Bleeding Edge, стр. 53
“You mean,” switching to loyal sidekick, “as in ‘Bird Dog’ by the Everly Brothers, well, far as I know, Conkling is nobody’s quail at the moment, and besides you only poach husbands, isn’t that right, Heidi.”
“Aahhh! You will never—”
“And what about Carmine, passionate, Italian, goes without saying jealous, a recipe for Naser versus Glock at high noon, no?”
“Carmine and I are deliriously happy, no I’m only thinking of you, Maxine, my best friend, don’t want to get in your way . . .”
At which point Conkling comes back and the saccharimeter readings drop to a less alarming level.
“Fascinating toilet. Not quite the complexity of a Welcome to the Johnsons, say, but plenty of stories old and new.”
• • •
CALL FROM AXEL DOWN at the tax office, latest on Vip Epperdew, seems he’s jumped bail and fled the jurisdiction. “His young friends have also disappeared. Maybe in another direction, maybe they’re still all together.”
“You want me to fix you up with a good skiptracer?”
“What’s to go after? Not our problem anymore. Muffins and Unicorns is in receivership, Vip’s accounts are all frozen, the tax liability’s being negotiated, the wife is filing for divorce and about to get her real-estate license, happy endings all around. Excuse me while I go find a tissue.”
Maxine, for whom the Uncle Dizzy ticket is a kind of tutorial in annoyance control, spends an hour or two with Xeroxes of Diz’s receipts and journals, takes a break, finds Conkling browsing through back issues of Fraud magazine. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“You looked pretty busy. Didn’t want to interrupt. Just an update on that 9:30 product—I consulted one of my associates, we go back to the old days at IF&F. She’s proosmic—she can foresmell things that’re going to happen. Sometimes a scent can act as a trigger. In this case more like a detonator—she took one pass at the air sample I showed her and went nitrous.” For weeks already she’d been going around in a state of panic, short of breath, waking up for no reason, probed gently but insistently by a reverse sillage, a wake from the future. “She says no one alive has smelled it before, this toxic accord she’s been picking up, bitter, indolic, caustic, ‘like breathing in needles,’ is how she puts it. Proprietary molecules, synthetics, alloys, all subjected to catastrophic oxidization.”
“Which means what, like a fire?”
“Could be. She has a pretty good record with fires, including some big ones.”
“And?”
“She’s getting out of town. Telling everybody she knows to do the same. Because 9:30 cologne’s connected with D.C., she’s not going near D.C. either.”
“How about you, you staying in town?”
Misunderstanding, “This weekend? I wasn’t going to, but then I met somebody and changed my mind.”
“‘Somebody.’”
“Your friend the other night, wearing the Poison.”
Bashful the Dwarf here. “Heidi. Well, I do congratulate you on your taste in women.”
“I hope this won’t come between you.”
A double take she has trained over the years down to a less noticeable take and a half, “What. You think we might get into some Alexis-and-Krystle-by-the-poolside, over who gets to date you, Conkling? Tell you what, I’ll do the noble thing, go back to my husband if he’ll have me.”
“You seem . . . annoyed somehow, I’m sorry.”
“With Horst due back any day, some impatience maybe, but not with you.”
“Your husband was always in the picture, I knew that right away—well, actually, I smelled it, so I made the effort from then on to keep things strictly business with us, case you didn’t catch that.”
“Aw, Conkling. I hope it hasn’t been too inconvenient for you.”
“It has. But what I really came over to ask, is have you seen her today?”
“Heidi? Heidi is . . .” But there she has to put it on pause. Doesn’t she. The ethical thing about now might be to, well, not warn, maybe just happen to mention one or two of Heidi’s minor character zits. But Conkling, poor zhlub, is so desperate here to talk about her, oh and what’s her sign and who’s her favorite band, and, and . . .
Please. “You want what, my blessing? Thinks I’m the Rabbi here. How about I write you an audit opinion, I could manage that.”
Wistfully though rehearsed, “I think you and I took it about as far as it was going.”
“Yes we could’ve been an item,” Maxine pretends to reflect.
“With Heidi you don’t think—it’s just the Naser, do you?”
“You want to be appreciated for yourself.”
“Bring out the Naser once, people jump to conclusions. Some women can’t resist a military connection, however remote. I was never a field type, in my heart I’m always behind some desk. Not like—”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
It is insanely unlikely he was about to mention Windust. Insane, right? But who else, then?
22
At three in the morning, the phone rings, in the dream it seems to be the siren of some cops who are chasing her. “You don’t have all the evidence,” she mumbles. Gropes for the instrument and picks up.
Sound effects on the other end suggesting an unfamiliarity with telephones, “Wow, these things are weird. Hey, now what’s it doing—is it gonna time out on me, jeez . . .” It seems to be Eric, who’s been up since the previous 3:00 A.M. and is about to grind and snort another fistful of Adderall.
“Maxine! You talked to Reg lately?”
“Hmm, what?”
“His e-mail, his phone, his doorbell, it’s all dangling links anymore. Can’t find him at work or on his mobile. Like everyplace I look, suddenly no Reg.”
“When were you in touch with him last?”
“Last week. Should I be starting to worry?”
“He could’ve just split for Seattle.”
Eric hums a few bars of the Darth Vader theme. “You don’t think it’s anything else.”
“Hashslingrz? They fired him, you knew that.”
“Yeah, meaning I got fired too, Reg being a class act sent me a nice severance check, but you know what, with core privileges now that let me go anywhere inside hashslingrz, lately the more of my business it ain’t, the more I can’t stay away from it. Fact, I was just about to go down there again but thought I’d better call you . . .”
“While I was asleep, thanks.”
“Oh shit, right, you guys sleep, hey, I’m—”
“It’s OK.” She gets out of bed and shuffles over to the computer. “You mind some company? Show me around the Deep Web, maybe? We did have a date.”
“Sure, you can come on my network, I’ll give you the passwords, walk you through it . . .”
“Just putting coffee on here . . .”
Presently they’re linked and slowly descending from wee-hours Manhattan into teeming darkness, leaving the surface-Net crawlers busy overhead slithering link to link, leaving behind the banners and pop-ups and user groups and self-replicating chat rooms . . . down to where they can begin cruising among co-opted blocks of address space with cyberthugs guarding the perimeters, spammer operation centers, video games one way or another deemed too violent or offensive or intensely beautiful for the market as currently defined . . .
“Some nice foot-lover sites too,” Eric comments casually. Not to mention more forbidden expressions of desire, beginning with kiddie porn and growing even more toxic from there.
It surprises Maxine how populated it is down here in sub-spider country. Adventurers, pilgrims, remittance folks, lovers on the run, claim jumpers, skips, fugue cases, and a high number of inquisitive entreprenerds, among them Promoman, whom Eric introduces her to. His avatar is an amiable geek in square-rim glasses wearing a pair of old-school sandwich boards that carry his name, as do those of his curvaceous co-adjutor Sandwichgrrl, her hair literally flaming, a polygon-busy GIF of a bonfire on top of a manga-style subteen face.