K Jeter - Noir

“I got ya.” The shellback nodded in understanding. “No wonder you’re some big exec type. You got brains. Okay, but it’ll cost you.”

Harrisch let the other man hit him for a mid-five-figure amount. The shellback returned the card after running it through his handheld scanner. He’d already decided to wait until the homeless figure showed some sign of realization; he knew it wouldn’t take long.

“Cool.” The gaunt-faced man radiated an appreciation of his good fortune. The other black domes, their residents’ eager faces peeping out from beneath their edges, crept closer, anticipating some distribution of the largesse. “Nice doing business with you.” The gap-toothed mouth barked out a laugh. “Only problem is, now I gotta go down to the charity offices in the morning and reregister. You just bought my whole ID, buddy. I can’t even collect my ration tags until I officially exist again…” His voice faded out; in his eyes, a new light faded in. Those eyes widened, staring at Harrisch. “Wait a minute…”

Harrisch said nothing; he didn’t feel like rubbing it in. He saw the shellback’s gaze shift to the gun that he’d brought back out of his jacket. The homeless figure’s pupils looked almost the same size as the black hole at the front of the parsifal’s muzzle. Reflected fire shone bright for the millisecond following Harrisch’s squeeze of the trigger, then was gone as the other arced backward and away.

The black shell cracked and splintered against the pavement, a few feet from the Daimler repro. Denuded of the portable shelter, the homeless figure’s corpse lay on the wet concrete and asphalt like something extracted from an unhatched egg, the artificial curvature of his spine drawing his limbs cocked above his shattered chest. A red puddle, blackened by the night’s limited spectrum and shimmered with the light rain falling, began to spread around what was left of him. The other homeless scurried away, toward darker and safer holes. Most of them speed-crept with their shell’s rims lifted only a fraction of an inch above the ground; a few, the more frightened ones, actually got as upright as they could and ran into the city’s shadows.

“Jeez,” said the cop, shaking his head. “Even I could see that coming. What a dolt.”

Harrisch glanced over his shoulder. “Any problem with this one?” He pointed with the gun toward the dead shellback.

“Nope.” The cop gave a shrug. “The guy’s off the books. There’s nothing to even register.”

With the gun put away, Harrisch took the Amex from his wallet and checked the account readout on the back. The charge to the homeless figure had bounced back, marked Account Canceled . The whole incident had been a freebie.

Which, as far as he was concerned, was as it should be. A signifier of God’s love toward the elect; it was times like this that made the strict interpretations of the Protestant work ethic seem so sensible. If only the choir beneath his feet had started singing again, voices raised in four-part SATB hallelujahs, then the moment would have seemed complete.

The cop took off, leaving the cleanup to the city’s sanitation department. Harrisch was left alone in the alley, in silence.

I want something to remember this by , he thought. He supposed he was getting sentimental in his old age. No need for a scrapbook; just some small item that he could keep for a little while, until its evocative power faded, then throw away.

Harrisch walked over to the dead cube bunny. She was as pretty now as before; he knew that some of his colleagues in the company would have thought her more so. Where there had been a red flower between her small breasts, that the gun had blossomed forth, there was now only a fist-sized hole and a congealing wetness around.

He took a little pasteboard rectangle from his pocket-the cop’s business card-and leaned down closer to the pretty corpse. He pressed his thumb against a bit of exposed, chilling flesh, then against the back of the card. When Harrisch straightened back up, there was an oval red signature, intricate lines and whorls, on the back of the card. He slipped it into his wallet-there were others like it in there, a little collection, one of them fairly recent-and then walked slowly, meditatively, toward the mouth of the alley and the waiting Daimler. The blank eyes of his witness gazed up at him as he stepped over the bits and pieces littering the ground.

DOWNLOADING THE ACTUAL BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST

The Bishop of North America lived in a hole nearly as bad as, or worse than, McNihil’s apartment.

“Not just North America,” said the bishop, hunched over his computer terminal. “The Holy See just added Central America by Proxy to my job description. The appointment-well, elevation’s the right word technically, I think, but that doesn’t really seem right anymore-it fluttered in by E-mail just yesterday morning.”

If that wasn’t the right word, then hole seemed to fit the other well enough. The moldy ceiling of the windowless space came within a half-inch of the top of McNihil’s head. If he’d risen on his toes, he could’ve scraped gray, wet plaster flakes onto his scalp, like some kind of sebaceous organ donation.

“Forgive the mess,” the bishop had said as he’d held open the warped fiberboard door. “I’ve been rather busy of late.” He’d gone right back to the terminal and the ministrations to his flock.

“Me too,” McNihil had answered. Standing in the center of the dingy room, he tried to keep his shoulders away from the damp-rot patches that blossomed on the book spines and disordered stacks of paper lining the swaybacked shelves. With each breath, fungus spores collected in his nostrils like the silt of an invisible, stagnating river. “That’s life these days.”

“It’s so much work,” moaned the bishop. His forehead, with its strands of sweat-pasted black hair, nearly touched the terminal’s screen. “I should never have answered the ad on that matchbook.”

McNihil wondered if he’d really heard that last bit, or if it’d been some overlaid auditory fragment, a piece of his world that he somehow heard rather than saw. He glanced around while the bishop went on tapping and clicking, the little sounds forming a monotonous repeated pattern. He’d been down here a long time ago, with the same bishop or a different one-it didn’t matter. But it’d been before he had the surgery done on his eyes, had this perceived black-and-white world layered in. And the place-he supposed that it was technically a cathedral, no matter how small, since it was the official seat of the bishop-had looked exactly the same. Which meant that it came across the reality line unaltered. Nothing had to be done to it, no visual alterations, to make it fit into the world he saw. The hole and its contents were already dark enough, with all the shabby accoutrements that made it look like one of the ancient German Expressionist film sets that’d preceded the old Warner Bros. B-movie thrillers.

“Think of all the spiritual merit you’re accumulating.” McNihil didn’t care to listen to the bishop’s eternal complaints. There was supposedly another world, brighter than this one or the hard reality that everyone else saw, that the bishop’s carefully tended faith was supposed to evoke. “You’ll get your reward in heaven.”

The bishop sighed, hunched shoulders lifting and then collapsing like a deflated black balloon over his shoulder blades. “Sometimes…” He shook his head. “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

McNihil wasn’t surprised by the existence of doubting bishops. He would’ve been more surprised by any sign of faith at all.

He turned away from the moldering stacks of papers, and looked over the bishop’s shoulder. On the terminal screen appeared a low-rez image of a stylized human face, without identity or gender. Then a dialogue balloon with tail, straight out of the ancient comic strips, and the words Bless me, Father, for I have sinned .