An hour later, in the lobby, while Prior signed the bill, she saw Eddy’s black gator-clone suitcases go by on a robot baggage cart, and that was when she knew for sure that he was dead.
Gerald’s office had a sign with big old-fashioned letters, fourth floor of a condo rack in what Prior said was Baltimore. The kind of building where they throw up a framework and commercial tenants bring their own modules, plug-ins. Like a highrise trailer camp, everything snaked with bundled cables, optics, lines for sewage and water. »What’s it say?« she asked Prior. »Gerald Chin, Dentist.« »You said he was a plastic surgeon.« »He is.« »Why can’t we just go to a boutique like everybody else?« He didn’t answer. She couldn’t really feel much now, and part of her knew that she wasn’t as scared as she should be. Maybe that was okay, though, because if she got scared enough she wouldn’t be able to do anything, and definitely she wanted to get out of the whole deal, whatever it was. On the drive over, she’d discovered this lump in the pocket of Michael’s jacket. It had taken her ten minutes to figure out it was a shockrod, like nervous suits carried. It felt like a screwdriver handle with a pair of blunt metal horns where the shaft should be. It probably charged off wall current; she just hoped Michael had kept up the charge. She figured Prior didn’t know it was there. They were legal, most places, because they weren’t supposed to do much permanent damage, but Lanette had known a girl who’d gotten worked over real bad with one and never got much better. If Prior didn’t know it was in her pocket, it meant he didn’t know everything, and he had a stake in having her think he did. But then he hadn’t known how much Eddy hated gambling. She couldn’t feel much about Eddy, either, except she still figured he was dead. No matter how much they’d given him, he still wouldn’t walk out without those cases. Even if he was going for a whole new wardrobe he’d need to get all dressed up to go shopping for it. Eddy cared about clothes more than almost anything. And those gator cases were special; he’d got ’em off a hotel thief in Orlando, and they were the closest thing he had to a home. And anyway, now that she thought about it, she couldn’t see him going for a buy-out bid, because what he wanted most in the whole world was to be part of some big deal. Once he was, he figured, people would start to take him seriously. So somebody finally took him seriously, she thought, as Prior carried her bag into Gerald’s clinic. But not the way Eddy wanted. She looked around at the twenty-year-old plastic furniture, the stacks of stim-star magazines with Jap writing. It looked like a Cleveland haircut place. There was nobody there, nobody behind the reception desk. Then Gerald came through a white door, wearing the kind of crinkled foil suit that paramedics wore for traffic accidents. »Lock the door,« he said to Prior, through a blue paper mask that hid his nose, mouth, and chin. »Hello, Mona. If you’ll step this way . . .« He gestured toward the white door. She had her hand around the shockrod now, but she didn’t know how to turn it on. She followed Gerald, Prior taking up the rear. »Have a seat,« Gerald said. She sat on a white enamel chair. He came close, looked at her eyes. »You need to rest, Mona. You’re exhausted.« There was a serrated stud on the shockrod’s handle. Press it? Forward? Back? Gerald went to a white box with drawers, got something out. »Here,« he said, extending a little tube thing with writing on the side, »this will help you. . . .« She barely felt the tiny, measured spray; there was a black blot on the aerosol tube, just where her eyes tried to focus, growing. . . .
She remembered the old man showing her how you kill a catfish. Catfish has a hole in its skull, covered with skin; you take something stiff and skinny, a wire, even a broomstraw did it, and you just slip it in. . . .