Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [23]
“So, you got a place to stay?”
Niki shrugged again, shook her head.
“I guess I haven’t really thought about it,” she said. “I guess I’m gonna have to find a room.”
“Or you could crash at my place for a few days, if you can deal with cockroaches and noisy neighbors.”
“Are you sure?” The offer made her uncomfortable, made her automatically wary, and she wondered just when and where she’d gotten so goddamned paranoid. “I mean, a motel would do just fine.”
“I have an entirely better class of roaches. And besides, it’s not every day you get the chance to offer shelter to a wandering pilgrim.”
“What?” Niki said, but then she remembered the brochure, the miniature temples pieced together from broken soft drink bottles and scrap metal, got the joke and laughed.
“Maybe you know some kinda a blessing for doomed musicians and bands going nowhere at the speed of light,” Daria Parker said, and then someone was asking her for a steamed hazelnut soy milk and she rolled her eyes when the guy turned his back.
“One vegan pussy drink, coming up,” she whispered to Niki and headed for the cooler.
Niki drank the last lukewarm sip of her Cubano, stared down at the few stray espresso grounds at the bottom of her cup. The feeling that things had slipped out of her hands, that she was no longer running the show, had been growing stronger and stronger since the ride to the Texaco station with Wendel Sayer; a helpless feeling too much like the way she’d felt after Danny’s death, and it made her want to run.
She’d gotten awfully good at running.
Niki left the money for her drink and a tip on the bar and found an empty booth. She set her bag on the seat next to her and took out the dog-eared copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, scrunched herself into the corner, and this time she made it through four pages before she dozed off. When Daria woke her, gently shook her shoulder and whispered her name, the coffeehouse was empty and there was blue-gray dawn outside the steamfogged windows.
CHAPTER THREE
Spyder
1.
Spyder stood out of sight, almost invisible in the dust-scented shadows, and watched Daria Parker, watched her as she gazed in at something in the window display. She knew Daria well enough that they spoke, nodded, exchanged smiles whenever Daria came in to buy hair color or used records or just to prowl around the shop. And, of course, she’d seen her on stage at Dr. Jekyll’s, had sat and listened to her words and the steady hammer of her bass like a heart trapped inside the black-box speakers. When the streetlights came on, Daria looked over her shoulder, and Spyder knew that she’d seen the cop car, knew she was leaving before she even turned away.
“What do you think she was looking at?” Byron said, and Spyder ignored him. He was still sitting on the wobbly-legged stool behind the register, chain-smoking cloves in the dark. Two hours ago, he’d stuck a New Order cassette in the tape deck and now “Bizarre Love Triangle” was coming around for the third or fourth time.
Daria walked away with her head down, guitar case swinging in her hand like a portable monolith, and the cops followed, cruising slowly past Weird Trappings.
“If you don’t play something else,” Spyder said, “I’m gonna make you eat that fucking tape.”
“Like what, Spyder?” and without looking up, without having to see, she knew the sour, impatient expression on Byron’s face, the way his eyes narrowed and his lower lip pouted out like a wasp sting.
“Anything else,” she said. She couldn’t see Daria anymore, and the police had gone, too; the cars out there now could be anyone. Spyder turned around, and the big cardboard box was still sitting unopened on the floor, waiting right where she’d left it, only a few moments ago. The streetlights bled through the glass storefront, light pared, skinned down to its bones, and the shop was not nearly as dark as before.
Byron was rummaging through the cassettes she kept beneath the cash register, making as much noise as he could; big, pissy