Free Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) by Elizabeth Hand

the bartender, and returned her phone. She’d notice that I’d called Anton, but I’d be gone by then. I thanked her for the beer.
    “No worries.” She smiled. “You’re sure you don’t want to come back with me? Ilkka will want to talk more at dinner.”
    “Yeah. Not sure what I’ll do.” I’d been tempted to stick around and talk shop with Ilkka, but I had no desire to meet Anton, especially after I’d just inflated the value of Ilkka’s photos. “Find somewhere to crash for a while, probably.”
    “Okay.” Suri tilted her head toward the giantess behind the bar. “Ritva will take care of you if you need anything.”
    Suri kissed me on my cheek. I watched her go, sorry I hadn’t pressed my luck harder, got another beer from Barzilla, and retreated to a corner table. More customers floated in, but no one paid any attention to me. Music crackled from a speaker, the theme from The Dukes of Hazzard in Finnish. I downed my beer, then poured a jolt of whiskey from my stash. My head hummed with static, alcohol, Focalin, jet lag, exhaustion, all compounded by the memory of the photos in Ilkka’s basement. More than anything, I felt the dull, familiar ache of envy. Not for Ilkka’s wealth or house or family, or even his art collection. I’ve lived without all that for my entire life. I’ll die without it, too.
    No. I envied him his obsession, whatever alchemy of desire and fear had fueled those photographs. You don’t get pictures like that without being in love with your subject.
    But what kind of passion would drive someone to travel alone, in the depths of winter, to remote places where you wouldn’t just risk hypothermia but prison? His son’s medical expenses wouldn’t be enough; the murders had occurred years before the kid was born. Some sick, extraordinary vision hid behind those wire-rimmed glasses and taciturn demeanor. I recognized it because the same fire had consumed me once, so long ago it was like dredging up the memory of a story I’d heard from someone else.
    Quinn.
    Once upon a time, that name conjured an entire world, lost to me now. No one before or since has ever made me feel like that or see like that. Cigarette smoke and the blinding rush of amyl nitrate, the feverish rush of Quinn himself, sex and speed and the scratch of a needle on vinyl.
    But it wasn’t just sex. Even after he disappeared, the enduring sense that Quinn was out there somewhere—in another part of downtown or another city, another country even—charged everything I saw and did with a secret glamour, the expectation that at any minute he might walk into CBGB or Club 82, or crawl from the wreckage of a party in some decaying loft. Photographing Quinn altered the way I saw the world. He was the lens that made everything darker, even as it brought it all into painfully sharp focus. It wasn’t love but something stronger: a sense of immanence, of being on the edge of some revelation that drove me to arm myself with a cheap camera and black-and-white film. That feeling stayed with me throughout my early years in the city. It charged my best work. Even if no one else could see Quinn’s gaze reflected in a broken syringe or a bathroom mirror at last call, I could.
    But gradually that sense faded, or I did. I felt flickers of it sometimes, if I was drunk enough. Like now.
    I retrieved his photo from my bag and stared at that bruised gaze, at once defiant and slightly desperate. I had always thought I’d known how that story ended. Prison, then …
    What? The boy in that photograph was as dead as the girl who’d been behind the camera. But somewhere, the man Quinn O’Boyle had become had found that picture. He’d found me.
    I put away the photo. The music stopped; my boots echoed loudly as I headed to the bar. Ritva looked up from a magazine.
    “Another?”
    “No thanks.” I held up the card William Lindblad had given me that morning. “There a phone I could use?”
    She slid a phone across the counter, and I