“What do you know about it?”
“Because he picked me for the same goddamn reasons. I fit the outfit, and my build is close enough to the dead guy who wore it. Nothing special about it. Just bad luck.”
“I was plenty special.”
“You were street level just like me, making rent, giving BJs and hand jobs. So what? I liked my life fine. I was having a good night.”
He turned to Eve with that. “A pretty good night. I was supposed to have breakfast with friends. I had friends, which is more than she ever had.”
“When you’re the best, when you’re looking down from a penthouse, you don’t need friends. And that’s where I was going, to the top!”
“Yeah, right. All I wanted was to get solid enough to move to the business of sex, right? And I’d’ve taken my friends in with me if they’d wanted. Now I’m dead, dressed up like some weird-ass doll. Maybe worse? I’m stuck up here with her, and all she does is whine and bitch, bitch and whine.”
“Fuck you, Bobby.”
“Being dead means I don’t have to fuck you, whining bitch, even if you had enough to pay me.”
“If I were alive, I wouldn’t do you for triple rate. You’re nothing special.”
On a sigh, Bobby shook his head. “You dumbass. That’s the whole damn point. We weren’t special. We just fit the stupid outfit.”
“Is this how you want to spend your time now?” Eve wondered. “Bitching at each other?”
Bobby shrugged. “Nothing much else to do. I’m hoping the next one isn’t a whiner.”
He looked over, as Eve did, to the empty frame beside him.
Then there were more, more empty frames filling the wall.
Waiting to be filled with the dead.
“I’m going to stop him.”
“Yeah? Then you’d better wake the hell up and get going on that.”
And with another shrug, Bobby shifted and held the pose.
In the dark, in the stillness, Eve woke. When she rolled to her back, the cat gave her a quick jolt by climbing onto her chest. Then sitting, staring.
“You’ve got weight, pal.” She gave his ears a scratch. “Just a dream, more weird than bad. Display time.”
5:36
“If Bobby and Leesa hadn’t decided to invade my subconscious to bitch at each other, I could’ve caught another twenty.”
Instead, she rolled the cat over, gave him one long head-to-tail stroke, then called for lights at fifty percent.
She got up, got coffee, wondered vaguely what sort of gazillion-level deal Roarke directed in his office with somebody probably somewhere on the other side of the globe.
Then she decided to take that twenty in the pool doing laps.
Staring at the communicator on the table beside the bed, she wondered if she could will it to stay silent. Since she couldn’t, she walked over, picked it up, and took it with her.
She rode the elevator down to the tropical wonder with its crystal-blue water. Then she stripped off her nightshirt.
And dived.
For one moment she let the water take her, let the cool silkiness surround her and smooth away the rough spots from the dream. Then she cut through it, a sharp blade bent on speed. At the wall, she rolled, pushed off, and struck out again.
