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Henry's black clinic wasn't just a side hustle — it was one of the Continental Hotel's external listening posts.
Reporting patients' movements wasn't part of his official duties, but he certainly didn't mind making a little extra on the side.
After all, from the Continental's point of view, the only clients who truly deserved confidentiality were those who paid in gold coins.
Everyone else? Fair game to sell out.
People liked to romanticize the Continental and its "code of honor," but Henry knew better.
For organizations like this, loyalty was cheap talk — integrity was something you could price by the pound.
So while he operated inside their system, Henry always kept one foot out the door. Ready to disappear the moment things went south.
Still, appearances mattered. To keep milking the system, he had to make it look like he was deeply embedded — just another cog in the Continental's well-oiled machine.
That took acting.
Traffic was light outside rush hour, and it didn't take long for Henry to pull into the underground parking lot near the Continental.
He parked, stepped out, and entered through the side door.
Unlike the grand lobby above, this entrance had no doormen, no chandeliers. It led directly down to the management level — the real nerve center of the operation.
Down here, information was traded, bounties posted, contracts logged. The place buzzed with quiet, purposeful activity.
For most of the hotel's "contracted professionals," all it took was one gold coin — and an assistant would personally run the errands, fetch missions, even pull intelligence reports for them.
But Henry, like most broke rookies and small-timers, handled his own business.
He walked up to one of the counter stations — where a woman in a pale-gray business suit sat waiting.
If you ignored the purple spiked hair, the nose ring, the black lipstick, and the tattoo sprawling from her chest up to her cheekbone, she might've passed for a polished Wall Street professional.
Unfortunately, the overall look screamed punk who almost went straight but still parties with her ex every weekend.
> "Hey, Lena. Still killing it with the unique look today," Henry said, smiling as he handed over a folder. "But this perfume… citrusy. Don't think I've smelled that one before."
She grinned.
> "Family recipe. My grandma's secret blend — natural scent, keeps the skin healthy too. Don't tell anyone."
Lena had Native American blood — and a family full of folk remedies to match. Henry sometimes wondered if there was a line of shamans or witch doctors somewhere in her ancestry.
He didn't pry. Instead, he flattered.
> "Figures. Most women's hands are rough and dry, but yours—wow. Smooth as a baby's skin. You must work hard and take care of yourself. That's rare."
As he spoke, he took her hand — gently rolling each finger between his own, testing the softness.
Lena didn't pull away immediately. She let him enjoy the moment just long enough — then snapped her hand free with a sharp slap.
> "That's all you wanted? Just a feel? You already have my number, you know."
> "Hey, you've got a boyfriend," Henry chuckled. "Breaking up happy couples isn't my thing. Too many grudges come back to bite you."
> "Please. You don't need to do anything to get hated," she said, rolling her eyes. "Now, let's see what you've brought me."
Sliding on her narrow-framed glasses, she switched into work mode — fingers clacking rapidly across the keys of an old monochrome terminal.
The green-on-black glow of the screen painted her face in a ghostly hue.
The Continental had built its database system long before personal computers went mainstream — a relic of the early information age, closer to a bank mainframe than a modern PC.
Operating it wasn't easy. Every command had to be typed manually, every search coded precisely.
The front-desk staff, mostly women like Lena, had trained hard to master this dinosaur of a system.
Still, once you knew what you were doing, the thing was powerful.
Instead of flipping through endless paper files alphabetically — a job that could take three days minimum — Lena could type in a name, hit Enter, and instantly pull every related entry on screen.
If too many results appeared, she could narrow them down with extra parameters — a second, third, even fourth filter.
Officially, she was supposed to verify each new piece of intelligence against the database, assess how much overlapped, and then calculate the bounty value.
In practice? They simplified it.
Whatever the system displayed after filtering — the number of matching entries — determined the payout.
Ten matches per page.
If her search turned up nothing, the intel was considered unique — worth the maximum of $10.
Each additional match lowered the payout by one dollar.
If the screen overflowed with results, the reward defaulted to the minimum $1.
It was a clean, transparent system. Easy to explain. Hard to argue with.
Of course, it also left room for creative interpretation.
The right keywords, the right filters — they could make the results look however the clerk wanted.
Which was precisely why Henry made sure to stay on Lena's good side.
Whether anyone else knew or not didn't matter.
When she finished typing, Lena scribbled a few red annotations on his report sheets. Then she removed her glasses, smiled, and said:
> "Alright, your total payout's twenty-three dollars. You want small bills or large?"
> "Large's fine. Need to stock up on meds and supplies — coins are a hassle."
Henry's "no drug sales" rule at his clinic didn't cover things like antibiotics or basic medical materials.
> "Please wait a moment," Lena said, all professionalism now.
She rolled his paperwork into a tight cylinder and fed it into the pneumatic tube behind her.
Fwoosh! — the canister shot upward through the system toward the records department for filing.
Then she turned to the cash register, counted out the full amount, and set the bills neatly on a silver tray in front of him.
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