One of Us

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  I stood up, started walking. ‘Never mind.’

  She caught up with me, grabbed my arm and spun me round. ‘I took the contract because it was there. Someone wanted you dead, enough to put out a big open call. I’ve got a certain reputation, and I’m a made girl. I thought if word got around I was on the case, maybe other contractors would stay out of it. In other words, that you’d be safe for a while.’

  I looked her in the eyes, knew she was telling the truth. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Okay. So be nice.’

  ‘Helena, give me a break. I haven’t seen you in a long time. You know what you did. Then suddenly you’re following me around and saving my life and…’

  I stopped, not wanting to say any more.

  She smiled: ‘It’s good to see you again, Hap.’

  Not a helpful thing to hear, and kind of a selfish thing to say. Hurt and anger fought it out for supremacy in my mind, searching for some arrangement where they could both speak at once. I snapped: ‘Is it?’

  ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘I don’t know, to be honest. You’ve had a couple of days to get used to the idea, do a bit of fieldwork on the life and habits of the lesser-regarded Hap Thompson. I don’t know shit about you any more.’

  ‘Well, I’ve still got the same job, and I still live in LA and I’m going out with someone.’ She named a local mob figure, about ten years older than me. That hurt, but not as much as I would have expected. Mainly I just felt numb.

  ‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘So how exactly am I supposed to react? Do tell.’

  She tried to take my arm again. ‘You’re supposed to take a walk with me down to the water, and tell me what’s going on.’ My head shook violently, outside my control. I didn’t want to walk down there with her, do anything we used to do. ‘Or we can stay here,’ she said quickly. ‘Whatever. I just want to help, Hap. Tell me what’s happening.’

  After a while, and only because my legs started to ache from standing in one place, we did start walking. And if you’re walking on a beach you’re going to wind up going down towards the sea. It makes sense. We walked along the damp sand, a few feet above where the swell petered out, and in time I realized I was looking for sand dollars, even though it was too dark and the tide wasn’t right. I kept on looking anyway. That’s what beaches are for.

  In the meantime I told Helena about Travis—though not about the deal I’d struck—and what had happened at Hammond’s house; about Laura and Quat and how I’d ended up in this situation, right back to when I first met Stratten. Even a little about life before then, the years spent traipsing from state to state. All I could find to say about that time was that I was watching myself getting older, and that it was taking too long. So I stopped talking and walking, and turned to face the sea.

  Helena looked at me for a long while. I didn’t turn my face towards her. I didn’t want to be able to see her properly. I knew she wanted to ask me other things, and that if I looked at her she’d take that as a signal to start. I’d had a long fucking day. I wasn’t ready for it. Being in her company again was too weird for words, and the air between us seemed to pulse with the things that should and shouldn’t be said. At one moment it was like nothing had ever changed, and then the next it was like I was with a stranger who I couldn’t possibly have met before. Talking with her used to be as natural as breathing, a living shorthand honed by affection and understanding. Now it felt like I was standing on a planet wearing an oxygen mask, because I didn’t know what the atmosphere contained, whether it would nurture or kill me.

  ‘I don’t want to depress you any further,’ she said eventually, ‘but this Stratten character is the guy who’s taken the hit out on you.’

  That woke me up, I’ve got to admit. ‘What?’

  Helena nodded. ‘Five days ago. Sixty thou, and your head must be completely destroyed. Which seemed a bit harsh, I must say. It’s quite a nice head.’

  I stared at her, feeling a little dizzy and very stupid. Stratten wasn’t an idiot, and I’d been acting pretty strange after a year and a half of being his star caretaker. ‘Of course. Jesus Christ.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Somehow he worked out I was into something that could damage REMtemps. If the cops found out I was carrying a major crime, using equipment supplied by his company, he’d have been in deep shit. Even the people he must be keeping lubed would have drawn the line at that.’ So he’d tried to have me killed, and had already put the order out when I talked to him in Ensenada. That’s why no paid dreams were forthcoming last night: he’d just been stringing me along, keeping me in town long enough for someone to find and kill me.

  ‘But how could he have found it out?’

  ‘Quat,’ I said. ‘It’s the only way.’ Suddenly it made sense, leading to an inescapable conclusion. Quat had been working for Stratten all along. ‘About two weeks after I started proxy dreaming I met this wirehead on the Net. In retrospect I guess he found me, and ingratiated himself. He told me how I could have my money kept safe, and I paid him to do it.’

  Which meant that all the time I’d thought I was safeguarding my future, Stratten already had me backed into a corner. My independence had been coded by someone on the REMtemps payroll. Then I remembered my first meeting with Stratten, the way he’d shown me visuals of the dreams I’d had in Pete’s Rooms.

  ‘There must be some way of monitoring what memory a client is dumping,’ I said, ‘like there is with dreams. Quat earned his money helping Laura transfer the memory to me, watched the monitor afterwards—either out of policy or because he’s a voyeur asshole. He clocks something hinky is going down, contacts Stratten. Stratten knows he’s got a problem: gets Quat to set me up at the Café and then crash my accounts.’ I realized something else, and my mouth dropped open. ‘Christ, I’ve been dumb.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Travis’ cops found me yesterday, ten minutes after I’d made a payphone call to Stratten. I should have put the two together. REMtemps kept me hanging on hold: meantime they traced the number and tipped off the police.’

  ‘But Stratten doesn’t want the cops getting hold of you. That’s why there’s a contract.’

  I shrugged. ‘He found out you’d taken the contract, worked out who you were, realized it might go weird. Maybe in the meantime he’s cut a side deal—Travis is offering to drop the recall rap altogether, remember. Stratten gets in touch, lets him know he might be able to find me—and that Quat has put us back on the database. Then when Travis has caught the guys in the suits, I have an accident in my cell before a verithal test can implicate REMtemps. Everybody’s happy. Except for me.’

  Helena crossed her arms, looked dubious. ‘You really think Travis would do something like that?’

  ‘There’s one way to find out.’

  I met him alone. Put a call through to the station, patiently waited out a tirade concerning the bruising of a police officer’s forehead, told him to meet me alone at the corner of Riviera and San Juan. Cut the connection without waiting to hear a reply.

  Helena volunteered to fade back, make her way there by a different route. That way she could keep an eye on what was happening, and alert me if Travis brought other people along with him. I agreed. It might work in our favour somewhere along the line if he didn’t know we were on the same team. Helena gave a crooked smile.

  ‘Is that what we are? A team?’

  When we’d been together I’d often railed about people who called their lovers ‘partners’, as if corporate terminology was now appropriate in other relationships too: as if love was a business transaction between people who rotated the roles of client and supplier and communicated with each other in bullet points. Screw that, I always said. I was her boyfriend, and then her husband—not just someone who slept in the same office environment.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what we are.’

  Her smile faded immediat
ely. She nodded curtly and walked away.

  At the crossroads where I’d told Travis to meet me is a place called the Happy Spatula. It used to be a pretty well-known restaurant, popular with local families: cooked the kind of lasagne which said ‘Yes, we know about current scientific thinking on diet, and we don’t give a shit.’ Also they left a little bowl of parmesan on the table, for you to help yourself. When I become King of the World this practice will become mandatory, even in restaurants which don’t serve pasta. Unfortunately there was a series of violent incidents in the restaurant, and the families learned to stay away. The owners sold up, the clientele went downhill like a rock dropped off a cliff, and in season it’s wall-to-wall psychos. Rest of the year it’s like a morgue. Venice is on the very edge of the region affected by the microclimate fuck-up, and has more stable weather than most, but it still tends to go in cycles of a few weeks or so. Tonight it was cool, and the tables outside were empty.

  I sat at one, ordered a jug of coffee, and waited for the next thing to happen.

  Or tried to, anyway. My mind felt like someone was applying electric shocks to it, alternating current and voltage. I guess I should have been trying to get some kind of handle on what had happened back at Deck’s place, but something told me I didn’t have the background information required to parse the event. That was my excuse, anyhow. In fact my mind was just running from the problem. It didn’t want to think about it. I was worried about Deck, and Laura too I guess, but there was nothing I could do. Particularly when my head was full of someone else.

  I knew she’d be somewhere nearby, utterly invisible. I could almost feel her, believed that if I put my mind to it I could close my eyes and point in the direction she’d be. Now that she wasn’t with me I wanted to talk to her very much, though I was still far from sure what I wanted to say. I couldn’t see past a three-year edifice of studied indifference. It was too long ago, too much had changed. Too many bad things had happened.

  Time runs forward. That’s the way it is.

  When the arrival of my coffee jolted me out of this festive train of thought, I pulled one of the pieces of paper from Hammond’s study out of my pocket. I know jack shit about cryptography, but it occurred to me that Hammond probably hadn’t been at the cutting edge of the field either. Relative ignorance might even be a help. I scanned the page into my organizer and asked it to take a look, more as a distraction than out of any real hope.

  The machine hummed and hawed for a while, said it couldn’t make head or tail of it and would I mind changing its batteries soon?

  Then I remembered Hammond’s notebook and its list of figures. I plugged it into the organizer and told it to see if it could find any relationship between the two sets of information. It did stuff for a while, still grumbling about its waning power, and then said we might be dealing with a book code—where each letter is replaced with one from a given book—albeit one that was slightly more complex than usual. The patterns of letters weren’t consistent with a single passage being used as a key, but the numbers in the notepad might be a list of rotated sections.

  I told the organizer to get on the Net and connect to an online version of the King James bible. Fifty seconds later it had an answer for the two words at the top of the sheet of paper.

  Nicholas Schumann. Holy shit.

  ‘Writing out a will?’

  I flicked the organizer’s screen off, stuffed the piece of paper back in my pocket. Travis was standing behind me, wearing a wet raincoat and looking pissed. ‘It rained on me on the way from the car,’ he said. ‘Naturally it’s dry where you are.’

  I looked around, saw that the pavements were wet up to about three yards from where I was sitting. I hadn’t even noticed. Travis sat opposite me, in an unwelcome reminder of our conversation earlier in the day. I turned sideways in my chair, lit a cigarette.

  ‘Want me to arrest you for that?’ he asked. ‘You know I can.’

  ‘And I know you’re not going to,’ I said. ‘You’ve got your eye on bigger things.’

  He poured himself a coffee. ‘Okay, Hap—so what’s the problem? And be fucking brief and to the point, because I don’t appreciate being ordered around by hoods unless they have something very interesting to say.’

  ‘I’ve seen the guys in the suits again,’ I said.

  He stared at me, furious. ‘So why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘I didn’t have time. They arrived, then disappeared.’

  ‘Just like that? They sort of said “hi” and then moseyed off?’

  ‘No. They also abducted two friends of mine.’ Suddenly I realized that was exactly the right word for what had happened.

  ‘Who? And what the fuck do you mean, “abducted”?’

  ‘I got away, and then the suits aren’t there any more. And there were six of them, incidentally. They vanished, taking my friends.’

  ‘Vanished how? Drove away, you mean?’

  I leaned towards him. ‘No, Travis. Listen to me. They vanished. In a column of white light. Get the picture?’

  ‘You think I’m going to believe this?’

  ‘I really don’t give a damn what you believe, Travis. But what’s the percentage in me telling you this if it isn’t true?’

  ‘Maybe you’re laying the groundwork for an insanity defence.’

  ‘Yeah, right. With you as my sole witness.’

  Travis took a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing better to do. Tell me a story.’

  I told him, described exactly what had happened. I didn’t think it would help, but it felt good to have it on record anyway. He listened, one eyebrow archly raised, stirring his coffee. When I’d finished he laughed.

  ‘They have a spaceship or something, Hap? You get a good look at it?’ I just looked at him. ‘Shame. Maybe we could have busted them for a damaged tail light.’

  ‘There some other detective working this case?’

  He frowned, wrong-footed. ‘Of course not. Why?’

  ‘Not some guy in a suit, good-looking, about forty?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I broke into Hammond’s house after I lost your tail,’ I said. ‘Checked out his study. There was a guy already there, and I’ve seen him before. He knew my name. And yours.’

  Travis looked confused, working on irritable. ‘There’s no-one on this case that I don’t know about. And what the hell do you think you’re doing, breaking into that house?’

  ‘There’s a connection between me and Hammond you don’t know about,’ I said, ‘over and above the guys in the suits. I’ve got a vested interest in working this situation out. I went there to see what I could find.’

  ‘Which would have been precisely nothing,’ he snapped. ‘We’ve already been over that place.’

  ‘Yeah, but not closely enough. For a start, did you notice the labels on Monica Hammond’s clothes?’

  ‘Yes I did.’ He looked very slightly uncomfortable. ‘So what?’

  ‘You know what I’m saying. And point two, I found something in the study.’

  ‘You going to tell me what it is?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Depends on your answer to my next question. What’s your relationship to Mr Stratten?’

  I watched his eyes carefully. Nothing happened in them except bafflement. ‘Never heard of the guy.’

  ‘So how did you find me in Applebaum’s, Travis? And don’t tell me it was great police work. If you’d tracked me down, it would have been a fucking SWAT team coming to collect me—not just the two rookies who happened to be closest to the scene.’

  ‘We got a tip,’ he admitted. ‘Somebody called it in.’

  ‘And they didn’t suggest that you might like to forget about the recall rap?’

  ‘No they didn’t, and the implication pisses me off.’

  ‘Tough. That call came from the office of the guy who runs REMtemps. He’s almost certainly the guy who put the contract on me too.’

  ‘Nice to see you maintain a p
ositive relationship with your employer.’

  ‘It’s a skill of mine.’

  ‘So why does he want you fucked up?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I lied. ‘But do try to remember that trying to have a person killed is illegal, even if that person is me.’

  ‘I will,’ he said. ‘And if I bump into Helena I’ll remind her of that too. I must say I’m surprised you’ve stayed alive this long.’

  ‘Maybe she’s losing her touch,’ I said. I pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket and laid it on the table. ‘This is the other thing I got from Hammond’s house.’

  Travis looked at it. ‘And it would be?’

  ‘It was hidden in the study. It’s in code.’

  ‘And it says?’

  ‘The first two words are a name,’ I said. ‘Nicholas Schumann, that rich guy who killed himself last week. Why did Ray Hammond have Schumann’s name on a piece of paper hidden in his study?’

  Travis looked shaken. ‘What does the rest of it say?’

  ‘I haven’t decoded it yet, and I’m not telling you the code or giving you the other pieces of paper I have. Something else you don’t know: Hammond was killed outside a second apartment he kept a secret. Somebody has been through the place and taken a computer and some files.’

  ‘Shit. Why didn’t you…’

  ‘Because I was pissed off with sitting in that cell and I had no reason to trust you. I still don’t, but I’m running out of options. I’ll email you the rest of Schumann’s sheet at six tomorrow morning provided you leave me alone for the next two days.’

  ‘What will you be doing?’

  ‘Trying to get my friends back.’

  ‘What makes you think you can find them?’

  ‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘But I’m going to try anyway.’

  ‘That piece of paper could say anything. You could have typed it yourself. Why should I do as you say?’

  I leaned back in my chair. ‘Because you’re a good guy. I remember going for beers with you before all this happened, even if you don’t. Because you’re also a good cop, and you know there’s something weird about Hammond’s death.’