Read Online New York Nights [Virex 01] by Eric Brown - Free Book Online Page A

okay?’
     
    Carrie was perhaps forty, her thin, tanned face made even longer by her shaven skull, patterned with tattoos. She wore stylish cords, a black bolero jacket, and looked stunning.
     
    ‘I need to talk, Anna. I ... I need to talk to someone who understands people. We’ll meet somewhere. I’ll call tomorrow and we’ll arrange a meeting . . .’
     
    ‘Carrie, where’s Sissi?’
     
    Carrie hesitated. ‘I’m with her in a hotel.’ She spoke with a distinct Quebecois accent. ‘She was gone for five days, then yesterday she called me up and said that she needed to see me.’
     
    Anna shook her head. ‘What’s going on, Carrie?’
     
    ‘I don’t know. I met Sissi in the hotel, but she was acting very strange. It wasn’t drugs,’ she said, as if to dispel the notion. ‘I don’t know what was wrong with her. It was as if she didn’t know me. She sometimes goes out for a few hours, but in disguise. Then she comes back and everything is normal, she’s herself again, and everything’s fine for a few hours.’ She hesitated. ‘You understand, people, Anna. I need to see you, tell you about what’s been happening.’
     
    Anna shrugged. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
     
    Carrie looked pained. ‘Sissi claims that people are after her, that she needs to hide - which is why she wears the disguises.’
     
    ‘It sounds as though she needs help,’ Anna said. Psychiatric help, she thought to herself.
     
    Carrie looked up suddenly, stared off-screen. ‘She’s coming back. I’ll call you later, okay?’
     
    ‘Fine,’ Anna began, but Carrie had already cut the connection.
     
    It seemed almost as if Carrie was afraid of her lover.
     
    She moved to the kitchen and fixed herself a coffee. Kia was still in the shower. She carried the coffee back to the lounge, stared through the window, and waited for Kia to emerge from the bathroom, disturbed by the thought of what might be happening to Sissi Nigeria.
     
    * * * *
     

Four
     
     
    At eight that morning Barney Kluger found Halliday’s note on the desk-com: Looking into the Nigeria case, Barney - gone to the Scumbar. Be back around eight.
     
    Barney fixed himself a coffee and lowered his bulk into the swivel chair. The chair was getting to be a tight fit these days. He’d been on a diet the past three months, cut out all the pastrami on rye he’d become addicted to over the years. The Ukrainian wheat beer they served along at Olga’s, though, was harder to kick. Maybe if he could cut his daily consumption by a couple of bottles. . . ‘You’ve got the circulation of a stone, Barney,’ Doc Symes had warned him. ‘Don’t know how your heart keeps on going. Lose some weight, okay?’
     
    Well, he’d done his best, shed half a stone in twelve weeks, but his waistline didn’t seem to be getting any thinner. Maybe he’d invest in a new swivel.
     
    He wiped Hal’s note from the screen, called up the case file and sat back with his coffee. He’d look through his notes on a few cases for an hour, before heading downtown for his appointment at Mantoni Entertainments.
     
    He was pleased to see that Hal had taken the Nigeria case. He hadn’t fancied it himself, and not only because it would have meant him asking questions where he wasn’t welcome. He’d had a hunch about the situation as soon as Villeux had walked in and told her story the other day. So her lover was missing and Villeux was concerned, but Barney had seen it all before: the girls had had a tiff, fallen out, Nigeria had gone back to stay with some old lover for a period of cooling off. In a few days she’d be back, and when Barney’s bill came in at five hundred dollars per hour, Carrie Villeux would wish she hadn’t bothered hiring his services.
     
    He had to hand it to Hal, he had a hide as thick as a rhino’s. Barney had no qualms about showing his face in some of the gambling dives in the area - at least, he hadn’t a few years ago, when he’d been a bit younger, a