Noir

a limited basis. Kind of a gambling mentality-for a twenty-five-percent surcharge on all fees and services, they’ll do the full job on November here, the grafts and skinwork, the blood and neural microsurgery hookups, everything. A brand-new skin, shining like a baby’s-that’s a pretty good deal for her. Maybe they’ll give her the dead bits, the ashes in a jar, to keep on her mantelpiece at home.” He managed a brittle laugh. “Snakes get to shed their skins-so I’ve heard; I don’t know from personal experience-so why shouldn’t people? They need it so much more-don’t you think?”

What the connect… Harrisch gazed at the other man, as the pieces fell into place. Slowly, because he couldn’t believe it. “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said. “You want to pay for this person’s skin grafts and all the rest of the stuff they can do for her in this place, and you want to take it out of the bonus for the job you’re doing for me? That’s it?”

McNihil nodded.

“You’ve gotta be crazy.” Harrisch stared at him in amazement. How could anyone be so connecting stupid? “You realize what that would mean?”

“Of course,” said McNihil, voice calm. “It means that when I’m done with this job for you, there won’t be a lot of cash going into my pocket because of it. The money will already have been spent here at the hospital, on this November person’s skin grafts and therapy.”

“That’s what happens, all right… if you pull it off.” A fierce glee seized Harrisch, as the implications unfolded to him. “You’ll have everything riding on this, McNihil. Because as soon as I sign over the bonus payment to the hospital, and they accept it and do their work on spec, then your ass is mine. Totally-way more than it is already.” He had difficulty restraining the triumphant emotions compressing the breath from his lungs. “Because from that moment, you’ll be in debt to me-”

“To DynaZauber, actually.”

“Whatever,” said Harrisch impatiently. “Believe me, your fate’ll be in my hands and nobody else’s. I’ll have your file welded to my desk. Because of my deep personal interest in you, pal. Either way that it goes with you on this job, whether you track down and return our missing property or whether you slam straight into Verrity again and she takes you apart like a cheap watch-either way, I’ve got you. Succeed or fail, I’ll get my money’s worth out of you.”

“Then I guess,” said McNihil with a cool absence of emotion, “that I better succeed. Just to keep you off my ass.”

Like there’s any chance of that, thought Harrisch as he took his tight-cell phone out of his coat pocket. The poor bastard just didn’t know. “Yeah.” He spoke after dialing. “I’m going to need a contract notary up here. Immediately.”

He’d left a couple of assistants sitting in the car, over in the hospital’s multileveled parking garage. Within minutes, the elevator doors at the end of the corridor slid open, and the DZ flunkies had crowded into the burn- ward chamber. “You won’t be able to say you didn’t know what you were doing.” Harrisch watched as the new document, a three-way agreement between the asp-head, DynaZauber, and the hospital, was recorded and sealed. “This is as close to full disclosure as it gets.” Or as it needed to; he figured that McNihil would find out soon enough how thoroughly he’d been connected. That in fact and potential there had never been any way for him to win. All he could do, thought Harrisch with satisfaction, was make things worse for himself. He’d seen people engineer their own defeats before-the late Travelt was a perfect example of that-but never to such a complete degree as this. It was like watching someone screw down the lid of his coffin from the inside.

As soon as the contract was registered, the numbers on the financial-status monitor gauges changed, scrambling up into the high digits of temporary solvency. On the other side of the transparent contamination barrier, the readouts flicked from red to green, indicating a surgical Go condition. The almost-subliminal murmur of the pumps and tube-connected machines went up in tempo and pitch, getting ready for long-delayed action; from the corner of his eye, Harrisch could see the burnt woman’s body contract, the large muscles tightening with the first unconscious rush of injected adrenaline, then relaxing as better and more expensive opiates ticked up in synch. Submerged in junkie oblivion, she awaited the knife. Harrisch heard the prep carts approaching, their black wheels rattling on the outside corridor’s hard and glossy floor.

“That’s fine.” McNihil spoke first. He turned away from the contamination barrier and its dreaming captive. “I’d love to stand here and talk with you some more. But I’ve got work to do.”

Harrisch stepped, letting the other man slide in front of him, toward the door. The two flunkies had already retreated out into the brighter light; they watched in silence as the asp-head strode past them.

“Good luck,” called Harrisch. His raised voice trembled small waves on the vertical barrier. “You’ll need it.”

McNihil’s hardened face glanced back at him. “No, I won’t,” he said. He turned and continued walking toward the elevators.

SIXTEEN

THE SMILE OF THE ULTIMATE BARFLY

You’re back.” The woman smiled at him. “I kind of expected you would be.”

The smile of the ultimate barfly was part of the establishment’s furniture, as much as the dim lights reflected in the mirror behind the bottles, as much as the long-enclosed air that crawled in and out of McNihil’s throat. “Where else could I go?” His thumb sank into faux leather as he pulled out a stool and sat next to her. “This is the only game in town.”

She laughed, holding up a glass with ice cubes rattling like polished bones, their round square curves melting into brown alcohol. “You got that right, pal.”

McNihil sipped at the drink that had been placed in front of him, without his needing to ask. Bad scotch, as though from the well of indifferent souls, trickled near his heart. In the mirror, flecked with dust and something more deliberate, he could see himself and the bar’s space, both endless and claustrophobic. The black-and-white world in his eyes had set up tight and hard, shutting out anything more recent. No future, thought McNihil, for me. The obliging deity of the universe he saw had heard that decision, made even before he’d gone into the hospital and formalized it in front of the burnt November, floating at the altar like a charred bridesmaid, tubes and oxygenated hoses trailing like the ribbons of a bouquet crushed to what was left of her small breasts. That particular god had heard and had obliged far beyond what the stingy, nonexistent object of the Bishop of North America’s worship would’ve given: McNihil’s present as well as his future had been extinguished, leaving just this dark past, both threatening and oddly comfortable. Just what I always wanted…

The barfly nudged his shoulder with her bare arm. “I wonder,” she said softly, her mouth close to his ear, “just what game you’re talking about.”

He drew his finger through the small puddle that had been jostled from his glass. “There’s all kinds… aren’t there?”

“No.” She took his hand-the darkly shining polish of her fingernails caught sparks from the mirror-and brought it to her mouth. “There’s only one.” Gazing up at him through her eyelashes, she licked the smoky drop of alcohol from his fingertip. “You know that.”

McNihil let his hand stay caught in both of hers, like a small animal too stupid to run away, even as the trap was folding around it. His eyes had adjusted to the bar’s shadows enough that he had been able to catch a glimpse inside the woman’s mouth, past the diminished-spectrum red of her lipstick and white, unsharpened teeth. He’d seen the scars along the surface of her tongue, the minute roughened and healed abrasions, as though from needles that had been held in a match flame. McNihil had seen the same marks before, and often. But the last time had been in the mouth of a corpse, lying on the floor of a lux cubapt, as he’d knelt on the deep-pile carpet to make his quick, disinterested examination. Scars indicating prowler usage, the wet flesh, all muscle and sensors inserted pluglike into the socket of that other mouth, that face like a mask opening and fused to knowledge.

Face like mine, thought McNihil; if he’d taken his hand away from the woman’s, he could’ve touched his own inert flesh, skin yielding just slightly more than the bone beneath. On the way from the