MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH is an award-winning author who lives in London. Spares, his American debut, has been optioned by DreamWorks SKG. He is at work on his next novel, One of Us, which has been optioned by Warner Bros.
If you enjoyed SPARES—
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an electrifying new thriller
from Michael Marshall Smith
ONE OF US
by Michael Marshall Smith
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August 1998
Night. A crossroads, somewhere in deadzone LA. I don’t know the area, but it’s nowhere you want to be. Just two roads, wide and flat, stretching out four ways into the world: uphill struggles to places that aren’t any better, via places which are probably worse.
Dead buildings squat in mist at each corner, full of sleep and quietness. It seems like they lean over above us like some evil cartoon village, but that can’t be right. Two-story concrete can’t loom. It’s not in its nature. The city feels like a grid of emptiness, as if the structures we have introduced to it are dwarfed by the spaces which have remained untouched, as if what is not there is far more real than what we see.
A dog shivers out the end of its life meanwhile, huddled in the doorway of a 24-hour liquor store. The light inside is so yellow it looks like the old guy asleep behind the counter is floating in formaldehyde. When she was younger, the woman might have done something to help the dog. Now she finds she doesn’t really care. The emotion’s too old, buried too deep—and the dog’s going to die anyway.
I don’t know how long we wait, standing in the shadowed doorway, hiding deep in her expensive coat. She gets through half a pack of Kims, but she’s smoking fast and not wearing a watch. It feels like an eternity, as if this corner in the wasteland is all I’ve known or ever will see; as if time has stopped, meandered to a halt, and sees no compelling reason to start flowing again.
Eventually the sound of a car peels itself off from the backdrop of distant noise, and enters this little world. She looks, and sees a sweep of headlights up the street, hears the rustle of tires on asphalt, the hum of an engine happy with its job. Her heart beats a little more slowly as we watch the car approach, her mind cold and dense. It isn’t even hatred she feels, not tonight or any more. When the cancer of misery has a greater mass than the body it inhabits, it’s the tumour’s voice you hear all the time. She’s stopped fighting it now.
The car pulls up thirty yards along the street, alongside an address she spent two months tracking down, and ended up paying a hacker to find. The engine dies, and for the first time she glimpses the man’s face through the dirty windshield. Shadowed features, oblivious in their own world of turning things off and unfastening the seatbelt. Seeing him isn’t climactic, and comes with no roll of drums. It just makes us feel tired and old.
He takes an age to get out of the car, leaning across to gather a pack of cigarettes from off the dash. I don’t know for sure that’s what he’s doing, but that’s what she decides. It seems to be important to her, and what she feels about this man is far too complex for me to interpret. She is calm, mind whirling in circles so small you can’t really see them at all, but her heart is beating a little faster now, and as he finally opens the door and gets out of the car, we start to walk towards him.
He doesn’t notice, at first, still fumbling with his keys. She stops a few yards from the car, and he looks up blearily. Drunk, perhaps—though she doesn’t think so. He was always too much in control. Probably just tired, and letting it show while there’s no one around to see. He’s older, greyer than she was expecting, but with the same slightly hooded eyes. He looks early fifties to me, trim, a little sad. He doesn’t recognise her, but smiles anyway. It’s a good smile, and may once have been quite something, but it doesn’t reach the eyes any more.
It’s about now that the other car first appears, far down the other road. I didn’t notice it the first time, and she never does. She just stares at him, waiting. A generic smile isn’t enough, some tired and distracted muscle contraction. We want him to know who we are.
“Help you?” he asks eventually, peering at her. He stands by the car, back straight. He’s not frightened, sees no need to be, but he’s beginning to sense this is not a run-of-the-mill encounter. All he sees is a skinny woman in a good coat, but there’s something about us which disturbs him, reminds him of someone he used to be.
“Hello, Ray,” she says, and then nothing else, waiting for him to remember.
Maybe it’s something in her face that does it, puts him in mind of a grin long ago. His eyes open wider and some measure of confidence returns, his face relaxing a little. A picture of reliability. They look at each other for a while, but by now my attention is on the sound of the car. I know it’s coming, big and silver and fast.
“It’s Laura, isn’t it?” Ray asks eventually. Her name is still there, near the front of his mind. Maybe it always has been, the way his has been in hers. He nods. “Yes, it’s you.” He gives a short, bewildered laugh, sticking a cigarette in his mouth. “I never forget a face.” He clicks the wheel of his lighter and starts bringing it up to his face. His left eye droops slowly.
The wink is like returning to a childhood playground, and finding a swing still rocking as if you had only just this moment climbed down. It’s enough.
The first shot goes straight through his left eye, blatting a baseball of shit out of the back of his skull. He’s still trying to back away as the next bullet tears through his groin, and as another splashes through most of his throat. But then he’s on the ground, legs spastically twitching, as we step forward to stand over him.
The dog watches it all, from its patch by the wall, but it’s got problems of its own and Ray’s going to die anyway.
She doesn’t stop firing until the gun is empty. The body is still by then, and has nothing worth speaking of above the neck. The cigarette alone is almost intact, clamped between lips which look like something out of an autopsy wastebasket. She decides to leave it that way.
I put my hand in her pocket, and pull out another clip. Her hands are trembling a great deal by then, and I think she already knows she has failed. While she’s still fumbling to reload, she finally notices the sound of a car hurtling towards her. Her head jerks up.
I know immediately that it’s not the cops, and that I’ve seen the car somewhere before. Laura doesn’t. She doesn’t know what to think. He mind is too empty and fractured to make a decision, and her body makes it for her.
We back away, stumbling over our feet and dropping the gun. Then we turn and run, tears flying out either side of her face, expecting to die and wondering only why it has taken so long.
We glance back for an instant, and see the car has pulled to a halt in the middle of the crossroads. The doors are open, and two figures are standing over Ray’s remains. The men are of identical heights, wear matching light grey suits, and have eyes that don’t look right.
One picks up the gun; the other shouts “Shit! Shit shit shit!” in a voice so deep and loud that I wonder how the buildings around us remain standing. He turns slowly towards us, a streetlamp directly behind his head.
We turn the corner before he sees us, and run until we fade into black.
part one
REMtemp
I was in a bar in Ensenada, drinking a warm beer quickly and trying to remind myself that I hadn’t murdered anyone, when my alarm clock caught up with me. Little bastard.
Housson’s was full to the rafters and noisy as hell, and not just because everyone was talking loudly. Two local alfalfa barons had come into the bar to celebrate some deal, perhaps even a merging of their cash crop-related dynasties, and an eight-piece mariachi band had joyfully latched onto them and settled in for the night. The rest of the bar was a Jackson Pollock of local color: seedy photographers trying to charge tourists for pictures, leather-faced ex-pats peering around the place like affronted owls, and Mexicans setting about get
ting drunk with commendable seriousness. The bar looks like it was last redecorated about forty years ago, by someone who had the more functional end of the Wild West in mind: dusty floorboards, walls painted with second-hand cigarette smoke, chairs stolen from some church hall. The only nod in the direction of decor is the fading sketches of ex-barmen, renowned alcoholics and similarly distinguished local characters which adorn the walls. One of these had already come crashing to the ground, the casualty of a bottle hurled by a disgruntled drunkard, and all in all the atmosphere was just one step short of chaos.
I was tired and my head hurt, and I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I should have been out on the streets, or checking different bars, or even heading back to LA. Anywhere but here. She was nowhere to be seen, and as I hadn’t had the time to go to a co-incidence dealer before I left LA, I didn’t expect her to just wander in. I was still pretty confident the Chicago lead was a deliberate false trail, but didn’t have any particularly good reason to believe she’d have run to Ensenada either. I was just there to drink beer and avoid the problem.
The older of the two businessmen looked like he consumed a fair amount of his alfalfa personally, but he’d obviously done a bit of singing in the distant past and was now working steadily through his repertoire, to the delight of the assembled henchmen and underlings. One of these, a slimy little turd I pegged as the accountant son-in-law of one of the principals, was busy eyeing up a group of young local women who were cheerily clapping along at the next table. As I watched I saw him signal to the non-singing baron, who turned and clocked the girls. His smile broadened to the kind of leer which would make a werewolf look bashful and charming; he beckoned the leader of the band over, more money already in his hand.
I was sitting to one side of a table crammed with tourists, the only seat that had been free when I’d entered over two hours before. The girls were red-faced from the day’s sun, and fizzing with Margarita-fuelled bravado; the guys sipping their Pacíficos sullenly and panning their eyes around the bar, probably trying to work out which of the locals was going to come and try to steal their women first. I could have told them that it was much more likely to be another American, probably one of the boisterous frat rats who were in town for some damnfool motorcycle race, but I didn’t know them and couldn’t be bothered. In fact, they were getting on my nerves. The girls were dancing in their seats in that way people do when they’re letting themselves off a very short leash, and the nearest one kept banging into my arm and causing me to spill beer and cigarette ash onto jeans which hadn’t been that clean when I’d pulled them on two days ago.
When I felt the tap on my shoulder I turned irritably, expecting to see the waiter who was working that corner of the room. I like attentive service as much as the next man, but Christ, there’s a limit to how fast a man can drink. In my case that limit is pretty high, and yet this guy was still hassling me well before I’d finished each beer. It-was good that the waiter was there, because the only way I could have gotten to the bar was with a chainsaw, but I felt he needed to calm down a little. I was in the middle of deciding to tell him to go away—or at least to do so after he’d brought me another drink—when I realised it wasn’t him at all, but a fat American who looked like he’d killed a dirty sheep and glued it to his chin.
“Fella asking for you!” he shouted.
“Tell him to fuck off,” I said. I didn’t know anyone in Ensenada, not any more, and didn’t wish to start making new acquaintances.
“Seems pretty insistent,” the guy said, and jerked his thumb back towards the bar. I glanced in that direction, but there were far too many people in the way. “Little black fella, he is.”
In those parts this could mean the guy was actually black, or an indigenous Mexican Indian. Didn’t really make much difference, I still didn’t want to talk to him, but it surprised me that my fellow countryman hadn’t felt qualified to tell him to fuck off by himself. The guy with the beard didn’t look the type to run errands for ethnic majorities.
“Well then tell him to fuck off politely,” I snarled into a moment of relative quiet, and turned back to face the mariachi band.
They immediately and noisily embarked on yet another song, which sounded eerily identical to all the others. It couldn’t be, though, because it got an even bigger cheer than usual, and the singing businessman clambered unsteadily onto a chair to give it his all. I took a sip of my beer, wishing the waiter would hurry up and hassle me again, and waited with grim anticipation for the alfalfa king to pitch headlong into the table of girls. That should be worth watching, I felt.
Then I became aware of a sound. It was quiet, and barely audible below the baying of voices and barking of trumpets, but it was getting louder.
“Told him, like you said,” the American behind me boomed. “Didn’t take it very well.”
A beeping sound. Almost like…
I closed my eyes.
“Hap Thompson!” a tinny voice squealed suddenly, cutting effortlessly through the noise in the bar. Then it went back to beeping, getting louder and louder, before sirening my name again. I tried to ignore it, but it wasn’t going to go away. It never does.
Within a minute the beeping was so loud that the mariachi band began turning in my direction. Gradually they stopped playing, the instruments fading out one by one as if their players were being serially dropped off a cliff. I swore viciously and ground my cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray. Heads turned, and a silence descended on the bar. The last person to shut up was the singing businessman. He was now standing weaving on the table with his arms outstretched. He would have looked quite like an opera singer in that moment, had his face not been more reminiscent of a super-middleweight boxer who’d thrown too many fights.
Taking a deep breath, I turned round.
A channel had cleared in the crowd behind me, and I could see straight to the bar. There, standing carefully so as to avoid the pools of spilt beer, was my alarm clock.
“Oh, hello,” it said, into the quiet. “Thought you hadn’t heard me.”
“What,” I said, “the fuck do you want?”
“It’s time to get up, Hap.”
“I am up,” I said. “I’m in a bar.”
“Oh,” said the clock, looking around. “So you are.” It paused for a moment, before surging on. “But it’s still time to get up. You can snooze me once more if you want, but you really ought to be out and about by half past nine.”
“Look, you little bastard,” I said, “I am up. It’s a quarter past nine in the evening”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. We’ve been through this.”
“I have the time as 9:17 precisely. AM.” The clock angled itself so that I—and everyone else—could read its display clearly.
“You’ve always got the time as AM!” I shouted, standing to point at it. “That’s because you’re broken you useless piece of shit.”
“Hey, man,” said one of the tourists at my table. “Little guy’s only trying to do his job. No call for language like that.” There was a low rumble of agreement from nearby tables.
“That’s right,” agreed the clock, two square inches of injured innocence on two spindly little legs. “Just trying to do my job, that’s all. Let’s see how you like it if I don’t wake you up, huh? We know what happens then, don’t we?”
“What?” asked a woman at the other side of the room, her eyes sorrowful. “Does he mistreat you?” With my jaw clamped firmly shut, I grabbed my cigarettes and lighter off the table and glared at the woman. She stared bravely back at me, and sniffed. “He looks the type.”
“He hits me. He even throws me out the window.” This was greeted by low mutters from some quarters, and I decided it was time to go. “Of moving cars…”
The crowd stirred angrily. I considered telling them that having a broken am/pm indicator was the least of this clock’s problems, that it was also prone, on a whim, to wake me up at regular intervals through the sm
all hours and thus lose me a night’s work, but decided it wasn’t worth it. Trust the little bastard to catch up with me in the one bar in the world where people apparently cared about defective appliances. I pulled my jacket on and started shouldering my way through the people around me. A pathway opened up, lined with sullen faces, and I slunk towards the door feeling incredibly embarrassed.
“Wait, Hap! Wait for me!”
At the sound of the clock’s little feet landing on the ground I picked up the pace and hurried out, past the pair of armed policemen moonlighting as guards in the short passageway outside. I clanged through the swing doors at the end, hoping one of the cops would whip back and catapult the machine back over the bar, and stomped out into the road.
It didn’t work. The clock caught up with me, and ran by my side down the street with little puffing sounds of exertion. These were fake, I believed, little sampled lies. If it had managed to track me down from where I’d flung it out the window (for the last time) in San Diego, a quick sprint was hardly going to wind it.
“Thanks,” I snarled. “Now everyone in that fucking bar knows my name.” I swung a kick at it, but it dodged easily, feinting to one side and then scuttling back to face me.
“But that’s nice,” the clock said. “Maybe you’ll make some new friends. Not only am I a useful timepiece, but I can help you achieve your socialising goals by bridging the gulf between souls in this topsy-turvy world of ours. Please stop throwing me away. I can help you!”
“No you can’t,” I said, grinding to a halt. The night was dark, the street lit only by stuttering yellow lamps outside Ensenada’s bars, food rooms and rat-hole motels, and I felt suddenly homesick and alone. I was in the wrong part of the wrong town, and I didn’t even know why I was there. Someone else’s guilt, my own paranoia, or just because it was where I always used to run. Maybe all three—and it didn’t really matter. I had to find Laura Reynolds, who might not even be here, before I got shafted for something I hadn’t done, but remembered doing. Try explaining that to a clock.
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