I was about to make a scene and get my money and my card back when Overholt spoke again. “She’s in through there,” he said, pointing. “If you like it, there’s more.”
I didn’t want Overholt to register my confusion, but I guess it must have shown.
“Danny told you—”
“Yes,” I assured him. “Danny told me.” I got up and went through the door.
It was a bedroom. The light was dim, but not so dim that I couldn’t see the way the walls were rotting at the baseboard. The place smelled of mold, and I figured a pipe somewhere was leaking into the walls. The girl was already undressed. She was lying on the bed, and when I came into the room, she turned and smiled at me and beckoned with her white arms. She was beautiful to look at, but there was something clumsy in her movements. I had a bad feeling right away. I closed the door behind me and went over to the bed and let her put her arms around me.
I took her head in my hands and held it close to mine so I could look into her eyes. She was smiling with her mouth, but the eyes were blank. They were pointed at me but focused somewhere in the middle distance, about where I’d been standing when I first entered the room. I waited, but she didn’t make the adjustment. She was looking right through me. When I moved my hand up the back of her scalp, I understood why.
The slavebox was buried in her hair, a little cluster of wire implants soldered together with a glob of plastic. It didn’t seem to hurt her when I touched it, but her arms fell away from me to rest on the bed when she realized I wasn’t paying any attention to her body. Things got through to her, to some operative fraction of her consciousness, but it took a while. Given the way she was spending her time, and the place she was spending it in, it was probably just as well.
I pushed her back on the bed. All I meant to do was get away from her, but I guess I pushed a little harder than was necessary, and she giggled. It stirred up an old memory in me, something bitter, and involuntary, something I’d have thought was completely gone by now. I guess the act of pushing a naked woman back on a bed is always going to contain a sexual element—whether playful, hostile, or both—no matter how long it’s been.
I got up from the bed. Through my haze of disgust some things were finally making sense. Phoneblum’s allusions to the slave camps fit in nicely now, and I understood why he needed to maintain a relationship with the Office. He needed to be tipped off when a nice-looking body was getting iced. The girl on the bed was all I needed to picture how it worked. And I could think of dozens of unpleasant reasons why Phoneblum might need the part-time services of a doctor or two.
I opened the door and went back out to where Overholt was waiting. He looked at me questioningly, almost sympathetically. “Something went wrong,” he said.
“No,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“We got all kinds, you know. Men, women, groups. Any age you like. Don’t be shy.”
“Right.”
“We’re always here.” He furrowed his brow, truly concerned. I was touched.
“Okay,” he said, after a minute. “Here.” He handed me an envelope, too flat to hold drugs. “Take this to the makery on Telegraph and 59th. They’ll give you what you want.”
I stuffed it into my jacket pocket.
“We don’t handle the drugs out here,” he said. He wouldn’t stop talking now. “Too dangerous. It’s just a sideline, anyhow.”
“I understand.”
“Okay.” He went behind the little table with the phone. He seemed disappointed I wasn’t more interested in the girl or the talk.
He held my card out to me. “We ran this through our decoder,” he said. “Twenty-five is real low. I can help you with that…”
“No,” I said. “But thanks no. It wouldn’t work. The Office is watching me close right now. They’d catch on.”
He smiled broadly, like a pitchman who’d been fed a line by his shill. “You don’t get it, Mr. Metcalf. The karma we sell is good. The Office can’t touch it. I’ve got an inside line.” He paused. “And frankly, you have a bit of leftover credit with us here.”
The sick irrational part of me that was still trembling in fear at how low my karma had gotten made me stop and think it over. But it didn’t take a lot of thinking to realize it really wouldn’t make any difference. Overholt didn’t know who I was, or he wouldn’t be offering.
“Thanks, really,” I said, trying to put some heart in my voice so he wouldn’t feel too bad. “It just wouldn’t work in my case.”
“Okay.” He threw his hands open in a gesture of resignation. I took my card back.
I left him there sitting behind the phone, and went out alone. When I was out of his sight on the stairs, I stopped and leaned back against the wall and caught my breath. The thing with the girl had shaken me. It was easier for me to think of all the people, dozens, maybe hundreds, Phoneblum had taken out of the deep freeze than it was for me to think of this one girl smiling blankly, holding her arms up in a cold damp room, with a clump of wire and plastic in her hair. I couldn’t banish the image, so I let it sit there for a while and tried to get used to it.
After a couple of minutes I went the rest of the way down the steps, and passed back through the room where the big guy was lurching between the pool table and the wall. He was setting up shots now, moving the balls around, holding three of them easily in one of his big flat hands. I looked at him and he smiled. I guess I’d been upstairs long enough for him to think I’d had a quick one off with the girl. I tried to feel angry, but I couldn’t muster it up. I smiled back and went into the bar.
Things had progressed as usual in the Fickle Muse, which is to say the air was thick with the unique perfume of men sweating out alcohol and breathing out cigar smoke. The music was louder but it wasn’t any more lively. I wanted a drink, but the room was full enough that I couldn’t get to the bar without pushing and shoving for a place. It wasn’t worth it. A line of make in the car would do fine.
As I shouldered through the crowd, making my way to the exit, I heard the voice of the big barkeep, the one with the half hundred in his pocket. I didn’t turn around to look. I just somehow wasn’t in the right mood to pay up. I figured he’d have as much trouble getting through the crowd as I had, and if there was one thing I’d gotten good at in this life, it was starting a car in a hurry.
I went to the exit and put my weight behind it, but it turned out I didn’t have to. Somebody pulled the door from outside, and I almost stumbled into his lap. I started to mutter and curse at the guy, then saw who it was. Standing in my way like a cowardly, red-faced linebacker was Grover Testafet It wasn’t funny, but I wanted to laugh. A second later, when the kangaroo stepped up behind him like the punch line of the joke, I did.
CHAPTER 24
THEY MADE A PRETTY HUMOROUS PAIR. TESTAFER WAS nominally in charge, I guess, but when he saw me, he turned to Joey for his cue. The kangaroo just screwed up his face. I quit laughing and pushed out between them to go to my car, knowing as I did it that it wouldn’t come off. And sure enough, before I got my key in the lock, I heard their footsteps behind me, and a shadow passed between the moon and its reflection in my window.
“Hello, Grover,” I said as I turned around, but it was the kangaroo who stood closest to me, and he had the little black gun in his paw again.
“Hello, Metcalf,” said Testafer, a little weakly. He just wasn’t used to this much action, I could tell. He stepped up closer but kept behind the kangaroo and the gun.