Free New York Nights [Virex 01] by Eric Brown

latest scams. Barney had listened to her about savings and investment, but he drew the line one day when she came into the office, took a long look around the place, snub nose turned up in distaste, and declared that the room was losing energy like a stuck pig loses blood and needed some changes. He’d complimented her on her imagery and said that he was perfectly happy with the office as it was, thank you. She tut-tutted and said that if he remained sitting at the desk with his back to the window, along with a dozen other things he was doing wrong, then he’d have a week of bad luck - and hell, if they didn’t have a week of bad luck. They lost a case to a competitor; a customer left the country owing them a couple of grand; his sciatica had gotten worse . . .
     
    So the next time she showed her smug little grin around the door, he called her in and said, ‘About this . . . this sheng-phooey malarkey, Kim . . . run it past me again.’
     
    And he’d moved the desk and the chesterfield as she instructed, more with amusement than a belief that it might affect anything. He’d hung a picture of the sunset on the south wall and positioned a vase of dried flowers in the south-east corner of the room. Kim had painted the office door green and placed a fern on a stand just outside the door, to counter the bad yin rushing up the straight staircase. She’d advised him to keep a pet, preferably a cat, but Barney had never had a pet in his life, and he was damned if he was going to start now. He did agree to keep the loo seat down in the bathroom, though, and to move his bed into the corner of his room.
     
    Kim had told him that it might take a few days for the good chi to start flowing, and Barney had looked at her as if she had lost her marbles.
     
    But gradually, over the course of the next week, things began to change for the better. Lucrative contracts came in; they solved cases they’d struggled with for weeks - and even his sciatica cleared up. Barney told himself that the sudden success of the business was due mostly to Hal’s renewed enthusiasm for life. Over the weeks he’d watched Hal lose his apathy, begin to enjoy his life and work again.
     
    The transformation of his partner soon made Barney realise something that he’d tried to push to the back of his mind for a long time. Despite it being almost six years since Estelle’s. death, and despite thinking he’d managed to get over the worst of the grief, the simple fact was that he still missed her like hell.
     
    It was a combination of many things, not just the obvious. Hal had spent a lot of time with Kim in the early days; they ate out frequently, went to the holo-dramas, once or twice went skiing upstate. Barney missed doing the big things with Estelle, but it was the smaller details that he missed, too; the things which, when he noticed them pass between Hal and Kim, made him wish, with a kind of hopeless envy, that Estelle were still with him: the glances, the quick touches they assumed no one else noticed, the phrases and sayings that meant so much to each other.
     
    Christ, but he still missed her, and her absence was like an open wound.
     
    He hadn’t seen anyone else since her death: that wasn’t the solution. Other women were pale imitations of Estelle. Whenever he met women through the business, he was forever comparing them with his wife, and finding them lacking. They had been together for thirty-five years, ever since New Year’s Eve, 2000. They’d met at a party to see in the New Year, the new century, the new millennium - he twenty years old, Estelle just seventeen - and while he never claimed that it had been love at first sight, there had been an attraction, and they had seen each other for a year before getting married. He’d been a rookie cop, she a secretary for a legal firm, and they’d lived in a tiny, damp, and dirty walk-up in Brooklyn, and it had been the happiest time in all his twenty-one years.
     
    And their marriage