Born in the Morning’s voice was shrill with astonishment. “My man, how’d you let a streetlight hit you?”
“Keep it quiet,” Honesty said, and Kevin said, “It fell on you.”
“No, I ran into it with my face, so hard I fell on my ass and blacked out and when I woke up some wino who felt sorry for me had dragged me into their alley, so that’s how low I fell, I got babied by a tramp,” said Honesty. Then he said more reflectively, “Probably saved my life though. They were good tramps. Didn’t understand what the fuck they were saying. They kept checking my eyes and my mouth and miming going ‘Ahhh’ and fucking biting at the air. Wonder if they were on something new, I gotta know for market economics.”
Honesty was talking very fast. When he had taken a couple of breaths and put a piece of fruit in his mouth for comfort—it was tiny sprays of green berries, the slightly soggy kind you had to suck off the stems—he said, “Anyway, I was out of my fucking mind scared.”
Hot Sauce said, “The job?”
“Yeah.” Honesty fidgeted with the empty spray and picked between one of his teeth with it, which seemed to give him courage. “It was a fucked-up job. I’m not doing odd jobs with those guys anymore. Well … can’t anymore even if I wanted to, come to think of it.”
Now Hot Sauce was very quiet and gentle when she said—
“Tell what happened.”
Honesty took another spray to fortify himself. It was one of Beautiful Ruby’s sprays, but Beautiful Ruby didn’t even complain.
“I thought the job was to go down into the tunnels and get the stuff off the pipes, but it was van guys,” said Honesty, very fast. “I said no sir, not if we’re knocking off a gun vehicle, but they said no, they were gonna grapple for air-con units off the tops of megatrucks—you know, circuit boards and coolant and shit. They said the trucks don’t even notice until the next pit stop if you do it right, the driver just thinks a gasket’s blown or something. I dunno, one of the old chicks explained it, but I didn’t get it. And I wasn’t gonna be grappling, I was gonna be put in one of the overheads holding out the net so the grapplers could get back up. I don’t get sick around heights.”
He suckled one of the sprays completely free of berries and chewed them. This close up there was a little bit of saliva so everyone went, “Ugh,” and leant back, but then they leant back in.
Honesty said, even more quickly now, “It was a neat job, right? They drop on the van from the top of the tunnel, they unscrew the unit, then down the end of the street we’re there with the net and we scoop up the guy and the unit. The timing’s sweet as hell.”
He looked at Hot Sauce, implacable and opposite, and he swallowed again and said, “Worked fine first two times. Then they were like, let’s do a third, let’s do a third, and their guy in charge was like, well we don’t have a timetable but okay, we’ll get into position and if something comes along we’ll do one last run. So the guy gets in position and so do we…”
He stopped.
“Keep going,” said Born in the Morning urgently. The rest of them shushed him, Hot Sauce included, and even Kevin. Honesty didn’t join in. His eyes only met Hot Sauce’s eyes now.
“Then we heard the noise,” whispered Honesty. “I thought it was an earthquake, I—I just about pissed myself. Just about. I saw them go beneath me—the heat nearly fuckin’ roasted me and the other guy, but we’d skinned up and I always slop extra thermal, like you tell me, I’m the good boy, I burn like fish in a rowboat, don’t I. We had on masks so we didn’t choke, even me, they’re professionals, but—but the guy had fuckin’ dropped for them. I don’t know what the fuck he was thinking, why did he drop? Why did he drop for that? Fucking nuts man, fucking nutter, just braindead, just out of his ears.”
This was all pretty incoherent and Nona didn’t quite follow it, and Honesty’s voice had risen in a kind of strangled way and broken a little too and nobody had even made fun of that either. Then Hot Sauce reached out and put her hand quietly and firmly on Honesty’s shoulder, and that calmed him down, but he was sweating, he was warm. He smelled like overheated animal.
“So we pick him up when he beeps us. We get the net out,” Honesty said, more slowly, more methodically. “We get him up and he hasn’t even got shit. He’s like, go. Go. Lead guy’s like, get out, get back to the car. So we climb up the pipes and we get out to the vehicle and we stash everything else and I get in. I’m in the car with the guy, and his boss is there over the radio, and this guy—this guy’s fuckin’ crying. He’s a grown man. He’s all like, I fucked up, I fucked up, and the boss is like, who did we hit, and he’s like, I dunno, and then he tells us this fucked-up story—says he dropped onto the back and it was real sophisticated, he climbed down into the vent pipes to get the unit, pay dirt he said, real good stuff, but then he … he pulled up a vent, and he saw down into the cargo trawler, and he said he saw…”