Almost Complete Short Fiction by William Sanders

Author:William Sanders [Sanders, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2025-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Fat Slim looks at the holo and says exactly what I already knew he was going to say. “Don’t recognize her,” he says to Jerry Duane, “but that doesn’t mean a thing. These kids come through here all the time, and there’s no way I could remember their faces even if I had any reason to.”

We are standing on the front steps of the neck house, which is an old two-story brownstone that probably used to be somebody’s home they couldn’t afford. It is the middle of the afternoon but the sky is cloudy and everything along the street looks dark and gray. Through the open door behind Fat Slim I can hear the steady eeeeeeeee of the eek boxes. Sounds like business is good today.

Fat Slim hands the picture back to Jerry Duane. “I don’t really look at them,” he explains, “except just enough to size them up, spot the obvious flipouts and trouble freaks or the ones who look like they might not be able to handle it physically, like they’re having trouble breathing or something. Your babe didn’t have anything like that wrong with her, did she?”

Jerry Duane shakes his head. “Then,” Fat Slim says, “she could be in there right now and I wouldn’t necessarily know it. I don’t think she is, but—” He jerks his thumb toward the doorway. “Want to go in and have a look?”

Jerry Duane looks at me. “Go ahead,” I say. We have this basic rule in the partnership: I deal the shit on the street and keep the supply coming, and Fat Slim runs the neck house. We don’t second-guess each other. He wants to let Jerry Duane in, it’s cool with me.

The light inside is strong, brighter than outside in fact, and I get out my shades and put them on. Most neck houses are pretty dim—I’ve been in some where you had to practically feel your way around—but Fat Slim likes to be able to see what he’s doing. The other places, he’ll tell you, it doesn’t matter since they don’t know what they’re doing, but Fat Slim was a Navy med tech for thirteen years before they busted him out and he runs the place like a regular clinic. Costs a bit more, but we’ve never yet lost a customer, which is why we stay in business and the cops are reasonable to deal with. I mean, you lose just one of these freaks and there’s going to be all kind of shit come down, I don’t care who you think you paid off, know what I’m saying?

The people who had the place before us knocked out a lot of walls—I think they had a dance school—so the downstairs is mostly one big room. We’ve got eighteen beds in there, could have more but Fat Slim says he can’t do a proper job on more than that, and then there are the private rooms upstairs for the customers with serious money. Real beds, too, not mattresses on the floor like in the cheap neck houses.

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