K Jeter - Noir

“So if it was the right kind of tattoo, a human could pick one up from a prowler. The image, whatever it was, could pass from a prowler’s skin and migrate over to a human’s.”

“No.” The Adder clome smiled tolerantly and shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. Same technique, different materials; just because a prowler looks like a human being, that doesn’t mean it’s made out of the same stuff. You can’t use the same inks and pixel embeds, the same programming and energy sources. You use the human stuff on a prowler, it’ll just fall off like carbon dust, make a nice little mess on the clinic floor. On human skin, prowler tattoo materials go septic; they die and rot off like some kind of dermatitis or leprosy. A traveling tattoo has a basic self-preservation instinct wired into it, down at the molecular level. It looks for a suitable environment to migrate to, a place where it can go on living, in its own way. So a human tattoo wouldn’t even be tempted to cross over to a prowler, and vice versa. Like two different species; you can’t just cut and paste from one to the other.”

“I didn’t think you could,” said McNihil. “I thought that was the way it worked.” He leaned forward, hands against his side of the desk. “So tell me-” His voice stayed level and drained of emotion. “What was the tattoo you put on Travelt?”

“I didn’t.” The Adder clome spoke without hesitation. “I’ve got a pretty fair recollection of that client. And he never stepped into this clinic. I really never saw him at all. Harrisch ordered up the prowler for him, and when it was ready, we sent it on to the address we’d been given. And there weren’t any tattoos on it, either. I remember that much.”

“So why was there a tattoo-a big one-on Travelt’s body, when Harrisch showed it to me?”

“The guy must’ve wanted one.” The Adder clome looked unimpressed. “Plenty of places where he could’ve gotten one put on. Could’ve gotten it at some other Snake Medicine™ franchise, for that matter. He didn’t have to come here to get something like that.”

“You’re right. I bet Travelt didn’t come here.” McNihil leaned farther across the desk. “But I also think you know where that tattoo came from.” One hand shot forward and grabbed the front of the Adder clome’s shirt, bunching the thin fabric into the center of McNihil’s fist. McNihil drew his arm back, dragging the Adder clome across the top of the desk. “And how he got it, who gave it to him-the whole thing.”

“What-what’re you talking about?” The Adder clome struggled like a gaffed fish. “I don’t know anything-”

“Now you’re really pissing me off.” McNihil lifted his white-knuckled fist up against the Adder clome’s chin, rocking back the terrified face. “Tell me. What was the tattoo? What did it look like?”

“You’re crazy-” Papers and a cup full of pens scattered across the floor, as the Adder clome’s arms flailed out to the sides. He gasped for breath. “You-you’re out of your mind-”

“I’ve been told that before,” said McNihil. “And that was before your pal Harrisch started leaning on me. So now you should be really scared about what I might do.” The chair fell back as McNihil stood up, dragging the other man flopping the rest of the way across the desk. “You should’ve been scared before you started jerking me around.”

The Adder clome’s hands scrabbled futilely at the knee pressing him to the office’s floor. “I don’t-I don’t know anything about the tattoo-”

“I’ll give you a hint.” McNihil still had his fist tight beneath the Adder clome’s throat; with cold precision, he lifted his other one and brought it hard across the side of the man’s head. “Does that work for you?” He wiped the spattered dots of red from his knuckles, onto the lapels of the white coat. “It’s a memory thing, isn’t it?”

“All right… all right…” Both of the Adder clome’s hands had seized onto McNihil’s wrists, holding fast as though to keep from drowning. “I’ll tell you…” A red bubble swelled and burst at his lower lip. “It was a letter…”

“That’s right,” said McNihil. With the ball of his thumb, he smeared the blood across the Adder clome’s chin. There was enough to have written the letter on the man’s face, if he’d wanted. “A great big letter.”

“ V ,” said the Adder clome. “It was the letter V .” He gasped and swallowed, the hard labor of his lungs slowing. The panic in his eyes went down a notch, as though he’d surmised that McNihil wasn’t actually going to kill him. “Done in a rather… ornate style…”

“You don’t have to describe it.” McNihil shifted his crouching weight back, easing up on the other man. “I’ve seen it. I just wanted to know whether you had.” He unclenched his fist; the back of the Adder clome’s head thumped against the clinic office’s floor. “And if you didn’t put it there on Travelt-and I believe that part, all right-then it would follow that you’re in thicker with Harrisch than either you or he would like me to know about.”

“That’s it,” the Adder clome said hurriedly. He nodded as he propped himself up on his elbows. “Harrisch showed the tattoo to me-”

“Where? When?”

A trace of the ebbing panic showed again in the other man’s eyes. “He… he didn’t actually show me. Harrisch told me about the tattoo, what it looked like…”

“Bullshit.” McNihil backhanded the Adder clome, hard enough to snap his head to the side and push his shoulders up against the angle of the wall. “If you were in so tight with Harrisch, you wouldn’t have hesitated to tell me. You don’t do much to avoid self-promotion.” McNihil stood up, looking down at the Adder clome. A tooth in the other man’s mouth had cut one of McNihil’s knuckles; he wiped the saliva and blood against his trousers. “So there must be somebody else you’re in with. Somebody you wouldn’t want me-or Harrisch-to know about.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A sullen defiance tightened the Adder clome’s discolored face. He hunched himself into a sitting position, back to the office’s wall. “I’ve got a nice little business going here.” He rubbed his palm against his swelling lip. “Why would I want to get involved with anybody else?” He managed a ghastly, red-specked smile. “I’ve got enough troubles already.”

“Not as many as you will have,” said McNihil, “if you don’t come straight with me.” He fell silent for a moment, a few seconds that stretched on through the hands of the clock on the wall and returned to fill the space between one heartbeat and the next. It had happened before, usually in connection with some surge of adrenaline in his bloodstream, like that produced by taking the Adder clome to the floor. Suddenly, McNihil had the sense of the world he saw, the black-and-white vision capsuled in his eyes, having become realer than real, truer than the dull world beneath the perceptual overlay. The opaque film, the net of bits and pieces from ancient thriller movies, deepened as McNihil stood in the middle of the Adder clome’s office; he could feel it stretching out past the door and beyond the clinic’s walls, a tide of bleak, rich images flooding through the streets and lapping up against the shadowed buildings. No , he told himself. It’s the other way around . An ebbing tide, a false ocean being drained; the world he no longer cared to see was swirling down into a subterranean reservoir of lies, as the real world emerged with a few wet strands of seaweed clinging to the rocks.

If they had eyes to see , thought McNihil. He was almost convinced that anyone could have looked out of the window at this moment, and seen this darkly perfect world. But they’re still blinded . Real time had ended somewhere in the early 1940s; this other stuff, the shoddy substance of the cheap-’n’-nastiverse that people so foolishly believed in… what did it matter? McNihil felt as though his hand had poked through a curtain made of some flimsy synthetic fabric and had found coarse wool and smooth cotton beneath, the stitchery of God’s tailor shop.