Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

I woke up with a spacious red headache, and I woke up alone.

My initial reaction-pure reflex, embarked on even before I'd begun to explore the margins of my headache-was to feel blindly around for Bravo. For some time now I'd been entering each day nasally, via Bravo's bravura pong, and my nose knew immediately that something was missing. It took me a few excruciatingly queasy moments and a couple of blind gropes with my right hand to discover that more than Bravo was missing.

“Holy shit,” I groaned. A memory bloomed, horribly bright through the red murk: I had unwrapped Tran. Since there appeared, under the circumstances, to be no reason ever to open my eyes again, I rolled over onto my side and resolved to sleep forever. Death sounded appealing. Better, at any rate, than facing Eleanor, or even myself, and admitting that I'd let the kid get away. With Horace still out there, no less.

Something said, “Ping.”

It did not engage my attention. A ping could have been anything, any kind of mocking reminder from the land of the living: a moth against a windowscreen, for example, or the tags on Bravo's collar, wherever the hell Bravo might be. I consigned all pings to hell and concentrated on the details of a comfortable death. I waited patiently for it to come, to spread its anesthetic wings around my head. It kept its distance. A comfortable death, it seemed, would require effort. I'd have to cure my headache first.

Something said, “Burra-burra-burra.”

I cranked one eyelid open and looked at the cracked leather covering my couch. If I'd achieved paradise, I'd apparently taken my couch with me. I'd imagined paradise before, full of willing, lissome houris, but I hadn't imagined them on my couch. Paradise seemed a lot cheaper with my couch in it.

Someone said, “Wheeee.” Not something, but someone.

“Left wing up,” the voice said, and I recognized words I had spoken myself while I was still alive.

“Throttle back,” croaked a rusty hinge that I recognized as me. “Not so fast.”

“Quiet,” the other voice commanded. “Working it out.”

“Fine,” I said to the back of the couch. “I'm dead anyway.”

“Landing, me,” the other voice said unsympathetically. “Die later.”

“Then get the goddamn left wing up and throttle back.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the other voice said. I closed my eyes. Then it said, “Shit.”

“You crashed,” I said, disappointed that the exit from life wasn't more clearly marked. What if there was a fire?

“I totally eat it.” The tone was apologetic.

“Do you think,” I asked, trying not to plead, “that you can find the Excedrin?”

“Already took three,” Tran said. “Water?”

“Good idea,” I said, reconciling myself to the thin and tepid gruel of life. “You can walk okay?”

“You took them off, remember?” Tran said over the splash of running water. “I got no place to walk, that's the problem.”

“That's your problem,” I said primly.

“You should learn to throw up,” he said, sounding closer. "Me, I throw up." A tentacle touched my arm, and I rolled blindly toward it and opened my eyes to see a hand that looked larger than Australia, with a couple of pills in it.

“Five,” I suggested.

“Salowly,” he said. “Two first.” He extended a glass of water in the other hand.

I gulped them down, closed my eyes again, and slid down a long greased chute into queasiness. I had no indication that we were no longer alone until I heard Eleanor's voice saying, “What's wrong with this picture?”

“We're alternating,” I said. “Tomorrow I take care of him.”

“Well, who should I look at first?”

“Him,” I said, without turning over to face her. “There's nothing that can be done for me.”

Something clinked. “All three bottles,” she said accusingly. “Did you get this boy drunk?”

Tran laughed, a light, merry, truly merciless little laugh.

The bottles hit the paper bag in the kitchen that serves as a garbage can. “Sit down,” Eleanor said. She sounded sympathetic.

“I haven't got that much energy,” I said.

“Not you, you sot. You.” The chair in front of my computer-the computer on which Tran had just totaled an electronic airplane-creaked. Saran Wrap rustled. “Well, well,” Eleanor said approvingly, “this is much better.”

“He's seventeen,” I said bitterly.

Tran said, “Ouch.” It momentarily cheered me.

“Shhh. Have you had coffee?” she asked.

“Yes,” Tran said.

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“You know where it is,” Eleanor said.

“I know exactly where it is,” I told the back of the couch, “and I know I can't possibly get there.”

“Sit tight, sweetie,” Eleanor said to the little murderer. “Let me get the old sot some coffee.”

“I finish it,” Tran said, without a tinge of guilt.

“That's all right. He needs some special coffee. We make it with uranium.” Extremely familiar puttering sounds came from the kitchen. If I'd died, I found myself thinking, I would never have heard those sounds again. A little butterfly, or, more likely, a cabbage moth, spread its wings in my soul.

Two and a half hours later, I was sitting in a blindingly bright coffee shop in Monterey Park, watching the most nervous man I'd ever seen in my life. Peter Lau was definitely not enjoying his middle forties. He was tall, almost six feet, and unhealthily thin, with the jaundice-yellow face of a drinker whose liver is moments away from retirement. Wary eyes swept the restaurant from above dark circles that looked like they'd been planted with a punch press. He'd checked me out twice, but he hadn't seen Tran, who'd retreated strategically into the men's room.

Across an expanse of scalp that began three inches above his eyes, Lau had meticulously pasted twenty six foot-long hairs, left to right, to form a clever little hair hat. The vanity behind this hopeless pretense was echoed in his clothing, which was stylish in a way that had nothing to do with style, like someone who'd once heard a description of the well-dressed man on the radio but had never actually seen one: color-coordinated tie and handkerchief, both in a large check; striped shirt; blazer nipped too sharply at the waist; wide gray slacks; white shoes. The gold rings on his index fingers, like the rings under his eyes, were a matching set.

We'd visited five coffee shops before we found one with a window table that had a reserved sign on it. Tran had led me to a table and we'd had more coffee, not as bracing as Eleanor's, but strong enough to keep the floor level. After a few minutes, one of the Chinese waitresses had started to set the reserved table: a carafe of coffee, a couple of pieces of toast.

“Here goes,” Tran said, and did his fade. Thirty seconds later, Peter Lau jittered in with three briefcases, looking like something that had been run over by the Doodah Parade. He'd sat down as though he were afraid his knees would snap, and gone immediately to work on the latches of the first briefcase. After nine or ten false starts he worried the snaps into submission and pulled out a laptop computer, which he opened and put dead center in front of him. The next case yielded, after a prolonged struggle, a cellular telephone and a miniaturized fax machine. Case number three, which probably contained his secretary, he placed on the seat next to him.

Only then, floating office in place, did he take any sustenance: He lit a cigarette, cupping his shaking hands around a cheap plastic lighter as though he were in a full-force gale. Smoke streaming from his nostrils, he carefully poured coffee onto the table near his cup and then gave up and handed the trembling carafe to the waitress, who doled out something less than half a cup. When he lifted it, I could see why; his hand was so unsteady that I would have taken equal odds on his dropping it, spilling the coffee on his shirt, or knocking out a tooth with the rim of the cup.