Free Internecine by David J. Schow

himself),
butmuch of what he did offer made him sound like an alien observing Earth culture from afar, or a visiting animus from some parallel spirit plane. He seemed to know the score and had all the answers, the way I would expect him, as a fictional character, to just
know
things not apparent to the rest of us.
    Or maybe I was just exhausted, free-associating myself into a padded room.
    “It’s time to go visit Mr. Varga,” he said, wrapping the topic of my apartment, is-it-is-or-is-it-ain’t.
    “Maybe I should just curl up in the backseat, you know,” I said, “and cry myself to sleep.”
    “No. I need another set of hands and eyes, and right now is ideal for a social call. You hit them at night, when they’re tuckered out or perhaps have had a couple of cocktails. It hampers their menu of reactions.”
    “What you meant when you said you were going to use me?” I said. “Does that mean you’re using me now instead of Celeste, back there?”
    “No. It means I want you to pay attention, and alert me if something smells funny. Something I wouldn’t notice. I’m serious.”
    “How?” How was I supposed to become sensitized to a world I barely understood?
    “I can’t explain it, Conrad—it’s the sort of thing you’ll know when you see it. Why you? Because you’re here. Besides, you have yet to tell me what I want to know about those politician fellows, remember them?”
    “You didn’t ask me.”
    “That’s right,” he said knowingly. “Celeste is academic.”
    Fair enough. “What about the window?” I said. “There’s glass all over your car.” I still felt sheepish about it.
    He said exactly what I thought he would say. “Don’t worry—it’s a rental.”
    We took the freeway downtown and wound up near the top edge of Compton, a confusion of railroad switch-tracks and warehouses lit by harsh, sodium vapor lamps, in the middle of Ramparts Division, locally notorious with the LAPD as gang central.
    On the way I explained what I knew or could cobble together about the cryptic G. Johnson Jenks, as referenced in the hit-kit folder on Alicia Brandenberg—the same bullet points I had uselessly amassed while tied up. I slammed into the brick wall of how little I actually knew about Kroeger’s political client, and Dandine glanced at me with an arched eyebrow, as though I had just made it all up. My big hole card of presumed information was useless.
    “This is why you never get involved with a contract client beyond their dossier,” he said. “The water just gets muddier. Kind of the opposite of your line, come to think of it.”
    He had a point. One of my job skills, borne of necessity, was the cultivation of bogus intimacy, the ability to read between the lines of a dry printout and extract the one personality quirk that would make your target believe you were on the same frequency, that you were simpatico.
    It hit me like a bolt of heat lightning in the desert: I needed something I could
sell
Dandine. And he was allowing me a bit of latitude to find out just what that might be. In a way, I had reinforced his latent need to
give
me that latitude . . . or so I deluded myself.
    I used to think I was a lot smarter than I was proving to be now. And Dandine was a world-class expert at teasing a fish, this capacity exacerbated by what I was coming to see as a weird disposition toward the oblique. He was definitely one of those adverse to authority or stated rank, a condition common to thinkers. He enjoyed bumping the rule-book out of true. He was doing it now, by allowing my ride-along, and leaking more of his psychology to my inner salesman. I could not go passive; he’d smell it.
    “So you missed the case,” I said, “and found me. How does
that
work?”
    “I had to access the car rental records,” he said. “Which delayed me. Almost too long.”
    “Kroeger rented the car, not me.”
    “Kroeger’s records led to yours. You know that dossier on Alicia Brandenberg? You should see the