I sat in my dusty cubicle looking out the window at the noonday sun and thought about going downstairs for a gasper, but the oppressive heat changed my mind. Walking outside was like entering the center of a freshly baked pie, and the winos and the skells would be down in the gulag, puking freshets and rapping their scabbed knuckles on the chain link. Nothing I couldn't handle. Those mooks from Cytogenetics were all talk.

But what I needed was a job. The phone hadn't rang in months and my dame was nagging me about it. I leaned back in my chair and fetched a bottle of Mr. Pibb from my desk drawer and took a long pull. It wasn't whisky, but it would have to do. I tugged the brim of my fedora down and settled in for forty winks while wrapped in the embrace of my battered trenchcoat.

Moments later, there was a rustle of fabric and a gentle tapping at my half-wall. I peered up from under my hat and checked out a broad. I knew her. I knew her well. Well enough to know that she was trouble. Angie. She slinked around the corner of the cube, hips moving under her Dockers. She gave me a smile like an Escoffier recipe: saucy and impenetrable. She wanted something.

"Kurruk," she said in a voice like a sack of tenpenny nails dropping into a vat of sweet molasses. The Estonian plosives of my name sounded good in her mouth. Too good. "I have a job for you."

I let the corners of my mouth twitch up into a flinty smile. "A job, huh. What brings little Angie slumming all the way down from glitzy, ritzy AppDev to my humble little flop?" I motioned for her to take a seat, remembering too late that I only had the one chair.

"This project," she said, her mouth disgorging the words like a mother bird feeding her young, "is delicate. That's why I came to you."

Right. Delicate. Skot Kurruk is about as delicate as a solid brass crapper, and she knew it. I let it pass with a hard smile and shot a Camel Ultra Light out of the pack. Delicate. I put the coffin nail in my mouth and then casually didn't light it, because of various workplace regulations.

She continued. "We've got this specimen tracking project," she breathed, probably in order to live, "and it's got to have everything. See, someone wants to send a tissue sample to a lab, and then the lab needs to log receiving it. But then say the lab needs to cut that sample into slides--"

"Stained or unstained?" I barked. It was all I knew about slides, but I wanted to knock her rhythm and see how she danced then.

"Who cares?" she said. Damn. She was a killer.

"Go on," I retorted. My unlit cigarette was getting damp.

"So they cut the tissue into slides, and then they send some of those slides to another lab. But it's all part of the same original sample, with the same identifier, but now it's actually two or three or for different samples--sometimes they're called aliquots--and maybe it's in two or three different places. You getting this?"

"Sure, babe." Pure chin-waggle. She was being as clear as Kurt Vonnegut.

"Good. That's the job. You need to figure it out." She pulled out a thick sheaf of greenbacks--what we in the trade call pieces of paper. "So, Skot," she purred and laid down the stack on my desk. "You think you can handle it?" Pure challenge.

I couldn't believe her guff. If she were a guy, I'd have him rubbing his jaw and picking himself off the floor by now in my mind. But I stayed cool and gave her another smile from my dusty gray filing cabinet of Damn Good Smiles. I reached inside my trenchcoat and pulled out my gat, a beauty I liked to call Bess. I held it up in the dusty fluorescent light, the metal cold and heavy in my hand.

"I think old Bessie and I can help you," I said, cooler than Zima. I put Bess down on the stack of papers and she winked in the light. Angie stared at it.

"That's one . . . big stapler," she breathed admiringly. She raised one eyebrow into the shape of a provocative, hairy tilde.

"Loaded for bear," I grunted. "You better scoot now, sugar," not actually saying "sugar" due to various workplace regulations. "I'll call you when I'm finished."

She squeezed out of the cube, then, pausing momentarily to run a finger over the broken thermostat regulator hanging from the wall. She looked back at me, a vision in khaki. "Thanks."

"It's my job." Snap of the brim, and she was gone. I looked down at the papers and heaved a sigh. My job isn't usually pretty, and this was no different. I was up to my armpits in stink, and I didn't have a menthol rub in sight.

I picked up Bess and started the worst of it: the wetwork. Bess screamed like metal falcon as she ate holes in the stacks of paper, her exit wounds neat and compact; Bess is a precision instrument, and it didn't take too long to achieve Max Collation. Finally, it was done, and I sat back wearily. I'm getting too damn old for this, I thought. I wondered about what to do next.

Aliquots, I thought. It sounded like . . . salvation. It also sounded like a brand of almonds, or possibly a remote South Sea island. Aliquots. Aliquots. I whispered the word in my mind as I slipped into a troubled doze.
Aliquots. I have no god damned idea what she's talking about.

And slept the sleep of the ignorant.