The Perdition Score. Richard Kadrey

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      “I get it. Sorry to have bothered you. I’m going. Besides,” he says, “you look like hell.”

      “Now,” says Carlos.

      Richie starts for the door.

      Carlos shakes his head.

      “Some people couldn’t buy a clue with all the gold in Fort Knox.”

      I hold up my glass, toast Carlos, and down my drink.

      “Thank you, Doctor. I’m feeling much better now. How’s my eye?”

      He looks and nods.

      “It’s getting there.”

      Then he looks up past me.

      Someone throws his arm around me and clicks a picture. It’s Trump and his iPhone. I turn just in time to see him scrambling out the front door with my bruised face in his hand.

      Perfect.

      So, to sum up the evening. A Sherman tank with the brain of an angry hamster gave me a black eye, and now some college boy snuck up behind me and got my picture without me even knowing he was there. I think this is what’s known as a wake-up call. Something has to change. Starting with me.

      “You have any food left back there tonight?”

      “Some tamales with some beans and rice. You want some to go?”

      “Could I get three?”

      “No problem.”

      He disappears into the back and reappears with a packed paper bag.

      I sniff the food and smile.

      “What do I owe you?”

      “You know you always eat and drink for free around here,” he says.

      “Not for the food. The advice.”

      “All you owe me is not fucking yourself up anymore. Do that and we’re square.”

      I set down the rag I’ve been holding to my eye and pick up the food.

      “I’ll work on it.”

      “You do that. And tell Chihiro hi for me.”

      “You got it.”

      I got out to the car and set the food on the passenger seat. Donald Trump is halfway down the block showing his phone to anyone who’ll look. Showing my face to strangers.

      I start the car and gun the engine a couple of times. If he moves just a little to his right, I could pick him off without hitting anyone else. The front of this Catalina is solid steel. He won’t even make a dent. I can just hose him off when I get home.

      But I don’t do it. It would be too easy. Too Koyaanisqatsi. Something has got to change and it will start with me not killing a rich kid who’ll go on drinking shit Scotch and stealing photos with people because he’ll never know how close he came to frat-boy Heaven tonight.

      I pull away from the curb and head home.

      “I KEEP TELLING you,” says Kasabian when I come in. “If you just buy the Girl Scouts’ cookies, they’ll leave you alone.”

      “That gets funnier every time you say it.”

      “It’ll be even funnier next time.”

      Kasabian runs things day to day at Maximum Overdrive, the video store where I live with him and Candy. Him downstairs in the back and me and Candy in the small apartment upstairs. This arrangement is best for everyone if for no other reason than Kasabian doesn’t really have a body. I mean, he has one, but it’s not his. It’s a retrofit from a mechanical hellhound body I stole when I could still shadow-walk Downtown.

      “Keep going. You’re going to talk yourself out of tamales.”

      Kasabian holds up a mechanical hound paw.

      “Witness me shutting up.”

      The paw creaks a little as he says it. Sometimes he clanks when he walks. That’s the other reason he spends most of his time down here and not upstairs in our palatial penthouse. I set the tamales on the counter.

      “Smart man. How’s business?”

      “We’re doing all right. Still making bank off the special stash. But we haven’t had anything new in for a while. The requests are piling up.”

      The special stash are videos a little witch named Maria gets for us through her ghost connections. Movies that don’t really exist, at least in this time and space. James Cameron’s Spider-Man. Sergio Leone’s The Godfather. Orson Welles’s Heart of Darkness.

      “Do you explain that our movies come from another fucking plane of reality? It’s not like we’re rifling the bins at the Salvation Army.”

      Kasabian lifts the edge of the tamales bag and looks inside. I close it and move the bag to the other end of the counter. He gives me a look.

      “They’re customers,” he says. “They know what they want and they want it now.”

      “Next time someone whines, tell them to fuck off home and watch Kindergarten Cop on Netflix.”

      He slips a DVD into a case and holds it up in my direction.

      “And that’s why you’re not allowed down here during business hours.”

      “I have my own work these days. I don’t have to mingle with you rabble.”

      He points at my eye.

      “Your boss give you that for mouthing off?”

      “It’s still noticeable?”

      “Like a glazed ham at a bris.”

      “Don’t say anything when you see Candy.”

      I take the bag and head upstairs.

      “Hey. What about the tamales?”

      “No one eats until Candy gets home.”

      “I admire her work ethic, but tell her to get a day job. I’m hungry now.”

      “Didn’t someone say that suffering was good for the soul?”

      “Only preachers and insurance salesmen.”

      “We’re still waiting. I’ll put these in the oven to stay warm.”

      I go upstairs, stash the tamales, and go into the bathroom. In the bathroom mirror, I stare at my face. Yeah. There’s no way she’s not going to notice the bruise. It will be gone by morning, but right now I’m fucked. For a second, I think about more ice, look at myself again, СКАЧАТЬ