The block looked like a different street.
Glass on the pavement. Car alarms still cycling in overlapping rhythms that nobody was rushing to silence. Two squad cars already angled across the intersection, their lights painting the brownstones in rotating red and blue. The building two doors down had lost its entire ground-floor front — the wall just gone, replaced by a ragged mouth of broken brick and scorched wood that breathed heat into the evening air.
Gwen had a cut on her forearm from falling debris. Locke had a matching one across the back of his hand. Neither was serious. Both of them knew it.
George had been on the front steps in about twelve seconds, still in his off-duty clothes, moving with the particular velocity of someone who had spent thirty years training himself not to panic and was spending all of that training right now. He looked at Gwen first, the way a father does, a full-body scan that takes a quarter second and somehow checks everything and then looked at Locke.
Whatever he'd been filing Locke under for the past two hours quietly shifted categories.
The EMT who arrived with the first unit pulled off her mask once she'd done her assessment. "Superficial lacerations, both of them. Cleaned and dressed. Nothing to worry about couple days and they'll be fine."
George nodded. He looked at the building.
Then he looked at the R8.
What had been, seven hours ago, a silver Audi R8 was now a silver Audi R8 with a section of load-bearing wall on top of it. The windshield was gone. The hood had a depression in it that suggested something heavy had landed there with significant enthusiasm. A portion of what the first responders were quietly categorizing as human remains had contributed to the general situation on and around the vehicle.
Locke looked at his car for a long moment.
I owned that for seven hours.
George, standing beside him, cleared his throat. "We'll get whoever did this."
"I know you will." Locke turned away from the wreckage. "Has anyone identified the- the individual? From the building?"
"Not yet." George shook his head. "The blast destroyed most of the physical evidence. We're working with what we have." He paused. "Could be a gas leak. Could be something else."
From his tone, George didn't think it was a gas leak.
Locke didn't either. The pattern of the damage was wrong for a domestic accident, too directional, too deliberate in what it had taken out and what it had left standing. Someone had known what they were doing, or had hired someone who did.
Which raised questions he wasn't going to ask out loud in front of George Stacy.
He looked back at the car one more time. The R8 had been a practical purchase, mission mobility, nothing sentimental about it. He could replace it.
What he could not replace was the seven hours of depreciation he'd already experienced, on top of the total loss, on top of the fact that somebody had apparently decided to blow up his street on his second full day in New York City.
Don't let me find out who you are.
George was watching him with the expression of someone running a calculation. "You doing alright?"
"Fine." Locke meant it. Adrenaline had a clean, functional quality when you'd worked with it long enough, it stopped being noise and started being information. Right now the information was: the scene was secured, Gwen was unhurt, the threat was past. Everything else was paperwork.
"Good instincts," George said. It wasn't quite a compliment. It was more like an observation being filed.
Locke kept his expression neutral. "I was paying attention."
George left it there.
Gwen was sitting on the front steps of her building, a foil blanket around her shoulders that she clearly found unnecessary but hadn't bothered arguing about. She looked up when Locke came over.
"You okay?" she asked.
"Fine. You?"
"Fine." She looked past him at the R8. "Your car is destroyed."
"I noticed."
"You just bought it."
"I noticed that too."
She looked at him for a moment, the way she did when she was trying to read something in his face and not quite getting the whole picture. "You're not upset."
"I'm upset," Locke said. "I'm just not going to perform it."
That seemed to satisfy her, or at least give her something to work with.
He sat down on the step beside her and they both looked at the controlled chaos of the scene for a moment, first responders moving with purpose, George at the perimeter talking to a detective, neighbors clustered at a respectful distance that was slowly becoming a less respectful distance.
Then:
[Ding!]
[Mission Generating...]
[Mission: Every Debt Has Its Debtor - Part 1 of 2]
[Reward: Achievement Points ×1,000 / Potential Points ×1,000 / 1× Treasure Refresh Coupon (90% Off)]
[Mission Note: "It's Not About the Car."]
Locke stared at that last line for a long moment.
Yeah, he thought. It's really not.
The car was property. Property was replaceable given sufficient income, which was a solvable problem. What was not replaceable, what had landed with the quiet weight of something genuinely significant, was the realization that somebody had just tried to kill him, or someone near him, or had been catastrophically indifferent to the collateral. On his second day in the city. Before he'd had time to make a single enemy he knew about.
Which meant either someone had tracked him from Texas, possible, given his profession or he'd stumbled into someone else's situation entirely just by being on this block at this time.
The System had generated a two-part revenge mission.
He didn't know yet whether to be reassured or worried that the System had a strong opinion about this.
Part 1 of 2 meant there was a second half waiting on the other side of something he hadn't done yet. Find out who. Then, presumably, the System would have further thoughts.
He closed the screen.
George reappeared from the perimeter, stopping a few feet away. "Locke. I can have someone drive you home. Given-" he gestured at the R8 in a way that communicated the obvious situation, "I think you've earned a ride."
"I'd appreciate that." Locke stood. "Thank you, Mr. Stacy."
George looked at him, that steady, measuring look that Locke was starting to recognize as the man's default setting. Not hostile anymore. Not quite warm either. Something in between that felt like the beginning of a different kind of attention.
"Get some rest," George said.
Locke glanced once more at the wreckage of his car, the scorched building, the scene that would probably make the morning news under a gas explosion headline that wouldn't capture what it actually was.
Three days in New York City.
An assassination contract completed, an apartment purchased, a school enrolled in, a car bought and immediately totaled, a dinner survived, and now a mystery revenge mission with a two-part structure and a coupon he didn't fully understand yet.
The grind, he thought, settling into the back of the squad car, is evidently going to be eventful.