I found a coffin motel near the shore close enough to a skimmer I know named Jack that I’d be able to count on him in the morning to get me over. The job called for me to be on Manhattan Island. When I was a kid I saw this flatvid called Escape from New York. I thought it was hilarious how bad the CGI was, but facts being as they are, the flick was damn near prescient about the rotten apple. It isn’t a prison per say, but it is locked up tighter than the crown jewels. The fake ID fed me the juice to get in, supposedly, but I wasn’t ready to test that theory until I absolutely had to. From my limited time with the cops I knew that IDs worked like show tickets. Every time you ran it you left a mark there that built a file that tallied somewhere and people who had nothing better to do would look at those tallies and figure out who you were and where you’d been. With this being the first tally for the ident, I’m guessing those bored folks on the other end of the digital feed might pop up and ask the wrong kind of questions if I went from no hits to several in one day.
That’s what led me to Jack.
He and I had done work before. His professional title is skimmer. in times past they called his type coyotes or the nonspecific trafficker tag that made people so uncomfortable. He got people across the dark waters separating Manhattan from everywhere else. Others like him did it with various technologies that skimmed folks across the surface, giving the job it’s cute and fluffy name. Jack was different. He worked with magic and spirits. When he sent you across the water it was just you, shooting out over the East River, barely touching the black surface of the water as his mana powered you from point A to point B. Cool. Crazy. Flat out exhilarating. Also, scary as hell. That being said, I was looking forward to the trip.