Street Magic

for police and rival dealers and giving the place away as a shooting gallery. Pete kicked his foot once, twice. He snorted and shifted in his sleep, but nothing more. She was insubstantial as a fever dream.
    A token agent's notice on the front of the building was covered with spray-painted obscenities, and faded enough that Pete thought even Susan, Terry's hopelessly cheery estate agent, would throw her hands up in despair. The door, half off its hinges from some long-ago bust, grinned at Pete with a gargoyle knocker as she pushed it open, feeling sticky dampness from the decayed wood and stippled paint. "Hello."
    Shredded shades were pulled over the windows, and in the blue-gray ghost light Pete barely avoided overturned furniture, Margaret Thatcher vintage, and a surfeit of filthy mattresses and crumpled blankets, like bodies under turned earth.
    Pete took her penlight from her pocket and flashed it into the corners of the room, illuminating a gaunt sleeping face. Not Jack's.
    A kitchen filled with more dripping rust and cockroaches than any one room had a right to contain sped Pete up a set of rickety stairs and into a narrow hallway with bedrooms to each side. The first still held vestiges of wallpaper and an iron bed, like something one would find in an orphanage of Dickensian origin. A mother, who couldn't have been more than the age Pete was when she first met with Jack, looked up with wide black eyes. Her skinny baby let out a wail.
    "Sorry," Pete muttered. "Just looking for… I'm looking for a friend."
    The mother watched her silently, not breathing. "Jack Winter," Pete said desperately. "He's not here, is he?" He hadn't been at the last half-dozen squats she'd visited. No reason to think he'd turn up here. He'd vanish as surely as he had after… well. Pete didn't think about that.
    "He's next door," the mother whispered. The baby grasped at the air around her face, cries weakening, and she dropped her head to soothe it without taking her eyes off Pete.
    "Ah," said Pete. "Thank you." She stepped backward into the hall and went into the next room with a low thrumming in her blood, excitement and fear she had no right to feel because you didn't trust the ramblings of addicts and crazy people, Connor Caldecott's first rule in his long list.
    The front bedroom looked out onto the street and the Thames, a view that would have been worth something once, just like the house and the men sleeping or murmuring on the floor.
    Pete shone her light on each face in turn. They were mostly white, all thin and bones, stubble and dirt, and sometimes blood or vomit caking. Eyes glared at her dully in the thin beam of light.
    Until she hit on the platinum shock topping Jack's drawn face. He threw an arm over his eyes and swore. "Who's that?"
    Pete swallowed. She couldn't speak. It was the hotel room all over again, and she was dumb from the sight of him. Jack groaned and sat up. "You've got a hell of a lot of nerve, whoever you are. Got a mind to put my fist in your teeth, cunt."
    "It's me," Pete managed finally.
    Jack squinted for a moment, and then flopped back on his mattress with a sigh. "And just what do you want?"
    The wavering blade of the penlight illuminated the dull flash of a disposable needle at his hand. "We found Bridget Killigan."
    "Of course you did," said Jack. "I said it, didn't I?"
    Pete crouched and touched his shoulder. Jack jerked away from her and then hissed, rubbing his arms as a shiver racked him. "Get out of here," he said.
    "How did you do it?" Pete said. "How did you know where to find her? Jack, I'm not leaving without an answer."
    Jack sat up and rooted through a plastic Sainsbury's tote. Disposable sharps, a battered shaving case containing a shooting kit, and empty bags coated with crystalline dust slid through his fingers as he shook.
    Pete clamped her hands around his wrists. "Jack. Answer me."
    His face was wreathed in droplets of sweat and she fought the urge to brush them away.
    "Leave me alone, Pete," he rasped. "I don't want to see you again. Not ever." He pulled loose, picked up an empty twist of plastic and held it to the light. "Shit." His slow-burn gaze shot back to Pete. "You're still here? I said get the bloody hell out!"
    There was a time, Pete knew, that those words from him would have devastated her. Words from Jack were like the tears of angels. Wounding words stabbed directly to the heart of her.
    But this was the real and painful present, not a memory of the fragile girl