Noir

“So you want to talk to me, huh?” A few feet away, McNihil wasn’t even looking at her. He was examining the trophy container again, knocking a few smudges of soot from the object, checking that the seal between the head and the elongated body hadn’t been violated. He smiled when he looked back around at her. “I bet you do.”

The blow from the back of his hand took November by surprise; she was cursing herself in fury even before she landed sprawling on her back. Before she could pick herself up, one of her outflung wrists was pinned against the rooftop by the sole of McNihil’s shoe. Her vision cleared, and she found herself looking into a black hole inches away from her face. Behind the hole was the familiar shape of a high-caliber weapon, and behind that, McNihil’s outstretched arm pointing down at her. Behind that was his face, no longer smiling.

Never underestimate these old bastards, vowed November. Now she’d have to find some way to maneuver around him. “What’d you do that for?” she asked. “Fine way to treat somebody who just saved your ass.”

“It’s how I treat people who follow me around.” The gun looked like some unmoving geological outcropping in McNihil’s fist. “And who don’t do a very good job of it.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Sweetheart, I have blown away people just for coming on all dumb with me.” McNihil could have leaned forward and tapped the gun’s muzzle against her brow. “Figure it out. We’re standing on top of a burning hotel, someplace nobody gives a rat’s ass what happens to it. I can walk off here easily enough. But if the scavengers tomorrow go rooting around through the ashes and they find your bones with a hole drilled through the skull, do you really think anyone will care?”

She said nothing. Her pinned arm was beginning to ache from the pressure of McNihil’s shoe.

“What’s your name?”

No need for lying. “November.”

“Good enough. There’s so little poetry in our lives nowadays.” McNihil shook his head. “Most of the time, it’s just scrabbling around and pointless subterfuge. Like your tailing me. Like your hanging around whenever I was having my little meetings with Harrisch and his pack of execs.”

Shit, thought November. She’d been operating under the impression that she’d pulled that one off, that he hadn’t a clue about her keeping tabs, at least up until that engineered train crash. She wondered how much else he knew. The dismaying prospect came to her that he could be completely ahead of her. That he might’ve known that she would be here waiting for him.

At that moment, an invisible fingertip, with ice under the nail, touched her heart. November looked up at him, with a new understanding and even a degree of admiration. There was a good reason to be afraid of people like him.

“Okay,” she said. The rooftop was uncomfortably warm beneath her, the tarry surface liquefying and seeping into her jacket. “But I already told you-we need to talk. And if I hadn’t been following you…” She nodded toward the parapet. “You’d be all over the street by now.”

In his other hand, McNihil held the trophy container like a staff of office. Smoke billowed behind him, from holes torn in the hotel’s structure. “Talk about what?”

She didn’t see any need to lie about this, either. “Harrisch, of course. All that stuff he’s leaning on you about. It’s not what you think it is.”

McNihil laughed. “As if I care. Since he can lean on me all he wants, and I’m still not having anything to do with it.”

There were also good reasons for feeling sorry for him. He still doesn’t know, thought November. The trap had just about closed tight around him, and he still didn’t feel its teeth.

Which was just as well for her, she figured. One way or another, she was going to move in on his action. The more connected he wound up, the easier it would be.

“You know,” said McNihil, peering at her, “I can see the gears turning around inside your head. You’ve got a nice cold attitude, young lady. Most people, their brains stop when they’re staring into something like this.” McNihil tilted the gun a fraction of an inch, letting it catch bright points of light from the flames licking past the roof’s edge. “You could’ve been an asp-head. But there haven’t been a lot of openings posted by the agency lately. That’s kind of a shame.”

It’s because you’re ancient history. She kept her reply silent. You and all the others. The reasons for the asp-heads’ existence-if there had ever been any-were long gone. Somebody like McNihil could blow away a scamming punk, put his spine and cut-down brain in a long metal jar; big deal. Who needed that anymore? It was what pissed her off about all her own scheming and plotting against McNihil. They should’ve just come to me first, November brooded. Harrisch and his little pack. If they’d done that, instead of thinking they could get some line on their dead colleague by using some old, burnt-out asp-head, they would’ve been off and rolling by now. She could’ve finished the job, found out what they wanted to know-Hell, she thought, I’m already more up-to-speed on what happened to Travelt than this guy could ever be-and pumped the numbers in her palm back up to where they should be. But no, it was never that simple. The standard complaint of freelancers such as herself: you not only had to do the job, you had to get the job first.

“I wear no man’s collar,” said November. “Except for pleasure, and then only on a time-limited basis. What I mean is that I prefer to be an independent operator.”

“That’s ridiculous.” McNihil took his shoe away from her wrist. “When you work for the Collection Agency, you get full medical and dental coverage.” He took a step back. “It’s the benefits, not the salary, that’s important.”

November sat up, massaging the blood back into her hand. “I don’t worry about things like that.”

“You should.” He kept the gun aimed at her, though his grip had relaxed slightly. “Believe it or not, someday you’ll be as old as me.”

“No, I won’t.” If the numbers blinking from her palm got much lower, she wouldn’t have to worry about even getting into her thirties, let alone through them.

“Whatever.” He let her stand up, the gun lowered in his hand. “But as I said before. If you want to talk to me, punch in the number. People who walk in on me while I’m doing business are likely to get hurt.”

“I don’t mind.” November showed him a three-quarter profile, her gaze emitted from the corners of her eyes. “That could be fun, actually.” She stepped closer to him. “Like you also said… I’m young. Flexible, as it were.”

This time, McNihil made no reply.

It’s too easy, thought November. It was always too easy. She wasn’t used to an encounter of this nature, with its familiar accelerating ramp-up and its foreordained conclusion, happening out in the open. But the smoke folding above their heads gave a comforting claustrophiliac illusion, the heat from the burning hotel beneath them completing the sense of giant machinery rushing toward an endlessly receding destination. There were even syringes and pads underfoot, debris left from the tenants who’d preferred to ingest in the stars’ cold view. If she closed her eyes, November could feel the world narrowing in around her shoulders, the corset or casket of desire, as she moved past McNihil’s gun and inside the perimeter of his defenses. Close enough to sense the human temperature of his body, close enough to bring the awareness of her body-she knew-into his machinelike percept systems.

November stood next to him, her narrow hip against the front of his thigh, the curve of one small breast deformed by the pressure against his torso. She looked up into McNihil’s face, then stood on tiptoe, reaching her hand to caress the corner of his brow, the soft touch of her fingers brushing the side of his head. Just as she had done so many times before, with other men, in other places that had collapsed down to the non-space held between her body and his.

She wanted to punish him, just a little bit. For being such a smart-ass, for holding an ugly gun in her face, for standing on her wrist; that still ached somewhat. But mainly to show him that he should pay serious attention to her. She let the localized magnetic-resonance pulse travel through one arm and into her palm, a paralyzing spark leaping from between her heart and life lines and into the sonuvabitch’s skull…

For a moment, the clouds of roiling smoke parted, enough to let her see the cold points of light in the dark sky. If that’s what they were; in another moment, she wondered if she might be gazing into the blackness at the center of McNihil’s eyes.

Then she realized she was lying flat on her back once more, the fire-heated rooftop beneath her spine. Bits and pieces of the world slotted together again, replacing the blank daze inside her head.