Noir (43 page)

The male prowler spoke again. “You’re just connecting around with him.”

“Shut up,” said the barfly, more amused than angry. “I know what I’m doing.” She nudged McNihil with her shoe. The pointed toe of the vampy five-inch-heeled number was almost sharp enough to penetrate his ribs. “You don’t have any complaints, do you, pal?”

“The hell I don’t.” McNihil had managed to roll over onto his side; he felt his own weight pressing against the tannhäuser inside his jacket. He gathered and spat an evil-tasting substance out of his mouth, the residue of the kiss’s transmission of gathered memory. “This … this is just uncalled for.” Lying on one shoulder, McNihil fumbled his hand across the buttons of his shirt, trying to get his stiffened fingers onto the weapon, not caring whether they were watching him. “Not … friendly at all …”

He was starting to wonder if he’d misjudged the situation into which he’d wandered.
Maybe they don’t want me to find out
, thought McNihil. Prowlers obviously had more secrets than he’d known of … and maybe the prowlers wanted them to stay secrets. If there’d been time, and some way of clearing his head of the stuff the barfly’s kiss had put in there—the memory download went on unfolding like a toxic flower, each petal made of human skin—he might have tried figuring out what it meant. Something was going on, that was way outside the original prowler design parameters. Even the barfly—
She shouldn’t have been able to pass for human
, he decided.
At least not so easily
. The transference effect that Harrisch had told him about—maybe that hadn’t been just an isolated occurrence between the late Travelt and his prowler. Maybe it had been going on all along, with all the prowlers and their users.
And maybe
, the thought struck him,
maybe Harrisch knew about it
. Perhaps
from the beginning; and not because something was going wrong, at least from the viewpoint of that DZ executive bunch.

Another flower threaded its black stem through McNihil’s skull. One that he was going to let remain unopened, rather than forcing the hothouse blossom of revealed conspiracies. That was a particular garden path he didn’t want to go down, at least not at the moment: the possibility that whatever was going on with the prowlers wasn’t something outside the original design parameters … but inside. If they were becoming human, in whole or part, soaking up their owners’ thoughts, minds, maybe even souls—maybe that was just what they were designed to do.

Those considerations tumbled through the murk inside McNihil’s head, as though his fingertips were reading tactile Morse code on the tannhäuser’s checked grip.
I’ll think about ’em later
—he seized the weapon and dragged it out of his jacket.

“Oh, great,” said the male prowler standing nearby. “Now look—he’s packing.” An anxious hubbub rose from the others at the little tables scattered through the bar. “Somebody should’ve taken that thing away from him.”

“But you didn’t,” said McNihil. His legs still didn’t seem to be functioning, as though some link down his spine had been snapped by the barfly’s kiss. He managed to push himself up on one elbow, raising the tannhäuser in the other hand. “Lucky for me.” The gun wobbled as he swung its pendulumlike weight toward each of the hovering onlookers in turn. “Sorry … it’s not in
your
plans …”

“It’s your own that you’re connecting up.” The barfly looked down at him with mingled contempt and pity. “You came here to do a job—to get that job
done
and over with—and we’re just trying to help you out, pal.” The tough-girl persona from the old movies firmed up around her like a suit of armor, one made of cheap silky stuff molded to her ribs and hinged down the seams of her smoky-dark stockings. “Come on—that’s why you came here in the first place. Because you knew that we could do that for you.” Her smile held legions of superior wisdom. “Because you know that this is the door in.”

“I changed my mind.” McNihil flopped back against the bar’s padded flank. He held the tannhäuser in both hands, trying to steady it. The implications about the prowlers—what they were, what they’d
become—had gone spiraling out, despite his intent not to think about that. “I gotta fall back … and punt. I thought … I knew what was going on. Or at least part of it.” The weapon had started sweating in his tight grip. “Plus what … I was going to do about it.” The conceptual territory had shifted beneath his feet, as though the edges of one of the tectonic plates underlying the Gloss had broken through the asphalt and concrete, totally rearranging the map he’d stood on. “So it’s been nice, but …” A little tingling sensation had returned to McNihil’s legs; he made a tentative effort at getting them beneath himself. “I think I better be running along.…”

“I don’t think so,” announced the barfly. Contempt outweighed pity in her gaze. “You shouldn’t make appointments you don’t plan on keeping. There’s somebody waiting for you.”

“Somebody important.” The male prowler loomed ominously above McNihil. Behind the prowler, the others had left their places at the bar’s small tables and had assembled in rough, anonymous formation; the crowd of extras had morphed into an ugly mob scene, their muttering anger directed at the figure sprawled between the stools. “Somebody …”—the prowler’s flat voice ratchetted down into a growl—“somebody you’ve needed to meet for a long time.”

The words inside McNihil’s head, the few that had been left after the power surge of the barfly’s kiss, were replaced by quick, overriding panic. In instinctive self-defense, he raised his clasped hands up in front of his chest, the tannhäuser cranking into position as though on an invisible hoist line.

“Don’t be stupid.” The barfly shook her head in disgust. “That’s not going to help.”

McNihil let the tannhäuser take the initiative, whatever small mind it had inside its works substituting for his own exhausted one. The weapon spoke in true operatic fashion, a Wagnerian basso roar hitting the bar’s walls as an orange gout of flame spat out of the muzzle.

“You dumb shit.” In the fuzzy mists beyond him, the voice that spoke sounded like the male prowler who’d been getting so ugly with him.
He’s still standing?
wondered McNihil. “There’s a time,” said the voice, “and a place for everything. This ain’t it.”

With the back of his head against the padding, McNihil opened his eyes as wide as possible, the furrows of his brow enough to bring the bar’s contents into a discernible order. Only roughly so: between the aftereffects
of the barfly’s kiss, the engorged memories popping out from each other like an infinite series of Chinese boxes, and the still-echoing wallop of the tannhäuser, the things inside his head felt marginally connected, if at all, the synapses as ragged and wet as used tissue paper. The world of ancient movies encoded inside McNihil’s eyes went soft and transparent, like a molecule-thick permeable membrane letting in the other behind it, the more-or-less real one. The gearing of his brain revved into a bone-held fever, trying to sort out the overlapping data and reassemble them into a coherent whole.

McNihil pressed his clenched hands, weighted with the tannhäuser, against his eyes, trying to shield himself from the chaotic stimulus rush. Even through his eyelids he could see what had been the bar, the dark hole both comfortable and threatening, with its diamond-padded door and leatherette-topped seats, the neon cocktail sign sizzling in the night air beyond, the rain slowly leaking down the stairs from the wet streets and sidewalks jeweled with the moon’s shattering reflection … and over and mingled with that a bleak metal warehouse, industrial end-of-millennium chic, all exposed bolts and scrubbed-bare sheet steel, black anaconda cables looped over the girders and crawling around the space’s litter-thick perimeter. Seeing even that much put a miasma of chemical sweat and twitching O.D. vomitus into McNihil’s nostrils, the smell of grim fun aftermath. Places like this were why he’d left one world for another, the annihilating real for the endurable gone.

Wake up
, he told himself,
and smell the burning corpses of your dreams
. McNihil lowered the weapon in his hands and looked up at the prowler standing before him.

The barfly had draped herself around the humanlike figure’s shoulders, clinging like erotic seaweed to a jagged shoreline rock. As though a wave had broken over the prowler and drawn away only a few seconds ago; the front of the figure’s dark jacket was shining wet, blood seeping from the hole torn through the upper chest.

As McNihil watched, and as the barfly smiled and watched him in turn, the male prowler reached up and hooked a forefinger in the bullet hole. The jacket’s fabric ripped away as easily as damp paper, exposing the pallid flesh beneath.
No wonder
, thought McNihil,
it didn’t fall down
…

Like a rock dropped into a gelatinous sea, the bullet hadn’t created a wound, but rather a rippling distortion, a faint bull’s-eye pattern that
had spread over the prowler’s torso and faded. The bullet’s entry point had been transformed by the black-ink tattoos that had swarmed and inched their way from the prowler’s abdomen and back, like blind fish and bottom-feeding ocean creatures, attracted by a sudden food source. The hole itself, edged with a small wreath of pinkish erectile tissue, exuded a fluid clearer than blood, but just as viscid and blood-warm, glistening like silvery snail tracks in a moonlit garden. When the prowler’s fingertips stroked the soft rim of the swollen non-wound, a tiny brass sun rose in its depths, just south of the ridge of collarbone. Shining wet, the flat end of the tannhäuser’s bullet slid with minor grace from the hole, the surrounding pink-to-red tissue enfolding its steel-jacketed shaft. The prowler’s thumb and fingertip grasped the exposed end of the cylinder; the humanlike figure’s flat gaze shifted from where it had examined, chin tucked against throat, its adaptive flesh, up to McNihil’s eyes.

“You see?” The male prowler spoke, its voice unaltered by pain or shock. “It’s no big deal.” The gathering tattoos, black hearts and black flowers, the names of martyred saints, nibbled at his fingertips. “As long as you’re …
ready
for it.” Slowly, the prowler slid the wet bullet back and forth in its receptacle of softly lubricated flesh. The black holes of his eyes, apertures in the mask that concealed no other face, narrowed as though savoring the slight penetration, the caress of the nerve endings just beneath the surface of the skin. “Just like you’re ready.” The prowler withdrew the bullet, slick with transparent mucus, and held it up before himself. “Whether you like it or not.”

“You don’t,” murmured the smiling barfly, “have much of a choice.” Her bruised-looking eyelids had drawn down to an expression of postcoital satiety. “Do you?” The barfly peeled her languorous form away from the male prowler; she stepped forward and knelt down directly in front of McNihil. “Because … it’s all memory now. That’s what we deal in here. We don’t have any other merchandise … and we don’t need any.” She reached forward, past the tannhäuser in McNihil’s doubled grip, and placed her fingertips on his brow, as though in blessing. “It’s what you gave us. All of you; it’s what we were created for. You wanted memories, memories other than your own, memories of things that hadn’t happened to you, but that you wanted to have happen to you. All the pleasures of remembering and none of the risks.” The barfly stroked his sweat-damp hair back from his forehead. “Maybe that wasn’t such a good deal, though. Maybe you gave us more than you got back
in turn. Maybe you really didn’t get anything at all … and we got part of you.” She wasn’t smiling now; her voice had turned harsh and grating. “The ability to feel, and suffer … and remember. Everything that made you human, that made you different from the things you created … that’s what you gave us.” The barfly’s hand pressed harder against McNihil’s brow, as though her lacquered nails could pierce the wall of bone. “It wasn’t,” she whispered, “a good deal for us, either.”

He tried to push himself away from her, his spine indenting the padded surface behind him. “I’m sorry …” McNihil raised the tannhäuser between himself and the woman. “But I wasn’t the one … who did it …”

“No … you’re not.” The barfly gave a slow nod. “But you’re the one who’s here. So you’ll do.”

The bullet had dropped from the male prowler’s fingertips and rolled against the toe of McNihil’s boot. In the bullet’s wetly polished metal, he could see himself—his real face, the one without the mask that had been stitched on at the clinic; his face in that other world he’d left behind. That was what small, shining things had always done for him: mirror reflections that didn’t synch up with all the rest that his eyes saw. Just as though the bullet had left another hole, which let the other world leak through.

There’s more where that came from
, thought McNihil. He placed the tannhäuser’s muzzle against the kneeling barfly’s forehead, the blond curve of her hair trailing across the barrel’s black metal. “You know … I’d do this …” He folded one finger across the weapon’s trigger. “If I weren’t such a nice guy …”

“But you are.” The barfly didn’t draw away from the cold circle resting just above her half-lidded eyes. “You’re too nice. That’s your problem.”

“Maybe.” McNihil lifted the tannhäuser from the woman’s head, angling the muzzle toward the bar’s low ceiling. “But I’m working on it.”

Her gaze followed the weapon’s new trajectory. “That’s not a good idea,” she warned.

“They’re my memories,” said McNihil. “At least they are now. So I can do what I want with them.”

“We can’t let you do that.” The male prowler, non-wound still exposed on his upper chest, stepped forward, reaching for the tannhäuser. “It’s not allowed—”

“But you must have.” McNihil squeezed the weapon tight in his fists. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t be happening. Or have happened—doesn’t matter which. I wouldn’t remember it happening.” He managed a smile of his own. “But I can see it plain as day.”

The tannhäuser roared again, as though it had suddenly recalled the second verse of its low-pitched aria. McNihil’s spine jolted as the recoil knocked him back; a blinding spark, the same color as the flash from the tannhäuser’s muzzle, jumped across the contacts inside his head.