Noir

Anyway, decided Harrisch, it doesn’t matter right now. That was all housekeeping stuff, things that would have to be cleaned up later. The nausea ebbed lower in his gut, like a brown sea’s low tide, when he considered just how well things were going. If a hospital’s human charcoal ward wasn’t his favorite place for a conference, so what? McNihil wouldn’t even have wanted to come here to talk if he weren’t caught on this particular hook, too tight to wriggle free.

“You’re hosed,” said Harrisch aloud. He enjoyed saying it. “Those burning corpses should just about be cinders by now.” The seizure of corporate poetry in his soul overrode any doubts about whether the asp-head still dreamed or not. “You connecting jerk.” Fierce adrenaline was as good as any white-powder pharmaceutical. “I could’ve met up with you in the boneyard, if that was what you wanted, and it still wouldn’t have changed anything.” These psychological-warfare ploys were useless, at least when they were directed at him. “I don’t care what you know about TOAW. If you know anything at all.”

“Simmer down,” said McNihil. He glanced over his shoulder toward the room’s door. “You’ll have the hospital security up here in a minute.”

“Who cares?” The seizure had morphed into a spasm of self-congratulatory elation. The feeling returned, the one he’d had when he’d seen McNihil bruised and bleeding on the floor of that old writer’s place. Absolute control, the future on rails, speeding directly into the embrace of his heart. What God feels, thought Harrisch as he closed his eyes. When He’s rolling dice at some infinite Vegas. One of the archangels could’ve handed Harrisch a free drink then, with his life written on the little paper parasol sticking out of it, and he wouldn’t have been surprised. “I can deal with them, the same way I’ve dealt with you.” He wondered vaguely if it was possible to get drunk off repeated hits of adrenaline. If so, it was happening to him; Harrisch felt the same giddiness and lack of regard for whatever happened next. Whatever he might say to this poor sorry bastard standing next to him… it didn’t matter. Because I’ve already won, thought Harrisch. Pleasure beyond smugness filled his body, like the bubbling light of the transfigured saints. And-almost as nice-the other man had lost. McNihil not only didn’t see the way things were in the real world-the asp-head was effectively blinded by his cut-up-and-stitched eyes, with their optical load of crappy old movie sets and shadowy lighting-but he was blind as well to what had happened to himself. He’d been connected over, poisoned and contaminated-And he doesn’t even know it, thought Harrisch with complete satisfaction. McNihil had embraced blindness as a way of life; the real world wasn’t good and darkly poetic enough for him. He had to have something else, see some other world more to his liking, with retro Warner Bros, shadows and-even more retro-tough-outside, tragic-inside women, just as if those had ever existed anywhere at all except in the movies. That was what he’d wanted, and so now he’d have no reason to complain about the consequences of his own self-generated ignorance, the chosen way of life turned to one of death. “You just don’t know…”

McNihil studied him coldly. “Know what?”

“Never mind.” Harrisch shook his head, letting his rhapsodic interior monologue fade away. “You’ll find out soon enough. That’s your job, isn’t it? Finding out things. You should be grateful I’ve given you this opportunity, to do what you’re so good at.”

“Yeah, right.” Beneath McNihil’s hardened features, the now-vestigial muscles shifted, subtly indicating disdain. “You still didn’t answer my question.”

“My apologies,” said Harrisch, still feeling amused. “Perhaps I didn’t appreciate your burning thirst for knowledge. There’s so much you want to know, isn’t there? What question was it, that I haven’t satisfied your mind about?”

“What I asked,” growled McNihil, “was how much time does she have? November… how much longer before they pull the plug?”

“‘Pull the plug’? You can see something like that?” Harrisch laughed. “I thought maybe you’d just have some notion of a nurse or an orderly, maybe even a doctor, coming in here and holding a pillow over her face, just to put her out of her misery. As for how long it’s going to be before that happens…” He glanced again at the numbers running down on the machines’ various gauges and dials, visible on the other side of the contamination barrier. What little money remained in November’s accounts was leaking away as though from a slashed wrist. The image came to Harrisch’s mind of the numbers in November’s palm, the stigmata of all fast-forwards, zipping by so fast that they blurred into a red, illegible smear, seeping through the bandages and dripping onto the floor beneath the chrome-barred bed. “Let’s just say… a ballpark figure… that the next time you’ve got a chance to come by here, when you’ve finished your job, whatever bed you can see will be empty. Or there’ll be some other mummy wrapped in gauze lying in it. That’s what you see right now, isn’t it? Well, it’ll be the same package pretty much-people are always falling into the flames-but it’ll be different contents inside. What’s left of this one will’ve been crumbled up and sluiced down the drain by that time.”

He watched McNihil silently regarding the human figure hidden beneath the gurgling machines. The stiffened angles of the other man’s face made it impossible to read whatever thoughts might be working through McNihil’s skull.

“I’ll make you an offer.” A few seconds had passed before McNihil had turned back toward him. “A deal.”

“You’re hardly in any kind of negotiation position.”

“This one isn’t negotiable,” said McNihil, voice flat and inexpressive as his face. “You won’t have any problem with it, though.” He gestured toward the burnt woman. “I’ll go her bill.”

Harrisch stared at the asp-head. “What’re you talking about?”

“You heard me. Call up the hospital’s accounting department. Or have one of your little minions do it. I’ll put up the cash for November’s therapeutic procedures here. Anything the doctors figure she needs-I’ll pay for it.”

“With what?” Harrisch barked an incredulous laugh. “You don’t have that kind of money, either. We’re talking about major tissue replacement here. Major, nothing; total is more like it. At least as far as skin goes-she doesn’t have a lot left. Even you should be able to see that. The DNA sample coding, the substrate matrices, accelerated regenerative foster-maps, all that epidermal plate-farming-and that’s just to get the raw materials ready. After that comes all the surgery, the grafting, the stitching, the stitch-ablation work, the laser spackling, the blood-vessel resassignments, the neural patterning… let me tell you, it’s not just some simple tuck- and-roll upholstery job that’s involved with somebody in her condition.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about the subject.”

“Connect, yeah.” Harrisch gave a slight shrug. “DynaZauber’s medical-products division makes most of the disposables, the active gels and the tissue-replication forms, that are used in burn wards like this. When they’re used-and we’re talking about a big ‘when.’ We also crank out the billing software for those procedures, so I know what they cost. Your pockets aren’t that deep.”

McNihil spoke without looking over at him. “What about yours?”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard me.” McNihil swung his flat gaze around. “There’s a bonus involved, isn’t there? For this job I’m doing for you. You can’t just let me off the hook; you have to pay me as well.”

“True.” Harrisch nodded. “Technically, you’re still on the Collection Agency’s list of operatives. So compensation has to be according to the agency’s fee schedule. So okay, you’ll get paid for it. Big deal.”

“It is,” said McNihil. “Big. I already checked into it. This job-matter of fact, anything to do with the Wedge and with Verrity-it’s on the Collection Agency’s red list. Those are the hot tickets; hot in the sense that the agency would rather not pick them up at all. They’d rather have them forgotten, instead of people like you poking into them and risking more embarrassment for everybody concerned. So the agency’s going to charge you a premium-a nice big fat one-on this job. And according to the last labor agreement between the agency and its operatives, ninety percent of that premium comes from the contracting party-that’s you, or DynaZauber, at least-and goes straight to me. When I complete the job.”

“If you complete the job.”

“Ah.” One of McNihil’s eyebrows creaked upward. “That’s not how you talked when you were first pushing me to take this on. Back there at Travelt’s cubapt. That was when you were so confident about me being able to pull this off. Remember?”

“I remember fine,” Harrisch said grudgingly. “But anything can happen. Anything bad. You’re the right man for the job, but Verrity handed your ass to you before. She can do it again. My hiring you is just a matter of playing the percentages; there’s no sure thing in this universe.”

“The hospital knows that, too.” With a tilt of his head, McNihil indicated the chamber’s doorway and the brightly lit corridor beyond. “That’s another thing I checked on my way in here. They’re into speculative ventures, at least on