‘What do you mean?’
‘The device has migrated from the original point of insertion. There are trace amounts of foreign compounds showing the path.’
‘Where is it now?’
‘In your spine.’ My neck went cold. ‘It has broken down into components too small to see, and implanted itself in the cells of the spinal cord leading up to the skull—rather like a localized virus. Fiendishly clever, actually. Impossible to detect unless you already know what you’re looking for, and impossible to remove. You’re stuck with it.’
‘You’re one of them, in other words,’ said Deck, quietly.
Yeah, I thought. I am. They’ll always be able to find me, and that past will never go away. So be it. Perhaps that was even the way it should be.
‘Do you want me to check the health of your other friend, while I’m here?’ Woodley asked, oblivious. ‘The one with the unfortunate wrists?’
‘Can’t,’ I said, mind elsewhere. ‘She’s been abducted by aliens.’
‘I see,’ he said mildly. ‘What an interesting life you lead.’
I paid him, he thanked me courteously, and toddled off into the night. Deck watched him go from the window.
‘Hap,’ he said. ‘There’s a white Dirutzu down the block, lights off, with a guy sitting in the front seat.’
‘Oh good,’ I said. ‘I want a quiet word with that guy. You got any spare guns?’
‘Only one,’ he said. ‘And firepower doesn’t exactly imply quietness.’
‘That,’ I said cheerfully, ‘is entirely in his hands.’
Eighteen
We went out the back, quietly, then at the bottom of the steps clambered over the garages and split to go different ways down the street. I went west, keeping out of sight until I saw Deck emerge about fifty yards up the street from the white car.
Deck wandered down the sidewalk for a distance, weaving ever so slightly, then lurched into the road. Meanwhile I quickly crossed the road and hurried up towards the car, keeping on Romer’s blind side. It took a little while for him to notice the drunk staggering down the middle of the street, but when he did, he kept a pretty close eye on him—close enough for me to drop down to a crouch and scoot round the back of the car. I sidled round towards the driver’s door like a crab, bent over double. Deck clocked I was close and started acting up even more, waving his fists and shouting at the moon.
When I was in position I simply stood up, leaned on the door frame and spoke through the open window. ‘You have got to be the worst fucking tail man I have ever seen,’ I said.
Romer’s face spun towards me, mouth dropping open. Then he turned back to see that Deck was now standing right in front of his car, gun pointed at his face.
‘See what I’m saying? Just dreadful. Now,’ I added, taking my organizer out of my pocket and flashing it at him, ‘what I have here is a scout-class scanner.’ Not true, but he wasn’t to know. I pressed a button on the side and placed it on the top of the car. ‘You do anything which sends out a signal to anyone, of any form, and I’m going to know about it and my friend’s going to blow your head off. Do you understand?’
Romer nodded quickly. There were still a few nick marks in his face where he’d been dented by especially hard peanuts. He clearly believed that a man who’ll commit an assault with cocktail snacks is capable of anything.
‘What do you want?’ he asked, voice jumping all over the place.
‘I want you to answer a couple of questions,’ I said. ‘And then I want you to fuck off. You followed me to Florida, didn’t you?’
A jerky nod.
‘And you did that not because you’re LAPD, but because you’re on Stratten’s payroll—right?’
‘No,’ Romer said quickly. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘Shit—you hear that?’ I asked Deck.
‘What?’
‘I thought the scanner made a sound.’
‘Like he pressed an alarm or something?’ Deck asked, face stern.
‘Sounded that way to me.’
Deck ostentatiously flicked the safety off his gun.
‘I didn’t,’ Romer said, very quickly. ‘Look, Jesus, man—I didn’t touch anything.’
Deck: ‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Honestly.’
Me: ‘What—like you’re sure you’re not working for Stratten?’
Romer’s eyes flickered. He tried to protest, but he knew how these things worked, and that I’d already seen the truth. ‘Okay,’ he said, shrugging, trying for chummy. ‘So I tipped his guys off.’
‘And now you’re doing collection work for him, too, right? Picking up blackmail money?’
‘Yeah.’
I smiled. ‘See? That wasn’t so hard. You got a cellphone?’
He frowned, confused. ‘Well, obviously.’
‘It was a rhetorical question. Tell me what the number is.’
When he’d reeled it off I retrieved the organizer from the roof of his car. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘And for your information, this isn’t a scanner. It’s an organizer with voice record function. I now have a digital recording of you confessing to criminal association with a known felon, and being an accessory to attempted murder.’
I tapped a couple of keys, waited a second, then winked at him. ‘And it’s now backed up in three places on the Net.’
He blinked at me, his face white. He tried to speak, but it came out like a croak. He knew he was fucked.
‘I’m going to be calling you real soon,’ I said. ‘And you’re going to help me out. You’re not going to screw me around, because you know what will happen if you do. Right?’
In the end he managed it. ‘Yes.’
‘Good. Now piss off.’ Deck and I stood back as Romer slowly started the engine up, and drove off down the street. It looked like his mind wasn’t really on the driving.
‘Good job,’ Deck said approvingly, as we watched. ‘You didn’t say anything about recording him.’
‘Only thought of it at the last minute.’
‘With that conversation on disk he’s yours for life.’
‘Yeah,’ I said ruefully. ‘Makes me wish I’d spent the extra hundred bucks.’
He frowned: ‘What do you mean?’
‘This model doesn’t have voice record.’
Deck crashed as soon as we got back inside. It was very late, and he’d been through about the weirdest experience imaginable. I guess it was only reasonable that his head should call a time out. I sat fitfully in a chair for a while, then decided to leave him to it. I left a note reassuring him I hadn’t been abducted, and went for a walk.
The air was cool, and the streets had that eerie presence you only really appreciate in the small hours, when there’s no-one around. The wide, empty streets put me in mind of the memory of Hammond’s murder I still held in my head, but Santa Monica is a hell of a lot nicer than Culver City. It’s one of those places you end up on purpose, not just because you haven’t got the strength to keep on moving. I padded quietly along the sidewalk, walking block after block until I could see the Palisades ahead of me. If you can find a stretch which isn’t wall to wall strange people, it’s a good place to stand and look out at the night, and also a good place to think.
Eventually I found a spot, right near the northern end. About fifty yards away a group of young derelicts were sitting round a fire on the grass, drinking and swearing with vague ferocity, but they’d seen me as I passed and didn’t seem in the mood for trouble. Who is, at that time in the morning? It’s the last thing you need. The small hours are the lonely, vulnerable time, when everyone reverts to being about five years old. All you want is sleep, or a fire to huddle round. It’s a time for monsters, and you don’t want to make too much noise, or they’ll come and seek you out.
I stared down at the beach below for a while, then raised my eyes to look out over the sea. I was trying to work out a plan of action for the next day, but it was slow in coming. Something about the time, or t
he light, made the problem seem curiously distant—as if it concerned the life of some guy called Hap who I’d never met, but felt a degree of responsibility for. I felt like I was watching the world with benign curiosity, probably much as the aliens did, and I remembered I had felt the same way once before. At about eight in the evening on Millennium night.
I was sixteen back then, and I was going to a party with my girlfriend and Earl. Earl was driving, and his new squeeze was in the passenger seat. I was in the back, holding hands. That was such a big thing at that age, clasping the hand of someone you loved. A heady declaration, the closing of a circuit, the joining of two souls. When you get older you don’t seem to do it so much. Your hands are generally busy with other things, and every relationship goes through an accelerated evolution. Everyone you meet has an apartment, and either self-confidence or a desperate lack of it: both tend to make you rush through the hand-holding stage. Sure, you may do it later, but it’s not the same. It’s like eating your appetizer after your dessert. When you’re a grown-up the only time you get to trace slowly through that delicious progression is when you’re having an affair, which I guess is why so many people have them. A trip back in time, to when everything had weight, through the medium of unfaithfulness. Perhaps that had been why Helena had her fling with Ricardo. Helena is very far from being stupid, and must have known that Ricardo’s only long-term potential was as shark food, but relationships and marriages can get too comfortable, their very rightness making them bland. You slide from the hurly-burly of the chaise longue to the sepulchral quiet of the shared bed, the only sounds the comforting ones of tea being sipped and pages of novels being turned: and sometimes the only thing that will make you feel alive again is the reality of a different body, a new pair of lips, an unexpected hand. It doesn’t even have to mean anything—in fact, it’s better if it doesn’t. All you want is a little aerobic session for your hormones, to stir them up and keep them flowing. Life occasionally loses its lustre, and it occurred to me that my snap answer to Laura had maybe also held some truth. The death of the cat Helena and I owned may have had as much to do with what happened later as anything else. He was a beautiful animal, and we learned his ways, and he was as much a part of our life as the air we breathed. Even while he was alive I knew that I cared about him so much that every now and then I would reassure myself that he had as happy a life as possible, and that he enjoyed being with us, so that when the time came I could be more reconciled to him going away. But it came too soon, and such self-reassurance wouldn’t have made much difference anyway. When I held his dead body, it didn’t help—and I could have collected as many pebbles as I liked and it wouldn’t have changed a thing. His fur was the softest thing I have ever felt, and to bury it in the ground just seemed such a waste. For weeks afterwards all I felt was a dull pointlessness, an utter lack of life. Maybe Helena did too, and she was trying to find some, to stop the world from becoming a weightless ghost. I still wished she hadn’t done it, but I supposed I could understand. Anger comes harder as you get older, because you comprehend more of what it’s like to be someone else, and you realize you’ve all got your legs in the same traps.
Anyhow, we were all pretty excited that evening. It was the end of the Millennium, for Chris’sake, the actual night itself. The last week had been one long anticipation, with weirdness simmering all around: CNN kept breaking stories about strange cults found dead all over the country, and running humorous shorts about the latest messianic predictions. The rest of us were trying to pretend we weren’t even a little bit afraid of waking up the next morning to find a black void outside the windows. Everyone talked loudly, laughed a lot, and turned their radios up—as if we wanted to make sure we would be noticed when the new era came along, so that it would be sure to drag us along with it.
The other three in the car were singing and yelling, tooting the horn at everyone we passed; faces red with excitement and beer, they kept babbling about what they wanted to be doing when the clock struck the change. I’d already decided. I had a phone with me so I could call my folks at five minutes after, and at the moment itself I wanted to be holding my girl in my arms, though in the end that didn’t happen. As I sat amongst the others in the car, careening towards a good time, I found myself settling into an odd mood. Not a bad one, just a little different from what the others were feeling. Very quiet, calm. Focused, and deeply alive. I didn’t want to shout or dance or take drugs. I wanted to be somewhere quiet and feel the universe gather around me like a cloak. It didn’t feel like I should run towards what was coming, anxiously embracing it and pleading to be its friend, but that I should let it come to me as an equal. Actually, that’s not quite it either, but it’s as close as I can get.
I spent much of the evening standing on the deck of the house where the party was being held, looking up at the skies. I didn’t partake of any of the dope which was being liberally smoked: I just watched, and listened. Of course it occurs to me now that some part of me might have been expecting visitors, on that night of nights, but I certainly didn’t realize that at the time. I felt poised between two worlds, what had been and what would be, and that seemed about right. And anyhow, I had fun. People kept staggering out and giving me beers, and my girl stayed with me most of the time. At the stroke of midnight someone grabbed her in the doorway and pulled her into a hug, not knowing she’d been on her way to me. I stood and smiled as she squealed and laughed.
I got my hug at about two minutes past. It was near enough. Six months later we’d split up anyhow.
I had felt that what was upon me was too serious to screw around with, and I felt the same tonight. Events seemed to be coalescing around me, and I wondered how much power I had to change them, or whether I would simply end up at the centre of forces I didn’t understand. As usual. On Millennium night the guys holding the party had rigged televisions up all over the place, showing satellite feeds of foreign stations. We cheered when people in other time zones jumped and shouted, but knew in our hearts that they were wrong, and that it was our time that made the difference. Then, as always, we were living on personal time: and personal time doesn’t always run in the same direction, or at a constant speed.
As I stood there on the front, some feeling swelled until all around me seemed transparent and arbitrary. I glanced to the side, at the palms which stretched along the Palisades, and they looked to me like a bump map wrapped round empty space. Empty but not vacant, just less tangible and yet more real. As if I was a part of everything around me, including things I had not yet seen; as if everything in creation was a shadow thrown on the same essence, different-sized ripples in the same pool.
Either I was having a flashback and needed chocolate urgently, or something odd was happening.
This time I could feel it coming. The world I could see, the world I believed to be solid, seemed to slowly turn through two degrees, and this small movement was enough to realign the spheres. Everything came into a different conjunction. What I had believed to be there in front of me was revealed as merely noise, an interference pattern caused by two waves hitting each other at a particular angle. As I watched, it was as if one of the waves turned, until the two shared the same source and were synchronized with each other, multiplying and accentuating each other’s power, for once locked into step.
It was like having every memory taken out of your head, and just being left with pure intelligence; like suddenly seeing a solution, and realizing it had been there all the time; like being caught at the centre of a web of coincidence, and seeing the true fabric of reality for a moment. For coincidences, like dreams, are personal, and say nothing about other people’s lives but everything about your own. I gradually made out a face in front of me.
It was Helena, and she was talking. I could see that Laura was still being kept in the same low room, and Helena was evidently with her. She wasn’t looking directly at Laura, whose point of view I now shared, and for a while I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
T
he vision was unstable, as if my mind wasn’t able to look through this window for long, and the nerves which perceived and interpreted it were misfiring through being supplied with the wrong kind of fuel. I wanted to call out, but had enough presence of mind to know that my voice would echo in a place where she couldn’t hear.
Then I heard Laura ask a question, as if it had been spoken in my own head. It was simple, straightforward, phrased with the kind of emotional bluntness you only ever hear between two women. Helena’s reply was the only sentence of hers I made out clearly.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do.’
Then, just like that, they were gone, along with the green and silver of the verdigris. The colours smeared back into shapes, and spheres swung back into their usual alignment.
‘Oh,’ I thought to myself, not even really knowing what I meant. ‘Back in the small guy again.’
Little by little I noticed the sound of the waves from far below, of the quiet murmuring of the people camped out down the way. I felt the coolness of the rail my hands rested on, and tiredness in my feet. My whole body felt like it was buzzing gently, as if electrons were limbering up, accelerating back into their usual courses after some unaccountable hiatus. Slowly it began to settle, to become comfortable once more with its corporeality, but because of a ringing in my ears it was another few moments before I could hear what was being said to me.
‘Earth to Hap,’ a voice was saying, clearly not for the first time. ‘Hap, have you gone deaf or something?’
I swung round, not knowing who on earth it might be.
‘Yo, carbon guy,’ the voice said. ‘You okay? You looked like you checked out there for a while.’
The voice came from something small standing on the sidewalk. It was my clock.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Looking for you, of course.’ The clock scuttered over to the wall and clambered up to sit precariously on the rail.
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