The Robot and the One You Love | Page 7

there.
The short one nodded his head and began to repack the cold bag. The tall one fired a shot that hit Connie in the middle of the forehead. The impact slammed her against the wall, and the shooter walked over to where she sprawled with her legs and arms flung wide, and put another shot into the inside curve of her left breast, into the heart.
"Go home," he said to Jerome in the flat voice of a poker player asking the dealer for two cards. "Someone will be along to take care of things--the woman, the car. Don't say anything to anybody, and don't ever bother us again. Understand?"
With her blood on him and the smell of her death in his nostrils, Jerome understood. The two men didn't wait for him to say so. They were gone.
The shuttle to Reno lifted straight up from a pad of cracked cement on the edge of the almost-town. Inside the old swing-wing jet, the stink of sweat came off tattered green upholstery. Over the mountains the plane swayed and bucked in rough air that penetrated Jerome's stunned grief and guilt and made him white with nausea.
In Reno the airport was bright blue cement, red steel, and a forest of mirrors, and Jerome and the diener were insignificant among thousands returning east, most having blown sensible amounts, a few telling stories of big casino wins, a few more nursing the gut ache that comes with big-time loss, the one you can't afford.
"You're sure the compartment is pressurized," Jerome said to the woman behind the United counter. The diener had already been checked through, but Jerome was anxious.
"Hey, Jackie," the woman said. "This guy's shipping a robot. You wanna talk to him? I'm busy." She was in her early twenties with bright, sexy eyes, and obviously did not give a shit.
"Fuck you," Jerome said. And walked away.
"Next," the woman said.
On the flight to Washington, the cabin was dark, and Jerome sat sleepless in the gloom, confronting the blank recognition that he had known little about Connie Stone, and he wondered who she was, and more... wondered about them... what were the odds that their passion would have endured past the moment's hot radioactive burn? At Dulles there was rain and fog and crowds dispersing quickly off two incoming flights.
The diener rolled up a ramp into the rear compartment of an airport limo; Jerome sat among the half-dozen glum people inside. As the limo moved along the Dulles Parkway, no one said a word, which was fine with Jerome. He could barely imagine trying to talk to anyone about anything.
Late afternoon the following day, Jerome sat on the minute terrace outside his bedroom. Through open glass doors he could hear the quiet swish of the diener as it moved through the room.
Jerome's voyeurism was gone, its energies extinct. He thought that maybe his curiosity had gone with it, though he did wonder about one thing.
"Diener," he called, and the robot came onto the terrace. "How do you think I.G. Biochemie found us?" Jerome asked. He breathed in the burned hydrocarbons from the street ten stories below. The diener stayed silent. "I used to think I was pretty good at this game," Jerome went on, "but they burned me down, they caught us."
"No," the diener said. "Not your fault."
"Of course it is."
"No. I told them."
Coming out of the chair, Jerome put his hands under the edge of the diener's porcelain shell . He thought, Of course you did, in a moment more of recognition than of discovery. He grunted as he levered the diener's body sideways so that it rested against the white-painted terrace railing. The diener's tentacles quivered like agitated black worms.
"To save your life," the diener said. "I made a deal with them. They would never have forgotten you, they would have killed you. Why do you worry about that woman? She was a thief, a murderer"
"You little shit."
Under the diener's weight and Jerome's push, the rail came free, and the diener tumbled in bright sunlight. Smashing through a sculpture of black wrought iron, it plunged through rippling water, and its body shattered on the fountain's concrete and sandstone bottom.
Over the chatter of people gathering around the fountain, Jerome's wail could be heard coming from high above.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/
2 RTEXTR*ch

A free ebook from http://www.dertz.in/