Afterparty Part 13

The Cat Lady scowled. She was a large, dark-skinned woman in her sixties, dressed in a red tank top and purple stretch pants. Her arms were sleeved in densely crowded tattoos that had blurred into paisley. "Fine," she said. "Just grab any old cat, why not."

I pointed to the orange monster on Bobby's lap. "Okay, this one."

"Shandygaff? Don't be ridiculous; he's too old."

"A kitten then."

"What?"

"Look, why don't you just pick one out for me?"

She closed her eyes, as if regretting ever letting me in the house. "Fine," she said.

She set down the two cats on her lap and began to look around the room. I could see fifteen, twenty cats, and no telling how many were in the kitchen and bedrooms.

Bobby yelped. He was clutching his treasure chest. "It clawed me!" he said.

"Settle down," I said.

The cat batted at Bobby's closed hands. "Lyda, please, get it off me."

"Let him play with your toy," the Cat Lady said.

"It's not a toy!"

She rolled her eyes. We were scoring no points with the Cat Lady. She put her hands on her hips, looked around at the bookshelves. "Ah! There you are!" She nabbed a black cat and pointed his face at me. He looked morose. "This is Lamont," she said.

"He's perfect," I said. "Where do we do this?"

The Cat Lady led me to the kitchen, a generous s.p.a.ce with white cabinets, a center island with bar stools, and old-fas.h.i.+oned white appliances. A plastic trough dotted with cat food lined one wall, where half a dozen cats paced, complaining. "It's not supper time yet," the Cat Lady told them. She shooed a big Persian from the top of the island.

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 f.u.c.king 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 b.u.mp. 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 b.u.t.ton.

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, was.h.i.+ng 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 b.u.g.g.e.r. 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 b.u.t.ton 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'.

h.e.l.lo 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-s.h.i.+rts 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 gla.s.s 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 bulls.h.i.+t phrase."

"It's a simple question. How long-"

"No, it's a signal that bulls.h.i.+t is about to follow. It's the hat that bulls.h.i.+t 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 f.u.c.king a zucchini when I was in high school. For years I thought I was a veges.e.xual."

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.