I was too wired then to feel what I experienced the following morning in the CybTrak compound—a sudden delirious joy at being back in the world. Instead, I concentrated on keeping myself invisible, trying to work out a way we could get out of the area. The fact that the road wasn’t crawling already with SafetyNet security or Roanoke police was almost eerie. We had very little time to vanish.
I found the CybTrak rails after about ten minutes and ran back to collect the spares. They were terrified by then, and so cold they could barely walk, but I got them back to the track. We waited, and it was not long before a train meandered past. I walked alongside the train hauling the spares one by one into a carriage full of computer parts.
Then I jumped up myself, pushed the panel shut and we left the Farm behind forever.
Howie sat staring at his hands, as he had for much of the second part. I’d seldom met his eye, just let my mouth run. It was the first time in five years I’d had a real conversation with someone who wasn’t a droid or a spare. Even though I’d been describing a disaster area, it had felt good. Except now I’d finished I remembered it was all true, and that there were people who wanted to punish me for it.
I told Howie the rest, how we’d fetched up in a backwoods CybTrak compound that morning, and how Ragald had been cut in half by two security droids which had disguised themselves as an abandoned snow-covered carriage. Then I stood up, bones creaking, and fetched another beer from the fridge.
When I sat back down at the table Howie raised his eyes and looked at me. Then he started slowly shaking his head.
I woke the next morning from dreams which had been confused and bitter. When my eyes blinked open and I found myself lying stiffly on the floor with my head on a balled-up coat I was seized for a moment with weary dread, the kind you get when you find yourself somewhere you have no recollection of going, somewhere you can’t even understand, and all you know is a churning confidence that you have done something wrong which you don’t even remember.
Then I realized where I was, lying on the floor of Howie’s storeroom, and fragments of dreams danced in front of my eyes. Trees, alive with flame, blackening leaves flicking back and forth with faces which were not there. Then real faces, faces ruptured with fear, studded with eyes which wore terror like milky cataracts. A smell, like the worst of the tunnels, but with a downward slope toward death, a stench which had nothing to do with healing and everything to do with a final dissolution. A flock of mad, happy orange birds, disappearing behind a hut.
I screwed my eyes up and pushed my fists into them, morphing the flames into geometric patterns which swirled and jumped. Then I let go and they disappeared. I sat up, reaching for a cigarette, and looked around.
Suej was still asleep. After Howie and I had finished I carried her through and laid her on the sacks which looked softest. She woke and we had a talk, mainly about David and where he might be. It felt different, being with her. She was just one person in the world now. After years of being there for her and the spares all the time, I’d started to go away. Maybe it wasn’t my fault. Perhaps it was just an inevitable consequence of returning here, like my increasing desire for Rapt. Ratchet once told me that you remember things best in the state that you learned them in the first place. Being back in New Richmond and trying to remember how to behave while straight was like trying to balance a chain saw on my chin while bombed out of my mind.
I’d lain, on the floor thinking of Rapt the previous night, thinking of it for hours. Thinking of how the worst addictions are the easiest to get hold of. Like alcohol. There it is, in stores, in bars, in people’s homes. It’s right there. You can see it, reach out for it, fall into it. People don’t have Rapt in their drinks cabinets, but it’s not too hard to get hold of it if you know where to go, and I knew.
I could hear the sound of revelry from the bar, and checked my watch. Seven a.m. The first shift. I watched the smoke from my cigarette curl into the air, and wondered what I was going to do. Just about every part of my mind knew that I shouldn’t be here, that I should take Howie’s advice and get out. I’d had no right to bring the spares into this in the first place, into a city they didn’t know and problems they couldn’t understand. Now the city had stolen them, and at three a.m. there’d still been no word on where they might be.
I was finding it increasingly hard to believe it was SafetyNet who’d taken them. Before we’d gone to sleep I’d pressed Suej hard on exactly what happened when the men came to Mal’s apartment. There was something about the way she described events that made me wonder if they hadn’t been bargaining on finding the spares. I was also intrigued by the fact they’d blundered round the apartment before they went. I’m not a small guy—it would have been fairly evident if I’d have been standing there, not least because I would have been firing a gun. Finally, only leaving one guy to finish me off: why not two, or more?
Maybe it was some gang making good on the contract Howie had warned me about, and then just picking the spares up as booty. All of them, except maybe the half-spare, could have been sold on for some purpose. Jenny alone was worth good money.
I needed to know which was true. If it was SafetyNet, chances were it was all over. If not, then maybe there was still time to get the spares back before anything happened to them.
But first Mal needed burying. I wasn’t going to leave him spread over his apartment to rot.
I rose quietly, used the men’s room for a shave, and then sat for a while on a bench in the street outside the bar, with a café au lait bought from a food stand on the corner. I knew there were only two questions worth answering—who the killers were and where they’d gone—but I felt as if I’d missed some train in the night. It was like I knew the rules but not the game anymore; or maybe it was the other way around.
The newspost on the corner kept distracting me, burbling the day’s current factoids. Another woman had been found dead, this time on the 104th floor. The story rated slightly longer than the previous day’s, because the victim lived on the right side of a certain horizontal line. Her face had also suffered “unspecified damage.”
I frowned—two homicides with the same MO, on different floors, on consecutive days. “Unspecified damage” smacked of the cops holding back something distinctive to weed out hoax confessors. For just an instant my mind clicked into an old frame of reference, stirred sluggishly toward interest.
Then I told myself it was none of my business anymore.
The rest of the bulletin was fluff. New advances in some technology or other, recent statistics on something else. Some guy believed to be a mob figure had been found dead, and someone had discovered that Everest wasn’t the highest mountain after all.
“Beignet?”
“No,” I said. I hate breakfast. I turned to see Howie standing beside me, contentedly munching.
“You should eat something. It gives you a good start on the day.”
“It gives you brain tumors,” I said. “I read it somewhere.”
Howie sat on the bench next to me and took a sip of my coffee. He chewed for another few moments, ostensibly watching the newscast. Then he turned his round face toward me.
“I know this is turning into a constant refrain,” he said, “but what you’re thinking about is not a good idea.”
“What am I thinking about?”
Howie pointed at me with a beignet “You should go bury Mal, if that’s what you’re going to do. Then find some wheels, and I’ll get Paulie to deliver Suej to wherever you are. You could be in the mountains by lunchtime, who knows where by tomorrow. That’s what you should do. To be frank, Jack, you’re not the guy you used to be—and I mean that as a compliment. I don’t look at you and think ‘Christ—a psycho’ anymore. You’ve already fucked off the guys who owned your Farm. Topping that by paying a visit to a certain spaghetti-eater of our mutual acquaintance isn’t such a hot idea.”
“What makes you think I’d do that?”
“Your head gives you away. It glows wh
en you’re about to do something stupid. And that would be really stupid.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It would.”
When I was outside Mal’s door I hesitated for a moment. I’d seen a lot of bad things happen to friends, admittedly usually while on Rapt, but none of them had ever truly gone away. Sometimes I could feel them, just out of sight, as if I could turn my head quickly and catch them for a moment, bright and backlit and eternal.
On the other hand, if I didn’t do this now it wasn’t going to happen at all. I unlocked the door and opened it. The apartment was cold and it hadn’t really been that long: While I wasn’t expecting the smell to be bad, I wasn’t anticipating enjoying it.
I was surprised to find it wasn’t there at all. Slightly relieved, I shut the door behind me and crossed the room. I stopped abruptly halfway.
Mal’s body wasn’t there.
I stood there stupidly, turning my head this way and that, trying to see it differently. I couldn’t. His body simply wasn’t there. Closer inspection revealed that the floor was clean, with no sign of the blood, bone chips and brain smear which had been there the night before.
I checked the John, Mal’s sleeping area, the cupboards. The latter were stuffed full of Mal’s patented brand of junk. Everywhere else was empty.
Mal’s body had been taken away, taken by someone who’d unlocked the door and then locked it again behind him.
The only person who could have known about it was someone connected with the killer—whose own body had not been in the bottom hallway when I’d entered the building.
Leaving Mal’s apartment unlocked, I ran downstairs a flight and knocked on the door from behind which, for once, no music was coming. After a pause it opened. The rat-faced man stood and glared at me.
“What you want?” He looked nervous as hell.
“Have you seen anyone go upstairs in the last twenty-four hours?”
“No. Been too busy fucking your mother,” he said, and pushed the door back at my face. I stuck my foot in the jamb. It probably hurt, but I was too wired to notice. Rat-man’s head appeared again. “Co ’way before trouble starts, man,” he advised, face pinched.
“It’s already started,” I said, kicking the door straight back at him and crunching it into his nose. He clattered back into the hallway and fell somewhat awkwardly on his head. I strode a couple of paces into the apartment, which smelt bad, looking for more fun. Rat-face’s friend appeared in another doorway, recognized me, darted back the way he’d come. I followed, and found myself in a room with a gun pointing at my head.
Sitting at a table in the corner was a large black man, head shaven, the whites of his eyes luminous in the gloom. A line of blue LCD’s was tattooed into his scalp from front to back, blinking softly in the twilight. His features were broad and brutal, and his skin was greasy. He had a gun in his right hand. He stared impassively at me. Narcotics were spread out in front of him, arranged into piles of various sizes. I’d interrupted a buy—no wonder people were kind of edgy. I stood still. It seemed the thing to do.
After a moment the big man lowered the gun. He looked at me, moving his head slightly as if trying to catch a glimpse of me in a different light. Something about him struck me as strange, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it might be.
Rat-face reappeared raggedly from the hallway and started squawking, hungry for blood. “Say adios to your brain, motherfuck,” he snarled, and my head was suddenly knocked forward as he jammed the barrel of his gun into my neck.
“Ain’t no call for that,” the big man said mildly. “Leastways not until we find out what he wants.”
“I want to know if anyone saw someone go upstairs since last night,” I said, trying to avoid looking at the man’s flashing head. I thought I could hear it blinking on and off like a turn indicator.
“Well?” the big man said, raising his eyebrows at the other two men, Rat-face and his friend. In variously bad tempers but with apparent sincerity, the men denied having seen anyone. The big man looked back at me. “This be anything to do with the dead dude in the hallway?”
“Yes,” I said. “And who the fuck are you?”
“No one in particular,” the big man said, “Just passing through, doing a little deal with my new friends here. I ain’t seen anyone either, and I didn’t recognize the bag of bones lying downstairs. You want him, you can find the body in the bins behind the back of Mandy’s Diner out on the edge.”
“You moved it there?”
“Surely did it was lowering the tone.”
“Okay,” I said, starting to back out of the room.
“Now I’m going to blow his face off,” said Rat-face, getting excitable again. The big man tutted.
“No, you ain’t: Can’t you get that into your head?”
Rat-face stuffed his gun into the front of his pants and squared up to me instead. “Okay, well, Marty and me’ll just beat the shit out of him, then. Okay?” He glanced at the black man for confirmation, and I wondered what the power structure was here.
Friend Marty looked less than enthusiastic at the prospect, and quietly relieved when the big man shook his head. “You welcome to try,” he said, “but the dude has the Bright Eyes and in my experience they tend to be some crazy motherfucks.”
He winked at me, and went back to sorting his piles of drugs. Rat-face glared. Marty had taken a step backward at the mention of Bright Eyes, and took another as I turned to him. I walked unmolested through the gap and out of the apartment.
Back in Mal’s I stood for a while, wondering what to do next. Then I noticed something, and walked slowly to where Mal’s display hung on the wall down by the window. When the sheet of cloth was pulled away it confirmed what I’d suspected.
The display had gone. The board was still there, covered in tiny holes where pins had been, but all of the photos and notes had been removed. I let the cloth fall again.
Who’d done this? Not Mal. He wouldn’t have had time before being killed. And why would he take it down? He was a cop. It was his work. He was entitled to have what the fuck he liked on his walls. So who?
Whoever cleaned the place up.
Or, I thought, maybe it had happened earlier than that. When I’d come back to find Mal dead, checking whether his board was still intact had been the last thing on my mind. Perhaps the fumbling that Suej had heard was a scrabbling as they ripped everything off of the board.
Either way, it posed questions: Why remove evidence of what Mal had been working on? What did that have to do with me?
Answer, nothing.
So maybe it wasn’t me they’d been after. Maybe Mal had been the target all along.
I lit a cigarette and stared out of the window until I’d finished it. I was thinking, I guess, though it was like swatting flies off a piece of meat. Then I locked the door so I wouldn’t be disturbed, and tossed Mat’s apartment. Not all of it, you understand; the cupboards alone would have taken months. Just the places a cop would hide things.
I found nothing, not even a computer, which I knew Mal had. My eyes turned upward, and I saw the loose panel in Mal’s ceiling, a panel which was presumably the entrance to the place where he’d tried to hide the spares before opening the door to his killer. The hiding place that the people who’d whacked him hadn’t found.
I grabbed a chair and, standing precariously on its back, opened the panel. I boosted myself up into the darkness, and rested for a moment on the edge with my legs dangling down. I couldn’t see anything, but it felt right. Mal was a secretive bastard—when, he played poker he kept his cards inside his chest. I stood and wandered around like a; zombie, arms outstretched, groping for a switch. Eventually found one, a pull cord which lit a hanging bulb and threw the area into harsh shadow.
It was surprisingly neat—untypical Mal. A pile of boxes lined one wall—autopsy reports and other documents, hardcopied from police E-files. Illegal—Mal out on a limb about something. Down the other end was a desk, and on it a computer. Nothing in the
desk drawers. Everything looked bright and shiny, as if this was some new venture, a recent hidey-hole. The computer was his old one, a cellular Matrix connection plugged in the back. A digipic lay next to it.
On the wall above the desk, photographs. Three women dead; close-ups showing that their eyes were missing.
Unspecified facial damage.
I sat down heavily on his chair, and I found I was swallowing involuntarily. I forced myself to concentrate on the images, on these three women and not on any others.
Three murders, plus one in the early hours of today which he’d been too dead to know about. And maybe… I checked the fact sheets tacked under the pictures. Mal didn’t have yesterday’s either—too busy dealing with me and the spares. Five murders in ten days, each with the same MO.
He’d said he wanted to tell me about something.
I yanked the hard drive from the computer, slipping Mal’s digipic into my pocket alongside it as an afterthought. Then I climbed back down into the apartment, resealed the roof, and left for Mandy’s Diner.
Howie’s bar was nearly empty.
I have a talent for arriving between shifts, for finding gaps and walking into them. As I went in the back way I heard a voice call out from Howie’s office.
“Is it nice?” he asked.
“Is what nice?” I said, turning to look at Howie through the doorway. He was standing by his desk, holding a sheaf of invoices.
“The truck you’ve bought. The truck you went out to buy Is it a nice color? Is it comfortable? Did you check it thoroughly for rust spots and thunking noises?”
“I haven’t bought it yet.”
Howie sighed. “I know you haven’t, Jack.”
I walked into the office and stood in front of him. “Have you been out to Mal’s today?”
“Of course I haven’t. The Portal is from hunger. I only go out there to collect money from recalcitrant subcontractors.”
Spares Page 8