I need you to look out for new arrivals at the Stina Gate.’
The swan hopped away from me, waddled on the ground a little, and took off, flapping into an iron sky.
6 DO NOT STAND AT MY GRAVE AND WHOOP
At the hotel Murphy fixed herself an October Surprise and sat on a smashed TV whose innards looked like a city with kidney-coloured streets. I sat on the edge of the bed and opened a can of water. My left hand felt like a wedge of poison sticks. I’d wrapped it in a strip of rotten curtain patterned with brown roses. The beating was enough to prompt me to put everything else aside and deal with the pain. ‘I think my eye’s blown.’
‘Lose much blood?’
‘I’ve got DNA base pairs I haven’t even used yet. That was nice of you to haul my chestnuts out of the blaze back there. Kind of a miracle.’
‘So’s bleeding upwards.’
‘Was I doing that again? They seemed determined to find me mistaken. Their ancient form of wonder-working depends on it. Pretending you’re not helpless is just a coping strategy. I would have died for nothing.’
‘All do.’
I lit a shock absorber. My alertness was for her sake - as was the fact that I was awake atall.
‘As for the broken nose, I’ve decided to take it as a distinction - one of many bad decisions in my life. How’d you find me?’
‘Hole in the gap. You reversed into the story like a Florida gran, Atom. What’s the connective tissue?’
‘No mystery there. A slabhead warned me off the kid so I got serious. Then I found the Mexicans fiending for him at the Gate. They screwed up with a chronobomb. I’ve seen better timing from a stuffed olive. But the banditos caught me off-balance - I’ve been out of town a long time. There seems to be way less torque under the hood these days, but maybe I haven’t engaged enough to feel it yet.’
‘Fed training says the most dangerous town is one where the advent of crime is very recent and its novelty keeps everyone wasteful and imprecise, thinking they’re proving something. I don’t think there are any towns like that anymore. Why’d you leave?’
‘I figured out what the cops were doing right. But when I incorporated the lesson, they didn’t care for it. Now I get back and find Cortez is growing human in the ground.’
She smiled. ‘Yup. Neon headstone, flashing arrow pointing jauntily down. Casket with a half-lid, the works. Inscription says “This Tombstone is Not a Toy”. I guess there’s justice if you dig deep enough in a graveyard.’
‘No, that’s just forgetting.’ I dragged on the shocker. ‘Well, you’ve given me no cause to doubt you’re human, at least. How long you been here?’
‘When bad things happen to good people.’
‘Always? Thought you were from out of town.’
She humphed. ‘I got assigned right here on the seamy side of life.’
‘It’s the seams that hold it together.’
‘What I kept telling them. They interpreted it as dud loyalty tuning. Got a burn notice from the ruin.’
‘Can they afford to burn anyone these days?’
‘There was some knock-on when the Pentagon went up five years ago. Thank god the populace hadn’t the balls to take over even when there was a corpse at the wheel.’
‘When payback has atrophied for that long, it loses its spring.’
‘But meanwhile years of my life were run under those wheels. I’d earned the wrong things, obviously. Even my compromises are in ruins. I want to live the sort of life that’ll have consequences, Atom. A free agent.’
There was something in back of her explanation but I didn’t know what it was. I watched the smoke pirouette upward from my gasper. ‘Or maybe you’re keeping their deals warm for them.’
She stood up and started moving with a sort of evasive aimlessness. She was a bullet of a girl, a design classic. Her weight would have doubled if she grew her hair. She lifted the cover of the Gamete book with the tip of a finger. ‘What’s the book about?’
‘Amnesia conceals a killing, as usual,’ I lied.
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