You probably wouldn’t actually want to go to the 8th floor either, but at least it has pretensions. Originally, it had been the lowest food court in the MegaMall, and it was still predominantly a place where you came to eat, drink, or have a good time. Whatever the focus of your sexual inclination, you can go to the 8th floor and watch it dancing on a very small stage. You can also score recreational quantities of pretty much whatever you want, without danger of being caught in a firestorm. Most of it is only one story high, and they keep the ceiling lights off, relying on orange street lamps which run along either side of the thoroughfares. If you don’t check the corners too closely the floor has a kind of lopsided charm, like a run-down but cheery portion of some European capital, or the Old Quarter of New Orleans. The ceiling is covered in creepers and foliage, making the roads feel like paths in a forest. Forests usually give me The Fear, but I like 8, and always have. It’s full of neon, autumn jazz, the smell of good food and, for some reason, the feeling that it has just stopped raining. It never has, of course, but it always feels that way to me.
I walked quickly down the center of the street, noticing what was new and what remained. The streets were quiet but music slunk out of most of the open doors, buoying up the desultory strippers who swayed on tabletops. A few down-and-outs sat on street corners, stuck in main() with their handleMouseDown() mitts held out, but from the look of them I didn’t think anyone’s cursor was ever going to find them. It’s an image problem, I think. Maybe they should all club together and hire a PR consultant, put out a few TV ads, find some way of making begging seem cool. I’m sure there’s money to be made in it somewhere.
I had to be out of here quickly, but I wanted to make my last visit right. I stopped at one corner to catch a few minutes from a news post, just like I always used to. New Richmond has a twenty-four-hour local events feed on every corner. Flatscreen monitors hang like banners wherever you go, twisting and turning to foist information on the unwary public as they approach. It helps the upper floors think they know what’s going on. They don’t, of course, but they spend so much time talking about the twenty per cent the news covers that no one even guesses at all the rest.
Arlond Maxen had opened a new school on 190, I learned. Big fucking deal. The people who lived that high had so much money they had to be sedated every morning to stop them going berserk with glee. The only floors richer than 190 to 200 were the ones built on top of the MegaMall—all owned by Arlond Maxen himself, the de facto king of the heap. In the news footage, Maxen looked the same as he always had: distant, a man who was always the other side of an LCD panel or cathode tube. It was sometimes hard to believe that he was anything more than a pattern, of lights, moving across the face of New Richmond, always at one remove.
The next item said that Chief of Police McAuley was lobbying to relocate people out of 100 and fill it with concrete, to finally stop the plebs from accessing the higher floors. Cunning, I thought, and never mind that the real lowlife have fuck-off great houses on 185. The C of P in New Richmond is one of the world’s premier dickheads, and also one of the best kickback receivers in the country. Never known to fumble a play.
The new hobby for the young and stupid was wall-diving: jumping out of upper-story windows without a rope or parachute. And some woman had got psychoed and spread over twenty square yards of 92: the murderer had wrought “unspecified damage to her face,” and the cops were hopeful of an early arrest. Yeah, right.
Nothing much had changed.
Passing all the food stands wasn’t easy. The one thing Ratchet hadn’t been able to cook properly was burgers, and after five years I’d almost turned the idea of them into a religion. I took a turn off Main and walked some side streets until I reached the place I was going. The sign outside had been made bigger and more ostentatious, but apart from that, the bar looked exactly the same. I stood outside for a moment, looking past the wooden window frames, stained deep brown with polish, at the dim pools of light within. I came here a lot, at one time, when things were different. Seeing it again made me feel old, and tired, and breathlessly sad.
Just as I was reaching for the door, something odd happened. I thought I felt a hand try to wheedle itself into my palm, down where it hung by my side. It was plump and warm, like the hand of an eight-year-old girl. I felt it try to pull me away.
As soon as I noticed it properly the feeling was gone, and though I turned and looked both ways up the side street, there was no one there. I stood motionless for a moment, breathing shallowly, aware of a small tic under my left eye. So far, I’d managed to blank the things I should be feeling, but I knew I couldn’t keep it up forever. For the first time in years I wanted something that came in small rolls of foil, wanted it suddenly and completely with a need that defied all reason.
I forced myself to push open the door and walk into the bar. It was mainly empty, a few hopheads nodding over their drinks. I went straight through into the back area, which is smaller, cozier, and also where the owner tends to hang out.
“Jack Randall,” said a voice, and I turned.
Howie was sitting at one of the tables, piles of receipts and general administrative junk strewn all around him. That kind of stuff makes me want to go back to barter economy, but Howie lives for it. An unopened bottle of Jack Daniels was at his right elbow, next to a large bucket of ice and two empty glasses. He was slightly rounder, had lost a little hair and gained an alarming scar on his forehead, but apart from that he looked pretty much the same. He grinned at me affably, a picture of relaxation.
“Guess you’re not surprised to see me,” I said.
“To see you, no. To see you alive, always, and especially today. Dath? Paulie?” Howie gave an upward nod toward the couple of steroid abusers lurking round a table near the back. They rose and split up, one going to cover the front entrance, the other the back. I’m a cautious man, but Howie sleeps with a bazooka under his pillow. Dath nodded at me as he passed. “The guys at the back door gave me a call,” Howie told me, dropping a couple of cubes of ice into the glasses, and then filling both with whiskey. “Sounded like it had to be you.”
“That’s a big drink,” I said, accepting a glass.
“By whose standards? Come on, Jack, I’ve seen you unconscious earlier than this. Time was you thought by nine o’clock the evening was getting old. You want any Rapt while you’re here?”
I shook my head, silently cursing Howie for being able to read my mind. “I’ve cleaned up a little,” I said.
He laughed. “You just think you have,” he said, and lifted one of the glasses. “A man who lays it on like you did never goes on vacation.”
I chinked my glass against his and drank. Howie drained his in one, leaned back, and patted his stomach comfortably with both hands.
“How’s tricks?” I asked, looking around the bar.
“Tricky,” he said. “But what about this? Couples, okay, they’re always ringing each other up, inviting each other round for dinner. Sounds like a great idea at the time—some wine, fine conversation, a chance to peek down the other woman’s blouse. But then the day starts to approach, and everyone’s thinking, Jesus H—why did we agree to this? The hosts are dreading all the admin-restocking the drinks cabinet, cooking fiddly food, making sure all the tubes of Gonorrhea-Be-Gone in the bathroom are hidden. The guests are thinking about getting expensive cabs and babysitters and not being able to smoke. Complete downer all round. You with me so far?”
“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I was.
“Okay. So the idea is this. A Date Canceling Service. The day before the evening’s supposed to happen, the guests ring up and cancel. They call it off, politely, just before anyone has to actually do anything. Everyone gets a nice warm glow about agreeing to see each other, but no one has to tidy up afterward or schlepp baby photos halfway across town. Everyone can just sit in their own apartments and have a perfectly good evening by themselves, and they’ll enjoy if all the more because they thought they were going
to have to go out.”
“Where do you come in?”
“I come up with an excuse for canceling—won’t even have to be a good one, because no one wants to go through with it anyway. You can say, ‘My head has exploded and Janet has turned into an egg’ and it’ll be, ‘Oh, sorry to hear that, some other time then, yeah, great, good bye.’”
“Where does the money come in?”
“I take the cut of what it would have cost to buy the food and drink and cabs. In the early days it’s nickel and dime, I admit, but wait till it gets into the upper floors. I’ll make a pile. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a crock of shit,” I said, laughing. “Even worse than the mugging service.”
“You could be right,” he admitted, grinning. “But you didn’t come here for this—you can wait for my autobiography. What can I do for you, boss man?”
“Has the word gone round?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“The word has gone round and around and met itself coming back. ‘Jack’s in town. Everyone beware.’”
“Not anymore,” I said. Howie looked at me soberly.
“I know,” he said. “And I have to admit, that’s not what people are saying. You were spotted out in the Portal, that’s all.” Howie lit a cigarette and looked at me closely. “How are you doing, Jack?”
I knew what he was asking. I wasn’t ready to go into it yet, not even with him. Possibly not ever, with anyone.
“I’m okay,” I said. “But I’m in very deep shit.”
“That I will believe. What can I do for you?”
I reached into my pocket and brought the chip out. It was a small oblong of clear Perspex, about four centimeters by two, and five millimeters deep. Along one of the short edges was a row of tiny gold contacts designed to interface the unit to the motherboard of a computer. The number “128” was printed matter-of-factly on the chip’s front. I’d found it in my bag after we’d left the Farm. I hadn’t put it there, which meant Ratchet must have done so. Howie took the chip from me, peered closely at it, and sniffed.
“What’s this?”
“I think it’s one-twenty-eight gigs of RAM,” I said.
“Don’t recognize the make. Where’s it from?”
“A friend gave it to me.”
“You’re in luck,” he said. “The market’s volatile, and this week it’s up. I can probably give you about eight for this without fucking myself up too badly.”
“I’m in kind of a hurry.”
He reached under the chair and brought up a large metal cashbox. He placed it on the table and opened it, revealing bundles of dirty notes. All of the money in New Richmond is dirty, figuratively at least. There can’t be a dollar bill which hasn’t been involved in something illegal somewhere down the line, hasn’t been handed over in a suitcase at some stage in its life. Howie counted off eight hundred dollars in fifties and held it out to me between two fingers of one hand. “You want a loan too?”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but no. Don’t know when I’ll be this way again. Maybe never.”
“So pretend I’m your friend and call it a gift.”
I smiled and stood up, slipping the notes into my inside pocket. “You are and I’ll be okay.”
Howie pursed his lips. “You know there’s a whack out on you?”
I stared at him. “Already? What, an old one?”
Howie shook his head. “Don’t know, but I think it’s new. Heard twenty minutes ago.”
“How much is it for?”
“Five thou.”
“That’s insulting. Let me know if it goes above ten,” I said. “Then I’ll start seriously watching my back.”
At the door, Dath stepped to one side to let me out. I paused, and looked up at his face. Dath looks like your basic worst nightmare, except he wears expensive clothes and gets a nice close shave. There’d always been a rumor that before working for Howie he’d been a made guy in Miami: starting at the bottom, in the mail room, before deciding to specialize as a hitman. The word was he’d worked his way up the ladder in the old-fashioned way, beginning by being cutting to people: for a hundred dollars he’d march into someone’s place, look them up and down, and go “Yeah, great suit,” in a really ironic way, and then leave. His specialty was the “overheard conversation” hit. Wherever the target went—in a restaurant, in a bar, in the John—Dath would be somewhere just out of sight, talking loudly about postmodernism. It eventually drove the target crazy.
He always denied it. I was never sure.
“You heard about the contract on me?” I asked Dath. He nodded. “You a player?”
“Nah,” he said slowly. “Think HI wait till it goes up to ten.”
Then he winked, and I smiled as I walked past him back out into the streets.
Good bye to all that, I thought.
The guy behind the counter was looking at me strangely, but I went quickly about my business, walking the mart’s dusty aisles and picking out what we needed. I got a couple packs of soya bars, powdered milk, cheap food in heata Tins—and the biggest jar of Frapan pickles I could see. Every couple of minutes I glanced down the aisle and saw the guy was still looking at me. Not all the time, but enough. It was beginning to piss me off.
At the exit of the service shaft, I’d given the guys the hundred seventy dollars I owed them. They were pleasantly surprised, said it had been a pleasure doing business with me, and gave me their card for future reference. The main man also said that Mr. Amos had sent a message saying that I had a free pass in future. I told him I wouldn’t be coming back.
“Yeah, he said you’d say that,” the man said.
Which left me with a little under seven hundred dollars, just about enough for a beat-up truck and the gas to get us out of the state. After that, who knew what was going to happen? Certainly not me. I was in kind of a bad mood by then; wishing I’d had another drink with Howie, wishing I’d had several more, in fact, and just forgotten about the spares. I’ve never been good with responsibility. That much at least seemed not to have changed.
All I could sense for the future was the sound of road beneath tires and the chill of winter evenings in places I didn’t know. After so long away from New Richmond I could hardly believe this was it: a quick score, and then scurrying away back into the wilderness. The feeling got so strong that I actually stopped walking, turned and looked back up at the city. Other pedestrians had to pass on either side of me, muttering and glaring, and what they saw was a man just standing, staring up at a building, probably with an expression somewhere between love and hate in his eyes.
Halfway back to Mal’s I’d stopped at the Minimart, knowing there were things we needed. I expected a fast and joyless shopping experience. I didn’t expect to be stared at. I knew my clothes looked ragged, and I’ve got a couple of scars on my face—but who hasn’t, these days? This is a time for scars. It’s a feature. The counterman didn’t look especially charming himself. He had the slab knuckles of someone who’d grown up fighting, and the flat eyes of a man who could watch bad things and not feel too much about them. He was big in the shoulders but going to seed out front, and his face looked like someone had spent a happy afternoon flattening it out with a spade. The few other customers I’d seen were fumbling for the cheapest brands of alcohol and shambling up to the counter to pay with heaps of small change. Derelicts, in other words, in a store run by an ex-hood where the linoleum on the floor was yellowed and worn with age and curled up at every join to show the stained concrete underneath.
Maybe I looked too refined.
There was a convex plastic mirror hanging at the end of the aisle, bent in the middle from some past impact and so dirty as to be nearly opaque. It was there to stop people lifting stuff from the dead zone, but I doubt the proprietor could see much more in it than ghosts. As I walked slowly toward the cold goods I caught sight of my battered reflection. I guess I might have looked a little wired, and in certain lights my eyes can look a little weird. I have the Brigh
t Eyes, for a start, though it generally requires a certain kind of slanting light to show them, rather than the sickly haze which oozed out the Mart’s tired strip lighting.
I knew he could still see me, even though he was wrapping up a bottle for some huge black guy down the end, so I got out my wallet and made a big thing about counting through my cash. “I’ve got money,” was what I was saying. “Don’t worry. You’ll get paid.” The counterman’s big, impassive face showed no sign of having got my message. There was insufficient depth in his eyes to show if he was even looking, or just had his head pointed my way.
Maybe I was just being paranoid. I turned my attention to the stuff in the chest fridge instead.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said a low voice. I didn’t straighten, but just swiveled my eyes from side to side. I couldn’t see anyone, and it didn’t feel as if anyone was behind me. “Seriously, I can’t advise it,” the voice added, and I had my hand halfway in my jacket before I realized it was the fridge talking.
“What?” I said quietly.
“Don’t buy the cold goods.”
“Why?”
“They aren’t cold. I’ve been broken for six months, and he won’t get me fixed. Says it’s cold enough outside.”
“You don’t agree.”
“See that cream cheese? Been there a month. Another couple of days and it’s going to explode. And he won’t clean it up. That stain on the side there is from a yogurt that went critical a month ago.”
I glanced round to see if the guy was looking, and saw that I was pretty well masked from him by the racks. I leaned on the front of the cooling unit and spoke quietly.
“What can you tell me about him?”
“He’s a slob,” the fridge said. “That’s all she wrote.”
“Anything else? Like what his problem is?”
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