Noir

“I knocked your squat down because I don’t like you.” McNihil leaned his weight into the other man’s chest, hard enough to make a pink tongue protrude through the beard. “I meant to do it,” he lied. “And I wasn’t nearly as pissed off then as I am now.”

“Urrf.” Mottled patches appeared on what little of the bearded man’s face was visible. “Agk.”

The others, who had been following behind, had now backed off a few meters. Their faces showed that they hadn’t been prepared for the violence level to go up another notch.

“Now I’m going to put you down. And then I’m going to walk in one direction, and you’re going to walk in another. Got me?”

Above McNihil’s fists, the bearded figure nodded.

Wiping the backs of his hands against his trousers, McNihil watched the squatters scurry away. In the distance, back at the block-long park, fires had broken out in the 747’s disassembled wreckage, from overturned camp stoves and the few bits of electrical wire shorting out. Black smoke coiled toward the sky as McNihil turned and headed once more toward the movie theater.

What a putz, thought November. She had watched the whole bit, from her vantage point in a shadowed alley. From here she had been able to see her target, the former asp-head, come striding onto the scene, heading for what he was probably telling everyone was a business appointment. Right-she nodded to herself-same business as before.

The little knot of homeless-more homeless now-were making their way back to the smoldering plane debris. November turned her head, letting the shuffling figures fade from her attention. She hadn’t come here, stationed herself to wait for McNihil’s arrival, on their behalf. They couldn’t pay her tab, they couldn’t even get her close to making the monthly nut that kept the breath in her lungs. Inside her fist, the sweat-damp skin of her palm itched; she could feel the red numbers crawling across her life line, red numbers that she didn’t want to open her hand to look at. She was the only one who could see them, and right now she didn’t need to. Not after that last encounter with her finance company’s representative.

Her gaze swung across the narrow city streets and the boarded-up or burnt-out storefronts. And back to the figure of McNihil, disappearing into a little fly-by-night movie house without a glance behind himself.

Hard to believe this guy had ever had any cop moves at all. November shook her head, reflecting on the teeth of the slow gears, the inexorable machinery of time. They get old, she thought, they lose it. That was probably a big reason she’d put herself on a short leash, become a fast-forward. When she couldn’t cut it, when the numbers in her hand pulsed down to zero and the minuses beyond, it’d be a quick end. She wanted to avoid having that happen just yet, though.

A ticket stub from the little rat-hole theater was in the pocket of her jacket; she’d already been in and discreetly checked that McNihil’s “business” was there, scrunched down in a center-row seat and watching some stupid cartoon with a tub of butteroid popcorn in his lap. McNihil was running late, in risk of blowing the connection he’d come here to make. But he’d have to be late, considering the mess he’d made in the streets.

Real subtle. November sighed, feeling sorry for the poor old bastard. Why not just show up in town and blow up the whole place, like some old vintage Schwarzenegger flick? She smiled at one corner of her mouth, thinking maybe that was the real reason McNihil had gone to the movies, in hope of picking up a few destructive tips.

She didn’t feel like following him into the theater. She knew that he’d be out soon enough, with his “business” in tow.

With the red, invisible numbers ticking down inside her palm, November leaned back against the alley wall and waited.

TEN

BRAIN CELLS IMPLODING INTO SOME TERRITORY OF OPIATED BLISS OR GUNS, WOMEN, AND ANGST

All right,” said the business. His hand rooted around in the grease and unpopped kernels at the popcorn tub’s bottom. “This is a good part. I really wanted to see it again.”

From the next seat over, McNihil glanced up at the screen. This month’s disnannie, all bright cartoon colors and state-of-the-art CGI, was playing. A week ago, it’d been fresh and coming over the wires to the upscale movie houses. Now its earnings had already dropped off enough for it to be printed out on old-fashioned film reels and dumped at flea-pits like this. There hadn’t even been a marquee or a pretense of a ticket window outside, but just an old woman on a folding chair, a debit-card reader and a cashbox on her schmatta’d lap.

“What’s it about?” McNihil pushed away the popcorn tub that the pimply kid extended toward him.

“Beats me.” The kid shrugged. “I never pay attention to that story stuff.”

The kid was in his early twenties; that was what McNihil pegged him at. All skinny arms and legs, folded up in the seat with his knees against the one in front of him, looking like a whooping-crane carcass dressed in T-shirt and faded jeans. The reflection of the movie images made bright, shifting rectangles out of his glasses.

“It’s the visuals,” said the kid. “You just gotta go with that.” His hand operated by itself, feeding more fluffy shrapnel into his mouth. “That’s all that’s important.”

“Really? How can you tell?” In places like this, the standards were always shoddy. McNihil pointed to the wedge of light, filled with dust motes, above their heads. “They’ve got their projector element canted backward. Look at that keystoning on the screen.”

“Huh?” The kid bent forward, spine arched, squinting through his glasses. “What’re you talking about?”

“You can’t see it? The image is wider across the top than the bottom. That’s why everybody looks like some kind of hydrocephalic.”

“Aww…” A moan of disappointment escaped from the folded scarecrow figure. He hadn’t been able to see the aberration until it’d been pointed out to him, but now he wouldn’t be able to keep from seeing it. “That sucks.” He glanced toward the simple plywood door behind him. “I oughta get my money back.”

Like there’s a chance of that. McNihil let his gaze travel around the theater, such as it was. In the dark, smelling of sweat and urine and spilled wet sugar, the screen’s soft radiance fell on just a few scattered faces. And some of those were asleep, or looked so narcotized that if the film had broken and nothing but white light had filled their blank eyes, they wouldn’t have protested. They’d probably just have thought it was their own brain cells imploding into some territory of opiated bliss. McNihil looked back at the kid. “Don’t sweat it.”

The eyes behind the lenses were glaring at him with real hatred. “You’re a pretty smart guy, aren’t you?”

McNihil shrugged. “On occasion.”

“Smart enough to figure out why I wanted you to meet me here? At the movies?”

A song had started coming out of the theater’s rinky-dink speakers, mounted on the walls with cables dangling. McNihil glanced up at the misshapen screen image, remembering now that this month’s disnannie was a cartoon adaptation of the ancient black-and-white film The Lodger, transformed into something called Jackie Upstairs. A teenage Ripper was serenading a fogbound period London from his boardinghouse window, while a trio of cutely animated viscera-Kidney, Liver, and Uterus-danced and wisecracked around him.

“Beats me,” said McNihil. He looked back over at the kid. “If you feel like telling me, go ahead.”

“Because…” The kid leaned across the armrest between the seats. A yellow fleck of popcorn kernel hung on his lower lip. “I figured you might not be on the level, mister. Maybe you’re not a book collector at all. Maybe you’re a copyright thug. What do they call ’em? A snake-head.”

“Asp-head,” corrected McNihil. “It’s one of those bilingual confusions. Deutsch-lish, German and American muddled together. Asp from the English, kopf the German for head. So you get asp-head; it’s what they call a back-formation, from the name of the old twentieth-century organization ASCAP. They were the ones who used to round up the money for composers and musicians, until the Collection Agency came together from the old software protection and copyright defense outfits, so there was just one rights authority for all intellectual-property forms.”

The kid goggled at him in distaste. “Did I ask you for some connectin’ historical lecture?”