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Wills asked: “ You want Browning to ask a few questions?”
Salvatore sca
Browning had talked to The Pacific, who’d referred Dekker down the row to The Black Hole, and sent his card there when the management at The Hole had called for it. Browning had had the sense to query Wills before any next step, and Wills had told Browning not to follow that lead too closely: Dekker was apparently still there, The Hole was a quiet place with no apparent reason to lie to The Pacific, but Dekker hadn’t used the card at The Hole after he’d gotten it—which indicated Dekker must have some acquaintance there—or that he’d found some means of support—meaning hiring out for something, ditching the card for a while, not an uncommon dodge for a man evading the cops: prostitution was the ordinary way for somebody with reason to duck the System—or if not that, he had to have friends.
Wills said: “ Bird and Pollard are staying there. We checked them earlier.”
Bird and Pollard. Salvatore searched his recent memory.
“ The ones that claimed his ship,” Wills said. “ The ones that brought him in. Ship claim went through. The company paid. But Bird and Pollard saved his life. My guess is he looked them up, with what idea I don’t know, but evidently it wasn’t war. He’s staying there, evidently on one of their cards.”
Not necessarily looking for trouble, then—searching out the only two people he knew made perfect sense. Healthy sense, even. Salvatore sipped at a cooling cup of coffee, thought about it, and said: “All right, all right, the boy’s got himself settled. Long as he’s quiet, understand? Just get a list of the current residents. Run backgrounds. That sort of thing.”
“ Copy that,” Will said. “ We can do it on a tax check.”
“Do it.”
They’d gotten the lawsuit dropped—the report had convinced the EC board, a closer call than the kid knew about. But he’d signed the accident report—he was out of hospital and if he just for God’s sake got a job and settled, he was fine. Visconti said rehab might not be productive right now. There was a lot of hostility.
So let him run through the Human Services money. Let him settle and think about surviving. There wasn’t any negligence, there wasn’t any charge to file, and Dekker didn’t go to trial, however much Alyce Salazar wanted his head. Salazar was threatening civil suit now, to tie up the bank account and the insurance, but Crayton’s office said don’t worry about it: the daughter was over 18, the partnership was signed and legal, with a survivor’s clause, and the account was jointly acquired, anyway. Dekker was safe: there was no legal way Salazar was going to get at him.
Thatcard could go in the pending settlement stack.
Strolling along the frontage spinward of The Hole, Sal had things of her own to say. And for openers, since Meg wasn’t getting started: “I’ll tell you this, Kady, we got to get him out of there, God, of all places for him to come!”
“Natural enough.”
“Natural! He said it, they friggin’ took every lovin’ thing he owned—what’s he going to do, forget it?”
Meg walked a few steps further. Kicked at a spot on the decking. “Du
“Forgive, hell!”
Another silence. “You know, brut frank, Sal—there’s a difference in Ben and Bird.”
“We’re talking about Dekker. Or why are we out here?”
“We’re talking about that. Calmati, calma, hey?”
“So say! Doesn’t make sense so far!”
“I tell you, I never had any use for the mother-well. You less.”
“Damn right.”
“Watch it go, right? Screw it all, all that shiz.—But—I get out here, Sal, I du
“So? Why did he?”
“You know you don’t say ‘morning’.”
“Of course I say morning. And what’s that to Flaherty, anyhow?”
“You say it because I say it. You didn’t come saying it. Or ‘evening’. Brut different, Sal.”
“So?”
“Different the way Bird’s different from us. Never saw how the motherwell matters til I figured that.”
“That’s shit.” Sal hated soppiness. This was getting soppy, it wasn’t like Meg, and it was making her increasingly uncomfortable.
“May be shit,” Meg said. “But I know why Bird paid.”
“Because the motherwell makes you crazy.”
“Dekker’s from the motherwell. At least from Sol Station—which is close enough for ‘mornings’.”
“Accent tells you that.”
“Yeah. But we thinkin accents. That’s what I’m talking about. Yours and mine. I can turn my back on the motherwell, I can take what I want and leave the rest. Bird’s not rab, Bird’s just norm, but I know how his mind works—I dealt with there, remember.”
“Are they all fools?”
“Fools, peut et’. But not the only. You mind me saying, Sal—you’re going to be a skosh bizzed at me over this—”
Puzzles and puzzles. A body could be irritated at motherwell Attitudes, too. “All right. So we got this deep secret difference. It’s worth five. Go.”
“Head-on, then—MamBitch is scamming her kids.”
“Is that new?”
“It is when you don’t see it. You know, even the vids that get out here, they’re pure shit, Aboujib, they’re company vids. They’re slash-vids, cop-chasers, fool-fu
“Neg.” She looked at Meg with the slight suspicion Meg was talking down a long motherwell nose at her, a long thirtyish nose at that. But Meg hadn’t made sense enough yet to make her mad. “This going somewhere significant eventually?”
“It’s the Institute, all over again. Understand? You didn’t take the shit there. But you don’t say ‘morning’—”
“F’ God’s sake, Kady, good morning, then!”
“But Belters don’t say it. Bird remarked it to me once: Belters don’t and Sol Station will. Belters don’t give you a second cup of coffee without you pay for it. On Sol Station you expect it. Belters don’t give you re-chances. You screw up once, you’re gone, done, writ off—”
“E-vo-lution. Don’t let fools breed.”
“Corp-fad, Aboujib. It’s wasn’t always that way.”
Down a damned long motherwell nose.
“You take a look at corp-rat executives the last couple of years, Aboujib? Seen the clothes? Rab gone to suits.”
“So? Poor sods still got it wrong.”
“No. No. They got it right. Idon’t say on purpose—I’m not sincerely sure they have that many neurons compatible—but they likethe rab. In their little corp-rat brains, shit, yeah, dump the past, let the company say what’s fad, what’s rab, and what’s gone—they don’t ever like some blue-sky lawyer citing charter-law at ‘em, so that’s gone. Don’t teach anybody about the issues: all us tekkie-types and pi-luts need is slash-vids and fu
Corp-fad made an ugly kind of sense. The Institute was without question MomCorp’s way of making little corp-rat pilots—she’d seen that happening: she wouldn’t salute the logo and they’d found a way to can her, right fast.