The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘What did Troy mean about being related to William?’

  Bryant shrugged. ‘Search me. Troy knows a lot of people. What are you drinking?’

  And so it went on, the night swelling with noise and hilarity for a while, and then paring down again as people left. Chris’s high began to flatten into something more reflective. Julie Pinion went home in a cab, the young executive she’d been arguing with in smug tow. The driver of one of the other cars announced his imminent departure around three a.m. and most of the remaining Shorn crew went with him. By four the party was down to one table - Chris and Mike, an off-duty Troy Morris and a couple of the floorshow dancers, now dressed and divested of most of their garish make-up. One introduced herself as Emma and, lurching into the toilets, Chris had to wonder if she was the object of the fellatio-inspired graffiti gouged there amidst the political commentary.

  When he got back to the table, Emma had gone and Troy was leaving with her colleague. The gun bag from his doorman duties was dumped on the table, the sawn-off and Chris’s Nemex nestling together in the canvas folds. Chris joined in the round of farewells and there was much drunken promising to keep in contact. ‘Yeah,’ said Troy, pointing at Chris. ‘You should write, Faulkner.’

  He left, chortling inexplicably, with the shotgun slung over one shoulder and his other arm around the dancer’s waist. At that moment Chris found himself possessed of a powerful desire to be Troy Morris, walking out of the Falkland into an entirely simpler and, to judge by the black man’s laughter, more joyous existence.

  He slumped into the chair opposite Bryant.

  ‘I,’ he pronounced carefully, ‘have drunk far too much.’

  ‘Well, it’s Friday.’ Bryant’s attention was focused on heating a stained glass pipe. ‘Switch horses, try some of this.’

  Chris’s eyes tightened on what the other man was doing.

  ‘Is that—’

  Bryant’s eyes shuttled sideways above the pipe and lighter. Narrowed irritably. ‘Ah, come on, man. Lighten up. Just a little drive-right.’

  The contents of the pipe smouldered and Mike inhaled convulsively. A shudder ran through his suited form. He made a deep grunting sound and his voice came out squeaky as he offered the pipe.

  ‘So. How does it feel?’

  Chris frowned, confused. ‘What?’

  ‘Conflict Investment, a week in. Go on, take it. How’s it feel?’

  Chris waved the pipe away. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Pussy.’ Bryant grinned to defuse the insult, and drummed impatiently on the table. ‘So tell me. How’s it feel?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Conflict fucking Investment!’

  ‘Oh.’ Chris marshalled his sludgy thoughts. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Bryant seemed disappointed. ‘That all?’

  ‘It’s not so different to Emerging Markets, Mike.’ Trying to think was hard work. Chris began to wonder if he should have accepted the pipe. ‘Longer-term outlook, but basically the same stuff. Yeah, I like it. Apart from that bitch Hewitt.’

  ‘Ah. I wondered how that was going. Had a run-in, have we?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  Bryant shrugged. ‘Hey, don’t let it get you down. Hewitt’s been that way as long as I can remember. It’s always been harder to cut it as a woman in this field, so they come out twice as tough. They have to. See, these days Hewitt practically is Conflict Investment. Big reorganisation about five years back, austerity measures. Division got cut to the bone. There’s a lot of pressure to make good, and most of that pressure falls on Hewitt’s shoulders.’

  ‘Notley’s senior partner.’

  ‘Notley?’ Bryant piped more smoulder. ‘Nah, it was his baby in the beginning, but once he went senior he downloaded everything onto Hewitt and Hamilton. There was another guy, Page, but Hewitt called him out just before profit share last year. Rammed him right off the Gullet. Believe that?

  ‘The Gullet?’

  ‘Yeah, you know. Last section as you come up over the zones on the M11. The two-lane narrows. Where you took out that no-namer, well, just after, after the underpass. Where it goes elevated. Hewitt let Page get ahead there, knew he’d have to either slow down or turn around to face her. No chance of just being first to work these days, you’ve got to turn up with blood on your wheels or not at all. So yeah, she lets him go, waits, he’s not good enough to make the 180 turn on a piece of road that narrow, so he slows up, tries for a side-to-side, she won’t let him, just rams him off on a corner. Bam!’ Bryant gripped the pipe in his teeth and slammed fist into open palm. ‘Page goes through the barrier, falls right into a low-rise, goes through seven levels of zone housing like they were paper. Gas supply ripped open somewhere in one of the flats on the way down. Boom. Adios muchachos, everybody in black.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yeah, pretty fucking impressive, huh.’ Mike squinted at the pipe, tried the lighter again. ‘See, now what Hewitt did, that’s okay, but now she’s got to prove that she doesn’t need two junior partners to help her run CI. If she can’t, it means she made a bad call. Pure greed call. No one round here minds greed, just so long as it’s good for the company as well. If it works out for Hewitt, she’s saved Shorn the expense of a junior partner, and she and Hamilton get bigger equity. It’s the free-market trade-off. Something for us, something for them. But if it doesn’t work out, she’s dead in the water and she knows it.’

  ‘Well, Ms Conflict Investment doesn’t have a whole lot of confidence in me,’ said Chris gloomily. ‘Not bloody enough for her, apparently.’

  ‘That what she said?’ Bryant shook his head. ‘Shit, after what you did to Quain? That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Well, let’s just say that not all my challenges have been that uncompromising. This kill-or-be-killed stuff is strictly for the movie-makers. It’s crude, man. You don’t always need a kill. That’s crude.’ Chris leaned forward as his enthusiasm kindled. ‘You ever see any of those old samurai movies?’

  ‘Bruce Lee? Shit like that?’

  ‘No, no. Not those. This is other stuff. Older. More subtle. See, these two guys, they’re about to have a duel. So they both stand there, swords out.’ Chris thrust with an imaginary sword and Bryant jerked back in reflex. His eyes narrowed momentarily, and then he laughed.

  ‘Whoops. Scared me there.’

  ‘Sorry. Wasn’t intentional. So yeah, the two of them stand there, and they stare into each other’s eyes.’

  He locked gazes with Bryant, who emitted another snort of laughter.

  ‘They just stare. Because they both know that the one who blinks or looks away first, that’s the one who would have lost that fight.’

  Bryant’s laughter dried up without fuss. He set the pipe aside. Both men were leaning on the table now, drilling their gazes into each other’s eyes with chemically altered concentration. The shared stillness of the moment stretched. The sounds of the bar receded into a backdrop, surf on a distant beach. Time ran on like a train they had both just missed. The pipe smouldered quietly to itself on the scarred wooden table. Vision wired their stares over it, eyeball to eyeball. From somewhere, an internal silence leaked into the world.

  Mike Bryant blinked.

  Mike Bryant laughed and looked away.

  The moment blew away like an autumn leaf and Chris sat back with a look of tipsy fulfilment on his face. Bryant grinned, a little intensely. Chris was too drunk to catch the upped voltage. Bryant made a pistol of thumb and forefinger. He pointed at Chris’s face.

  ‘Bang!’

  The laughter bubbled up again, this time from both men. Bryant made a sound between a snort and a sigh.

  ‘There you are. You stared me out.’

  Chris nodded.

  ‘But I blew your fucking head off.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Chris leaned back across the table. Enthused. Oblivious to the edge sheathed in the other man’s voice. ‘But you see, there was no need for that. We’d already established the winner. You blinke
d. I would have won.’

  ‘Bullshit. Maybe I had a hair in my eye. Maybe all these samurai guys walked away from fights they could have won just because they had a jumpy eye muscle that day. Where’d you read all this shit, anyway?’

  ‘Mike, you’re missing the point. It’s about total control. It’s a duel between two whole people, not just two sets of skills. We could have a fist fight and you could turn up with a gun. We could have a gun fight and you could come with an armoured car and a flame-thrower. That’s not what a duel’s about.’

  Bryant picked up the pipe again. ‘Duel’s about winning, Chris,’ he said.

  Chris wasn’t listening.

  ‘Look at China, a couple of centuries ago. There were cases there where two warlords sat down on the battlefield and played chess to decide the outcome of a battle. Chess, Michael. No death, no slaughter, just a game of chess. And they honoured it.’

  Bryant looked sceptical. ‘Chess?’

  ‘Just a game of chess.’ Chris was staring off into a corner. ‘You imagine that?’

  ‘Not really, no.’ Bryant stuffed the pipe into a pocket and started to get up. ‘But it makes a good story, I’ll give you that. Now, how about we get the car and get out of here before the sun comes up? Because Suki’s going to fucking take me apart if I don’t get back soon. And she’s not into chess.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  They came out of the Falkland through a side door and onto a different street. Cold night air like a slap in the face, and for a couple of moments Chris reeled. He wondered how Bryant was dealing with the pipe high.

  ‘Where’s the fucking car?’

  ‘This way.’

  Bryant grabbed him by the arm, dragged him round the corner and started across the deserted street. Halfway there, he jammed to an abrupt halt.

  ‘Ooops,’ he said softly.

  The BMW sat on the far side of the street under one of the few working street lamps. Sitting on the car: four men and one woman, all dressed in oil-smeared jeans and jackets. The grime was a uniform, the pale silent faces style-coordinated accessories. Heads shaven and tattooed, feet heavily booted. Hands filled with a variety of blunt metal implements.

  None of them looked over eighteen.

  They stared at the two suited men on the other side of the street and made no move to get off the car.

  ‘You’ve got to get your contact stunner fixed, Mike,’ Chris sniggered, still drunk. ‘Look at the shit you get all over it if you don’t have it powered up.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ hissed Bryant.

  The female contingent of the car-jackers levered herself off the hood of the BMW with sinuous grace.

  ‘Nice car, Mister Zek-tiv,’ she said solemnly. ‘Got the keys?’

  Bryant clutched automatically at his pocket. The woman’s eyes flickered to the move and locked on. She nodded in satisfaction.

  ‘Get off my fucking car!’ Bryant barked.

  The remaining four jackers obeyed in unison, arms spread and hands holding their makeshift weapons. Chris glanced sideways at his companion.

  ‘Bad move, Mike. You carrying?’

  Bryant shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  ‘In the car, remember. You?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Chris paused, embarrassed. ‘But it’s not loaded.’

  ‘What? ’

  ‘I don’t like guns.’

  ‘See, it’s like this.’ The woman’s voice jerked Chris back from the disbelieving expression on Bryant’s face. ‘Either you can give us the keys. And your wallets. And your watches. Or we can take them from you. That’s our best offer.’

  She lifted thumb and little finger solemnly to ear and mouth, making a child’s telephone.

  ‘Sell, sell, sell.’

  Bryant muttered something out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘What?’ Chris muttered back.

  ‘I said, back the way we came and fucking run!!!’

  Then he was gone, sprinting flat out for the corner they had just rounded. Chris went after him, flailing to stay upright in the Argentine leather shoes. Behind him, the incentive - sounds of yells and booted pursuit. He levelled with Bryant and found, incredibly, that the other man was grinning.

  ‘All part of a night out in the zones,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Try to keep up.’

  Behind them, someone ran a metal wrecking bar along a concrete wall. It made a sound like a gigantic dentist’s drill.

  They looked at each other and put on speed.

  Three streets away from the Falkland, the neighbourhood plunged from run-down to rotted-through. The houses were suddenly derelict, unglassed windows gaping out at the street and tiny gardens full of rubble and other detritus. Chris, brain abruptly adrenalin-flushed and working, grabbed Bryant and yanked him sideways into one of the gardens. Over piles of junk, scrambling. In past a front door that someone had kicked in long ago. Weeds grew up waist-high in the gap it had left. Beyond, a narrow, darkened hallway ran parallel to a staircase with half the banisters torn out. At the end, a tiled room that breathed stench like a diseased mouth.

  Chris leaned cautiously against the staircase and listened to the yells of the car-jackers as they ran past and down an adjacent street.

  Bryant was bent over, hands braced on his knees, panting.

  ‘You mind telling me,’ he managed hoarsely after a while. ‘Why you’re carrying an unloaded gun around with you?’

  ‘I told you. I don’t like guns. I don’t like Louise Hewitt telling me what to do.’

  ‘Man, after five days that’s a bad attitude to have. I wouldn’t go telling anybody things like that, if I were you.’

  ‘Why not? I told you, didn’t I?’

  Bryant straightened up and looked hard at him.

  ‘Anyway, where’s your gun, hotshot?’

  ‘At least it’s loaded.’

  ‘Alright, old piece of folk wisdom coming up.’ Chris gulped his breath back under control. ‘A gun in the hand is worth half a fucking million locked in the car.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ Bryant’s grin flashed in the gloom. ‘But I wasn’t expecting this kind of trouble. We’re only a couple of klicks inside the zones. Those guys are out of their territory.’

  ‘You think they know that?’ Chris nodded out towards the street, where voices were coming back. Some of the jacker gang, at least, were retracing their steps. He jabbed an urgent finger upward and Bryant took the creaking stairs into the darkness at the top. Chris slid back along the hallway towards the tiled room and sank into the shadows there. The stench enveloped him. The floor was slimy underfoot. He tried not to breathe.

  A moment later two of the jackers were standing where he had just been. Both were armed with long crowbars.

  ‘I don’t see why we need the keys anyway. Why not just smash the fucking window.’

  ‘Because, moron, this is a BMW Omega series.’ The other jacker cast a doubtful glance up the stairs. ‘State-of-the-fucking-art corporate jam-jar. These mothers have alarms, engine immobilisation locks and a broadcast scream to the nearest retrieval centre. You’d never move it a hundred metres down the fucking street before they got you.’

  ‘We could still smash it, anyway. Rip it up.’

  ‘Ruf, you got no fucking ambition, man. If it weren’t for Molly, you’d still be smashing up telephone points and throwing stones at cabs. You got to think bigger than that. Come on. I don’t think they came in here. Too much chance of getting their suits dirty. Let’s—’

  Chris’s foot slipped. Knocked against something that rolled on the tiled floor. Clink of glass. Chris gritted his teeth and inched one hand down to the butt of his empty gun. The two jackers had frozen by the door.

  ‘Hear that?’ It was the ambitious member of the duo. Chris saw a silhouetted wrecking bar raised in the faint light from the doorway. ‘Okay, Mister Zek-tiv. Game over. Come out, give us your fucking keys, and maybe we’ll leave you some teeth.’

  The two jackers advanced down the hall. They we
re about halfway when Mike Bryant dropped through a gap in the banister rail above. He landed feet first on the head of the gangwit bringing up the rear. The two of them tumbled to the floor. The lead jacker whipped round at the noise and Chris exploded from his hiding place. He punched hard, driving high for the face and low for the guts. The jacker turned back too late. Chris’s high punch broke his nose and then he folded as the solid right hook sank into his midriff. Chris grabbed the gangwit’s shoulders and ran his shaven head sideways into the staircase wall. Up ahead, he saw Bryant reel to his feet and stamp down hard on the other jacker’s unprotected stomach. The gangwit moaned and curled up. Bryant kicked him again, in the head.

  ‘Mother fucker! Touch my car, you fucking piece of shit !’

  Chris laid a hand on his shoulder. Bryant hooked round, face taut.

  ‘Whoa, it’s all over.’ Chris stood back, hands raised. ‘Game over, Mike. Come on. There’s only three left now. Let’s try for the car again.’

  Bryant’s face cleared of its fury.

  ‘Yeah, good. Let’s do it.’

  The street outside was quiet. They checked both ways, then slipped out and loped back towards the Falkland, Bryant navigating. Less than five minutes to relocate the corner pub, and the BMW sat gleaming pristinely under the street lamp as if nothing had happened.

  They circled the vehicle warily. Nothing.

  Bryant produced his keys and pressed a button. The alarm disarmed with a subdued squawk. He was about to open the door when the shaven-headed woman stepped out of the shadows of a doorway less than five metres away, a piece of iron railing raised in ironic greeting. She put her fingers to her mouth and whistled shrilly. Another jacker, similarly armed, stepped out of another doorway up the street and ambled down to meet them. The woman smiled at Bryant.

  ‘Thought you’d be back. Now, you want to throw me those keys?’

  In the moment that her eyes were fixed on Bryant, Chris produced his empty gun and levelled it at her.

  ‘Alright, that’s enough,’ he snapped. ‘Back off.’