Noir (39 page)

“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 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.

Y
ou’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.”