Slow River

“I’ll allow any passive use. That means you can listen to my messages. Or some of them. You can access news. But you can’t interact: no talking, no sending messages, no shopping. I’ll bring you anything you need. At least for now.”

“I’m not a child.”

“No,” Spanner agreed. “But this is the way it has to be.”

The first time the screen bleeped when she was alone, it was a man’s face that appeared: black spiky hair, blue eyes, thin eyebrows, smile like a cherub. “Remember those chicken hawks we came across last month? If you’re still interested, get in touch.”

That was it. Even with all Spanner’s precautions the message had not said much. But Lore knew about chicken hawks. That was not victimless crime.

When Spanner got home, she went straight to the screen, took the message, called back. “Me. Yeah, I’m still interested. Usual place? Fine.”

Lore waited for an explanation.

“Billy,” Spanner said. “Business.”

“I thought you said your business was victimless.”

“Yes.”

“Where there are chicken hawks, there are chickens getting hurt.”

“You know more than I thought you might.” Lore just nodded, and waited. Spanner sighed. “We got the information from some straight-looking punter’s slate: he runs a daisy chain.”

“Daisy chains?:

“A ring of fresh young faces. Younger than chickens. This one and his friends like them younger than four.”

Lore felt her cheeks pulling away from her teeth in disgust.

“It’s not much to my taste, either. So what Billy and I do is put a tap on him. Blackmail,” she amplified. “A certain rough justice to it, don’t you think? Those who hurt others get a taste of how it feels to be powerless, and we make money. All very neat.”

Lore stared at her. Spanner thought she was some kind of Robin Hood. “But the kids still get hurt.”

“Often they stop molesting them, once they’ve been burned.”

“Often isn’t always.”

Spanner shrugged.

“You don’t care, do you?”

“It’s business. We can’t go to the police because they’ll want to know where we got our information. Besides, it could get dangerous if we meddled too far.”

Lore remembered Spanner coming home with flushed cheeks; the hectic eyes, the sharp jaw where her teeth were clenched together and could not or would not let go, not for hours. Blackmail. “And who else do you blackmail?”

“No one who doesn’t deserve it.”

No one who can’t pay. Lore thought about chicken hawks and daisy chains. “You could send an anonymous tip to the, police.”

“We’ve done that. Now and then. When we think the situation warrants. But without solid evidence, they don’t usually take any action.”

Lore saw that the lack of police action suited Spanner just fine. If the men who ran the chains weren’t making money, they couldn’t pay quiet fees to insure silence.

Lore dreamed that night of being rolled, dead-eyed, into a plasthene sheet and tipped into a grave. On the lip of the grave, throwing shovelfuls of wet mud, were cherubs called Billy, laughing, and Spanner holding something out of reach, saying, When you’re all grown up, and Lore, who could not close her eyes because she was dead, saw that what Spanner held were manacles.

She woke up gasping and clutching her throat, remembering her lungs fighting the plasthene for air, a cupful, a spoonful, a thimbleful. It was morning. Spanner was gone, but the screen was lit to a sunburst of color and a cartoon of a rabbit with a thought balloon saying, Call who you want. It’s open to your voice. Lore stared at the screen a long, long time. She would not call the police. She wondered how Spanner had known that. She did not feel too good about it.

Spanner was still out when the medic returned in the early evening. He pronounced Lore’s back to be healing well and left her a tape-on plaskin sheath to wear when she was in the bath or shower. “The rest of the time, let the wound breathe. You won’t need any more injectable painkillers. These distalgesics should do,” He handed her a bottle of brightly colored caplets. “You need anything else?”

He seemed in a hurry, and Lore wondered what mayhem or despair he was rushing to.

“Do you ever wonder where your patients get their injuries?”

She thought of a three-year-old, and what injury an adult might do her or him in the name of need.

He looked at her with sad eyes. “There’s no point. I just do my best to heal what I find.”

When he had gone, she went into the bathroom to look at her back. It hurt to twist and turn, but she looked at the scar in the flyblown mirror as best she could. It stretched diagonally from her right shoulder blade to the lower ribs on her left side. At the top, it was nearly an inch wide. She could not bear to look at it. She stared out of the window into the backyard instead. It looked as forlorn and closed in as she felt: a fifteen-by-forty patch of rubble and weeds and what might be scrap metal, surrounded by a six-foot-high brick wall; barren and broken and played out. The walls were topped with broken glass set in cement.