Other black shapes, smaller but with the same basic curvature, had started to gather near the Daimler. They were attracted by the residual engine heat seeping out to the damp air. Connectin’ freeloaders-the appearance of the beetle-armored homeless bugged him even more. The man glowered balefully at the dull black carapaces, made shiny only by the rain, that had been grafted onto the limbs and torsos of the recipients of the do-gooder shelter agencies’ charity. The cracks between segments of the shells opened and closed tight again as the vaguely human figures inside jostled for position against each other, getting nearer to the car’s attractive force with each squatting step.
The loitering man had turned off the car’s various alarms, not so much because there was no point to them-the turtlelike homeless were technically within their rights, moving up on anything left out on the streets-but because he knew that most of them had sonic-energy converters inside their shells. They could suck a few microvolts out of the wailing siren noises that would have otherwise split the air, convert those wisps of energy either into heat for their shoulder-wide homes or battery storage for the Crawlman™ music systems that stoppered their ears.
It’s a welfare scam, he brooded as more of the black domes crept along the oil-spattered sidewalks. One of the hard-shell bastards had come across the cigar stub that the loiterer had discarded when he’d started his wait in the alley. A random find; the rain had snuffed out the last orange spark in the saliva’d tobacco, so there hadn’t been any thermal trail for the crawler to zero in on. As the man watched, the black dome sealed itself down onto the wet asphalt and cement; a moment later, a puff of blue-gray smoke pulsed out of a tiny ventilation hatch. The ripe smell of the Cohiba Eisner y Katzenberg stung the man’s nose; he had to resist the impulse to stride up to the dome, pry it loose and roll it over on its back, and snatch the cigar butt from the scrounging sonuvabitch. An unpleasant vision came to him, that he’d had before, any time he’d been on a nonprivate street; of the black beetle shapes swarming up around him, the way they were doing now with his car, and likewise sucking the heat from him, the way his old granny had told him that cats did with the breath of newborn infants in their cradles. He shuddered from both nausea and moral revulsion.
Luckily, the person for whom he was waiting showed up then, sliding out of a service doorway beside the deactivated dumpskers lining the far pocket of the alley. The big cubist elephant shapes, their dead proboscises rooted in the multistratified trash and garbage they were no longer capable of snuffling up, towered above the girl’s fragile image as she carefully eased the door back into place. The teeth of the vertical row of locks snagged back together, as though nothing more than a shadow had passed through them. That was all part of her talents, the loitering man knew; to go in and out of places she wasn’t supposed to. And to know which places.
“About time.” He let his voice rattle gravel in his throat. “I was just about to leave. I don’t have time to hang around waiting for people like you.”
“Oh, no-” Genuine dismay showed in the cube bunny’s widening eyes. She stepped up close to him and touched his arm with a child’s delicate fingers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harris-”
“Harrisch,” he corrected. For the hundredth time. “There’s a difference. Try to get it right.”
“Gosh, I really am sorry. I’m so stupid.” The touch turned into something more, her fingers gripping his forearm just tight enough to transfer heat from her skin into his flesh. A tiny electrical charge connected with a spot between his shoulder blades and rolled down his spine. “But he was talking. You know? He wanted to talk to me-”
“Sure.” Harrisch nodded. “Of course he did.” The poor bastard up in one of the building’s filthy live/work spaces-Christ, he thought with a shudder, probably not any better than out here in the street-would naturally have wanted to talk to something like her. A scrabbling down-on-his-luck asp-head didn’t get many chances along those lines. “So you talked.”
Her turn to nod. “Some of the craziest stuff, too.” She had a child’s squeaky little voice as well, all innocence and fun. The sound of it made men’s teeth grow longer in their sockets. “Like you never heard.”
“Really?” Harrisch supposed it was a good idea to know what was going on inside McNihil’s head. That was the problem with using these freelancers; you couldn’t just ring up the human-resources department and get a readout on them. “Such as?”
“Oh… all kinds of things.” The cube bunny shrugged her bare, pretty shoulders. Raindrops made soft jewels on her artfully exposed skin. “Like the way he sees things. He’s got these funny eyes, you know? And the way he saw me. Stuff like that.”
It was pretty much what he expected to hear from her. Sadly so; in this life, there were no surprises. “And you did everything else? That you were supposed to?”
The cube bunny nodded happily, perfect white face and cherry-red lips. “Then I fell asleep-kinda-and he got up and went to the bathroom. That’s what I was waiting for. So I could get away, without him noticing.” An impish glint appeared in her eyes. “Or at least not right away.”
Harrisch smiled back at her. You little conniver, he thought approvingly. He supposed her cute mind was part of her pretty genetics, her way of getting through this world of thorns and lust. Who could stay mad at someone like that? It would be like rage directed at the berry you were about to crush between your teeth.
“That’s fine,” said Harrisch. “It doesn’t really matter, anyway. I’m sure you did a good job.”
The glint in the cube bunny’s eye hardened to steel, or an even hungrier metal. “Does that mean I get paid now?”
“Sure.” He reached into his jacket pocket.
From below them, from the grating beneath his and the cube bunny’s feet, the wavering candlelight poured upward, as though a new sun had been discovered at the center of the earth. How good they sound, thought Harrisch, listening to the hidden chorus. They had shifted keys, to a bright C major, the notes of simple and universal triumph. The basses and tenors had dropped out; the female voices were slowly rising, not toward resurrection but to some even brighter apotheosis. Harrisch felt a little door open inside his heart as he lifted a weight of black metal from his pocket.
“Maybe I could do something like this for you again some time.” The cube bunny didn’t see what he had in his hand. Her childish and seductive gaze was locked on Harrisch’s eyes, looking for some other door to open up inside him. “’Cause it was easy. All I had to do was tell him the truth. About what happened to poor Mr.Travelt. It wasn’t like I had to lie or anything. So it really was easy.”
“Great,” said Harrisch. “Speaking from the viewpoint of upper management, I think it’s good that people get some sense of satisfaction from what they do. Every once in a while, at least.” Actually, he didn’t care. He raised and aimed the gun at a point equidistant between the cube bunny’s small breasts and slightly higher, just below the hollow in her white throat. “But I don’t really think you’ll be working for us again.”
Genuine tears welled at the bottoms of her eyes; the trembling lashes darkened. “That’s not fair,” she said in a small voice, a whisper almost lost against the choir’s gentle murmur.
“No, it’s not.” He had to agree. He could almost regret the tightening of his finger on the gun’s trigger.
“But I did what you asked me to-”