5

He actually left the first round of reconnaissance to Mystique. They agreed on a meeting place and time, and she was under the impression he was meeting up with Faith.  So, he’d lied. Whatever.

This was far from Logan’s first time in Vancouver, and he knew some things about the city. Like the locations of all the seedy bars where no one asked a lot of questions, where you could pick up work that was semi-legal at best, and who was the person you needed to see when you wanted information.

The guy Logan went to see was a man called 'Lucky', who seemed to have a permanent stool at the end of the bar at Hancock’s, a dive bar on one of the piers that tourists never went to, mainly because they valued their lives. The place reeked of cheap beer, vomit, and piss, which barely covered up the smell of rotting kelp outside. It was like permanent night inside, the neon beer signs barely offering enough illumination to see if the bartender spit in your glass or not. It was not a happy place to be; indeed, it seemed like the last stop before death. If the despair didn’t kill you, one of the patrons would.

Lucky had earned his nickname because he had been shot in the face but survived with nothing more than a livid pink scar on his left cheek, and been attacked with a machete and survived with only three missing fingers. Logan actually thought it was probably bad luck that he’d been shot in the face and attacked with a machete, but logic didn’t seem to apply here.

If Lucky had a job, it must have been as an informant, because he never seemed to do anything or go anywhere.  Much like Barney on The Simpson’s - if Hancock’s was open, Lucky was here, keeping his stool warm.  He was a pale, doughy man with stringy hair held back in a loose, greasy ponytail, with a face like a crowbar: sharp enough that it looked edged, and his nose had been broken so many times it looked too thin for his face. Logan could smell his body odor the moment he came in the door, so he dug out a cigar and lit it, using the smoke to block the smell.  He still wore the same old ratty tan trench coat he’d always worn, but his face had a sprinkling of fresh acne across it, making the scar looked puckered and fresh.  Meth?  Probably.  Meth addicts usually had bad acne and bad teeth, and a strangely chemical reek to their body odor.

Logan took the bar stool next to his, and as the big, bald bartender approached, he threw a ten dollar bill on the scarred bar top, saying, “Bring me a decent beer, and give my friend another of whatever’s he’s having.”

The bartender, who was missing his eyebrows (flaming brandy gone horribly wrong?) gave him an odd, dead-eyed look, but took the money and went to get the drinks. Lucky stared at him curiously for several seconds before placing the face. “Fuckin’ ay, is that you Logan? You shaved.”

His stubble was starting to come back in, but slowly. “Had to some time.”

“Haven’t seen you in like forever. Figured you ran into somethin’ you couldn’t beat.”

Logan shrugged as the bartender came back with their drinks and pissed off again. There was a low murmur of the CBC news from the distant corner, but the screen was so small and grimy almost no one could see it even if they wanted to pay attention to it. “Sure, but I’m still here. Need some info.”

“Lookin’ for a job? ID?”

“Not this time. I need to know what place the Russian mafia calls home base these days.”

Lucky turned to him, bug-eyed, and grabbed his sleeve, yanking him close enough that he could smell the decay and acidic scent of meth beneath his general whiskey breath. “Are you fuckin’ nuts?  The Russians?  There are easier ways to commit suicide, man.”

Logan yanked his arm out of his grasp and sat back, taking a puff of his cigar so his eyes didn’t look like they were watering from his stink. “Ain’t your concern. I just need to know where they call home.”

He scoffed and shook his head. “And if they find out where the info came from -”

“They won’t,” Logan held up his hand as he reached for his beer, flashing him the folded twenty he had palmed. “Gonna tell me, Lucky?”

Twenty was actually pretty cheap, but Lucky was happy to accept any two digit denomination; he’d have settled for ten. He licked his dry, cracked lips nervously, almost colorless, bloodshot eyes briefly flicking around the darkened bar before leaning in and whispering, “There’s this private club on the east side, known only as the Tea Room, but you won’t see any signs on it. It’s like this old apartment building that looks like it’s been converted into a storage facility. It’s really like the social club for the Ruskies. Only people who know about it can get in. There’s a brothel in it, supposedly, but not one that they share with your average joes.”

Probably because the girls were all underage, spoke no English, and probably had no idea where the fuck they were. Just thinking about it made Logan angry. “Where on the East Side?”

“Know George Street?”

“Yeah.”

“Take it all the way down ‘til you reached this burned out liquor store. There’s an unmarked side street - it’s really McCormack Avenue, but all the signs are gone - and if you take the street all the way down, you’ll find it. It’s red brick, and in spite of all the run down places near it, the sidewalks are surprisingly neat.”

“Well, this is Canada.”

“Yeah, but the rest of that area’s the pits. It’s like America or something.”

Yes, Canadian chauvinism existed. But it seemed extra funny coming from a meth-head who probably hadn’t showered in three days. Logan slid him the twenty discreetly, and took a swig of his beer. It was lukewarm and vaguely disgusting, which was par for the course with Hancock’s. “Thanks, Lucky.  Nobody will know I was here.”

He snorted. “Not when they fish you out of the bay, no.”

“Have a little more faith in me. I was just curious, that’s all.” A blatant lie, and Lucky looked at him like he knew it, but he wasn’t about to comment on it. Logan took a final swig of his beer and then left it on the bar, sure that Lucky would finish it off.

Once outside, he walked to a better part of the neighborhood and hailed a cab, getting it to take him to the end of George Street. He told the driver, an agreeable Rastafarian named Hugo who swore he “looked familiar” (“You been on t.v., dude? You an actor?”) to come back for him in twenty minutes, and walked down the unnamed street and found what must have been “the Tea Room”. There were no markings at all outside, and while there were windows on the ground floor (covered though they were with old-fashioned blinds), there were no windows at all on the upper floors. Bricked over? Probably. There was the burned shell of an abandoned building across the street, so he hid in it for a while and watched the building. There wasn’t a lot of activity, but he hadn't expected there would be. There would probably be a bit more action later on, when it started getting dark, and the mobsters decided to relax with a little gambling and whoring.

A little reconnaissance showed there were only two exits on the ground floor: the front door and the back. People could technically use the windows, but the big macho men with guns rarely did.

He eventually walked back to George Street, and Hugo showed up a few minutes early, full of questions about what movies he’d been in. He assured him he hadn’t been in any movies, that he was mistaking him for someone else, but Logan secretly feared he’d seen video of him fighting on YouTube or in some sort of X-Men news footage. Eventually, weary of the third degree, he borrowed a credit from Kier and claimed he’d once been on the X-Files. That made Hugo happy - “Oh yeah! That’s where I saw you!” - and went on to ask which episode and what he was in. He didn’t actually know what Kier’s role had been, so Logan just said he’d been an alien in that one where they were plotting an invasion, a description so bland it could have applied to any one of three dozen X-Files episodes. But once again, Hugo was happy to volunteer that he remembered that and he was “really creepy”, which he took as a kind of compliment. Luckily he had reached his destination before he had to answer the “So what’s Gillian Anderson really like?” question.

He and Mystique had agreed to meet outside a dockside gay nightclub that didn’t open until nine, so they were alone, and it was unlikely that any Russian mafia guy would ever admit being anywhere near here. (There were gays in the mafia - but they never admitted it for fear of being killed. The macho culture was no place to admit being different.) Still, sticking to the gay theme, Mystique showed up in the guise of a rather stereotypical twink, a lean but athletic man wearing a tight pink t-shirt that showed off a lean stomach, and two hundred dollar (simulated) jeans so tight they looked painted on, displaying both a sculpted ass and a sizable bulge. Her hair was short and spiky platinum blond, streaked with cotton candy blue, and she appeared to be wearing a diamond nose stud. “Sweetie!” she said, grabbing him and giving him a hug. “Where have you been?”

“Do you know how offensively stereotypical you’re being?” he grumbled.

She feigned a limp slap on his shoulder. “God! Stereotypes exist for a reason, you know!  Maybe the gay guys you know aren’t flaming, but I can show you where those who are gather in flocks like high-pitched geese. They can‘t all be butch like Marc, now can they?” She then grinned, showing off teeth so white he felt like he needed to avert his eyes to avoid being blinded.

He snorted and shook his head. “Yer a piece of work.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. Now lovey, have you shaken your fag hag?”

She was enjoying this far too much. “What did you find out?”

She shrugged, surreptitiously looking around to make sure they were alone. They were, save for some crows and seagulls looking through whatever litter Humans had left behind for anything edible. “Nothing much. They seem to be leaning on some businesses near Chinatown for protection money, the usual penny-ante bullshit.”

“I know where these guys go to unwind. It’s called the Tea Room, just a few miles from here, and I wanna hit it tonight.”

She quirked up a seemingly sculpted eyebrow. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Logan Yashida’s gonna show up and tear it to pieces. Wanna join me?”

She gave him a half smile that was razor blade sharp and evil enough to give him a faint chill. “What’s your hurry?  What tipped the scales?”

“It’s a whorehouse. They probably got a bunch of teenagers in there. I wanna get them out.”

She chuckled faintly. “Oh, there’s that sentimentality teaming up with your estrogen weakness. You know Mr. Patriarchy, not all women are damsels in distress needing saving.”

He fixed her with an evil glare. “I know that. But considering the mob’s reputation for sex trafficking, I doubt any of them are there voluntarily.”

She shrugged, unconcerned. “If they were stupid enough to get caught up in it -”

“They’re kids, Mystique. Those fuckers are fucking kids. You really wanna give them a pass on that?”

She sighed and shook her head. “You are so predictable. But shouldn’t you hit it alone? We don’t want them to know you have a partner in crime.”

He’d actually thought of that while waiting for Mystique to show up, and he had what he figured was a brilliant idea. “What if the guy helping me appeared to be one of their own?  As soon as word got out that someone had flipped and was working with Yashida, it’d freak everyone out. They’ll start turning on each other, become ultra paranoid, and help us tear them down.”

She grinned savagely. “Wow, old man, you and I think alike sometimes.”

“Gee, thanks. And here I was just startin’ to feel good about myself again.”

“I doubt that.” There must have been no one around, as she morphed from the flamboyantly gay man to a thick-necked Russian mobster much like those they'd seen today, in a long black coat with severely slicked-back dark blond hair. The most disturbing thing was the black sunglasses that grew out of her face, like they’d been hiding under her skin and just this moment resurfaced. “You know, if I do turn on my own, it’ll be weird if I use less than deadly force.”

“We need to keep some alive so they can tell the others. But beyond that … go nuts.” He knew he’d probably regret saying that, but truth be told, all he wanted to do was get the girls out of there. He wasn’t averse to using deadly force if they tried to stop him.

Seeing her joyless, predatory grin on a mobster’s face was deeply creepy.  For a moment, it looked like her teeth had turned into fangs. “Sounds like a party.”

Actually it sounded like a slaughter. But he supposed he should be used to that by now.

****

It would have been better to hit the place at full dark, but Logan was impatient to get this started. So was Mystique since he'd told her she could take the gloves off, although she hardly needed his permission - she’d have probably killed anyway. But now she got to do it in front of him, aware he couldn’t throw a hissy fit about it, and that made her positively itchy to get to it.

Barely an hour after they'd discussed it, Mystique drove them to the unnamed street, parking several meters away from the Tea Room, so any stray gunfire wouldn’t hit the car. Logan didn’t think it was a rental, although he doubted Mystique would pony up the dough for a Lexus, so he presumed it was stolen. He just hoped she'd stolen it from a lot and hadn’t killed a person over it, but knowing her, there was no point in doing it if she couldn’t kill someone in the process.

They walked up to the Tea Room, Mystique leading the way since she was supposedly the mafia thug, and he tried to figure out how many people were waiting for them inside by smell. It was really difficult to do on a city street where there had been lots of foot and car traffic - scents overlapped one another, fresh ones bleeding all over older ones, and he was able to separate out and identify at least three dozen different people, but he couldn’t say for sure if they were all inside or not.  It’d just have to be a surprise.

The door was locked, so Mystique rapped on the door, hard enough that it rattled in the frame. A tiny metal window in the door was retracted, and an eye looked out at Mystique. Logan himself stood against the wall on the far side of the door so he couldn’t be seen from such a narrow vantage point. “Who are you?” a voice asked in Russian.

“Federov,” Mystique responded, her voice almost a perfect mimic of his, just slightly lower in pitch. “We got a problem. I need to see the boss.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Logan Yashida.” There was no reaction, so she said, “The boss will know what it means. Tell him.”

The window slammed shut, and she stood there, hands in the pocket of her coat, waiting. She didn’t once break character and look at him. Finally there was a noise of locks being undone, and the door was opened. Mystique grabbed the door’s watchmen by the throat and twisted it at a hard angle, the bones in his neck crackling like firewood, and as his body sagged, she reached under his jacket and pulled out his handgun. She let him go and flattened against the wall as others inside reacted, opening fire, while Logan lunged in the door, popping his claws, a couple of bullets punching into him as he ran for the gunmen, claws slicing the air before they sliced into metal and flesh.  The men yelled for back-up before screaming in pain, the one with the severed fingers falling away as he kicked the standing man in the stomach. He went flying into another man, and they both fell to the floor as more shots rang down the narrow entrance foyer. The bullets were like bee stings, little annoyances, sharp bursts of brie pain that faded as his adrenaline kicked in, and Mystique shot back, narrowly missing him but hitting an approaching gunman square in the face, blowing his brains all over the man coming up behind him.

Although the foyer was narrow, it eventually widened out into the bar/gambling den, so Logan had some room to move. The problem was, so did the guys responding to him, and now there were more, boiling out of back rooms like angry insects, firing and barking out orders in Russian.

Logan just let his mind go, entered a kind of Zen space where he simply let his body do what it was trained to do: hurt and kill, as efficiently as possible.  Without conscious thought getting in the way, he was faster, and he noticed the pain of the bullets less.  He slashed limbs, faces, reduced guns to shrapnel that fell on the floor with the sound of ball bearings pelting from the sky.

Mystique remained far behind him, using the shelter of doorways and him to hide from bullets and occasionally leaning out to fire, the bullets always dangerously close to him but never hitting him, always hitting their target instead. She’d plucked guns from the fallen and now had a small arsenal, discarding weapons as she used up the ammo, a weapon in each hand like a hero in a John Woo film.

Occasionally, he opted for crippling injuries over slashing. He stomped on the side of knees, shattering legs, throwing elbows that shattered noses and sent men falling to the floor in paroxysms of pain. Some of the guys were harder to take down than others, the old mob warhorses who had been hurt a thousand ways and yet still kept coming, a stab wound to the gut or a few missing fingers not enough to discourage them. He slashed them in the face, taking off bits, kicked them in the stomach hard enough to rupture organs, or, worse case scenario, Mystique simply shot them, and she didn’t shoot to wound.

Eventually they cut their way to the back room, and Logan was dimly aware that he felt like he was burning, his healing factor kicking into overdrive, bullets dropping out of his healing body like rotten teeth. Splattered with blood, gore dripping from his extended claws, his eyes empty of everything but incoherent rage, the mafia guys started finally reeking of fear. But it didn’t stop them from trying to fight.

They got smart enough to try and swarm him, but that brought them into close quarters, which is where he excelled.  He slashed open stomachs, blood splattering the floor and entrails poking out of deep gashes, point blank bullets ricocheting off adamantium bones and punching through the gunmen or their friends as the only noise became screams of pain and the wet noise of flesh being torn open, along with the dull explosions of bullets.

He cleared a path to the stairs, where Logan found a full cadre of gunmen shoulder to shoulder, waiting for him on the upper riser. Looking down at him, one of them demanded, “Why are you doing this?”

Thinking up a response would have required him to come back to himself, but luckily it didn’t matter, as Mystique came to stand behind him, using him as a Human shield while aiming both guns up at them. “Justice,” she said cryptically. That was so far from the truth it was incredible … or was it?  Honestly he’d have to come back to himself to think about it, and he didn’t want to.  It smelled like a charnel house in here, bloody and raw, cordite stinging his eyes, and he knew if he came back to himself he would be horrified by the slaughter. This was what Weapon X was; this is what Stryker insisted he always was; this is what made Mystique seek him out and made her smile like they were old friends. An animal, a killer, a monster to be feared by both night and day, in a hundred different ways.

So he was glad he didn’t come back to himself. Sometimes there was nothing more merciful than auto-pilot.

With a roar of unfocused rage, he tore up the stairs, through a hail of stinging bullets, and lunged at the gunmen.