“You’re the clerk,” I said. “The grocery clerk.”
The geezer worked his scaly lips soundless.
“What??” Maggie stepped forward, all angles.
“There was no robber at all. The police arrested you.”
“Donner, what are you—”
“We walked in, and you shot us from behind the counter. Simple as that. You were waiting for us.”
Maggie gaped back and forth from me and Hector like her head was on a spring.
“You’re gonna kill me.” The man’s voice was reedy and trembling.
I pulled the Beretta from my ankle holster.
“Where the hell did you get all these guns?” said Maggie.
I gestured to a couch that was hemorrhaging foam. “Sit.”
Hector complied. I surveyed the apartment. The light that stumbled into the room was gray. Considering the barracks-style efficiency of the building, the window was surprisingly large. Its security grate was open. Beyond, I saw a carefully potted garden on the fire escape. A tiny yellow tomato, a couple anemic peppers.
I turned back to Hector. “Someone hired you.”
Hector blanched. He stood, turned his back and started removing the cushion of the couch where he’d been sitting. I waved the Beretta. “Whoa whoa!” Hector just kept fishing in the bowels of the couch. My trigger finger tightened. I wanted to complete the motion. It would be so easy.
Hector turned, holding a piece of paper. Frayed and yellow. A newspaper clipping. He handed it over. “No name,” said Hector. “Never got one. But one day I saw this in the Times. I couldn’t believe it. The face. Right there. That was him, alright.”
The photo was of a crowd; some kind of early, anti-Necropolis rally-turned-riot. Maggie came over and nodded. “This was right after New York became the Necropolis. Hundreds of protesters were shot. Our own Tiananmen Square.”
Of the thirty people in the medium-angled photograph, one visage was circled in faded ballpoint. It was rock-hard, devoid of emotion; and separate, scanning the crowd, the only one not participating in the frenzy. The blonde hair was short. A scar ran diagonally across his features, like a baker’s knife-crease across a loaf of bread.
“Tell me,” I said to Hector.
“This guy—the guy in the photo—one day, he comes into the store. Buys a Yoo-hoo. I know he’s not there because he has a chocolate jones. When I’m checking him out, he tells me he knows about me doin’ Seraphina.”
My eyes narrowed. “My half-sister,” Hector explained, with a shrug.
I heard a disgusted sound from Maggie. Smarties didn’t like incest any better than us.
“Said he knew my rep, too. Said if I’d do this job for him, my homeboys would never find out about Seraphina. And I’d make fifty yards.”
“Five thousand dollars,” said Maggie. “The price of two human lives.”
“Seraphina, man. Puerto Ricans, they don’t go for that shit. I’d get cut for sure.”
“So you said yes,” I said.
Hector blinked bloodshot eyes at me. “The dude gives me money. A picture. You and your lady. Says you’d be together.”
Maggie wasn’t buying it. “How could anyone know they’d come into your store?”
Hector looked sideways, running his eyes along the wall. “They did, though.”
“Yes, we did,” I said. “You’ve got more to say, don’t you, old man?”
“You’ll kill me.”
“Then I’ll give you a minute to find your courage.” To Maggie: “Watch him. I’m going to toss the place.”
The air in the bedroom was thick with ancient cat piss. In the closet, empty hangers dangled over a mound of soiled clothes. The bedside stand held nothing but expired pizza coupons. I pulled the stained mattress from the bed, checked under the frame, went through the pressboard dresser. A couple porno magazines. Nail clippers.
As I searched, my mind wanted to process the nasty implications of what I’d learned, but I stopped it. I’d wait. One step at a time. Figure things out when this was done.
When the old man was dead, I realized with a jolt.
Until that very moment, I hadn’t been sure I was going to kill him.
It solved nothing. It didn’t matter. I was about to become a murderer. It didn’t matter. I was on a track with no turnoffs and void as a destination. A hell-bound train, no stops.
It didn’t matter.
Then there was a loud crash from the living room, and I was vaulting through the door.
Maggie stood in the middle of the room, her face a mask of disbelief. The window was shattered, wind whipping the frayed curtains into a frenzy. Hector was gone. I went to the window. He’d overturned the garden on the way out. Down below, on the pavement, the tomato was splattered next to him, mingling with his pulped head. I turned and stared at Maggie.
“He just—he just—” she stammered.
My mind instinctively worked the scene like a cop. You walk into a room. The window’s broken, someone’s standing there. Another person has gone out the window to their death.
There were only two explanations.
***
José and his crew were leaning against our pink rental when Maggie and I walked up.
“We was watchin’ it for you,” said José.
I nodded. I’d never felt so tired in my life. The men moved back. I opened the door.
“Guess you didn’t need the piece after all,” said José.
“Guess I didn’t,” I replied.
25
DONNER
“I never saw a man die before,” Maggie said on our way back to Manhattan. She shook her head over and over, weeping. “Your bodies. They’re so fragile.”
I rolled the window down and let the wind batter my face. She quieted eventually, and we rode in silence.
I thought about how I missed old-fashioned cars. EM travel felt mushy. No rubber-meets-the-road contact. I’d seen a few classic rides tooling around the city. But with gasoline at $34 a gallon and a mountain of environmental restrictions in place, the days of the internal combustion engine were pretty much over.
In my youth, I’d owned a Vincent Black Shadow. That Brit motorcycle had been my pride and joy. Maintaining it had taught me about engines. It really hadn’t been worth the work—the damned thing was finicky and tough to keep purring, the parts were expensive, and it cost a fortune to store in the city. But it had lines as sweet as a VH1 diva, and the rumble-roaring delight of opening her up on a windy upstate road, leaving the stress and bullshit of the city behind in a burst of smoke—well, it was indescribable.
I sold it when I married Elise. Too dangerous, she said. Not as dangerous as a pack of cigarettes, it turned out.
“Ready to talk?” I asked.
Maggie sniffed and crossed her arms, steeling herself.
“Just walk me through it. He jumped?”
“Sort of.”
“What does that mean?”
“He just… flew right through the window.”
“Without opening it?”
“Yeah.”
I was smoking filter. I lit another, trying to get my mind around what she was saying. “Why would he do that, Maggie?”
“How the hell should I know? Maybe he thought you were going to kill him, and he decided to beat you to the punch.”
There was something wrong about her defensiveness. I couldn’t put my finger on it. So I moved into the tough stuff. “I have to ask this, Maggie. Can smarties become… well…?”
Her fingers twisted in her lap. “Unbalanced? No. Well, yes. Theoretically. It’s rare.”
“Rare?”
“Yes, rare, alright? We’ve got protocols, back-ups… I’m not crazy!”
“Could you have been tampered with? Forced to do something, then had your memory erased?”
“Made to kill Hector, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Not… no.”
We rode some more in silence. I felt like scratching away
my skin. The nicotine was giving me the jitters. I’d started to believe I knew the woman next to me, but now I didn’t know what to think. Hector jumping right through a closed window? It was only remotely more plausible than Maggie pushing him.
Snake eyes. Nothing to do but cut my losses. “Let’s put what happened to Hector on hold for now and go through what he told us.”
She okayed that with visible relief.
“If I’ve got this straight,” I said, “this man in Hector’s picture, the man with the scar… somehow he knows I’m gonna be in that bodega that evening. He approaches Hector out of the blue, blackmails him to kill me. Me, specifically.”
“Then you show up with your wife, so bad luck, she gets it, too?”
I pushed something black and thorny back into my chest.
“But the cops arrest Hector faster than anticipated,” Maggie continued. “So someone—someone with juice—gets him released and covers the whole thing up. Forty years later, you revive, and the cover-up starts again. You interrogate your old partner, and either to shut him up or kill you both, this someone blows up his apartment. Now, you’re on the lam from God knows who,” she continued, “probably someone in the police or government themselves, and I’m an accessory to a dozen crimes.”
I flicked the butt out the window. “Sounds about right.”
“Well, fuck me.”
I let out a surprised laugh. I’d never heard Maggie swear before.
“That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”
“Sorry you helped me?”
“What do you think?”
Even in my funk, I couldn’t help noticing the little crease of pique between her eyebrows. She was especially adorable when she was furious. She’d be even more furious if I mentioned it.
“What’ll they do to you?” I asked, to banish the thought.
“Don’t ask,” she said. “If I get connected to any of this, losing my job will be the least of it. The number of smarty-perpetrated crimes in the last forty years is exactly zero.”
“C’mon.”
“I shit you not, shamus. It’d be front page news. A worldwide sensation. There’d be calls to revisit VP independence.”
My face remained neutral, but her reply sent me into a tizzy. She was my only ally in this strange new world. If she became a liability and I had to cut her loose—
I realized what I was thinking and felt a hot flush of shame. I’d been fouled, growing up in the jungle. Elise had done much to awaken something in me resembling a heart, but in the days since I’d revived, I’d become aware that my childhood hardwiring had been coldly and methodically reasserting itself.
Maggie was still talking. “How could a cover-up still be active after all these years? Does that mean the murderer is still around?”
“I hope he’s still around,” I said through my teeth.
She paled. Pull it back, I thought. Don’t spook her.
She was still staring at my face. “We’re assuming Bart’s death is related to the cover-up and my murder,” I said.
“Well, what else—”
“The Armitage guy?”
“The guy who kidnapped you?”
“Yeah. He threatened Bart’s life if I didn’t do a B&E on the Surazal lab.”
“Are you kidding?” A furrow snaked across Maggie’s brow and disappeared under her hairline. “But why kill Bart before you’ve done anything?”
“I don’t know the man well enough to know that what he does has to make sense.”
“What’s your gut tell you?”
“I don’t think it was Armitage. He’s smarter, more low-key than that.”
“So we’re back to the cover-up.”
“There’s another thing that’s bugging me. Why bother to have Hector released after my murder? Why not just let him take the fall for the homicides?”
“Cause then he’d ID Mr. Scar.”
“Then why not just whack him?”
“In 2012, no one thought you’d be back, Donner. Maybe it was easier to have Hector released. Maybe, for whoever orchestrated this, the cover-up was easier than having to deal with another dead body that could lead back to the them.”
That sounded possible. “So it’s not until I revive and start nosing around that Hector became a threat again,” I said.
I looked at her, wondering about that room again, about her and Hector. She met my eyes, and I caught a repeat flicker of… what? Fear? Doubt? Guilt? I couldn’t tell. About the only thing I knew for sure was that I wouldn’t get the answer by pressing her right now.
“The picture Hector gave us—the man with the scar,” I said. “Can you scan it? Run a facial make on him?”
“Great! I tell you I’m going to lose my career and maybe be front page news and you ask me to dig myself in deeper!”
“I didn’t force you into this.”
“No, you just were so pathetic and lost—”
“Whoa! You’re saying you did all this because you felt sorry for me? Are all smarties this lousy at lying?”
Her brow darkened. “How the hell would you know? I could put what you fleshpots understand about us in a thimble!”
“Fleshpots?”
“Forget it.”
“Maggie!”
She shifted uncomfortably. “It’s a term smarties use amongst themselves. For humans.”
“Is it a good term?”
“No.”
“Smarties aren’t above prejudice, then. Sounds human to me.”
“You’re twisting my words!”
“I didn’t twist anything, Maggie.”
“What you just called ‘human’ is actually egocentrism—and it’s an inherent condition of consciousness, Donner. Any consciousness. Human or not.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“As soon as an entity—human or not—becomes self-aware, it’s impossible for it not to become the center of its own universe. As soon as there’s an ‘I,’ everything else becomes ‘not-I’. A potential competitor. Get it?”
“So smarties are just like humans. They can’t help but calculate their relative position in the scheme of things. ‘I’m better,’ ‘I’m worse,’ ‘I have more,’ ‘I have less’…”
“No,” she said. Her irritation had left her. Now she just looked exhausted. “Self-aware and separate does not imply value, only position. You just said, ‘I have more, I have less.’ But only humans beings turn that into ‘I’m better, I’m worse.’ To us, ‘I have less’ does not equal ‘I am less.’ We don’t need to prove our value through competition. And without that drive from the ego, there’s no purpose to violence.” Her voice got quieter. “Or vengeance.”
I knew what was coming.
“You were going to kill Hector,” she said.
The words wrapped cold chains around my guts. I didn’t know what to say. So we watched the BQE flow by, a stream of steel and concrete. Traffic was light.
“No smarty has ever committed murder?” I asked finally.
“Never,” she said. But a tick jumped under her eye and I got that weird feeling again. “To regard another entity as better or worse in terms of value is ridiculous, because separation and permanence are illusions.”
“Huh?”
“What you think of as ‘you’ is a mental abstraction, a bunch of intellectual definitions. What I think of as you is also an abstraction. Neither is what you really are.”
My heard was starting to hurt. “So what’s the real me?”
“That’s the point. There is no ‘real’ you. What you are is not definable because it’s changing moment from moment. And who you think you are is in constant flux as well. Is the Real You the ‘you’ you are when you’re liking yourself? Or the ‘you’ you become when you screw up? Was the ten-year-old Paul the real Paul? Is it you today? Or is it you ten seconds from now?”
I shook my head, completely lost.
“Do you see how pointless it is for humans to claim they have a soul and consciousnes
s but that smarties are only mechanical mimics of human behavior?” she continued. “You can’t even define your own consciousness, so how can you make a judgment on ours?”
My voice came out sounding defensive. “So if you’re so evolved, why do smarties still feel emotions like hurt and regret and… affection? You were crying a minute ago.”
She flushed. “I never said we were perfect.”
“Fair enough. What did you mean about separation being an illusion, too?”
“At this moment, our molecules are crossing the space between us. Co-mingling.” Her eyes twinkled. “Can you say where you end and I begin?”
“We’re intermingling?”
“Separation is another delusion of the ego.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Think of separation and identity like this: a wave can convince itself that it’s separate from the ocean, but only for a moment.”
“So we’re just two waves?”
She nodded.
“Hmmm.” I front-loaded a smile. “So wave on into the database and run the make for me, baby.”
She barked laughter, like a seal. “You’re incorrigible!”
“That’s what you love about me.”
She punched me in the shoulder. “Autodrive.”
***
And left me to wonder how she had managed, in a few minutes, to move me from murderous rage to feeling some kind of strange stillness inside, however fleeting.
If, as she implied, those landmarks from the past—those people and things I’d loved and felt lost without—if they hadn’t been going to remain the same anyway… even if I hadn’t died, they’d have still changed and eventually gone away, as all things do—if the world was going to be what it was, whether I wanted it to or not…
If all of that was true, what would my choices be?
Change what I could, and just accept what I couldn’t?
Was that sanity, or giving up? And was it possible for me to live that way?
***
Sixteen minutes later, after my inability to sort through my jumbled thoughts had me back to being nice and pissed off, Maggie smacked her hands together. An image popped into existence. Sure enough, there the bastard was, with his dead eyes and diagonal scar. “Ewan McDermott,” she read. “Former IRA soldier, turned mercenary after the British-Irish peace accord. Worked for drug cartels, mostly. Homeland Security had him on a watch list, but he got into the country anyway on fake papers.”
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