K Jeter - Noir

The show, McNihil knew, prided itself on authenticity, or enough of a simulation of it to get the ratings. On the screen, at the other end of the cable, the actors probably weren’t chipping at the same low-grade opiate as this audience-AFTRA regs usually insisted on blissful fentanyl-but it certainly wasn’t sterile Ringer’s solution being shot up. That’s entertainment , thought McNihil as he headed for the door.

Outside the transient hotel, he found himself thinking of the last dead-really dead-person he’d seen. Which had been the one named Travelt, lying with blank eyes on the carpeted floor of a cubapt farther south on the circle. A little movie with no action unrolled behind his eyes, on the smaller screen of memory. That poor bastard would’ve been exactly the kind of fool to imagine that there was some sort of low-rent glamor to that sad congregation in the hotel lobby, that his sheltered exec life had kept him from all sorts of dark fun. Imagining things like that, and then acting upon them, was what had most likely left Travelt staring up at the ceiling, his breath all clotted blood in his throat. Which was just a little too late to acknowledge the hard lesson he’d been taught.

Unencumbered by the tools he’d left with the desk clerk, McNihil headed toward the movie theater off the little urban park. By now, the dead 747 had finished collapsing, its disjointed wreckage strewn across the grassless raw earth and the surrounding streets. The destructive work that the Noh -flies had begun was complete; the city’s dispossessed who’d made temporary shelter from the fuselage now stood around or scrabbled with their black-clawed hands to drag their meager property from it.

“Hey! That’s the sonuvabitch! That’s the guy!” A voice called after McNihil as he passed by. “He fuckin’ did it!”

He recognized the voice as that of the panhandling gantry’s operator, now undistorted by the tube-and-funnel arrangement. The face behind the beard was cave-pallid from what had probably been years down in the buried nose section of the airliner. Even this zone’s diminished sunlight was enough to force the red eyes into teary, squinty blinking. A dirt-encrusted hand pointed an accusing finger toward McNihil.

Soon there were a dozen or so ragged figures trailing after him on the sidewalk. He stopped and turned around to face their bearded leader.

“Look,” said McNihil. “Too bad about what happened. But I’ve got business to take care of. And you’re cramping my action.”

“Screw that.” The one with the beard hunched over troll-like, as though his confinement in the airliner had permanently bent his spine. “You owe us, man.” A grimy paw, the flesh-and-dirt equivalent of the articulated gantry, extended toward McNihil. The crowd behind the bearded figure emitted a mumbling, angry chorus. “Pay up. Card or cash.”

A familiar adrenaline ticked through McNihil’s bloodstream, as measured and evocative as that produced by the machine back in the hotel lobby. Part of him could sit back inside his skull as his hands grabbed the front of the other man’s shirt, gathering the tattered cloth into his fists, then lifting the other into the air. The line of McNihil’s white knuckles pressed up beneath the bearded figure’s collarbone.

“I tried to tell you.” McNihil turned and slammed the man’s spine against the nearest building wall. “I’m busy. And I don’t like being harassed for small change.”

Pinned between McNihil’s doubled fists and the wall, the bearded figure did a spastic butterfly dance.

“I knocked your squat down because I don’t like you.” McNihil leaned his weight into the other man’s chest, hard enough to make a pink tongue protrude through the beard. “I meant to do it,” he lied. “And I wasn’t nearly as pissed off then as I am now.”

“Urrf.” Mottled patches appeared on what little of the bearded man’s face was visible. “Agk.”

The others, who had been following behind, had now backed off a few meters. Their faces showed that they hadn’t been prepared for the violence level to go up another notch.

“Now I’m going to put you down. And then I’m going to walk in one direction, and you’re going to walk in another. Got me?”

Above McNihil’s fists, the bearded figure nodded.

Wiping the backs of his hands against his trousers, McNihil watched the squatters scurry away. In the distance, back at the block-long park, fires had broken out in the 747’s disassembled wreckage, from overturned camp stoves and the few bits of electrical wire shorting out. Black smoke coiled toward the sky as McNihil turned and headed once more toward the movie theater.

What a putz , thought November. She had watched the whole bit, from her vantage point in a shadowed alley. From here she had been able to see her target, the former asp-head, come striding onto the scene, heading for what he was probably telling everyone was a business appointment. Right -she nodded to herself- same business as before .

The little knot of homeless-more homeless now-were making their way back to the smoldering plane debris. November turned her head, letting the shuffling figures fade from her attention. She hadn’t come here, stationed herself to wait for McNihil’s arrival, on their behalf. They couldn’t pay her tab, they couldn’t even get her close to making the monthly nut that kept the breath in her lungs. Inside her fist, the sweat-damp skin of her palm itched; she could feel the red numbers crawling across her life line, red numbers that she didn’t want to open her hand to look at. She was the only one who could see them, and right now she didn’t need to. Not after that last encounter with her finance company’s representative.

Her gaze swung across the narrow city streets and the boarded-up or burnt-out storefronts. And back to the figure of McNihil, disappearing into a little fly-by-night movie house without a glance behind himself.

Hard to believe this guy had ever had any cop moves at all. November shook her head, reflecting on the teeth of the slow gears, the inexorable machinery of time. They get old , she thought, they lose it . That was probably a big reason she’d put herself on a short leash, become a fast-forward. When she couldn’t cut it, when the numbers in her hand pulsed down to zero and the minuses beyond, it’d be a quick end. She wanted to avoid having that happen just yet, though.

A ticket stub from the little rat-hole theater was in the pocket of her jacket; she’d already been in and discreetly checked that McNihil’s “business” was there, scrunched down in a center-row seat and watching some stupid cartoon with a tub of butteroid popcorn in his lap. McNihil was running late, in risk of blowing the connection he’d come here to make. But he’d have to be late, considering the mess he’d made in the streets.

Real subtle . November sighed, feeling sorry for the poor old bastard. Why not just show up in town and blow up the whole place, like some old vintage Schwarzenegger flick? She smiled at one corner of her mouth, thinking maybe that was the real reason McNihil had gone to the movies, in hope of picking up a few destructive tips.

She didn’t feel like following him into the theater. She knew that he’d be out soon enough, with his “business” in tow.

With the red, invisible numbers ticking down inside her palm, November leaned back against the alley wall and waited.

BRAIN CELLS IMPLODING INTO SOME TERRITORY OF OPIATED BLISS OR GUNS, WOMEN, AND ANGST

All right ,” said the business. His hand rooted around in the grease and unpopped kernels at the popcorn tub’s bottom. “This is a good part. I really wanted to see it again.”