Shadowboxer Read Online Free Page A

supremacy on the littered sidewalks. Simsense parlors and the mandatory rock bars sprouted every few meters, each louder than the one before, or so it seemed to her disgust. Graffiti tried its best to hide the filth on the walls of the buildings and few stores.
    The Miami sprawl embraced much of what used to be the Million Dollar Mile along the Gold Coast, going in all the way to Coral Gables. But times changed, as they always do, and now the majestic hotels were half-empty, become hives of chippers and organleggers. Ratnests for gutterkin, squatters, and gangers who preyed upon those too hopeless or too weak from hunger to fight back effectively.
    The Overtown DMZ, home of the desperate and doomed. This place should be burned to the ground, Erika Johnson thought for the thousandth time. Painful memories of her own childhood in such a demilitarized zone flashed momentarily, but she forcibly shoved them back down among the rest of her scarred youth. She was out now and never going back. Except for work, of course. Here, where the law was afraid to tread, a sharp operator could make a fortune and eventually retire someplace clean. If there was someplace clean anymore. Outside of the corporate enclaves.
    Westside blackness marked the middle of the next block, where a series of street lamps were out. As the Caravaner neared, the lamps burst into life, sending dozens of denizens scurrying toward less prominent locations of visibility. Rolling the Caravaner onto the broken curb, Johnson drove straight for the closed doors of a garage. The louvered portal opened before her and shut immediately after, so fast not even an elf with wired reflexes could have followed her. A few ticks later, a sleek black Mitsubishi Jaguar rolled out the other side of the garage onto the next street over. At the wheel a raven-haired woman sporting a blue silk Majeure scarf gunned her vehicle and screeched with smoking tires off for uptown proper, classic Queen blaring from the sixteen tandem speakers.
    Reaching 95, Johnson was klicks away, tooling for Opa-Locka, when an explosion tinted the horizon and orange flames tongued the night sky. A glance at her digital. Exactly on schedule. Everything was going fine tonight. This had been the third attempted raid by her shadowrunner teams on the Miami complexes of the Shatogunda Corporation and was the last needed. The first infiltration had occurred via the Matrix and had sent Shatogunda troops scurrying to protect three locations: a downtown office on East Fifty-seventh Street, an underground laboratory in the swamp, and one shoreside warehouse. The second had been a magical penetration by a shaman, which sent the Shatogunda wagemages rushing to protect four radically different locations, two of them repeats from the first time. Tonight’s physical sortie relied heavily on armed guards to rush and protect five points—only one of them a repeat from the other raids. Done and done. Now she knew where the main datastore for Shatogunda was located, and she could use that information in any of a hundred different ways that would all result in her acquiring a lot of nuyen. And power. Always more power.
    Sirens from firefighters foolish enough, or brave enough, to challenge the sprawl, screamed in the distance when the thundering music abruptly stopped as the telecom system of the car bleeped for her attention. She stared in mild curiosity at the communications unit below her automatically paused chip-player. At this hour? Pressing a button gave her a garbled read-out of the caller’s number on a small liquid crystal display. It was from the executive offices of the Gunderson Corporation. At this hour? Keying the access code, Erika activated the speaker unit.
    “Johnson here,” she said, lighting a cigarette with one hand while steering through the thickening traffic with the other.
    “James Harvin,” replied the unseen caller.
    Erika stared at her descrambler, the monitor verifying that this was her boss and