thing you should know about me: I'm never off-duty. Call it dedication, call it a curse. In this case, call it trouble.
The picture showed the getaway car on the day of the heist. The guy behind the wheel wasn't the husband. It wasn't even a guy. It was the dame.
She came through with the coffee, saw me with the photo and laughed.
"You can't prove anything," she said.
"You framed your own husband," I replied.
"My alibi's cast-iron."
"What about the photo?"
"A sentimental reminder," she said, drawing a tiny gun from the garter around her right thigh. She wasn't wearing anything else so there was nowhere else she could have hidden a weapon.
The gun held one bullet and she used it to shoot a hole in the photo, right where her face was. I tossed the ruined photo aside through a cloud of gunsmoke and chicory.
"You used me," I said. "Now that loophole's closed your husband's never getting out of there. And you're walking around free as a bird."
"As an eagle," she laughed.
As I brushed past her she pulled me close and kissed me once, brutally.
"See you around, mister," she whispered.
And she did. Most years she came to me with some scam or other. Every time I told myself I wouldn't get involved. Every time I told myself she was a ruthless, heartless dame on the lookout only for herself. And every single time I fell for it. And her.
Except this time.
This time, I told myself, things were going to be different.
The Tunnel of All Ends is the place to go when you want to find something out. Everything's down there, and I mean everything. Everything that ever happens gets recorded and filed away in some or other side alley and it stays there forever. Don't ask me how it works—something to do with a quantum inseparability link to a place called Stone—but the paperwork must be catastrophic because everything's there, categorized and cross-referred and waiting to be found. You just have to know where to look.
Which is where the Search Engine comes in. It's ugly and terrifying but it's fast and it never fails.
Unfortunately, the fare can be on the high side.
"There," said the driver, pointing out a long, shabby passage with something like a finger. At the far end, a tired-looking station platform sagged beneath flickering fluorescents. "Lycanthropia Terminus."
Then the driver turned towards me, brandishing something like a hole punch, but more like a surgical instrument, and said the words I'd dreaded hearing this whole trip: "Tickets, please."
By the time I folded myself back out of the filing cabinet, the dame had shot herself a neat, round hole in the door. She was about to reach through the hole to undo the latch. Dropping the hat, I marched over and did it for her. Her fingers brushed mine and our eyes met through the rain-streaked glass. Her lips parted and, so help me, I felt my heart do that familiar high-wire plunge.
I pulled away from the door and slumped myself down behind the desk.
"You can let yourself in," I growled.
"I already did," she replied, her voice husky, maybe from the cold, maybe not. "May I sit down?"
I shrugged. "Please yourself. You usually do."
She sat down, smoothing her soaked sweater over her knees. I tried not to watch her doing this, without much success.
"I'll come straight to the point," she began. "This man . . ." she pointed to the corpse on the floor, ". . . I mean, this creature, has been blackmailing me."
I kept my eyes fixed on hers. It wasn't hard. "Looks like he just stopped," I said.
"Are you going to turn me in?" She leaned across the desk and clasped her hands around mine. Her touch was cold and electric. "Are you?"
"Is that why you shot your way in here? To plead your innocence before I figured it was you?"
"How long would it have taken you to find out?"
I shrugged. "Would have taken me a minute or two to get the slug out of the stiff. As for tracing it—that depends who I went to."
"Give me a for instance."
"Deke the Rip could do it in a half hour. Twenty minutes to get to his place and back."
"So you'd have been knocking on my door within the hour."
Again I shrugged. "It's what I do."
"You think I don't know that?"
"You know it. So why shoot the werewolf on my doorstep? Why not choose somewhere more discreet? And why was he blackmailing you?"
She pressed her shoulders back in the chair and crossed