Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [53]
I stood up shakily, deciding that the Rapt maybe hadn’t been so weak after all, and lurched round the corner in search of some beer to calm it down. I noticed that I was hungry, and realized I hadn’t eaten in two days. I beguiled the rest of the walk by imagining seventeen different ways of having a cheeseburger, given three sets of variables: the condiments, the relative amounts of lettuce and pickle and tomato and onions, and the number of patties, up to a maximum of three. By the time I got to Howie’s, I had every intention of ordering them all at once.
Howie was standing at the bar, benignly watching the crowds and listening to the band in the corner. For once I’d arrived when the bar was full. It seemed to take me a long time to get to the bar through the hot mass of people being noisy, and I watched Howie all the way. He had a large piece of cheese and a jar of peperoncino rings in front of him, and he was slicing slivers off the former to create something to ladle spoonfuls of the latter onto. Each time he completed this maneuver he popped the result into his mouth and then immediately started again. He was doing this quickly and efficiently, as if under match conditions, and it was doing my head in.
He looked me up and down when I reached the bar. “Bought that truck yet?”
“No,” I said patiently, and waved at the barman for a beer.
“Thought not,” Howie said, through a mouthful of cheese. “And you can stop avoiding my eyes—I clocked your pupils as soon as you walked in. Welcome back, jack. You need some more?”
“No,” I said. I was beginning to like the word. No seemed to fulfill all my current needs. I was about to take a sip of beer when suddenly my mouth dropped open. “What are you doing here?”
I was talking to a woman whom I now saw was sitting a little farther along the bar, behind Howie. Apart from her dress being red rather than blue, she was dressed exactly as I’d last seen her. It was the woman I’d run into in the women’s restroom the first time I entered New Richmond. Helping me to recognize her was the fact she was engaged in exactly the same activity now as then. She was busy cutting a line on a mirror, so Howie answered for her.
“This is Nearly,” he said. “An employee of mine.”
I didn’t ask in what capacity. I remembered my conclusion from last time. The woman looked up and winked at me, and the faint glimmer in the back of her right eye proved me right. It also reminded me how attractive I’d thought her, and that I’d been right about that, too.
“Hi,” I said, and Howie laughed.
“Jack’s not one of the most sparkling conversationalists of our time,” he said, shaking his head, and then took something out of his pocket and slapped it on the bar. “Or one of my most reliable suppliers.”
I picked up the object and stared at it. It was the RAM chip I’d sold him the day before, though in my current condition it looked rather different. I thought I could see old datastreams moving through the clear Perspex, ones and zeros flipping back and forth. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Possibly nothing. But it isn’t RAM.”
“Shit,” I said. “Then I owe you money.” I had about a hundred dollars of it left, mangled into three different pockets. “I’ll pay you back,” I added lamely, slipping the chip into my pocket.
Howie waved his hand, dismissing the idea and making me feel’ about so high. There I was, when I should have been thinking about the spares, worrying about looking like an idiot in front of one of Howie’s girls. I guess I hadn’t been out much recently. She didn’t seem to be thinking worse of me, but then she was probably stoned enough to think that Ebola had been kind of cool.
“Some guy came looking for you, Jack,” Howie said, screwing the top back on the jar of peperoncinos.
I frowned. “Who?”
“Don’t know. He didn’t say. Big guy, blue lights in his head.” Howie looked serious. “He didn’t look like especially good news.”
I remembered the dealer out in the Portal, the one who’d hidden the killer’s body. For no reason I suddenly felt cold. “What did he want?”
“To see you.