“You told me not to do it, so I didn’t. I shouldn’t have to keep saying it.”
“But you wish you had done it.”
“We wouldn’t be in this situation if I had.”
8
The next day was Saturday, October 29. Like most profitable holidays, over time Halloween had expanded to swallow up more and more of the calendar. The actual Halloween celebration had, as such, spread to two separate days and nights. October 30 the night before, was now Devil’s Night. It was the naughtier of the two, the night for wild parties, drugs if you were into that kind of thing, vandalism, pranks, and a costume that was either incredibly inappropriate, gross, slutty, or all three. At midnight in Tabula Ra$a was the annual Black Parade, which Zoey was told was legendary, though she was dubious because parades by their very nature were sad and stupid.
The next morning, October 31, marked the beginning of the family-friendly part of the holiday. That’s when the mischievous gifts from under the Halloween Tree were handed out by hungover adults. The rule was that if your gift was actually thoughtful or useful to the recipient, you had failed—these gifts were to be tasteless and worse than useless. They were also extremely difficult to shop for, you had to know a person pretty well to know exactly what they hated. For the kids, there were baskets of booby-trapped treats (say, a batch of six caramel apples, only one was secretly an onion). Everyone either had a separate costume for that day, or a tasteful modification to their Devil’s Night outfit for the traditional haunted houses and trick-or-treating. At Zoey’s estate, they were hosting a “haunted” maze in the courtyard for hundreds of mostly poor kids from the city. The point is, this had been cued up to be a hectic, stressful weekend even before somebody mailed Zoey a dead body.
She was still in her pajamas when she dragged herself toward the conference room at the obscene hour of seven forty-five A.M. These were different pajamas; she’d spent forty minutes in a hot shower scrubbing the corpse juice off herself before bed. She was carrying a mug of steaming Da Hong Pao tea.
She glanced back at Wu—his left arm now in a plastic cast that could also dose the area with pain medication—and said, “Can you smell me? I feel like I smell bad again. I think I was sweating all night.”
“I would say you are within range of how you normally smell.”
“That is an amazing answer.”
They headed down a hall to a sturdy door labeled STAFF FARTING ROOM—DO NOT TURN OFF VENTILATION FAN.
The door automatically unlocked itself for Zoey, revealing the Suits’ conference room. Echo was already inside, sitting at the long table, drinking some kind of morning post-workout shake probably made with oats and algae protein or something. There was an understanding that the estate was Zoey’s home but also the Suits’ workplace, so they had access but with a rule that she always be told whenever they were coming so she could put on some pants.
Zoey said, “You look awful. Do you have some sort of disease?”
She said some variation of this every time she saw Echo, who’d done something different with her hair, pulling the curls to one side so it formed a mop that cascaded down the right side of her face. It was adorable in a way that could almost be considered an act of violence.
“I actually am a mess this morning. Couldn’t sleep last night, for some reason. Put on my gym clothes at three and just went to work on the heavy bag, to burn off the energy.”
“Whose face do you imagine on there when you’re hitting it?”
“Yours, of course. I’ve stuck a little wig on top.”
When Zoey had first moved in, the conference room had been a dour space dominated by a beaten-up table and battered leather chairs, the room stinking of old tobacco and coffee, like they were all sitting inside a giant cop’s mouth. The table had since been replaced with a new one with a built-in display along with new chairs that had on-the-fly body temperature adjustment to keep your back from getting sweaty. Along the wall to the right, opposite the main monitor, was a row of plants under grow lights, to freshen up the air. It was a whole different vibe. Will hated it.
Zoey set the mug of tea in front of an empty seat, then went and sat in another spot. Will was next through the door, in a suit the color of a ripe cherry that had been spray-painted flat black. He was carrying a fedora and went to set it down at his customary spot, when he found a mug of tea in its way.
“Is someone sitting here?”
“That’s yours. It’s that tea you like.”
Will stood frozen for a moment. He did not like it when people gave things to him unexpectedly, because he hated being put in the position of having to choose between saying “thank you” for something he didn’t ask for, or refusing an act of kindness and looking like a jerk. Will knew that Zoey knew he hated this, because he had told her as much.
He muttered, “Thank you. Where’s Budd and Andre?”
It was still seven minutes until meeting time, so neither of them were late, but in Will’s mind the meeting started whenever he happened to get there. He’d ask after whoever wasn’t in the room when he arrived as if they were missing, no matter how much time was left until the actual appointment. Andre showed up a minute later, in a pinstripe suit with a tie woven with some kind of reflective red that appeared to undulate as he moved, subtle changes in light making it appear the colors were rippling across the fabric. He was carrying a huge pink donut box, bless him.
Andre glanced around the room, looked at his watch, and said, “Where in the hell is Budd? Must have overslept. Probably hungover.”
Budd appeared five seconds later, clearly having been right behind Andre in the hall. They’d probably ridden together.
After everyone was seated, Echo said, “First order of business, we should talk about the sale of the Moutainview lot, they finally got financing squared away. I’ve got documents. Just need signatures.”
Zoey said, “Wait, are you serious? I think me getting attacked by a mechanized corpse last night is probably the first order of business.”
Will said, “Actually, we’ve been going back and forth with AliCOM on this sale for months, we definitely don’t want to give them time to change their minds.”
Zoey said, “Sure, sure. Whatever it is, I’m confident you’re on top of it.”
“You have to give final approval and signature, Zoey. That’s your land. You said you wanted to be involved in the business, this is the business.”
“Then in my role of Queen of Business, I declare that we talk about the mechanized attack corpse and the organization who sent it to try to kill me because they think I ate the guts of their friend, who happened to be the very corpse they sent.”
“The corpse wasn’t trying to kill you,” said Will, in an infuriatingly dismissive tone. “I’m estimating that the implants were operating at about one percent power. They just wanted to make you run around in a panic and get it on camera. That was the whole point. They don’t want you dead, because then the show’s over. You don’t kill the cow as long as it’s giving milk.”
“Either way,” replied Zoey, “the murder of Dexter Tilley is officially our problem. Now, with the combined brains of everybody here, I think we should be able to knock this out over the weekend. If we’re lucky, maybe somebody caught his murder on cam—”