The dancer bellied up to the pole, slid it up and down between her breasts. Chris took a deep interest in the low hammered copper table the pipe stood on. Liz Linshaw laughed again.
‘Look.’ She leaned across to place one hand gently against his cheek and pushed his head back towards the performance. He fought down a jagged impulse to grab the hand and twist it away. ‘I mean, look, really look at her. Let’s get this over with. She’s sexy, isn’t she. Young. No, don’t look away. It’s a great body. Worked out. And worked on, obviously, unless someone invented anti-gravity fields recently. Yeah, if I were a man, she’d do it for me. She’d make me, Chris, hey, Chris, you’re blushing.’
‘No, I’m—‘
‘You are. I can feel it. Your face is hot.’ She laughed again, delightedly. ‘Chris, you really are in trouble. You’re a grown man, you’ve got a dozen kills under your belt, and you can’t look at soft porn without flushing like a teenager. I mean, what do you and Carla Nyquist do in the bedroom?’
She must have seen the change in his face. Before he could move, she reached out and touched his arm.
‘Sorry. Chris, I’m sorry. That was bitchy.’
This time he did take hold of her hand. He pushed it back across the table and sat looking at her in silence.
‘Chris, I said I’m sorry.’
They were saved by the pipe waitress. She sauntered across, lifted the cage and cast a practised eye over the glowing embers of tobacco in the pan. She glanced at Chris.
‘Bring you another?’
He hadn’t smoked much of the first, it was just the price of sitting there while he waited for Liz Linshaw. He shrugged.
‘No, I think we’re pretty much done here.’
The waitress left. He met Liz Linshaw’s gaze and held it.
‘Chris—‘
‘Reason I asked you here, Liz. You’ve got friends in Driver Control, right?’
She looked away, then back. ‘Yes. Yes, I have.’
‘Inside sources? People who can get information for you?’
‘Is this really why you called me, Chris?’
‘Yes. You have sources, right?’
A shrug. ‘I’m a journalist.’
‘There’s something I need to know. I need to find out if—‘
‘Whoa, Chris.’ She gave him a hard little smile. ‘Slow down. Now I may have just gone over the line a little with that bitchy crack about your wife. But that doesn’t mean you own a part of me. Why the fuck would I put pressure on one of my hard-won sources for you? What’s in it for me?’
‘You’re writing another book, right?’
She nodded.
‘So this is a whole chapter if you’re lucky.’ He hesitated at the edge, looking for something to fill the gap that had suddenly opened up between them. ‘You heard I was up against a no-namer last week?’
‘Yes. Inconclusive, I heard. Driver Control had to come in and mediate.’ She smiled, a little more warmly this time. ‘I’m sorry, Chris. I like you but I don’t shadow you through the net on a day-to-day basis. There was something about a software failure, the challenge didn’t register in the system or something?’
‘Yeah, that’s the official line.’
One eyebrow arched. He thought there was a little mockery in it. ‘And the unofficial line?’
‘The no-namer was never registered in the first place. Some zone kid jacked a battlewagon and tried to take me down in the rain. No challenge issued. And Driver Control didn’t mediate, they turned up with an enforcement copter after I drove the kid off the road and they fed him a couple of cans of gatling shells for breakfast.’
He saw, with some satisfaction, the way the shock went through her. How her carefully constructed cool fractured open. Her voice, when it came, was almost a whisper.
‘They killed him?’
‘Pretty conclusively, yeah.’
‘But haven’t they traced the car?’
Chris nodded. ‘To an unemployed datasystems consultant. He reported it stolen from outside his house in Harlesden about an hour after the duel.’
‘He must have known before that!’
‘Not necessarily. He hadn’t driven it for a while, apparently. Couldn’t afford to renew the licence this quarter.’
‘Do you believe that?’ Journalistic interest kindling.
‘From the look of him in the interview tape, he’d be hard-pushed to afford a full tank of fuel, let alone a licence to use it, so yes, I do. But in the end it doesn’t matter. Whoever set this up is a long way up the chain from either him or the kid who nicked the car. And whoever set this up also has their claws into Driver Control.’
‘Alright, I’ll buy that. What else do you have?’
‘That’s the lot.’ He wasn’t about to get into the Mandela estate connection. Troy Morris was already running down rumours across the southside, asking softly after Robbie Goodwin’s displaced family, trying to find a safe approach to Khalid Iarescu’s underworld machine. The last thing he’d need was a high-profile journalist crashing the zones and stirring things up. Liz Linshaw was most use where she already was - highly placed in the world of competition driving, reeking of cachet and connection.
She smiled, as if she could read his thoughts.
‘No, there’s more. You just don’t feel like telling me right now.’ She shrugged. ‘ ‘sokay, I can live with that. Sure, I’ll talk to some people I know. Shouldn’t take much leverage to see if something’s being covered up. I can take it from there.’ She picked up the pipe and drew on it. Inside the cage, the last of the embers flared. ‘You understand, this doesn’t come for free. I do it, and you’ll owe me, Chris. Big time.’
‘Like I said, it’ll make a chapter of—‘
‘No.’ She shook her head, and her hair fell across her face. It made him want to clear it away with one hand. ‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘So what do you mean?’
The corner of her mouth quirked and she looked away. ‘You know what I mean, Chris.’
That sat between them for a while, smouldering out like the pipe.
‘Listen,’ he said.
‘I know, Chris. I know. In fact, I’ve seen it all before. You’ve got some stuff you’ve got to work through. Don’t worry about it and. Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not short of male company, believe me.’
‘You seeing Mike again?’ It was out before he could stop himself.
She raked fingers into her own hair and grinned up at the corner of the room. ‘That really is none of your business, Chris.’
‘I’m not like him, Liz.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘I don’t see the women around me as. Product.’ The images from the porn segment glowed in his head. Studded leather parting buttocks, encircling breasts impossibly full. Fully clothed, the Liz Linshaw sitting opposite him shrugged.
‘Alike Bryant knows what he wants, and he takes it and then he looks after it as best he can. I don’t think his morality stretches much further than that, but he does at least know what he wants.’
Her eyes flickered up to meet his. She was still smiling.
‘Listen, Liz. That night, I.’ He swallowed. ‘I’m having some problems with my marriage, but that doesn’t mean I—‘
‘Chris.’ He’d never in his life been interrupted so gently. ‘I don’t care. I want to fuck you, not replace your wife. But I’ll tell you something for nothing. You came home with me that night, and you grabbed hold of the merchandise when it was on display. Whatever’s going on in your relationship with Carla, you might as well have fucked me then. You’ve got the same guilt, and the same hard-on for me. The fact you didn’t do it is a technicality.’
‘You—‘
She waved it off. Getting up, shouldering her way into her jacket.
‘I’ll get back to you about Driver Control. But the next time you get a bed for the night at my place, you’ll work your passage.’
In the end, the pipe waitress came and told him he’d have to order something else if he wanted to sit there any longer.