‘She’d much rather put a knife to your windpipe than a tenner in your back pocket. It’s all a matter of nuance.’
Pen looked at me with glum resentment. ‘I’m not appreciating the nuances right now, Fix. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s all I can do to keep up with the logistics. Can you spell me? I haven’t slept since the last time I saw you.’
‘Sleep now,’ I suggested. ‘They’re not going to try anything in broad daylight – especially not if they’re expecting the courts to give them a thumbs-up to throw you out tomorrow.
She blinked in slow motion, her shadow-rimmed eyes not wanting to open again once she’d let them close.
‘But you’ll stay?’ she pressed, the words forced out of her. ‘I can’t sleep unless I know someone’s watching. Someone who cares about him.’
It wasn’t what I wanted to do: I was thinking of the fight I had ahead of me; of Myriam Kale riding Doug Hunter back out into the world when I still hadn’t made a single move against the real enemy – when I didn’t even know who or how many they were, and wouldn’t begin to find out until I’d raided Maynard Todd’s office and turned over his files.
But I could see that Pen’s natural resilience had reached its limits: she looked brittle, strained, liable to break in pieces at any moment.
‘I’ll stay,’ I said. ‘Put your head down. I’ll wake you in an hour.’
As things turned out, I gave her four and some odd minutes.
Soul and flesh are friends! Soul and flesh will mend! Death is not the end!
I gave them one out of three.
I killed the time while I was waiting by looking over the sheet music again, reading it as Luke/Speedo had told me to, and trying to sound the rhythms – the beats and the pauses, the overlaps and elisions – inside my head.