Chapter 18 #3
He wavers at the point of just running for it.
Knocking over all these good hard-working Gehirner in his panicked flight, the mad possum snapping at his heels.
In the end he finds he just doesn’t have the energy for it.
Life has made too many demands of him recently.
He could do without one more chase. Instead, he turns to face her.
Two Americans abroad. Not even standing tall, not bristling, no threat display. He’ll go calmly if it’s his time to go.
Maria stops, eyes him up and down. She doesn’t have her spiker actually out and in sight, but she could probably get it pointed in his direction before he reached her, if he decided to close.
“Did I leave my keys?” Skotch asks acidly. “Or you want to share a ride home?”
She scowls at him. Bared teeth, mad eyes, but that’s just resting possum face. Which means he has zero indication of whether she’s going to go for him or not.
“Benson’s going to have you offed,” she tells him.
It’s absolutely the sentiment he was expecting but it’s not the tense. “I mean, you’re carrying, and you’re right here in front of me. I don’t see that the situation needs this kind of formality.” Tensed to leap, if that’s all the option he’s given.
“Once he’s got the mouse, or once the mouse is dead. Because of what you know,” Maria says.
“I don’t know jack,” Skotch says, heartfelt.
“Sure you don’t,” she says, then adds, “and probably you don’t. But just in case the mouse told you. To stop it ever getting out. Doesn’t want you turning up and asking for a bucket of Plangent and buttons just to stop anyone hearing of what might have been.”
“And what might have been?” Skotch demands of her.
Possums aren’t really built to shrug, but the hunch of her spine implies it. “I don’t want to know, Skotch. Cos then I’d be on the list too. But maybe you ought to find out, given they’ll kill you for it anyway. Maybe that gives you some leverage.”
Skotch opens his mouth, closes it. Understands that he knew this was the deal, at some deep level, and that he could have pried down to the heart of the mystery if he’d wanted.
But easier just to stomp around and ask questions of people he knew would never give him a straight answer.
And probably most of the animals in this particular race don’t quite know what the trophy is, at the end; just that there is one.
But those who know are jealous of it. He’d understood, at heart, that this was the sort of knowledge that gets you killed.
And now, like it’s paint or radioactivity, he’s been around it long enough that it’s on his fur. He’s marked as knowing too much even though he doesn’t know enough. The two untenable poles of the situation. So maybe Maria is right. Maybe he needs to take that middle ground of knowing just enough.
“Why even tell me this?” he asks Maria. “Not like you owe me.”
“They paid off Fitch’s gelt,” she says. “The stoat with the Country Club just turned up with a bag of buttons. So sorry we killed your man, here’s the fee.
All quits now, no hard feelings.” And of course that was how it worked.
You paid the gelt for a killing, and it was all clear between the two guilds or companies or whatever the factions were.
That way, there weren’t ongoing vendettas getting in the way of everyone doing their jobs and keeping the city running.
It was a good system right up until someone close to you got killed and you were supposed to take that bag of buttons and smile.
“Fitch was a mean, crooked, vicious son of a bitch,” says Maria. “But he was my partner and my friend. And I can’t just let that go because the Country Club has deep pockets.”
“And I thought you blamed me,” Skotch says.
“I blame you because it should have been you dead in that nook, and not him,” Maria says fiercely.
“I blame you for still breathing, Skotch. They hand over a sack of buttons for your corpse, I’m shedding not one tear.
But it ain’t your doing. You’re just bumbling cluelessly through all this.
We’re not friends, but you’re not the one spitting in my eye right now and telling me I got to like it.
So you take what I’ve got for you or not, but I reckon seeing you right is what I can do to piss off that stoat. ”
“And maybe Benson,” Skotch says, because precious little of what she’s said really has much of an impact on Szerky’s plans, the way he sees it.
“Maybe,” she admits. “We’re his people. He’s not supposed to just … take the money.”
And of course that’s exactly what Benson is supposed to do.
And Maria isn’t supposed to have such strong feelings of loyalty towards her dead partner that they override her bond with the company.
But that’s how they made her, it turns out, and Skotch isn’t in any position to turn down even this kind of mean and grudging help.