the sex spell, but not now. Not when her blood still simmered a little too fast for comfort.
“Aye. Don’t worry on it, Chess. Maybe you free tomorrow, come back for another look? In the daylight, dig at the walls an all. Bring yon Church stuff, them little machines and all you use.”
“I thought you didn’t think it was a ghost.”
His eyelids flickered and he nodded toward the huddle of girls, counting their money and lighting the dead men’s smokes. “They do. Bump an me, we ain’t so sure. You ain’t think it’s fair chances, them showing up here this night, aye?”
“You think—”
“I pick you up tomorrow round midday, cool?”
She didn’t want to. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help him; it was that Lex’s words about payback wouldn’t stop echoing in her head. If this was a gang thing, some sort of territory struggle, she did not need to be involved. Her life worked, as much as it could. Getting in between the people to whom she owed her loyalty—the one person to whom she owed loyalty, anyway, all Bump did was sell her pills and run the closest pipe room to her apartment—and the one with whom she swapped bodily fluids probably wasn’t the best way to make sure it kept working.
But there really was no good way to refuse. It wouldn’t just look suspicious, it would be…it would be wrong.
She glanced again at Daisy’s body, abandoned like a busted Dream pipe on the cracked and pitted sidewalk. If it weren’t for the Church, that could have been her. Probably would have been her. Certainly it was what she’d grown up expecting.
So she nodded. “They told me not to worry about coming in tomorrow, not after what happened tonight. No new cases anyway.”
“They give you the day off? How bad your night go?”
“Oh…it was nothing. I got poisoned a little bit. They had an antidote, no big deal.”
He cocked an eyebrow.
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m here, right? No problem. Where’s the girl who saw the ghost?”
He started to say something, then stopped himself. “Laria. She name is Laria.”
“Yeah, her.” Chess scanned the little crowd of women, picking out the frizzy brown head. Laria stood near the back, a confused look on her face. Chess tried to catch the girl’s eye, but she wasn’t sure if it was possible for anyone to catch the girl’s eye at this stage; she looked like she was ready to keel over backward.
“I get her.”
Laria looked younger close up than Chess had thought. Sixteen, perhaps, or seventeen at the oldest. Her pale blue jacket had stains on the sleeves and a tear in one elbow. When she squeezed her arms tighter around her chest her pinkish-white skin poked through the hole like a turtle peeping from its shell.
“Laria, I’m Chess. Could you tell me what you saw earlier? The man who killed Daisy?”
Laria shook her head. Her clouded brown eyes filled with tears. “Ain’t seen nothin.”
“You said earlier you saw—”
Laria shook her head again. Her hair moved with it like a clump of dirty steel wool.
Chess glanced at Terrible, not bothering to hide her irritation. She had sympathy, sure, but it was late and freezing cold and she just wanted to go home, and Laria’s reticence wasn’t helping anyone.
He gripped Laria’s arm. “You tell she, girl. Only way for us to catch him, dig?”
“I ain’t—”
“Ain’t nothin. You the one left she alone so’s you could go stab up, aye? Least you owe she some knowledge.”
Laria gasped; Terrible’s fist was so tight around her arm that his thumb pressed the second knuckle of his middle finger. “Terrible, you hurtin—”
“Be hurtin worse, you don’t talk up.”
Chess held out her hand. “We can do this tomorrow, can’t we?”
“Come the morrow she won’t get any recall,” he said. “Gotta get what we can now.”
Laria’s cheeks were wet. “He had a hat on. All’s I remember, he had a hat on.”
“He big? Small? You see through him?” Terrible’s grip relaxed, his voice softened. “Come on, Laria. You recall it, aye? You just gotta think on it.”
“He weren’t big. Ain’t much bigger’n me. He were bendin over her when I come close enough to see—he stood up and he was…” Laria swallowed once, then again. “I seed through him.”
“He was transparent?”
“Could see through him,” Laria whispered. “‘Ceptin he looked up at me, under the brim o’ his hat, aye…funny hat, with a point in the center and them flaps on the side, on the ears? All of him clear, his clothes and all, ‘ceptin…” She raised a hand to her face, patted trembling fingers beneath one eye.
“His eyes?” The chill creeping up Chess’s spine had nothing to do with the temperature of the air.
“Not his eyes,” Laria said, and it came out like the low moan of a wounded animal. “Hers.”
“What?”
Laria started to cry. “Him were wearin she eyes.”
You must always be vigilant in guarding against the desires of the flesh. Even those acts not deemed illegal can stain the soul in some situations.
—The Book of Truth, Rules, Article 278
The knock on the door came just when she’d started to think it wouldn’t. Typical Lex. She opened it, determined not to let her tiredness loosen her lips.
Of course there were other things to do with those. Despite the way she’d hung up on him earlier, he seemed to be in a good mood—at least his kiss indicated he was. She was almost dizzy by the time he pulled away and set a plastic baggie in her hand. More pills.
“Plan on giving me the clapperclaw, Tulip?” His dark eyes gleamed with amusement—or desire. She didn’t bother to analyze.
“It’s no more than you deserve, being so flippant. I thought I was going to get killed in that damn alley.”
“But you ain’t killed.” He opened her fridge and grabbed a couple of beers. “Look, you still here. So whyn’t you tell me what was on the happening?”
She stiffened. “Why do you want to know?”
“Ain’t I allowed some curiosity? You get stuck in the middle of some road brawl, I can’t ask why you was there in the start? Why you always so mean to me?”
“I’m not mean.”
“Aye, you sure is mean.” He kissed her forehead and handed her an opened beer. She watched him slump gracefully onto the couch and lean back, his Buzzcocks T-shirt riding up to expose a thin line of flat stomach. “Especially after I called them men off. But no matter. Come on in here and sit down.”
She drank off half her beer in one nervous swig. She did not want to sit down. If she put herself within easy reach of him, they’d never get around to discussing anything, even if she wasn’t still jacked from the sex magic around that poor dead girl. “Tell me what you meant first.”
“Meant by what?”
“You know what. You said it was about time Bump got some payback. What did that mean?”
“You ain’t really wanna talk about