“I can’t see,” he said. The camera side of the tablet was trapped under her upper arm. When she freed it, and turned him around, he saw trees, smaller ones, and a trampled earthen trail, descending. “Where are we going?”
“Burton’s trailer. Down by the creek. He’s lived there since he got out of the Marines.”
“Is he there?”
“He’s back at Coldiron. Or in town somewhere. He won’t mind.”
“Where’s Tacoma?”
She swung the Wheelie around. He saw Tacoma on the trail behind them. Swung it back, started down. “Daedra,” she said. “How’d you meet her, anyway?”
“I was hired to be a publicist on a project she was central to. Its resident celebrity. Rainey brought me on. She’s a publicist as well. Or was. She’s just resigned.” Trees on either side, the trail crooked.
“Envy her that,” Flynne said, “having the option.”
“But you do. You used it when you thought Lowbeer’s agent would use the party time on those religionists.”
“That was bullshit. Well, not bullshit, ’cause I’d have done what I said. But then, pretty soon, we’d all be dead. Us back here, anyway.”
“What’s that?”
“Burton’s trailer. It’s an Airstream. Nineteen seventy-seven.”
The year, from the century previous even to this one she carried him through, struck him as incredible. “Did they all look like that?”
“Like what?”
“An assembler malfunction.”
“That’s the foam. Uncle who hauled it down here put that on to stop it leaking, and for insulation. Shiny streamline thing, under that.”
“I’ll be out here if you need me,” said Tacoma, behind them.
“Thanks,” said Flynne, reaching for the handle on a battered metal door, set back in the weathered larval bulge of whatever the thing had been covered with. She opened it, stepped up, into a space he recognized from first having interviewed her. Tiny lights came on, in strings, embedded in some slightly yellowish transparent material. A small space, as small as the rear cabin of the Gobiwagen, lower. A narrow metal-framed bed, table, a chair. The chair moved.
“The chair moved,” he said.
“Wants me to sit in it. Man, I forget how hot this sucker gets. .”
“‘Sucker’?”
“Trailer. Here.” She put him down on the table. “Got to crack a window.” The window creaked, opening. Then she opened a squat white cabinet that stood on the floor, took out a blue-and-silver metallic-looking container, closing the cabinet. “My turn to not be able to offer you a drink.” She pulled a ring atop the container. Drank from the resulting opening. The chair was moving again. She sat in it, facing him. It hummed, creaked, was silent, unmoving. “Okay,” she said, “she your girlfriend?”
“Who?”
“Daedra.”
“No,” he said.
“But was she?”
“No.”
She looked at him. “You two were doing it?”
“Yes.”
“Girlfriend. Unless you’re an asshole.”
He considered this. “I was quite taken with her,” he said, then paused.
“Taken?”
“She’s very striking. Physically. But. .”
“But?”
“I’m almost certainly an asshole.”
She looked at him. Or rather, he remembered, at part of his face on the Wheelie Boy’s tablet. “Well,” she said, “if you really know that, you’re ahead of most of the dating stock around here.”
“Dating stock?”
“Men,” she said. “Ella, my mother, she says the odds are good around here, but the goods are odd. ’Cept they aren’t odd, usually. More like too ordinary.”
“I might be odd,” he said. “I like to imagine I am. Here. I mean there. In London.”
“But you weren’t supposed to get involved with her that way, because it was business?”
“That’s correct.”
“Tell me about it.”
“About. .?”
“What happened. And when you get to a part that I can’t understand, or I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’ll stop you and ask you questions until I understand it.”
She looked very serious, but not unfriendly.
“I will, then,” said Netherton.
101
Her time in the trailer with Wilf had kept her mind off what she couldn’t quite believe she’d decided about Lowbeer and Griff. The ordinary sad-ass humanness of his story with Daedra, in spite of big lumps of future-stuff, had been weirdly comforting.
She still wasn’t sure how Daedra made her living, or what her relationship with the United States government was. Seemed like a cross between a slightly porny media star and what sophomore year Art History called a performance artist, plus maybe a kind of diplomat. But she still didn’t get what the United States did either, in Wilf’s world. He made it sound like the nation-state equivalent of Conner, minus the sense of humor, but she supposed that might not be so far off, even today.
After the trailer, the three of them had gone up to the house and had the peas Janice had stir-fried with some bacon and onions, sitting around the kitchen table with Leon and her mother. Her mother had asked Tacoma about her name, and her job, and Tacoma had been good at not seeming like she wasn’t explaining what she did, and Flynne had seen her mother seeing that, but not minding. Her mother was in a better mood, and Flynne took that to mean she’d accepted that she wouldn’t be sent off to northern Virginia with Lithonia.
Driving back, it was the same convoy, and no other traffic on the road at all. “Should be more people driving out here, this time of day,” she said to Tacoma.
“That’s because it’s shorter to list what Coldiron doesn’t own in this county. You own both sides of this road. In the rest of the county, Hefty still owns the bulk of what you don’t. What’s left either belongs to individuals, or Matryoshka.”
“The dolls?”
“The competition. It’s what we call them in KCV. Out of Nassau, so that’s probably where they first came through from the future, the way Coldiron did in Colombia.”
They were at the edge of town now, and Tacoma started talking to her earbud, making the convoy take unexpected turns, or as unexpected as you could manage anywhere this size. Flynne figured they were angling to get into the back without attracting the attention of Luke 4:5, on the other side of Tommy’s yellow Sheriff’s Department tape. They knew how to obey police tape, because that could help them in court, when they eventually sued the municipality, like they always did, most of them having gone to law school for that express purpose. They always protested in silence, and that was deliberate too, some legal strategy she’d never understood. They’d hold their signs up and stinkeye everybody, never say a word. You could see the mean glee they took in it, and she just thought it was sorry, that people could be like that.
At least there was some traffic in town, mostly KCV employees trying to look local. Not a single German car. Anyone who made a living selling secondhand Jeeps should be hosting a big fiesta about now, for the workers at the factory in Mexico.
“Always been a redhead?” Flynne asked Tacoma, to get her mind off Luke 4:5.
“A day longer than I’ve been with KCV,” Tacoma said. “They have to bleach it almost white, before they dye it.”
“I like it.”
“I don’t think my hair does.”
“You get contacts at the same time?”
“I did.”
“Otherwise, you’d look enough like your sister that people would put it together.”
“We drew straws,” Tacoma said. “She would’ve gone blond, but I lost. She was blond when she was younger. Brings out her risk-taking tendencies, so this is probably better.”
Flynne looked over at the blank screen of the Wheelie’s tablet, wondered where he was now. “Are you really a notary?”
“Hell yes. And a CPA. And I’ve got paper for you to sign when we get back, taking your brother’s little militia from cult of personality to state-registered private security firm.”