that had gone on in and around there in the past few weeks. The many monkeyshines with Allie. Mirplo and the gun. Hard-ass confrontations with Scovil and Hines. Billy and me building the Penny Skim like a high school science project. Funny: all that traffic through my life. It made me realize how sterilely I’d lived before. You think you’re so out there in the world, you know? But if all your relationships are just narrow wires of exploitation, then you’re really not in the world at all, you’re just taking up space. It could be my epitaph: He just took up space.
I got out of the car and went inside. My head felt less like a used piñata and the ground felt less like an ongoing aftershock, but my overall cognitive structure still seemed cracked and shattered, jarred loose. A rough mosaic, like pixilated boobs on a tabloid TV show. This was no way to run an endgame, but what could I do? I didn’t see anyone giving me the rest of the day off.
Scovil stood in the middle of my living room, arms crossed, scowling down at Billy Yuan. I saw tension hanging between them like Ghostbusters slime. Literally saw it. So now my visual cortex was acting up. Terrific.
“Okay,” said Hines, “let’s do this by the numbers. You,” he said to me, “get word to your marks that you need their pass codes now. You,” he said to Yuan, “launch the skim as soon as the first codes arrive.”
When you’ve been on the snuke as long as I have, some things are second nature, so with my volition in tatters, instinct took over. “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen,” I heard myself say.
“What do you mean?” asked Scovil. The fear vibe in her voice told me she had more than a rooting interest in the Penny Skim succeeding, and also that maybe my ability to read people was coming back online.
“It’s going to happen,” growled Hines.
“Or what?” I asked. “You’ll kill me twice?” That was more like it. That old Hoverlander élan.
Hines didn’t dignify my jape with a response. He just said, “Burn down the fucking house.”
“Can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It’s a house of cards, you moron.” I saw Scovil stifle the urge to say “What do you mean?” again. “There’s no Penny Skim,” I said, and then repeated for emphasis, or just because the words sounded good inside my head, “There. Is. No. Penny. Skim. Billy and I made the whole thing up. You’ve been mooked, you mook. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” Hines’s face turned red. I turned to Allie and Vic, and said, “Sorry, guys, you backed the wrong horse. Or rather, I guess you’d say, you backed a scratch.” I thought that might make sense, at least on a metaphorical level, but I really wasn’t sure. The air seemed to go out of Allie and Vic. Hines and Scovil looked deflated, too.
But there was Billy with a can of Fix-A-Flat. “He’s lying,” he said. “The Penny Skim is real,” he said suddenly. “And it’s already on.”
“Fucking Billy,” I said in a low warning voice.
He looked at me and shot me a shrug. I could see the little thought balloon popping up over his head. It said, Every man for himself. I had no doubt that Hines and Scovil could read it as clearly as I. “I launched it as soon as you left this morning,” Billy told me. He swiveled his laptop toward Scovil and Hines. “See for yourself,” he said. “The take so far is $675,000. It’ll go a lot higher.”
“No it won’t,” I countered. “That’s a dummy webpage running a dummy program.” I glanced at the screen. “Nice work, though. I have to admit.”
“Give it up, mate,” said Billy. He stood and faced Hines, carrying himself with the confident air of someone playing a long-held card. “What Radar had in mind,” he said, “was to blow you off by selling the skim as a perpetual-motion gaff gone wrong. He figured you could get us for attempted something, that’s all. We’d do some short time, and meanwhile the proceeds would pile up in a Manx bank, just waiting for our coming-out shindy.”
“Billy,” I said, “I don’t know why you’re doing this. You’re never going to be able to show them the money.”
Billy ignored me. “I knew it was only a matter of time until Radar double-crossed me.” He gave me another knowing look. “New leopard, same spots, yeh?” He turned back to Hines.