Street Magic

decided that her mind might be standing agape, but the rest of her didn't need to be. She caught him by the wrist. "Wait! Jack, how do you know that? Please."
    Please tell me why you've been alive all along and never breathed a word to me. Please tell me how you survived that day.
    He sneered. "Let go of me."
    Pete held on, and he wriggled in her grasp. "I just want to have a word, Jack—after twelve years, don't you?"
    "No," he said. "I told you what I needed to tell you, and now I'm off to the pub.
Leggo
, you bloody fascist!"
    He ripped his arm away and the sleeve of the jacket jerked back, revealing a miniature tube system of veins and punctures on his forearm. Numbness stole over Pete as she stared, until Jack glared and pushed his sleeve down again.
    "How long?" she asked.
    Jack shoved a cigarette between his lips and touched it with the tip of his finger. An ember sprang to life. "Like you bloody care."
    With a slam of the broken door, he vanished.
    Pete dialed MG at her commune in Sussex on her mobile when she left the Grand Montresor and hung up. She dialed her desk at Scotland Yard. Ollie picked up, but Pete rang off with him as well.
    What the bloody hell would she say? "
By the way, that bloke who dropped dead in front of me when I was sixteen? Saw him today. Yeah. Gives his love
."
    Ollie was ill equipped to offer advice, unless it was regarding Leeds United football or cheap minibreak destinations. MG already had enough reasons to think Pete was a raving nutter. After the graveyard, after Pete had started talking again a few weeks later, MG had screamed and slapped her and demanded to know what had happened to her boyfriend.
    I
wish I knew, I really do
, Pete had said, but it wasn't good enough. MG had never really trusted her again. She had been the one to introduce Pete to Jack, taken her to hear the Poor Dead Bastards play, so in MG's mind, where the universe rotated around MG, it was MG's fault that Jack was dead, and Pete's fault that she didn't throw herself on the same sword. Picking up and getting on with things was Da's way, and MG wouldn't hear of it.
    Pete leaned her head against the steering wheel of her Mini, and tried unsuccessfully to reconcile the wasted middle-aged man in room 26 with the memory she'd carried for a dozen years. She hadn't brought Jack to mind often. It was painful to think of even the first time she'd seen Jack, at Fiver's, torn up and bloody even though his set had just started. That image stayed with her, Jack screaming and bleeding and irrefutably alive.
    In the dreams that came in the twelve intervening years, the two pictures of Jack—alive and inanimate—blended, and Pete often found herself standing alone in the pit at Fiver's, being sung to by a dead man.
    Pete's mobile rang and she jerked, dropping it between the driver's seat and the shift console. She swore as it continued to chirp and finally dug it out from the crevice. "DI Caldecott."
    "Where are you?"
    Pete held the phone away and checked the caller ID screen, terry (work) blinked in red letters. She took a breath and shoved everything that had happened inside the Montresor into the tidy bin she kept at the back of her mind for information too awful or real to process.
    "I was working and I turned off my mobile. I do have a job still, Terry."
    Terry drew in a breath. "You were supposed to be at the estate agent's to sign the sale papers at four."
    Pete turned the key in the Mini's ignition and the faulty dash clock flickered to life. Three forty-five. "Terry, there's no way I can make it in traffic," Pete said. "We're going to have to put it off until tomorrow."
    "Pete." Terry sighed. "Just because we're no longer together doesn't mean you can dispose of our communal property at your leisure. I want the flat sold by summer. I'm going on holiday to Spain and I don't want to deal with it."
    "God forbid I should intrude on your precious holiday," Pete muttered. "Because it's all about you, Terry. Isn't it?"
    "Pete," he said. "We bought the flat together, and we're no longer together, and I am going to get my money and wash my hands of it. That's all there is."
    Pete had nearly forgotten the patronizing tone Terry pulled out, the one that made her feel like a first-year recruit every time, but it came back to her in a rush. "Terry, I'm working," she snapped. "I don't have time for you."
    "That was always your whole problem," said Terry. After a moment a bleep told Pete she'd been disconnected.
    "And a fine