Chris kept his voice mild. ‘So did Hammett McColl. They saved about fifteen mil in bonus payments when Quain went down. And I haven’t needed to do much killing since. Sometimes it’s just enough to do the work. You don’t have to be proving yourself all the time.’
‘Here you do. You’ll find that out.’
‘Really.’ Chris pulled out the top drawer and looked in at the contents as if they interested him marginally more than the woman in front of him. ‘You got some toy boy lined up to call me out for this office?’
For just a moment he had her. He caught it in the way her frame stiffened at the upper edges of his peripheral vision. Then she drew a long breath, as if Chris was a new flower she liked the scent of. As he looked up, she smiled.
‘Cute,’ she said. ‘Oh, you’re cute. Notley likes you, you know that? That’s why you’re here. You remind him of him, back when he was young. He came out of nowhere just like you, riding one big kill. He had a tattoo, just like you. Stream of currency signs, like tears down from one eye. Very classy.’ Her lip curled. ‘He even dated his mechanic for about five years. Little zone girl, with a smudge of grease across her nose. They say she even turned up to a quarterly dinner once with that smudge. Yeah, Notley likes you, but you notice something about that tattoo? It’s gone now. Just like that little zone girl. See, Notley gets sentiment attacks sometimes, but he’s a professional and he won’t let it get in the way. Hold that thought, because you’re going to disappoint him, Faulkner. You don’t have the grit.’
‘Welcome aboard.’
Hewitt looked at him blankly. Chris gestured with one open hand.
‘I thought one of us should say it.’
‘Hey.’ She shrugged and turned to leave. ‘Prove me wrong.’
Chris watched her go, face unreadable. As the door closed, his eyes fell on the matt black Nemex pistol on the desk and his own lip twisted derisively.
‘Fucking cowboys.’
He swept the gun ceremonially away with the clips and slammed the drawer closed.
There was a list of induction suggestions on the datadown: people to call, when to call them, and where they could be found. Procedures to implement, the best time to access the areas of the Shorn datastack necessary for each procedure. A selected overview of his caseload for the next two months, flags to indicate which needed attention first. The p.a. package had phased everything into a suggested convenience sequence which got the work done as efficiently as possible and told him he would find it most convenient to go home at about eight-thirty that evening.
He toyed briefly with the idea of loading up the Nemex with its jacketed ammunition and repeating Hewitt’s target practice on the datadown.
Instead, he punched the phone.
‘Carla, this is Chris. I’m going to be late tonight, so don’t wait up. There’s still some chilli in the fridge, try not to eat it all, it’ll give you the shits and I’d like some myself when I get in. Oh, by the way, I’m in love.’
He put down the receiver and looked at the datadown screen. After a long pause, he prodded the bright orange triangle marked Conflict Investment and watched as it maximised like an opening flower.
The backglow lit his face.
It was past eleven by the time he got home. He killed his lights at the first bend in the drive, though he knew that the crunch of his wheels on the gravel would probably wake Carla as surely as the play of high beams across the front of the house. Sometimes she seemed to know he was home more by intuition than anything else. He parked beside the battered and patched Land Rover she ran, turned off his engine and yawned. For a moment he sat in the still and the darkness, listening to the cooling tick of the engine.
Home for six hours’ sleep. Why the fuck did we move this far out?
But he knew the answer to that.
This place is no different to HM. Live at work, sleep at home, forget you ever had a relationship. Same shit, different logo.
Well, that’s where all the money comes from.
He let himself into the house as quietly as he could and found Carla in the lounge, watching a TV screen tuned to the soft blue light of an empty channel. Ice clicked in her glass as she lifted it to her lips.
‘You’re awake,’ he said, and then saw how far down the bottle she was. ‘You’re drunk.’
‘Isn’t that meant to be my line?’
‘Not tonight, it isn’t. I was wired to the fucking datadown until quarter to ten.’ He bent to kiss her. ‘Rough day?’
‘Not really. Same old shit.’
‘Yeah, done some of that myself.’ He sank into the chair beside her. She handed him the whisky glass just a fraction of a second before he reached out for it. ‘What you watching?’
‘Dex and Seth, ’til the jamming got it.’
He grinned. ‘You’re going to get us arrested.’
‘Not in this postcode.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ He glanced across at the phone deck. ‘Did we get any this morning?’
‘Any what?’
‘Any mail?’
‘Bills. Mortgage repayment went through.’
‘Already? They just took it.’
‘No, that was last month. We’re over the line on a couple of cards as well.’
Chris drank some of the peat-flavoured Islay whisky, tutting learnedly over the sacrilege of ice in a glass of single malt. Carla gave him a murderous look. He handed her back the glass and frowned at the TV screen. ‘How’d we manage that?
‘We spent the money, Chris.’
‘Well.’ He stretched his suited legs out in front of him and yawned again. ‘That’s what we earn it for, I guess. So what same old shit did you do today?’
‘Salvage. Some arms supply company just moved into premises out on the northern verge lost a dozen of their brand new Mercedes Ramjets to vandals. Whole lot written off.’
Chris sat up. ‘A dozen? What did they do, park them in the open?’
‘No. Someone dropped a couple of homemade shrapnel bombs through a vent into their executive garages. Boom! Corrosives and fast-moving metal in all directions. Mel got a contract to assess the damage and haul every write-off away gratis. Paid to clear it, and he gets to keep whatever salvage we can strip out of the wrecks. And here’s the good bit. Some of these Mercs are barely scratched. Mel’s still out celebrating. Says if the corporates are going to insist on this urban regeneration shit, we could have a lot more work like that. He must have put a good metre of NAME powder up his nose tonight.’
‘Shrapnel bombs, huh?’
‘Yeah, ingenious what kids can wire together out of scrap these days. I don’t know, maybe Mel even set them up to do it. Connections he’s got in the zones. Jackers, drugs. Gangwit stuff.’
‘Fuckers,’ said Chris vaguely.
‘Yeah, well.’ An edge crept into Carla’s voice. ‘Amazing what you’ll get up to when you’ve got nothing to lose. Nothing to do but stand at the razor wire and watch the wealth roll by.’
Chris sighed. ‘Carla, could we have this argument some other time, please? Because I haven’t rehearsed in a while.’
‘You got something else you want to do?’
‘Well, we could fuck by the light of the TV screen.’
‘We could,’ she agreed seriously. ‘Except that I always end up on top and I’ve still got carpet burns on my knees from the last time you had that bright idea. You want to fuck, you take me to a bed.’