Afterparty (14 page)

Still holding Lamont in one arm, she opened a cabinet above the stove and began handing me items—a plastic-wrapped towel, a floral-pattern toiletry bag, a device that looked like a battery tester, a white plastic insulin injector—which I placed on the island.

“Unroll the towel on the countertop,” she told me. She laid Lamont on the towel and ordered me to pet him while she unpacked the medical supplies from the toiletry bag.

I pointed to a syringe and needle. “What’s in that?”

“That’s not for you,” the Cat Lady said. “Hold him still. There you go…” She slid the needle under the fur behind Lamont’s neck. The cat didn’t seem to notice. “Sleepy times,” she said. Then to me, she said, “Now would be a good time to take care of the payment.”

I held out the HashCash card, and she produced a slate. “That will be twenty-five hundred,” she said.

I pulled back the card before she could touch it. “On the phone you said a thousand.”

“A thousand is for the
cat.
Plus five hundred for the cat carrier and the month’s supply of food, and a thousand to do the transfer. Unless you want to do that yourself?”

“Lamont better be one fucking great cat for a thousand bucks.”

“He has the heart of a champion.”

I keyed the card to the amount and let her tap it into her slate.

Lamont lay on his side, breathing deep, completely out. Maybe it was wrong to use an animal like this. But I was sure of one thing: If Dr. Gloria were here, she’d be on the cat’s side.

The Cat Lady pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “Let’s do you, now.”

I stretched my arm across the countertop. She ran a finger along the forearm and tapped the bump. I thought of Ollie, when she’d first touched the pellet. “Looks like you just got this,” the Cat Lady said.

“I didn’t want to get attached.”

She swabbed rubbing alcohol across my inner arm, humming. Then she placed her arm across mine, pinning me to the countertop with her weight. With her free hand she picked up a scalpel. “Look at the ceiling,” she said.

The Cat Lady drew a line across my skin. Blood welled in the cut, glossy and bright. I exhaled. “That wasn’t so bad,” I said.

“Hold still,” she said, and pushed into the cut with her finger.

“Jesus Christ!”

She looked me in the eye. “I have to let go of your arm. Can you stay still?”

“Just warn me next time, okay?”

The Cat Lady moved the electrical device between us. She pressed the tip of one wire into the incision, a fresh burn that made me wince. She taped the wire to my skin, then inserted and taped down the other wire.

Her hand reached for the device. “Is this going to hurt?” I asked.

“Does it
matter
?” she asked. Still mad at me about refusing to choose a cat. She pressed a button.

I flinched. But I hadn’t felt a thing. Not even a tingle.

“The chip’s offline,” the Cat Lady said. “An alert will show up in your file, but that’s okay—service gets interrupted all the time. They’ll think you drove through a tunnel.” She unwrapped a soda straw and put it to her lips. Then she poked the other end of the straw into the cut.

“Mother of—!” I yelled.

She capped the top of the straw with a fingertip, then released the pellet into a capful of the rubbing alcohol. “Got it. We just have to pop this into Lamont right away, before it reboots.”

She swirled the cap for a moment, washing the pellet. She stripped the paper off another straw and sucked the chip back in to it. She lifted the straw, and something small fell out. “Oopsie.”

“Did you just—?”

“Hah. Fell right back in the cap. That was lucky.”

She poked inside the cap with the straw, trying to feel for the pellet. “If they hit the floor, they’re impossible to find,” she said.

“You said, ‘right away.’”

“Tiny little bugger. Let me get a spoon.”

“The reboot, that’s what—thirty seconds?”

“Give or take.”

She slid the tip of the spoon into the cap, using tweezers to push the pellet into it.

“Could you hurry?” I asked.

She stopped, looked at me.

I stared back.

Finally I said, “Okay. I’ll shut up.”

She slowly placed the chip at the top of the insulin injector. “Could you roll Lamont onto his back? There we go.”

“I’m dripping,” I said. Blood was creeping down to my elbow; I turned my arm so it wouldn’t fall on the cat. The Cat Lady rubbed at the underside of Lamont’s neck, feeling for a vein. Then rubbed some more. I started to say something, thought better of it. She pressed the white tube into his fur and clicked the button at the top of the tube.

“Is that it?” I asked.

She checked the screen on the device with the wires. “And … the signal’s back.”

“Is it a clean report?”

She looked at me. “How would I know?”

She had a point. The message was private-key encrypted. In the early days of the chips, people built jammers that would suppress the signal, then broadcast a bogus clean report, the whole jamming device no bigger than a wrist watch. It worked great until the medical industry figured out what was going on and started encrypting each report with a date-time stamp hashed into the message. Now there was no way to fake a chip report unless you knew its private key.

However, you
could
move the chip into a new host. And cats’ blood, strange-but-true fact, was almost identical to humans’.

Hello Lamont, the Clean and Sober Cat.

CHAPTER TEN

Two nights later Ollie and I were in a marina beer joint half an hour east of Toronto. There were only two other women in the place, including the waitress. The men were blue-collar types in paint-spattered jeans and oil-stained work boots, or else no-collar types in T-shirts and basketball shorts. A room of hefty guts and loud opinions.

“My ginger ale tastes like aluminum,” I said.

Ollie grunted. She was on edge, her body still, but her eyes flitting like sparrows. She was watching the windows, which had turned into mirrors of the room. I’d adopted some of her paranoia. The bodies of Pastor Rudy and Luke had been discovered yesterday morning, and the story was all over the Canadian news sites. We moved out of the Marriott and to a cheaper hotel, expecting the cops to come knocking. Ollie was confident that we hadn’t been picked up by cameras and that we hadn’t left prints at the crime scene, but these days, who knew? A traffic camera could have seen Bobby’s car pulling out of that lot. A random bystander could have seen us in the alley.

“That guy’s watching you,” Ollie said.

“What? Who?”

“The cowboy. No, don’t look.”

Too late. A man in a black cowboy hat and a white, Western-style shirt sat at the end of the L-shaped bar, kitty-corner from us. He saw me looking at him and tilted back his hat with a knuckle. Then he lifted his shot glass and raised his eyebrows, inviting me over.

“Jesus,” I said. “I’m so done with local boys.”

Ollie glanced at me, then looked away.

“What?” I asked.

Ollie said, “How done?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

She grunted, took a sip from her beer.

“Wait,” I said, “are we playing the ‘who’s gayer’ game?”

“I’m just curious,” Ollie said.

“Just curious? That’s a bullshit phrase.”

“It’s a simple question. How long—”

“No, it’s a signal that bullshit is about to follow. It’s the hat that bullshit puts on before it goes out to get the paper.”

“How long has it been?” she said, refusing to get distracted. “Maybe an experimental phase in college?”

“You can’t seriously be doubting what team I’m on,” I said. “I was with Mikala for eight years. Five of them married.”

“I’m just asking about your life,” Ollie said.

“No, this is some weird jealousy thing over a nonexistent person.”

She pointed the neck of her beer at me. “And you’re not answering the question.”

“I will admit to fucking a zucchini when I was in high school. For years I thought I was a vegesexual.”

Ollie’s not a big laugher, but I caught her as she was drinking, and she had to purse her lips and put down the bottle. For Ollie, that was the equivalent of a spit take.

“How about you?” I asked. “Ever do one?”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Boys were never an issue.”

“I was talking about vegetables.”

She started to answer, then froze, her eyes on a reflection in the window. “Here we go,” she said.

This time I resisted the urge to spin around. After an appropriate pause, I glanced casually over my shoulder. Two men had come in, a guy in his sixties with a silver ponytail and a younger man in a Mercury baseball cap. I don’t know how Ollie recognized them, because she’d told me that she hadn’t met them before. They took a table in the back with no view of the water.

After a few minutes we walked over, carrying our drinks to look natural. They didn’t get up. We shook hands, and their palms were dry as burlap. Ollie had said they’d be First Nations people, but if she hadn’t told me I would have put down their ethnicity as Weathered. The older one had a face like a crumpled paper bag, and his companion looked out from under his cap with a squint that suggested too many hours out on the water.

We sat down across from them. No one spoke.

These were the second and third drug smugglers I’d ever met, but they supplied a much more dangerous product than Fayza’s marijuana: the second-most addictive substance known to man or woman.

I wished Dr. Gloria were there; she could always settle my nerves. After a long while—probably only ten or twenty seconds, but it felt like a minute, all of us staring at each other—I said, “So. You guys smuggle cigarettes.”

The men stared at me. Ollie tensed but said nothing.

The man in the ball cap said, “Yah. Pretty much.”

Ontario was rife with smoke shacks, most of them on First Nations property, that sold illegal cigarettes smuggled in from the States. Rogue factories on the other side of the border, most of them also on Native American reservations, pumped out millions of cheap, untaxed, generic cigarettes a year. You couldn’t blame the Indians. We took their land; they were giving us cancer. Of course, we also gave them alcoholism, poverty, and type II diabetes, so we were still coming out ahead on the deal.

Black-market cigarettes were big business in Canada, had been since the seventies. Oh, there were intermittent crackdowns, and joint task forces of RCMP and FBI and Six Nations police that made big busts on the evening news. But there was no political will for a war on tobacco. The border was just too damn long, and too many people liked their cheap smokes. What politician wanted to shoot their own economy in the foot? Besides, nobody liked to look like the bully when dealing with the indigenous peoples.

Ollie spelled out the logistics of what we needed. The old man said nothing, and the young one said nothing but, “Sure. Yah. No problem.”

Ollie said, “I’ve heard you’ve had some problems with the rowboats. Interference.”

I thought, Rowboats?

“Not ours,” the young one said.

My pen chimed. I glanced down at the name scrolling across the narrow body of the pen and said, “I’ve got to take this.”

Ollie said, “Lyda—”

I put up a hand in apology and walked away from them. “Rovil,” I said into the pen. “What do you got?”

“I can’t believe it,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“I can show you the numbers. Can you switch to video?”

I glanced over my shoulder. Grumpy and Son were eyeing me. “Maybe later,” I said.

“I’ll mail them,” Rovil said. “The sample’s not pure, and there are other chemicals mixed in it that look biological. But over ninety percent falls within the spectral range. It’s ours, Lyda. It’s NME One-Ten.”

“Shit.”

A curse of resignation, not surprise. As soon as I met Francine at the NAT, weeping and tripping on God and talking about “the Numinous,” I
knew
it was NME 110 out there. But believing wasn’t evidence. The hardware in the chemjet printer told me that the church’s drug wasn’t just another MDMA or LSD knockoff, but this was the first proof that it was our drug. There was no arguing with a mass spectrometer.

“Where did you find it?” Rovil asked. “Who made it?”

“I found it in a church,” I said. “Some brand-new religion. They made it on a custom printer, and we have to assume it’s not the only one.”

“So this made-up religion—”

“I didn’t say made-up. I said brand-new. ‘Made-up religion’ is redundant.”

Rovil laughed, too comfortable to take offense. He knew God was real; he had Ganesh to tell him so. “This
brand-new
church,” he said. “They made the printer themselves?”

“I can’t see how. Hardware like that takes a load of cash, and these guys were set up in a fucking storefront. So it’s either a millionaire or a drug cartel. Or a millionaire running a drug cartel.”

“Lyda, drug dealers? You shouldn’t be—”

“You wouldn’t believe the people I’m hanging out with these days.”

Ollie was crossing the room toward me, looking concerned. I covered the phone. “What is it?” I asked her.

Ollie said, “They don’t like it when customers hop up and start making calls in the middle of a conversation. Is that Rovil?”

“Yep.”

Her eyes widened. She could see the excitement in my face. “So it’s for real then.”

“
Oh
yeah.” I nodded behind her. “So how much do they want?”

“Thirty-five thousand Yuan.”

Holy shit. She said it’d be expensive, but I hadn’t been thinking
that
much. I wasn’t sure what the current Yuan-to-Canadian exchange rate was, but these guys were asking for somewhere around $11,000.

“Apiece,” Ollie said.

“Wait,
what
?”

“You have the money, right?”

I’d told her not to worry about the money. Which was not to say that I actually had the money. I said, “That’s not what I’m talking about. Eleven K
apiece?
”

“I’m going with you,” she said. She looked up at me with those dark eyes, her face set.