She leans to one side so the light from the clinic lobby falls across my face.>There’s a light on upstairs in the room I used to share with Kasabian. I go up the stairs quietly, knife out and ready. At the top I push open the door with the toe of my boot. It opens on a messy bedroom. There’s a wooden desk where Kasabian used to keep his bootleg video setup. Now there’s a computer surrounded by monitors. I push the door open more. Something is in the room with its back to me. A heavy mechanical body with a human head. It picks up a bag from Donut Universe in its mouth and heads for the desk on all fours like a dog. When it sees me, the head opens its mouth and drops the bag. It raises a paw and points at me.
“Don’t say a goddamn word.”
The last time I saw him, Kasabian was still just a chattering head without a body. Now he’s something more, but I don’t know if it’s an improvement.
I come inside and drop the duffel. My armor is sticking out from under my shirt. Kasabian nods at it.
“Did the Wizard give you a heart, Tin Man?”
“Funny. Careful you don’t pop a rivet, Old Yeller.”
His face is like the couple in the street. Smeared with something dark and coarse, like black sand. He trots to the desk on all fours. Kasabian’s head on a hellhound body isn’t a pleasant sight.
When he gets to the desk chair, Kasabian pushes back with his hind legs until his ass is firmly on the seat. Then he leans the rest of his body back like half of a drawbridge rising. In a second he’s gone from windup toy to Pinocchio on a good day, an almost real boy. He picks up the bag of donuts with his claws and drops it on the desk without offering me one.
“Is that the best Saint James could come up with? It’s better than nothing but it doesn’t exactly look finished.”
Kasabian frowns for a second then gets it.
“Saint James? Yeah. That’s about right. As for this”—he raps a fist against his chest—“your better half never paid off the charm maker reworking it, so he didn’t finish the job.”
“Why not?”
“The asshole disappeared.”
“How did you know it was me and not him just now?”
“He looks like a bathing beauty and you’re the Loch Ness Monster. Seeing you young like that was giving me the heebee-jeebies.”
“You mean how I looked before you sent me Downtown.”
“Something like that.”
With the back of one metal hand, he pushes away an ashtray overflowing with Maledictions. Fidgety jailbird stuff, like now that I’m back he thinks I’m going to steal him blind. I lean in for a closer look at his body.
“So how does it feel?”
He flexes his arms and legs. Stands and starts picking up the beer bottles, pizza boxes, and crusted food containers that cover every flat surface.
“You remember that arcade game where you move a claw around to grab a shitty teddy bear out of a bin? It’s kind of like I’m the claw.”
He flexes his fingers and picks up a Chinese-food container. His hands are the hound’s paws reworked and extended into clawlike hands.
“I know I’m ugly as a spider on a baby but it’s nice to have hands again.”
“Don’t feel so bad. We’re both in gimp club these days.”
I take the glove off and push up my left sleeve.
Kasabian shakes his head in disgust.
“Is that Kissi?”
“Yeah. Josef’s idea of a joke.”
He shakes his head and goes back to picking up trash.
“I get Rin Tin Tin’s gnawed-on bones and you get to look like Robocop. Story of my life.”