Terminal World Read Online Free PDF Page A

can’t.’
    ‘I’m sure you and Fray know more than enough on that score already.’
    ‘Well, maybe. But Fray’s not the man he used to be, and my problem is I like to make them squeal. Sometimes I go too far too fast, you know?’ Malkin looked as if he was expecting sympathy, for being too enthusiastic with his interrogation and torture methods. ‘You, though, you’ve got the necessary restraint. All I’m saying - and I know I speak for Fray in this matter - there’s always potential employment here, if work dries up in the morgue.’
    ‘Thanks for the offer. Work’s not very likely to dry up in a hurry, though.’
    ‘I take your point. It being a morgue and all.’
    ‘Anyway, I’m not looking for a new line of work.’ Quillon took a sip of the Red Eye. It was sharp and he felt it trickle down his throat in fiery rivulets. Alcohol had no significant effect on the angel nervous system, even given his modified physiology. But the taste wasn’t unpleasant, and it helped him fit in with the bar’s other customers, insofar as any were bothering to pay attention to the thin man in a coat talking to the thin man behind the bar.
    ‘You in trouble?’ Malkin asked.
    ‘I’ve never been out of it.’
    ‘I mean, something other than whatever shit it was brought you into Fray’s sphere of influence.’ Malkin fixed him with his small, pale yellow eyes. They were the exact colour of urine drops on the rim of a toilet. ‘Which, incidentally, I have never seen fit to pry about.’
    ‘That’s good.’
    ‘Just like it’s never occurred to me to pry about what exactly happens each time you come up here and go into that back room.’
    ‘That’s also good.’
    Malkin was part of Fray’s organisation, but to the best of Quillon’s knowledge he did not know the truth of Quillon’s identity. Fray, Quillon believed, had never told a living soul what he knew.
    ‘Well, he’s in the back. Usual haunt.’
    Quillon reached for change, but Malkin shook his head. ‘On the house tonight. The least we can do, you choose to pay us a visit.’
    Fray could normally be found in a small room set back from the rest of the bar, entered by a narrow stoop-under archway. The windowless nook was only just big enough to accommodate the table and chairs around it. With its narrow entrance, there was a claustrophobic sense of entrapment about the place. Today Fray nursed a cigarette and a half-empty shot glass, and according to his usual custom was sitting alone. There was something in his demeanour, some subtle, hard-to-articulate quality of expression and posture that caused people to orbit away from him. He was a big man, black-skinned, almost too big for the chair he was sitting in. His hair had been black when they first met, but in nine years it had turned first to grey and then to a brilliant pure white.
    ‘Starting to think I’d imagined that phone call,’ Fray said, his voice a low, threatening rumble. He blinked and twitched. ‘Uptown traffic’s a bitch, right?’
    ‘I made it, didn’t I?’
    ‘So take a seat. Look like you plan on spending more than five seconds in my presence.’
    Quillon eased into a chair opposite the bottled force that was Fray. ‘Thanks for agreeing to see me.’ He took off his hat and placed it on a wall hook. Fray sucked on the cigarette, the orange tip the only bright thing in the gloom of his favoured nook. His hand shook terribly, as if there was a hook in it and someone was jerking an invisible string.
    ‘I took the liberty of calling Meroka. She’s on her way.’
    ‘Who’s Meroka?’
    ‘One of my extraction specialists. You’ll like her.’
    ‘Who said anything about “extraction”?’
    ‘I did. And we’re doing it. Pieces are already falling into place.’
    ‘Aren’t we jumping the gun a little here?’
    ‘You told me enough on the telephone.’ Fray sipped from his own drink. ‘Joining the dots, that’s one of my specialities. I joined the dots where you were concerned,