Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) by Elizabeth Hand

chunks of concrete and plywood walkways. The wind stung my face, but I hardly noticed: I was rapt, sucked into that place where the vision inside my head merged with what was in front of me. I shot half a dozen frames, and for a few minutes I forgot about everything except for the world inside my viewfinder.
    In the last hour the city had awakened. Molten sunlight set steel girders and I beams ablaze as a decrepit orange bus jounced by in a cloud of exhaust, empty except for its driver. I put away my camera and set out to find the flea market.
    Along the shore a couple walked hand in hand, a skein of gulls trailing them like smoke. Live music—more band rehearsals—wafted down streets corrugated with frozen slush. I found a crowded hot dog stand where I waited in line with bleary-eyed kids who passed around cigarettes as they kicked at the broken tarmac. I picked up an occasional word or phrase in their hangover chatter—band names, mostly. I bought two hot dogs and, when I was done eating, approached a boy wearing a pink-and-green anorak and matching Vans shoes.
    “I’m looking for Kolaportið.”
    He gestured at a nondescript white building that took up most of a block. “Over there.”
    I crossed the street, walked through a parking lot filled with people unloading cars and pickups, and went inside. There was already a small mob, so I waited between a wizened man in a cowboy hat and a dumpy woman flanked by three kids squabbling over a Game Boy. Another man guarded a rope that separated us from a cavernous, table-filled space flooded with acrid fluorescent light. People jostled past me, and Cowboy Hat shook his head reproachfully until the rope dropped and the crowd dispersed.
    Inside was the usual flea-market crap: fast-food toys marketed as collectibles, pirated slasher movies from Indonesia, homemade jewelry, tapestries emblazoned with dolphins or Michael Jackson, used appliances, old paperbacks. It was like the gods of commerce had swallowed all this stuff, then puked it up again. The only thing that marked this as a flea market in Reykjavík rather than Rockville was the glut of woolen clothing. You name it, somebody’s Icelandic grandmother was perched on a folding chair, knitting it while she kept a cool eye on the competition across the aisle.
    At least it was crowded, which would make it harder for someone to find me. Harder, too, for me to find Quinn. How the hell would I recognize him? Half the middle-aged men here looked like they’d had the life Quinn probably ended up with: gazes blunted by drugs or alcohol; gray hair, bad teeth, thinning ponytails; stained relaxed-fit cargo pants, Bob Marley T-shirts pulled over slack bellies.
    I made a circuit of the room and ended at an indoor café with plastic tables and a take-out window. The old man in a cowboy hat had set up an electronic keyboard and was singing Roy Orbison songs. Not bad, either. I checked out the delicatessen area, which was big on food that looked like doggie chew toys—dried fish and the heads of quadrupeds in varying stages of decay. I passed on the free samples and made another loop of the market.
    Most of the faces were familiar from my first go-round. Anxiety crept into my frustration as I considered the notion that Quinn and Ilkka’s killer were the same person, which would at least consolidate my growing paranoia. I paused at a bookstall whose proprietor ignored me to speak animatedly into his cell phone. To one side of the bookstall, a woman with close-cropped black hair presided over a makeshift grotto filled with carven animals, handmade leather pouches, and stones painted with runes. Beside her, two teenage girls hawked tie-dyed clothing to a man in an expensive-looking loden-green overcoat. He looked slightly out of place among all the schlubby jumble salers: expensively shaggy dark-blond hair, pinstriped trousers, nice leather shoes ruined by road salt. It was a second before I twigged that it was the same guy I’d seen