Friday Night Firefight - A Cyberpunk 2077 Isekai

Friday Night Firefight - Chapter 23

I was seated in a dark, abandoned apartment, gazing across the street at the Ho-oh club. For the better part of two weeks, that had been my routine. I scribbled down some notes on what I saw, sifted through intercepted text messages and emails I lifted off Agents of everyone hanging around the club, and waited for something interesting to happen.

As I reorganized my notes, trying to mash them together into some cohesive narrative, my mind wandered to the peculiarities of Night City's real estate market.

Night City, home to millions, surprisingly had a glut of deserted apartments. It didn't make sense. In a city this size, the apartment market should have been as cutthroat as New York's. Finding a place to live should have been a Hunger Games style competition, filled with underhanded tactics and a bit of luck. You'd expect to need connections just to find a decent place. Yet I always seemed to find a deserted apartment perfectly situated for surveillance. Clearly, Night City's landlords weren't doing their jobs well.

Not that I was complaining. Using abandoned apartments to spy on unsuspecting targets was slowly becoming my milieu. The Tyger Claws had no idea I was camped out directly across the street from the Ho-oh club, scouting their operation from the safety of a cozy one-bedroom. From my vantage point, I had a clear view of the entire club, including the third floor where Jotaro ran his operations. It was his apartment, his office, and his 'playroom' where he recorded his snuff BDs.

I was nearing the two-week deadline to report back to Susie and Anna about Jotaro. My meticulous surveillance had revealed a detailed picture of all the smuggling, kidnapping, and drug production he was responsible for. I even knew about the boxcar full of captives stashed in a storage facility in North Watson.

Shortly after leaving Anna with the Mox, I raced to the Ho-oh club and tapped into the local access point, intercepting every text and email sent to and from the club and everyone hanging around. Most of my time in the apartment had been spent sifting through the flood of inane messages, skimming and discarding the irrelevant ones.

The entire ground floor of the Ho-oh club was a gambling den and bar where locals would come to drink and toss away all their hard-earned eddies. Most of their messages were of no interest to me and were quickly trashed.

The real gold came from the second and third floors of the club. The second floor, permanently closed off to the public, acted as a private sanctuary where Tyger Claws could unwind. Through intercepted messages, I managed to piece together how the gang operated in Watson. I had names, dates, contacts, and accounts – everything Anna needed to deliver a devastating blow to the Tyger Claws in the area.

But I knew that wouldn't happen. Unlike Anna, I understood the NCPD would never willingly crack down on the Tyger Claws. The gang paid way too much in bribes for that to happen. If I handed my findings over to Anna and she took them to the NCPD, her superiors would ignore it, the Tyger Claws would tighten their security, and Anna would be found dead in a ditch by morning.

I had left Anna with the Mox after securing a promise she wouldn't investigate for the next two weeks. Last I heard, she was still hanging around Lizzie's, working security at the bar. There were two reasons I didn't want her snooping around Kabuki.

First, I doubted her ability to blend in. If she started asking around about Jotaro, her cop demeanor would inevitably alert the Tyger Claws that someone was hunting them, and they'd send a hit squad to eliminate the problem.

Second, I hoped that hanging with the Mox would give her a better understanding of what life was like on the streets of Night City. During our conversation at the diner, I saw she honestly believed the NCPD was a force for good in the city, instead of the corrupt entity that chewed up good cops and preyed on everyone else it actually was. Anna and River Ward were the only "good" cops I could remember from the game. Maybe Barry – the cop locked in his apartment mourning the loss of his turtle was also good. So, three good cops in a city teeming with thousands of bad ones.