on the table. Her dark eyes flick to the blood-stained paper, then up to him.
He's been rehearsing this line since he set out for Pittsburgh, but now, under her unimpressed gaze, he falters. "Next time-- next time you send someone after me," he says, "You'd better hope they finish the job." Dammit, that sounded so much cooler in his head.
She sits back in her chair and takes a drag of her cigarette and continues to stare him down through the cloud of gray smoke. It takes every ounce of his training to hold her gaze and not fidget.
At length, she says, "You're new, huh?"
That's not the response he was expecting, and he doesn't know how to answer it.
She ashes her cig. "Look, you clearly don't have money, but you're cute -- aside from that mustache -- so I'll give you some free advice. As long as you have an Object, people are gonna be after you, whether they go through me or not."
"So you're not going to stop giving people my information?"
She smiles at him. "No. And taking me out won't make you any safer."
He bristles at the implication, and then realizes how ridiculous that is. He opened with a threat. "I'm not going to shoot a civilian." Even if her business does endanger his life.
"Aw. You are new," she says with a laugh. One acrylic nail, painted with a smiley-face, drags the printout across the table toward her. "Tell you what. It's bad for business if my clients get killed--"
"Hospitalized."
She doesn't so much shrug as just tilt her head. "Either way. Someone asks about the Ring, I'll upcharge them. That way the only ones that'll come for you are serious, and you don't have to feel bad about..." She taps one of the bloodstains. "Hospitalizing them. That's the best offer you're gonna get."
It probably is. "You do that," Lassiter says grudgingly.
As he leaves, she calls after him, barely audible over the hiss of the steam machines: "Seriously, get rid of the mustache!"