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voice returned, and Cherabino stopped, her hand going to her gun.
    I turned the corner too—a wide door on tracks was closing. Cherabino had seen something; she’d seen something to spark recognition and surprise but I hadn’t seen what.
    Standing in front of the now-closed door was a white, overweight guy in an Atlanta Braves baseball cap, with the small three-dot tattoo on his right hand that would tell paramedics he had an artificial heart. He was sweating, droplets of it on his neck, and the butt of a gun showed faintly through his shirt on his waistband.
    “The club is closed,” the guy said, his face screwing up in what should have looked ridiculous but instead looked fierce, like the glare of a bulldog before he bit down and didn’t let go.
    Normally at this point Cherabino would have flashed the badge, but oddly, here, she didn’t. “When’s it going to open?” she asked instead, her voice pitched higher, like a silly college girl. She played with her hair in a way that made her suddenly less threatening. I did a double take. She could almost pull that off.
    But I could take a cue. “Yeah, I majorly need a break,” I said, and pulled her toward me suddenly.
    She threatened me with violence over the Link if my hands got too friendly, but giggled. “We need someplace to go,” she said, and put her hand on my face, shyly.
    The guy with the gun relaxed his body language. “We’ll be open at six,” he said.
    “We’ll see if we make it that long,” I said, smiling down at her lecherously.
    The threats in Cherabino’s head escalated into a kidney blow, but she smiled, playing along for his benefit. She giggled again. “Let’s get out of here, okay?”
    And we wandered out, hand in hand, flirting—me enjoying it immensely while the back of my neck itched like someone was going to shoot me at any moment. But we made it back to the car and she pulled away.
    “What was that all about?” I asked.
    She shot me a glare. “Drugs. A lot of them, and guns, and ammunition. They’re running a major operation out of the place—and, better, we have a guy inside already.”
    * * *
    She drove us through the skylanes to a small divey barbeque joint maybe ten miles away, and got a table. We ordered tea and waited. And waited. I got more and more tired, and finally asked the waitress for a cup of coffee, which made me feel jittery but got me to focus.
    Finally, forty minutes later, Johnny Kubrick walked in the door. He sat down at the table, took off his filthy knitted cap, and scratched his scalp. The tracks on his arms flexed with the movement, and his painfully-thin face grimaced. Cherabino offered him wipes she’d gotten from the waitress earlier. He nodded to me, and took them.
    “Hey, sweetcakes,” he said to Cherabino.
    She blushed, and didn’t object to the title, which was odd.
    “You working the Plantation?” I asked him. We’d worked together for a year or two, taking down the guys who’d once sold me my drug.
    “That’s right.”
    “I was starting to think you missed the signal,” Cherabino said, with a little smile.
    “Naw, just needed a second to extricate smoothly. Good to see you again.” He winked at her.
    Huh? There was some history here I wasn’t aware of, I could feel it. It took everything in me not to sneak out over the Link and take the information from her, but I’d promised. And my promises meant something. Or at least they did, now.
    Kubrick meanwhile had washed off the apparent caked-in grime from his hands, the apparent track marks on his arms, and was working on the black-eye makeup on his face. He had a pile of wetwipes on the table already, their formerly-pristine surfaces now covered in multiple colors of dark pigment. His face, once he finished swiping at it, ended up a little streaky, like a rock musician after a crazy-sweating concert, but it was obvious, once the makeup was off, that he was just lanky, thin, naturally. The sickness, the addict’s heaviness and