“She’ll destroy it anyway, if we don’t do something. I’ve Seen what will happen if we don’t stop her, and anything would be better than that.”
I didn’t look at her scarred face. I didn’t think of her half-dead, half-mad, come back through Time to kill me, with the awful Speaking Gun grafted where her right forearm should have been.
“What if the others don’t want to get involved?”
“I’ll make them want to.”
“And end up just like your mother?”
I sighed, and looked into my empty glass. “I’m tired, Suzie. I want… I need for this to be over.”
“It should be one hell of a battle.” Shotgun Suzie ran one thumb caressingly over her bandoliers of bullets. “I can’t wait.”
I smiled at her fondly. “I’ll bet you even take that shotgun to bed with you, don’t you?”
She looked at me with her cold, calm expression. “Someday, you just might find out. My love.”
She blew me a kiss, then returned all her attention to her bottle of gin. Alex looked at me with a mixture of awe, horror, and utter astonishment, and seized the opportunity for a quiet chat while Suzie was preoccupied. He pulled me aside and lowered his voice to a whisper.
“Did I just hear right, John? My love? Am I to take it you and the psycho bounty hunter from Hell are now an item?”
“Looks like it,” I said. “I’m as shocked and surprised as you are. Maybe I should have checked the wording in my Personals Ad more carefully.”
“But… Suzie? I mean, ten out of ten for courage, yes, but… she’s crazy!”
I had to smile. “You think anyone sane would hook up with me?”
Alex considered the matter. “Well, there is that, yes. Good point. But John… her face…”
“I know,” I said quietly. “It happened in the Past. There was nothing I could do.”
“John, she’s one step closer to becoming the future Suzie who tried to kill you. Shouldn’t we tell her about that?”
“I already know,” said Suzie. I hadn’t heard her approach, and from the way Alex jumped, he hadn’t either.
She was gracious enough not to smile. “I’ve known for some time. You can’t keep secrets long in the Nightside, especially when they include bad news. You should know that, John. Don’t worry about it. I never worry about the future. Mostly because I don’t believe I’m going to live to see it. It’s a very liberating attitude. Worry about the present me, John.”
“Oh I do,” I assured her. “I do.”
I put my back against the bar and looked out over the place. Just another night in the oldest bar in the world. Alex’s muscle-bound bouncers, Betty and Lucy Coltrane, were throwing out a bunch of burly masked Mexican wrestlers, and making them cry like little girls in the process. Never mess with the Coltranes. Especially when they’re wearing their ROLLERBALL HELLCAT MUD-WRESTLING CHAMPIONS T-shirts. Not far away, a cyborg with glowing golden eyes ordered another bottle of neat ethanol from Alex, in a strange buzzing voice. He’d dropped in from a possible future via a Timeslip, and was currently trying to mend his left leg with a pair of pliers and a sonic screwdriver someone had left behind in the bar. I was actually pleased to see him. It was good to know that other futures, apart from the terrible devastated future I feared so much, were still possible.
Not far enough away, half a dozen flower fairies in drooping petal outfits were singing a raucous Victorian drinking song, buzzed up on pollen. Soon they’d start getting nasty, and go looking for a Water Baby to beat up. Coming down the metal stairs into the bar proper was Kid Psychoses, in his tatterdemalion rags, doing his rounds and peddling his appalling wares. The Kid sold brief interludes of mental illness, for people who wanted to go really out of their heads. He once told me he started out selling mental health, but there was no market for it in the Nightside. I could have told him that.
And the King and Queen of America were passing through, smiling and waving.
“So,” said Alex, freshening my glass, “what was the Nightside like, in the Past?”
“Messy,” said Suzie. “In every possible sense of the word.”
“Kill anyone interesting?”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “But a gentleman doesn’t kill and tell. Have you seen Tommy Oblivion recently?”
“Not since he left here with you earlier. Was I supposed to?”
Tommy Oblivion, the existential private eye, had gone back into the Past with Suzie and me, but we’d had a falling-out. He accused me of being cold and manipulative and more dangerous than the people I was trying to stop. I had to send him back to the Present. It was either that or kill him, and I’m trying to be one of the good guys, these days. But I had a feeling I might have missed the mark, just a bit. I could remember Tommy appearing in this bar quite suddenly, out of nowhere, some months back when I was working the Nightingale’s Lament case. Back then, he’d threatened to hunt me down and kill me. I’d wondered why, but now I think I knew.
I sighed and shrugged mentally. Tommy Oblivion could take a number and get in line. There was never any shortage of people trying to kill me, in the Nightside. There was a loud creaking of heavy leathers as Suzie moved in beside me, her back to the bar, gin bottle in hand. It was already half-empty, and she had a cigarette in one corner of her mouth. Smoke curled up slowly past her sealed-shut eye.
“I’ll find you a spell,” I said. “To repair your face.”
“I’m thinking of keeping it,” Suzie said calmly. “It’ll help my image as a desperate character and ruthless killer.”
“Your image doesn’t need any help.”
“You always know the right things to say, Taylor. But I’ve never cared about being pretty. At least now my outside matches my inside.”
“Suzie… I won’t have you hurt, because of me.”
She looked at me coldly. “You start getting protective, Taylor, and I will drop you like a hot elephant turd.”
“Speaking of really big shits,” said Alex, “Walker was in here a few hours ago, John. Looking for you.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Walker, that perfect city gent in his smart city suit and bowler hat, represented the Authorities. His word was law in the Nightside, and peopled lived and died and worse at his whim. They say he once made a corpse sit up and answer his questions. He doesn’t approve of me, but he’s thrown some work my way from time to time, when he’s needed a deniable and completely expendable agent. He was mad at me at the moment, but he’d get over it. Or he wouldn’t, in which case one of us would almost certainly end up killing the other.
“He brought his people in here and had them search the place from top to bottom,” said Alex, sounding distinctly aggrieved. “Hence my need for a thorough and very expensive cleanup crew, just before you dropped in.”
“You let them search your bar?” I said.
Alex must have heard the surprise in my voice, because he had the grace to look a little ashamed. “Hey, he brought a lot of people with him, all right? Serious people with serious weaponry. Some of whom are still missing, presumed eaten. I warned them not to go down into the cellars.”
I shook my head. Walker must be getting really desperate to lay hands on me if he was prepared to raid a bar protected by Merlin Satanspawn. Merlin had been buried in the cellars under the bar, after the fall of Camelot; but being dead doesn’t necessarily keep you from being a major player in the Nightside. I wouldn’t go down into those cellars with a gun at my back.
“I have to go take a piss,” I announced. “I’ve been holding it in for over two thousand years, and my back teeth are floating.”
“Thank you for sharing that with us,” said Alex. “Try and keep some of it off the floor this time.”
I headed for the toilets at the back of the bar. Without making a big thing of it, people moved slowly but deliberately out of my way. Partly because of my carefully maintained reputation, but mostly because bad things had a habit of happening to and around me, and wise people kept a safe distance. I pushed open the door with the stylised male genitals painted on it, and headed for the row of stalls. I’ve never been one for urinals. Far too easy to be ambushed. I took a quick glance around me, breathing through my mouth to avoid the worst of the smell, but
