Noir (34 page)

Real bad news for someone like him; fine distinctions like this made the difference between being an asp-head and an asshole, someone who’d stuck his foot so far into it that there’d be no extraction short of sawing it off at the hip.

“You know … I was ready to leave a while ago.” McNihil pushed himself up from the couch. “Now I’m way ready.” Whatever buzz had been imparted by the alcohol had burned out of his system; a cold sobriety, cheerless as a gray post-insomnia dawn, crept through his veins. “It’s been …
interesting
talking to you. I don’t think we’ll be doing it again anytime soon.”

“I can understand that.” Turbiner nodded slowly. “This sort of thing is pretty corrosive on friendly relations.”

No shit
, thought McNihil. There were other things he wanted to ask
the man, things he could’ve said to him. But now there wasn’t time. By the sheer force of will, whether it left him one-legged or not, he’d managed to get both himself and the surrounding universe started up again; McNihil could even sense his heart speeding up, as adrenaline trickled into its fibers. Which meant that if he started running, the things pursuing him would kick into high gear as well.

How much of the actual substance of time was left to him, he didn’t know. McNihil supposed he’d find out soon enough.

“Take care of yourself.” Halfway between the flat’s living area and the front door, McNihil stood and gave a nod toward the other man. “You’ll have to. After this, I won’t be doing it for you.” He buttoned his jacket, as though in expectation of the chill winds he’d find outside. “I’m gone.”

“Don’t leave just yet.” Another voice spoke, from the mouth of the unlit corridor that ran to the back of the flat. “As a matter of fact, we’ll really have to insist on your staying.”

It was the voice he’d been expecting to hear. McNihil brought his gaze up from the figure in the sweet-spot chair. “Harrisch …” He nodded slowly. “Why am I not surprised?”

Still seated, Turbiner glanced back over his shoulder. “Should I take a walk?”

“Why bother?” Bearing his unpleasant knife-blade smile, the exec sauntered out into the living area. “You’ve been so helpful already; I’m sure you won’t be in the way. Besides—” Harrisch gave a shrug. “You live here, after all.”

McNihil heard the front door open; he turned and saw other corporate types, a pair of them, come in. Not execs like Harrisch and the ones who’d been there that other time, standing around the late Travelt’s wide-eyed corpse. But thugs, refrigerator-sized and similarly intelligenced. They came to a halt, forming a wall with cheap suits and badly knotted neckties between McNihil and the exit. Small sullen eyes below bullet-headed brows fastened onto him and waited.

“Well … I’m not going to connect around.” McNihil looked over at the smiling exec. “If I were carrying, it’d be different. But I left the tannhäuser at home.” He tilted his head toward the others, now standing with their arms folded across their bulky chests. “So you don’t need to drop the weight on me.”

“No …” Harrisch made a show of considering the remark. “I don’t
need
to …”

The thuggish types moved in and proceeded to take McNihil apart. Nothing fancy, sheer muscle and knuckle; knees to the kidneys, sweat-smelling forearms thick and corrugated as tree trunks, hard enough across the face to screw his neck around, a panoramic quick flash of the flat and its inhabitants as the one holding him up let go at last.

He could almost admire their professionalism.
Control
, came a fragmented thought inside McNihil’s head; spread out on his back, he gazed up at the flat’s conduit-laced ceiling. He was waiting for the blood to fade out of his vision, as though the hallucinated spinning he sensed could draw it away from his eyes. They’d hurt him just enough to make their point—or Harrisch’s—but not so bad that he wouldn’t be able to function again.

Which was Harrisch’s point. The exec leaned over McNihil, looking down at him. “That was for being rude. The last time we got together.” Harrisch let his smile fade, his voice dropping to serious as well. “When I offer somebody a job, I expect that person to give it a lot of thought. And not just lip off to me.”

One of the company thugs gave McNihil a kick in the ribs. He could recognize the nature of the boot, its steel toe reinforced with a lump of depleted uranium; the guy would have to be big to walk around in footwear like that. The impact was enough to shock the contents of McNihil’s gut into his throat, but he managed to hold down the sour rush. Rolling onto his side, he spat a red wad of saliva and a broken tooth fragment out onto the floor.

“And then—” Harrisch squatted down and looked him straight in the eye. “I expect him to
take
the job.”

McNihil shook the last anesthetic fog out of his head. The bruises sang up along his nervous system, but he could string his thoughts together again. “It’s going to be hard … for me to get much work done for you …” His mouth had filled with blood again; he swallowed thick salt. “If I’m up on murder charges.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of your legal problems. You won’t even have to think about them.”

That was what he’d expected the deal to be. If Harrisch and his crew of corporate lawyers couldn’t get him off entirely, they could delay
it long enough for him to die of old age. Or at least long enough for him to figure out some other escape plan.

“You know where we are.” Harrisch stood up, holding the thin smile over him again. “We’ll expect you bright and early.”

McNihil closed his eyes and listened to the heavy tread of the pair who’d worked him over, heading toward the door and pulling it open for their boss. The door closed behind them and the flat was silent; another moment, and the stereo started up again. The chorus sang once more of resurrection, but he didn’t believe them.

“What I’m not completely sure about …” McNihil spoke slowly, tasting the trickle of blood down his throat. “Is why you.” He raised one swollen eyelid and brought Turbiner into focus. “Why should you help connect me over.”

In the sweet-spot chair, Turbiner dangled the remote control in one hand. “No special reason.” He gazed toward the invisible orchestra between the speakers, rather than at McNihil. “Or just the usual ones. They made me an offer. I needed the money. I’m not getting a lot of reprints; nobody’s really interested in old books these days.” He shrugged. “You know how it is. You gotta make your copyrights valuable one way or another.”

McNihil lifted himself painfully into a sitting position on the floor. He wiped red onto his palm from his chin. The strange thing was that he couldn’t even manage to hate the guy.

At the door, McNihil stopped as he laid his hand on the metal knob. “You know …” He looked back over his shoulder. “This is why nobody reads your old books …”

Slouching in the chair, Turbiner raised his head. “Why’s that?”

“It’s that
noir
thing.” McNihil pulled the door open, letting the darkness of the corridor outside stretch out before him. “People don’t have to go into your books for that world anymore. Now they live in it all the time.”

After a moment, Turbiner slowly nodded, then turned back to the music.

McNihil stepped out into the corridor and silence. But only for a moment; then he turned and walked back into Turbiner’s flat.

Silence became total, the music over, when McNihil reached behind the stereo equipment and ripped the new trophy cable loose.

“Now that’s just connecting petty,” said Turbiner, disgusted. “That’s just vindictive.”

“That’s right, pal.” McNihil rolled the cable up into a tight coil and stuck it in his jacket pocket. He didn’t feel any better for having done it, but he didn’t feel any worse.

“You know … that really does belong to me.” The old writer followed him to the door. “It’s from the violation of my copyrights.
My
books.”

“Yeah?” McNihil halted; he glanced over his shoulder at the other man. “Your books, huh? And what would somebody like me do to you right about now, in one of your books? Tell me that.”

Turbiner didn’t have an answer. Or did, but didn’t want to say it.

“Believe me,” said McNihil. “You’re getting off lucky.”
Luckier than me
. He pushed the door open and walked out, trying not to limp too much.

A
re you sure this is where you want to be?”

“That’s funny.” McNihil found that funny, because the place looked like a doctor’s office. A real one, the way doctors’ offices looked in the movies stitched inside his eyes. He could’ve used a doctor, even though forty-eight hours or more—hard to tell in the perpetual night McNihil saw—had passed since Harrisch’s thugs had handed his ass to him. He’d spent the time since that occasion lying on top of the narrow bed in his unkempt apartment, in the same clothes he’d been wearing then and was wearing now. Every once in a while, he’d gotten up and headed down the hallway to the bathroom, he’d had to lean his arm and forehead against the wall above the toilet to remain standing. His urine had gradually faded from the color of cabernet to a light rosé. Even now, his bones and a good deal of his bruise-darkened flesh still ached; it’d been
a big accomplishment to even try shaving before venturing out and coming to this place.

There was another reason he found the question funny. “Somebody else,” said McNihil, “asked me that exact same question, just a few minutes ago.”

“Really?” The man sitting on the other side of the desk wasn’t a doctor, not a real one; not even an imitation of a fake one. He was just an Adder clome, the commercial cloned replica of the maybe-fictional character that was always found running one of these Snake Medicine™ franchises. For his costume, the Adder clome wore a doctor’s white examining-room coat and had a prop stethoscope tucked in the breast pocket. The brow of his hatchetlike face, the surgical embodiment of the corporate image, was encircled by a headband with that mysterious metal disk on it, which always indicated somebody was a doctor in the old movies. “Who was it?” the Adder clome asked.

“You’re not really interested …”

“No,” said the Adder clome. “But tell me anyway.”

“It was a woman,” said McNihil. “In a bar.” He didn’t need to tell what kind of a bar it’d been. He wasn’t sure, himself. He’d let himself fall so far beneath the opacity of his vision, into the world leaking out of his eyes, that any details from the other world had been completely obscured. There wasn’t any less pain to feel that way, but it seemed more appropriate, at least. He could exist as a beat-up operative on a cracked leatherette barstool, downing a shot and a chaser, in a place with beer spilled on the floor and neon flickering like ionic discharge in the mirror behind the nameless bottles. “Ironic discharge,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” said McNihil. “A misfire in the brain. Some of the connections are still loose.” The woman in the bar had offered to tighten them for him. Or a similar service. She’d sat down on the stool next to his, so close that he’d been able to tell the difference between her flesh and his, through the thin layers of his trousers and her skirt. Which was all right; it fit in perfectly with the world he saw, that he preferred to see. McNihil had brought his gaze up from the depths of his glass and looked over at her. What he’d seen had made him both remember and forget the cube bunny that had so briefly visited his shabby apartment. The woman had been the ultimate barfly, a movie vision of glamour
and lust, like the dream of what nameless women in a dive bar should look like. Complete with luminous golden hair in a soft curve along one side of her face,
à la
Veronica Lake. But with a radiation as bemusedly intelligent as Lizabeth Scott, giving a hard time to Humphrey Bogart in the ’47 classic
Dead Reckoning
. Her gaze, the unhidden part of it that McNihil had been able to see, was colder than his dead wife’s.

“You have to watch out for ones like that,” said the Adder clome. “It’d be better if they wanted money. Then you could deal with them. But all they want is trouble.”

McNihil couldn’t tell if he’d spoken anything else aloud. About the woman or the bar. But then, the man on the other side of the desk, sitting beneath nonsensical framed diplomas—he was supposed to know. It was his business to know things like that. If someone possessed bad longings, kundalinic warps, guiltily sweating desires, this was the place to have them read out. As though the non-doctor could spread one’s heart open on his palms and decipher the quivering lines that spelled out life and destiny.

“That must be why she came my way.” McNihil leaned back in the office’s smaller chair, lacing his fingers together across his stomach. “She figured I had enough to spare.”

“Why did you come here?”

McNihil didn’t answer. He was wishing himself back in the bar, preferring it to this place, with its smells of disinfectant-swabbed chrome and blood-soaked cloths thrown in the plastic bags marked For Biological Waste Only. Which was what he felt like at the moment, but he was trying to maintain.

The ultimate barfly, the woman with the cold dead gaze, had asked him the same thing. To which he’d replied,
I’ve got an appointment nearby. Just killing time till then
. Her hand had smelled of nicotine and lust as she’d touched him, stroking the side of his neck as she’d leaned toward him.
Is that
, she’d asked,
all that you want to kill?

“I asked you a question.” The Adder clome’s voice tapped at McNihil’s ear. “We’re not going to get very far if you don’t tell me.”