The Bride Wore Black Leather

I’m not normally a touchy-feely type, and we stood close together for a long moment. She finally let go of me, stepped back, and grinned happily.
    Cathy; big eyes, bigger smile, and a pretty face so heavily made-up it was practically a mask, under a heavy bob of expensively styled hair. She was wearing a long white dress of the kind made famous by Marilyn Monroe, and filled it out nicely. She also wore very high stilettos, on the grounds they made for handy weapons in close combat during bar fights. Cathy was bright and crafty and very smart, and ran my office and my business far more efficiently than I ever could. Bangles clattered noisily around her wrists with every movement, and she wore a long set of beads with artless charm. Heavy diamond pendants hung from her ears. She did try to tell me about her other more intimate piercings once, but I declined with all the politeness at my command. Cathy was my secretary, my side-kick, and my good friend; but I have never let it go any further than that. I do have some principles. Cathy’s been my secretary ever since she first came to the Nightside as a teenage runaway, and I rescued her from a house that tried to eat her.
    I took a look around my office. It had been a while since I’d seen the place. It boasted all the very latest conveniences and luxuries, including several things I was pretty sure were heavily frowned on even in the Nightside. I carefully averted my eyes from them and studied the brightly coloured walls, the deep plush carpeting of a plum-wine colour, spread across a room big enough to swing an elephant in, provided you had a good wind-up.
    Oversized cuddly toys with disturbingly large eyes and unnerving smiles peered at me from every gap in the jumble of odd items and even odder office equipment, like animals watching from a strangely civilised jungle. Polka-dot book-shelves took up all of one wall, packed with reference books. A large poster showed off the generous charms of a Finnish all-girl rock group, INDICA. Various pieces of discarded high tech lay piled up in one corner, presumably replaced by more recent versions. Nothing gets made redundant faster in the Nightside than the Very Latest Thing in high tech.
    I did notice a few changes from the last time I’d had reason to visit my office, starting with a tall potted plant that shifted and swayed furtively in one corner, muttering to itself in a breathy voice. A filing cabinet that showed clear signs of the bigger on the inside than the outside spell, without which most buildings in the Nightside couldn’t cope. And the massively overstuffed, leather-bound chair behind the desk, from which Cathy had launched herself; which on closer inspection proved to have its own built-in drinks cabinet, Game Boy, and massage function. I’ve lived in places less comfortable than that chair. Cathy caught my gaze and shrugged charmingly.
    “I’m the one who has to work here. You haven’t dropped by in . . . ages! I was beginning to think you’d forgotten where this was, again, and I’d have to send you another map. And a compass. Why are you here, boss?”
    I persuaded her to sit back down behind the desk again while I sank into the surprisingly comfortable visitor’s chair. I looked at her thoughtfully.
    “Oh bloody hell,” she said immediately. “It always means trouble when you look at me like that. What’s gone wrong now?”
    “Now that I’m to be the new Walker for the Nightside,” I said carefully, “I can’t be a private investigator any more.”
    “Ah,” said Cathy, nodding wisely. “Conflict of interest.”
    “More like I won’t have the time,” I said. “There’s a lot to do when you’re Walker.”
    “John Taylor, the last honest man in the Nightside, is now the Man,” said Cathy. “Can’t say I saw that one coming.”
    “Same here,” I said. “Or I’d have run extremely fast in the opposite direction. But, better me than someone else who couldn’t be trusted or depended on in a crisis; so I have to do it. If I’d have known my conscience was going to cause me so much trouble, I’d have had it surgically removed long ago. But my time as a PI is definitely over, so I won’t need this office any more. You’re going to have to close it down, Cathy.”
    “Oh, is that all? I’ve known that was on the cards ever since I heard you were going to be the next Walker! Don’t worry, boss; I’ve got it all under control.” She stopped and looked at me