Free Strawman Made Steel by Brett Adams Page A

doing
with that. I wonder myself. It was all they sent back, to prove they had him.
But I knew he was dead.”
    “A man can live without a finger,” I said.
    “Yes, I wrestled with that hope for many
years. I paid the ransom, but...”
    I suddenly had a strong desire for sun on
my skin. I took my leave and headed out. She followed me to the door, where the
eunuch appeared again, and without a word gave me my gun.
    Part of me had one more question for Mrs. Speigh.
I argued with myself, and I guess that part won: “Why did your nightwatchman
try to kill me with a dog?”
    Her full lips drew into a line before she
answered. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The nightwatchman of that
facility was found in the morning―in his office, bound and gagged. Your card
was found on the premises. You can understand how that looked.”
    “No dogs? No deranged midgets? No Liberty
Borough bankers?”
    She shook her head, brows pinched in confusion.
“Just your card.”
    While I rode the elevator to the ground,
one thought stuck to my mind like a fly on flypaper. It was about the scar on
Nicole Speigh’s neck. No mother forgot how her only daughter got a scar like
that.

 
     
    — 7 —
    Back on the street, I found an
exchange office and looked up Alltron Corp. The address listed in large was in
Brooklyn. It was called a ‘campus’.
    Before heading over the bridge, I stopped
at a bar called The Whipped Elephant. Between the hours of eleven and two it
played host to newshounds, who flocked into the joint for ten-minute lunches,
cheap rumor, and cheaper drinks. I ordered a ham on rye and sat at the bar with
an eye on the door. I was hoping to see a guy I know who sub-edits the society
pages of an independent rag.
    There was no sign of my guy. I left
half-disappointed. The sandwich was half-good.
    The trains that pump Brooklyn’s humanity
into and out of Lower Manhattan are big―so big they seem parts of the bridge.
When they move, the bridge is a colossal engine block encasing massive
connecting rods.
    I rode the train, my hand clutching a loop
of leather, and watched a trawler on the river heading out. Sunlight glinted
from its cabin windows. Waves on the Hudson made its mast pivot like a spinning
top, so that the gulls hanging over it were having trouble finding a perch. The
boat’s hull ploughed through a smear in the water that told me another engine
in the sewage treatment plant had bust.
    Alltron was in a part of Brooklyn that had
been heavily shelled. When rebuilding, a visionary in the Borough planning
division had decided that technology parks―such as they were―beat plain parks.
Alltron sprawled over twenty acres of one such park. I had fun finding
reception.
    When I gave my name to the girl at
reception, her eyes lit with purpose. It seemed I was persona grata, access all
areas.
    I had a job convincing her I wanted neither
the CTO nor a flunky tour. That troubled her, like I was a potential customer
that had wandered out of her sales-pitch matrix into no-man’s land. (“You want
free money?” “No.” Crickets.)
    “I don’t want a manager, and I don’t want
the janitor. I want someone in charge who gets their hands dirty.”
    Eventually, with the aid of an
organizational chart, we settled on a “sub-divisional adjunct”. I spotted the
sub-division I wanted: therapeutic bio-tech, endogenous. In my head that translated
loosely to something like ‘squeeze a squid for what ails you.’ Antidotes and
the like.
    And antidotes were just the flip side of
the coin to poison.
    I walked a mile to find the office of Dr
Lucius Arnold. The good doctor was in.
    He was an old-looking fifty-something. The
feet poking beneath his desk were sheathed in argyle socks and shod in oxford
wingtips. But somewhere above his ankles and below his breastbone, he’d lost
the formal urge. His restless hands poked from the sleeves of a threadbare
tweed jacket. Bright purple suspenders peeked from beneath his suit lapels as
he