Herk advances the screen. Now there is a picture of them facing each other at close range.

“So?” I say with a runt laugh. “It’s crowded.”

Again Herk clicks the button. Now there is a pic of them embracing. I note that her face looks flushed and damp with moisture that common sense suggests is sweat. She looks indisputably happy, ruddy, frisked-over.

“That’s just . . . comradely.”

In the next one Charlie is hugging the guy with her face so deeply embedded into his beard it’s like it’s in a fucking holster. A body of a passerby is blocking them partially, so I can’t see the terminus of the Sikh guy’s arms—or hands—but the angle of the shoulders, and a lifetime of examining portraiture of entangled lovers, tells me that it can’t mean anything good.

The next pic is essentially the same posture. Even with my optics, it’s hard to tell what the hell her face is doing inside that beard, but the general disposition of her head and the way that her arms are laced around his torso makes the whole transaction seem very . . . unbusinesslike. It doesn’t help allay my feelings of jealousy that the guy is unusually large, which in my workaday universe isn’t unusual at all—in my line of work, everyone is bigger than me—but this guy, with his muscular shoulders birdwinging around Charlie, his hands doing who-knows-what, his beard getting a good nuzzle—it makes me enraged.

Who the fuck is this guy?

Then, with a Holofernes itch in my neck, I realize I have seen him before. I saw him in an Indian restaurant. Dining with Charlie in a picture shown to me by Deke.

Herk’s last photo features the couple in much the same position, only now Charlie’s face is upturned toward the guy at the same angle, I’m thinking, that it assumed with me that spring day at the Frick. The beard is too thick to tell what her mouth is doing, but you don’t need to score 800 on the Amsler Grid visual acuity test to see that it’s unsanctioned.

Or to see why she has been acting so strange lately.

The air punches out of my stomach. When I have the strength to look at the photo again I blink at it but it doesn’t help. It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make anything disappear.

“Herk,” I say, “give me the gun.”

Wordlessly, and without looking me in the eye, he does. I empty the clip into the air. None of them hits the target but as each bullet shrieks harmlessly past the Rat Burglar on a taut, sizzling, gray cable and embeds into the surface of the wall, the tears sting a little bit less. The nausea diminishes. I feel just a little bit better, bullet by bullet.

The Effects of Drinking and Dosing

The Effects of Drinking and Dosing