Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [129]
“You have no right to use Henna like that,” I shouted, prising her hands from my jacket. “It’s none of your fucking business and Vinaldi shouldn’t have told you about her.”
“Fuck Henna!” she spat. “Henna’s dead. I’m not speaking on her behalf. I’m speaking for me. I don’t want you to die.”
“I don’t care what you want,” I said loudly, and heard the words drop like coins into a well without bottom.
“It’s because I’m a whore, isn’t it?” Nearly said. “Because I sell it to earn a living. We all like the idea of a woman who enjoys fucking but we don’t want them if they’ve ever been with anyone else, right?”
“It’s got nothing to do with that,” I said quietly, and I think I was telling the truth.
“Yeah, right.” She slugged the last of her drink down. “Well, hey, Jack—finish the rest of the wine by yourself.” She stood, snatched her cigarettes from the table, and then looked down at me, utterly furious. “Maybe it’s better you go off and play tomorrow after all,” she said. “Otherwise that’s all it’s ever going to be, Jack. Finishing the wine by yourself.”
As she walked toward the door I stood up, too, suddenly afraid.
“Don’t go like this,” I said, reaching out to grab her shoulder. She slipped out from under my hand and kept going. “Can’t we be friends?”
Her face was hard, and she looked like someone I’d never seen.
“Friends is no use to me, Jack. I’ve got friends. I don’t need any more. What I need is someone who’ll light up the woods so I can find a place to stay.”
I blinked. “What made you put it like that?”
She shrugged. “Who gives a shit? It’s just a phrase, like ‘Hey, we can still be friends.’” Her eyes ran over me, as if capturing something. When she spoke again, her voice was calm and dull. “No, I don’t want to be your friend, Jack. You’d be a lousy friend. For a start, you’re going to be dead, and dead people never return your cal Is.”
She grabbed my face in her hands, and kissed me hard on the lips. It wasn’t tender, or forgiving. It was fierce and uncompromising, the flip side of a punch in the mouth.
“Good bye and fuck off,” she said, and walked out of my life.
I sat in Howie’s office until six, then went into the bathroom. I stood in front of a mirror and shaved, and when I was finished with each itemi I threw it into the trash. Shaving cream, razor, comb, toothbrush. Then I examined my reflection for a while. I looked like an alien.
The bar droid told me Howie had gone to bed. I got it to serve me a coffee and drank it sitting at the bar.
The room was almost empty, just a lone couple sat at a table in the corner, come in for an early coffee on the way to work. They were holding hands, and something told me they’d just spent the night together for the first time. The girl’s hair was still wet from its morning wash, her normal routine disrupted; his cheeks were pink from using a razor found lying around in her bathroom, feeling oddly unsettled, wearing yesterday’s shirt and smelling of someone else’s deodorant. Neither of them seemed quite sure what to say, how to be, as they struggled to deal with suddenly widened perceptions of someone they saw every day at work. Confused memories of the night before; of the shock of so much skin.
The cat I’d pulled from the abandoned Farm was also there, curled up asleep in one of the corners. I was glad it had found a home. It would never want for peperoncinos, at least.
A little while later the young couple stood up, hesitated, and then held hands as they walked out the door.
I thought about leaving a note for Howie, but I couldn’t find any paper and I didn’t know what I would say. Seven o’clock, I left the bar and walked to an xPress elevator. There was very little life on the streets. The only place doing business was a Chinese restaurant with a variety of tired-looking dishes sitting in hot plates in front of the window. The restaurant was called the Happy Garden, but it didn’t look like a Happy Garden. It looked like a Pretty Miserable Garden. It looked like the kind of place