It was a standard print copy of the King James version, quite small and bound in battered black leather. The pages were wafer thin and bordered in gold. I flicked through it quickly from back to front, and saw that a few passages had been marked in the margins. A handful in the New Testament, rather more in the Old. There didn’t seem to be any particular rhyme or reason to the selections he’d picked out, but I know jack shit about such things—I come from a long line of belligerent atheists. My sole view on things bible-related is that the Good News revision was the most nauseating crime against language ever committed. Good News? Good grief, more like. Even a non-believer doesn’t want to see that stuff recouched in the kind of language you use to book a re-birthing session.
Then I remembered the passage which had been copied out on the inside front cover. I found the place and held it out to Laura. ‘Does this look like Hammond’s handwriting?’
She glanced at it. ‘Yes. Probably.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘It’s been a while.’ She set her knife and fork down, and refilled her glass. Her food had been barely touched, though it had been shifted around the plate a little. She caught me looking. ‘And I’m just not very hungry, okay? Don’t go all sensitive and “I know about eating disorders” on me, because as it happens I don’t have one.’
I smiled, held up my hands. She grinned back, but something had changed in her face. Her eyes glittered, and what was animating them was not humour any longer, but fear. Not of anything in particular: just a general fear, of everything and everyone including herself.
‘You want a coffee?’ I asked. She shook her head and looked away. Deck volunteered to sort out the bill—which was just as well, because I’d left the finger in his apartment. They’re not really something you can pull out in a restaurant.
Meanwhile I went into the back of the restaurant to use their john. Tables full of wannabes lifted their eyes covertly as I walked past, checking to see if I was someone famous enough to be worth smoking. The general consensus appeared to be that I wasn’t, and I sent each and every one of them a smidgen of ill-will. I was introduced to Applebaum’s by an acquaintance of mine called Melk, who’s wasting his life scuffling around the edge of the Business. He currently works as an Emission Manager, better known in the trade as a fart wrangler: hired by movie stars to walk behind them at parties, and—should the unfortunate occur—surreptitiously flap an unfurled napkin to disperse the smell as quickly as possible. The best wranglers can make it seem like it never happened, even corral it up and redirect it so a rival actor gets the blame. This is not a job for a grown human being, and Melk is one of the bigger fish who frequents the restaurant—so imagine the troughs of loserdom that the other patrons inhabit. I’m not a particularly self-confident guy, but I felt I could live without their validation.
An attendant in the anteroom tried to give me all manner of unguents and towels to take into the rest-room with me, but I told him to fuck off. He backed off bowing and scraping, probably assuming my rudeness meant I ran a studio and was in Applebaum’s as a result of a terrible restaurant-booking accident.
Then suddenly I found myself face-down on the floor, with someone kneeling in the middle of my back. For a second all I could do was gasp, the air punched out of my lungs: by that time my hands had been yanked behind my back and cuffed.
Two polished black shoes appeared close to where my nose was resting on the carpet. ‘Don’t you fucking move,’ said a voice from above.
I craned my neck, looked up and saw a cop pointing a .38 down at me. His hands were very steady. ‘You’re coming with us.’
‘Yes I am,’ I said accommodatingly, and let myself be hauled to my feet. Both cops were young and shiny, one with a blond crew-cut, the other brown-haired. Apart from that I couldn’t see any significant difference between them. They each grabbed one of my arms, and led me back out into the restaurant.
The wannabes stared at us as we passed through, evidently trying to decide whether this turn of events made me a smaller or bigger fish. Someone who I assume was either an attorney or an agent lobbed a business card at me.
I had my face ready-set as we emerged onto the patio, knowing that Deck would have the sense to blank me as we passed. Turned out he’d gone one further. They’d disappeared altogether, money for the meal left by Deck’s empty plate.
Blond-hair opened the back door of the black and white parked at the kerb; brown-hair shoved me and got in beside me.
I sat looking out the window as the car pulled away, and waited patiently for my life to get worse.
‘How did you find me?’ I asked, when he finally arrived.
Travis gave me a pitying look. ‘We’re the cops, Hap. It’s our job.’
I was sitting in an interview room in the Hollywood precinct, and had been for five hours. No-one had offered me a coffee in all that time, and I was thinking of filing a complaint. The room had bare grey walls obviously designed to make you feel grim, the monotony enlivened only by large no-smoking signs. But since smoking is now more-or-less illegal it’s mainly criminals and cops who do it, and there was a large and overflowing ashtray in the centre of the table in front of me.
Travis leaned with his arms folded against a mirror which covered all of one wall. He caught me glancing at it.
‘Nobody behind there,’ he said.
‘Right,’ I said, not knowing or caring if he was telling the truth. Come one, come all. It didn’t make much difference now. ‘How’s the arm?’
‘Painful,’ he said. The upper right sleeve of his shirt bulged where there was a bandage underneath. ‘But then you’d know how it feels, wouldn’t you? You caught a few once, as I recall. That’s what the witnesses said, anyhow.’
I didn’t reply. He looked at me for a while, then reached into his pocket. He pulled out a piece of folded paper, straightened it out and laid it on the table in front of me. ‘Take a look at this.’
It was a print-out from the LAPD Crime Databank, with today’s date at the top. It related to an armed robbery and multiple homicide on 3/15/2014, a little over three years ago. Strong eyewitness testimony led to the naming of three suspects: Ricardo NMI Pechryn (since deceased), Harry ‘Hap’ Thompson, and Helena Ruth Goldstein. Mandate to use force if necessary to secure an arrest: advice to use especial care and SWAT backup when attempting to apprehend Goldstein.
Quat had put it back on the database. I closed my eyes.
‘Kind of a blow, isn’t it?’ Travis agreed. ‘Odd, too. Gone all that time, then I check the file this morning and there it is. There’s probably an explanation, but to be honest I don’t really care what it is. Welcome back to my personal Most Wanted list, Hap.’
‘Great to be here,’ I muttered. Quat had evidently realized that with the hacker and two other on-the-spot witnesses dead or in a coma, the conspiracy to lease memory equipment rap looked shaky. So he’d tied me up neatly with this instead. Why?
‘The bottom line is that you’re screwed, Thompson. Do you accept that?’
‘Yes.’ It couldn’t just be for the money. There had to be something else behind what Quat was doing to me. One thing was certain: if I ever found him in the real world, he was dead.
Travis raised an eyebrow. ‘So?’
‘So you let me call a lawyer, you put me in a cell with a bunch of whackos who’ll beat the shit out of me just to relieve the monotony, and we take it from there. If you’re expecting me to hand over Helena, you’re out of luck. I haven’t seen her in three years.’
I was going to go on, but I stopped: tongue-tied by saying her name. I had deliberately not thought about her since the delivery outside Deck’s house the night before. Deliberately, and with great force, not thought about her. I had no intention of starting now.
Travis shook his head. ‘Not why you’re here—for the moment. I want to talk to you about something else. I just wish you to understand that our discussion is taking place within certain parameters.’
I took a ci
garette from the packet in front of me, lit it. ‘So talk.’
‘Tell me what you know about Ray Hammond.’
I shrugged. ‘Ranking cop, gunned down in Culver City a week ago. Gangland hit, I heard.’
Travis shook his head. ‘Try again.’
‘That’s all I know.’
‘Bullshit. I’m in the middle of arresting you for an entirely unrelated matter, and four people—who I realize in retrospect strongly resemble the suspects in Hammond’s murder—walk in and demand we hand you over. Three cops get killed or badly injured in the ensuing fire fight, which speaks of an extremely strong desire for your company.’
‘Not everyone’s got a hard-on for me like you have,’ I said. ‘I’m actually quite a popular guy.’
‘Evidently.’ Travis pulled out the chair on the other side of the desk. ‘Though they didn’t seem overly concerned as to whether you made it out alive.’
He balled one fist and laid it on the table. ‘This is a rock, Hap,’ he said, and then placed another fist about six inches away from the first. ‘And this is a hard place. Can you guess where you are?’
I looked in the mirror, and saw myself sitting there alone. I looked tired and old and pale, and I suddenly got a flash that there probably wasn’t anyone in the observation room, that for some reason Travis was just talking to me alone. That might mean there was something on the horizon other than a simple walk down to the holding tank. It was time to be polite.
‘I don’t know who they are,’ I said, and Travis sat down. ‘Yesterday morning two of them came to my apartment. I managed to get away, spent the morning outside Griffith. The only other time I’ve seen them was in the room at the Prose Café.’
‘Where you had come to pick up a memory machine?’
There was no point in lying. ‘Yes.’
‘You want to tell me why you need one?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t. You want to get anywhere near that, I’m not saying anything else until I call a lawyer.’
Travis leaned towards me. ‘You know what I think? I think you’ve been working as a memory caretaker.’ He reached below the table and picked up a box. Inside it was the dream receiver, tagged in an evidence bag. ‘Found this in your jacket when you were processed. Now: because of that asshole lawyer who’s quantumized the dream-transfer issue, I have no way of knowing whether possession of this device is legal or not. Given that all memory caretakers so far apprehended have started life as proxy dreamers, however, and the fact you were trying to get hold of a memory machine, I can try damned hard to use it as evidence that you are or have been involved in a conspiracy to commit illegal activities with regard to recall.’
‘Shall I make that phone call now?’
‘What else do you know about the guys in the suits?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Why are they after you?’
A lie: ‘I have no idea.’
‘We have reason to believe that there may be another two men involved, in addition to the four at the Café. Would you agree?’
Throw him something: ‘It’s possible.’
‘Why do you say that?’
Carefully: ‘Two guys came to my apartment. Four were at the Café. Either two of them were the same, or not. If not, there’s six.’
‘You’re not saying that, for example, because you’ve talked to the old guy in the store near the murder scene.’
‘What old guy would that be?’
‘Because if you had done so, that would imply you had an interest in Hammond’s death.’
‘Which I don’t.’
‘Despite the fact that the chief suspects have a strong interest in you.’
‘You got it.’
‘How did they know where to find you on these two occasions?’
The truth: ‘I have no idea.’
Travis nodded, looked up at the window in the wall behind me. I stubbed out my cigarette, waited.
‘I’ll lay it out straight,’ he said, eventually, ‘because I liked you once, and also to make sure you understand it’s a final offer. Your crime’s back on the ’base, the witnesses are all still in good health and of sound mind, and we have your dream receiver. You’re going down whatever happens.’
‘You want to get one of the girls from Marketing to help your pitching technique. This isn’t sounding like such a great deal so far.’
Travis ignored me. ‘But that’s a bank job which happened five years ago, and nobody but me cares that much any more. The victims had six relatives between them. Two are dead in a car wreck, one’s a junkie who didn’t like her brother much anyway, and the other three are poor and black. They still call the station every now and then, but nine times out of ten I don’t even get passed the messages.
‘On the other hand we’ve got a high-ranking cop brutally murdered a week ago. I think you can imagine which is rated a higher priority at the moment.’
I looked at him. ‘And you can’t find the suspects no matter how hard you try, but they seem to be able to find me.’
‘You’re a clever guy, Hap. I always said so. Want to put the rest of it together?’
‘You release me, let me wander around town and wait for the guys with the guns to catch up with me. I give you a call—assuming I have time before I get clipped—and you come and catch the bad guys.’
‘You’re wasted as lowlife, Hap. With a mind like yours you could have aspired to greatness.’
‘Fuck you, Travis. What do I get for risking my life to make you look good?’
‘I lose the dream receiver, and you aren’t submitted to a truth test regarding your work as a memory caretaker.’
I shook my head. ‘Not nearly enough. You’ve already admitted the dream machine is circumstantial. The only remaining witness to me allegedly attempting to procure a memory machine is in a coma, and you don’t have probable cause for involuntary sodium verithal.’
‘You been watching a lot of TV or something, Hap? I don’t know how you appear to yourself in your own head, but to the outside world you’re just a minor ex-hood that no-one’s going to give two shits about. Somebody’s paying for what happened in that bank and Pechryn is already dead. That puts you in the bull pen all by yourself, and you have precisely no-one on base. I can get two hundred cops to stand in a line and confirm in unison that you agreed to the verithal test. I can get them to sing it to the tune of “I Got Rhythm”, if that fucking helps.’
‘Try something else,’ I said, wearily. I had just remembered that given the current state of my accounts, I’d be relying upon the state for my defence. I knew both that I was going to deal, and that whatever I agreed with Travis now was as good as it was going to get.
Travis tapped his fingers on the table for a moment.
Then: ‘Helena walks,’ he said.
In that moment it felt as if time had drained away—two separate measures of time, to two different periods in my life. To an instinct that said no, that simply wasn’t fair; and to another that agreed to the idea without thinking.
‘Yes or no,’ he said. ‘I wipe her name out of the file. To be frank I don’t fancy trying to arrest her anyway. That’s the final offer.’
I stared down at the table, feeling weak, on the verge of tears. Some instinct in Travis had probably told him that gut-shooting me with Helena’s name would have just that effect. I abruptly lost the will to fight. I wanted it all to be over. I wanted to be alone. I wanted, to be frank, my mother—but she was a long way away and we hadn’t spoken in weeks.
I looked up and nodded.
Travis smiled. ‘Good. Don’t fuck with me on this, or I’ll announce that bullets found in the two cops who died at the scene yesterday match the gun you left behind. You know how we tend to feel about people who whack one of our own.’
He stood, opened the door. I pushed myself to my feet, face numb, and shambled towards it. ‘You can collect your coat on the way out,’ he said, as I passed him. ‘And one more thing.’
I stopped, tu
rned back, waited.
‘There’s a contract out on you. Big money. Two reliable snitches told me the word is that Helena has taken the job.’ He smiled. ‘Funny: always thought she was the one for you. Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?’
I turned back and walked quickly away, so he wouldn’t see the expression on my face.
I went immediately to the darkest bar I could find, and sat in the darkest corner. Then I asked the waitress if they could turn the lights down a little, and ordered five beers. While I waited for them an ancient song came on the juke box, something about sending lawyers, guns and money. Sounded like a service I could use. I waited for an 0800 number at the end, but there wasn’t one.
A guy came in just as my drinks arrived, and sat at a booth on the other side of the room. Cheap suit, a tie the store must have sold him for a joke. He ordered a club soda and a bowl of nuts, sat and examined the ceiling. Not the most subtle tail I had ever seen. I ignored him and got on with drinking.
By the second beer I was a little calmer, and I called Deck on the cellular and told him I was okay. He sounded relieved, but said Laura was acting weird. Prowling around his apartment and drinking a lot. Took a half-hour shower, and when Deck stood close to the door he could hear her talking angrily to herself: when she emerged her skin looked raw, as if she’d been scrubbing it all that time. Now she was prowling and drinking again, alternating with chainsmoking and staring into space. I told him to try to distract her, show her his collection or something. I also told him the situation. He didn’t say much. There wasn’t a lot worth saying.
I spent the third beer considering the situation I was in, and chewing absently on nicotine pretzels. I tried to think rigorously, but the structure kept collapsing in the face of the obvious truth. I was fucked. If I tried to bug out of town Travis would certainly follow through on his threat, and the cops would find me and shoot me on sight. All I could do was what I was told, and I knew the deal was final. I was free for precisely as long as it took for the guys in suits to find me, which on past experience wasn’t that long. Added to which some asshole had put out a whack on me.
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