Mask Market

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Steve: childhood pal, crime partner, lover of science, doomed boy.

“I’m not the client,” the ferret seated across from me said. He was as thin as a garrote, with a library-paste complexion, the skin surrounding his veined-quartz eyes as papery as dried flowers. He was always room temperature. “You know me, Burke. I only work the middle.”

“I don’t know you,” I lied. “You knew—you say you knew—my brother. But if you did—”

“Yeah, I know he’s gone,” the ferret said, meeting my eyes, the way you do when you’ve got nothing to hide. With him, it was an invitation to search an empty room. “But you’ve got the same name, right? He never had any first name that I knew; so what would I call you, I meet you for the first time?”

It’s impossible to actually look into my eyes, because you have to do it one at a time. One eye is a lot lighter than the other, and they don’t track together anymore.

A few years ago, I was tricked into an ambush. The crossfire cost me my looks, and my partner her life. I mourn her every day—the hollow blue heart tattooed between the last two knuckles of my right hand is Pansy’s tombstone—but I don’t miss my old face. True, it was a lot more anonymous than the one I’ve got now. Back then, I was a walking John Doe: average height, average weight…generic lineup filler. But a lot of different people had seen that face in a lot of different places. And the State had a lot of photographs of it, too—they don’t throw out old mug shots.

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