One of Us

by Michael Marshall Smith

  While I waited for my food to arrive I took a look through what I’d retrieved from Laura’s bag. Her organizer.

  Luckily the unit wasn’t finger coded, or I’d have had no chance. It was password protected in the conventional way, but that didn’t take long to crack—especially as I had a vague idea of what it was from her loaned memories of Ensenada. I plugged her organizer into my own, which is packed full of software of dubious provenance which I’ve picked up on the Net. By the time I was halfway through my first cup of coffee the OS had rolled over and I was in.

  The fact that she’d passworded it at all said a lot about Laura Reynolds. Every organizer gives you the option, and the world is divided into those who do and those who don’t. If you do, then every time you turn it on you’ve got to scribble or type in that sequence of characters before you can even get someone’s phone number. A bit of a pain, and no real protection against someone who knows what they’re doing. Secrets are difficult to keep, and anyone who runs their life around them is forever teetering on the edge of disclosure. Plus this: making something secret makes it too important, elevates it to the point where it runs your life from the shadows. If you hide what’s at your core from other people for too long, sooner or later you end up hiding it from yourself and waking up with no idea of who you are.

  Laura’s password was 4/16/2003. I worked out she’d have been around fourteen, fifteen back then—assuming I was right in pegging her age in the late twenties. I checked that date in the diary, but it was blank. Of course she wouldn’t have had this organizer then—it was an Apple Groovy™, quite new—but she could have filled it in anyway. People often do that, in the first flush of new organizer joy, sketching in the story of their life so far. I also did a search for the phrase ‘My Birthday’: everybody puts them in, privately making the day special for themselves—as if the organizer is their own private world, and they’re free to be vulnerable there. Laura’s was the 4/11, so that wasn’t it either. Whatever. It evidently meant something to her.

  I knew there’d be no entries for the period when she’d been in Ensenada, and found there was nothing on the day when she dumped the memory on me either. I trawled through her address book for a while, but nothing jumped out: then did a search to see what names were most frequently cross-referenced in the diary. It seemed Laura hung with a girl called Sabi pretty regularly, but that was it. The rest was just business appointments and working lunches. I didn’t recognize any of the company names. I didn’t even know what Laura did for a living.

  My food arrived, and as I chomped rapidly through it I set the organizer to do a general search on my name and that of Ray Hammond. The sausage was pretty good, if you’re interested, though something about the eggs made me suspect the hens had had a rather harder time of it than the pigs. The guy down the end now appeared to be asleep, his forehead gently resting on the table. Just looking at him made me want a beer.

  Checking the search results didn’t take long. There weren’t any. Either there’d never been anything about me or the dead cop in the organizer, or more likely she’d erased it. I couldn’t even find the email from her hacker, listing Hammond’s address, or any Net addresses with distinctive hacker domains. There were no records in the diary of the days when she’d used REMtemps’ services. Some time between the memory dump and last night she’d done a pretty thorough job of clearing out her life, maybe believing that if it wasn’t down there to read then it hadn’t really happened.

  Finally, much later than it should have done, it occurred to me to check the owner information in the organizer. There was no address listed—sensibly, but again secretively—but there was a phone number, an email address and the promise of a small reward to whoever returned the device. I decided to claim it, and dialled the number. It rang a couple of times, and then picked up.

  ‘Laura?’ I said, surprised.

  There was no answer. I realized it was probably her machine, and waited to leave another fruitless message, promising myself that at some point in the day I’d talk to someone who was actually there. I was beginning to feel like I was in a parallel universe where nobody could hear me except machines.

  The line remained quiet. ‘Laura, are you there?’ I said, suddenly less confident. ‘Deck?’ I tried. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Nobody’s here,’ a voice said. It was male, deep.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, thinking: boyfriend? Cops?

  ‘You know who it is,’ the voice said. The more I heard it, the less I liked it. It sounded too clear, like it wasn’t coming into my head via the phone. Something told me this was neither a policeman nor an insignificant other.

  ‘No I don’t,’ I said. ‘You going to tell me, or what?’

  There was a long pause. ‘You’ll remember,’ it said.

  ‘Look, is Laura there?’ I asked, petulantly. My own voice didn’t sound at all deep any more.

  ‘Round the school we went,’ the voice said, and the line went dead.

  I remained absolutely motionless for a moment, the phone still at my ear. It felt like something was going to swirl out of blackness, as if a word was finally going to make it off the tip of my tongue. A memory. There was so much in the way, other people’s and my own, but it was coming.

  ‘You okay?’ asked a voice, and the sensation disappeared. I blinked and saw that it was the man at the end who had spoken. He’d raised his head off the table and was looking at me. A little older than me, mid-length wavy fair hair. Strong features, strangely reassuring, and his eyes were clearer than you’d expect in someone who clearly had a hangover from hell. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  I left what was left of my money on the table and ran out.

  I drove aimlessly and fast, not knowing where to go. Just being on the move seemed important. I eventually turned off the Boulevard and pootled through residential for a while, then pulled over to the kerb, cut the engine and sat. As soon as the car was stationary my hands started shaking.

  I hadn’t recognized the voice on the phone, but it had sounded familiar. Generically familiar, in the same way as the men who seemed to be chasing after Laura were also familiar. But I ran a check on her area code—the phone must have rung way the other side of Burbank. They say that nowhere in LA is more than a half hour from anywhere else, but they also say that the moon is made of cheese and the Empire State building is a phallic symbol. I didn’t believe the men could have got from my hotel to Laura’s house in the time provided, but I didn’t know where that conclusion left me.

  I’d started the morning with a simple, albeit difficult, task. Getting hold of a transmitter. Not only had I made very few inroads on it, but the problem seemed to be broadening, seeping sideways into areas I had no understanding of. It was as if something was holding me in place, preventing me from going forward. There was a structure here, but I couldn’t see it. Without Laura Reynolds to revolve around, nothing that was happening seemed to make sense.

  As I sat there, staring out of the windshield and wondering what to do next, the door to a house on the other side of the street opened. It was a good-looking house: two-storey, not too fancy, nice deck. A youngish woman in a lilac dress peered suspiciously across the road at me: keeping an eye on the neighbourhood, keeping the chaos at bay. A tiddly kitten came trotting out of the door from behind her, and she called to it. The kitten scooted vaguely around on the deck for a moment, obviously rather taken aback by the magnitude of the space it now found itself in, and then galloped back indoors. I hoped it had a sibling to whom it could spend the afternoon fibbing about its adventures. The woman took a last look at the car, then followed the kitten inside and shut the door.

  For a moment I wished more than anything that I lived there with her. That she knew my name, that the kitten was ours, that I had wood-working tools and knew where I kept them. From the outside other people’s lives always look more rounded than mine, more meaningful, more whole. At least, I hope it’s only from the outside.

 
Sometimes it feels as if reality is streamed, and that I’m sitting in the back of the class that knows nothing but transience, hotels and take-out food. As if there’s some test you have to take before they’ll let you move up a grade to where the nice folks live, but I can never find out where it’s being held.

  For want of anything else to do I bit the bullet and dialled REMtemps. I still had the dream receiver in the trunk of the car, and I wanted one less thing hanging over me. Sabrina put me on hold, then Stratten himself came on the line.

  ‘You’re a hard man to get hold of, Mr Thompson,’ he said.

  He sounded impatient, but not unfriendly. I played it off-hand. ‘Man of mystery. Anyhow, I’m back in town, and…’

  ‘Back?’ he said quickly, and I realized I’d made an error. I’d patched my calls through Quat’s system while in Mexico, making it look like I was still in LA.

  ‘Had to go upstate yesterday,’ I continued, as smoothly as I could. ‘Why I wasn’t there for your calls.’

  ‘Business trip?’

  I’m not that stupid. ‘Personal, of course.’ I left it there. Extraneous details always sound like lies.

  ‘Next time set a redirect. I’ve got a lot of work stacked up for you.’

  ‘I can’t do a memory,’ I told him. ‘My head still isn’t right.’

  ‘Migraine?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and at that moment it was pretty close to the truth. A sudden gout of Laura’s vacation slewed down through my head, filling it with hangover and sour Margaritas.

  ‘But you’ll do dreams, despite that?’ Stratten was too polished to let suspicion into his tone, but I knew it was there.

  ‘They’re different, as you know. Plus I need the money.’ Not true. I had around a quarter million hidden in various places in the Net, not including the money I intended to give back to Laura Reynolds. But I figured it would make Stratten happy to think I was beholden to him.

  I was right. ‘Okay,’ he said, apparently satisfied. ‘Take one more day off. But make sure it’s a restful one. Tonight’s going to be very tiring.’

  You don’t know the half of it, I thought.

  I drove back to Griffith, and took a pass in front of the Falkland. There was nothing to see, but I still didn’t like it, and so I parked on the far side of the square and sat outside a bar drinking beer on credit. Deck’s phone remained unanswered, there was no message on my machine, and a call to Tid’s cellular told me there’d been no sign of the men in grey suits. I didn’t try Laura’s number again.

  I was halfway through my third beer, and trying to work out a way of checking out the apartment without laying myself open to the possibility of being killed, when the phone finally rang.

  ‘Where the fuck are you?’ I shouted, scaring some of the other early afternoon drinkers.

  ‘In the Net, where else?’ answered a calm voice. ‘You running a little tense there, Hap?’

  ‘Quat,’ I said, more quietly. ‘Thought you were someone else.’

  ‘Well, be glad it’s me. Got some good news for you.’

  About time. ‘What?’

  ‘You lucked out. I found a guy who lashed a part-working device up less than a week ago, for a woman who wanted to make a large transferral. Sound familiar?’

  ‘Sure does.’ Laura’s hacker. Had to be. ‘When can I have it?’

  ‘He’s in the area. Tonight soon enough?’

  Better than I’d dared hope. I felt light-headed with relief. ‘What’s the deal?’

  ‘Thirty thou, one-off usage. He delivers, waits, takes it back.’

  ‘Can’t do it that way. I have some logistical problems.’ Like not having my receiver to hand. ‘I need it overnight at least.’

  ‘Hold a sec.’ There was a pause, then Quat came back on the line. ‘Okay, but the price goes to fifty, and it’s back by six a.m. He’s doing me a favour here. He wants it back in pieces pronto.’

  ‘Deal.’ It was actually less than I was expecting, and in the current situation cheap at the price. ‘What about the delivery? Time and place?’

  ‘Why not your apartment?’

  ‘I’m going off the colour scheme.’ I thought for a moment. ‘You know the Prose Café?’

  Quat sniggered. ‘I know of it.’

  ‘Tell him eight o’clock, there. Will you arrange the money transfer?’

  ‘As we speak. And you might want to be alone, Hap. I think this is a guy who’s going to scare easy.’

  At least he makes it out into the real world sometimes, I thought. ‘How will I know who he is?’

  ‘You’ll know,’ Quat said, and was gone.

  I took a celebratory swig of my beer, and beamed goodwill at my fellow drinkers. The most difficult piece of the puzzle was now in place. True, the easier bits—like having access to my own machine, and to the woman whose head the memory needed to go back into—had gone a bit complex to compensate, but at least I was getting somewhere.

  I had an idea, and dialled the Tidster’s number again. He answered on the first ring. He always does. He doesn’t seem to have anything to do except run errands for people like me.

  ‘Got a fifty buck job for you, you got ten minutes.’

  ‘That rate, you can have half a day. What do you want?’

  ‘I left something I need in my room. Thought maybe I could give you the key and you could go up and fetch it.’ For a moment I understood why Woodley would only operate through remotes. Maybe he was more in tune with the times than me.

  ‘Sure. But why can’t you go?’

  ‘There are reasons. But listen—when you get to the room, you’ve got to knock first. Don’t just go barging in there.’

  ‘Whatever you say, boss. Where are you?’

  ‘Just across the square.’ Abruptly I stopped, realizing I couldn’t do this. Tid could knock on the door all he liked, or more likely he’d ignore my advice and just open it right up. On past form, if the two men had come back to my apartment, they’d shoot him either way. If they weren’t there, he’d earn fifty bucks. It wasn’t enough. No amount of money was, for that kind of risk. Plus I remembered I didn’t have any cash left.

  ‘Listen, Tid,’ I said. ‘I’ve changed…’

  ‘Hey hey hey,’ he said, voice distant, ‘talking to a man who’s been looking for you.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I asked, but then realized he wasn’t speaking into the phone. Frowning, I listened to a muffled exchange, and then someone else’s voice came on the line.

  ‘Hap,’ it said, urgently. ‘Where the hell have you been, man?’

  Luckily my phone was made of the stuff they used to fashion space shuttles from. ‘Deck? Are you okay? Have you got Laura?’

  ‘Yes and yes, though I’m pretty spooked. Been trying to get hold of you all morning.’ Deck sounded relieved.

  ‘How?’

  ‘On the phone, Hap. How do you think, spirit guides?’

  ‘Don’t go up to the apartment. I’m across the square outside the Twelve Bar. Get the fuck over here.’

  I stood up, stared across the square. There was a couple second delay, and then the doors to the Falkland opened. Deck came out, Laura’s upper arm gripped firmly in one of his hands. She was wearing the green dress and looked nice, though pretty pissed. At least she wasn’t bothering to dig her heels in, which would have been merely tiresome.

  Deck was talking fast from five yards away. ‘Jesus H Christ, Hap. You leave it off the hook or something?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘And I’ve had it in reaching distance all the fucking time. You sure you’ve got the right number?’

  He spieled it off like a machine gun.

  ‘I am getting really, really fed up with this,’ Laura said. ‘Being dragged round dives by this monkey all morning is my idea of a very dull time.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘I fetched your stuff, so be polite.’

  ‘Oh yeah, like that’s some big favour.’

  I ignored her, turned to unlock the car. ‘What h
appened?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Deck said, looking sheepish. ‘Got twitchy. Hap, there’s something a little weird going on here.’

  ‘No shit, Scully.’

  Deck helped Laura into the back, then settled in the passenger seat. I locked the doors and set the car on an auto-tourist route, then got their story as we tazzed around the neighbourhood.

  Deck had waited until Laura got out of the shower, then gave her a coffee. They were exchanging unpleasantries when the phone rang. Deck was going to let the machine take it, then realized it might be me calling from the Net with a change of plan. So he picked it up.

  A deep voice came on the line. Asked to speak to Laura Reynolds. Deck said she wasn’t there. The voice chuckled quietly, then asked for me instead. Deck said the same thing again, and was asked to deliver a message. ‘The wrath of nothing will fall swiftly.’

  ‘Not very nice,’ I said.

  ‘No, and quite threatening, I thought. Plus a little incomprehensible. So I wait for a few minutes, thinking maybe I should call you, and then I get a nervous feeling. Something about the guy’s voice made me think that “swiftly” might mean not, like, “tomorrow”, or “some time later in the week, possibly Friday”. It might mean actually now. So I went to the window, looked down at the street. I couldn’t see anything unusual, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. I called you, but the line was busy.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Exactly a half hour after you left.’ At which point I was sitting in the parking lot below the Falkland, smoking a cigarette and not talking to anyone at all. Deck shrugged. ‘So, well, you know how I get sometimes.’

  I did. Deck has a sixth sense. Sounds corny, but he does. A while ago he saved the life of someone I cared about, simply by keeping them talking. I wasn’t there, for a variety of reasons, but I heard about it afterwards. They were drinking together in a bar, killing time. She was due to go meet up with someone and drive out of the city, but Deck got the Fear and kept her there, talking nonsense and pretending to be trying to convince her of something else. He only managed to delay her for ten minutes, but that was enough. The guy she was due to meet got impatient waiting for her, ran to his car to go looking. Couple of seconds later he was spread in a thin red mist over a hundred cubic yards, and it was raining bits of motor vehicle.