Noir

legible, luminous blood. But at the bottom of one of the columns, the total blinked on and off, speeding ahead of her pulse. That meant a great deal. None of it good.

“Things can change on you. Really fast.” He looked down at her with a mixture of pity and contempt. “The Djakarta quarterlies-and the peek-ahead from the Vladivostok exchanges-their output figures were way up. The teneviki put out a regulatory call, and the bank conglomerates jacked their prime rates. Get the picture?” He gave her arm a tug, not for pain, just for emphasis. “Your main account, the one in which you’ve been rolling over all the others-you didn’t lock in the interest. You wanted that discount from going with an adjustable. That was stupid of you.”

“It seemed like a good idea.” November still felt a little dazed. The numbers kept on blinking, like intermittent stigmata. “At the time, it did.”

“That was then. This is badly now. Bad for you, sweetheart.” His voice had actually softened. “You got the picture, didn’t you?” He brought her palm down nearer to her face. “We can call in our markers right now. We can foreclose on you. We can have your ass on toast, if that’s what we want.”

She looked up hopefully into his face. “Is it?”

A smile showed at one corner of his mouth. “That’s a tempting offer, sweetheart, but not right now. I don’t mix business with pleasure. And at this particular moment, my business is telling you what the score is.”

“Please… you really don’t have to.” November hoped the guy wasn’t about to go into details, all of which she was familiar enough with. She’d spent enough time down there, south of True Los Angeles, talking with the dead and indeadted, including McNihil’s deceased wife, to know what happened to people who couldn’t pay their bills. Especially the kind she’d run up; the loan sharks were always hardest on speculators and hustlers such as herself. Maybe out of some ruthless Darwinian motivation: weeding out the failures was how a tougher, faster species was bred into existence.

“Look,” said November. Her thoughts had pulled together, enough that she could at least talk, even if she didn’t know what hustling verbiage to use. “Maybe we can work something out…”

“I told you. I’m not interested in that right now.”

“No, no-I mean some kind of, uh, financing arrangement.” She could feel her brain kicking into overdrive; all she needed was some traction on this slippery ground. “You know I’m about to score here. Really. All I need is a little more time.” The words started coming faster and faster. “It’d be a shame, I mean a shame for you people, if you had to write off my account, all that money down the toilet, just because you couldn’t cut me a few extra days-”

“Don’t sweat it.” The man shook his thick-necked head in a combination of amusement and disgust. “We’re not writing you off. You want some more time? Great, that’s what I’m here for.”

She drew back, eyeing him. “What’s the catch?”

“What do you want it to be?”

November frowned in puzzlement. “I didn’t follow that one…”

He used her trapped hand to pull her upright. “Like I said: Whatever you want.” He pushed her palm toward her face, almost touching her nose.” How do you like these numbers? Better?”

The red numbers were so close, she could just bring them into fuzzy focus. But that was enough for November to see that the baleful total wasn’t blinking anymore.

“Does that do your heart good?” The man smiled at her from the other side of the hand in front of her face. “Think you can breathe now?”

“I don’t get it…” The tips of her fingers felt numb, detached. “What did you do…”

“No big thing.” The man let go of her wrist. “I just took care of your problems, that’s all. Or let’s say… they were already taken care of.” He wiped her sweat off against the front of his coat. “You’re a lucky girl. Today, at least.”

They refinanced me, thought November. She moved her hand away, bringing the numbers sharper. Without needing any authorization from her; the sharks had that option, if they wanted to, when somebody’s account went into the foreclosure zone.

“Look, I appreciate this…” November lowered her hand. “But I don’t know if I can take any higher interest rate than what I had already. You’re gonna be slicing my margins pretty tight…”

“I wouldn’t know about tight. Like I said, I’m not interested in that.” The man’s heavy shoulders lifted in a noncommittal shrug. “Besides, you don’t have anything to fret about. We haven’t jacked up your rates. We’re doing you a favor: your terms have been rolled back to what they were when you signed for the adjustable, and we’ve frozen ’em there. Plus we’re cutting you an extension on the due date.”

“What?” November stared at him in amazement. “Nobody does that.”

“So what can I say. We’re connectin’ saints.”

“No, you’re not.” She pressed her hands flat against the alley wall behind her. “I know that much.”

“Well, maybe you’re right about that.” The man looked out at the empty street, then back toward her. “Maybe there is something we want in exchange.” He brought his face close to hers, his exhaled breath as fiery as before. “For being so understanding of your problems.”

She said nothing. Just waited, without moving.

“Don’t fuck up.” No smile, nothing but the black holes of his eyes, capturing the tiny images of her face. “You got that? That’s what we want. Don’t connect up this one.”

His voice, without shouting, had efficiently pinned her to the wall. It’s not about money, realized November. Or at least not about the money I owe them. Something else was going on. Deep shit, with its own negative luminosity, like some dead and malignant sun.

She spoke at last. “I got it,” said November.

“That’s why you don’t have to say thank you.” The man stepped back from her. “It’s not really necessary, is it? Strictly business, that’s all.”

That got a nod from her. “Strictly business.”

“Maybe next time…” His smile floated lazily to the surface once more. “Maybe next time, we can talk about that other business. Between me and you.”

“I don’t think so.” November regarded him coldly. “Like you said; you’re not doing me any favors. So I don’t have to be nice to you. So connect off.”

He laughed, then turned and walked away, steering his wide bulk toward the alley’s mouth.

When he was gone, November turned her gaze back toward the building she’d been watching. Her target, McNihil, would be arriving soon, she knew. She’d kept her vigil; all the time the loan sharks’ man had been harassing her, she’d been able to keep a minimum eye on the building’s doorway.

The connector didn’t know how important he was. For a lot of reasons, and not just for her. She wondered, as she folded her arms across her breast and leaned back against the damp bricks, just what some of those other reasons might be.

McNihil leaned back into the padding of the taxicab’s backseat and watched massive, vaguely Stalinist buildings slide by. For a moment, he wondered if he had actually overshot his destination and wound up in some entirely different segment of the Gloss, over on the Pacific’s Asian shores. He checked his watch; it hadn’t adjusted for moving into a new time zone, so he knew he was still on the West Coast of the North American continent. Plus, he simply hadn’t been traveling long enough to have looped around the Bering Strait and south toward Vladivostok. I may be losing it these days, he thought, but not that much.

He figured this had to be around Sea-Tac, where the international airport had been, back when the Noh-flies hadn’t taken up residence in the gray, endless clouds and people could still take jetliners from one point to another on the earth’s surface. McNihil just hadn’t been up this way for a while-months, at least-and the rate of new construction piling out of Seattle’s core had gotten away from him. The architecture, great brutal slabs and cubes of poured and uptilted ferroconcrete, was the manifested embodiment of the lowering weather and the population’s taste in bloodstream additives. There was a certain smack grandeur, the confluence of De Quincey and Cobain, to such massive, raw vistas. Places where one could be borne to the sepulchre in a crystal, sound-proofed coffin by leering hallucinations of alligators, streets cleaved between towers to the frozen center of the earth, the annihilation by scale of all that was puny and human.

Settled in the cab’s stained upholstery, McNihil let bleak architectural musings seep from his thoughts. He took comfort in the knowledge that he was heading into the center of the old city, that the business he’d come here to