Dirty Work

by Pat Cadigan

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Dystopian

Synopsis

Dirty Work? In a manner of speaking, perhaps, but certainly not along the lines of de Sade or Henry Miller. "Dirty" maybe because within this remarkable volume of short stories (a follow-up to her award-winning collection Patterns) author Pat Cadigan unflinchingly explores the implications of technology on modern and near-future societies, humorously challenges our perceptions of reality, and chillingly strips away our civilized facades to confront the bestial nature of our souls. With stories like "Home By the Sea," "Dispatches from the Revolution," "No Prisoners," "50 Ways to Improve Your Orgasm," and "Naming Names," Pat Cadigan exhibits an enviable ability to tackle a variety of themes, moods, and perspectives. And makes it all seem easy. Featuring 18 stunning fictions (including the previously unpublished "Lost Girls" written especially for this book)-as well as intriguing author introduction to each story-Dirty Work is a thought provoking, often funny, never compromising collection by one of America's most gifted authors. It doesn't get any better than this.

Release date: November 14, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 311

Sample

This book that you have picked up and (presumably) bought contains stories that are speculative fiction. I’d like to get that clear from the start. Although they will be enjoyed by lovers of science fiction, horror and fantasy, the stories are primarily Pat Cadigan speculating about the world she inhabits, and that is the world familiar to all of us, the same world that – occasionally – is unfamiliar to all of us too. Whether our belief system veers towards physics or something more mystical (is it possible to be more mystical than physics nowadays?), most of us, at some time, get a feeling that there just might be another side to reality that exists alongside our own. Perhaps more than simply one other side – perhaps a great tangle of them! In paranoid moments – or moments of solitude in the dark – you might think that maybe the cons piracy-freaks are right, and there really are weird people about, people who are unnervingly different to ourselves, who could be hiding within our society. People with Another Kind of Knowing. Sometimes we might even get what appears to be glimpses of these people and their other, ‘not our’ worlds. You know those times. It’s when coincidence aligns to alarming effect, invoking incredulity, bafflement and a creepy feeling up the spine. As an experiment, ask everyone you meet if they have ever experienced anything they found inexplicable, strange, reality-challenging. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t have their own weird story to tell. Pat Cadigan, undoubtedly, has a whole catalogue of them. She knows the other worlds of the Not-Quite-Normal quite intimately, I feel. She sees the secret people and accommodates them quite fearlessly within her stories. And yet, this is not to say her work can be placed solely in the realms of the fantastic, for what Pat writes about best, even in her most reality-shaping moments, is Life – our lives. She directs her clear sight into the viscera of estrangement, self-doubt, fear, political lunacy, loneliness and violence. Her hidden worlds and secret people are metaphors for all that is hidden and secret within ourselves. The characters in Pat’s stories are real people, never simply plot devices or ciphers; they just happen to be experiencing something quite bizarre for a little while.

My first experience of Pat’s work was her debut novel, Mindplayers, which appeared in 1988. I‘d already become acquainted with the cyberpunk novelists, and their offspring: Mindplayers had been heralded as another relative of this irreverent tribe. Now, while I had admired the neon extremities of cyberpunk, and post-cyberpunk, creations, marveled at the slick-speak employed by the authors, the casual familiarity with mind-blowing technology, as a body of work it had never touched my emotions. Perhaps this was simply a characteristic of the genre. Mindplayers was to change my mind about that. After reading only a few pages, I knew I‘d come across something different–and maybe, despite its trappings – Mindplayers wasn’t quite the book I’d been led to believe it was. It wasn’t just that the prose itself was a pleasure to read, (the rhythm of a novel is what tends to draw me into the story). Regardless of the sleek techno-trappings, Mindplayers transcended its supposed genre. It was about people; frail and vulnerable; tough and street-wise. The idiom Pat wielded was deft, yet there was a constant rhythmic rumble beneath the words that whispered of the cracking sanity of Deadpan Allie, the female protagonist (who makes a guest appearance in this collection). Disorienting mantras pervaded the text. Altered states of consciousness? Alerted snakes of consequence, of course.

If Mindplayers was an outstanding achievement for a first novel, Pat’s second book, Synners, had me in awe of her writing. The plot was convoluted, yet skimmed along with silvery ease. As in Mindplayers, the novel was permeated with mantras, little loops that stuck in the brain, the murmuring, insistent, almost sinister undercurrent that underlined the neuroses of certain protagonists within the story. Pat insisted to me she was not an aficionado of new technology, yet this was far from apparent in the book. However, the story was never sacrificed to the technology; the characters were (literally in some cases) part of it yet vital and credible in their own right, with their own developed histories and futures. The sub-culture of the synners (hacker/punk/drug/music) was explored without resorting to cliché. Pat spoke with confidence and vision, almost as if she herself had experienced the wild life of her female lead, Gina. Also, Pat being a mistress of cynical asides, the book had been written with humour, even if it was often bitter sweet.

The stories in this collection cover many themes, but one of their unifying factors is the twist in the tail, the final ironic flick of a sleek paw that, with careless, whimsical cruelty, toys with the reader. It might be you thought the story you ‘d been reading had finished, but no, she puts a last sentence down, just a few words, just a few slivers of something, well, sharp and glossy. Pat likes to let her readers run about between her claws, allowing them to believe they understand what’s happening to them and will be allowed to escape, before she casually delivers the final blow she has been planning all along. Her stories never shrink from embracing every human feeling; sharp humour sits down with tragedy, the unexpected becomes manifest. The humour is often black, because of its devilish accuracy as it impales the human condition.

At first glance, ‘New Life for Old’ appears to be a light-hearted tale, a fairy story, but after lulling the reader into this false sense of familiarity, the story back-flips into a poignant stab at what it means to grow old, invoking the wistful inevitability of fading youth, the idyllic and best-remembered summer day that is all too short, the snapshot memory. The last line is devastating. I read this one aloud to a friend, starting off in a light-hearted voice, which gradually, involuntarily, changed in tone, to something distinctly more tremulous. At the end of it, hairs were standing up on my arms. My listener said one word: ‘Brilliant!’ And then, ‘Are they all like that?’

Well, not exactly of course, because, every story is different, but every one of them delivers. The stings in the tails vary in toxicity, but never fail to give a jolt, a rush, a feeling of ‘Oh Yes!’ Through her writing, Pat makes you feel as if you‘re being given insight into something arcane, and sometimes the complexities of her tale-weaving are like a juggler controlling a myriad flight of shiny baubles. The intricacies of the plot, and the almost elusive concepts the author is exploring, are intertwined enough to perturb the brain, like when you attempt to get a grip on the infinity of Universe. I often think that when she’s writing Pat must slip into some parallel level, whose rules and subtleties are almost beyond our ability to grasp. Yet in the end, mindful of her charges, the readers, she always leads us back to reality, aligns in our senses and our minds the threads of the story she is telling. ‘Oh yes, of course! Altered snakes of consequence, after all!’

The story ‘Naming Names’ also beguiles us at first into thinking we are in Recognized Territory, through Pat’s use of another motif from fairy-tale. Knowing a person’s true and secret name allows the Knower to strip the Named of autonomy, to acquire a person’s soul. This is a contemporary fantasy story, right, but our feet are firmly on the ground here, aren’t they? Don’t count on it! Gradually, surreality creeps through the familiar world. The protagonist’s trip on the ferry, populated by secret people who move unseen among the passengers, where random snatches of conversation carried on the air apply directly to the protagonist’s own life and needs, exemplifies perfectly Pat’s silken use of language to convey the subtleties of her stories.

The story ‘A Deal with God’ – a loose sequel to ‘Naming Names’ – plays havoc with your senses of reality and time. Here, the language jumps through hoops at Pat’s command, allowing her to convey her honeycomb of ideas without slipping or losing balance. It would be so easy to become lost in the plot, yet you emerge, perhaps a little dazed and disoriented, but aware you have experienced something other. Again. And you are breathless back in reality. Until the next time you pick up the book. Which is of course an impulse too strong to resist, even if the text can make you feel a little weird, a little unsure of whether real is real.

I feel strongly that these stories will resonate with their readers in different ways, according to the individual. They will get to you, all of you, (in both senses of the phrase) of that I am quite sure. When you put the book down, you will not come blinking back into daylight unmoved. There are secret messages, secret resonances, for everyone within the pages of this book. The stories work on more than one level, and the trip into their realities will differ for every one of you. The message of this introduction is: ‘read these stories now.’ Nothing more. In case you hadn’t guessed.

Storm Constantine1993

Com187962-JJJDeadpanAllie

TZT-Tijuaoutlie

XQWithheld

NelsonNelson

NelsonNelsonMindplayAgency

TZT-Easct.Njyman

XQ.2717.06X0661818JL

GO

So, NN, how’s the family? Ah, sorry, I mean the agency. Of course. Yes, of course. I’m sending you this instead of coming back myself. Sorry to cut into your Bolshoi Ballet viewing time like this. I won’t be transmitting a vocal. I haven’t spoken for, I’m not sure, days. Lots of days. Something’s happened to my speech center. I’d have to put a socket in my head to vocalize and there doesn’t seem to be a surgeon handy. Anyway, I know how much you hate sockets. Then, too, I don’t speak any Romance language. But just about all the merchants sign, so I make my needs known that way. I used to sign a lot back at J. Walter Tech when I was getting my almost worthless education and learning to read Emotional Indexes—Indices?—and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it. You know, NN, I like it so much, I’m thinking about just letting my speech center go. I haven’t sustained complete damage to language. I can write, and I can read what I’ve written for as long as my short term memory cares to hold it. It’s a capricious thing, short term memory. Where was I? Oh. Ever hear of that kind of damage before? I don’t know if I can understand anything said to me because I haven’t heard any English or Mandarin since I got here. But then, maybe I wouldn’t know if I had. I hear them talking here in their own language and it doesn’t sound right, it doesn’t sound like language. It sounds like noise. Clang-clang, clang-clang. Being a mute may be unnecessary in this day, but it’s hardly a handicap in my profession. People talk too goddamn much.

You wouldn’t see it that way. You talked me into this job. Big bonus, you said. Buy the apartment I’ve been scouting, you said. Just a job, where’s my professionalism, you said, and you said, and you said. Nothing wrong with your speech center.

But you know it—you would love me if you could see me now. Because one of the other effects of this half-assed aphasia I’ve got is my facial muscles are paralyzed. You’d never ask me again if they called me Deadpan Allie for nothing.

That’s what you asked me when you talked me into this. I can remember. I’ve got one eye out and I’m plugged into the memory boost (all the equipment’s here, I wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. Like yours). Left eye. I tried the other eye but I don’t think my left hemisphere wants to talk to you because I can’t type and remember at the same time plugged in on that side. Typing lefthanded, too. I guess I’ve got enough language on that side of the brain.

I’m meandering. You’ll have to bear with me.

I told you when you talked me into this I don’t do dirty work. People like me because I’m clean. I was clean with the fetishist, I was clean with the mindsuck composer, I was clean with your son-in-law and he pushed me. But you wanted me to do this one. Do you remember what I said or do you need a boost for it? I told you anyone who insisted on working with an empath didn’t need me.

Fine. It’s a silly prejudice. Maybe I wouldn’t want anyone to get that close to me without the decency of a machine between us. It’s my right to feel that way. Why did you send me when you knew I felt that way? Professionalism. I know that. Don’t try getting in touch with me to tell me something I already know. Fine. They asked for me. They asked for me. Fine. They asked for me. They asked for me. Fine. They asked for—

Excuse. I got a bounce on that, a real ricochet. I’m not myself today. Or maybe I am, for the first time in a long time.

I’d always thought of the entourage as a thing of the past. Not just entourage, but Entourage, as in the people who tend to accumulate around someone who happens to be Somebody. Now, I’ve seen performance artists who keep an audience on retainer so they can hone work as they go but an Entourage is a lot more than that, and a lot less, too. Caverty had a whole houseful of Entourage—highly unusual for a holo artist, I thought—and there was a hell of a lot of house. I’d already been told how it was with him—hell, I knew about the empath, didn’t I?—but that didn’t mean I could anticipate the experience of opening the front door and finding them all there.

Yes, I did open the front door myself. Noisy crowd, they didn’t hear me ring so I tried the controls and the door swung open to the entry hall. All those done-over mansions in the slightly-upper Midwest retained the entry halls, complete with chandelier. Yesterday’s gentility, today’s bright idea. This one was tiled in a black and white compass pattern. When you came in, you could see you were standing just slightly east of true north, if that sort of thing mattered to you. The Compass hasn’t permeated everything the way the Zodiac has, but then it’s a pretty new idea. Personally, I think What’s your direction? will always be as dumb a question as What’s your sign? None of the half-dozen people standing around in the entry hall asked me either question, or anything else, including Need some help? as I unloaded my baggage from the flyer. The pilot watched from the front seat; she was union and definitely not a baggage handler, as she’d told me several times on the trip out.

It wasn’t until I had all my system components piled up on the center of the compass—excuse, Compass, I mean (they’d want it that way)—that someone broke loose from the group and came over. To examine the boxes, as it turned out. She refused to notice me until she heard the whiny hum of the flyer as it lifted off outside.

“Are these for Caverty?” she asked, putting one hand on top of the pile proprietarily.

I put my own hand atop the pile, even with hers. “Not exactly. I’m the pathosfinder.”

The silver and gold weave eyebrows went up. In the middle of the day, they gave her the look of someone who hasn’t gone home from last night’s party yet. So did the rest of her outfit, which seemed to be a collection of swatches from this season’s best fabrics or something, predominantly silver and gold with the textures varying. Fandango would have tried to buy it right off her back.

“Pathosfinder,” she said, tasting the word uncertainly. “I don’t think—” she shrugged. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember us ordering a pathosfinder.” She turned to the other people still clustered over near the foot of a curving marble and ebony staircase. “Anyone put in an order for a pathosfinder?”

“Caverty did,” I said before any of them could answer. “You should ask him.”

The grey eyes widened; not biogems, I noticed, but eyes that looked like eyes. It seemed kind of out of character for her. “Oh, no,” she said. “Caverty works with an empath, everybody knows that.”

“He still works with an empath,” I said, “only he’s also going to be working with me temporarily.”

The woman shrugged again. “I’m sorry, I don’t think you understand how things are. If Caverty ordered some equipment from you, I’m sure he means to use it himself somehow, but I know that he didn’t order you to come with it. You can leave the equipment here and I’ll see that he gets it and sends your company a receipt but—” She was starting to show me the egress when the chandelier said, in a cheery, female voice, “You’re a lousy doorman, Priscilla, you should stick to partying. I’m coming right down.”

For several moments, all Priscilla did was gape up at the chandelier with her mouth open. I stole a look at the little group by the stairs; the Emotional Indices ranged from apprehension to mild indignation to somewhat malicious satisfaction. I felt myself going over a mental speed bump. The milieu here was going to be a bitch to get around, and it would no doubt be reproduced in some way in Caverty’s mind. Terrific, I thought. As if the job weren’t already hard enough, I had a complicated social structure to clamber around on. NN, you old bastard.

Then another woman came trotting down the staircase. “Ah, here we are. The pathosfinder. Alexandra Haas, right? Deadpan Allie?” Somehow her hitting the foot of the stairs shooed everyone, including Priscilla, away; they flowed off into a room to the left, or west, according to the Compass.

“Sorry about that,” said the woman. She was all business, tailored, no frills, brown all over, including her eyes, which were some kind of artificial gem the color of oak. “Sometimes the Entourage gets a little out of hand around here. I’m Harmony. At least, Caverty hopes I am.” She laughed. “I’m kind of the general factotum, grand scheduler, traffic director, hall monitor. I try to keep things harmonious. I’m the one who contacted your agency about you. I’ve done quite a lot of research on pathosfinders; I’m really happy you were able to take the job.”

I nodded. “Thanks. I need a place to stash my equipment and then I’d like to meet Caverty.”

“I’ve had a room prepared for you upstairs, away from the general foofooraw and infighting—”

“Somewhere close to Caverty, I hope?” I said, as she tried to herd me toward the stairs. “I like to be as available and accessible to a client as possible.”

Harmony’s face clouded slightly. “Oh. Well. I, uh, I’d really have to check that out with Caverty. He has his own section of the house where no one else stays, out of respect to his need for a private working environment. You’re experienced with creative people, so I guess you know how that is.”

“I understand completely. However, clients sometimes feel that they have to see me right away, in the middle of the night or whatever. I need to be easily available.”

Harmony smiled with indulgence. “There’s nowhere you can go in this house where you would not be available to Caverty on a moment’s notice or less. Everyone here understands that. It is his house, after all.”

I opened my mouth, thought quickly, and shut it again. Trying to explain to her that I was not just another body added to the general Entourage population wasn’t going to penetrate; I could tell. She was sure she knew the kind of people who stayed in Caverty’s house, she was one of them. “My system—” I said, gesturing at the stack of components still sitting in the center of the Compass.

“I’ve already taken care of that. It’ll be moved up to your room for you.”

“I’ll just wait here, then, until I see everything moved.”

The professional mask almost slipped. She caught herself before she could sigh and spoke into her brown bracelet instead. “Entry hall right now.” Four people with straps and handtrucks emerged from a door half-hidden by the start of the curve of the staircase. They weren’t exactly in uniform but there was a sameness to them and I knew immediately from their posture that they weren’t Entourage. They were employees.

“We don’t do that much heavy lifting and moving large objects around here,” Harmony said as the hired help labored along behind us with my system. “The people who come and go here tend to travel light, although we haven’t actually had anyone leave for a long time. Leave permanently, I mean. Which is good. For all of Caverty’s—oh, I don’t know what you’d call it, wildness of heart or freedom of spirit, I guess—for all that, he really needs a stable living situation. And things have really stabilized here. It’s good. I think you’ll see that while you’re here.”

Even though I was getting short of breath on those damned stairs, I had to do breathing exercises to maintain the deadpan. She made my skin crawl.

<>

Whoa. Have to stop sometimes. That boost. Too vivid sometimes. I don’t know why I’m reliving this for you anyway, NN. I mean, can you appreciate it? What do I think I’m doing, making art or something? I’m no artist, not in that sense. But I’m the best pathosfinder in the hemisphere. Right? You made me the best pathosfinder in the hemisphere, remember? You did it. And you know, that was nothing compared to what some people can do to you.

I know what you’re saying right now. I went into it with a bad attitude. Isn’t that what you’re saying? I know it is, even though—chuckle, chuckle—I doubt I could actually understand you if I were there right now and you were saying it to me. Clang-clang, clang-clang.

Um, bad attitude. Yes, you’d say I’d gone into it with a bad attitude. Now what kind of a thing is that for someone trading on the name Deadpan Allie, and my reputation and all. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s knowing when you’re in a bad situation. I wanted to pack up and go right then. Leaving aside the skin crawling and that stuff (interesting mental image, there, pack up and go and leave aside the skin crawling; there I go meandering again, bear with me, it happens, did I mention that? I guess I did but it’s too late to go back and see if I really did because I can’t read that part any more.). So. Even if my skin hadn’t been crawling like a lizard, like a million little tiny lizards, I should have seen it was already too hard. Pathosfinding you need privacy for. Go down and root around in somebody’s soul like that; the client gets embarrassed in front of me sometimes. Facing someone else can be impossible. Caverty should have known that, he was a professional, he’d worked with a pathosfinder years before, before he’d discovered his empath.

So that was mainly why I stayed, you know. I wanted to check that out, see this empath and Caverty, get a feel for how they worked and why Caverty wanted to work that way. But I think I must have had it in the back of my mind that I was going to leave after that, unless Caverty could disentangle himself from his empath and his Harmony and the rest of the Entourage. So I could work him properly.

Disentangle? Did I really say that?

I don’t know. I can’t read it any more.

Harmony gave me the house tour. Done-over mansion, the usual things overdone as well as done over. Ten thousand rooms, not counting bedrooms. Ballrooms, dining rooms, sitting rooms, room rooms, an art gallery, a theatre where Caverty showed his holos if he felt like it. That last wasn’t the way Harmony put it but that was the general idea, or so I gathered from her Emotional Index.

Reading the Emotional Index of someone who is trying like hell to give you the best impression can be amusing or annoying, depending on your mood. Occasionally I found myself feeling one way or the other about it but mostly I felt uneasy. She’d fallen into some kind of PR ramadoola that she was running on me. Silliness; you don’t give a pathosfinder PR because she finds out what the truth is right away. But Harmony was straining to make me happy or get some kind of approval from me. Maybe because she thought then I’d do a better job with her boss?

No, that wasn’t it. She was trying to sell me something. Or convert me.

Oh, yes. Once I saw it, there was no way not to see it. But never mind. Sooner or later, I’d get to Caverty and I wouldn’t have to bother with Harmony or Priscilla the Party Baby or anyone else in the Entourage.

“I need to see Caverty as soon as possible,” I told Harmony as she led me down yet another upstairs hall toward yet another room she thought she had to show me. “He is my client, I have to let him know I’ve arrived.”

Harmony turned to look at me with mild surprise. “But—were you thinking of starting work today?”

“If Caverty wanted to start in five minutes, I’d do my best to be ready.”

“He won’t want to start today, I’m positive. And I’m sure someone must have told him you’re here.” The smile turned a little hard. “Perhaps Priscilla. Anyway, wouldn’t you like to get comfortable, settle in a little, get to know the place? Not to mention all of us. Caverty’s group. I know he’d like you to feel like you’re a part of things. I mean, if you’re going to be here awhile—”

“I don’t actually know how long I’ll be here. I won’t have any idea until Caverty and I begin working together, and even then it’ll be hard to say. Pathosfinding isn’t a simple business. And that doesn’t even come into it. Some extremely complicated jobs have taken less than a day to complete while others that were more straightforward took weeks.” I resisted the temptation to look apologetic; not hard, really, because they don’t call me Deadpan Allie for nothing, but her proselytizing was working at me, trying to find a way in, at least to my politeness sympathies. “I really must speak to Caverty, whether we begin working today or two weeks from now. He’s my client.”

Harmony spread her hands and then clasped them together with a little sigh. Her nails were also painted brown, I noticed. That shouldn’t have seemed bizarre. “Well. If you must, you must. Could I at least phone him and tell him we’re coming? Is that all right?”

“Of course.”

She stepped into a room which seemed to be a souvenir gallery of some kind—still holos alongside flat pictures promoting one or other of Caverty’ s works, things that might have been awards, props, or just items he (or someone) had wanted to keep for sentimental reasons. Not a junk room; it was all neat and very organized. I glanced around while Harmony used a talk-only phone on a seven tiered ceramic table. She didn’t say much and she didn’t say it to Caverty, I was pretty sure. The Entourage has a completely different way of talking to the Man (or Woman) than they do to each other, and for each other, they had their own pecking order that was never quite congruent with the Man’s idea of who was over whom. Harmony was talking to an equal, without a doubt and, without a doubt, that wasn’t the empath.

“He says come right up,” Harmony said, replacing the phone. “Caverty lives at the top of the house; starting on this floor, there are elevators so we don’t have to climb a million stairs.” The smile was forced now, though I wouldn’t have been able to tell if I hadn’t known how to read an Emotional Index. She really hadn’t wanted to take me to Caverty today at all and I couldn’t figure that out. She’d chosen me (according to her, anyway); her own comfort was contingent on my helping the Man but she was reluctant to let me near him. Not completely reluctant—just for today. Tomorrow. Mariana, no problem. Entourages could be funny things. I had a passing thought that Caverty had better turn out to be worth it after the obstacle course I was having to run to get to him.

Well, of course, he had the whole top floor of the house, though the main room where he did most of his living and working was a big studio at the rear of the building, where he could look out a fan-shaped, floor-to-ceiling window at cultivated rolling country. He was sitting at the window when Harmony led me in—I was never going to walk with Harmony, I saw, she was always going to lead—off to the left side, looking away from the sunset, which was visible through another much smaller window behind him. A woman was sitting at his feet, one hand resting casually on his ankle. I could just barely hear their voices in quiet conversation. Harmony looked around, saw no one else and nearly panicked.

“I talked to Langtree, he told me to come up,” she said, ostensibly to me but actually so Caverty would hear and know that she hadn’t just taken it upon herself to barge in. Whatever happened to Caverty says come right up, I wondered.

“It’s all right, Harmony,” Caverty called out. There was a slight echo off the mostly empty walls. “I sent Langtree out.”

“Oh,” she breathed, pretending to fan herself relievedly with one brown-tipped hand, “that’s good, I’m glad I wasn’t interrupting anything important—”

“You weren’t,” Caverty said good-naturedly. He had one of those voices that would sound good-natured all the time, even when it was chewing someone out. “You’re okay, Harmony, thanks for everything. You can go now, too, take a break, get some rest. Have a drink, have kinky sex, whatever you want.”

Harmony gave one of those full-bodied ha-ha-ha laughs and sort of backed out of the room, looking from me to Caverty and the woman on the floor and back again.

“The pathosfinder,” Cavert