“What isn’t the matter? Listen, Temple. You stood by me like, I don’t know, like the brave little drummer girl, when everyone thought I was a cad and coward and a murderer.”
“Everyone?”
“Well, mostly Molina, but she carries a lot of weight. It’s not fair for me to ask this, but you might have to do it again.”
“Stand up to Molina?”
“Always. I mean, stand by me.”
“What’s happening?”
“I can’t quite tell. Can’t quite say. I don’t know what to think. I know.” He laughed ruefully. “That’s not like me. This is getting too much like Northern Ireland. Foes and friends mixed together in one bloody stew. You start to question friends, you start to sympathize with foes, and the upshot is almost always betrayal and death.”
“Max! You’ve never talked this way before.”
“I’ve never been here, in this precise position before.” His hands touched her shoulders, then his thumbs reached up to caress her cheeks. “You’re sharp. You’re nobody’s fool. You might hear some things about me. Don’t believe them. No matter who they come from. I know. You’ve done it before, but it’ll be worse now. What I’ve found is worse.”
“The Synth?”
“No, nothing that exotic! Something down-home and downtown. Just remember, if I’m suspect, it might be because other people are more suspect.”
“People? Or person? Is it this Nadir guy?”
Temple watched her stab in the dark ricochet off the wary expression in Max’s blue eyes, like a stone skipping across one of her native state’s vaunted ten thousand lakes, never quite connecting with anything, defying gravity, just defying. Everything.
She was close, but still too far away.
“Does it have something to do with Molina?”
“It always has something to do with Molina,” he answered, laughing bitterly. “Try to keep it between us, Temple. Can you?”
“I always have,” she said, no longer certain she could.
DOD: Domesticated or Dead
No sooner I have applied myself to sniffing around the silver mesh than I sense a change in the air.
I do not hear a thing, mind you. Yet the empty space surrounding me has suddenly become not so empty. It cannot be rats. Rats cannot retract their shivs, so they always announce themselves, like Miss Temple in her high heels. Also, rats cannot refrain from chittering when excited, and the gang I expect knows how to keep its lips zipped tighter than a leather bustier on Pamela Anderson.
I flick a nail at the pungent glop of fish before me, then say right out loud, “Sucker bait. One bite and boom! You are in stir.”
I turn to regard my audience. Gack. Imagine a ragtag road show of CATS! with the entire cast recruited from a feline West Side Story.
These dudes are lean, edgy, and ravenous. Their shivs nervously scrape the cracked asphalt. Their whiskers are broken and twitching. I spot one poor sod who was in a rumble with a car. His untended broken leg sticks out at such a bizarre angle he can only walk on his knee. I notice a duke’s mixture of ragged ears — some neatly notched — and crooked tails, not to mention fresh and festering wounds. As for coats, this crowd looks like it has just come from the Ragpickers’ Ball. Exiting through a shredder.
There must be a dozen of them. Three or four start circling me so somebody is always at my back no matter which way I turn.
This is when prior planning pays off. I retreat until I am pressing the nap of my coat flat against one wall of the wire grille. After this gig I will look like I am wearing monotone plaid from the back, but sartorial concerns are the last thing on my mind.
These are not just tough and desperate dudes; this is the original Wild Bunch.
A big tiger-stripe pushes forward until his fangs are in my face. “You got a lot of nerve coming onto our turf, a downtown dude like you.”
This I already know, so I say nothing.
A marmalade tom with a broken front fang pushes so close I can inhale the Whiskas-lickings on his breath. “Fee, fie, foe, fumbug! I smell human on your lapels. You are a housebroken cat.”
“Not true,” I hiss back. “I do happen to occupy a co-op off the Strip, but I come and go as I please and when and where I please.”
“Where is your collar, dude?” taunts a once-white semi-long-hair I hesitate to describe as a lady. “No vet tags, Prince Chauncey?”
“Yeah,” the tiger-stripe adds. “We need an address for where to send the body.”
“At least I do not live in a road-kill academy.” I glance at the street. “I bet they drag race their lowriders so regular along there that a lot of you end up as poster boys and girls: flat as a face card in a fixed deck.”
I have hit a nerve, for several sets of green and gold eyes narrow to angry slivers.
“It is the rugrats like Gimpy,” says Snow Off-white, with a shrug of her razor-sharp shoulder blades, “who get creamed.”
I glance at the kit with the right-angle leg, and conceal a shudder. Poor sod would be better off with that seriously bum limb amputated.
“It is not so bad,” the dingy yearling pipes up. “The winos and bums feel sorry for me because I cannot forage and see that I get McDonald’s leavings.”
Jeez, this lot is so low that the homeless humans show them charity. Chalk one up on the pearly gates for the homeless humans. I have always found that the have-nots are better at sharing than the have-it-alls who got plenty to share.
“What about this day-old fish market behind the grille here?” I say.
“We stay away,” says Tiger, with a growl. “We think it is a trap. People come and take away the dumb ones that venture inside and cannot get out.”
“And you never see them again?”
“We do,” Snow Off-white says, eager to explain. I can always get through to the babes, which may be why Tiger and Tom are breathing down my epiglottis. “But…they are different.”
“They are…drones,” Tom snarls. “All the fight is out of them. They come back with their ears…and everythng notched and have zero interest in dames and just want to lay around and wait for free food and get fat like you.”
“I am not fat. I am well built. If your lot was not half-starved, you would see that you are all way too skinny.”
“That is better than the alternative,” Gimpy bursts out in his high adolescent voice.
“And what is the alternative?” I ask.
“Death or domestication.”
I digest this for a few seconds. It is no use to preach the joys of the domestic lifestyle to those to whom just living for the next day is a real achievement. They regard every human with fear and suspicion, and in almost all cases around here, rightly so.
Except, that is, for those beneficent bums and bumettes, and the feline birth control brigade responsible for the satellite clinics that litter this junkyard, one of them right at my back.
I realize, of course, that if this gang gets too rough I can always leap through the open door, grab the glop, and trigger the automatic closing mechanism. I will be caught like a rat in a trap, but I will also be safe from the Wild Bunch.
Ole Tiger seems to be reading my mind, because his yellow teeth show a Cheshire cheese grin. “Guess you would not mind a ride in a cage, being the domestic sort to start with. You would come back minus your cojones, though.”
“You do not understand. I have already been rendered free of unpopular potential, such as progeny.”
Gimpy has been slinking around the side. “He has still got them, boss. He is lying. He is still armed and dangerous to dames.”
I sigh. “It is too difficult to explain to street types. I have had a fancy operation by a plastic surgeon called a vasectomy, and —”
“We are not interested in your medical history, you pampered sellout!” Tom spits. “Whatever you have had, what you will not have when you come back from the twenty-four-hour abduction is your hairballs.”
I gulp. This mission is more dangerous than I thought. If I happen to fall into the hands of these do-gooders, they will have me sliced and diced for real in no time, because a vasectomy is invisible. I will be summarily cut off from my former self just as if I were a homeless, irresponsible, kitty-littering street dude.