Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

He switched to English. “What, with this accent?”

A tiny bend to the lips now as she moved around to face him again. “You’re British? I’m sorry, I thought—”

“Forget it. I hate those motherfuckers, too.” That he’d killed one in a bar in Caracas last year, he didn’t mention. Not yet, anyway. He went back to Spanish. “You got family in Venezuela?”

“Colombia. But it’s the same story down there, only for coca, not oil. And for longer. Been going on since my grandparents got out, and it’s never going to change.” She went to her bag where it sat on the desk and fished out a handheld echo imager. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things my cousins tell me.”

Carl thought about the uniforms he’d seen on the streets of Bogotá a few weeks ago. A summary beating he’d witnessed.

“No, I would believe you,” he said.

She knelt in front of him and touched the wound again, more gently now. Improbably, her fingers seemed warmer. She ran the imager back and forth a couple of times, then got to her feet again. He caught a gust of her scent as she came up. As it happened, their eyes met and she saw that he’d smelled her. There was a brief, flaring moment, and then she retreated to her bag. She dug out dressings and cleared her throat, raised brows and sideways-slanted eyes at what had just happened.

“There’s not much I can do for you that hasn’t already been done,” she said, a little hurriedly. “Whoever glued you up knew what they were doing. It’s a good job, should heal quickly enough. Did they spray it?”

“Yeah, they did.”

“Do you want anything for the pain?”

“The pain’s under control.”

“Well, I’ll dress it again, if you like, unless you’re planning to shower now.”

“I’ve just had a shower.”

“Okay, well, in that case I can leave—”

“Would you like to have dinner with me?”

She smiled then, properly.

“I’m married,” she said, holding up the hand and the plain gold ring on it. “I don’t do that.”

“Oh hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice,” he lied.

“No problem.” She smiled again, but there was disbelief etched into it, and the tone of her voice said she wasn’t fooled. “Are you sure you don’t want any painkillers? I’m going to charge you the rate minimum, they’d come as standard with that.”

“No, I’m all right,” he said.

So she packed up her bag, gave him one more smile, and left him to put his own dressings on.

He went out.

It probably wasn’t smart, but sense memory of the unattainable doctor drove him. Her fingers on him, her scent, her voice. The way she’d knelt in front of him.

An autocab took him east from the airport, cruising broad, multi-laned streets. Most places were still open—LCLS glow from the frontages beckoned, but still seemed oddly distant, like the lights of a seafront town seen from offshore. He guessed it was the codeine, maybe playing off something in the mesh. For a while he was happy to watch it roll past. Then, as the traffic started to thicken, he got out at random where the lights seemed brightest. An avenue named after some Cuban Repossession hero, bronze beachhead-and-bayonet plaque fixed into the brickwork at the corner. Remixed Zequina and Reyes classics splashing out of propped-wide doorways, tanned flesh flexing within or strutting the street around him. It was warm and muggy, and dress ran to billowing scraps of silk over swimwear for the women, linen or tight leather jeans and bared chests for the men. On skin alone, Carl would have blended in well enough—it was one of the few things he liked about Miami—but he’d blown it with his wardrobe. Canvas trousers, the lightest of his trail shoes, and a bradbury bubble ’97 T-shirt. He looked like a fucking tourist.

In the end, tired of the flickering he don’t belong glances from the local streetlife, he ducked off the main drag and sank himself in the gloom of a club called Picante. It was seedy and half empty and no closer to his fantasies of how his evening would turn out than the screen ad he’d seen outside the bar in Garrod Horkan 9 was to Caribbean reality. In the back of his mind, there’d been this vague storyboard of images in which he met the Latina doctor—well, a close substitute, anyway—in some classy salsa bar full of dance-lights glittering off cocktail glasses and good teeth. Segue to the easy, low-light surroundings of some other more intimate place, equally upscale, and then the homestretch to her place, wherever that might be. Fresh sheets on a big bed and the cries of an uninhibited woman in the throes of orgasm. Fading out, satiated, in the shadowed, temporary comfort of a strange woman’s nighttime home.

Well, you got the shadows , he admitted to himself with a sour grin. Picante ran to a couple of LCLS dance panels not much bigger across than his hotel bathroom, a traditional straight-line bar, and wall lighting that seemed designed in kindness to the handful of fairly obvious prostitutes who hung around the tables, smoking and waiting to be asked to dance. Carl got himself a drink—they didn’t have Red Stripe, he settled for something called Torero, then wished he hadn’t—and installed himself at the bar near the door. It might have been professional caution or just the odd comfort that being able to see the street outside gave him—the sense that he didn’t have to stay here if he didn’t want to.

But he was still there, nearly an hour later, when she came in and parked herself beside him at the bar. The barman drifted across, wiping a glass.

“Hi. Give me a whiskey cola. Lot of ice. Hey there.”

This last, Carl realized, was directed at him. He looked up from the dregs of his latest beer and nodded, trying to calibrate in the dim light. Trying to decide if she was working.

“You don’t look like you’re having a whole lot of fun there,” she said.

“I don’t?”

“No. You don’t.”

She was no doctora from the Marriott—her features were sharper and paler, her body curves less generous, and her mestiza hair less groomed. No wedding band, either, just a scatter of cheap and ornate silver rings across both hands. Bodice top made to look like it was sculpted metal, too, clasping her to just below the armpits, midthigh skirt in dark contrast, the inevitable wrenching heels. There was taut coffee-colored flesh on display, thighs below the skirt, shoulders and the slope of pushed-up breasts above the bodice, belly button slice between where the two garments didn’t quite meet—but no more than street standard in this heat, didn’t have to mean anything either way. Makeup a little on the heavy side, a little caked in the pores on the side of her nose. Yeah, she was working. He stopped trying to kid himself, hung for a moment over his decision like a skydiver in the hatch, then let go.

“I just got in,” he said. “Business trip, I’m still kind of wired.”

“Yeah?” She tipped her head on one side, crossed her legs in his direction. The skirt slid up her thighs. “You want some help with that?”

Later, elsewhere,and helped out of his tension like it was a tight pair of leather trousers he couldn’t take off alone, he lay slumped up against the headboard and watched her move about in the white-blasted cubic environment of the en suite. From the foot of the bed to the open bathroom door wasn’t much more than a meter, but it felt as if she’d stepped off into a parallel universe. Her actions seemed to be taking place at a profound distance; even the small bathroom noises, splash and swill of water, click of makeup utilities, were all somehow muffled as if he were staring through a thick-glassed observation panel into some cramped vivarium in an alien-world zoo.