The elevator opened, and he took me by the arm again and led me down the hallway as I was, bent over and gasping for air. By the time we were at Morgenlander’s door, I had managed to pull myself together, although standing upright made my face flush hot. Kornfeld opened the door and shoved me into the room.
Morgenlander was visiting brass, and he rated a nice layout, with carpeting, and a little refrigerator under the window for snacks and beer. The chair I fell into was leather or a deceptively real copy. Morgenlander didn’t look any more shaven or less disheveled than when he’d come through my place. His hands were spread out on a pile of papers, and there was a pencil behind his ear. “Thanks,” he said, looking up at Kornfeld. “Why don’t you leave me alone with him, okay?”
There was an appreciable pause, and then Kornfeld said: “No. I can’t do that.” Morgenlander just nodded, and Kornfeld went over and sat in a chair against the wall. I had had Kornfeld figured for a rookie tagging along after the big man; I realized now I might not have the intricacies of their professional relationship worked out exactly right.
But Morgenlander recovered. “Funny you walking in here,” he said to me. “You always seem to pick funny ways to do stuff. It’s very funny.” He leaned over the desk and cracked a knuckle for punctuation.
“I’m a comedian,” I said. “Either of you guys want to play straight man, the part is still open.”
“Funny,” smiled Morgenlander, and he showed me his worn-out tongue again. “It’s a good thing you’re a comedian, because as a P.I. you’re a pain in the ass. You complicate things. You know Angwine spent the night in your office?”
“I gave him the key.”
Morgenlander smiled more, his eyes crinkling around the edges like a department-store Santa who gets a funny feeling when the girls sit in his lap. “Why are you here, Metcalf?”
“You took me off the case, but a lead came my way.” I was fishing for a response, and willing to bait the hook. “I wanted to throw it to you. Don’t ice Angwine until you get a handle on somebody named Danny Phoneblum.”
Morgenlander didn’t show any response to the name. He looked over at Kornfeld, and then back at me. “Who’s Phoneblum?”
“You know as much as I do now. He’s just a name that won’t stop cropping up. Don’t say I never did you any favors.”
“Get him out of here,” said Morgenlander. He leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair. Kornfeld got up and put his hand on my shoulder. “In my district we don’t license people like you, Metcalf. You’d be lucky to stay out of the ice wagon, where I come from.” He looked at Kornfeld. “Bill him twenty-five points and put him on the street.”
Kornfeld took me back down in the elevator, and this time I kept my hands folded over my stomach. He walked me through the corridors and back past the front desk and out onto the street. The rain was starting to fall, in fat oblong drops that dampened the tops of my knees and the back of my neck. Kornfeld took out his magnet and aimed it at the karma in my pocket.
“I’m down to sixty-:five,” I said.
He just stood there.
“Forty’s too low,” I said. “You know that.”
The wind took the rain and threw it sideways into my face. An Office vehicle pulled into the lot behind us, and a couple of inquisitors jogged past us up the steps of the Office, collars raised against the wind and rain. Kornfeld and I just stood there getting wet. He flicked his thumb, and I saw the little red indicator on the back of the magnet light up. “You shouldn’t have mentioned Phoneblum,” he said, with something resembling sadness in his voice.
“Thanks a lot, pal,” I said. My fingers curled instinctively around the card in my pocket. “I’ll remember this.”
“You stupid shit,” he said, and turned to go back into the building. “You stupid little shit.”
CHAPTER 12
I GOT BACK IN THE CAR. I FELT PRETTY LOW, THANKS TO the unmagical combination of a punch in the stomach, twenty-five points missing from my card, and two or three lines of make missing from my bloodstream. What’s more, there was rain in my collar and I needed a sandwich. The clouds were still bunched up in the sky like a gang on a street corner, and it looked to me like they had the sun pretty effectively intimidated. I didn’t have a clear next move lined up, and I wasn’t really getting paid enough to eat lunch in the car So I drove home. I almost ran down some pedestrians coming around a corner, and when I leaned on my horn, the guy closest to my car took a big horn out of his coat and honked it right back at me. I’ll admit it was a first.
I parked as close to the building as I could, but that wasn’t particularly close. The rain was falling in heavy, languorous sheets, and it ran in dirty streams along the waste-clogged gutters. With my shoulders up over my ears I sprinted to the doorway of my building and stepped into the darkness under the crumbling archway, and stood there for a minute, watching the rain run off the sill over my head and splash a few inches from my shoes. I was playing out a hunch.
The hunch was right. It took about a minute for the kangaroo to catch up with me, and he must have been pretty sure I hadn’t seen him, because he strolled up to the front of the building without taking any pains to conceal himself. He was wearing a drab rain slicker and a sort of wrapped-up turban for a hat, his ears pressed down against the sides of his head by the knotted cloth. I was well hidden in the darkness of the doorway, and I got more of a look at him than he did at me before our eyes met. The second they did, I laid into him with everything I had.
My edge was surprise. I probably had intelligence and experience on him too, but in a fight with a kangaroo I’ll take surprise, thanks. I made the most of it by jumping into a clinch with him, wrapping my arms around his neck, and thrusting my knee into his gut as hard as I could and as many time’s as I could. I’m no athlete, but I do all right. The force of it moved us out into the rain and halfway across the pavement in front of the building.
I knew I had him, but I wasn’t finished making my point. I pushed him the rest of the way across the sidewalk and backed him against a car parked at the curb, pinning him against the passenger door with my hip. My face was buried in the wet fur of his neck, and the reek of it was strong in my nostrils, but I knew that stepping away would give him room to operate with his big legs and feet, and that I couldn’t afford. I brought my hands up and joined them under his chin, then smashed his head backwards against the roof of the can The cloth around his head unfurled and fell across my arms like some pathetic flag of surrender. I smashed his head back again, straining against the muscles in his neck, and then I felt his grip around my shoulders slacken and fall away.
That was the end of it. The mindlessly capable muscles of his lower body kept him standing upright, but the rest of him wasn’t working too well. I put an arm around his shoulders and guided him into the lobby and pushed him against the wall, then fished in his pouch for the gun. The front door eased shut on its hydraulic hinges, sealing us off from the roar of the rain. The only sound was the throb of pulse in my temples. I found the gun, put it in my jacket, pushed the kangaroo off me, and slumped back against the banister. I’d won the thing, but you couldn’t tell it from the way we were both slumped in the corridor, depleted and quiet. The puddles of rain at our feet crept across the lobby floor until they ran together into one.