Noir (28 page)

“So you want to talk to me, huh?” A few feet away, McNihil wasn’t even looking at her. He was examining the trophy container again, knocking a few smudges of soot from the object, checking that the seal between the head and the elongated body hadn’t been violated. He smiled when he looked back around at her. “I bet you do.”

The blow from the back of his hand took November by surprise; she was cursing herself in fury even before she landed sprawling on her
back. Before she could pick herself up, one of her outflung wrists was pinned against the rooftop by the sole of McNihil’s shoe. Her vision cleared, and she found herself looking into a black hole inches away from her face. Behind the hole was the familiar shape of a high-caliber weapon, and behind that, McNihil’s outstretched arm pointing down at her. Behind that was his face, no longer smiling.

Never underestimate these old bastards
, vowed November. Now she’d have to find some way to maneuver around him. “What’d you do that for?” she asked. “Fine way to treat somebody who just saved your ass.”

“It’s how I treat people who follow me around.” The gun looked like some unmoving geological outcropping in McNihil’s fist. “And who don’t do a very good job of it.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Sweetheart, I have blown away people just for coming on all dumb with me.” McNihil could have leaned forward and tapped the gun’s muzzle against her brow. “Figure it out. We’re standing on top of a burning hotel, someplace nobody gives a rat’s ass what happens to it. I can walk off here easily enough. But if the scavengers tomorrow go rooting around through the ashes and they find your bones with a hole drilled through the skull, do you really think anyone will care?”

She said nothing. Her pinned arm was beginning to ache from the pressure of McNihil’s shoe.

“What’s your name?”

No need for lying. “November.”

“Good enough. There’s so little poetry in our lives nowadays.” McNihil shook his head. “Most of the time, it’s just scrabbling around and pointless subterfuge. Like your tailing me. Like your hanging around whenever I was having my little meetings with Harrisch and his pack of execs.”

Shit
, thought November. She’d been operating under the impression that she’d pulled that one off, that he hadn’t a clue about her keeping tabs, at least up until that engineered train crash. She wondered how much else he knew. The dismaying prospect came to her that he could be completely ahead of her. That he might’ve known that she would be here waiting for him.

At that moment, an invisible fingertip, with ice under the nail, touched her heart. November looked up at him, with a new understanding
and even a degree of admiration. There was a good reason to be afraid of people like him.

“Okay,” she said. The rooftop was uncomfortably warm beneath her, the tarry surface liquefying and seeping into her jacket. “But I already told you—we need to talk. And if I hadn’t been following you …” She nodded toward the parapet. “You’d be all over the street by now.”

In his other hand, McNihil held the trophy container like a staff of office. Smoke billowed behind him, from holes torn in the hotel’s structure. “Talk about what?”

She didn’t see any need to lie about this, either. “Harrisch, of course. All that stuff he’s leaning on you about. It’s not what you think it is.”

McNihil laughed. “As if I care. Since he can lean on me all he wants, and I’m still not having anything to do with it.”

There were also good reasons for feeling sorry for him.
He still doesn’t know
, thought November. The trap had just about closed tight around him, and he still didn’t feel its teeth.

Which was just as well for her, she figured. One way or another, she was going to move in on his action. The more connected he wound up, the easier it would be.

“You know,” said McNihil, peering at her, “I can see the gears turning around inside your head. You’ve got a nice cold attitude, young lady. Most people, their brains stop when they’re staring into something like this.” McNihil tilted the gun a fraction of an inch, letting it catch bright points of light from the flames licking past the roof’s edge. “You could’ve been an asp-head. But there haven’t been a lot of openings posted by the agency lately. That’s kind of a shame.”

It’s because you’re ancient history
. She kept her reply silent.
You and all the others
. The reasons for the asp-heads’ existence—if there had ever been any—were long gone. Somebody like McNihil could blow away a scamming punk, put his spine and cut-down brain in a long metal jar; big deal. Who needed that anymore? It was what pissed her off about all her own scheming and plotting against McNihil.
They should’ve just come to me first
, November brooded.
Harrisch and his little pack
. If they’d done that, instead of thinking they could get some line on their dead colleague by using some old, burnt-out asp-head, they would’ve been off and rolling by now. She could’ve finished the job, found out what they
wanted to know—
Hell
, she thought,
I’m already more up-to-speed on what happened to Travelt than this guy could ever be
—and pumped the numbers in her palm back up to where they should be. But no, it was never that simple. The standard complaint of freelancers such as herself: you not only had to
do
the job, you had to
get
the job first.

“I wear no man’s collar,” said November. “Except for pleasure, and then only on a time-limited basis. What I mean is that I prefer to be an independent operator.”

“That’s ridiculous.” McNihil took his shoe away from her wrist. “When you work for the Collection Agency, you get full medical and dental coverage.” He took a step back. “It’s the benefits, not the salary, that’s important.”

November sat up, massaging the blood back into her hand. “I don’t worry about things like that.”

“You should.” He kept the gun aimed at her, though his grip had relaxed slightly. “Believe it or not, someday you’ll be as old as me.”

“No, I won’t.” If the numbers blinking from her palm got much lower, she wouldn’t have to worry about even getting into her thirties, let alone through them.

“Whatever.” He let her stand up, the gun lowered in his hand. “But as I said before. If you want to talk to me, punch in the number. People who walk in on me while I’m doing business are likely to get hurt.”

“I don’t mind.” November showed him a three-quarter profile, her gaze emitted from the corners of her eyes. “That could be fun, actually.” She stepped closer to him. “Like you also said … I’m young. Flexible, as it were.”

This time, McNihil made no reply.

It’s too easy
, thought November. It was
always
too easy. She wasn’t used to an encounter of this nature, with its familiar accelerating ramp-up and its foreordained conclusion, happening out in the open. But the smoke folding above their heads gave a comforting claustrophiliac illusion, the heat from the burning hotel beneath them completing the sense of giant machinery rushing toward an endlessly receding destination. There were even syringes and pads underfoot, debris left from the tenants who’d preferred to ingest in the stars’ cold view. If she closed her eyes, November could feel the world narrowing in around her shoulders, the corset or casket of desire, as she moved past McNihil’s
gun and inside the perimeter of his defenses. Close enough to sense the human temperature of his body, close enough to bring the awareness of her body—she knew—into his machinelike percept systems.

November stood next to him, her narrow hip against the front of his thigh, the curve of one small breast deformed by the pressure against his torso. She looked up into McNihil’s face, then stood on tiptoe, reaching her hand to caress the corner of his brow, the soft touch of her fingers brushing the side of his head. Just as she had done so many times before, with other men, in other places that had collapsed down to the non-space held between her body and his.

She wanted to punish him, just a little bit. For being such a smart-ass, for holding an ugly gun in her face, for standing on her wrist; that still ached somewhat. But mainly to show him that he should pay serious attention to her. She let the localized magnetic-resonance pulse travel through one arm and into her palm, a paralyzing spark leaping from between her heart and life lines and into the sonuvabitch’s skull …

For a moment, the clouds of roiling smoke parted, enough to let her see the cold points of light in the dark sky. If that’s what they were; in another moment, she wondered if she might be gazing into the blackness at the center of McNihil’s eyes.

Then she realized she was lying flat on her back once more, the fire-heated rooftop beneath her spine. Bits and pieces of the world slotted together again, replacing the blank daze inside her head.

November realized that her arm, the one with which she had reached up to McNihil’s face, was numb and trembling; the first pinpricks of sensation had started. They felt as if they were happening to a piece of meat disconnected to her body. She managed to raise her head—the rooftop tilted dizzyingly—and could see her cupped palm, the one without the red numbers written there. A burn mark had been seared into the flesh, as though she had laid hold of a high-voltage cable; the pain from the wound had begun working its way up her stunned arm.

She lifted her gaze from the marked hand to McNihil, standing nearly a meter away from her. The shock must have been powerful enough to launch her through the air, like a crumpled tissue he’d discarded.

“Don’t try that one again.” McNihil had put away the gun. He smiled. “I’m wired, shielded, and all zipped up against your kind of action.”

No shit
, thought November. With her still-functioning hand, she rubbed the corner of her brow, feeling a massive traumatic headache coming on. That kind of subcranial block, with a feedback and amplification circuit built in, wasn’t standard asp-head issue; he must have paid for that with his own money, somewhere along the line. Worse, she hadn’t known that McNihil had it, when she’d been operating under the assumption that she had him down cold, all his little details. Now, there was no telling what kind of stuff he had.

That was the kind of surprise for which she had no liking.
I’m screwed
. All her calculations were meaningless now. And at the same time, she was too far into this situation to abandon it and start over somewhere else. The red numbers in her palm would scroll down to zero before she had a chance of scoring another paying gig. If she had been looking into the centers of McNihil’s eyes, there weren’t any stars there; nothing but empty black, the unknown. For better or worse, her fate was welded to his.

A liquid shiver traced down the center of her spine, as though some central element of her self were being dissected by an asp-head’s clever little knives. A sex twinge, the feeling of things beyond her control, opened below her gut. If she hadn’t been worried about sheer survival, she could almost have been grateful to him.

“Gotta run.” Carrying the trophy container in one hand like an oversized scepter, McNihil moved toward the farther edge of the rooftop. “But like I said. You want to talk? Give me a call.”

November watched as he leapt easily over to the adjacent building. Then he was gone. For a while longer, November stayed where she was, regarding the flames and smoke rising on all sides.

A little too long.

When the rooftop gave way, a section collapsing beneath her as quick as a sprung trap, she found herself falling into smoke and flames. And then she wasn’t falling, and she could only marvel—for a few seconds, before she lost consciousness—at how much it truly hurt.

E
ven after he washed up, he smelled of fire and smoke and burnt things. McNihil came out of the bathroom, into a sonic ambience of vintage Haitink conducting Mahler, the acoustics of the old abandoned Amsterdam Concertgebouw cranked up loud enough to be heard through his whole apartment. He took the towel from across his shoulders and rubbed his gray-flecked hair dry as the contralto came on.

Little red rose
, thought McNihil. He always agreed with the singer, about preferring to be in heaven. A goal he had come close to achieving,
when he’d been out there taking care of business. Like most asp-heads, or at least the ones who weren’t born cold-blooded, McNihil had an amygdalic shunt microsurgeried into his brain, a tiny shutoff valve triggered by the adrenaline levels in his system; when the juices got high enough, fear became an abstract concept. Even the contemplation of his own death—he’d had time to consider it while he’d been hanging on that disintegrating fire escape—seemed like no more than an assemblage of words, something he’d read about in a book. It worked better than a straight hormonal tamp-down; the adrenal fluids kept the body revved and fast-reacting, while the head contents lived up to the agents’ collective nickname.

“Knock knock,” said the door. The sound got only a slight irritated reaction from McNihil.

When he’d moved into this place, forking over the rent and deposits and key money from one of his last bonus checks from the agency, he’d taken his Swiss Army knife to the workings of the hallway security system, trying to dismantle the annoying visitor-announcement protocols, so that if somebody came to see him, on business or pleasure, he’d hear the sound of actual human knuckles on reinforced simulated-wood-grain fiberboard. He’d been defeated, though; the circuits kept repairing themselves, usually while he was out of town on an extended assignment. McNihil would come home, sometimes bleeding and with the crap almost literally beaten out of him—not every piece of business had gone as easily as this last one had—and would find that the circuits had healed over, soft boards and severed wires seeking each other out and knitting themselves back together again. Though usually in some increasingly crippled manner, the announcement sounds devolving through an entire programmed auditory repertoire after McNihil’s attempts at a permanent silence. He and the system had worked their way through lisping trombones, Everett Dirksenoid kazoos, and splintering glass that shouted in Provençal French before arriving at a compromise: the system remained functional, McNihil put away his miniature tools, and the circuits announced visitors with a realistic-enough simulation of knuckles on wood. McNihil no longer cared beyond that point.