“Never know what?”
“When you’ll need one.”
“Do you think you’ll need this?” She waved the keyboard at him.
He shrugged. “Might do.”
“It looks pretty standard.”
“They said that about the first gen Amstrad.”
“Good point,” said Shirley, and slammed the keyboard against the side of Lech’s desk, where it exploded in a loud scatter of plastic. When she replayed the moment in her head later, the air was filled with a confetti alphabet. In real life she was left holding a computer keyboard folded in two, its halves held together by wiring.
“Fuck!”
“I know, right?” she said.
“Don’t do that!”
“I just did. And I have to say, I was not expecting it to make so much noise.” She let what was left in her hands fall to the floor, and took another keyboard from the shelf. “Do you think they’ll all be that loud?” She smashed it against the desk. “Certainly looking that way.”
“You’re a fucking maniac!”
“It’s been said before.” She dropped the junk and reached for a monitor: flat-screened, 18-inch. Already she was picturing the contact it would make with the wall; all those pixels whooshing everywhere, like glitter. All the crunching underfoot that would ensue.
Ho didn’t dare come closer, preferring to keep his desk between them.
“You wanna make me stop?” she invited. “You’re the one with the light sabre.”
“Lamb’ll go ape shit.”
“That’ll be fun. How far do you think I can throw this?”
“Put it down!”
“I’ll break every piece of kit in this office,” she said. “Including the stuff that’s still plugged in. And while you’re crying about it, I’ll tell Lamb what you were using it for while it still worked. And when he’s finished laughing, he’ll do to you what I’m doing to your toybox.”
“Put it down!”
Instead she raised it above her head with both hands and made a chimp-like noise. There’d be glass and plastic everywhere, and the ghost of every image the screen had ever displayed would flow into the wall it broke upon, and spend an eternity trapped in the bones of Slough House.
That was such a pleasing thought it almost came as a disappointment when Roddy screamed, “Okay! Okay!”
She hovered, unwilling for the moment to end. One more small explosion? Couldn’t do any harm . . .
“I said okay!”
Reluctantly, she placed the screen on Lech’s desk.
“You’re a fucking maniac.”
“You already said that.”
“There’s . . . crap everywhere now.”
“There was crap everywhere before.”
He came out from behind his desk and snatched up the monitor, cradling it in his arms. You’d think she’d threatened to drop his baby out of a window. Then she thought, Ho, with a baby? Jesus. Some stuff, you don’t want in your head.
She held her hand out. “Keys.”
“No way.”
“。 . . You want me to start again?”
“You’re not taking my car. I’m coming with you.”
She hadn’t been expecting that.
“You’ll just get in the way,” she said.
“Don’t care. You’re not taking my car. You’ll just smash it up.”
To be fair, evidence of her propensity for smashing stuff up wasn’t hard to find. He looked pretty determined, and while she didn’t think it would take her long to break that determination—about as long as it would take to break another keyboard—time wasn’t necessarily on her side, not if she wanted to catch up with Louisa and Lech before whatever was happening happened. Besides, Ho could keep her up to speed on their position. And another besides: if she was right about being jinxed, then teaming up with Roddy Ho was a win-win.
She said, “Okay. One minute,” and stalked out of the room and into her own office.
Ho thought: Christ, that was close. It was like dealing with a wild animal, one you had to talk out of its temper when you didn’t even share a language. Hardly a surprise his razor-sharp recall was letting him down, not after dealing with Dander’s tantrum . . . He’d come this close to bringing her down—quick jab to the throat—and was thankful he hadn’t: last thing he needed was an ex-colleague on his carpet. Sure, Lamb would have seen things his way—there are times you can’t keep your powers in check: ask any man—but that wouldn’t have kept da Feds at bay. Imagine, the Rodster behind bars. He’d seen enough movies: it would have been a full-time job defending his sweet virtue. He’d have been unlikely to come out of it without a scar or two. He raised a hand to his face, traced an invisible line down one cheek. An eye would be partly closed, its surface gone milky. One-eyed Rod. He’d be bitter, a loner, but still devoted to the cause of justice. He was still clutching the monitor, too. He put it back on its shelf, then looked darkly down at all the broken plastic. Someone was going to have to sweep that up.