Authors: Finder
because I needed a couple more cubic feet of air. She stood stiffly, one hip against the car, as if she wanted to follow me and wouldn't. I sat on the curb next to the Triumph's right front headlight and laced my fingers together on my knees.
"I don't want to take this all on," I said slowly. "I don't want to take any of it on. I thought I did, for a while. Now all I want is for my life to go back to the way it was last week."
"It never does," she said. "I've wanted something like that at least once a day for the last few years." She came over and settled herself on the front fender, one booted foot on the chromed tubing of the bumper.
She took her cigarette case out of her jacket pocket again and handed me one. "But I understand. If that's what you want, I'll leave you alone." The match scraped, and flared, and was held a cigarette's length from my face.
The timing, I realized with an uncomfortable rush of anger mixed with something else, wasn't
accidental, and the heat in my face wasn't all from the match. I held her eyes for a second, to show her
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I'd caught
the trick, and drew the flame into my cigarette.
"Do you want me to leave you alone?" she pressed.
"What, couldn't you tell?"
"You have a better poker face than I gave you credit for," she said lightly. "I'm sorry, it's a habit. Some people bite their nails; I manipulate as a reflex."
I watched the ash grow on the end of my smoke. "What about Tiamat?"
"I hope you'll pass on anything I need to know, but you don't have to. Hell, if you really want out of it entirely, you could leave town."
I looked up at her, outlined in moonlight. "I can't leave town."
"Because of Tick-Tick? She could go into the hospital. Or you could hire a nurse to stay with her; there are good ones around."
"No. I couldn't—I couldn't go, and not know what was happening. She might not mind, but I would."
"And you objected because
I
insisted on taking responsibility." There was ever-so-slight mockery in her voice.
I took a mouthful of smoke, and was glad the cigarette hadn't gone out. The last thing I needed was another revealing match. "We go way back."
"That's a mixed commodity in this town, have you noticed?" she said, and the mockery had been replaced by a sort of mild speculation. "Friendships of long standing are valuable. But a long friendship, here, is four or five years. And nothing goes back to before, either to the World or to the Elflands.
Before we came to town. We all pretend that when we hit the Borderlands, our pasts were cut off like six inches of out-of-fashion hair."
"That's part of the point of coming."
"Of course. But it's still just pretend."
It doesn't take nearly long enough to smoke a cigarette. I flicked the remains of mine into the middle of the street and stood up. "If the results are the same, what does it matter?"
"Are the results the same? You don't like hospitals. You're not sure you like yourself. Is that because of things that have happened to you since you got here?"
I was angry. It seemed to me she was picking at a scab, and I wasn't even certain whether it was mine or hers. And when had I given her permission to tell me about myself? "I don't know. What do you think?
You're the one with the father who was a bad cop."
That stopped her; or at least, she sat still, and that might have been the cause. If she made a sound, I couldn't hear her. I couldn't, in fact, hear anything much around us, and I wondered that I hadn't noticed earlier what a quiet night it seemed to be.
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"How ar
e you using 'bad cop'?" she asked, in a voice that seemed merely curious. "One that's not
skillful? Or 'bad,
' as in 'a bad apple?' Rotten?"
I said, carefully, "I don't know. I'm just quoting you."
She sighed. "One can lead to the other, it turns out. I grew up thinking my dad was a good cop. It was the religion of my youth, in fact. I had a pretty fuzzy notion of Jesus, but I was certain my father was a good cop, and that everyone admired him. His precinct buddies would come over to play cards, or for backyard picnics, and they'd take me on their knees and say, 'Bet you're proud of your daddy.' And they were right. I was so proud of him that I hardly had to think about it. That was one of the pillars that held my life up—that my daddy was a good cop, and I was proud of him."
"What happened?" I asked.
"About what you'd expect, given an introduction like that." Her cigarette followed roughly the same arc as mine had, into the street. "He wasn't good, at least when the going got tough. I think first he was unskillful. Then he tried to make up for it by being crooked. It turned out a lot of those guys who'd held me on their knees were taking a little something and looking the other wayùfrom party houses, stolen car parts rings, coke dealers.
"But I didn't know about it for a long time. My mom knew before I did. He knew that she knew, and they'd fight, and after a while he started to hit her. That was when I realized there was something wrong.
And… one night, when he was on duty, I got her to tell me what it was."
I thought I knew how that must have felt. I remembered what it had felt like when one morning my mom had come home at the end of her shift, and lost her temper over something, and said to me—no, never mind what she said to me. But I knew the feeling, as if your insides were an elevator in a tall building, and someone had just set off the fire alarm. Straight to the basement, do not pass Go. "Did you…
confront him with it?"
"Oh, yeah. Perfect timing, too. That night he and his partner had had to chase a vehicle, and he'd banged his head on the rear-view mirror in the squad car when it jumped the curb. So he came home with a bandage onùlike yours only smaller, actually. I was very brave and called him a crook anyway."
"What did he say?"
"He said I didn't understand."
"Did he—did he straighten out eventually?"
"I don't know." I saw her shrug at least one shoulder. "We screamed at each other 'til the neighbors phoned in a noise complaint, and then I ran away from home." Her head lifted, turned a little to one side.
She added, sounding almost amused, "It wasn't like I could call the police."
"Yeah," I said after a moment. So was she a cop to prove to herself it could be done right? To even the overall score for her father? I remembered her reaction when she'd realized that one of her fellow officers had to be part of the group that put, and kept, the passport on the streets. "And you still can't."
Some quick motion of her head showed me that she understood the reference. "No. There's just me."
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Maybe she thought
, after that account of her history, that I'd answer with something melodramatic, l
ike,
"And m
e." An appeal to the swashbuckler after all. What I said was, "I'd better go see if Tick-Tic
k's still
asleep."
She stood up and stretched her spine, both hands on the small of her back. "Give her my best."
"Sure."
I stayed where I was, expecting her to get into the car and drive away. Instead she reached out two fingers and pinched a lock of my hair that had fallen down in my eyes. "You need a haircut," she said, and deftly flipped the lock back off my forehead, never touching the skin. "G'night."
Then she got in the car and started the engine. The Triumph pulled away primly, as if out of respect for the night and the sleeping locals.
A haircut. A
haircut
, for crying out loud.
At least maybe nothing would happen to make me have to admit to Tick-Tick that she'd been right, that I did have a thing for Sunny Rico. If I was very lucky, maybe nobody would mention it to Sunny Rico, either.
My scalp tingled, in the front, right along the hairline. I scorned to rub it.
Tick-Tick rallied in the morning, as she had the day before, but she didn't seem quite as rallied as she was then. Since neither her household nor mine could boast a fever thermometer, I could only judge from the feel of her forehead what her temperature was, but it felt high. I could tell from her face that she was in pain. She turned down food again; she drank some orange juice, and I wanted her to drink more, but she said it hurt her throat.
I had the windows open, so I heard the banging on the front door. I hopped up three platforms and stuck my head out to see, wondering why, if the Ticker had gone to the trouble of installing a remote
mechanical latch for the front door, she hadn't rigged up a doorbell, too. Probably wasn't enough of a challenge.
It was Tiamat. When I whistled she looked up, and I saw the evidence of tears on her white, pouched face.
"Oh, Jesus, you
are
here," she said.
"I'll be right down." I could have let her in, but I didn't think she'd be a useful distraction for Tick-Tick.
And I remembered the way she'd looked at the Ticker, and spoken to her, as if being born on the other side of the Border had made her the author of Tiamat's miseries.
As Rico had reminded me the night before, it hadn't been so awfully long since the last time I'd seen her, and consequently, the last time I'd seen Tiamat, too. She didn't seem taller, or thinner, or paler, and her hair was still red—though that, I realized, seeing it in sunlight, wasn't the color it usually was, anyway.
But her skin seemed dry and dull, and her eyes were bloodshot, as well as red from crying.
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"I w
asn't going to come," she said, as soon as I came out
the door. "Everything was okay then, when I
"I know. Have a seat," I told her, in as soothing a voice as I could manage. Hers was hoarse and inclined to crack, suggesting that she was prepared to have hysterics if the occasion called for it. My nerves weren't exactly titanium-wrapped, what with one thing and another. I settled down on the stoop and stretched my legs out in front of me, and pretended I was relaxed.
Tiamat didn't sit down. Instead she shifted from one foot to another on the sidewalk in front of me, and fixed me with a desperate glare. "I don't know what you can do about it, anyway. Except you seemed to know all about this before anybody else did. Jesus, you've got to be able to help me."
"I'll try. Are you sure you don't want to sit down?" Maybe she could be helped—maybe she wasn't so far along that the effects of the passport couldn't be reversed, or at least, stabilized.
She looked down, rummaged in the inside of her denim jacket, and came out with a folded sheet of
neon-yellow paper, rather dog-eared and stained. "I wasn't worried until I saw these. I thought everything was going like it was supposed to. But then I read—" She stopped and swallowed. "I read these. And I knew that it wasn't okay. That I have it."
I took the paper from her. As I unfolded it, I asked, "Have what?"