“No. But her body hasn’t turned up either.”
“I’ll pay you to find her. I feel like I should do that. No one is paying you anymore, and you’re still investigating. Why?”
“Because people keep telling me not to, I guess. Because there’s a chance the chief of police will try to frame me for Henry’s murder if she gets bored trying to solve it for real. Because I probably just lost my only friend over it, so I better see it through, otherwise what has all this…” Simone gestured at the room, and then let her hand fall. Her cigarette was almost gone. She sucked down the last of it and stubbed it out in the ashtray. Lou was still smoking hers. Simone didn’t know how Lou did it so leisurely, how she could let the inhale linger and not just keep trying to get all of it inside her. “You got another?” Lou wordlessly took the pack out of her pocket and laid it on the table next to the gun. Simone sat up, fished out another and lit it, then lay back again.
Outside, another boat went past—this one quieter, but its light shone directly into the window, through the venetian blinds, lighting Lou from behind, so she was only a dark silhouette, and making lines of shadow over Simone’s face and the smoke that was now circling her. It started to rain, drops tapping on the glass like musical notes.
“How’d you lose your friend?” Lou asked quietly.
“I should’ve just asked her…” Simone started. “I don’t trust people. Or I didn’t, but now I do, but it’s the wrong ones.”
“Most people betray you at some point.” Lou took a drag on her cigarette and let it out slowly, smoke covering her face. “Maybe it’s something stupid, they don’t realize what they’re doing, but they do it, and it hurts because you thought they knew you, thought they knew better and would somehow know that doing whatever it was they did… but no one is a mind reader.” Lou lifted her hand up as if to take another drag of her cigarette, but let it fall back down before it reached her face. Her shoulders slumped backwards like old buildings, worn away and finally falling.
“My dad was,” Simone laughed, then coughed. “He could read guilt on a perp from a mile away.”
“No one ever betrayed him?”
Simone was quiet.
“Everyone gets betrayed at some point,” Lou said. “And we respond… well, we don’t always think. So we ask forgiveness. That’s all we can do.”
“Yeah,” Simone said.
“I didn’t know how these sorts of things were done,” Lou said, reaching into her purse, “so I got cash. It was hard to come by, so I hope it’s something you can use.” She took out and laid a stack of bills on the table. “That should cover it. Find Linnea. Find who killed Henry.” Lou stood up and straightened out her clothes.
“I’ll do what I can,” Simone said, without looking at her.
“Do the best you can,” Lou corrected. She didn’t look at Simone. She looked at the door and, without a goodbye, began to walk towards it, dignified, and Simone was suddenly struck by the memory of an old movie she’d seen with her parents, and a scene where a woman marched to the firing squad, blindfolded, proud, and not afraid.
“It’s raining,” Simone said, sitting up. “I can call you a cab.” But Lou was already gone, the door closed behind her, the room dark.
Simone finished her cigarette in the dark, the only sound her own breath and the rain on the window, like something trying to get in.
“YOU HAVE TO LEARN how to swim, Simone,” her mom said. “Especially out here.” Her mom gestured around them—but they were on a cruise liner with tall railings, and the ocean could be heard, but not seen. She was five and was sitting on the edge of the pool her mother was in, wearing floaties on her arms. Her mom stood in the shallow end, water up to her knees, red hair streaming out in the breeze. She had on a floppy sun hat and huge sunglasses. She’d brought Simone to this public pool to teach her to swim, but Simone didn’t like the look of the water.
“Come on, baby,” her mom said. When she grinned, her nose wrinkled up, and her freckles danced on her face. “Just jump in. I’ll catch you.” Simone hooked a finger into her mouth, sucking on it, and looked at the water her feet were dangling in. It wasn’t like ocean water. It was clear, and the pool was painted blue. Her feet looked bone white. This water wasn’t safe, she knew. No water was safe. Here it seemed like an old dog that couldn’t bite anymore, but it was still water.
Her mom came to the edge of the pool and, in one swoop, lifted Simone up and put her in the water before she could protest. She bobbed there a moment, the floaties keeping her up, the water lukewarm.
“See? See how easy that is?” her mom asked, crouching down so she was eye-level with Simone. Simone paddled her hands so she was up against her mother and clung to her, as best as the floaties would allow. “Nothin’ to be afraid of,” her mom said. “Just water.”
THE SOUND DIDN’T JUST wake her; it made her whole body convulse. Simone used the blanket to cover her ears, but it didn’t help. She knew she had been dreaming, and she remembered the smell of chlorine and feeling safe. That was gone now. Instead, there was the sound, the horrible sound that burrowed into her skull like a drill and wouldn’t go away. She opened her eyes. The room, thankfully, was dim, her blinds down, the lights off. She lay on the sofa, still fully clothed and smelling of stale smoke. And still the horrible sound persisted: her phone. It was on the floor, where it had fallen out of her ear. A weak holoprojection shone out of it, the name too blurry to make out. She hit it. Sensing no ear, it went into speaker mode.
“Hey soldier.”
“What do you want, Peter?” Simone rubbed her temples, and stayed on the sofa, eyes closed. It was an awful hangover, but a survivable one.
“Thought you’d want to know, a snitch fingered Linnea St. Michel sometime last night. I didn’t get the call, or else I would’ve told you.”
“Where was she?”
“Trying to score some Foam over on the West Side.” Simone furrowed her brow. Drugs again. Why would she need more?
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said.
“Snitch swears on his mother it was her. They sent some blues over, but she was long gone. Thing is, I know this snitch. We’re not the only ones he talks to.”
“And there are plenty of people looking for Linnea right now,” Simone said, thinking of Dash.
“Yep.”
“Fuck. Thanks for telling me.” Simone tried opening her eyes again but gasped as the light sliced her eyes, julienning them like soft grapes.
“You sailing smooth, there, soldier?”
“Just need a shower,” Simone said, rubbing her face.
Peter paused. “Guess you better take one, then,” he said.
“Yeah. Thanks again.” She hung up on Peter and made her way to the bathroom, where she shook out a handful of painkillers and took them without bothering to count. She tried Linnea’s number again but hung up when she heard the outgoing message. Then she took a shower. She’d screwed things up with Caroline; Linnea had briefly appeared, but was still missing; deCostas was meeting with Marina—The Blonde—and somehow this was all about drugs and art. Simone didn’t know anything about art.
She toweled herself off, feeling a little better, and drank several glasses of water. Then she got dressed and went to her touchdesk. When she turned it on, a screen was already up. Memories came back to her, hazy, sea-glass-stained from last night. She’d been searching the web for Reinel, the name of the artist Caroline had mentioned. Paul Reinel, born in 2063, died 2170. He went to art school in Chicago, then dabbled in painting for a while. But he was most known as a coral sculptor—one of the early ones. When the waters were rising, one of the bits of technology that was quickly born out of desperation was accelerated coral growing for making reefs to keep particularly nasty tides at bay, like breakers. They worked okay for a little while; New York probably still had some sort of reef somewhere around it, though no doubt dead from pollution by now, just a wall of bone. But the technology also led to a fad in the art world, where artists would grow coral, almost like bonsai, into the shapes of animals, plants, humans, or other, less definable forms. Reinel’s work was noted but not actively sought after or especially valuable.