K Jeter - Noir

“That must be why she came my way.” McNihil leaned back in the office’s smaller chair, lacing his fingers together across his stomach. “She figured I had enough to spare.”

“Why did you come here?”

McNihil didn’t answer. He was wishing himself back in the bar, preferring it to this place, with its smells of disinfectant-swabbed chrome and blood-soaked cloths thrown in the plastic bags marked For Biological Waste Only. Which was what he felt like at the moment, but he was trying to maintain.

The ultimate barfly, the woman with the cold dead gaze, had asked him the same thing. To which he’d replied, I’ve got an appointment nearby. Just killing time till then . Her hand had smelled of nicotine and lust as she’d touched him, stroking the side of his neck as she’d leaned toward him. Is that , she’d asked, all that you want to kill?

“I asked you a question.” The Adder clome’s voice tapped at McNihil’s ear. “We’re not going to get very far if you don’t tell me.”

McNihil pulled his darkened gaze away from memory and toward the white-coated figure. “You know already,” he said. “Why I’m here. Harrisch told me to come and see you.”

“Oh, well… sure.” The Adder clome shrugged. “I’ve done a lot of work for Harrisch over the years. Him and the rest of his pals over there at DynaZauber. Regular customers. Anything they want, from one of those silly little iris tattoos on a secretary’s ankle, to a Full Prince Charles job, we’re happy to provide. We’ve got a corporate account set up and everything.”

“I bet you do.”

“Standard business practice.” Leaning back in his leather-clad swivel chair, the Adder clome made a cage of his elongated fingers. “There’s a certain natural… shall we say?… interface between their operations and mine.”

“‘Natural,’” said McNihil, “isn’t the word I would’ve used.”

“Already with the sarcasm.” A slow shake of the head. “And we hardly know each other.”

“I know you well enough.” Slouched in the smaller chair, McNihil gestured at the office’s confines, at the ersatz medical diplomas and the regrettably accurate photographs of procedures and results. “I’ve been inside a Snake Medicine™ franchise before. You Adders are all alike.”

“From one reptile to another, then.” The white-coated figure’s gaze sharpened, stripped of a layer of civility. “I suppose an asp-head such as yourself has a certain… authority in these matters. You should already know, then, that if we’re all alike, it’s because we’re supposed to be that way. There are standards we have to maintain that come right down from the SM headquarters itself. Not just hygiene requirements and surgical quotas and the advertisements we run on the shellbacks-all that stuff.” Whatever nerve had been struck was wired to simmering grievances. The Adder clome’s voice tightened to a rasp. “The only reason I’m taking the time to meet with you at all is because DynaZauber bought out a fifty-one-percent share in the SM holding company. Now that Harrisch is on our board of directors, all of the franchisees have got his boot on their necks. We either produce or the head office’s goons will come out and strip the signs off the building.”

“I’m bleeding for you.” McNihil was past taking consolation in other people’s miseries. “So we’re working for the same guy. Do I look overjoyed about it?”

The Adder clome moodily pushed a blunted scalpel around on the desk. “All right; so Harrisch sent you here. And I’m supposed to talk to you. About what?”

“Beats me,” said McNihil. “I wasn’t provided with an agenda for the meeting.”

“What’s the job you’re doing for Harrisch? Maybe that’d help, if I knew that.” The Adder clome picked up the metal instrument and pointed it toward McNihil. “You at least know that much, don’t you?”

“I’m looking for something…”

“Everybody who comes in here says that. One way or another.”

“Something that belongs to Harrisch. Or to DynaZauber.” McNihil saw a triangular section of his own face reflected in the scalpel’s blade. “There doesn’t seem to be much of a distinction between those two anymore.” The polished metal made his face look just as bright and hard. “But it’s something he lost. Or it got lost for him. And he wants it back.”

“Oh?” The Adder clome showed no sign of doubting him. “Mr. Harrisch does, indeed, set great store at not losing… things. Just what kind of thing are we talking about?”

McNihil shook his head. “You don’t need to know.”

“Now that,” said the Adder clome, “is very much like Harrisch. Rather a private individual. Where did this certain item get lost?”

“That’s why I’m talking to you.” McNihil tilted his head back, a gesture indicating the office’s door and the nocturnal world beyond the Snake Medicine™ franchise. “It’s out there in the Wedge. That’s where it got lost.”

“Ah.” An understanding nod. “Lots of things get lost there. That’s where things go to get lost. Badly lost. You know what I mean.”

For a moment, McNihil wondered if that was some kind of personal comment. How much would some Adder clome, a scrabbling sexual-services franchisee, know about what had happened years ago? Not much, maybe even nothing at all, unless their mutual employer had filled him in.

“I’m a little surprised, though,” continued the Adder clome. “I wouldn’t have thought Harrisch would be hanging around that particular zone. Either in person, or by proxy. So to speak.”

“Knock it off.” Irritation filtered through McNihil’s voice. “I don’t need all the cute stuff from you.”

“Doesn’t cost anything extra.” The Adder clome had a creepy nonsmile that he could easily have picked up at the DZ executive suites. “I throw it in as a bonus, as part of my operating-table-side manner. You might as well try to enjoy it; like a lot of things in this world, there’s no escaping.”

“That’s why I don’t live in this world.” The faces in the framed photos regarded McNihil with a blank absence of envy. “Or at least I try not to.”

“I thought that was the case.” Leaning across the desk, the Adder clome studied McNihil’s eyes as though they were soft, inanimate objects. “When you’re in the business like I am-the surgical business-there’s little signs, indicators that professionals can pick up on.” He sat back in his chair. “You must’ve had it done a while back.”

“How can you tell?”

“The work’s too good. You can hardly see the stitches around the corneas.” The Adder clome sighted through his tangent fingertips. “The only problem is the one you already know about. This world is what you can’t escape from. It always comes seeping back into your little private existence.”

McNihil had said as much to the cube bunny not too long ago. So it must be true , he thought now. Or true enough-he’d had that proved to him at the last place he’d been before walking into the SM clinic with Harrisch’s card tucked in his jacket pocket.

“That woman,” said McNihil. “At the watering hole down the block. Sitting on the barstool next to me.” The whole dimly lit space had been empty except for the two of them, as she’d leaned her cigarette breath and decaying-rose scent toward him-she’d been proof enough. Even in that black-and-white gloom, with the shadows leaking out of McNihil’s eyes and stacking up in the bar’s corners like strata of negative ghosts, the ultimate barfly’s unsunned flesh had glowed with pale mycologic fire. But not all her flesh; some of it had been cut away and replaced, probably right here at this SM franchise, perhaps with the scalpel with which the Adder clome idly played. An oval window, in that space bounded by her throat and her naked shoulders, the bottom edge touching the first swell of her breasts; a soft window, made of some bio-mimetic polymer that was so expensive it got weighed out by the microgram like all the better or at least more effective drugs. McNihil had seen the price sheets on that kind of thing; the woman’s elective surgery hadn’t come cheap. She was either seriously in hock or rich enough to enjoy trolling around the Wedge’s blurred circumference.