Zaeed grabbed another handful of cookies and headed back down to his cargo bay. He debated going out in full armor briefly (the Citadel was just as much of a potential clusterfuck as a place like Omega, just with better views), but decided against it. He settled for an armored vest under his shirt, and headed out into the Wards.
He naturally stuck to the shadows as he slipped down the streets. It wasn't so much an attempt to be invisible, the way Krios was, as it was a way to be unnoticed. C-Sec was incompetent, but there were lots of them, and he didn't feel like spending his shore leave in an interrogation room. He glanced down at his wrist as his omnitool gave a soft ping, and quickly read over the message from Kasumi. 1900. Plenty of time to go buy some more inferno grenades, meet up with an old friend, and then get hammered drunk. He dashed off a quick message to his weapons contact, setting up a meeting to buy more of the incendiaries, then paused to glance over his shoulder.
He made direct eye contact with a kid, maybe 16, who'd been staring holes in his back. When the teenager saw Zaeed look at him, his eyes widened, and he bolted for the nearby alley, but Zaeed beat him there by a step, pinning him to a wall with one brawny arm.
"What the hell do you want, kid?" Zaeed scowled at the skinny youth, who looked like he was about ready to shit himself right there in the alley. Hands trembling, the boy reached for his pocket. Zaeed gave him an elbow to the nose for his troubles. "No hands in your own pockets, jackass. I have no idea what you have in there. Christ you're new at this." Rolling his eyes, Zaeed reached into the pocket he'd been reaching for and pulled out a small datapad. He shoved the boy away, and he took off like a bat out of hell, scarcely stopping to look back at the grizzled merc.
Zaeed flipped open the datapad, which held a single line of text above a prompt for a username and password.
If you had to pick your two favorite letters of the alphabet, what would they be?
Zaeed snorted a breath of laughter under his breath. Looks like his friend had found him first. He quickly typed in "Guzman" for the username and "gofuckyourself" for the password, and the datapad blinked over to a letter.
My guy at the docks says that the great Commander Shepard's ship just pulled into the docks, and a guy with half a face was seen getting off and heading out into the wards. Figured you'd probably gotten tired of seeing all those ugly faces every day and had come looking for your own personal Mona Lisa. Trouble is, I've hit a spot of trouble with C-Sec (shocking, I know), and I'm currently a little harder to find than usual. Anyway, I'm currently bunkered down at the former home of the fellow who introduced us, so if you've got some time, you should swing by. Drinks are on you. I heard how much Cerberus paid you to go with Shepard. I'm never buying again.
PS. Sorry about the kid. I'm a little shortstaffed, and I didn't have a lot of notice. I make do with what I have.
By the time he finished reading the message, Zaeed's face had split into a huge smile. Juan Cruz Valencia de Guzman had somehow overcome his fairly serious authority issues to become the second in command in a Blood Pack mercenary cell until he watched his unit kill an entire village of unarmed civilians, which didn't sit well with him. That night he killed the entire rest of his squad in their beds and shot his Krogan boss forty-six times while he was sleeping, then cut off his head and mailed it to the Blood Pack headquarters on Omega. He’d evaded Blood Pack capture for almost three years until they finally caught him in a bar on some shithole out in the Terminus systems. He’d been placed in a Blood Pack controlled prison to await execution. Zaeed had been hired to break another guy out of the prison, so he’d cut the power to the door locks as a distraction. He’d entered the prison to find that JC had already overpowered a guard, taken his weapon, and killed 14 other prison guards, all by himself. Impressed, Zaeed had teamed up with Guzman to get his target out.
Guzman had turned down his offer to join one of his personal cells and instead joined up with the Tiburon Rojo in Mexico City on Earth, with whom he now held a position of some distinction. He'd helped take the Tiburons off planet too, and he now ran their sizeable Citadel cell. Evidently, he was running it out of the home of the Batarian who'd owned the prison they'd met in, which was a nice little twist that Zaeed heartily approved of. Sending another message to his contact that their meeting would have to wait, he called upon his mental map of the Citadel and took a sharp right.
Zaeed had missed shore leave.
