Emma Bull (26 page)
Authors: Finder
Talking Heads
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She was tired—reasonable enough,
I
was tired, it had been a hell of a day—and said, if I didn't mind, she'd as soon sleep in the armchair as stumble off home.
"I mind," I answered. "You can have the bed."
"Where will you sleep?" She really did look tired; her eyelids drooped, her shoulders drooped, and her head was carried a little crooked, like a rose beginning to sag on the stem.
"Same place I slept before I got the bed. On the floor."
"Aren't you a little bruised and chipped for that sort of thing?"
"Nah. Foam pad and a sleeping bag will take care of it."
She protested a little, but only a little. She slid from the chair over to the bed in one boneless motion, and seemed to fall asleep as soon as she landed.
It didn't sound like a restful sleep. I lay on the floor in my sleeping bag listening to her cough, because I knew I'd wake up every time she did it, anyway. Not a familiar sound. Tick-Tick had been hurt before, and sick drunk once in my memory (tequila shots, immoderately taken, will make even an elf sick), and mildly food-poisoned a couple of times, from one cause or another. I couldn't remember ever hearing her cough before, and the strangeness of it, and the intensity, brought me fully conscious every time she did it.
When the light through the window got to be too much to ignore, and the room warmed up too much for
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the s
leeping bag, I got up and put a kettle of water on. I was out of peppermint tea, which the Ticker
would have liked, and out of
licorice root, which she wouldn't have liked but which
would have been
good for her. There was purple coneflower, though, which according to Ms. Wu was good for the
immune system. Okay, better late than never. I made a pot, poured out two cups (I had no idea if I could catch anything she could catch, but a well-groomed immune system is an ornament to one's life at the best of times), and took hers to the bedside.
"Hullo," she croaked. Tick-Tick usually wakes up quickly and gracefully, unlike yours truly. This was obviously not going to be one of the usual days.
"Tea. Do you want honey in it?"
"No, thank you. I'm sorry if I kept you up. I did, didn't I?"
I thought about lying politely, but it would have been pointless. "I think Linn gave you his stupid cold."
"I think you're right. Probably the day before yesterday; he was coughing at the hospital."
"I hope he's miserable."
"For shame, dear heart. I assure you, I'm not miserable. Indeed, once we finish this pot of tea, I think we should venture out for breakfast. Oh, but I was
so
weary last night, as if all the virtue had been drawn off from my blood!"
She spoke in a good, strong, lively voice, but spoiled it by coughing at the end.
"I can cook something here."
"Certainly. This from the boy who had to beg beer from his neighbor last night, and I know very well that if you have nothing else consumable in the kitchen, you have beer. I had something more sustaining in mind to break my fast than fried water."
She was right, of course. "I can go out and get something and cook it here."
"No, my dear, if I'm in a weakened state, the last thing I need is your cooking. Huevos rancheros at Taco Hell will set me up to a nicety, if it's open yet."
It was, for a wonder. Mingus, in fact, looked as if he hadn't been to bed yet, which didn't interfere with his cooking. I looked around for his sister Electra, without much hope; she's not the kind of girl who sees eight o'clock in the morning very often. If she was seeing it that day, she wasn't doing it at Taco Hell. One less compelling distraction. I had, suddenly, an urge to know what Sunny Rico was doing at eight in the morning. Idle curiosity.
The Ticker and I ate, and talked about nothing very consequential. We avoided the matter that had absorbed us all day yesterday as if we were under a compulsion. Tick-Tick explained to me that fresh salsa was the best remedy for a cold the world has ever known, and I wanted to know, if that was true, why hospital food was bland.
She laughed, and coughed, and, suddenly serious, said, "I'm sorry I told Rico that you didn't like hospitals."
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I shrugged. "No reason why you s
houldn't. I didn't think you knew."
"You've never said, all in one piece, what your life was like before you came to the Borderlands. But you've said bits of things… I suppose it's like knowing who lives in a house by the washing they hang on the line. I've come to understand that your family thought of your talent much the way my family thought of mine." She began to pleat her napkin. "I believe that your mother didn't like you very much."
"No, she just had a lot on her mind." It still bothered me, though. You're supposed to be able to count on your mother putting in a good word for you in spite of everything. All those serial killers, down through history, whose mothers swore to the reporters, "He would never have done that—he was a
good
boy."
"Why?"
"Why, what?" I'd lost the thread.
"Why did she have such a lot on her mind?"
"Oh. Because I busted up her marriage. Or at least that's what Dad said in the message on the answering machine."
Her brows climbed up her forehead. "The
answering machine
?"
"He's a modern kind of guy. Mom picked me up after track practice, we came home, she played back the messages while I made us a snack, and there it was."
Tick-Tick sat with her mouth open, until another round of coughing seized her. She gulped water and croaked, "Mab and all attendants. What did he say?"
"He said," (and I knew exactly what he'd said, even after all those years, but I preferred to paraphrase it),
"that he'd had his chromosomes checked, and they were normal, so it had to be her fault, genetically, that their only child was a mutant weirdo, and he was going to find a normal woman and have children with her before he was too old to father a proper son."
The Ticker thought about this. "I'm sorry to have to say it to your face, but I think your father was not the most well-spoken man I've ever heard tell of. What, then, did your mother do?"
"She'd been a nurse, before I was born. She got recertified, and got work in a hospital emergency room.
Which, she found out, is a hell of a lot different from being some specialist's office nurse, which was what she was used to. I gotta tell you, in the list of jobs you should not take home with you, night shift ER is right up there. And it made her kind of… unstable. She started saying things to me, out loud, that she'd probably thought before, but at least hadn't felt the urge to share. So," I shrugged again, "I have bad associations with hospitals."
"Gracious," Tick-Tick said mildly. "Most of us simply go straight to the source and have bad associations with our mothers."
That made me sort of laugh, which was a better way to end the meal. Tick-Tick stood up from the table and said she was going home.
"Should I come along?" I asked.
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"Wha
tever would I do with you underfoot? No, I believe you have an errand to run."
"I do?"
"I distinctly remember hearing you say that Rico needed to know about yesterday's events."
"Yeah. But…"
"But what?"
"I mean… will you be all right?"
"Good grief," she said, a little explosion in words. "I only have a cold."
"Okay, okay. Make some chicken soup or something."
"Yes, my keeper. Now do make yourself scarce."
We parted on the sidewalk. I heard, behind me, the sound of her cough.
There weren't a lot of people at the Chrystoble Street copshop. Shift change had been hours ago, and in Bordertown, as in most places, first shift is a relatively quiet time for the cops. The one with desk duty was the green-haired halfie woman with the dragon tattoo I'd seen the last time I'd been in the station, the ill-fated morning that Walt Felkin blew up. There was another guy I didn't recognize, who seemed to be filling out a claim for somebody, at one of the long tables; and there was Captain Hawthorn, who walked through the door that led to the back rooms just as I came in.
He was surprised, in a well-bred sort of way. "Orient! I had no idea you were up and around already.
Are you certain you're not pushing yourself?"
"No, just walking like normal." That got me a blank look from Hawthorn and a little noise from the desk cop. "Is
Rico
here?"
Hawthorn looked to the desk cop, who told me, "Nope. I think she's at home. I suppose I can give you the address…"
"Don't worry," I said, "I'll find it." Thataway.
"Is there anything I can help with?" Hawthorn asked.
Rico thought we were looking, at least in part, for a cop. "No, just checking in. Almost a social call actually. See you."
Rico lived in a nicer neighborhood than I did. Not that mine's a bad neighborhood, just that anyplace where you can live without paying rent won't be the aesthetic equivalent of Boardwalk and Park Place.
And it wasn't that Rico lived on the Hill, either. Thataway said she was behind the facade of one of a block of red-brick row-houses. Their steps and mortar were in good repair, and none of the windows had blankets substituting for curtains, which told me that all of the people who lived there had done so for a while and planned to go on doing it. The row fronted on a street split down the middle by a broad median strip planted with grass and trees.
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I triangulated a little and deter
mined that hers would be the second door from the east end. Yes, four
mechanical bells mount
ed in the doorframe, and "Rico" under the top one. Fourth
floor. She probably
chose it on purpose to keep in shape. I twisted the bell knob.
Just to my left I heard a distant bonging noise, like
someone
whacking a
radiator at the far end
of a pipe. It was a speaking tube, I discovered.
"Who is it?" asked the far-away voice, which was probably Rico's.
"It's Orient," I shouted back.
That produced a nerve-racking silence. It hadn't previously occurred to me that she might not
want
to see me, or that this might be a bad time, or that she might be annoyed that I'd found her doorstep and shown up on it. No, she'd said, next time come wake me up, but this wasn't the next time, exactly…
"I'll come down," the voice said, and I felt a wave of relief big enough to surf on. Then I wondered what I'd been expecting, since being told to go away wouldn't have done me any lasting damage.
As I would have expected, it didn't take Sunny Rico much time at all to come down four flights of stairs.
I saw her through the heavy glass in the door; she came loping round the corner and down the last few steps into the little dim-lit tiled hall with the smooth, swooping motion of a good hurdler. Whatever stresses this case had put her under, they hadn't cut into her energy.
