“I’ll give you a hundred bucks on the fool,” I said. “Where are my cigarettes?”
* * *
I got a shower, passed on shaving the two-week beard, and dressed. I found a green-and-black paisley button-down shirt, a pair of well-worn jeans, and my boots, still with a few old flecks of dried blood, in the closet of the room. I figured Vigil had brought them from the mansion. I tied my hair off in a ponytail and went out to meet up with Grinner.
I found Robert Shelton, aka Grinner, in the galley-style kitchen that was a nexus for this floor of the Hard Limit, which included Dragon’s and Anna’s suites and an arm of guest rooms, like mine. Grinner was sitting at a small table, a tea nook that Anna often haunted, sipping from a bottle of water and reading a dog-eared paperback copy of Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive.
Grinner was tall, well over six feet, and stocky; his midnight-black dye-job hair had grown out to a lazy military-cut length, no longer high or tight, but close. He was sporting matte black plugs in his ears these days, and I thought I caught a flash of new ink on his thick, muscular forearms. He was clean-shaven except for a black soul patch on his wide face. He wore baggy gray cargo shorts that fell to just below his knees. The pants had more pockets and pouches than Batman’s utility belt and most likely a very similar content. He wore ripped-up black Chuck Taylors that had a three-teardrop yin-yang symbol on the sides, as well as a black Motörhead T-shirt that he had owned since I first met him more than twenty years ago. Grinner had an earbud in one ear, connected to his smartphone on the table.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Mr. Robot?” I asked as I opened the fridge and fished out a cold can of energy drink.
“Waiting for your lazy ass to wake up so I can get back to work,” Grinner said, putting down the book and slipping the earbud free. “How you doing, man?”
“I’m good,” I said. “Ready to get back on this. Oh and what’s this shit about ‘being on retainer’? Does that make you my faithful manservant?”
“That makes you a fuck lump,” he rumbled. “Don’t push it. You contracted me for intel, and I’m doing that job. That makes you a client until we settle up, so it would have been a conflict of interest to take another job.”
I laughed and sat down at the small table.
“‘Conflict of interest’? When did you get a morals transplant?” I said. “Besides, I paid you up front.”
“For what I already got for you. So now you’re paying me more. That makes you still my client. Oh, and I’m adding a little more to the tab since you questioned my business ethics.”
“Thanks, man,” I said. “If you’d cracked that drive for Ankou, I’ve got a feeling I would have woken up back in a Dumpster.”
“A ‘thank you’ from you, Ballard, is about as sincere as a kiss from a whore,” he said. “And don’t be so sure. Ankou may be a smeghead, but his man, Vigil, he seems pretty solid. He treated me square.”
“I don’t trust him,” I said, “that whole samurai, honor, thing.”
Grinner laughed.
“Shit, man. He’s you back in the day, when you still gave a shit, still believed in something.”
“No wonder I don’t like him.”
“Didgeri sends her love,” he said. “She was going to meet me out here when I got the word you were laid out, but she had a last-minute consult with some cops in Texas about some red-skinned, tentacled Aussie critter called a Tara-ma-yha-who. Apparently they got one out there eating people. She’s worried about you and about Magdalena, but she felt she had to go help them stop this thing.”
I nodded. “Yeah, they’re part of the Dreamtime and can be a bitch to dislodge from the material world. Give her my love back. I saw Magdalena. Tell her she’s … she’s okay.”
“Mmhm,” Grinner said. “I wish she had never crossed your path, pal. You fucked her up bad.”
“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I slipped the USB drive out of my jeans pocket and handed it to Grinner. “We cool to talk business in here?” Grinner examined his smartphone and made a few swipes at the screen.
“We are now,” he said. “Dragon and Anna have some kick-ass security in this place. They like to keep their clients protected. I just did an extra sweep, and we’re good.” He examined the thumb drive, and then it disappeared into one of the pockets of his utility shorts.
“Somewhere in that data is the identity Caern Ankou slipped into back in 2009. It’s the next path stone on the road. I need it quick. The trail is ice cold. She may have already ditched this ID and moved on.”
“If she did, I’ll pick up the trail,” he said. “Give me a few hours.”
“Vigil said the Emerald Tablet Hermetics struck out trying to crack the encryption,” I said. Grinner gave me a faux expression of gasping fear.
“Oh no!” he said. “If those fucking, wand-waving script kiddies can’t hack it, then what chance could I, a mere mortal, have?”
Grinner was in the Life, of the Life, but he was no wizard. All his voodoo was pure talent. He was a savant, seeing code the same way Mozart or Bach had seen music. He once told me that magic was nothing more than another type of coding, universal source code.
“Give me an hour, chief,” he said.
* * *
I spent that hour ordering some food from a Thai place Anna, Dragon, and I
