“No sex. No blood. Just find out something for me.”
“But you’re the one who finds things out!” Colene protested.
“Not this time. She’s my niece—my sister’s child. About your age. Maybe the one good thing in my life, only she isn’t in my life; Sis won’t let me near her. You know why. I think she’s going to kill herself. I want to save her. You talk to her. Find out what’s with her. Who’s making her hurt. Give me that name.”
And if that name had to be killed, it would happen, Colene realized. Slick was a professional; he thought in terms of killing problems. So the girl would have no more trouble.
“Slick, I’ve got to tell you, killing won’t solve some problems. If she’s suicidal—”
“You know about suicide,” he said.
“Yes. But what I mean is, once a girl’s been, say, raped, killing the man won’t make that rape go away. I might find out something you don’t want to know.”
“Then find out how I can make it right for her. Anything. That girl’s got to be set right. I’m dirty, but she’s got to be clean.”
“She may be dirty too,” Colene said.
“No. She’s clean. Like you.”
“Listen, Slick, I’m dirty! I got had by four men, and I can’t ever wash that filth out of me. It’s not so much my body, it’s my mind. They shit on my innocence.”
“I know it. But you’re a fighter. Esta’s not. You talk to her, help her be clean. Tell me how. How I can fix things for her.”
“This may be like fishing a snowball out of hell. I’m afraid of what I’ll have to tell you.”
“You want that Mandelbrot info?”
Colene sighed. “Well, I warned you. She may be as far into her situation as you are in yours. She may not even talk to me. All I can promise is to try.”
“You try,” he agreed. “That’s the deal.”
“That’s the deal.”
“You may need money,” he said. He walked to the picture, pushed it aside, and worked the combination to the safe. Colene saw Provos watching. This was what she had remembered.
He gave Colene a wad of bills. “Save Esta,” he said.
Colene stared at the wad, her eyes refusing to focus on the bills. It had to be more money than she had known existed. “Slick, what is this? You hardly know me, and—”
“I know you’re the gutsiest little girl this side of hell,” he said. “The money doesn’t matter any more. Just do the job, and you can keep that roll or throw it away.”
Colene shook her head. “There’s got to be something I’m missing. You could hire an army of psychiatrists for this! You don’t need me.”
He gazed at her a moment, considering. “I’ll level with you, kid. I don’t have much time. I made a mistake, and there’ll be a contract on me before long. I have to go far away. So I can’t mess with others, and I can’t stay here to watch my niece. I have to make it right for her now, while I can. Your showing up right now—it’s almost like a message from God. Maybe He knows this is my only chance to do some good before I get blown to hell.”
Blown to hell. He was not speaking figuratively. He expected to be killed, and to be in hell. His “mistake” must have been to kill a wrong person, maybe a ranking mobster. It might take the mobster’s henchmen a while to figure out just which hired hit-man had done it; then they would act, and it wouldn’t be pretty. So this really was Slick’s last plane out, as far as helping his niece.
It was a motive Colene could trust. She knew about wrapping things up in this life, before leaving it.
“Let’s go.” Colene hoped that Provos would be able to help in this too, because it promised to be difficult. She knew just how tricky it could be to talk about suicide to a suicidal girl.
Slick took them back to his car and drove for an hour, to the city of Chickasha. “Take a hotel room for the night,” he said. “Two nights. As long as you need. Bring her there, if you have to.”
“But what about you? Does she know you? I mean—”
“Kid, I’m under court order not to see her. I love her, and I watch her, and I help her how I can. Her bike’s broken, so she has to walk home from school, and no one mugs her. They know. But if I get near her, she’s in trouble, and I don’t want that.”
Colene considered. “Let me make sure I have this straight. You know her, she knows you, you never molested her—”
“I never touched any child,” he said. “My business’s my business, but I’m no pervert. That’s why I was glad to see you get off last month. I couldn’t interfere, because it was your challenge, and you showed you were savvy, but I kept thinking of Esta. But my sister—I can’t blame her for not wanting her daughter to associate with the likes of me.”
“Okay. But maybe Esta would be better off with you than what she’s in now.”
“Not with my business! She doesn’t know about that, and I don’t want her to. She thinks I live too far away to see her. And I do—but not in distance.”
Colene was intrigued. She suspected she shouldn’t push her luck, so she did. “You figure you’re not good enough for your niece?”
“I know it,” he said seriously.
“But suppose maybe, just maybe, you could, well, take over, and be her parent-figure, and she’d be like your daughter. You’d have to take her to the dentist and foot the bills for her braces and see that she got in from dates by eleven pee em or be grounded and go to PTA meetings and make her keep her grades up—all that dull stuff parents have to do—and finally she’d grow up and get married and move far away and you’d only get postcards from her any more, but her kids would call you Granddad when they visited. How’d you feel about that?”
He spread his hands on the wheel. “That would be heaven. I’ve never had a life like that, and never will. I’m locked into what I have. I’m good at it, but I don’t enjoy it. I’d have quit long ago, if I could.” He smiled grimly. “And now I will, only maybe not the way I wanted.”
She was surprised. She had assumed that he did what he did because he liked it. Or at least because he liked the money it paid. Yet now it seemed that he envied ordinary people their routine lives. Somehow he had gotten trapped, and could only dream of change. That had been the case with her, before Darius came, and the Virtual Mode.
“Where can I reach you?”
Slick gave her his business card. It had no name or address, just the phone number. “Just say your name when you call,” he said. “They’ll put your message through.”
Colene realized that any person who had to ask Slick’s business wouldn’t want his business. The man was a contract killer. Yet she liked him, and if she wasn’t fooling herself, she was picking up his sincerity about Esta from his mind. Also, Provos was not protesting, which meant that things would work out okay. In fact, Provos herself seemed to like him. People with what amounted to telepathy and precognition could walk safely through the most hazardous regions and relationships.
Then another thought made her nervous again. This was the science reality. Magic didn’t work here. So how could Provos remember the future? How could Colene have telepathy? Were they fooling themselves?
But these things were working. She knew it. Provos had proved her ability, and Colene knew the difference between fancy and reality. Special abilities did not either work or not work in different realities; they might be partial or qualified. Seqiro’s telepathy was reduced in range on Oria, but otherwise complete. Provos’ future memory seemed to be constant no matter where she was, limited only by her time in a given reality. Darius had lost his sympathetic magic in the reality of the DoOon that they had escaped by freeing its anchor, but had retained some of his emotional transfer ability. On Oria he had lost the transfer and recovered his other magic. So it was different for each person in each reality. It just had to be tested. Magic didn’t work here on Earth, but the more subtle things might.