Carnival

The engine of the flashboat was faster and louder than the caterpillar drive on the scoot. Andrй waited until his prey was in motion before powering up. His scoot was dark gray, and the topcoat had a gloss-or-matte option that got a lot of work on night jobs. With the lowlight, he didn’t need the running lights.

He concentrated very hard, thinking of Spivak dropping Cricket off at the ferry landing, just the other side of the paramangrove swamp, and turning back for home, maybe a little careless and tired. He couldn’t take a blacked-out scoot into the city; if he didn’t get run down by a barge, he’d get pulled over by traffic enforcement—and Cricket might recognize him or the vehicle under conditions of more light. The ideal, of course, would be for her to drop off Cricket, turn around, head home, and run into engine trouble. Unfortunately, Andrй didn’t think his untrained mojo was enough to pull off that set of coincidences, but he held the thought anyway, sharp and fine, visualizing it in detail.

But Spivak guided the flashboat toward the lights of Novo Haven. The universe wasn’t listening. Or somebody else’s free will was getting in the way again. Just plain inconvenient.

She opened quite a gap as she headed inward—his craft wasn’t as speedy—but Andrй wasn’t worried. It shouldn’t matter, as long as he could spot her running lights and the silhouette of her boat across open water.

Traffic was light at first, and there were no street- or channel-lights on the outskirts, other than the occasional door or dock lamp. But the traffic regs assured that Spivak couldn’t just flash off and leave his slower vehicle behind. Andrй made up some of the distance and then slotted his scoot in behind a water taxi two vehicles behind Spivak and Cricket.

He didn’t even need to follow that closely. It was obvious pretty quickly that they were going to Cricket’s new flat. Andrй hadn’t been there yet, but he had the address, and it was a neighborhood he knew.

He stuck close anyway, though, the tactile rubber of the scoot’s handlebars molding his palms, the engine softly vibrating his calves. He pulled a hooded sweater on one arm at a time—keeping his eye on traffic—and slipped on eye protection. Too dark for dark glass in the goggles, but they changed the line of his face a little. He skinned the beard off, which wouldn’t help if either woman was running connex, but he knew Cricket at least usually kept her skins live. She hypertexted like a mad thing in conversation, her agile brain tending to shoot off in six unrelated directions at once.

The scoot was a quiet little craft, and Andrй was glad of that as he ducked it out of the traffic stream one bridge shy of Cricket’s flat and diagonally across the channel. They unloaded quickly—a small favor from fate—and Cricket gave Spivak a one-armed hug as she climbed past her before turning away.

Andrй crushed a pang of conscience. He’d be there to console her. It might even bring them closer together. Cricket had this unnerving tendency to flit just out of reach, as if she were covered in something slick and transparent. You could brush against her surface, but there was never any way to get a grip.

A minute later, Spivak finished fussing with her safety belts and pulled away from the landing, headed in the opposite direction, not back across the side channel where Andrй lay in wait. He twisted the throttle and sent the scoot forward, pulling into traffic smoothly to avoid attracting attention.

Now his heart thumped his breastbone. The crackle of tension spidered up his back to grab and prickle across his shoulder blades, and his stomach seemed to sway in his gut like a ballast bag of wet sand. His skin crawled taut across his thighs and groin; nausea chased bitterness up the back of his throat.

This was it.

The luck was running now.

It was ninety minutes before he got his shot. Spivak stayed in the city, visited a tavern Andrй didn’t follow her into—it was on a decommissioned ferry, moored along the east side of Broadbrook, and there was no way off it that wasn’t immediately obvious—and returned to her flashboat after less than forty-five minutes. It might have been the meet, but his job wasn’t to stop the meet, or to identify the other party. He didn’t do that sort of thing.

Afterward she headed west, out of the city on bayside. Not back the way they had come, but this was a shorter route out of the city and she could always cut across the shipping lanes for a nearly direct route back to Kroc’s house—a shortcut that would be ideal for Andrй’s purposes. Not only did lighters kick up a hell of a splash when they touched down—a splash that could turn over a small craft—but big ships sometimes didn’t notice little boats, and accidents could happen.

Andrй didn’t like to smile over his work; it seemed disrespectful. But it was hard to keep this one down: maybe prayer was good for something.

He should have stuck to his demand to be paid a bonus for a twenty-four-hour closure.