The Man Who Fought Alone

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  After that I sat alone in the dark. Outside, Carner shone like a nuclear blast, but I kept the blinds closed and contemplated my sins.

  She didn’t show up until after midnight. I heard her heels outside the door before she got her key into the lock, which gave me plenty of warning.

  She came in without turning on any lights. Apparently she thought that she could avoid disturbing me. She may have been humming under her breath, but I couldn’t be sure. My heart laid down a barrage so heavy that I didn’t trust my ears.

  We talked about it in the dark.

  I kept it simple. “Where were you?”

  “I had my interview,” she answered softly. I couldn’t tell whether she was glaring at me or not. But every word had the force of a bullet in flight. They were so accurate that she might’ve been using tracers. “Marshal showed me around. We had dinner. We talked.

  “I didn’t try to keep track of the time.”

  No, of course not. Why should she?

  My next question sounded thick, labored—congested by bandages and self-neglect.

  “Did we get the job?”

  Her voice might’ve come from anywhere in the room. “Not we. I. I got the job. You’re on your own.”

  A gulf opened at my feet. I sat still and hugged my chest so that I wouldn’t fall into it.

  She pushed it wider. “We’ll stay here until you’re well enough to find work. Then I’ll move somewhere else.” No ground remained between us. “Or you can move, if this rent’s too high.”

  When I couldn’t say anything, she went into her room and closed the door.

  That was a good thing. I didn’t really want her to hear me whimper like a beaten hound.

  2

  That night I didn’t go to bed. For an hour or two, I paced. After that I sat up in one of the living room chairs, holding my .45 like an offering in the palms of both hands, and trying to think. Or I told myself I was trying to think. What I meant was that I didn’t want to feel.

  Sometime around 4 A.M. I pulled off my bandages and took a shower. That was probably safe enough—a good three weeks had passed since I was shot—but it felt like baring my soul.

  By the time Ginny got up to start her first day working for Marshal I-can’t-remember-the-last-time-I-had-that-much-fun Viviter, I had myself dressed. As ready as I was likely to get. I’d shaved so hard that the follicles on my face still cringed. I’d eaten as much breakfast as I could stomach. And I’d put on my best—which was also my only—suit.

  As soon as she took a look at me, her face turned belligerent. If I tried to foist myself off on her now, she’d probably give me a new gut wound to match Estobal’s. I had other plans, however.

  Wanting to prove I could do it, I faced her head-on.

  “I still have about five hundred dollars in the bank.” I sounded like I was chopping wood. “But I don’t have any cash, and I need wheels. I can’t hunt for a job if I can’t get around.”

  Hell, in a city like Carner I might not be able to reach an ATM without a car.

  While she studied me the hostility drained out of her eyes. I’m sure she heard self-pity in my voice, but apparently she’d picked up determination as well. Frowning, she chewed on the inside of her cheek for a couple of heartbeats. Then she said carefully, “You aren’t ready.”

  She sounded just a touch unsure of herself.

  I liked that. Somewhere deep inside, I was angry enough to catch bullets in my teeth. The more I managed to keep her off balance, the better.

  “That’s my problem, not yours,” I told her. “Leave me some money. I’ll pay you back.”

  She wanted to argue with me—I knew the signs—so she tried to get mad. “Goddamn it, Mick—”

  I stopped her there. I was fast when I needed to be, and I already had my hand in her face, with my index finger pointing rigid as a gun barrel between her eyes. “Don’t call me that. You fucking know better.”

  She took a deep breath. A struggle I couldn’t identify conflicted her reactions. Now that she’d decided to walk out of my life, she may’ve felt guilty about it. Her grey eyes held a hint of violet, like a threat of bruises or thunder.

  As she let that breath go, she said, “You’re right, Brew. I know better.”

  Like flipping a switch, she turned businesslike and started fishing in her purse. “I can only spare twenty bucks right now. But I’ll leave you the company credit card.” She’d kept Fistoulari Investigations alive on the assumption that we’d manage to get home someday. “You can use it until you start getting paid. And I’ll have more cash at the end of the day.”

  With her claw, she pointed two tens and a piece of familiar plastic in my direction.

  I took them. What the hell else was I going to do?

  She also gave me my antibiotics. I took them, too.

  By the time I’d put the money and credit card in my wallet, and dropped my pills into a pocket, she’d left the apartment, closed the door behind her. I was alone again, lumped in the middle of the living room floor like a pile of unsorted laundry.

  Which meant that I had to face the consequences. I’d staked out my ground. Now I had to stand on it somehow.

  Unfortunately I didn’t know a soul in Carner. And my résumé wasn’t likely to inspire confidence. I’d spent too many years being drunk. Not to mention dependent.

  But I’d decided during the night that I didn’t mind making a fool of myself, if I had to. In reality, of course, I did mind, but since I couldn’t imagine any obvious alternatives, I might as well swallow it. Add it to the list of pains in my gut.

  On the theory that what’s good for one pain is good for another—pharmacology as sympathetic magic—I took my pills. Then I picked up the phone book and located the nearest rent-a-relic agency.

  The address wasn’t much help at first. The yellow pages included a rudimentary map, however, and eventually I deduced I was only fifteen or twenty blocks away. Presumably I could walk that far. I’d been practicing.

  Carner’s climate didn’t exactly encourage pedestrians, but it was still winter, so the heat didn’t kill me. By the time I reached Acme Cars Cheap, I was wearing just a shower, not an entire hot tub.

  Once the credit card cleared, Mr. Acme put me in a perky Subaru that would’ve been small for someone half my size. And he deigned to sell me a real map. After that, I was ready to embark on my new career, Indignation-For-Hire.

  The map, and the complexity of the route I had to take, confirmed the impression that reading the paper and watching TV had given me. Carner was only two states away from Puerta del Sol, but it might as well have been in a completely different world. It made the city I called home look like a hick town.

  For one thing, it was huge. A crooked valley between low rumpled hills confined its downtown to some extent, but its suburbs and malls, convention centers and car dealerships, parks and stadiums—there were a lot of stadiums—lapped away from the valley in every conceivable direction, sending out ripples of fresh concrete, glass, grass, and stucco to cover every viable patch of ground and dirt for a thousand square miles. And with all that room, Carner was still crowded. It had enough inhabitants for a Third World country. The airport was so vast you could’ve staged an invasion of Europe from it. Two beltways four lanes wide spread out the traffic jams while three freeways pumped in more cars. Hundreds of buses crawled the streets as if no one ever needed or wanted them to get anywhere. Some of the malls could’ve hosted Alpine skiing events without any significant remodeling. Hell, even the city Animal Shelter occupied a building the size of a cathedral.

  But Carner wasn’t just huge, it was new. In fact, practically everything you could see anywhere looked new. Towering offices, banks, and hotels by the dozens clotted the horizons downtown, breaking the sky into pieces like construction blocks. Some of them had so much glass on their sides that sunlight came off them whetted keen as knives. If the skyscrapers hadn’t spent so much time shadowing each other, the reflections would’ve driven every sane
human being in the vicinity blind. As it was, even on cloudy days Carner’s denizens wore sunglasses welded to their faces. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to walk downtown, never mind drive.

  That section of Carner was so comfortless and artificial, so full of buildings pretending they weren’t identical to each other, that it should’ve ceased to exist as soon as the sun went down and you couldn’t see it anymore. Darkness doesn’t ordinarily tolerate pretension on that scale. So, I learned, the city fathers had ordained that the sun didn’t set. When the actual sun ignored their designs, they replaced it with so much glaring incandescent neon, sodium, and halogen illumination that you wouldn’t know night ever happened if the city didn’t cool off occasionally.

  The suburbs weren’t that bad, but they weren’t much better, either. There the zoning board allowed trees and grass, which took some of the glare off the cement, but still didn’t prevent the houses, apartment buildings, mini-malls, and convenience stores from looking like they’d arrived prefabricated from some happily rich Developers’ Heaven.

  And all of them were lit. Carner spent electricity like a city that owned its own public utilities. Streetlamps as harsh as spotlights guarded the roads. At night every right-of-way looked like a landing-strip. Lights watched over the mansions, malls, dealerships, privacy walls, and stores. Even in the ghettos, you couldn’t go to a park at night without getting a tan. And as the sun set the stadiums seemed to go off like nuclear blasts—except your average thermonuclear device probably wasn’t that bright.

  One way or another, Carner did its utter damnedest to look like a place where no one had any secrets. Every furtive human desire or deed must surely have withered away decades ago, shamed to death by all that illumination.

  As far as I could tell just watching the news and reading the paper, most of the cash that kept the place going came from sports. Professional, university, college, high school, middle school, for God’s sake, minor league, semi-pro, amateur, tour, back-room—you name it, Carner had it. Most of the high schools sprouted gymnasiums on the scale of Olympic venues, plus separate amphitheaters for football, track, and tennis. Even the churches worshipped with basketball courts and swimming pools in their basements. Every citizen who wasn’t an athlete either owned, supported, worked for, or watched spectator sports, and well-toned bodies insulted their own mortality at every imaginable opportunity.

  All that dedication to sweat and injuries, as well as franchises, concessions, merchandising, nutritional supplements, and TV contracts—never mind good old-fashioned gambling, the foundation and tombstone of the American Way—gave me hives. That, and the incessant pitiless glare of the lights.

  I was completely and entirely out of my element. The kind of people I could really understand and talk to didn’t even come out of hiding until after dark. And they sure as hell weren’t athletes.

  Nevertheless Ginny’s contact flourished here. I didn’t see how.

  By the time I found my way to “Professional Investigations: proven, prompt, discreet,” I felt more than a little shaky. So far, being on my own was the shits.

  But that changed nothing. I still didn’t know a soul in Carner.

  I had two different plans, depending on how much Ginny had told Marshal Viviter about me. If he knew enough to recognize me, I intended to ask for advice, contacts, a reference, whatever. Hell, I had to ask somebody. But if my name didn’t mean anything to him, I wanted him to give me a job.

  For a while during the night, my famous intuition had gone into overdrive. Now I felt sure that despite all the time she’d spent talking to her old friend recently, Ginny hadn’t said much about me.

  For one thing, I guessed, she was ashamed of what had happened to our relationship. She wanted a clean start with Viviter, no baggage or self-justification. And no limits. Because she was already half in love with him—or so my sore stomach proclaimed vehemently. All that fun and all those happy memories made my contribution to her life look pretty abject. The last thing she wanted to do with him was discuss a former lover. Especially a former lover who made her feel ashamed.

  I could’ve been wrong, of course. Intuition is like that. Sometimes it functions like effective prescience. And sometimes it leaves you facedown in your own muck.

  But even if I was right, I still had to ask myself why I wanted to risk undermining her by trying to get a job with Professional Investigations. At the moment, the only answer I had was that I didn’t know where else to turn. To pacify my conscience, I promised it that I’d be straight with Viviter—and that I wouldn’t give away anything Ginny might’ve kept to herself.

  What I hadn’t figured out, of course, was why Viviter would even bother to talk to me. My inspiration didn’t stretch that far. But I didn’t let that stop me.

  With my obligatory sunglasses clamped to my face, I squeezed like a circus trick out of the Subaru and went to meet Marshal Viviter as if he were the Oracle at Delphi.

  Nevertheless I distrusted Professional Investigations before I even left the sidewalk. Its offices—they took up the whole eighth floor, I discovered—were in a massive glass-and-concrete skyscraper that also featured title companies, lawyers, accounting firms, and sports agencies. It was, I told myself acidly, no place for a private investigator. People like Ginny and I were in the pain business—uncovering it, containing it, avenging it, occasionally relieving it. We needed seamy offices in run-down buildings that made no pretense of tidiness, never mind sterility. We didn’t belong in an edifice where people got rich riding on the backs of their clients.

  And inside the place was worse. It had scarlet carpets so thick that if you dropped a coin you’d never see it again, and potted trees ten feet high positively gleaming with health, and wall after wall of mirrors clean enough to focus surgical lasers. The expensive air was so balmy it must’ve been imported from a beach somewhere. Polite functionaries hovered everywhere to assist the bewildered. Where I came from, the elevators could’ve been rented out as apartments.

  Bordellos should look so good.

  Professional Investigations wasn’t just successful, it was bloody triumphant. Ginny’s college boyfriend had raised pain-for-profit to a level I couldn’t even imagine. Of course, this was Carner, not Puerta del Sol. But still—It seemed to me that Marshal Viviter must be a proven, prompt, discreet scumbag, as dirty as death almost by definition. The only reason I didn’t turn my back and leave was that Ginny obviously had a good opinion of him. And I still didn’t have any choice that I could see.

  Girding up my loins, as they say, I braved the foyer, got directions, and rode the elevator up to the eighth floor.

  For once there wasn’t any glass. The agency probably didn’t want its clients to feel like they were being watched. A tasteful brass nameplate on the rosewood door announced:

  Marshal Viviter

  PROFESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS

  proven, prompt, discreet.

  The door opened without a sound when I turned the knob.

  On the other side, I found myself in a lobby that might’ve been small by the standards of the rest of the building, but that was still bigger than Ginny’s entire office in Puerta del Sol. Cushioned armchairs and deep loveseats which matched the carpet—here a reassuring taupe instead of scarlet—arranged themselves decorously among the potted plants, end tables, and ashtrays. Deliberately meaningless paintings in muted colors softened the walls. As soon as I closed the door, I felt like I was in the waiting room of a funeral home.

  Three other people had taken up residence ahead of me, a youngish couple with anxiety as thick as stage makeup on their faces, and an older businessman digging his heels into the carpet like he wanted to hurt it. They glanced at me when I entered, but didn’t pay any real attention.

  The far end of the room sported several doors, but still no glass. In front of them, a receptionist at a sleek rosewood desk presided over an intercom/phone console and a computer monitor. By then I felt so intimidated that at first I didn’t notice she
wasn’t blond, or pretty, or even especially polished. And I didn’t realize until I got closer that she was sitting in a wheelchair.

  Like the outer door, the desk had a brass nameplate. This one introduced her as “Beatrix Amity.”

  “May I help you, sir?” Her tone, like her mild smile and her remote gaze, was perfect for the job—impersonally welcoming and relaxed, without a hint of intrusion. Her capable hands rested on the desk as if they were at my service.

  I coughed at a sudden dryness in my throat. Now that I’d spotted the wheelchair, I also saw plastic runners over the carpet behind the desk, presumably so that she could move around easily. And at least two of the doors had electric eyes to open them automatically for her.

  “My name’s Axbrewder,” I informed her with an uncomfortable rasp. “I’m here to see Mr. Viviter.”

  “Do you have an appointment, Mr. Axbrewder?” She managed my name smoothly, like she practiced it every day.

  Warming up to feel foolish, I shook my head. “Afraid not. But I want you to tell him I’m here anyway. I think he’ll see me.”

  That was pure bullshit—and she probably knew it, too—but she kept her opinion to herself without any visible strain.

  “Certainly, Mr. Axbrewder.” She turned to her console. “May I say what this concerns?”

  I tried to smile, but only managed a spasm. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “As you wish,” she replied immaculately. The merest hint of a frown warned me that I was out of line. “I’m sure you understand that Mr. Viviter is quite busy. We usually insist on appointments. Otherwise his schedule becomes impossible.

  “If you’d like to take a seat—?” She nodded toward the chairs, promising me nothing.

  I didn’t move. Whether or not what I wanted made sense, I wasn’t any good at backing down. And I’ve never been gracious about it when I feel intimidated.