by Simon Logan
Kissy nods.
“I’ll go take a look at the clinic, see what I can see. You got any other pickups to make this evening?”
“That’s me done,” Kissy says.
“Needing a lift?”
“I’m good.”
“Okay,” Lady D says, revving the engine. “Oh, and Kissy?” she calls out, the other Tgirl already walking away.
“Yeah?”
“Just how reasonable are their prices?”
• • •
She finds the clinic quickly, parks the van outside a diner nearby and walks across.
All the lights are out, as she would have expected, but she takes no chances. She peers in through the front window but between the glass frosting and the blinds within she can’t see a thing. She listens. Nothing.
She reaches into her clutch bag and takes out a lipstick. Uncaps it and twists and, instead of a waxy block of make-up, a thin-edged blade emerges. She pokes it into the lock and works it around, hears a click. She then re-opens her bag, this time taking out a small flashlight, a small mirror, and some heel repair glue. She shines the light into the crack between the door and the frame until she finds what she is looking for, then grips the flashlight between her teeth. She uncaps the glue and squirts it over the back of the mirror then slides the mirror into the gap where she shines the light. There’s a momentary glow of red laser light and she holds it there for several moments, until the glue has set. She lets it go and the mirror stays where it is.
“And . . .”
She opens the door. Silence.
Smiles to herself.
She slips inside and closes the door behind her. Mounted on the wall to one side is the alarm system, chirruping every ten seconds or so to confirm that everything is okay, that none of the detection seals have been broken.
She removes her heels, placing them at the back of the door, then makes her way up the corridor. She listens at each door along the way then opens them one by one, the flashlight lighting her way. Two small surgeries. A cleaning closet. A small cupboard with a network hub and router mounted onto a metal rack, their lights flashing away. A private office.
And nobody there.
“Damn,” she says under her breath. Then louder, “Damn.”
She considers her options then walks back to the front door, enters the waiting area. Using the flashlight she locates the reception desk and opens the drawers but finds only blank sheets of stationery marked with the clinic’s name and a collection of pens and paper clips. Next she opens the filing cabinet behind her, having to use her lipstick tool to crack open the lock again. She flicks through surgical records until she finds a tab marked Employees.
She searches through the folders within and then pulls out the one stickered Bridget Soelberg.
She opens the folder and there is a colour photocopy of the woman’s driver’s license. A smooth, narrow face and bright pink hair. The address on it is illegible, however. She keeps going, stops on a tax form of some kind.
“Found you,” she says aloud, making a mental note of the address.
She puts everything back where she found it, closes the drawer and leaves the reception. She picks up her heels and is about to put them on then stops. Walks back up the corridor and into the first surgery. Using the flashlight’s meagre glow to navigate she goes to the glass-fronted and wall-mounted cupboards. One more use of the lipstick tool and the door pops open. She reaches in and takes out a couple of bottles labelled Botox as well as a some syringes in sealed packets.
“With the worry lines you’re probably giving me you owe me,” she says, then gets the hell out of there.
18.
There’s no alarm system in Soelberg’s apartment so, after satisfying herself that there’s nobody home, it’s a good old-fashioned lock-picking which gets her inside.
She takes out her pencil flashlight and flicks it on.
The apartment is small, the few pieces of furniture mis-matched as if gathered at random. There’s a kitchenette to one side and a pair of doors leading through into a bathroom and bedroom respectively. Both are littered with clothes and makeup. She examines the cupboards and refrigerator, mainly health foods past their expiration dates, then the books which line some shelves—old school science fiction and some pulp crime. On the counter is a box of disposable latex gloves. She checks through the stack of opened mail on the kitchen counter but there’s nothing of interest there so turns her attention to the trash bin.
“Hello,” she says to herself, pulling out crumpled up photographs and sticky notes. The photos are obviously hand-developed, enlargements of shots taken at a distance and all of the same man—he’s exiting a club, he’s ordering coffee, he’s adjusting his tie in a shop window. There are blurry Polaroids too, notes stickered to them with times and dates, locations.
An address.
“Is this where you are?” She vaguely recognises the street name but it’s at the very edges of the city limits, too far for her to go on a whim.
She stuffs the photos and notes back into the bin then sits before a small desk with TVs stacked on top of it. She hits the power buttons but they each display only static. She fingers the slots of the VCR decks underneath, finds a tape in one of them. She powers the deck up and hits play. Whatever it is on the tape ends as soon as it starts, returning the screen to which it is hooked up to static. She hits stop then rewinds for several seconds. Hits play again.
A couple making their way up a stairwell. They stop and start kissing then the woman leads the man up out of shot. There’s a moment of static then another camera angle, this one of the inside of another apartment. The couple move through it quickly. Static again. Another shot, this one looking down on a bed. The man removes the woman’s clothes.
Whilst the recording continues to play, Lady D reaches for the trash and takes out one of the photos, holds it up next to the screen. The man is definitely the one from the photos. The woman is definitely not Soelberg.
She opens the drawers of the desk one by one, searching around inside. She finds more videotapes, each labelled with a man’s name. A notepad. Then something rigid but soft. She takes it out and holds it up to her torchlight.
“You’re a little freak,” she says, twisting the vibrator from side to side.
She puts it back as, on screen, the man buries his face in the woman’s crotch. She flips through the notepad, past shopping lists and doodles. The final page with anything on it is titled Dream Man. Underneath is a list of traits, bullet-pointed.
Looks—Johnny Ca$h/dark cowboy.
Smart. Wicked smart.
Eyeliner?
She puts the pad down and rewinds the tape farther, static blitzing the sweaty, entwined bodies. She hits play again and this time the shot is of a street outside a club. It’s dark and the angle isn’t quite right but Lady D is certain she recognises it as Mood Lit, a fairly upmarket place only a couple of blocks away. The man from the photos and the mystery woman emerge together then it’s back to the stairwell where she had first started watching them. This time she notices something, something she had missed the first time around—the briefest of glances from the woman, right up at the camera.
“You know,” Lady D says. “You know . . . but he doesn’t does he?”
The shot cuts to the apartment then to the bedroom. Lady D hits the pause button, freezing the man with one of the woman’s ankles in each hand.
She flicks off the torchlight, sits in the darkness as she considers her next move.
She paces the length of the apartment as she thinks.
She could wait for Soelberg to return, of course, but there is no guarantee of when that would be, or even if she will return at all.
She could just forget all about Katja and see what happens, if the punk turns up for the gig to honour her debt and then deal with her if she doesn’t, but the risk of Katja vanishing was too great. Lady D has
a reputation to uphold.
Her pacing brings her to the apartment door and she thinks she hears something outside. She presses an ear to the door, realizes it is someone a couple of flights up, their keys jangling. She pulls away and there is something stuck to her face.
Another note.
It must have been slapped onto the back of the door. She peels it off and shines the light on it.
Tired waiting for u. Off to ML to find Dream Man. Txt u later. Liz.
Lady D crushes the note in her fist. “Time to get changed,” she says.
19.
Lady D is gone, at least for now.
Lady D is now, she has decided, Jake.
He feels an urge to pull at the bolo tie and loosen it but resists, aware that the woman named Liz is now approaching him.
He subtly tugs at his crotch, hating the feeling of being loose in there and not strapped into a gaff as he had been earlier that night. His feet are aching within the boots which may well have fitted him once but haven’t been worn in so long that they appear to have shrunk through disuse. The wig he wears, smeared in aged Brylcreem, itches at his scalp.
Liz is beside him now, leaning over the counter. She’s dressed simply, in jeans and a tight-fitting t-shirt which shows off her tattoos. Her hair is glossy-black, her lips the deep red of viral blood. She glances briefly at him, looks away deliberately, then orders a rum and coke for herself.
“Can I get you . . . anything?” she asks suddenly.
When Jake looks up at her she’s grinning sheepishly, looking as if she wished she’d never asked the question. He forces her.
“I’m sorry?”
“A drink,” she says, smiling a tipsy, crooked smile. “You’re . . . you’re empty.”
She nods at the glass in front of him, the remainder of a whiskey nothing more than a single drop of amber fluid.
“Oh,” he says, feigning surprise. “Sorry. I was miles away.”
“What you drawing?”
She looks down at the doodles on the napkins spread out before him. He’d made them before coming out, copying them from a book, and he’d spent the previous twenty minutes tracing over them but she doesn’t need to know that. A mixture of lines and undulating curves angling away from one another, scattered with letters and symbols.
“Oh,” Jake says, doing his best to look caught out. “They’re called Feynman diagrams. They represent the behaviour of . . . of subatomic particles. The . . . uh . . . the blue wave represents a photon. The green squiggle is a gluon.”
She raises an eyebrow but still looks interested. “And you come to a bar to draw these?”
Jakes puts on his best sheepish smile, avoiding eye contact with her, ensuring that he appears slightly shy and uncertain of himself. He’ll switch it up to a more domineering stance later but for now the woman needs to feel it’s her drawing him in, not the other way around.
“I guess I come to meet people,” he says. “But it doesn’t always work out that way.”
“Too much time doodling and not enough talking?” she says.
“Probably.”
The barman delivers her drink and she signals to him to wait. “So how about we do some talking?”
“Sure,” Jake says. “That’d be nice.”
He curls up the napkins and puts them in his pocket, taking long enough to do so that she will notice his hands. He’s made a good job of the nail polish, expertly applied then chipped away at the ends to make it look as if he has been wearing it for several days. The barman slides another whiskey in front of him.
So they start talking just like she suggested, Jake sticking with the slightly awkward demeanour he’d decided on, letting her lead the conversation as she gradually gets closer and closer to him.
“Can I get you another drink?” he asks her eventually. Four empty glasses are lined up before her.
“Sure,” she says and he notices her pupils are now fully dilated.
“But not here.”
“Then where?” Liz dips a finger into the bottom of her glass then slips the tip of it into her mouth, a little girl gesture and maybe she is performing as much as he is.
“Do you have somewhere we can go?”
“Yeah,” she says, then the coquettishness falls away. “Look, I don’t normally do this . . .”
“But sometimes things just click into place,” Jake finishes for her. “The superposition collapses.”
He smiles at his own absurdity and she bursts out laughing, leaning her head into him, her hand on his back.
“Exactly,” she says, looking him right in the eyes. “I was just going to say that myself.”
She laughs again and then kisses him.
When she pulls away her expression is more serious, assessing his reaction to what she has just done.
Jake reaches out and takes her hand.
“Then lets get out of here,” he says.
20.
Bridget kills the car’s engine but remains seated within it, her breath coming fast and sharp, almost painfully so. Her heart thuds in her chest and she can almost feel the blood rushing through the veins and arteries in her neck and temples. Her hands are shaking.
She still doesn’t know exactly how she is going to do this, to get Katja back from Stasko. Could she really expect to just walk back in there and ask for her back? Or threaten Stasko? Or somehow smuggle her out? Either would mean the end of everything as it stands.
But all she can think about is Liz.
Her eyes are red and raw from wiping away panicked tears on the drive across. Her mouth is dry.
She gets out of the car and walks to Flesh Heel, avoiding eye contact with the doormen on duty though they will obviously recognise her. Inside the place is still busy though the headache-inducing Euro-synth has now been replaced by retro goth and new romantic tracks. She heads straight for the door at the rear. Her hands linger over the keypad.
She considers, for the first time, what Stasko’s plans for the punk might be and how far into his planned surgeries he will be. Will she even be recognisable as the girl which Bridget had earlier delivered?
She punches in the secure code and slowly descends the stairs.
She doesn’t call out his name, not yet, perhaps hoping that the punk will be there by herself, briefly worrying that the punk might not be there at all.
The gurney is empty but the sheets atop it are ruffled. The machines around it look as if they have been hurriedly shoved out of the way. Bridget descends the rest of the way, still remaining as quiet as she can.
“Doctor?”
She notices something smeared across the ground next to the observation room and approaches slowly. It looks like toothpaste which has been spat out and left to dry.
“Doctor?” she asks again but still no reply. Maybe he’s gone back to the clinic to get additional equipment or off to one of his dealers for black market drugs. Perhaps she will be able to just sneak the girl back out after all.
She presses her face to the observation room’s window and peers in.
And sees Stasko sprawled on the ground.
She punches in the security code and throws open the door. A long smear of blood on the waxy floor beneath him indicates that he has dragged himself, or been dragged, towards the door.
“Doctor!” she calls out and rushes to his side.
He blinks to clear his vision, his thoughts. He holds out one hand and Bridget takes it.
“Bridget?”
“What happened?”
“The girl,” he says as she helps him to his feet. He touches his ear, clotted with dried blood, winces. “That fucking man.”
“What man?” she asks, wondering if he meant the man from the club, if he’d tracked down Katja before she could. But she came straight to Flesh Heel from the apartment, he couldn’t possibly have gotten there before her.
“The one you br
ought!” he shouted at her, pushing her away. He sways, still woozy and now without her for support. He leans on the counter behind him, smearing blood on it.
“Where is she?” Bridget asks. “What did she do to you?”
“She’s gone!” he screams and Bridget feels something plummet deep within her chest.
“She’s gone?” Bridget says, trying to get her head around the concept and what it means. “She . . . she can’t be gone . . .”
“Take a look around!” He switches on the tap and dabs water over his wound.
“But I have to find her.”
“You’re damn right you do, Nurse Soelberg,” he says, switching back to the more formal method of addressing her. “That fucking junkie you brought here helped her escape. This is your doing, your responsibility. Get out of here and go find her. Bring her back to me.”
Bridget’s mind spins, having trouble keeping up with the night’s events, now spiralling around her.
“But . . . I . . . I don’t . . .”
Her words falter. She has no idea what to do now. She thinks of Liz and her panic increases.
“How am I supposed to know where—”
“Your problem, Nurse Soelberg,” Stasko snaps, applying a cotton swab to his wound.
It was sheer luck that had enabled her to find the girl in the first place, what chance is there of her being able to do the same thing again? Particularly now that she is on the run, Katja will be even harder to find than she had been earlier. The only connection Bridget has is the squat and there is surely no way that the punk will be stupid enough to go back there, not after being grabbed from outside it—twice within ten minutes. She’ll need to head for somewhere else, somewhere she can lie low and get to quickly.
Someone Nikolai can go to as well.
21.
Heading towards Lindenmuth, trailing Bridget’s car at safe enough distance, Stasko still isn’t sure whether he can trust her any more.
There is something about her reaction to him telling her about Katja escaping that feels wrong to him and this feeling is compounded by the fact that it was Bridget who selected the guinea pig in the first place—the guinea pig who ended up helping the punk to break free. Bridget had made it clear throughout her time with him that she didn’t want any involvement in his special procedures but despite this he had always felt that he could trust her.
