Chapter 6: Full Stop
Bang!
"Hey there, Janpeng. Business looking good outside but you've got the place closed up? Leaving all that money on the table?"
Vito kicked the clinic door open and pressed his gun against Janpeng's head. Janpeng was in the middle of cleaning his surgical table and was very clearly not expecting this.
"You're not, you're not supposed to..." he started.
"Not supposed to what, come back? I'm supposed to be in a bag somewhere? You absolute piece of shit! What kind of ripperdoc are you? I paid for a haircut and you sent scavs to kill me? And five fucking eddies to use your mirror, are you kidding me?"
Janpeng had actually cleaned up his clinic for once, waiting for Vito to show up. He'd just pictured it going slightly differently. Vito was supposed to come in horizontal.
"Calm down, calm down, I don't know what you're talking about, I'll give you back the mirror money, take it, take it!"
Vito dragged Janpeng over to his computer, shoved his head down onto the desk and pressed the gun against the back of his skull. "Transfer everything you've got to me. Then give me the scavs, every last one of those body-picking dogs. I want to know exactly who thought they could carve me up."
Janpeng saw there was no way out and reached for the last card he had. "You really want to let me go. Those people I sent after you were nothing, small fish, but there are a lot more of them. Some of them are running military-grade cyberware, your bullets won't even scratch them. And we've got connections at Arasaka. Don't make this harder than it needs to be."
Bang!
Vito put a round through Janpeng's calf.
"A dirty rat who can't be bothered to shower doesn't have friends at Arasaka. Last chance. Next bullet goes through your skull."
Janpeng had no cards left. He transferred everything in his account.
"What the fuck, only 1741? You taking the piss?"
Janpeng was deeply regretting not getting a pain editor installed. He gritted through it. "I just restocked, I've got nothing. And look at this place, it's all knockoff gear, what money do you think I have?"
Vito grabbed him by the head and jammed the barrel in his face. "Then give me the scavs. Their location, now."
Janpeng could smell the gunpowder off the barrel. He was terrified of what Vito would do to him, but more terrified of what the scavs would do if they found out he'd talked. They'd take him apart while he was still breathing.
He said nothing.
Vito was mildly surprised. People in Night City had some spine after all.
He put another round through Janpeng's thigh, then kept pressing. "Talk or die. I can sit here and wait until you run dry."
Janpeng had never hated being in Night City this much in his life. Where the hell was the NCPD? With gunshots this loud, wasn't there a single civic-minded citizen out there who could call it in?
Right. Calling the NCPD costs money. Goddamn new regulations.
"We contact each other by email. The boss's name is Dov. He's got a lot of people. Just walk away now and I'll pretend none of this happened."
Vito let go of Janpeng. As the man exhaled in relief, a bullet took the top of his head off.
Now Vito needed to figure out how to deal with the rest of them.
His Kiroshi swept across the room and caught something: a medical crate in the corner. Standard stuff, a few MaxDocs inside, but something about it looked different to Vito. A small tag appeared in his vision: DISASSEMBLE.
He picked up one of the MaxDocs and tried it. His hands moved fast, almost automatically, and a few seconds later he was holding a Tier 1 component.
"No way. That actually works."
He turned his attention to the computer. It was encrypted, but to Vito's Technical Ability 20 it may as well have not been. He jacked in and cracked it in no time, and everything Janpeng had was laid out in front of him.
Dov ran a scav crew of around thirty. He did work with corporations, but not Arasaka, he was just a body parts contractor, pulling implants out of unemployed workers for various companies, with some straight kidnapping on the side. Standard scav operation.
Janpeng had lied about the military-grade cyberware. Dov himself didn't have any. A few of his people had subdermal armor and Mantis Blades, nothing beyond that.
Vito sent an email from Janpeng's account to Dov.
"Hey, the guy slipped through, he just walked back into my place. Brought one of your crew's heads with him, wants me to pull the eyes for him. I'm keeping him calm, send more people over here fast. I think this one's a genuine cyberpsycho."
Dov forwarded it to a few of his crew and told them to head to Janpeng's clinic. He had somewhere else to be. Word was a Trauma Team employee had been in a car accident at another clinic nearby, still had all his corporate-grade chrome on him.
Six scavs showed up at Janpeng's clinic inside of ten minutes. The kicked-in door put them on alert immediately. They drew weapons and moved carefully inside.
They worked their way through to the office and found Janpeng's body. One of them went to check on him while the others scanned for anything off.
Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang!
An SMG opened up on them from the doorway in a sustained burst. Two scavs went down before they could react and didn't get back up.
"He's got us pinned inside!"
The scav who'd shouted it got cut down by Vito charging through the door. Vito had burned through the first SMG's magazine and didn't bother reloading, he dropped it and pulled the second one, keeping the pressure on.
In the space of a few seconds it was down to one, the scav who'd been checking Janpeng's body and had a desk between him and the doorway. He was mostly unhurt.
He stayed behind the desk and started working fast, trying to jack into Vito's systems. Stuck in this room, he had maybe thirty seconds before a grenade came in.
While the scav was grinding away at the hack, Vito dropped both SMGs, drew his Unity, and slid hard through the office door. The scav's eyes had gone red, the telltale glow of someone deep in a jack-in.
Vito put two rounds into his shoulder and laughed. "I'm made of meat. What exactly are you hacking? My eyes? My whole interface is factory stock, you gonk."
The scav collapsed and dropped any pretense. "Don't shoot, please, let me go!"
"Is Dov here?"
"Dov didn't come, he went to another clinic. Please, let me go!"
"Give me the location. And how many he took with him."
Bang!
Information received. Vito ended the scav's career permanently.
He gathered the crew's weapons, found a crate to pack them in, loaded everything into the scavs' van, and drove it to the gun shop.
"Hey, it's me again. This time I'm making you money. What have you got in the way of heavy hardware?"
He walked in calling out to the owner before he'd even cleared the door.