I took my hands off the wheel, left the motor running. “Put the gun away, Joey.”
“Fuck you, flatface.” He twisted his muzzle into a sneer. “I’ve had enough of you. Get out.”
I sighed and got back out of the car The barkeep was motionless now on the ground, and Testafer was long gone, so it was just me and the kangaroo squaring off in the dark of the parking lot. The lights and music of the Fickle Muse seemed far away now. Joey was breathing heavy, his eyes wide and crazed. The broken glass of my windshield was proof enough that he’d found his trigger finger.
“Okay, Joey,” I said. “It’s your show. Just keep in mind if you don’t hurry, you’ll have company.” I nodded my chin at the lights of the bar.
I couldn’t believe it. He took the bait and looked. It was the last brushstroke in the portrait of the kangaroo as rank amateur. I undipped the anti-grav pen from my shirt pocket and lobbed it gently at his face. When he turned back and caught sight of the pen in the air between us, he made a calculation of its trajectory based on a weight it didn’t have, and batted at it with his free hand at about chin level. The pen soared through the air, the proverbial rising sinker, and hit him in the eye. He squeezed off a shot in the air before I landed my right fist on the underside of his jaw.
I made contact so solid, I almost regretted it. The hand was instantly useless. I didn’t have time to weep over spent knuckles, though. I put the bad hand around the back of his neck and moved in close to smash his nose with the hand that still worked. I got in about three good ones before I had to let both hands dangle, but by then Joey wasn’t looking so great A dewy string of saliva stretched between his mouth and my fingers. The gun was still in his paw, but when I jostled it with my knee, he didn’t even look to see where it fell. I’d learned from the last encounter that it was a waste of time trying to get a kangaroo to fall down. I kicked the gun under a car, grabbed my pen, and left him there swaying on his big feet.
The two shots brought Cue Ball and some other guys tumbling back out of the Fickle Muse. I took this as a hint to get in my car. My hands didn’t work all that well on the steering wheel, but I managed to put the car in reverse and peel out of the space just as the first guy jogged up to my window. I screwed the wheels around to face the exit to the street, and caught one last glimpse of the scene in my rearview as I drove away. The barkeep was up on one knee. Someone else was digging under a car for the gun. I could even make out Testafer’s pink face hovering between two cars. They looked like a group of white dolls or puppets acting out some idiotic farce in the middle of a black night which then swallowed them whole. I pressed the gas pedal to the floor and squealed away from there before somebody got hold of the gun and started taking potshots at me again.
A few miles away I pulled over into a driveway and turned off my lights. Nobody was following me. I folded my hands together, which took some doing, and flexed them until the knuckles cracked back more or less into their original positions. The pain almost had me screaming. When I felt ready to use my fingers again, I broke up some make on the dashboard mirror. There was a bleak interval while I waited for the drug to hit my bloodstream, and then the pain went away. I waited another few minutes for my heart to stop hammering, and then drove down the hill to my office.
CHAPTER 25
I WAS THROUGH THE REVOLVING DOORS IN THE LOBBY OF my building when Catherine Teleprompter came out of the shadows and took my arm. Her hair was loose again—I mention this because it was the first thing I noticed. She pulled me into the darkness against the wall of the lobby, a finger raised to her lips. I smiled and put up a finger to match hers. My hands felt better if they were elevated, anyway. She put her mouth close to my ear and started whispering. I had trouble concentrating on anything but the heat of her breath against my face.
“They’re upstairs,” she was saying.
“Then they must want to see me,” I whispered back.
“Kornfeld’s taken your file off the computer,” she said. “I don’t know what it means.”
I turned so she could see me smile in the dim light of the lobby. “In my day,” I said, “that was the end of the line.” I laughed without making any noise. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. My day came and went a long time ago.”
She didn’t say anything. She still hadn’t let go of my arm. I certainly wasn’t taking it away from her. I just hoped she wouldn’t try to hold my hand.
“I don’t want you to go upstairs,” she said finally.
“Okay,” I said. “But I want to talk to you. That is, if you feel you can afford to be having the conversation. Last time you weren’t so sure.”
The weight of the enormous scrolled ceiling of the lobby seemed to press down on us as we huddled in the corner. The building was quiet, but I could sense Kornfeld, or whoever it was, waiting in my office. In fact, I could sense them across town too, waiting in the living room of my apartment. That time had come. I would have liked to go somewhere with Catherine Teleprompter, but there wasn’t much of anywhere to go.
So I suggested we sit in my car.
“Let’s make it mine,” she said. “I can listen to Kornfeld on the radio.”
I told her it sounded okay and followed her out to her car. She sat behind the wheel and fiddled with the Office radio until it came in low and clear. The voice of the dispatcher droned on ceaselessly, spewing codes and coordinates, stirring up old memories in me of nights out cruising, alone or with a partner, listening to the voices on the radio, knowing and caring what they meant. I didn’t anymore. I knew I could sit in her car for as long as I liked and not care once. Unless maybe they mentioned my name, and even then only maybe.
I kept my foot on the passenger door so the overhead light would stay on, but I didn’t look at Catherine. I was a million miles away. On my drive from the hill the bullet-cracked glass of my windshield had fragmented my reflection into a thousand pieces. Now, in Catherine’s car, I was one piece again—one piece stretched out in the warped Plexiglas of the Office vehicle, until I looked like the fat man at the sideshow. Or Phoneblum.
“Tell me what you think,” I said softly, after a little time had passed.
“I think it could blow over in a few days,” she said. “But I wouldn’t be you around here until then. I’d be somewhere else or I’d be someone else. Kornfeld doesn’t like you.”
“I figured that out.”
“There’s no point in going on, you know. Angwine is gone. Morgenlander was sent away. The case is closed.”
“The case is closed. It’s so easy to say. The inquisitor’s mantra: the case is closed, the case is closed.”
She almost laughed. “How’d you last a day in the Office?”
“One of us has changed since then. Me or the Office. I haven’t figured out which.”
“I think it was you,” she said.
I turned and looked at her. She was sitting sideways behind the steering wheel, and I could see she’d been watching me the whole time. Once I turned, I had no choice but to look into her eyes. I took my foot out of the door and let the light go off, solving the problem for the moment. I wasn’t making a decision about eye contact between us, I was putting it off.
“You went around with Kornfeld,” I said. “You must know a certain amount about the case.”
My eyes were getting used to the darkness. Street light leaked through the windows, outlining her neck and jaw against the black backdrop of her hair. I watched her throat bob as she considered an answer, but nothing came from her mouth. Except, I imagined, the sweet, warm mist I’d felt on my ear a few minutes ago. ‘