The day was too young to meet Anders the cop for a drink, so I spent the next several hours pickling myself in cheap whiskey and consuming the kind of greasy rubish starving men crave the most. Rory’s Ramshackle wasn’t busy in the early afternoons, but stayed open twenty-four hours a day to catch a crowd of aimless drifters and discreet businessmen. That particular afternoon it was me and two men far too involved in the depth of each other’s eyes. No doubt they both had men back home. Nobody met at Rory’s for romance unless they had to. The place smelled of old fish.

Rory’s son, Jason, sat on a stool behind the bar, cheering at a small screen showing the latest rugby match. For a while, I ate my grease and read the papers Saint Jerome had given me.

After engaging in the kind of mindless blather that passes for conversation among certain kinds of men—talk of teams and scores and the best hits of the game—I took a sip of my whiskey. “This new stuff’s not good, Jason.”

“It’s got smoky undertones.”

“Sure it does.” I took another sip. “Smoky overtones, too.”

He shrugged. “It’s a big hit up the chain. They love it in the Hallows.”

Trends filtered downward in Nicodemia. Sometimes it was fast, sometimes it was slow, but down in the Heavies, people liked to copy the trends of their betters. It made the grease in my belly churn when I thought of it. “You ever heard of anyone selling art around these parts?”

Without taking his eyes from the screen, he said, “Like paintings?”

“Something like that.”

“There’s a fella upspiral who teaches drawing classes. They say he went to university in the Hallows when he was young.”

“You don’t say.”

“Me, I’ve always been more of a sculpture kind of guy. I got this one bronze statue of these two fish jumping out of the water and it’s been in my family for a few generations.”

“Ever worried someone will steal it?”

Jason chuckled a little, almost to himself. “Nobody’s going to get worked up about a statue of a couple fish.”

“No,” I said, leaning forward, “but suppose they did. Suppose someone upstairs says that fish statues are the greatest achievement of mankind. Then on one of those broadcasts where they’re always appraising people’s old junk someone comes in with a bronze fish statue and suddenly it’s worth a million dimes and a trip to the Hallows. Everyone wants fish statues and yours is looking like a pretty good haul. What then?”

Jason took his eyes off the game for two thirds of a heartbeat just to get a good look at my face. “Demarco, nobody gets that excited about fish statues, not even down here in fish gut central. Plus, you haven’t seen this statue. It’s not that great.”

“Maybe.”

He watched the game for a while, then said, “In my experience, folks who get excited about art are actually excited about something else entirely.”

“It’s a proxy.” I raised the whiskey to my lips, then thought better of it and set the glass down. A little whiskey sloshed over the rim onto the papers spread out on the bar in front of me.

Jason said, “Some people are just not that good at processing emotions. You might know what that’s like.”

“I have no idea.”

He looked at my spilled whiskey, then up at me, probably to see if I was joking. I’m not sure that I was. Shrugging, he turned back to his game.

“You ever heard of anyone named Maurice Ribar or Trey Vitez?” I asked.

His brow furrowed. “Not sure I do. Is this related to the art thing?”

“They would have been newcomers a few years back.” I endured another sip of whiskey. It was still not good. “Likely they would have wanted to move some goods.”

“Don’t they know this isn’t a capitalist society?”

“Every society’s capitalist if supply and demand get far enough out of whack.”

He nodded. We’d been over this conversation before, and it always ended the same way. I cracked the roll of dimes in two and slid half across the counter. “Is this capitalist enough for you?”

“You think it’s going to be that easy?”

“It never is.”

“I’ll ask around. Anybody with anything worth selling is going to move up the chain.”

“Word is they docked here.”

“On a Heavy bead? They must have been trying to hide something.” He chewed his chapped lip. “Have a talk with a guy named Costner up in customs if you’re brave enough. I hear they track smugglers every once in a while. Maybe they have a lead for you.”

“A cop? You’re telling me to talk to the blue?”

“He’s decent enough.”

I scooped Saint Jerome’s papers up, shook the whiskey off of them, and crammed everything back into the folder. It had been a dry bit of reading, and having finished, I didn’t feel particularly enlightened. Restaurant and bar inspection reports made for a bland afternoon, but these were particularly dry. Even the violations were boring, with the occasional rodent infestation and a few mild storage temperature fluctuations. The papers hadn’t helped me much for figuring out the Saint’s plans, but at least I knew where they needed to be filed. The government buildings had a paper backup for all recent reports—a hardcopy in case of digital storage failure, and low-level documents like this would only be covered by minimal security. It was an easy task for someone like me. A quick one. All the more reason to be suspicious.

“Hey, Jason,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Can you get me an address? I need to drop by and have a chat with a friend.”

He glanced down at the dimes on the bar. “That’s not a lot of money, Demarco.”

“Just be glad it’s anything at all.”

“It won’t even pay your tab.”

“You and I both know I’m never going to pay my tab.” I forced a serious look across my face as I swallowed the last of the harsh whiskey. Its smoky undertones burned a hole in my lungs. “This is a simple lookup. Nothing fancy.”

“What’s the name?”

“I don’t have a name.”

“If you don’t have a name it’s not a simple lookup.”

I tossed a few more dimes on the fiberoak bar. “I need to know who’s in charge of restaurant inspections.”

Jason peeled the dimes from the bar one by one before answering. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Now would be helpful.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’re the only person I know who’d come into my place looking for emergency restaurant inspection.”

I made a show of looking around the place. “Maybe I’m looking for a seedier place to hang out.”

“A new place to mooch off the kind owner and scare away customers? A fella can hope, I suppose.” He swiped the rugby game off his screen and brought up a directory. Technically, everyone in Nicodemia had access to this same book, but as an excommunicated handyman such information was harder for me to get. Trinity’s excommunication extended to all connected screens, so I depended on the kindness of strangers. It made it useful to know people like Jason, who rarely asked hard questions. He also happened to have his thumb on the karmic scales when it came to deep info access. “The guy in charge is named Matthew Williams.” He spun the screen to face me so I could see the address and video of a silver-haired man pushing papers at a desk. I never did understand how Jason was able to get up-to-date video of anyone in town. “He’s an uptown kind of guy, and he’s at work right now.”

“That’s a hell of a walk from here.”

“You want me to call you a cab?”

I tossed a couple more dimes on the bar. Already there weren’t enough left, but he deserved more for being helpful. “You know a cab driver who’ll cart a fella around for free?”

“Wouldn’t be much of a driver if he did.”

“Then I’d better get walking.” I tucked the folder under my arm and headed for the exit.

As I pushed the door open, Jason called out to me. “Good luck, Demarco.”

I didn’t bother telling him that luck had abandoned me long ago, and I’d need more than that, anyway. My luck must have been particularly sour, because I ran straight into Nick Sully on the way out.

He shouldered me hard as we passed in the short hallway, then froze and gave me a hard look. I could feel his gaze digging into the back of my neck. “Demarco.”

“Sully.” I continued out the door into the open. Last thing I needed was to deal with Nick Sully after how the job with McCay had ended. Sully followed me out the door.

The sky was a hurricane swirl of gray on gray.

“What the hell happened with that job I sent you?” Sully said, standing at my elbow.

“You cut right to business these days.”

He lit a cigarette and let it dangle from his lip. He was a scrawny guy, scruffy right down to his thin mustache and frazzled hair. “I do when business goes to shit.”

“You gave me a bad job. Your guy died. Nothing to do with the job, he just died.” I stared up at the swirling sky, peering into the cloudy mist. Anything to keep from looking him in the eye.

“It’s a hell of a coincidence.”

I failed to keep the frustration from my voice. “Med runs like these always go south.”

“You needed the work. I needed my cut.”

“Your cut’s not worth much for work that doesn’t pay.”

His face went red with anger. “What I don’t need is the hit to my reputation, Demarco.”

“Then send better jobs.”

“He would have paid if you hadn’t screwed it up.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “McCay called me after you left, you know. He was mad as hell about how you treated him.”

I finally looked Sully in his sunken eyes. “I did what I had to do.”

“It was a simple fucking med run. Not even recreational. He just wanted some fucking medicine, and you couldn’t give it to him.”

Would McCay still be alive if I had done what he’d asked? The thought made me ill. “There could have been more to it.”

“But there wasn’t, was there?”

“He’s not dead from what I did.” All the frustration dropped out of me leaving a big hole in my chest that felt something like guilt. “I swear, Sully. All I wanted to do was figure out where his meds went. I was on my way to give him a new supply when I saw the police.”

This seemed to surprise him. He took a step back. “You didn’t out him?”

“Why would I do that?”

“A man doesn’t go from zero to suicide on a whim, Demarco. You figure it out.”

McCay had been terrified of someone figuring out his genetic condition. Terrible as it was, he had staked all his hopes on finding a way to return to the Hallow. If he had been outed, that might have devastated his dreams, but suicide? That didn’t settle well. “Maybe his old dealer sold him out.”

There was something fitting about that answer that placated Sully. He stepped out his cigarette and disappeared back into Rory’s Ramshackle. As much as I didn’t like the job he’d given me, at least it was closer to what I like than placing fraudulent paperwork and tracking down art.

Jason had been right about the walk back upspiral, and my whiskey-leaded legs weren’t up for the task. It made me wish for a scooter like Beck’s. Fast, agile, and independent. She’d have had this job finished in under an hour. The weight of responsibility was an iron cross lashed around my neck.

But how would she have handled it? It would be simple for me to drop the papers where the Saint wanted them. I could be done soon enough. Something told me there was more to the story, and I needed a chat with this Williams character if I wanted to know what it was.

With a few dimes in my pocket, I had options. Even if I couldn’t take a cab or swipe a scooter, I could still take a shortcut. My feet took me edgeward, back toward the outside of the city where dark reigned, and the idea of sky was a figment in the minds of sinners. As I walked, the afternoon wore on and the crowds thinned. Where I walked alone, the lights didn’t brighten for me, and shadows wrapped around me like a bulletproof vest. It was cold out here, and the haunted eyes that glanced my direction came from the gaunt faces of the almost forgotten.

There are several elevators running along the outer edge of the station. This one was a beige box set into a fibersteel facing. Neon graffiti decorated the surrounding walls, and a short distance away someone had carved a symbol into the hard wall. When the carriage car arrived, I payed the ferryman my dime and he let me board. There were few other passengers, but they didn’t need dimes. Their karma carried them upward. I leaned against the far wall and waited. Soon, the car bucked and we rose straight to the next loop of the spiral. There, a dozen more people boarded. Outside, I could see the change in neighborhood. Where below was a dark pit of the forgotten, this level was the bright cacophony of lights—like an eternal Mardi Gras parade looping through space. The sin quarter wasn’t one I frequented. I had plenty of that already, and it wasn’t the kind of place a person could depend upon for the kindness of strangers.

Then, the car continued upward. Neighborhoods shifted before me, becoming brighter as the teardrop shape of Nicodemia made for shallower ledges of the spiral and therefore more access to the concave sky at the edges. More, but still not much. At almost the top, I stepped out into the stifling gray top of the world. The government quarter.