“El. You’re late.”
“Had work to do. Scotch.”
Sinclair opened the door wide and let me in. A couple boys from work were already there, sitting at the kitchen table. Sinclair placed a glass in my hand. Before drinking the amber liquid, I pressed the cool glass against my cheek, feeling the sting from the knuckle I took to the face.
I kept playing the scenes over and over in my head to convince myself I’d gotten the job done: Getting caught and dragged in. Hiding my gun somewhere they wouldn’t look. Getting pulled up in front of the boss. Taking a bit of a beating while they pulled teeth for information — Bruno on the left, Red-eye on the right. Breaking Bruno’s arm. Throwing the machine off balance. Sending one bullet to the boss’s head. Getting out.
The fire escape had been my first choice of exit, but because they’d been especially wary of me — I guessed they’d recognized me — the garbage chute had had to do. Boss killed, mess cleaned up, done deal. Still, I felt as if I was forgetting something …
“Roach? You want a hand?”
I lifted my eyes immediately at mention of the insect. The Blue-eye at the table brought me back to the present. I should take a sip from the glass that was soothing my wound.
“Deal me in.”
Every Sunday poker night was the same: I lost most of the pot, then I got it all back, if only just enough to make a buck or two.
I sat with my glass of Scotch and a dart in my right hand, two cards in my left: King and Jack. To my left sat Paddy Sinclair, still antsy, tapping the tops of the two cards stacked together in his hand. Reynolds, a desk sergeant with too much time on his hands and not enough balls, sat across the table from me, trying to decide whether to fold or to stay in. And to my right sat our Automatic friend Tobias, Toby for short, the one Blue-eye I knew that could swear like a sailor. The metal man scanned the room and the cards with its blue bulbs, the lenses reflecting the light from the lamp hanging over us.
Sinclair always had this wild look about him, though it was only in his eyes. Clean-shaven with side-parted hair, at first glance he looked like a pretty boy from one of those military posters. He’d served for long enough to earn that look, too. He had broad shoulders and a bit more beef than the average guy on the street. With his classic New York accent, he was the golden boy of the 5th Precinct, and one of the few people I trusted there. I wished he’d stop wearing that damn polka-dot tie, though. He looked ridiculous.
“I ever tell ya guys what kinda case I handled on Friday night?”
Sinclair always started a story when he had a bad hand, trying to get us to fold by acting confident. He thought he was clever, but I’d caught on. I couldn’t say the same of the other two at the table, though.
We all sighed and groaned. The Automatic’s white pupils rolled in its blue eyes, and the buzzing electrodes of its voice box emitted a flanged, metallic voice: “Paddy, I couldn’t care less about who you locked up. Play the goddamn game.”
“Well, ya should care, because we got a Blue-eye who was runnin’ some shipments across the border. It thought it could hollow out its carapace and slide in some bottles, sneak ’em over through the Lower City to Pennsylvania, and make a quick buck. That metal man is one of the reasons the politicians are getting wary of ya, Toby.”
“Cute, asshole. You ain’t looking so high and mighty with that in your hand.” Toby pointed a metal finger to the snifter Sinclair held gingerly. He downed its contents and slid the glass under the table. “Don’t you be ragging on us Blue-eyes,” Toby continued. “There’s not many of us left who haven’t been turned off to be your little lapdogs.”
“Easy, man, easy. Simple jab is all. Besides, ya can’t catch me with this here alcohol.”
“And why not?”
“No evidence, no crime.” Sinclair laughed, and I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit. “Exactly the logic the Blue-eye had when it got caught crossing from here to Penn. Except, unlike me, it didn’t have to try too hard to hide what it was carrying, seeing as the goods were already out of sight. But, eh, stereotypes aside, no one trusts Blue-eyes these days.”
“All right, get on with it.” Toby looked at me with an expression I’d thought only humans could make in the face of something stupid.
I stifled another chuckle.
“Glassware, fine dinner plates — a lot of clutter, mostly covered in silver and gold. It was posing as a ‘shipment official’ for some tableware company near the docks. No idea where it got a story like that, since it was as far from a harbour as it’s possible to be.”
“Let me guess,” Toby said. “They didn’t catch on that it had booze, no matter how many times they roped it back into a cell?” Toby had fallen right into another of Sinclair’s old tricks, getting caught up by the story.
“They hadn’t a clue. It did this for months — until this Friday, that is, when it wasn’t so lucky. It had passed through customs fine, but I got roped into Automatic screening on the Washington that day. This Automatic rolled in, and maybe it forgot to put extra padding in there to keep the bottles from knockin’ around, because when it kept clinkin’ after it set its luggage down, we knew somethin’ was up.”
“And what was the padding?” I
