Watch Dogs by John Shirley Page B

cameras, blurring his face in the camera itself.
    But ordinary people on the street saw him as he really was, a lean white guy in a black neighborhood, an interloper with a two day growth of beard, just trucking along, hands in his pants’ pockets, as if he had no particular place to go.
    He was walking with the sleety wind to his back. He had the .36 under his hoodie, and the phone in one hand.
    He’d already used the PearcePhone before leaving the safehouse—to break into a police computer file on the various gang turfs in Chicago. According to the file, this street was being taken over by The Club, who had lately been trying to muscle in on Black Viceroy territory.
    He might be confronted by any of them here—Club thugs or Viceroys. But he was pretty sure that the Club had taken over this block, through a group of ex-cons it had hired to move weight here.
    Wolfe didn’t like drug dealers—not if they dealt in major drugs like crack or meth or heroin. He’d seen what they’d done to his own neighborhood.
    On the right was a fast food place, Golden Fish and Chicken, with a white and blue awning. Across the street was a shaggy, fenced-in park, with steel piping exposed in muddy trenches. A sign on the fence said Change for Chicago At Work but it didn’t look like there’d been any work done there for a long time. Across the street three men hunched along in the sleet, one of them talking on a cell phone.
    Wolfe thought , If I want, I can listen into that guy’s phone call...if this phone works.
    But someone else had words for him. “Hey, you here for a reason, bub?” came a rough voice behind him.
    He turned to see a red-haired man in a long black leather coat looking at him from the parking lot, half-sheltered in the back of the Golden Fish eatery. Probably from the Club.
     “Thing is,” the Club thug continued, “you got to be a customer, a resident of this block—or you got to pay a toll. To me.” He patted his coat pocket. “Got a .45 here will back me up.”
    “A toll? Sure.” Wolfe reached into his pocket, and walked timidly up to the thug, as if to pay him off. “Here...”
    Then he flashed the .38 out instead and used its gun butt to knock the thug on his ass.
    Wolfe bent over the stunned man, plucked the .45 from his coat, and stuck it in his own waist band. Straightening up, Wolfe drew out the PearcePhone with his left hand. With his thumb he activated the contiguous phone hack; it penetrated the nearest phone, the thug’s...
    The system pulled up the man’s phone bill, first off. The bill provided the name Ken Brown, with an address a few blocks from here. Might be his real name but Wolfe suspected it wasn’t.
    Wolfe took a phone picture of the sprawled thug with a quick flick of his fingers. He hacked ctOS recognition, cross referenced the phone photo with the population database. Came up with another name in the CPD case files: Buford Keeting . The red-haired Keeting’s face came up, along with his rap sheet. Buford “Duck” Keeting.
    Keeting groaned as he sat up, holding his head. “Where’s muh gun...want muh gun...”
    “Don’t worry about your gun, Keeting,” Wolfe said. “I’ll take good care of it.”
    “I know you? My name...How yuh know...?”
    “Sure I know you, ‘Duck’,” Wolfe said, glancing around to see there wasn’t anybody else around going to interfere. He saw a group of school kids across the street, walking by a nineteenth-century brick building with a FOR RENT sign in it. The kids were careful not to look over Wolfe’s way. They knew trouble when they saw it and how to avoid it. Wolfe looked back at Duck Keeting—he was trying to get to his feet. Wolfe used a boot to shove Keeting back on his ass. “I know you’ve got two warrants out for you.”
“So you is a cop, huh? Go ahead, arrest me, the Club’ll have me out again in an hour!”
    “I know they would. But I’m not a cop so it doesn’t matter. But hold on—one of those warrants is