Spares

by Michael Marshall Smith

  Vinaldi’s spies had no reports of sightings. I wasn’t surprised. Now that Yhandim had everything he wanted, I reckoned the only time we’d see him again would be in the two seconds or so before we died. Maybe he wasn’t even planning to bother with me anymore, now that he had Suej. But I was planning to bother with him. As I stood in Nearly’s apartment and noticed the bags from Suej’s shopping trip lying crumpled in the corner, I imagined just how badly I was going to bother him.

  But first we had to find him.

  “Why the fuck are we dealing with this guy?” Vinaldi asked, as he followed me up the stairs to Golson’s apartment. I didn’t answer, but simply banged on the door loud enough to wake the decomposed. It was only nine o’clock by then, and I didn’t make Golson as an early riser.

  After a few minutes the door opened and Golson appeared sleepy-eyed and vague in a dressing gown. I forbore formalities as usual and pushed my way into the apartment, Vinaldi close behind.

  “Hey, dude, what’s the problem?” Golson squeaked, scurrying behind us. In the living room we discovered that someone was in his bed, a midrange redhead with big brown eyes.

  “Hi, Johnny,” she said, simpering like this was an audition or something.

  I turned to him. “You two know each other?”

  Johnny shrugged.

  “Sure,” the girl piped up, running a hand through her hair, tucking the sheets around her and generally primping for Vinaldi’s benefit, “I go to Club Bastard all the time.”

  “Get dressed and get out of here,” I told her. “You don’t want to be Johnny’s lay. They’re suffering from short life expectancy at the moment.” Vinaldi looked at me angrily, and I shouted at him. “You telling me Louella Richardson and Laverne Latoya weren’t in your book? Why the fuck d’you think Yhandim’s going round whacking them?”

  The girl was up and in the bathroom before Vinaldi had time to answer, leaving us with just the boy Golson.

  “What have you got for me?” I asked. “And hurry.”

  “Not much,” he admitted. “But you said tell you anything weird. This is it.” He held a small card out to me. I took it and turned it over. A credit-card-sized sliver of cream-colored plastic with gold trim around the edge. Didn’t look especially weird to me, or particularly interesting.

  “What the hell is it?” I asked.

  “It’s an invite,” Vinaldi said. “Can see you don’t get out much.”

  “I get out lots,” I snapped. “I just turn up uninvited. Why isn’t it doing anything?”

  “It’s keyed to my DNA,” Golson said. “Here.” He laid his index finger along one edge of the card. The word “invitation” swam up out of the whiteness. This held for a moment and then faded, to be replaced by an inch-square video of a well-preserved but clearly grieving woman in her fifties. Speaking with baffled dignity she invited the holder of the card, plus a guest, to a memorial service for Louella Richardson.

  “Okay, so they’re having a funeral,” I said. “This is hardly news.”

  “It’s not that,” said Golson. “It’s this. I’m out last evening with people and I find out that virtually everyone who knew Louella is invited. I’m not talking just close friends, I’m talking people who held the door open for her one day six years ago. It’s the day after tomorrow, and it’s happening somewhere kind of weird.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “Two-oh-three,” Golson said, gleefully. “In the Maxens’ private chapel.”

  I blinked. That was genuinely strange. The Maxens were so reclusive that no one even knew exactly how many of them there were. Invitations above the 200th floor were rare to the point of unheard-of—unless you were one of the few people who had something Arlond Maxen needed. I looked at Vinaldi, and was surprised to see an extreme but unreadable expression on his face. Storing that to ask about later, I turned to Golson, who was clicking his finger rings along the surface of a table in a way I found very stressful.

  “Any word why?”

  “Well, Val says that Yolande Maxen was one of Louella’s shopping clients. Maybe they’re all cut up about it because of that.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “The Richardsons weren’t special friends of the Maxens?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. Word is the Maxens aren’t special friends of anyone at all.”

  It wasn’t clear whether this made any difference to anything, but it was certainly odd.

  “You really slip it to Louella?” Golson asked Vinaldi, his voice full of manly respect.

  Vinaldi’s voice clearly betrayed that he had. “It’s no business of yours, you twelve-year-old ass-wipe, and it’s disrespectful to talk like that of the dead. Didn’t your father, whoever the fuck he may be, teach you anything at all?”

  “Hey man, whatever you say,” said Golson, holding his arms up placatingly and flashing an orthodontic smile. “Shit, I’m just impressed. Your secret’s safe with me.”

  Then it happened. In the way that it does, regardless of events, clues or intuition. Your mind just burps it up. Sometimes.

  “Where’s your deck?” I asked. Golson pointed and I leaped over to the side of his bed, pulling Mal’s disk from my pocket. I slammed it into the spare slot and slapped the button.

  “What?” Vinaldi asked, coming to stand behind me.

  “The guy who killed Mal had no rap sheet,” I said, drumming my fingers on the desk as I put it together. “Maybe now we know why.”

  “Yo, Jack,” said Mal’s versonality. “How’s it going?”

  “Give me the picture of that stiff,” I said, and it popped up onto the screen.

  “Hil Trazin,” Vinaldi said immediately. “He was there too.”

  “Okay, so all these guys are out of The Gap. Somehow. They’ve got a job—search and destroy for SafetyNet—but these are people with a grudge against you, and so half the time they’re moonlighting trying to fuck you up. One of them, probably Yhandim from what Ghuaji said, is getting way out of hand and not just whacking your associates but climbing through your ex-lays as well. Computer, get me the info on SafetyNet again.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Vinaldi. “What’s this got to do with—”

  “The homicide files on all five victims are security locked from the top of the NRPD. Which means the real job they’re supposed to be doing is for someone with more power than God. This person bought protection for Yhandim while he was looking for the spares, because one of them was important to him.”

  “Company information,” said the computer. “SafetyNet still looks a mess.”

  “Trace back every single company with a stake in it,” I said. “All the way back to the bone. I want to know if anyone’s got a majority shareholding.”

  While the computer chugged away I lit a cigarette. Golson pointed out that they were bad for me, and I suggested that he fuck off.

  “Do you know what the answer’s going to be, and if so just give me in ASCII,” said Vinaldi. “The suspense is giving me hives.”

  “Not for sure,” I said, but then the answer burped up onto the screen. The majority shareholder in SafetyNet, through about a billion holding companies and subroutes, was an outfit called Newman Sublinear. Didn’t mean anything to me, but it sure as hell did to Vinaldi.

  “That’s a Maxen company,” Vinaldi said quietly. “Administered by Arlond Maxen himself.”

  I’d already noticed that the more serious Vinaldi was the simpler his sentences got, so I knew he was telling the truth. “How do you know?”

  “I just do.” Vinaldi turned away. “Jesus shits.”

  “Either of you guys want coffee?” Golson inquired, baffled but enjoying the show. I yanked Mal’s disk and stood up.

  “So,” I said, “Maxen’s behind SafetyNet, which figures. He’s somehow pulled these guys out of The Gap. They must owe him for something, otherwise why’d they be doing his work? In the meantime they’re running after you for old times’ sake, and Louella Richardson gets chopped up in the undertow. Maxen realizes what’s
happened, gets guilty, throws money at her Memorial.” But not, I thought to myself, at one for Laverne Latoya, or any of the other girls who died below the 100 line. “It’s Maxen. He’s behind all of it”

  “Hey, cool,” said Golson brightly. “Then you guys are in really deep shit. Sure you don’t want coffee? It’s cinnamon apple—”

  “Shut up!” shouted Vinaldi and I simultaneously.

  “So what now?” Vinaldi asked, deferring for once to me.

  “We go see a guy who I think’s going to be hurting by now,” I said, turning to Golson. “And you keep your mouth shut about everything you’ve heard, or forgetting women’s names is going to be the least of your troubles.”

  “I believe that,” Golson said with sincerity, and jumped out of the way as we ran for the door.

  “What makes you think Ghuaji’s going to talk now?” Vinaldi asked, as we stormed into Howie’s for what—for me—seemed like the twentieth time in two days.

  “Three things,” I said, shouldering my way through the people inside. “First, his skin was fucked. It looked and felt funny. I saw something similar a couple of days ago on the body of the guy who killed Mal. Second, the wound in his head seemed to get worse rather than better while we were here this morning. Three, he said something about top-ups, and there were leaves on his boots.”

  Vinaldi got it as we were stalking down the corridor. “They have to keep going back?”

  “I think so. And Ghuaji’s currently going nowhere at all.”

  “So maybe you’re not as stupid as you look. That’s encouraging.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I told him. “I have hidden superficialities.”

  There were three people in Howie’s storeroom. Dath, who was watching over the body with sterling vigilance, balancing a chain saw in his hands; Howie, who looked like he was taking the whole thing rather personally and trying to make up for that morning; and Ghuaji himself. I walked straight over to the latter and bent down, keeping well out of the way, just in case.

  The hole in his temple looked looser than before, and there was a small pool of blood under the back of his head. His skin seemed the same. Maybe the strange texture was just a result of having been there so long, and not something which got any worse.

  “You know what’s happening, don’t you?” I said. There was no reply. “You’ve got that place in your blood. You need to go back there to recharge, and you’re not getting it lying here. Meanwhile, Yhandim’s running around New Richmond with the other guys. He may have a major plan, Ghuaji, but the way things are going it ain’t going to involve you.”

  “Fuck you,” he said, predictably. They all say that, don’t they—and probably not even one of them realizes that when it comes to their turn it’s worn pretty thin and isn’t terribly frightening anymore. Especially when they’re taped into immobility and smelling of wet blood from the holes in their head. “Your mother sucks goats in Hell,” he added, hoarsely.

  “A telling riposte, I grant you,” I said, “but you know what I’m saying is true. Now listen up. We know that Arlond Maxen got you guys out somehow, so that’s something you can’t tell me.” I ignored the explosion of surprise from Howie and Dath. “So let’s concentrate on where Yhandim is holding the spares.”

  “Man, you know I ain’t telling you nothing,” Ghuaji said, coughing up another mouthful of blood.

  I pulled away the collar of his coat and saw that the neck wound was also opening up. A flower of blood above the collarbone showed trouble was coming there too. I shrugged.

  “Have it your own way. But time’s running out.”

  I’d barely lit a cigarette in the corridor outside when I heard a scream from within the storeroom. I opened the door a crack and saw Vinaldi standing over Ghuaji I didn’t know what he could have done to make the soldier make that sound, and I didn’t want to find out. I shut the door on another shriek and finished my cigarette alone.

  Suej was my problem, Nearly too, not to mention the rest of the spares; yet it was Vinaldi who was in there doing the wet work. It couldn’t have been any other way. I have no stomach for that kind of thing. It was the same in The Gap. I just did my time and tried to stay alive. I guess I managed it, but sometimes my life feels like a piece of demo shareware, all the key or interesting features disabled, running on a fourteen-day trial period that just repeats over and over again without ever becoming mine.

  So I waited there, breathing smoke in and out, hearing the cries and melding them with many others from long ago. Something, either exhaustion or despair, was stripping years off me. I kept expecting to see flashes of orange, to hear beating wings and voices from long ago. I was remembering people I’d killed, and trying to recall why, and failing to see that it added up to anything at all. Maybe it’s impossible to see out when you’re stuck there in the if-loop. Maybe you’ve got to be dead for any of it to make sense. Life and chance write the code which drags you along, and all you can do is watch—alternately saddened, bored and horrified—as they execute their instructions. Emotions run the action, as they always have, and the brain is powerless to intercede.

  I was on a bit of a downer, in other words.

  Vinaldi joined me after ten minutes. He wasn’t even breathing heavily, although the front of his suit was splattered with blood.

  “Yhandim’s in The Gap,” he said, with a small, brutal smile.

  It was obvious, and maybe I had already known. Where better to hide than somewhere no one else can enter? Perhaps that’s why I’d spent the last twenty-four hours in decreasing circles of futility, running away from the problem.

  “Then we wait till he comes out,” I said.

  “Come on, Randall. You know we can’t do that. He’s got your girl in there, and the other woman. That’s no place for them. It’s no place for anyone.”

  “Johnny, The Gap’s been closed since the last sidelift. That’s twenty fucking years. How the hell are we supposed to get back in there? It’s impossible.”

  “Clearly it isn’t, or our lunatic friends wouldn’t be able to come and go as they please. And Maxen must have found a way, didn’t he? Howie in there came up with a plan. For once it’s a good one—so much so that he may have earned himself a higher place in my organization at some later date. We let that guy inside free, let him think we’re finished with him, and then we see where he goes. He’s fucked up pretty badly now. If you’re right, then he’s going to need to get back there real soon.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “It might.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Vinaldi shouted, his face suddenly inches from mine. “You got any better ideas?”

  “I can’t go back in there,” I said. “I’m not going back in The Gap.”

  “You’re scared, I’m scared,” he spat. “Anybody’d be fucking scared. But it’s the only answer, Randall. Either we go in there and fuck these guys up or they’re going to fuck up those two women and all the others you keep talking about. More important than that, far as I’m concerned, and I’m a selfish man and happy that way, when they’re finished with them they’re going to come after me. I worked twenty years to get where I am today, and I’m not losing it because some guys who should have been dead decades ago blame me for the fact they couldn’t keep track of where the fuck they were and follow the rest of us out of a firestorm which I didn’t lead them into in the first place.”

  I turned away from him, but he carried on ranting.

  “I could just wait until they come out, but you can’t. You got to go in there and find them. I’m offering to help you, Randall, but the offer ain’t going to last forever. Understand?”

  “I can’t go back,” I said, and walked away.

  People are always finding me when I don’t want to be found. When Vinaldi appeared in the doorway I was sitting on Mal’s floor, surrounded by used foil, unused packets and a needle. Half of the last of my money was already in my bloodstream, the rest was ready
and waiting. In my own mind I was sitting in Mal’s because Yhandim knew where it was and might come looking for me there; in reality, I was there because I had nowhere else to go.

  I’d gone straight up to my contact on 24. He didn’t seem surprised to see me again, or that this time I wanted Rapt that had been less cut. I gave him everything I had, and he passed it over. I shot up in the back of his store.

  By the time I got back down to 8 it had kicked in. Climbing into the chute at the back of the women’s rest room was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. But the last, dying tendrils of my working mind told me that if Maxen was tied so heavily into the NRPD, I couldn’t afford to leave by a normal route, so I soldiered on with it anyway.

  More by luck than judgment I found my way to the main shaft, and laboriously clambered down. I don’t know if you’ve ever descended eight floors, hand over hand on a ladder, while full of designer hallucinogenic amphetamorphines, but it takes a certain degree of doggedness. It was very dark, for a start, the shadows brown and continually slithering over my hands and face. They were like snakes in that they were drier than they appeared, but unlike snakes in that they whispered bad things to me, which reptiles rarely do. I slipped once on the way down, and because of my condition believed that I was falling upward. This, I thought, was fine, and I was mildly interested to see where I might end up. Perhaps I’d fall as high as the 200’s, in which case I’d give old Arlond Maxen a piece of my mind.

  Him and his brother both, I muttered, the fucken dead fucken fuck.

  Luckily—I guess—my back brain realized I was unlikely to have conquered gravity anywhere except inside my head, and my hands grabbed a lower stair entirely independently of my will. I failed to dislocate my wrist by the barest of margins, and made it down most of the remaining steps, only falling about the last six feet. I landed heavily on my back, and checked out for a while.

  When I came to everything was worse. But I stood up laboriously, deciding I ought to go somewhere.

  Then I got lost.

  I’ve done the back route in and out of New Richmond more times than I can recall. A lot of it takes place in the dark, so you have to be pretty good at remembering the way. On this particular occasion, I wasn’t. I wasn’t even especially good at remembering how to use my legs. I tried shutting my eyes, but this merely put me into a spotless operating room, where a cake fashioned out of eye-splittingly bright yellow and white icing was waiting for an operation. This scene remained for a number of minutes after I opened my eyes, before finally fading into the darkness. I resolved to keep my eyes open for the time being. I seemed to have been walking for an awfully long time without reaching the landmarks I was expecting, but on the other hand each time a droplet of sweat squeezed out of the pores on my forehead it seemed to take about an hour and I was worried about being drowned, so it’s possible my judgment may have been impaired.