Strawman Made Steel Read Online Free Page B

a
drop of whiskey, if you’ve got it. I’ve a headache on a comeback.”
    He decanted a turgid-looking black liquid
into a cup, added sugar and something from an unlabeled bottle, and set it down
on the desk in front of me.
    He sat and seemed to enjoy a moment’s
silence.
    I took a swig of coffee, burnt my mouth,
and noted its surprisingly hard kick.
    “So what is it?” said Inker. “That Pursell
stock tank and now you want to pay me back?” he said, but he was smiling. He
knew I never took his advice.
    “What do you know about the Speighs?”
    “We talking about the New York Speighs?” I
nodded. “What do you want to know?”
    “Whatever you’ve got. What they’re into.
What shape they’re in.”
    “Nothing pear-shaped, is a good bet.” He
swiveled till his back faced me, and began picking over ranks of folders lining
the rear wall of his office. “They are the ever-so rare marriage of old money
and true cunning.”
    “Cunning?” I probed.
    “Aha,” he said, and slipped a folder from
among a thousand that looked the same to me. It was an inch thick. He slapped
it on the desk, opened it, and began leafing through its loose sheaf of papers.
    From where I sat, it looked to be a
dossier. Prospectuses, year-end reports, notices of dividend, and news
clippings. But covering every inch of space were scribbled messages, balloons,
and connecting lines, as though the dossier had been left within reach of a
bored kid with a pencil and a jar of amphetamines. If it was a mind map, Inker’s
head was the Wild West.
    “I’m surprised you never heard of them,” he
said, pausing to write on the sheet under his hand. The tips of his fingers
were smudged with graphite.
    “I didn’t say I hadn’t.”
    He reached the last page and closed the
folder.
    I drank more coffee and lamented my dead
tastebuds.
    “In short?” he said. “If it’s in the
dictionary, they own a piece of it. They’ve got hedges on hedges.”
    “Specifically?”
    “They’re silent partners on half the
enterprises in New York.”
    I must have looked skeptical.
    “Okay,” he said, “I’m exaggerating, but
they’ve got hooks in banks, hotels, breweries, a nice slice of the exchange,
legacy biotech, casinos, stables, charities, contracts with City Hall―”
    “Which casinos?”
    “Broadway, Diogenes, Fontana.”
    I downed the rest of my coffee and changed
my mind about those taste buds.
    I said, “Anything shady?”
    Inker’s live eye rested on me a moment,
calculating, before he replied, “I don’t do that stuff any more.”
    I countered, “But it’s prudent to know.”
    Inker tilted his head. “Sure. Everybody has
wheels that need greasing.”
    I stood, and said, “Thanks.” He must have
spied my .38.
    “When did you last use that?”
    I lifted a coat flap as if to confirm it
was still there. A redundant gesture. All day, every day I could feel its
killing mass slotted into the speed rig, tucked up under my arm, lying against
my heart.
    “Last night. One shot. Killed a bitch.”
    “Anyone I know,” said Inker, and laughed
like a jester. Then, quietly: “I never did say thanks, for that business with
Gillian.”
    “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
    He seemed surprised, then said, “Me too. It
still might.” His good eye had a sheen like the glass one.
    I let myself out, past the teletypist who
still hadn’t registered my existence. I noticed for the first time how
knotted-up her fingers were, like oak roots, and wondered what age transcoders
took their pension.
    As I headed across town, I also wondered how
long it would be before Inker’s Speigh dossier listed the shirt on my back.
     
    The headquarters of Atlas Consolidated
was housed in a pillbox that reached forty-seven floors into the smog above
East 13th Street, not far from the dust of the last Palladium. The building sat
back from the street, and in the middle of the plaza out front rose a twenty-foot
statue of its mascot. Pigeons roosted in the clefts made