"I didn't say you needed anybody, I said I wanted to. To help! I can do that if I feel like it, can't I?"
"Drop dead, Michael. I'm not your damsel anymore."
She was gone, then, slicing through the crowd and out into the thick night without another word. It was no use watching her go; Michael knew where she'd be. He chewed the question, grinding his molars. Should he follow? His steel thumbnail dug a slow groove into the pea-green plastic of the table.
One clean line cut into the surface, then another bisecting.
The crowd-noise from the floor was getting louder, frenzied, as the clock ground closer to midnight. The tables were deserted now, nothing but flickering black lights and smoke from a hundred old cigarettes left in the ashtrays. Eleven fifty-four. Somebody in the crowd was trying to sing, and a hundred drunks joined in with him, Old Langsene or something like that. The laughing, the music, the happy gunfire down on the street...
He stared at the gouges he'd made in the tabletop -- two paths crossing. She was out there, back at the apartment. He knew that much.
Eleven fifty-eight.
He stood, ran his fingers throught the shells in his pocket. Pulled out a hollowpoint and fed it into the chamber in his wrist. A click as he snapped the lock shut, and a few blinks as he switched to IR. The club went green-and-black, the mass of hot bodies on the dance floor a squirming glow.
Turning for the door, he pulled the duster on; maybe she didn't want him. But she needed him. Somebody screamed behind him, celebrating a second too soon, then everybody else jumped in. Midnight.
Through the door and into the Cuba night -- humid, with the sound of parties and guns and music in the streets. January first: welcome to 2036.
It was going to be a long night.