Wolves and Men

As he followed the car below, he began to review everything that had happened when he got to this city. The strange phone call from his longtime friend and mentor Alessandro had happened out of the blue. He had not heard from the Head of House Dukart in years, almost a decade. So, picking up the phone and hearing the wise man’s voice was a real surprise. The message and the implication that he received was anything but.

He jumped another building and over the street again to follow the car as it made a right turn away from him.

Alessandro knew that there was something going on in his city. There were movements on the board that he wasn’t aware of. Someone was trying to rig the game and it fell to Simon to find out whom. Alessandro had only this nagging feeling of his to go off of, a feeling which had proven to be right time and time again. Simon did not question his old mentor, if Alessandro said something was going on, then there was.

The leads had been nonexistent. Someone was making a move on House Dukart. That usually meant a rival House, even though Brandt and Himura had kept the peace for over sixty years. There was money being exchanged and services rendered, and it was up to Simon to figure it out, and deal with the problem.

The car slowed down. They had traveled outside the city proper and were now in the area known as Little Tokyo. The trees were neatly trimmed along the main drag boulevard. The buildings were definitely inspired by Japanese architecture, with a modern flair.

The car pulled down a market street and then took several tight turns and disappeared into a garage. Simon had followed the car easily and was now faced with how to get inside the noted building. The building he was on had a fire escape and he rapidly scaled down the stairs and ladder to the street.

He walked around the place once. All the doors were locked. That wasn’t a surprise. He looked up and down the building’s concrete frontal façade, and then strolled around a corner. He made note of the side streets and places of entry. The pouring rain had not let up and it masked him pretty well.

The night had not been fruitless. He had a lead in any event, a place to start looking. The driver looked to know exactly what he was doing and this building was just the first. He would have to find a way into it without raising too much suspicion to see just what was inside. He wiped water from his hair and calmly walked away.

He hadn’t expected to find out House Dukart’s enemy tonight anyway. This work would be long and tedious, as his work mostly was. The thing that bothered him was what could be causing Alessandro this much anxiety?

Surely his house wasn’t in any danger of being overrun or overturned? House Himura and House Brandt wouldn’t make such a brazen power grab, not now. Alessandro owned this city. But he was here for a reason. Maybe it was just as Alessandro had told him, a hundred little bites that he had finally grown weary of. If that was the case than his nights were going to be very busy for a while.

He found himself making his way to the docks. He was walking and seeing everything around him. If there was something to be found, he might as well go there and snoop around for a bit. He dipped into an alley and hurled himself to the roof and started running at vampire speeds towards the docks district of this wonderful city of Los Angeles.

He arrived in about 30 minutes, he could have been faster, but his eyes were his best tool and weapon in this hunt. He surveyed an active loading dock and the containers being loaded into a nearby ship. The place was full of the sound of metal grinding and people yelling and machinery being used and cooled down with its oil and water pumps. The place was deafening to his ears. How could anybody hear anything down there? The rain had died down a little but the constant drumming of water on the cement and aluminum containers was still thunderous.

He jumped up on a stack of containers away from the bustling workers on the dock and looked around for the main office building. He would have to get copies of manifests and then go through those numbers with what had been delivered on the other side. This was one of the most boring parts of his job.

The office building was several blocks away from the actual port and safely nestled among other buildings. The one he was looking for had a nice sized garage and big open windows. Not that any human inside could actually supervise the docks from there, but he guessed that maybe it worked for the dock workers. He ducked inside the building and hugged the shadows of the place.

The offices were quiet and there were only a few lights left on. That was the good part, he didn’t need a lot of light to see or read by for that matter. The bad thing was that this office was huge. His heart sank a little at the enormity of the job that he had tasked himself with. He opened a file drawer silently and began shuffling through files.

* * * * *

The night was cool and Simon was waiting patiently in the crowded airport terminal. It had a been around two weeks since he first arrived in L.A. and it had taken him two of those nights to realize he needed help. In cases like this, there was only a few people he could call upon and he had called all of them.

The people around him at the airport smelled of stress, fear, hunger, irritation, but the most prevalent among them was hatred. Hate permeated this place. He watched one man duck out of the way of a child as he was exiting the bathroom and his face flushed as he quickly looked around wildly, for the parents he supposed. The man shook his head and stalked off to wherever he was going. Hatred.

He couldn’t blame them. There were too many people here. The raw emotions of mankind could, and have, caused explosions of pain and misery in the form of riots and fires, random acts of violence, aggression, and assault. He was glad that he was able to elevate himself above those concerns.

He would live forever and with that the rush of everyday life had been given up, slowly to be sure, but after the last forty years or so he had learned to slow down a bit and start to really appreciate life and all the delicacies of human interaction. It made him even better at what he did.