Noir by K. W. Jeter Read Free Book Online

him inside his apartment. The cube bunny that he’d spotted lurking around in the corpse’s hallway.
    “How’d you get in here?” McNihil would have felt no particular surprise or anger, even if there hadn’t been a slowly dissipating haze of alcohol over his brain. He closed the door, which she’d bypassed somehow, with all its locks and dead bolts in place.
    “Oh … you know.” She gave him a shrug and a timid smile, from where she sat over on the crookbacked, threadbare couch. “There’s always ways.”
    “I suppose so.” McNihil slipped his rattling keyring into his pocket, his fingertips brushing against an even smaller piece of metal, which hadn’t been there when he’d left this morning. “You want some coffee or something?” With the jacket unbuttoned, hanging shroud-loose fromhis shoulders, he threaded his way through the apartment’s cramped spaces. “Frankly, I need some.”
    “Sure.” The cube bunny sat leaning forward, hands clasped at the corner that her knees made in her worn woolen skirt. The fabric had probably been midnight-blue at one time, but had faded to somewhere closer to nine P.M .; that was the tone of gray it looked like in McNihil’s eyes. “That’d be great.” The girl didn’t draw back as McNihil passed by her, close enough that her skirt was brushed by his trousers leg. She glanced up hopefully. “Would it be real coffee?”
    “You’re kidding.” With his forearm, McNihil pushed aside the stacks of dishes and Chinese-restaurant take-out cartons by the sink, giving himself enough room to assemble the battered chrome sections of the percolator. On the kitchen wall, by the oven’s flue outlet, a calendar with days but no year hung, its unlikely mountain scene faded to a curling-edged transparency.
    “Mr. Travelt always had real coffee.” A slight tone of resentment sounded in the girl’s voice.
    “Yeah, well, there isn’t enough caffeine in the world to get a rise out of him now.” McNihil threaded the plug past the unwashed glasses and into the socket in the linoleum behind them.
    “No,” the cube bunny said mournfully. “No, there isn’t.”
    He figured he knew what came next. That she would start crying, not in a big emotional show, but just a few effective tears, half from real grief over somebody who’d been nice to her—or as nice as could be expected—and half for the effect it should have on her audience. And would have; he didn’t see things the way he did, this sad and mournfully beautiful world instead of the other one with all the colors, if he weren’t also inclined toward its emotional weather.
    McNihil turned his gaze from the doorway and back toward the things on the kitchen counter, as the girl rooted through the little black handbag she’d tucked beside her on the couch. He knew that if he’d gone on watching, he would’ve seen her come up with some little cotton handkerchief with the initials in the corner, which the nonexistent nuns back in the convent school had taught her to hand-embroider. Instead of the plastic-wrapped pack of disposables soaked in heat-activated anti-virals that she’d really have on the other side of the reality line.
    He dipped his hand in the water in the sink, then rar his fingertipsacross the surface of the just-warming coffeepot. The wetness made a slightly shinier mirror out of the curved metal. Shiny things worked better for this than real mirrors; anything big and intentionally reflective got absorbed too quickly into this world’s firmness. But in little bits of chrome and silver, sometimes the back of a spoon or a polished doorknob, he saw a scrap from the other side, a bit of optical leak-through, colors bleeding into the monochrome.
    This time, he saw the girl sitting on the couch. McNihil turned the metal pot slightly, angling the wet reflective patch’s shot through the kitchen doorway and toward the apartment’s living room. Seeing her this way, the girl didn’t look like a young Ida