shadowrun 40 The Burning Time by Stephen Kenson Page A

you called it quits with Ian?" Talon asked. "For me, there wasn’t much choice, but. . ."
    "Most of the time, no," Trouble said. "He cared so much about freeing the Irish that it seemed to mean more to him than I did. I guess I didn’t really want to share him with a cause, you know?"
    "Yeah, I can see that."
    The traffic began to move again, and they lapsed back into silence as Trouble cut through the city to South Boston.
    Talon began to go over the run with her. They agreed that, if all went as planned with Otabi, they should be able to pull it off with ease.
    "The only other thing that bothers me is that we don’t have any real information on the Johnson," Talon said. That bothered Trouble as well. Most employers—"Mr. Johnsons," as they were known—valued their anonymity. Shadowrunners, however, liked to know whom they were working for, just in case their Johnson tried to use them for some secret purpose of his own. The team knew very little about their current employer, apart from the fact that his credit was good.
    "I’ll see if I can dig up something," Trouble said, pulling up to the curb in front of Talon’s doss.
    He got out of the car. "Good. I’ll give you a call when everything’s set for the meet."
    "Okay." She watched him until he’d climbed the front steps and gone through the door of his apartment house before putting the ZX back into gear. At the stop sign, she glanced back again before driving on.
    Don’t be stupid, she told herself, but she really didn’t have much choice People in love were always doing stupid things, weren’t they? She turned the corner, but didn’t head for home to start tracking down information about their Mr. Johnson. She drove toward the Rox, a section of the Boston plex that most people avoided if they could.
    She was headed for "Doc’s Clinic," as it was known among the locals. It had no official name because most of the places and people in the Rox didn’t officially exist. When the metroplex government was formed, they decided to write off southern Roxbury and the Lowell-Lawrence Zone. From then on, the only market in the Rox or Lowell-Lawrence was the black market. That included medical services, and Doc’s Clinic was one of several that patched up Rox residents for a reasonable fee and no questions asked.
    That same policy made it popular with people who, for various reasons, preferred not to visit the licensed hospitals and doctors. In addition to stitching you up or giving you something for whatever ailed you, Doc’s was a place to get certain modifications, if the price was right and what you wanted was available. The mods included anything from a cyber-replacement hand to new eyes to a new face that wouldn’t be quite so well known to the authorities.
    "Doc" was Dr. Daniel MacArthur, a former combat medic for Ares Macrotechnology. He’d served in the Desert Wars for awhile after discharge from the UCAS military. Then he went to work for Ares, with some "consulting" work on the side until his bosses caught on. Ares booted him out and his license to practice medicine was revoked. In the Rox, however, everyone called him Doc, and no one cared about the license because he knew what he was doing. There weren’t many street docs better than Doctor Mac.
    The first person Trouble saw when she came through the door was Hilda, Doc’s combination nurse, receptionist, and bouncer. Hilda knew how to set a broken bone, draw blood, apply a dressing, and dozens of other things Doc needed done around the place. She handled the clinic’s computer files, keeping the records straight (and ensuring certain things were never recorded). Being a troll, Hilda was also more than able to handle anything from a punker whacked out on chips to a dissatisfied customer looking to cause trouble.
    At the moment she was changing a dressing on the arm of one of the Bane-Sidhe, a local gang. Trouble knew them well, mostly Irish kids, the children of Irish immigrants like her. The ganger