“What if your friend’s not here?” Peaches asked as Amos poked at the elevator’s call button.
“Then we think of something else.”
“Any idea what?”
“Still nope.”
He was more than half-surprised when the elevator doors opened. Flood damage could have ruined the mechanism. Of course it could also get stuck halfway up, and they could die in it. When he selected the club level, the screen clicked to life. A broad-faced woman with a scar across her upper lip sneered out at him.
“The fuck you want?”
“Amos. Friend of Erich’s.”
“We got no fucking handouts.”
“Not looking for any,” Amos said. “Want to talk about a job.”
“No jobs either.”
Amos smiled. “You new at this, Butch? I have a job. I’m here to see if Erich wants in. This is the part where you go tell him there’s some psycho in the elevator wants to talk with him, then he says who is it, and you say the guy calls himself Amos, and Erich tries not to look surprised and tells you to let me up and —”
“For fuck’s sake!” Erich’s voice was distant, but recognizable. “Let him up, or he’ll talk all day.”
Butch scowled into the screen and blinked out to the blue arcology menu system. But the car started up.
“Good news is he’s here,” Amos said.
Erich’s office looked the same as the last time Amos had been in it – the same wall screen showing the
same ocean view, the rubber ball instead of a chair, the desk encrusted with decks and monitors. Even Erich didn’t look different. Maybe better dressed, even. It was the context that changed it all. The screen showed an ocean of gray and white, and Erich’s clothes looked like a costume.
Butch and the four other heavily armed thugs with professional trigger discipline who’d escorted them from the elevator walked out, closing the door behind them. Erich waited until they’d gone before he spoke, but the tiny fist of his bad arm was opening and closing the way it did when he was nervous.
“Well. Amos. You’re looking more alive than I’d expected.”
“Not looking too dead yourself.”
“As I recall the way we left it, you weren’t ever coming back to my city. Open season, I called it.”
“Wait a second,” Peaches said. “He said if you came back here, he’d kill you?”
“Nah,” Amos said. “He broadly implied that one of his employees would kill me.”
Peaches hoisted an eyebrow. “Yeah, because that’s different.”
“If this is about the old man, I haven’t checked to see if he made it or not. Deal was he kept the house, and I did that. More than that, and I’ve got other problems.”
“And I got no trouble to cause,” Amos said. “I figured things had changed enough maybe the old rules weren’t a great fit for the new situation.”
Erich walked over to the wall screen, limping. A few seagulls circled, black against the colorless sky. From the last time he’d been there, Amos knew the buildings that should have provided a foreground. Most of them were still in place close in. Out toward the shoreline, things were shorter now.
“I was right here when it happened,” Erich said. “It wasn’t a wave like a wave, you know? Like a surfer wave? It was just the whole fucking ocean humping up and crawling onto shore. There’s whole neighborhoods I used to run just aren’t there now.”
“I didn’t see anything happen,” Amos said. “The newsfeeds and the mess after were bad enough.”
“Where were you?”
“Bethlehem,” Peaches said.