I knew her but couldn’t remember the name . . . I gave her my hard stare just in case. She kept coming. Shoot. I was out of practice. “Really?”

“Yeah. You took my gig.”

Ah. Alice Golansky. The last time I saw her was almost two years ago. Well, wasn’t that a blast from the past.

“So let me get this straight. You’re mad, because two years ago you were too drunk to do a job and passed out in the Guild’s mess hall, and the Clerk sent me out in your place?”

She shrugged her shoulders and raised her fists. Well, well. Someone had some karate training. “I’m going to teach you not to steal jobs.”

“You do realize that gig was assigned to me?” Not to mention that the job happened two years ago.

“You think you’re so high and mighty. I’m gonna pull you off that table and stomp your face in.”

Curran smiled.

Okay. “You thought this through?” I asked.

She looked up at me and punched her palm with her fist. “Oh yeah.”

I dropped to my knee and hammered a punch into her jaw. My fist had shot down like a jackhammer. I’d sunk all of the momentum of the drop into it. Knocking someone out was tricky, because it required power, speed, and the element of surprise, but when it worked, it made a statement. Alice’s eyes rolled into her head. She went rigid and fell straight back, like a cut tree. Her head bounced off the floor a bit.

The hall was suddenly silent. Ha! Still got it.

“Anybody else got any disputes they’d like to settle?” I asked.

The mercs sat silent.

“I’ll ask again.” I stood up. “Blue FJ Cruiser. Who has it?”

No answer.

“Maybe you didn’t hear her,” Curran said. “Or maybe you can’t see her well. Let me help.”

The table under me moved. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him holding it a foot off the ground with one hand. Okay then.

The mercs froze.

“It was Mac,” a large Latino man wearing faded fatigues said from the left. His name was Charlie and he used to be a regular when I worked for the Guild. “Mac and his idiot redneck cousin, what’s his name . . . Bubba? Skeeter . . . ?”

“Leroy,” Crystal said, tossing back her bleached blond hair. “Mac and Leroy.”

The names didn’t sound familiar. Curran quietly lowered the table back to Earth.

“Yeah, Leroy,” Charlie said. “I saw them getting into it this morning. They were going to do a job in Chamblee on Chamblee Dunwoody Road.”

I was pretty sure Chamblee used to be in Heyward’s zone.

“The cat lady?” a short skinny guy in a red sweater asked. “The one who called before?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “She’s got something with wings trying to eat her cats on Chamblee Dunwoody Road.”

That’s right, tell me more.