Zero History

“Seriously?”
“Then how are you hooked up with her?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Have you done something? A crime?”
“Not lately. Nothing she’d be interested in. Much. She’s after Gracie.”
“Who’s that?”
“He has Shombo. Gracie was watching Bigend. Thought he was a competitor. In a way,
he is. So she started watching me. Now I need to meet with her.”
“ ‘Chombo,’ ” she corrected, “not ‘Shombo.’ Where?”
“I think we decide. Not here.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Do you have to tell Hubertus?” he asked.
She put the tip of her index finger on Winnie’s card, moved it slightly, like a little Ouija
board, divining something. “My relationship with Bigend isn’t strictly business,” she said.
“My mother worked for him when I was a kid.”
Milgrim nodded, but really just because it seemed to fit.
“Is she going to try to stop whatever it is that Garreth is doing for Bigend?”
“She wants to fuck Gracie over,” said Milgrim, “any way she can. She’s hoping Bigend
will do it for her, because she can’t do it herself.”
Fiona tilted her head. “You sounded like a different person just then. Different kind of
person.”
“She might explain it that way herself,” he said. “But if it were just a matter of my going
out and meeting her, I’d do it, and tell Bigend when I could.”
“Okay,” said Fiona. “I’ve got the keys to the Yamaha. Call her. I’ll need to explain
where she’s meeting us.”
“Where is she meeting us?”
“Smithfield.”
>>>
This time, removing the hairspray helmet, which he was starting to accept as an inherent
and not entirely unfair cost of riding with Fiona—and almost, possibly, to enjoy—
Milgrim found himself beneath a sort of deep, glassy, probably plastic awning, slung
horizontally from above, running the seeming length of a very long building, apparently
the only one on this very long block, ornate to American eyes but probably leanly
functional to its Victorian builders. Sections of brick alternated with narrower sections of
gray cement. A pair of obvious couriers sat their bikes, the big Hondas Fiona called
maggots, about twenty feet away, smoking cigarettes and drinking from tall cans.
“Stay on the bike,” Fiona said, removing her own helmet. “We may have to leave
quickly. If we do, get the helmet on and hold on.”