Hammered by Elizabeth Bear Page A

came from?”
    He steps back. “Nobody. Nobody got any. Anybody got any not gonna sell it. Burned it if they’re smart. There’s some cop with a hard-on for anyone dealing it, I guess some other cop he was screwing got her head blown off.” A raucous laugh. “Teach her to fuck around in the North End. And word is the Razor says he’ll fry the balls of anybody he catches selling that shit. I know what’s good for me.”
    He’s sidelit for a minute, gaunt pox-scarred cheeks and eyes like buttered rum, hair black as the moonlit river sleeked away from his forehead. Something must have showed in my face in the glow of headlights sweeping past, or maybe he knows who I am once he can see me, because he purses his lips and nods once, then turns away. He crosses the street by the waterless fountain with its statues supposed to represent the native peoples of the Northeast. Which include the Lakota, apparently, but then Europeans always have had trouble telling us apart.
    I try to hook him back—“Ah. Sorry, man. Look, about the other stuff …”—and he just shakes his head and stalks away.
    Made.
Damn, and I’m not even a cop. I don’t know how I’m supposed to trace this shit back to a source when even a street-corner drug dealer won’t talk to me.
    Goddamn.
    And then the creak of leather and I turn as Razorface himself stops about ten feet away, waiting for me to notice him. He knows. He’s seen it happen. “Face.”
    “Maker. Walk and talk with me.” He’s got seven or ten of his ducklings tonight, my targeting scope picking out weapons on every belt and up every sleeve. That’s four or five more than he usually travels with, and Emery, his right-hand man, is with them—all scarred nose and bulging eyes, pinched and wary as a hungry dog. On the far side, I recognize Whiny—Derek—and a gangster named Rasheed, whose momma raised him right.
    I wonder if trouble’s afoot. Last time anybody got on Face’s bad side, 20-Love and Hammerhead blood got spread from here to East Hartford. I pull my hands out of my pockets, letting moonlight glitter on the scratched steel of the left one. “Bringing your friends?”
    He shakes them off without looking at them and comesforward. I sense the little knot of dealers melting away behind me, jackals when the lion comes back to the kill. Emery moves toward them, hand in his jacket, just to be sure.
    Razorface ducks down a little, speaking into my ear. “Whatcha doing out here at night, talking to trash?”
    “Talking to trash,” I answer. I turn to walk alongside him, down to the bowl of a filthy little mud-choked lake. There’s an underground river in Hartford, the Park River. They buried it, back in the last century, after it flooded one time too many. Now it breaks the surface in a few places, and mostly runs through concrete channels underground.
    Some places, you can still see phantom bridges, high arches the water doesn’t run under anymore. There’s one a few hundred yards west, in fact, ending the long sweep of lawn up to the wedding-cake-baroque Capitol Building. People sleep under it.
    “He offer to sell you anything?”
    “Nah.” I kick a rock out of the way. “Said you’d eat his balls with ketchup if he tried.”
    “Good.” Moonlight shatters off steel teeth, gleams darkly on the oiled smoothness of his scalp. “Gonna answer my question, Maker?”
    “Favor for a friend. No harm, no foul.”
    He grunts and gives me an odd, hard kind of look. “Anything you wanna tell me?”
    I shake my head. “I’m cool. I don’t think he wants his business spread around, is all.”
    “All right, Maker. You mind that’s all it is, though. Things about to get ugly. I got maybe some little boys, think Razorface getting old and slow.”
    “Funny that should happen just now, Face.”
    “Yeah,” he says, clapping a hand on my shoulder roughly. It could be an endearment. It could be a warning.It’s probably both—Face didn’t get where he is by trusting