“This is because you picked up the reins,” I said. “It’s for the girls upstairs in the back room of the Fickle Muse. It’s for the six years of wrecked lives I couldn’t do anything about because of the freezer. It’s for things only you know you did, things you did because you let yourself step into the fat man’s shoes.”
“Metcalf,” said Joey. “For God’s sake.”
“I had Phoneblum in the same spot this afternoon,” I said, ignoring him. “But I was years too late. With you I’m right on schedule. Besides, I wanted to kill somebody who remembered who I was.”
I squeezed the trigger. The first shot spread his face out across the top of the seat, but his legs kept moving. I had a lot of respect for those legs. I emptied the clip into his middle, and one of the bullets found his spinal column and put an end to it. Then I got his keys and left him there, and took his car for a drive. It handled a lot better than the rental job.
CHAPTER 8
THE NEXT MORNING I WAS SITTING IN JOEY’S CAR IN FRONT of the Office. I felt okay. I’d spent most of the night in the hills, looking at the moon, working the kinks out of my fingers, and apparently I’d dried out in the interval. My system was clean. I rolled down the window of the car, leaned back in the seat, and listened to the noise the new day made. I didn’t mind waiting. For some reason everything looked good to me all of a sudden. I even found myself admiring the buildings they’d thrown up while I was away.
After about half an hour Angwine came out blinking into the sunlight, fingering his new card and trying to get his bearings. I didn’t feel too bad for him. He was no more out of place here than he’d been six years ago. But I hunkered down in my seat as he passed. I didn’t have anything to say to him when it came down to it. I just wanted to have a look.
Then I locked up Joey’s car and went inside. I found an inquisitor and handed him my card and Barry’s gun, which played the Danger Theme one more time. I’d come to like it, almost.
“My name is Conrad Metcalf,” I said. “You’re probably looking for me.”
Now that I’d been cut loose, so to speak, the freeze wasn’t much of a punishment. I was like a hobo tossing bricks through shop windows to get a place to sleep for the night. If I didn’t like where I woke up next time, I’d get myself in trouble again, until I found a place where I fit in or they stopped offering me the free ride. In the meantime maybe I’d run across Kornfeld and deliver that punch in the stomach I was carrying around.
When I was in the holding area getting ready for the freezer, one of the inquisitors got friendly, the way they tend to do at that stage, and offered me a line of some make he was sniffing.
“Forgettol?” I said.
He shook his head no, indulging my question. “My personal blend,” he said. “Give it a try.”
So the makers still worked, in-house. It figured. I took the straw from him. It meant waking up with the monkey on my back, but hell, it was my monkey.
It was that rarity, an easy decision.
Copyright
A HARVEST BOOK • HARCOURT, INC.
ORLANDO AUSTIN NEW YORK SAN DIEGO TORONTO LONDON
Copyright © 1994 by Jonathan Lethem
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
First published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lethem, Jonathan.
Gun, with occasional music/Jonathan Lethem.—1st Harvest ed.
p. cm.—(A Harvest book)
ISBN 0-15-602897-2 (pbk.)
1. Private investigators—California—Oakland—Fiction. 2. Oakland (Calif.) I. Title.
PS3562.E8544G86 2003
813’.54—dc21 2003047827
Text set in Minion
Designed by Scott Piehl
Printed in the United States of America
First Harvest edition 2003
G I K J H F