Participants:
| Scene Title | Assume the Worst |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Not long after being dumped out on a chopper on Staten Island, Deckard finds himself back at a familiar dumpster without knowing how he got there. Teo and Abigail are there too, except that they aren't, because they're probably dead. |
| Date | January 28, 2009 |
The stink of dirty sea water clogs the senses and makes the cold out on this end of Staten Island all the more bitterly oppressive. Not that Flint can smell much of anything past his own corrosive stench. Rico's bloodspattered coat abandoned in the chopper, Deckard has found his way here for lack of any better ideas about where to go. There's nothing on his mind past the vacant ring of tinnitus left over from explosive fire, mounted artillery, and the discharge of various rifles and revolvers, all way too close for comfort. A stone stairway leads down into an abandoned parking lot at his feet. Beneath the rusted railing that runs perpendicular to the topmost step, a lone dumpster hunches in lengthening shadow. It's lid is closed.
"You're going to miss me."
From behind him Abigail walks, her hands buried in the back pocket of her jeans, dressed like she's going to go to work. Only the tank tops a little tighter, the jeans a little lower. Her ponytail high and bouncy. She moves out from behind him, swaying her ass side to side as she goes, sucking on a round red lollipop. "Admit it. your going to miss me"
Even more gaunt than usual, blood and rust and grit long-dried into the lines of his hollow-eyed face, Deckard closes his eyes. He doesn't turn around.
The accent's a dead giveaway.
Operating under the assumption that she'll vanish if he thinks hard enough about something else, he angles his bristled jaw down at the dumpster. It's cold. He has that to think about. His hands are still shaking. It looks like rain. He's going to need to buy a new jacket.
A tic starts at the cinched joint in the side of his jaw, and he opens his eyes enough to peer sidelong at the space to his right, where Abigail still stands. Low jeans, tight tank, lollipop. His eyes snap forward again. "Christ."
"Guess again!" Far too perky. The lollipop comes out of her mouth with a distinct wet sucking sound as she juts a hip out and leans against the rusted rail.
"I'm going insane." Deckard does not guess again. He just sounds dismayed, at a loss. He's going insane. Seeing people, hearing things. Wet sounds.
Is it necrophilia if she's only probably dead?
The thought sort of happens on its own, enough to prompt both hands up over his face to rub it out of his skull. The gesture has the added bonus of removing her from his line of sight as well.
A fish squirts out of the corner of Deckard's eye. It is narrow, slender, silver-finned; roughly the size of a bullet, or at least fragile enough in its dimensions to successfully hide in such a wound. "This is just embarrassing." A male voice, deep, abashedly wry, conspicuously accentless in that way an expatriate gets after the biases and mechanics of speaking have been worn down with the different shapes of too many languages.
Teo wipes salt water and fish scales off his hands and onto the thigh of his jeans. He doesn't have a bullet hole in his face; his parka and jeans are dry. That was just Deckard messing with his own head, ironically enough. "Buona sera, vecchio."
"Oh, honey, you went crazy a long time ago. Or did you forget all that happy fun time?" She's not disappearing from his view. In fact, she's moving, sauntering to the dumpster. It takes her a moment or two to climb up on it, ample time to get a good view of that tight ass before she's up on the dumpster, starting to sway back and forth, dance atop it as if it were the bar top at Old Lucy's. "Abigail Beauchamp. You know, that crazy religious girl." Down she dip, hips move left, then right, fingers pressed to the metal as she straightens her legs little, thrusting her ass up in the air like the others had done at the bar. "Hey Teo. Hows the ocean?"
"I still don't know what that means." Being insane has not gifted Deckard with an understanding of the language Teo is so fond of. One hand stays at his face, sandpapering through grizzle and pulling long at the loose skin around his mouth to leave light tracks across crusted blood and everything else trapped in it. He really needs a shower. Maybe a couple of them.
The brush of clinging scales and salt water is watched at an uneasy remove. Unfortunate to think about the inevitable rot of him at the ocean's mercy. Fish start with the mouth and nose. He read that once. Soft tissue and easy access to the inside. The hand at his mouth lifts again, this time to the top of his head, where it resumes shaking, along with the rest of him. Abigail's dancing on James Stutzman's grave.
"Don't. Come on — just." Coming here was a bad idea.
To all appearances, Teo's nose and mouth are doing just fine. Retain shape, color, even warmth, judging from the condensation of breath curling up toward the flat, algid sky. All parts intact, down to long, scar-notched fingers and their cowardly retreat from the cold and into his pockets. "It has to be a salutation of some kind," he offers sidelong. "'Vecchio' means 'old man.'" They've had that conversation before.
Repetition, also. "I don't know," he answers Abigail, presently. "My eyes were closed. Come on, signorina. Get down from there?" Manners turn instruction into query. Teo's snowboots leave a flaky print dried to the dock, stepping toward the girl with no visible intent to manhandle her down from her wildly inappropriate perch. His next query probably isn't for her.
"Why did you come here?"
"What do you care? Not like you cared when you put the bullet in his heart," Teo's given a pout as Abby starts to pull her upper body up, still weaving side to side, dancing to some music that seems to play near her, too low to properly hear just yet. her fingers drag up her jeans, slipping to the inside of her thighs then back out at her hip, across the dip of her stomach, ribs, chest. Her hands go from pointing downwards to upwards as they they pause at her neck as if perhaps she might choke herself till she stops. Her hands, the rest of her still slides side to side, a twist of the hips here and there. The lollipop is released again, not without a twirl of her tongue around the crown of it. "What was it Teo? He had children? Children," She offers her hand to Teo though so he can help her down.
"Good afternoon, good evening, good day," Deckard guesses blandly down at his boots, and the dumpster past them, blanched all the more pale for what would be a perfectly normal conversation about context clues if he wasn't having it with a dead person. "I remember vecchio." Mostly because he'd fucked up the first time he'd made a guess at its meaning. The memory knits his brow and turns the corners of his mouth firmly down. If he'd gone to Felix instead of Phoenix…
Abigail is still dancing, with the rating down there taking a dive from PG to PG-13 at a rate that quickens his breath and has him looking up and squeezing his eyes shut again quickly enough for the reaction to entail near panic. "I don't know. I started walking. The bridge is out." One kid, Stutzman had said. One that hated him.
One son, as Teo recalls. Well, Deckard's doing all the recalling, really, but as long as the Devil's in the details, the Catholic boy seems a suitable vehicle for them. He extricates saline-smeared hands from his pockets, and takes Abby's outstretched fingers in one. Turns around, and scoots her up into a piggyback, his arms hooking underneath the backs of her knees. It gets her off the dumpster, but makes her jeans ride precariously low.
Teo glances up, sharply, as if to preempt a lingering investigation of the woman's choice in underwear.
Or Deckard's choice of women's underwear. "Coming here was a bad idea," he says. Repeats, really, though Deckard hadn't said it out loud. He turns his head to the wrinkling sea. "Which way?"
Slim legs hook around Teo's hands, thighs gripping his waist and her arms slung around arms, the lollipop offered up to Teo to suck on. "Why didn't you offer him money Decksie? You had money. you could have given it to him and told him to get away, he would live if he walked away. To the right Teo. I want him to see my ass. He likes my ass." And the bright red thong that sprouts garishly from beneath he waistband of her jeans. Some brilliant abstract flower on a denim and flesh canvas.
"The boat was his livelihood. It wasn't for sale. Not for what I had. If I had known I could've…found a taser. Tied him up somewhere." Hoped he wouldn't wake up, hoped he wouldn't make too much noise. No. He would have shot him anyway. He screws up too much to have fucked up saving the world for one stomach-churning speed bump. Is there any point in lying to either of them?
He looks, eyes sketching precisely where they shouldn't. Why not? He knows what he is. Teo's glance is met with stiff-jawed annoyance a second or two later, and gripping the rail for support, he lowers himself down into a stiff sit on snow-crusted concrete to wait out their ascent. "I don't know."
Teo is sure-footed as a billy-goat, or a monkey, or at least as the last time the old man saw him loping across the wallowing freighter's deck, approaching. At least, in those final, sprinting seconds before the deafening hiccough of internal pressure and gravity conspired to throw and pin him to the railing, belly-up, gun falling away, as helpless inside his body armor as an overturned tortoise. Before that, he'd been spry.
And strong enough. The girl doesn't seem to weigh much on him. He bites down on the lollipop he's given, swivels the shaft sideways between his lips as if it were a cigarette. The candy part bulges his cheek out. Despite the knot of disapproval on his brow, he does go right. The red butt-floss shows festive under the slate light of winter until a twist and scrabble on ice swivel the Southerner and Sicilian to put the underthings out of view.
It takes a little time to get up there. Maybe by then, Flint will know.
"He was his livelihood. It's called insurance. but keep on making excuses. Lying to yourself. It's like a part of you, like your alcohol" Abby rests her head against Teo's though always, somehow, she's watching Deckard, giving a wink, or blowing a kiss to him. "What will you do now Deckie? Going to go find a bottle of alcohol and drown the past few days away in it? You're already half way there! You could go to my bar, find your seat, sit down, reassure it that your butt groove is still there. Whiskey, on the rocks, the glass ice cold and the liquor burning a hole down your gullet." She croons it out, the drawl deepening here and there, voice dropped till it's like she could voice over some sort of late night Cinemax movie.
"You're every bit as annoying as your dead counterpart," Deckard informs the Abby in his head, eyes narrowed and mouth thinned flat after the grey-black lap of water against pier some distance off to the side. The space previously occupied by Stutzman's rig is conspicuously empty. The ground is frozen, but kinder to the grating pain in his knee than standing. Walking. Maybe he'll stay here for a while.
"Your friend could have managed Rico. Taken out the gunners and blown the cargo hold. I didn't even need to be there and you made saving my ass a priority. Now you're dead. That's what happens." That's what happens when you do what you think is the right thing, that is.
Outside the realm of this conversation, a pair of emaciated rats waiting for nightfall peer dimly out from beneath the dumpster to watch Flint talking to himself with his back to the icy rail overhead.
"Same with you. You try to help people and they die anyway. Or you both die."
White teeth click hard candy, and Teo licks syrup off the wall of his mouth. You would too, if Abigail gave you her lollipop to s— right. Thusly occupied, and with a head of blond pillowed on the back of his own, he arrives with his precious burden on Deckard's level. Seesaws to a halt, huffing mist out from around the lollipop. "She would've killed Rico if it weren't for you.
"No hole in the cargo hold, and me and my crew would've been cut down like paper. You're not making yourself feel any better. I don't know why you have to be upset that I'm dead and Abby might be. Five and a half billion people are alive. Fair trade," he points out, baldly, staring down at the old man out of tactlessly blue eyes. "Now you have a new job where you don't have to run around much to make lots of money.
"If you think about it, it's a good time to have a bum knee. Everything worked out."
"He's upset because he won't get to drink with you again and hear you call him Vecchio," The lollipop is coaxed from Teo's mouth, making sure to make the whole process lewd as possible. "And he's never gonna get the chance to see if I'd let him tap that," A gesture to her ass. "Your sleeping with the fishies, and I'm somewhere, with a bullet in me, and my blood everywhere around me, and people are stepping all around me, taking pictures, poking me, a not nice death for a very nice girl." She's sucking on the lollipop again, pleasured sounds at the whole process. "Take me around behind him. I wanna tell him something. I wanna tell you something Deckard."
"Five and a half billion is just…a number. I don't know those people." Quiet reason lacks the fire necessary to be outright argumentative. Deckard lifts his eyes long enough to see that Teo is looking at him — that alone enough to have his attention slanting off sideways again, away from scrutiny. "The ones I do know are assholes." Cops, judges, felons, assorted others interested in putting their boots in places he'd rather not have boots. Does he have a job? Maybe. He should check his messages. At some point. When he's not sitting out here with a bunch of talking corpses and rats.
He doesn't have to watch the passage of the lollipop to know it's going on. "I'm not doing this on purpose," reiterated to both of them as if it matters, he tucks both trembling hands in deep under his pits and hunches in on himself against the cold chewing its way in through his damp leather of his coat. "And it isn't like I've tried." To tap that. Just in case imaginary Teo should care that he hasn't put a hand on real Abby. Er. Without her permission.
Despite the blush marching across Teodor's features, simultaneously irritable and bemused, he cooperates with his dead companion's wishes and acknowledges the well-articulated defense of the living one with a drop of his gaze. He circles Deckard. As his path insects with the wind, the reek of marine salt and brine intensifies, comes in a windy wallop through Deckard's nose, despite that the younger man's skin, hair, remains dry and undisfigured.
He squats off to the left, allowing Abby to take the old man's ear from behind. Her toes trail the cold concrete on either side of his hip. Teo seems to be thinking about what Deckard said, plumbing the unusually generous accumulation of sentences for the full depth of its meaning.
"He hasn't tried. I'm too good for him." Jasmine, Abigail smells of jasmine and blood when Teo gets her close, mingling with his the sea scent. That copper scent lurks on it's edges. Her lips seem to almost brush against Deckard's ear, blonde hair slithering to fall across her shoulder. "She saw it. It took her a moment Deckard, but she saw it on the boat. Everyone see's it. You can't function without it. God, that whiskey is so good. It has such a hold on you. It goes through your blood it wraps around your mind. the taste, the burn, it's… it's better than sex. But it's bad for you, and you know it, and still, still Deckard, night after night, you go home to it, and you bury yourself in it. What are you doing to do about that?" She pulls back, leaving a ghost of her scent. "I wanna go dance again Teo."
Deckard's rumpled head turns from the smell of them both, nose rankled against blood and brine alike. Their nearness makes him pretty clearly uncomfortable in itself, smell or no smell. He tenses, withdraws, leans away and looks down at the ice and snow rather than either of them. Unfortunately, this fails to make them go away. They're both still there, the sensation of Abby's hair over his shoulder and her breath in his ear.
Abruptly, he stands. Not abruptly enough to avoid the brunt of what she's said, unfortunately, but his discomfort has accumulated such that he has to move. Bone white against the dusky brown of his coat, he drags himself up against the rail and leans there a moment before pushing off to stumble a short ways off through the dead grass. Maybe they won't follow.
They must follow. Or else be doomed to extinguish falling off the receding, abysmal edge of Deckard's consciousness. And since Deckard's consciousness has it that death was a bad thing for them, they must follow. Teo rises, overturning pips and hardened fragments of powder snow, toiling after the older man through the crystallized grass at a gait half as loud and erratic as the rankle of ghoulish chains. "There's Leah," he says. "You saved Leah. Maybe you should call her.
"Make you feel better. That voicemail you sent her must've made her wonder, if she was sober enough to think straight.
"I must have a sibling too. The way I look at you two. It's the only thing that makes sense." Teo didn't have to say it aloud to think it and it's stranger for the train wreck of grammatical person that it invokes, but he does, perhaps merely to cut through the rising blur and bluster of wind. "I hope we're going somewhere Abby can dance." He scores his bottom lip with his teeth, pulling vestiges of cherry candy flavor off his skin.
"He just wants to drown us out in whiskey" Abby looks back over her shoulder, still sucking away on the lollipop that never seems to get any smaller. 'Goodbye Jason Stutzman. Rest in peace. In a garbage dump. Cold and alone, no one to bury him. That's not right, is it Teo. Do you think Leah would enjoy that? Not having something of you to bury? Knowing that you were somewhere, in a dumpster. Even if she hated you. Oh well." She doens't bother getting down, swinging her feet side to side in Teo's embrace. "I think he's trying to ignore us Teo. I don't think he realizes that you can't escape your mind"
"I don't know. I didn't even know your last name until the meeting. Maybe you were into her." Graveled voice dropped down to a half-hearted mutter, Deckard tucks his arms back over and under each other, head down and shoulders leaned into the wind. His boots sink and crunch along at a dragging pace, the stiffness in his knee the source of some dull pain but no limp. Maybe tomorrow morning, after its had time to rest. "I hardly know anything about either of you. Abigail's from Louisiana. Has some weird bible fetish. You were…in charge. Or something. Probably catholic. I don't know."
He is trying to ignore them. He's just doing a shitty job of it. And they're following him. "She'd get over it." Leah. She might even have believed the message, in time. Who knows.
Or something. Shouldn't have been, though. Teo was too young, and he wasn't lying when he said they'd killed his kids, back at the high school. Young enough not to know to mind his own business. "As fast as you're going to get over us?" he asks. Then he answers himself, glibly defeating the point of Deckard having himself psychologically split into personas around this weird schism of grief, "I don't think so either. I mean, I wouldn't even want you to be upset.
"Abigail's probably different. You should use some of your new cash-in to get her some flowers." Impudence tugs at the corner of the Sicilian's mouth, before letting it fall flat again, diminishing, almost meek with sympathy. "You should call Leah. Promise, right? Flint Deckard saves the fucking world. You get at least a little love for free."
"Bird. he's forgetting that you have a bird, and you live with me." The lollipop clicks against her teeth as she makes tsking noises. "Too bad I'm dead, or I could fix that for you. I could make it all better. Not that you'd let me. Because there are people out there who need it more than you, who are better deserving it, isn't there? Ohhh, I like daisies. And daffodils." The lollipop still perpetually getting the Rated R treatment.
"How am I supposed to get over you when you're following me around?" Earnest irritation creases in around Deckard's brow. His own addled subconscious won't leave him alone to lick his wounds and forget. If three months is long enough for someone elses conscience to rub off on you, next time he makes new friends he's wearing a full body condom.
"I'm not buying Abigail flowers. Who does that help? Some forty year old felon showing up to her funeral alone. She probably has parents. Siblings. Church…people." Whatever you call them. Too much room for trouble and assumption.
"I didn't forget he had a bird." He forgot. It's hard to think with the lollypop and the…everything else. The building ahead looks like it might have housed apartments at some point. Might be worth checking out. Could have an empty bed. "Are you enjoying this?"
Generally, Teo makes a point of not enjoying anything. In front of Deckard, anyway. Or perhaps it was mere coincidence, that he was Catholic, possibly not Evolved, and pathologically compelled to pick grave-robbers out of their own vomit and shoot machine-guns. They all have their crosses to bear. It's very dramatic and sad. Right now, Teo is merely bearing Abigail by her firm thighs and tautly-defined torso.
And not looking that interested, at least by the best of Deckard's recollection. He is gentle if not mild, solicitous if not obsequious, and about as dogged as ever. Thump-thump-crackle. Grass splits underneath his boots. If they're really undead, maybe Deckard will be able to get away from them at the threshold of the building by he refusing to invite them in. "Send flowers. Call Leah. Go to Old Lucy's.
"It's only been a couple days." Or one. "That's how you start."
"Or you can hide, in your bottle like you always do. Come out when there's a job needed. Keep going with your life you always have. Look out for you, make ramshackle efforts to look out for others. Grab your little bits of ethical debris to keep reminding yourself that at least your not a monster like the ones who killed me and Teo. Not yet." Teo's cross offers the lollipop again to him.
"Were you afraid that I'd use it against you? Sell you out the second I caught sight of something worth selling?" Negligent of the hopelessness inherent in interrogating a figment of his imagination, Deckard stops his awayward drag to round on Teo — and Abby by default, while she's still on his back. Lacking the energy to be properly angry, the best he can manage in fury's stead is some heavy breathing and a glare that might set aflame anyone more tangible that managed to cross paths with it. Eyes bright in the gathering dark, Deckard sees the overlap of them as they were in all the usual skeletal, metal-plated detail — his memory better here than it is elsewhere.
"Shut up." That's to Abigail, sharper. More reactionary. She's hit on something of a sore point, seems like.
Again, the lollipop is taken in Teo's jaws. His teeth knock it around. Having peeled past the layers of bone and sinew, most of the lewd overtones are lost to Deckard's preternatural perceptive powers. Only, you know. Deckard knows what Abby was trying to get at, so he can figure it out on his own anyway.
There's a hole to the upper left of the titanium in Teo's head. About the circumference of Abby's pinkie. It goes right through the bowl of his cranium, actually, which is probably a little too cartoonish to be logistically appropriate.
"Si. I was protecting my people, I guess," Teo says, lapsing into the position of authority that Deckard pegged him with without ceremony or objection. Clackety-clack. That's what his words should sound like, jawed out of a fleshless skull that glows luminous in X-ray vision. Instead, there's that lingering note of rue, pall of regret falling sheer, weightless, inscrutably gentle over his words. "But I didn't… want you to have to do anything you'd feel guilty about, either. So.
"Mi dispiace." That, too, is one Deckard learned, though Teodoro had never gotten around to actually explaining.
There's a bullet, lodged within her body where the imaginary bullet that killed Abby sits. Aimed to be right where her heart is. Her bones intertwined with Teo's as he carts her around. His sharpness only makes her smile more and bounce a bit on Teo's back "Ohh, Teo, he's not happy with what I said. Maybe I need to keep digging? Maybe…" She licks her lips, PG 13ish, the tip of her tongue tracing her lower lip, "You need to call your sister. Do what he said. Call your sister, visit Old Lucy's. If I'm alive, maybe they'll know, and if I'm not, you can drink to my death that you knew was coming. And you can put some daisies on my grave some night, when the moon is up and there's no one there to see you do it. To see the evidence of your humanity."
The rapid fire fog of his breath slowing into a more deliberate haze, Deckard glances aside after a flicker of unrelated movement to see another skull peering his way. Color bleeds back into the world, painting scant hair and a matted grey beard onto the homeless guy he's provoked out into the open with his snarling at nothing. Deckard stares. The guy stares back. Deckard stares more. So does the homeless guy.
Nose rankled, Flint eventually glances down at his feet, then back up to Abby and Teo. Whatever. Who cares what Hobo McGee thinks. "Contrary to popular belief, I am capable of keeping my mouth shut. As a matter of trust. Not just a matter of…money or fear." He is. NO REALLY, COME ON. HE IS. Never mind the fact that he doesn't sound like he believes himself.
"I'll call Leah if it'll get the two of you off my back." Whatever. Maybe she'll let him sleep on the couch again. "I'm not going to Old Lucy's. If you're missing and I show up half your coworkers will assume I'm the culprit. I'm not stupid enough to think none of them know who I am." Flint Deckard, fugitive murderer and arsonist. "Flowers don't have anything to do with humanity."
"They do if you're refusing to give any to Abby. Anyway," Teo kicks dirty slush in front of the hobo man, who is predictably indifferent to the riffle of movement through his environment, if in fact the riffle was there. "I don't see why we're arguing: you didn't want me to trust you. Not for a long time. You thought it would get me killed," he points out. Falls abruptly silent, the lollipop stick ticking up and down at the corner of his mouth, chagrined. He hitches Abigail high on his back. "Th—that's not what I meant.
"You'll call Leah." Lapsing into repetition again, one habit effectively immortalized. Segue into less uncomfortable topics.
"Flowers no, but the act of laying them, on a grave, for someone you care about, that, Deckie, is humanity. She'd say it is. I'd say it is" Up she goes, relaxing her thighs till she's hitched high as Teo wants her then back to iron grip and transferring ownership of the damned lollipop again. Though it's offered to Deckard. "Should bring them to your sister too. Pour some booze on wherever they put Teo's empty box"
Mr. Hobo takes a bite out of his donut, acquired from who knows where, and continues to watch with glittery-eyed fascination. More self-conscious than he might like, Deckard gives him another hard look and takes a step back. He should keep going. On to that building he was eying a few minutes ago.
"No takebacks." Not what he meant. A sigh shivers out through the rattle of his rib cage, and he starts walking again in earnest, ignoring the offer of Abby's hard candy in the process. "I'll call Leah. Maybe I'll make some calls in few weeks. Find out where they put you."
Teodoro acknowledges this concession with an inclination of his punctured head. Insofar as his skin is still intact, perfectly, but the injury remains visible to Flint and Flint alone. "No takebacks," he repeats, uncomfortably, roving a graffiti-scudded wall with the empty sockets of his eyes. You thought it would get me killed. It doesn't help, of course, that Teo had thought the reverse would be true, also. "Well," he says, blankly, sucking in one cherry-flavored breath. "Like you hoped. No ashes to rise from. I should have kept the medallion, that's all.
"You still have my number."
Teo implodes. Liquefies, more likely. The phosphorescent blue of his skeleton's feedback wobbles and falls out of the orderly geometry of its lines, merges, capitulates to gravity, sloughs down, down, and hits the snow with the foaming hiss of a tide coming in. Abby is dropped neatly onto her feet with the precision of a cat.
Abigails boots land not a wobble or anything, like she knew it would happen. She keeps moving forward, no misstep or change in her stride. the red of her thong visible as she walks ahead. One hand slides into her back pocket, palm hugging the curve of her ass, the other hand held out a safe distance from her side. Towards the building he's going towards and the away from it, veering off to the right. She jerks her hip to the side, a little squeal as her hip hits some invisible hip to bump against before she starts dancing her way the dirty street singing "You want a piece of me" before she stops, the jerk of her body as if it's hit by that bullet lodged in her chest and she too disappears, fading away in the breeze, converting to nothing but ashes that even a moment later, disappear.
"Yeah. Because it's brought me nothing but good fortune." Not that he's wearing it now, anyway. It's in one of his rat holes, stored away with his Rolex and his revolver. Apparently not something worth losing, good mojo or no. Aware that Teo has slowed behind him, Deckard slows himself, long face turned back over his shoulder to watch the foamy hiss of water to snow, and Abby's deposit in its wake.
He stays where she is, watching her take the lead with grim foreknowledge of her imaginary demise. The jerk gets a flinch, and by the time he looks back again, she's gone.
The slow, wet smack of the homeless guy's chewing fades into the front of his perception, but he doesn't pay it much attention. He's not far from hypothermia. A place to sleep out of the wind is priority.
Then maybe he can see about getting a drink.
 January 28th: My Many Faces |
 January 28th: Where Are Your Loyalties? |