K Jeter - Noir

“Hard luck for you as well,” said McNihil’s dead wife.

“Yeah…” He nodded. “If they’d been able to get the info straight from the corpse’s mouth, they wouldn’t have had to come around and bother me. It’s not as if I wanted to get dragged into this sorry-ass loop.”

“Oh, no-” She opened her dark-filled eyes, gazing straight at him. “It’s not because of the corpse. That wasn’t the start of it all. They wanted you even before he died.”

McNihil said nothing. He leaned back in the chair, letting his own brain silently pick away at what he’d just been told. This was something new, something he hadn’t known or even suspected before.

“Why should you have known about it?” The dead woman continued her calm regard. “They wanted you, but they hadn’t come round for you yet. But as soon as they had a reason to…”

“Not a reason.” McNihil gave another slow nod. “You mean, an excuse.”

His dead wife shrugged, bones visibly articulating beneath the surface of her skin. “Whatever.”

It put a different light on things, he had to admit. If his wife was right-and McNihil had no call to doubt her, and plenty for belief-then the implications were even deeper and spookier than before. If Harrisch and the rest of DynaZauber had been scheming on him, trying to find a way to drag him into its net, then Travelt’s death was suspiciously convenient. And not just the poor sonuvabitch’s death , thought McNihil. Everything leading up to it .

“Which would mean-” McNihil spoke his next thoughts aloud. “That they connected him over. Harrisch and his buddies at the company. They set Travelt up.”

“Possibly.”

He studied his dead wife, as though he could see the workings behind her eyes. “You don’t know?”

“If I did,” she said, “I’d tell you.”

“Would you really?” McNihil brushed his hand across the cover of one of the romance novels on the table. “Considering… what it would mean…” The bare-chested adventurer, with flowing blond hair as long as that of the brunette temptress in his arms, had collapsed with her skeletal form across the oil-stained beach. The mingled, graying strands floated like seaweed in the tired waves. McNihil looked up at his wife. “Because if they set him up… one of their own…”

“They’d be just as happy to set you up.” The idea didn’t seem to have any emotional impact on her, one way or the other.” For whatever reasons they might have.”

I knew , thought McNihil, I didn’t like that asshole . The image of Harrisch’s smiling face floated by on the screen inside his head. There’d been an instinctive aversion on his part toward the exec, more than McNihil usually felt when dealing with high-level corporate types. The one lying on the floor, looking up with empty eyes, was his notion of the only good executive type. Too bad that Harrisch didn’t fit-at least, not yet-that terminal description as well. Loathing for the man had been the main reason that McNihil had turned down any job offer. He could’ve used the money, might even have enjoyed finding out how the late Travelt got stiffed, but without even reasoning out why, he’d let the rising of his stomach up into his throat tell him that he’d wanted nothing to do with the whole creepy setup.

And now, what his dead wife had just told him-that confirmed the wisdom of his initial reaction.

“You were right,” she said. “From the beginning. Sometimes you are, you know. You don’t need me to tell you everything.”

“No… I suppose not.” The business with Harrisch and the corpse, all of which he’d now been pressured into making his own business, faded from his thoughts for a moment. He studied his dead wife, looking at her with that same slow contemplation as when, in the middle of the night, back when she’d still been alive, he would raise himself up on one elbow in the bed they’d shared then, and in the muted darkness watch her sleeping. The rise of her breasts against the sheets, the draw and exhale at her slightly parted lips, the flutter of her dark eyelashes as some unshared dream traced her vision… that was all a long time ago. A long time, and another world away. Everything about her now was as still as the empty bed he looked back at every night, the one perpetual night, from the door of the room in which he tried to sleep.

Death hadn’t been as hard on her, as far as looks were concerned, as it had been for the slowly decaying scavengers out in this territory’s cold fields. The transition had perhaps leaned her down, lost her the few pounds she hadn’t really needed to lose when alive; now she had both a fashion-model thinness and pallor, even to the dark, bruised-looking eye sockets. Her hair had been untouched by gray; it fell black as he remembered, past her shoulders, to that place along her back where he still had a tactile memory of his hand resting. Death, at least in the sense of physical beauty, had done her some good; he knew she had a certain vanity about that. She’d looked worse in the hospital, when she’d been dying, making the change from one state of being to another; that’d been the roughest, on both of them. And the most corrosive of feeling: he might not have done what he’d wound up doing, gotten into the betrayal mode so heavily. That was where I connected up , thought McNihil as he gazed at his dead wife.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.” She extracted another cigarette from the pack on the table. “You got something out of it. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

Moments like this, when she made little remarks so close to the bone, he could almost hate her. The other side of the guilt equation, the handle she had on his soul: he had profited by her death, in more ways than one. She doesn’t have to remind me , thought McNihil bitterly. That was what had enabled him to make his place in the Collection Agency, scrabble his way up the ranks of the asp-heads. It was a competitive field, in which a career could stall out from either a lack of guts or the right equipment. The agency itself only paid for the essentials, thus keeping its basic operating costs down, passing on the bulk of the royalties to its clients, the artists and content creators. To get the plum assignments, which was where the excitement was, and the resultant bounties and bonuses-small, but they added up eventually-a hustling young asp-head had to trick himself out with some expensive goodies, paid for from his own pocket. There was a valve at the center of his head, the installation of which hadn’t come cheap.

And had been worth it; not all the pirate types that he’d wound up dealing with had been candy-ass pushover types. Some serious bad people got into copyright violation, theft of intellectual property, on-wire counterfeiting and password-forgery scams, ID shadowing and third-party bucket relays. Operations of that sort, whether it was a fly-by-night anonymous remailer setting up shop in the New Guinea jungles or a Fortune 500 heavyweight trying to muscle in on just a little bit of a competitor’s crypt’d-up patents, took substantial capital investments to get up and running. People like that, with that kind of money sunk into their illegal enterprises, and with the kind of payoff they were hoping for in mind, didn’t enjoy the Collection Agency fouling up their plans. An asp-head, the visible embodiment of the agency, was in for a major-and final-ass-kicking if he couldn’t take care of himself. Which happened sometimes, the result being a small box arriving at the agency headquarters, a box that leaked from the bottom and smelled like the dumpsker behind a butcher shop by the time it got opened and the pieces identified for a proper burial. McNihil, just starting with the agency and totally green, had been in on the tail end of the raids on the last Guangzhou holdouts, deep inside the Guangdong FEZ in the Chinese mainland-data forgery, mastering and distribution facilities so entrenched that they had their own military, way beyond Beijing control. A lot of older asp-heads had gone home in crates before that had been wrapped up; McNihil owed at least part of his rise in the agency to the holes that had been shot through the ranks above him. Also his caution, and his more-than-willingness to keep his chops and equipment up-to-date. But that cost money.