Some couples play House. We play Boat.
In the pulsing business there is an old industry dream called the clean getaway: you work long enough to get the big gigs and then after a few years of heavy commissions you call it quits before you suffer anything irreversible.
And one night, while struggling with a timber hitch, it occurred to me that what Charlie wants is her own kind of clean getaway.
I had never envisioned getting away on a boat, but then again I had never imagined being loved by anybody. The next day I coaxed from her the exact type of boat she wanted, called up the manufacturer, and emptied my life’s savings on a deposit for a slick fifty-five-footer, a Najad, built to order, trimmed in handcrafted, unstained African mahogany, and loaded with all the oceangoing tech you need to leave everything behind and sail away with the woman you love.
After the celebrity of the Frankie Nickels conviction and my triumph at Salt Lake City I was supposed to earn enough in six months to pay for the whole thing, but then the Rat Burglar rolled me the first time on the Angkor Wat job. I didn’t get that commission, obviously, and a month later, on the same day I got passed over for my next assignment, Najad called to say they needed a payment for the next phase of construction, so I took out a hefty home equity loan on my apartment. I remember confiding fearlessly in my journal that it would be no problem. One bad mark on an otherwise unblemished record at Janus. I’ll just take out this loan and pay it back just as soon as I get my next gig. Only on my next gig (a priceless, 4,400-year-old statute of King Entemena, Sumerian ruler of Lagash) the room I was being paid to keep unempty was emptied forthwith by you-know-who.
A few months later I got a call from Najad indicating they needed another installment. I didn’t have it. The only thing I could think about was what had happened to some other veteran pulses. Two years ago a guy at Janus was injected with a refined dose of cyclosarin, a nasty G-series nerve agent; unfortunately, he lived for two days. Another guy got hit with some kind of synthetic hemotoxin that was roughly four times more virulent than that of a Russel’s viper; within forty-five minutes he had basically blistered, clotted, and hemorrhaged to death.17 Jimmy the Hat is always scalping some pulse somewhere. I didn’t want to wait for any of that. So I took out the maximum allowable cash advances on my credit cards. The rates were exorbitant, but I figured, what the hay, I’ll just pay them back on the next gig.
I never imagined it would happen again. But it did, and rapidly. The third time in under a year. (A little cluster of alabaster vases of the goddess Inanna: yawn.)
That didn’t look so great on the old résumé.