Alone Again Or | Page 2

here can afford white and not enough of your types come down to my apartment to make it worth the risk to have around. You in or out?"
"Three dollars," she said.
"Done. How many spoons?"?
"Twenty."
They made the exchange. When she was gone Syd put the money in the box under his bed which was filled with money and waited for the alarm in the ceiling to go off, and for the doors to automatically lock.?
He saw the girl outside walking quickly up the street. When she turned a corner Syd pictured her giving the bag to an agent from the MP and waited. Nothing happened.
You're not going to get arrested, not on your wedding day, he thought. He waited ten more minutes to make sure he wasn't going to be under arrest and got up. He put his coat on and left for the agency.
Jennifer sat on the round wooden bar stool and tried to ignore the music around her. Bodies sweated, lights flashed, and the whole place shook with the noise of drunken college students.
She swiveled in her bar chair, her glass of straight vodka half empty. The students looked young to her, almost babyish, although she could remember being their age. The bar wasn't strict about making sure everyone was of age, she knew. Most of the people dancing on the crowded cement dance floor were probably eighteen or nineteen. The kid throwing up in the corner she was certain was eighteen at the most.?
A bouncer already was descending on him as Jennifer watched. She knew the boy would end up in the alley behind the bar. Maybe he would make his drunken way to a street where a cab could be hailed; maybe he would sleep in the alley and wake up without shoes or a wallet.?
If the second happened, she knew, he'd have company. For some time she'd been one of the pickpockets who sat behind the dumpsters, throwing dice to decide who caught the next drunk kid to be thrown out. It hadn't been a bad way to make money; she'd been in a group of five people, three of which were girls, and she'd been able to stay drunk all the time on the money. They'd made sure that none of the kids got beaten, or raped, or anything. She'd considered stealing their petty cash a small payment in return for not waking up topless in the street with a pain in your crotch or asshole, depending.?
On one night one of her group went after someone who wasn't drunk enough, someone who'd merely been in a fight inside over a girl. The mark had had a fighting chain in his sleeve, a Manriki, and he almost killed Jona, the girl who went after his wallet. He'd been very drunk, but very good with the chain. Jona sobered up in the hospital, they discovered she was telepathic; and so she was arrested and sent to The Agency. Jennifer's group stopped robbing college kids behind Allen's. They all went their separate ways.
But she still had to make money, to keep the vodka coming. She needed the vodka in a way that none of the kids gyrating under the distorted music would ever understand. She looked at the clock. It was only two thirty. Closer to three she'd make her final decision and go after the mark. Her eyes scanned the room and picked out three potentials.
Her glass of vodka emptied, she turned around and signaled the bar keep.?
He must know that she was there often, that sometimes she would tip well, and that she was too old to be in the bar for a legitimate reason, she thought. He probably thought she was a drug dealer or a pedophile.?
She didn't care.
He poured straight vodka into her glass, the kind made synthetically from the starchy waste of the city. Clothes, starchy foods gone bad, paper to flimsy to be made into more paper. She sipped it.
I wonder when I stopped noticing the taste, she thought.
Syd walked in the direction the pretty follower of Kenna had walked. He did not have a car; with the amount of money he had under his bed he could have purchased a gasoline car or several battery cars if he wanted. But Steeple City had good transportation, even in the outer arc. He hated cars. He wondered if his wife would want one.?
The first time he'd ever been in a car was on the way to his grandmother's funeral. His father, a fat man with dark hair and a screw necklace, had drank too much foc. It was legal then. Syd, at eight, could tell his father had drunk too much because the old man was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. The car had been rented for the funeral procession. The