One of Us

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘Very amusing,’ he said, and his hand crept back to his side.

  ‘Keep laughing for a while,’ I suggested. ‘Or I’ll come back and explain it again.’

  I lurched around the corner to where I’d parked the car, and laid Laura Reynolds across the back seats. Then I got in and drove away, knowing that if I didn’t get her to a doctor within a very short time my life had just got even worse.

  As I two-wheeled onto Santa Monica Boulevard I nearly totalled us both, swerving to avoid a small group of chest freezers making their way across the road. I could have just driven straight at them, but I make a policy of not tangling with white goods. They’re really heavy.

  When we were safely heading in the right direction I called Deck. It took him a while to understand what I was saying, but he agreed to do as I asked. Then I flipped the phone to the Net and tried Quat again. It rang and rang, but there was still no answer. I frowned, cut the connection, redialled. Okay it was late, but Quat was always up, and whenever he was awake he was in the Net. Still no answer.

  I left it on callback with a redirect to the apartment, and concentrated on the road as we crossed Wilshire and into Beverly Hills. You should know that I’m not a big fan of driving. Never have been. I realize this undermines me in the view of any red-blooded American, but so be it. Lot of people still bemoan the fact that kids spend all their time in computer games: I say it’s the only thing that’s going to prepare them for real life. Driving equals long stretches of boredom, during which lunatics will randomly pop up and try to kill you—interspersed with pockets of hell where absolutely everything is out to get you. They call these pockets ‘cities’, and they’re best avoided unless you happen to live there. Give me a fist fight in a bar, and I’ll hold my own. Send me round the beltway at rush hour—fuck off. I’ll take a cab. Or walk.

  I glanced back at Laura Reynolds continually as I drove, and after the turn onto Western pulled over to get a proper look at her. She was still breathing, but the rise and fall of her chest was shallow. The blood round the cut on her right arm was congealing nicely, but the other still looked wide open. I loosened the tourniquet for a moment, then re-tightened it before setting off again. I really hoped Deck got hold of Woodley, or I was fucked. The only alternative was taking her to a hospital, in which case I’d lose her. I couldn’t stand guard the whole time, and she’d already proved she was determined to escape one way or another.

  When I turned off Los Feliz I was happy to see there wasn’t much of a queue for entry into Griffith. There’s only twenty entrances around the entire district, and at certain times of day it can be a complete pain in the ass. As we approached the wall I saw a knot of armed guards peering in the direction of the car, and was pleased to note that even at this advanced hour they were working for the inhabitants’ protection.

  In 2007 someone decided that Griffith Park wasn’t operating to its full potential. They felt the whole ‘park’ thing, in fact, was a little bit twentieth century. It was all very well having a huge open space with a couple of golf courses and areas for boy scouts to tramp around, but there were other uses the land could be put to. Up-scale residential, for example. The nice areas of LA were pretty full by then, and the well-heeled craved new Lebensraum—especially after plate analysis revealed that, come the next quake, Brentwood was going to end up in Belgium. There was a pitched battle with the local history fanatics and the poorer people who liked having a place to barbecue, but the problem with those guys is they don’t have much money. The developers did. They won, more or less. A solution was reached.

  An area was marked off, bordered by the Ventura and Golden State freeways in the North and East, and Los Feliz in the South. A hundred-metre wall was built along this entire stretch, and along the boundary with Mount Sinai Memorial Park in the West, creating an entirely closed area. The exterior of this wall was painted with high-resolution LED, and the whole surface was wired into a central computer. Certain interior features, like Mount Hollywood and small areas of the old wild lands, were left untouched. Even the developers realized the Hollywood sign was inviolate. This, along with stored images of how the park used to be before the development, was seamlessly displayed on the videowall—creating the illusion that nothing was there. From wherever you stood in LA, you could still see the sign, and the Hills and park to the North East. Unless you walked right up to the wall and punched it—which the guards were there to prevent you from doing—the illusion was perfect. It was like nothing had changed.

  Inside the district the same idea was deployed in reverse, with views of Burbank, Glendale and Hollywood constantly updated right up to the sky. LA got a whole new district, but kept the same view, and access tunnels leading from the outside to the three preserved areas even meant that there was technically still a public park. The environmentalists were a bit pissed about the whole thing, claiming this wasn’t the point, but they never have any money at all and weren’t even invited to the meetings.

  As we approached the gate—a ten-by-six-foot hole in the otherwise flawless panorama—I laid my finger over the sensor in the dashboard. This relayed my name, genome and credit rating to the matrix built into the car’s shell, for reading by the entrance computer. The matrix was treble-encrypted with a top-of-the-line government DES algorithm, and thus had probably taken someone a good twenty minutes to crack. I simply don’t believe that all the people you see driving round Griffith have the money to live there. Particularly those who hang around my block.

  I passed, and was allowed through the barrier. The outer doors shut behind me, leaving me in the access tunnel through the wall. The car hummed as it was conveyed towards the inner door. At the end the doors opened gracefully, and I drove out into the world again.

  I locked the car to Griffith’s auto system and told it to get me home as quickly as possible.

  On the inside Griffith looks like it was designed by someone who took acid in Disneyland. The hills provide perching space for split-level houses of high cost and loveliness, but the rest is wall-to-wall fun. The valley areas are split up into regular grids of stores and restaurants, and you’re never more than five minutes’ drive from a Starbucks or Borders or Baby Gap, the building blocks of Generica. Extensive areas are pedestrianized, and each storefront has been built up into an hysterical shout of commerciality. Restaurants in the shape of food and stores in the style of their products: the shoe stores look like shoes, the video stores are thin and rectangular, and Herbie Crouton’s—where the owner, Herbie, sells over two hundred different flavours of small cubes of toasted bread—looks like an enormous crouton. You don’t even have to be literate to know where to shop: the perfect, post-verbal landscape. There’s a spanking new subway, complete with designer graffiti, a cluster of big hotels in the middle, and little enclaves of speciality shops nestling in the canyons. Nothing is older than ten years, and even the smog is artificial and guaranteed free of pollution.

  It’s trashy, superficial, and vacuous. I call it home.

  When the car turned into my square I took it off auto and drove it myself. I can get all brave when the parking lot is in sight. My building used to be one of the flashest hotels in the area, but then one day someone decided that two hundred yards down the way was far cooler. Everyone checked out of the Falkland virtually overnight, some even carrying their suitcases by themselves. Within a week it was abandoned. By the time I opted for having a stable place to hang my hat, it had applied for and been granted ‘characterful’ status—then turned into private apartments. A SWAT team of interior decorators was called in to make the place look run-down. They did quite a good job, but if you rub hard on the walls in the apartments you can tell the grime’s just colour-wash, an environmental laughter track.

  I let one of the building’s regulars valet-park my vehicle, as always mentally waving it goodbye. I could afford a collapsing car now if I wanted, but I don’t really trust them. I’ve heard too many stories about people who’ve slipped one into their pocket, popp
ed into a restaurant for some lunch, and then found the car re-expanding at the table. The last thing you want when you’re halfway through your tagliatelle is two tons of vehicle on your lap.

  Laura Reynolds was still unconscious but also still alive, and I hauled her over my shoulder and hurried into the building. The whole of the first floor has become a kind of freak show bazaar, a throng of fun-seekers and working girls—with a constant backdrop of noise coming from a hundred different stalls. At first glance it looks kind of cool, in an ‘If you are over forty this is your worst nightmare’ kind of way, but take my advice: the drugs are generally cut to shit and you don’t want to tangle with the girls. Most of them are method prostitutes: the nurses carry catheters, the meter maids give you tickets enforceable by law, and the schoolgirls like terrible bands and always come straight from an argument with their mothers. The only highlight is the homeopathic bars, where you can get wasted on just one sip of beer: there’s a healthcare firm has ambulances out the back with engines running twenty-four hours a day.

  Deck was standing right inside the entrance, looking tense. The anti-smoking laws are even tougher inside Griffith, and it drives him berserk. He was also alone.

  ‘Where the fuck is he?’ I said, heading straight for the elevators on the other side of the foyer.

  ‘On his way.’ Deck held his arm out to keep the doors open as I manoeuvred into the elevator. Luckily by then I’d remembered my apartment number. ‘He wasn’t exactly awake when I called.’ Two guys tried to get in the elevator with us, but Deck dissuaded them. He’s a good couple of inches shorter than me, and on the wiry side—but it would be a mistake to read anything into that. His face is a little wonky, but his ease with his scars communicates an entirely valid confidence in his ability to handle himself. He’s kept in practice at the whole violence thing, working occasional muscle for local businessmen while holding part-time square john jobs. We made a policy of never working together, back in the old days, but I know that if I ever needed someone covering my back, Deck would be that man.

  As we stood outside my door he took Laura from me and held her upright as I fumbled with my keys.

  ‘You going to explain this to me at some stage?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘At some stage, yeah.’ I pushed the door open, listened for a moment, then helped Deck drag her in.

  Four

  We got her laid out on the sofa, and I was halfway through making coffee when there was a buzz at the door. I had my gun out before I knew what I was doing, and Deck held his hands up.

  ‘Be cool,’ he said, squinting through the peep hole, and kicking aside the small pile of newspapers which had arrived while I was away. ‘Just the old guy.’

  Woodley lurched in. ‘I take it you understand this is going to be double rate?’ he rasped, setting his two bags down on the floor. ‘It’s nearly four in the morning.’

  ‘Just shut up and get on with it,’ I said. ‘You’ll get four times the rate if you understand that mentioning this to anyone could be fatal. For you, not her.’

  Woodley harumphed for a moment, trying to hide a satisfied leer. If there’s anything the old berk likes more than money, I can’t imagine what it would be. He peered at Laura Reynolds: when he saw the blood-soaked towels he blanched, and waved a hand vaguely at Deck. ‘Let them out, would you, young fellow?’

  Though I’d managed to remain relatively calm during the journey home, seeing Woodley dithering around brought it home just how ill Laura Reynolds was. The only time I’d give the old twonk house room was when things were close to the edge. I grabbed one of his bags and shoved him in front of me towards the main bedroom. Meanwhile Deck opened the other bag and let the remotes out—small crab-like machines, the size of tarantulas. Attracted by the smell of blood, they clambered straight up onto the sofa, and started nosing around.

  Deck and I had used Woodley on and off for five years, back in the bad old days. He had once, he claimed, been a telesurgeon for covert army operations—conducting surgery remotely through satellite links. There was no way I’d found of establishing whether this was true, but it was certainly the case that he couldn’t stand blood. We’d shown him some once, just to check. He didn’t mind the sight of it, so long as it was mediated through the remotes’ cameras—just didn’t like the reality of the actual stuff. After he was court-martialled (unfairly, so he claimed, though he declined to specify what the unfair charges had been) he couldn’t get a proper licence, so he hacked out a living catering to people like me. People who every now and then needed something biological sorted out, and who couldn’t go to a hospital. Old fool he might be, and I strongly suspected he collected string and slept on the beach somewhere, but boy could that guy stitch. Nicely healed scars in my shoulder, chest and leg—all of which had once been bullet wounds—were testament to that.

  I stood where I could see both Laura and Woodley, and watched as he got down to work. The old man’s hands were trembling big time, but that wasn’t a cause for concern: the controls had anti-shake mechanisms built into them. He put the glasses and gloves on, and within moments the remotes were speeding up and down the woman’s arms. After a while one of them hopped off the sofa and delved in the bag, reappearing with a fridgipacked bag of plasma. Woodley clucked and frowned with concentration.

  Deck appeared next to me, handed me a cigarette. I fitted a prism filter on the end and lit it gratefully. The filters are a pain in the ass, stealing half the flavour, but it’s the only way of smoking indoors without the wall sensors ratting on you. The cigarettes dissolve after use, which is convenient, because possession of them is a misdemeanour. Smoking in LA these days takes more planning than conducting a minor war.

  ‘So?’ Deck asked.

  ‘Later,’ I said.

  Deck smiled, settled back to watch the remotes. He’s a patient man—far more so than me. You could dump Deck in the middle of the Gobi desert, and he’d just look around and say, ‘Is there any beer?’

  ‘No,’ you’d reply, obviously.

  ‘Water?’ You shake your head, and he’d think for a minute:

  ‘Anywhere to sit?’ And he’d walk over to the nearest fairly comfortable rock, and sit there for as long as it took for either beer, water or a parallel universe to appear.

  After a while I got fidgety, and checked the answering machine. This works pretty well, considering, hardly ever telling me that 67•0*3~ has called about the ;,,, t[{+®3, and so I was surprised to see I had no messages. I’d been away for two days. I’m not an especially popular guy, but people tend to ring me up at fairly regular intervals to bug me about something trivial. I experimentally banged the side of the machine.

  ‘Piss off,’ it said. The machine’s been sulking since I threw my coffee machine out. I think they had something going together.

  ‘Nobody’s called?’

  ‘Since midnight, no. Most people tend to sleep sometimes.’

  I stared down at it. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Which was the difficult word?’

  ‘When did you last give messages?’ I asked, very slowly.

  ‘11.58 p.m. yesterday.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘I remember it clearly. You pressed the button lightly for once.’

  ‘Problem?’ Deck asked.

  I didn’t bother to ask the machine if it was sure about the time. If there was any useful cross-breeding that could have taken place in my apartment, it would have been between the answering machine and my alarm clock.

  ‘Someone’s been in the apartment tonight,’ I said.

  ‘Has been?’

  It’s not a huge apartment. We checked the few remaining spaces. Deck walked carefully into the second bedroom, tossed the closets and looked under the bed—came out shrugging. I did the same in the main bedroom.

  ‘Nearly finished,’ Woodley said I passed behind him, expecting me to hassle him. ‘And for your information, she’s an occasional user. Smack—but not for a while—and a little bit of Fresh.
’

  This didn’t surprise me. ‘What do I need to do now? Recovery-wise?’ The closets were empty. Nothing appeared to have been taken. You’d have to have pretty specific needs to want to steal something from my bedroom. The memory receiver was still in the closet, and that was all that really mattered.

  The old guy shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me. Didn’t do that bit. Boys I used to operate on were just given a gun and told to go back out again.’

  ‘You’re a doctor, Woodley. You must have some idea.’

  He shrugged again. ‘Chicken soup. Keep her off the bottle for a few days. Or give her a stiff scotch. Whichever works. Don’t let her go bungee jumping.’

  ‘Woodley…’ I stopped abruptly, staring at the head of the bed. The sheets and cover had been turned back, very neatly, as if by a maid. It was so unexpected, so bizarre, that I hadn’t even noticed it at first. ‘Did you do that?’

  ‘Like to think I operate a one-stop service, dear boy, but it doesn’t extend to making your bed.’

  I paid him off, and waited impatiently while he gathered his stuff together. I ran an eye over the living room, and came up empty. Nothing obvious was missing, and trust me—the decor’s so austere you’d notice if anything was gone.

  When Woodley had left, I grabbed Deck and pulled him through to the bedroom. ‘The bed,’ I said, pointing at it.

  ‘We’ve been friends a long time,’ he said gently. ‘But I just don’t care for you that way.’

  ‘Someone’s turned back the sheets.’

  Deck raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. Does it seem something I’m likely to do?’

  ‘Not unless there was money hidden underneath.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So someone’s picked up your messages and turned back the bed. You got an imaginary girlfriend or something?’

  ‘Not even a real one.’

  ‘Nobody else got a key? The building’s Super, for instance?’