The Hit List opened up. They had a lot of bullets to fire. The air was filled with flying lead and then it was filled with strips of fabric and bits of plaster as the fusillade tore up my coat and my suit and my shirt underneath and sent them ricocheting all over the room. They kept firing even when the window broke and the big sagging landscape picture above the bed fell down and white grit snowed from the ceiling. They kept firing even when one of the boys jerked once then fell backward. It all happened to a soundtrack of cracks and bangs and pings. Somewhere behind me Honey was curled into a little ball. She was happy to let me do the talking now. I couldn’t see the tied-up girl but I hoped she was safe behind the bed or underneath it.
I counted the shots and did the math and I hoped I’d gotten it right.
I had.
The four men left standing dropped one set of guns and in unison reached behind their own backs to pull their backup pieces from the waistbands of their shiny tailored trousers.
I was a big robot but it was a mistake to confuse size and speed. I was big but I wasn’t slow.
The backup pieces were never fired and when I was done the Hit List were not going to be making sweet music ever again.
I left the motel room and I pulled the briefcase and Honey and the other girl from under the bed with me. Honey had the jewelry box in one hand. Out in the parking lot Honey untied the girl and I opened the briefcase and fished out a few notes. I pressed them into the girl’s hand and told her to run and keep running until she was outside the city limits.
Honey and I watched her until she disappeared around a corner and then I turned to Honey.
“Get in the car,” I said, and she did.
And so did I.
13
“They’ll find out what happened,” Honey said. “By now all the syndicates on the Pacific coast will be looking for the box, and eventually someone will find the bodies.”
We looked down on the city. We were up high. By the Hollywood sign. The sun was coming up. The sign was lit by four thousand lightbulbs. I counted them twice. I had a feeling the lightbulbs were new. I had a feeling I’d been up here not too long ago.
Then that feeling began to evaporate like the early morning fog that clung to the city below us.
We’d headed out of the old motel parking lot in a hurry. The place was empty but the gunfire had been very loud. Someone was going to call someone.
Honey left the destination to me. We hadn’t spoken on the drive. All I wanted to do was get some distance and find somewhere nice and quiet where Honey and I could be alone. The hills seemed like a good idea. I don’t know why I was drawn to the sign but I was. There was an access road behind the sign and a parking lot that was just a dirt platform cut into the hill. There was a hut there and nothing else. Parks Department most likely. Then we got out of the car. Then I pulled off the scraps of my trench coat. The suit jacket underneath was also finished but it was still hanging together so I left it where it was. We took a walk. I led the way. I didn’t know where I was going. Honey followed. Now we were here. Looking down on the city as it woke up.
Forty minutes left. It would take twenty minutes to get back to the office. More in the traffic that was starting to build.
“They’ll find the bodies, but they won’t find the box,” I said. I turned from the view to the girl. “That doesn’t help your father much. As soon as you hand the box over and he gets to work, they’ll know he has it, and they’ll know how he got it. And I don’t think anyone is going to like that much.”
Honey didn’t say anything. She was cold. I could tell. She had her arms wrapped around her shoulders, but that wasn’t doing much. She wasn’t dressed for a hike.
I pursed my lips and enjoyed the way that made the charge fluctuate in a circuit. I turned back to the view. It was quite something and I knew I wouldn’t remember it so I wanted to look at it for as long as I could.
“Unless Bob really was the only one of those hoods who could identify you,” I said. “So maybe you and your dad will be okay. They’ll find the bodies but not the box and they’ll never be able to put the picture together. Those British boys seemed to be the only ones who thought to keep an eye on the exiled Mr. Boxer. And that girl, she doesn’t know anything either. She’s just a dancer for hire who I suspect will be looking for a new job by breakfast.”
I turned and looked up at the towering letters above me. They were very high. You could fall to your death from the top of the O, you really could.
Honey and I hadn’t spoken on the drive up the hill but the telephone had rung. I’d picked up the receiver and I put it down again. Then I’d slid it off the cradle so it wouldn’t ring again. I knew who was calling but I wasn’t in the mood for talking.
Not just yet. I was still going over my notes.
“If you don’t work for Boxer, then who do you work for?” asked Honey. She squinted in the morning light and looked sideways at me. I looked back at her. I could see it in her face. She’d seen what I’d done in the motel room. “The way you’re talking, it sounds like you don’t want what’s in the box.” Her eyes lingered on my optics for a moment and then turned back to the view. “It was my mistake at the club, to think that Father Dearest had sent you,” she said. “So what were you doing there, anyway?”
I looked at her. She looked at me.
“I was there to kill you,” I said.
Honey’s eyes narrowed. I wasn’t sure if she was receiving me because she said “Okay” slowly and kept those narrow eyes pointing right at me.
“A robot assassin, huh?” She smiled. “Like I said, my mistake. So who sent you?”
“I don’t know. You were in a room full of mobsters. Could have been any of them. Could have been none of them. Maybe it was someone who wasn’t invited and who wanted to spoil the party. Maybe it was someone with a beef against your dad and the perfect idea to get even. Maybe someone you’ve crossed paths with in your line of work who didn’t appreciate it.”
Honey shook her head. “The path we take, huh?”
I turned back to the view and thought about those words. The path we take. Perhaps. Yes, I was a professional, but not by my choice, by Ada’s. She’d changed my program and had only told me when I’d worked out what was going on for myself.
Maybe I was no different from Honey. She was a hood, like the others in that club. Organized crime was a family business. She’d been born into it. That was all she had ever known.
So did that mean she had a choice? Or was she destined or doomed to follow a path that had been chosen for her?
The path we take.
I’d been mulling a choice in my mind. I sent it down the positive flux diodes on my left side and kicked it up the negative return resistors on my right.
I looked out across the city. I adjusted my focus. I was trying to see my office from the hillside. I wasn’t sure I was looking in the right place. “You were wrong,” I said.
Honey huffed in the cold morning air. “About what?”
“The box. The mysterious something. The key to it all. I do want it. I think my boss will find it useful.”
Honey’s face did something strange. Her eyes went wide and she smiled and then the smile vanished and her eyes narrowed again. She dropped her arms back to her sides.
“So you do work for someone? The person on the telephone.”
“We all work for someone,” I said, “whether we like it or not, whether that was the path we chose or had it chosen for us.”
“You can’t take it,” said Honey. “I went to a lot of trouble to get it. It’s important to us. It belongs to us now. There’s too much riding on it to let you take it.”
Inside my head I pursed my lips.
Honey turned back to the sunrise. She laughed. It was that old laugh. Loud and long. It echoed around the Hollywood sign and it echoed around the hillside and I thought early morning dog walkers out at the Griffith Observatory could probably hear it.
Then Honey shook her head and turned
around and she headed back up the path to the parking lot and to the access road. “It was fun,” she said. “I’ll call you sometime.”
I listened to her footsteps crunch on the dirt and the gravel. They got fainter and fainter, but they were still there.
I checked my clock.
I had thirty minutes left and I had a job to do.
I turned and walked up the hill after her.
14
I eased back into the alcove in the computer room that was behind my office. Lights flashed all around me. I was back inside Ada with two minutes to go before my tape ran out.
Two minutes before my world ended and I forgot about my troubles. Two minutes before the tape stopped and I began to recharge and then I would wake up with a fresh tape and a clean slate.
I decided that this was no bad thing. I was still thinking about what Honey had said. The path we take. They were just four words but they carried a weight and a meaning. I thought about them and I thought about Honey as I unbuttoned the remains of my shirt and popped my chest panel, the panel that was new and shiny and curved and that didn’t sit quite right. I thought about Honey and where I’d left her as I plugged in the power cable and counted the seconds in my head.
“I gotta admit, Ray, you were cutting it mighty close there.”
Ada blew smoke around my circuits. Or at least I thought she did. She was all around me. Her tapes were spinning. Her lights were flashing.
The computer room had a table and a chair in the middle of it. On the table was the early morning edition of the newspaper and my hat. It was the only part of my wardrobe that had remained untouched.
But that was okay. I could afford a new suit. Because next to the hat was the case of Falzarano’s money. Ada had clucked over it like a mother hen. I’d been right. It had softened the pain a little.
“Good job, chief,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. On the computer bank to my right the two big reel-to-reel tapes skidded to a halt then reversed direction. The magnetic tape looped out a little then snapped back to full tension.
“Something on your mind?” Ada asked. Maybe she sighed. Maybe she didn’t.
“A few things, Ada, yes,” I said.
Another puff of an imaginary cigarette.
One minute until lights out.
“You did good, Ray,” she said. “You can trust me on this one. Not only did you do the job and snag a nice bonus, but you might just have filled those gaps in my memory banks, too.”
Next to the case on the table was something else. A small wooden jewelry box. It was open, revealing a red velvet cushion, on which sat the prize half the crime syndicates in the country wanted to get their hands on.
It was a key, small and silvery, nothing special. It had no markings, no engravings. It looked like any kind of key, maybe one to a padlock or a cupboard.
Or, according to the card of instructions that had been sitting under the lid of the box, a safety deposit box, inside of which were the full records of the Gray Lake syndicate, a criminal organization wiped out not by the LAPD or the FBI but by the passage of time, the last, heirless don preparing a tasty little inheritance for his rivals to fight over. Because inside the safety deposit box was everything from bank accounts to log books, property deeds, contact lists and address books, ledgers and accounts for gambling, protection, money laundering, and a dozen other crimes that generated large profits and that would enable another enterprise to move right in and take over half the crime in the city and the profits thereof in the blink of an eye.
For a million and change, it was a bargain. And for us, a useful cache. There was enough locked away in a vault on the other side of the city to give Ada all the information about the city’s underworld she could possibly want, along with a healthy amount of pocket money and a useful list of contacts.
Behind the table was the big window. Although the daylight was growing, the window overlooked the brown brick of the building opposite and I could still see my own reflection in the glass. I looked at the grill of my mouth. The sharp triangle of my nose. The round glass eyes that glowed a faint yellow.
“The path we take,” I said.
Ada tutted. “Time to go to bed, Ray.”
I looked up at the ceiling into the corner. There was no lens there but I knew Ada could see me and I thought that was more or less where she could see me from.
“Goodnight, Ray. Sweet dreams.”
I heard the ticking of a watch. A stopwatch, the second hand racing to oblivion.
And then I woke up on another beautiful morning in Hollywood, California.
Bonus Story
Brisk Money
This story first appeared on Tor.com in July 2014
I pulled into the curb and stopped the car. It was dark and raining like nothing else, and when I killed the headlights I couldn’t see anything in particular. Just the night outside, the streetlight filtering in multicolored rivers through the water as it poured down the windshield. The rain had started heavy and gotten worse and now it was like there was someone lying on the roof of the car, pouring water over the glass in the same way they might lean out of an apartment window to water a particularly difficult-to-reach planter.
For a second I remembered a guy I once met who leaned out of a high window a little too far. Or maybe more than a little.
And then it was gone. Overwritten. Just another fragment.
I picked up the phone that sat cradled between the driver and passenger seats, pulling the coiled cable free from itself as I pressed the earpiece to the side of my head. The phone clicked in my ear and began to hiss, the sound fighting against rain. It was like someone was shoveling coal into buckets out there.
“So I’m here,” I said.
The voice on the other end laughed, and the image came back to me: your favorite aunt, the one who smoked too much and sat out on the porch on summer evenings wearing a skirt that was too short, and when she put her bare feet up on the rail, rocking back and forth in her rocker, she’d laugh and blow smoke out of the corner of her mouth.
It’s the image I always got when I talked to Ada. I didn’t have much of a memory and the image wasn’t mine, so it must have been one of his. Thornton’s. I guess he used his mind as the template for mine, although I didn’t know this for sure. Maybe one day I’d ask him. If I remembered, which was unlikely, so there you go.
“You’re early,” said Ada. Her voice didn’t come from the phone. I ignored this fact and held the phone to my ear anyway.
“It’s raining,” I said.
“There’s an umbrella in the trunk.”
“No, I mean I left early.”
“You lost me on that one, Ray.”
“So I gave myself extra time in case I got lost, because I don’t much like driving in the rain. So now I’m here, wherever ‘here’ is.”
“You’ve got one minute.”
“So not that early, then.”
I peered out of the windshield. The street was lit up like it was Christmas, the red and white of the flashing signs and neon mixing with the constant yellow wash of the sodium streetlamps. None of it helped. The whole world on the other side of the glass was twisted shadow, the rain reducing everything in my view to just shapes and movements. Cars cruised. People walked. Hunched over, against the rain. Maybe some had umbrellas. I couldn’t tell and I couldn’t have cared less.
“I hate the rain,” I said into the phone, and listened as Ada laughed inside my head.
“Afraid you’ll rust, detective?”
“It’s not that. You know it’s not that.”
“Thirty seconds.”
“Until what?” I switched the phone to my other ear and turned in the driver’s seat, seeing if maybe the view out the rear was any better. It wasn’t. It was raining as hard at the back of the car as it was at the front. A quick check confirmed it was also raining on the right and on the left.
Ada didn’t say anything, but I could hear her ticking away, like the fast
hand of a pocket watch.
“You know,” I said, “for a secretary you sure as hell don’t tell me much.”
Ada laughed at this and I would have sighed if I could, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t made that way. But I knew what a sigh was. People did it plenty when I was around. I even thought I knew how to do it, the way your mouth moved, the kind of shape you had to make with it. Thornton again. He sighed a lot too. I must have caught the knack from his template.
“Need to know, Ray,” said Ada. “And less of the secretary, if you please. I’m your partner, right? Just because I stay put and answer the phone.”
Partner? That was a new one. “Uh-huh,” I said.
“And about that.”
“About what?”
Ada sighed. She could do that even if I couldn’t. “You know you don’t need to pick up the phone to talk to me, right?”
“Habit,” I said. But that wasn’t true, so I corrected. “Okay, not habit. Programming.”
“Someone had a sense of humor.”
I shrugged. “Gives me something for my hands to do.”
Then the passenger door swung open quick and a man got in. He was wearing a tan trench coat colored at least two shades darker than factory issue thanks to the rain, and when he tilted his head as he brought his gun out from inside his coat, the rain ran around the brim of his hat and splattered onto his knee.
I froze with the phone in my hand and my eyes on the surprise visitor. I guess this is what Ada had been talking about.
I heard her laugh and she said “Good luck,” and then the phone was dead. Like it had ever been alive.
“Come on,” said the man. He pointed with his gun, which I took to mean I should put the phone down, so I put it back in its cradle. I tried to keep the cable neat but it twisted all by itself. Never mind.
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