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"I'm sorry, Maya. I had no idea they were . . . What can I do?"
"Nothing. We take care of our own."
I had a bad feeling. "And the two Smiths?" The Doom wouldn't have been kind.
She mulled over how much to admit. "We were going to cut them, Garrett." That
was a mark of the Doom. "Only somebody already did it."
"What?"
"Both of them. Somebody took all their business oaf. They'll have to squat
like women."
This was getting weird. They don't make eunuchs anymore, even as a criminal
punishment.
"So we just broke their legs."
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"Remind me not to get on the bad side of the Doom. Did you find out
anything?"
"Garrett, if those guys weren't walking around they wouldn't exist. They
didn't have anything but their clothes. You should see the woman at the Blue
Bottle. A cow."
"Weirder and weirder, Maya. What do you think?"
"I don't, Garrett. You do that." "Eh?"
"You said do a Murphy on two guys watching that place. Tonight you go
strolling over there with Tawny Dawn Gill, she gives you a peck on the cheek,
I figure you're working for her and you know what's doing."
"I didn't even know that name. She told me it was Jill Craight. You know
her?"
"She was in the Doom when they took me in. Never told the truth when a lie
would do. Had a different name every week. Toni Baccarat. Willi Gold. Brandy
Diamond. Cinnamon Steele. Hester Podegill. That's the only one that sounded
dumb enough to be real. She lied all the time about who her family was and the
famous people she knew and all the stuff she'd done. She mostly hung out with
the younger girls because everybody else had her figured out and wouldn't
listen to her shit."
"Hold on. Hester Podegill?"
"Yeah. One of her thousand and one names." She looked at me odd.
There were Podegills off in a back room of my mind. Neighbors in the old
days. Bunch of daughters. A couple of them turned up pregnant at thirteen. I
began to recall the talk and the way people had shunned the parents . . .
Third floor, that's where they'd lived. And the little one, a blonde named
Hester, would have been about ten when I left for the Marines.
But the Podegills were dead.
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The only letter my brother wrote in his life he wrote to tell me how the
Podegills died in a fire. The tragedy really broke him up. He'd had it bad for
one of the girls.
That letter had taken two years to catch up to me. By the time it did my
brother had been in the Cantard a year himself. He's still down there. Like a
lot of others, he won't be coming home.
Maya asked, "That name mean something to you, Garrett?"
"It reminded me of my brother. I haven't thought about him for a long time."
"I didn't know you had one."
"I don't now. He was killed at Flat Hat Mesa. Ask me sometime and I'll show
you the medal they gave my mother. She put it in a box with the ones for her
father, her two brothers, and my father. My father got it when I was four and
Mikey was two. I used to be able to remember Dad's face if I tried hard. I
can't anymore."
She was quiet for a few seconds. "I never thought about you having a family.
Where's your mom now?"
"Gone. After they gave her Mikey's medal she just gave up. Nothing to live
for anymore."
"But you "
"There's another medal in that box. It has my name on it. The Marines
delivered it four days before the Army delivered Mikey's."
"Why? You weren't dead."
"They thought I was. My outfit was on an island the Venageti invaded. They
claimed they killed us all. Actually, we were out in a swamp, living on
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cattails and bugs and crocodile eggs while we picked them off. Mom was gone
before the news got back after Karenta recaptured the island."
"That's sad. I'm sorry. It isn't fair."
"Life isn't fair, Maya. I've learned to live with it. Mostly, I don't think
about it. I don't let it shape me or drive me."
She grunted. I was getting preachy and she was getting ready to respond the
way kids always do. We'd been sitting there no more than ten minutes but it
seemed a lot longer.
"Somebody's coming," she said coldly.
Somebody was Jill Craight looking like she'd seen a zombie and his seven
brothers. She would have run past us if I hadn't said, "Jill?"
She squeaked and jumped. Then she recognized me. "Garrett. I was coming to
see you. I didn't know where else to turn." Her voice squeaked. She looked at
Maya but didn't recognize her.
"What's the trouble?"
Jill gulped air. "There's . . . There are dead men in my apartment. Three of
them. What should I do?"
I got up. "Let's go look."
Maya bounced up and invited herself along. Jill was too rattled to care. I
figured she'd be safer tagging along than wandering around alone.
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Near the door to Jill's building I spied something I'd missed when the light
was poorer blood. The women didn't notice.
I found more spots inside, small, nothing to grab the attention if you
weren't looking. I noted that the building was in better shape than its
contemporaries.
Lamps on the landings lighted the stairs. I caught sounds of life as we stole
to the second-floor landing, first a woman's laughter sudden as the shattering
of a glass, then sounds of a woman either having one heck of a good time or
fighting a bad bellyache.
There were four doors down the second-floor hall from which the sounds came.
There had been four on the first. The apartments couldn't be big, sound not
much retarded. How come the place wasn't an overturned anthill if three guys
had gotten killed?
Because Jill lived higher on the hog. Her floor was class, only two larger [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]