Adisu nodded vigorously. ‘Twenty-five ochre, one-fourth of what I figure we’ll clear off the wyrm. And that’s a generous estimate! The way prices have bottomed out lately, that might even be north of what I owed you. But then, I’m not the sort to quibble over a couple of copper.’
‘You said that already.’
‘When did I say that?’
‘About thirty seconds ago.’
Adisu spent something like that length of time trying to recollect it. ‘Right, yeah – what I meant was, it’s not about me turning coat on you, just so I could have your ends. I had every intention of paying you, honest I did. But then I got to thinking.’
‘A dangerous recreation.’
‘I figured the Warden, what’s he doing stirring up the Giroies? He got a nice little operation, he ain’t the sort to bring trouble back his way just to make a few ochre. Wouldn’t be . . .’ He turned abruptly to his second. ‘What’s that word I’m looking for, means you don’t do nothing gonna come back and bite your ass?’
The Muscle shook his head. The Muscle did not know the word Adisu was looking for. As far as I could tell, the Muscle had about a hundred-word vocabulary, consisting exclusively of monosyllables.
Adisu snapped his fingers and started to grin. ‘Prudent – that’s what I was trying to say. You a prudent motherfucker.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Too prudent to be stirring up trouble – unless . . .’ Adisu leaned his face into mine, teeth yellow as beaten gold, breath like he’d been scavenging road kill. ‘He wants the trouble! He don’t care about the money at all.’
‘Tell you what – if it’ll break this conversation short, you can keep my part of the deal. That settle you down?’
‘I just told you man – it ain’t about your cut. I don’t give a shit about twenty-five ochre. Twenty-five ochre don’t mean nothing to me. I’d scatter twenty-five ochre in the mud outside my house, just to see the bums pick around for it. So don’t fucking bring up your cut again, all right? I find that shit insulting.’ And indeed, he seemed genuinely wounded.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
He weighed over my apology for a moment. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘So anyway, I started doing some digging, made a point of keeping my ears open. Word comes out that the Giroie are awful riled up about the bodies we made. Ain’t no surprise there, I mean who likes having their men made into corpses?’
His pause extended onward. Eventually it occurred to me that the question had not been intended rhetorically. ‘No one.’
Adisu nodded happily, like he was pleased with my progress. ‘Exactly, don’t no one like it, not one bit. But here’s the interesting thing – the Giroies, they’re not looking in our direction, says the scuttlebutt. They looking at the vets. Don’t that seem strange to you?’
‘I’m too old to be surprised.’
‘Not me, man! It’s a crazy world we’re living on. You got to take the time to recognize what’s in front of your face, dig? Otherwise what’s the point?’
It’s an odd fact about lunatics and junkies, but every one I’d ever met is just dying to share their life wisdom. I started rolling up a cigarette while I waited for Adisu to continue.
‘You shouldn’t smoke, man,’ he said. ‘Bad for your health.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it. Anyway, I don’t mind telling you, Warden, figuring out your puzzle, it made me feel awful good about myself. Awful smart, you dig? Made me want to start crowing, let the whole world see how slick I am, that I can follow along with a real heavyweight like yourself.’
‘I hope you restrained yourself.’
‘I have,’ Adisu nodded emphatically. ‘So far. But you know me, Warden, I get bored easily. If something don’t come by to hold my attention, I might have to start making the rounds, bragging about my genius.’
‘And what exactly would it take to keep you occupied?’
‘We can start with what I was gonna give you. Twenty-five ochre – when you’ve got it, I mean I know you aren’t carrying it on you, don’t worry. I’m a reasonable man. And if I was you, I wouldn’t be thinking of this as no one-time thing – ’cause I’ve got to be honest, my attention span, it’s not exactly limitless.’
‘I hadn’t noticed.’
He shrugged apologetically. ‘Nobody’s perfect. Point being, if I don’t see a regular supply of coin coming my way, say once a month till forever, well – I can’t make no guarantee as to whom I might take it into my mind to chat with.’
‘I imagine the Giroies might take offense to finding out you murdered some of their men.’
‘The Giroies don’t scare me so much. I figure they won’t be so quick to come into the Isthmus looking for us, not when they’ve got you as an easy scapegoat.’
I finished up my cigarette, sparked it and put it to my lips. ‘You’ve come out of this pretty well,’ I said, doing my best to affect a reasonable tone. ‘Seventy-five ochre worth of wyrm, should catch you a couple hundred if you move it smart. Now that’s found money, and you didn’t have to work much for it. You said I was a prudent man – why don’t you take a lesson from me. Walk away with what you’ve got.’
He’d been staring at the wall behind me during my speech. He continued a while afterward, then blinked twice and turned back to me. ‘Sorry, what?’
‘I said that you’d be better off without making an enemy of a friend.’
‘We aren’t friends.’
A bit of my own medicine. I drank it down with the dregs of my coffee. ‘We’re friends in the sense that I’m not actively seeking your demise, Adisu. By my standards, that makes us damn near bosom brothers.’
‘Bosom brothers,’ he repeated, enunciating each syllable with peculiar intensity. ‘Bosom brothers.’ He seemed quite taken with the term, and it took a moment to free himself from its grip on his mind. ‘Were you breastfed?’ he asked.
‘One more time?’
‘Were you breastfed? Did you suckle your mother’s titties?’
‘You know, Adisu,’ I said, making a show of thinking about it, ‘I can’t rightly remember.’
‘Right, course,’ he laughed. ‘Me neither. But Moms, I mean back when she was around, she told me I wasn’t. You got any siblings, Warden?’
I found I wasn’t particularly interested in sharing the specifics of my upbringing with Adisu. ‘We’re getting off topic.’
‘I’m the youngest of eleven. Nine brothers, two sisters. Moms said that by the time she got to me there just wasn’t nothing left. Said she used to mix up some goat’s milk with water, soak a rag in it and put it in my mouth.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Ain’t right, you know? A little child, having to live on that. Sometimes I think: maybe, if I’d had what the rest got, I’d have turned out different than I did. Been taller, maybe. Used to make me angry, back when I was a kid, thinking what I could have been. On the other hand, though, it learned me something early on that most people don’t figure out till later.’
‘And what was that?’
‘There ain’t but so much milk to go around.’
As I’d mentioned, being cracked as an outhouse rodent didn’t stop Adisu from being right about most things. I’m not sure what exactly that says about the world. Nothing good, I don’t imagine.
‘All right,’ Adisu said, standing abruptly. The Muscle seemed caught off guard as well, because it took him a moment to do the same. ‘I said what I got to say. Twenty-five ochre by the day after tomorrow, or my gums start flapping with the wind. Whatever cakes you got baking, you sure as hell don’t need my crazy ass sticking a finger in the dough.’ He was back in good humor, smiling at me affectionately. ‘You be well. I’ll see you soon.’
The Muscle waited a second, then gave a sort of half-shrug and disappeared after him.
I finished off my cigarette and started on another, running over the last ten minutes. They didn’t look any better through the smoke. I had too much to worry about to add Adisu’s madness to the mix. And while the Bruised Fruit Mob were hardly considered reliable, there was enough truth in his story to get me killed by any number of people.
Of course, there were other ways to fix the situation than the one he’d presented.
