by Matt Doyle
I sigh and drop my phone arm. “Can’t blame a gal for trying. All right, let me ask you one more question. If I said that I had no idea who hired you, but name your price and I’ll hire you to go kill them right now, what would you say?”
“I’d say no can do, darlin’,” he replies, smiling wide enough for his overly white teeth to catch the light from the hallway.
“Fine,” I say, and walk away without another word. The door clicks shut almost instantly.
I knew that he wouldn’t tell me who hired him. That he wouldn’t just turn around and kill the client for the right price means he’s not changed either. Devin likes a good story. He likes to know not only who’s hiring him, but why they want someone dead. There’s not a single person out there that’s too high up or too important for him to take down if his client has the right reasons, but if he feels that something’s up, he won’t take the job. Knowing he’s still the same old killer means that I’ve got a better chance of hunting his client down myself. If he’d started taking cases indiscriminately, then that would open up the possibility of Eddie’s death just being a random execution, bought with no grudges or reasoning other than “I’ve got the money, and I can.” That sort of thing is hard to prove unless they get careless.
I make it out into the night, check the time on my phone, and give a sharp whistle. Bert comes swooping down from a windowsill somewhere further up the apartment block, and lands gently on my shoulder.
I tickle him under his chin again. “Let’s get some sleep,” I say, and hit the speed dial for a cab.
Eleven
I CLOSE MY eyes in my bed and open them again in Charlie’s living room. The dream is the same one that I have every time I visit her. I am unseen, as solid as the barest whisper of a ghost, and I can neither touch nor change the scenes that play out in front of me. All I can do is watch and wait it out.
I push myself away from the wall, the sound of Charlie and me laughing about some stupid joke from the TV following me as I walk the room. The screen is blank, but I still remember the joke. It was the story of a teenage party told by a heavily accented Scotsman, and the footage was a little blurred due to its age. Charlie preferred the comedians of the twenty-first century to the modern crop with their anecdotes of misspent virtual sessions. She told me once that the older comedians’ experiences felt more real to her, and that the reality for most modern humans was too far removed from reality for her taste.
The memory fades, and another slides seamlessly into its place: The two of us, dancing closely to music from a set of house speakers as silent as the TV was blank. The song was an instrumental ballad by a local jazz act that we’d seen earlier in the evening. I try to hum a few bars, but like always, my voice is silent, even to me.
I walk from the room and into the hallway, making my way towards the kitchen while my memories continue their slowly turning trip around the back of the couch. If I stay, they’ll fade out and leave behind the time that I managed to spill two cups of coffee down myself after I slipped on one of Charlie’s shoes, left ridiculously in the middle of the floor, then jump to me hiding in her arms as the monsters on screen close in on the heroine.
Every part of the history trip leads to the same point; those last few hours when we spoke properly for the last time. I can’t escape any of it, ’cause we took in the whole house with those moments. It was like we both knew exactly what was happening and we wanted to leave one last mark in every room before we said good-bye.
I stop in the doorway at the end of the hall, watching the two of us cooking a spaghetti bolognaise on the hob next to the counter that we’d leaned on when we shared our first kiss. We were drunk and rougher than we were in the days that followed, but that was okay. The two of us met during a case, and we kept in touch. Six meetings later, we’d both resolved to tell the other how we felt, and opted for alcoholic assistance to guide us on the way. As a result, I came to her place barely able to stand, and she met me at the door, barely able to walk in a straight line.
If I stay here long enough, Charlie will go to the fridge and grab two beers. She’ll turn, look at me in the doorway, and I’ll see it in her eyes. Back in the living room, we’ll talk, and the last bit of fight will fall away from both of us. Out here in the hallway, we’ll go to the door and I’ll hold her tight, but let go when she sags and grips my jacket. I’ll turn then and leave in silence. If the dream ever took me outside, I’d make it halfway down her drive and collapse onto all fours. I’d bury my head against the concrete, grip my hair and cry, then sit up, wipe my eyes, and walk away, a little more closed than I used to be. Right now, up in the bathroom, we’ll cross in the doorway, and share another short kiss. The warmth will be gone from it.
Instead, I walk up the stairs, ignore the sound of us trying to figure out how to unclog the toilet, and head to the bedroom. I sit down on the windowsill just as the final memory of the night fades in.
The last night that we spent together.
She teases me, while I wait for the memory of her touch to come rushing back, but just like my voice, I won’t find it here. I won’t feel the warmth of her breath on my neck, the sharp bite of her nails on my back, or the softness of her lips on my body. I won’t smell the flowery scent of her hair, and my head won’t pound with the desperate longing to try to make the night last forever.
All I can do is watch and listen as she finally lets me take over, her hand and voice guiding me to her favourite spots. The end comes quickly for both of us then, and we collapse onto the bed, our sweaty bodies clinging tightly to each other as we silently drift into an uneasy sleep.
Just like my memory self, I wearily close my eyes and…
Twelve
THE SOUND OF the alarm hits me like a freight train, jolting me upright. I double over in bed, struggling to catch my breath. My hair is plastered to my forehead, and judging by the sting shooting through my eyes, I’ve been crying too.
“Some hard-ass you are,” I grumble, using my thumb and index finger to wipe my face and push the mass of tangles back behind my ears. I should have known that this would happen. Every damn time I see Charlie, all it takes is for something familiar to click in my head, and I get this. It wouldn’t matter, but everything about her is familiar. The crease by her eyes when she grins. The playful lilt to her voice when she calls my name. The way her top sways over her hips when she walks. The rhythmic sound of her footsteps. Her hair, her scent, her damn coffee. I know all of it like I know the back of my hand.
Everything that I remember about being with Charlie is good. I should be able to smile about that, but I can’t. I don’t get to have little things bring back happy moments of reminiscing, and I don’t get to be grateful for what I had. So what did one year of happiness buy me? Bad dreams and a need to push people away if they get too close. Oh, and the fact that I feel like I have to deke out on someone I actually like so that I don’t get this crap.
“Diu,” I growl, slamming my sweat-covered fist into the mattress. “Diu! Diu! Diu!”
A light metallic clank makes its way across the office part of the main room, and Bert comes to a stop in my bedroom doorway. “Caw?” he asks.
The first time that he did that, I was bewildered. Over time, I’ve come to get used to him checking in on me. It’s the two sides of his programming interacting with each other. The combat part knew that there was no threat, and the pet part knew that it should try to comfort me. Over time, and a lot of these little episodes, I’ve gotten used to his squat frame appearing once I wake up.
“I’m fine, Bert,” I say. “Go make sure that you’re charged. It could be a long one today.”
“Caw,” he replies, giving a little bow, then turns and waddles his way back out again.
I wait until he’s disappeared around the doorframe, and mumble to myself, “Metal claws they came a-clacking, clacking at my chamber door. Quoth the Bert.”
“Caw, caw,” he replies from somewhere near the kitchen.
I shake my
head and smile to myself. “Silly little bugger.”
Thirteen
I MAKE MY way to the Industrial Park just behind Main Street first, heading straight for the Local Government’s Virtual Monitoring Office. It’s early, but that place runs twenty-four-seven, the same as most virtual-based business, so I can guarantee that someone will be there.
I go inside and find that the guy at the main desk is someone whose name I can never remember but who always seems to remember mine. He’s the sort of person that, if I insisted on following my father’s footsteps in that regard, my grandfather would have settled for me marrying, despite not being from the “old world”. Why would he be fine? Because he’s atypically ordinary, has a nice demeanour, a good job, and, above all else, is male.
Most of my family moved with the times, in some cases even adapting their religious beliefs to fit with the world around them, but Granddad, bless him, liked tradition. What that meant was that my one high school girlfriend was, to him at least, a “study buddy”. The few who came after that? Close friends, nothing more. I took that as a positive. Most people tell me I’m weird when I say that, but the fact is, I’ve known a lot of people who were completely ostracised by their family when they came out. Granddad loved me enough to not want to do that, so he chose to ignore that part of me rather than let it cause him to walk away from me. Would I have preferred acceptance? Sure I would have. But I had that from my parents, and I’d rather have denial than conflict.
Mr. X is as helpful as he always is, at least once I finish completing one of the warrants stored on the PD’s online system for my use. Deciding what information I’m going to need is difficult, though. I won’t be carrying out the work myself, that wouldn’t be allowed, no matter who I was, but I don’t want to leave myself with too much to go through afterward. If the need to clear my head wasn’t as dire as it is, I would have headed to Lori first and based my searches on whatever I turned up at her brother’s house. As it is, there’s no way that I’d be effective, so this guy gets the joy of my cheery disposition first.
In the end, I settle for three things. First, a full tracking of Eddie’s final log-in to the virtual world. That should show where he went, who he spoke to, and who else was in the vicinity that may have seen or heard something. If he died calling out the culprit’s name, for example, that would be a stunning, but strangely not unheard of, piece of luck. Second, I asked for a list of IP and MAC addresses used by Eddie over the last month before his death, including the real-world addresses that they related to. Finally, I requested the details of anyone that Eddie met multiple times over the same period and spent more than ten minutes with at a time, including names, IP and MAC addresses, and the relevant real-world addresses for each. It’s a broader search than I’d like, but it does mean that, if nothing turns up at his house, then I may still get lucky with Eddie’s online history.
I finish filling in my request, leave it with Mr. X, and go to call yet another cab.
Fourteen
I MAKE IT to Lori’s place a little after 07:55, and find that she’s already dressed and ready to go. She’s opted for a slightly different ensemble this time, with a lightweight long-sleeved burgundy sweater hanging over a pair of black baggy trousers and heavy-looking well-worn boots. The whole outfit would be classed as “scruff” by the local fashion-focused types; the slight stretch in the jumper, the small tears at the bottom of the trousers, and the scraped-away front of the boots, revealing the shine of steel toecaps, all add to the depreciation in style value. To me, it’s all just suitably casual. If she’s comfortable, then she’s going to be able to pick up more than if she’s feeling uneasy.
We stand in silence for a moment, me on her porch, watching her watch me from just inside her house. Lori is the first to make any significant move, leaning herself against the open door and crossing one arm just below her breasts, so that she can rest the elbow of the other on top of her hand and make a show of gently squeezing her lips between her thumb and index finger. Her pale blue eyes, icy in the shadow of the day’s black eyeliner and matching eye shadow, move slowly up and down as she studies me.
“Hmm,” she says.
“What?” I reply, mentally kicking myself for the irritability in my tone.
“I was just wondering if you only had one set of clothes, or just loads of the same thing.”
I look down at myself, noting my usual polished shoes, plain black trousers, and white work shirt from the men’s section. The tie is different than yesterday. Yesterday, it was a black tiger embossed on a black background, while today it’s a black dragon on a black background. I like the subtlety of it, but I guess it’s not overly apparent unless you get a closer look.
“Loads of the same,” I say at last, my academy training on communication kicking in as a method of self-defence and causing me to parrot her wording. “And I only wear them for work. It’s like a uniform or a character. Helps me separate one bit of my life from the other.”
“Cool,” she replies with a nod. She’s probably drawing parallels between what I’ve said and how she views Ink. To be fair, if that’s the case, she’s not a million miles off. She starts to gather her things, and asks, “So, what sort of stuff do you wear when you’re not working?”
I wait for her to start shutting the door, then turn my back to her and say, “Remember when you came visiting?” The creaking of the door comes to an abrupt stop. I let the silence hang for a moment. Then, smiling smugly, I look back over my shoulder and give Lori a wink. A little voice in the back of my head says, blushing looks good on her, but I ignore it in case Charlie creeps in again.
Lori blinks, laughs, and pulls the door closed.
Fifteen
WE ARRIVE AT Eddie’s house on Cornick Crescent less than half an hour later. The ride over started off fairly jovial. We mostly joked about people we drove by and talked about stupid things that we’d done when working. The closer that we got to the house, though, the edgier Lori became. She spent the final stretch of the journey staring silently into traffic while she tapped nervously on the steering wheel. Now that we’re here, she’s retreating into herself; jamming her hands into her pockets and standing stiffly as we survey the room where her brother died.
For all the assumptions that I made at the start of the case, Eddie kept a far nicer home than Mark Farlow and the Hollands. While their place was a pretty typical Nest, nothing here even hints at an Addict being the sole resident. The log-in chair and gear in the living room are in good condition and look like they belong in a small-to-mid-level business premises rather than someone’s home. Shelves line one wall, packed full of neatly ordered books on a variety of subjects, ranging from music and philosophy to cooking and programming. One small glass table sits a little way off from the chair, clean bar the normal layer of dust that things tend to gather over a week or so. Even compared to the rest of the road, number seventeen is a nice place.
Every room in the house is like that: almost obsessively ordered and kitted out in a retro-modern style with the feel of someone getting by far better than I am. “So what was he doing for a living to be able to afford a place like this? Freelance tech work or something like that?”
“No,” Lori replies. “I think that was part of his problem. We both had a decent inheritance from our grandparents. That would have been about seven or eight years ago, I think. I already had my job and just kept on working, but he was still struggling to find someone to take him on. He spent big initially, then just budgeted well and got by on the money while he was job hunting. The longer you’re unemployed, though, the tougher it is to get something.”
“True enough. Can I see the pictures that you took?”
Lori nods and taps her tablet screen a few times. After a moment, she passes it across with three photos tiled across the screen. “Those were the only ones that I saved.”
The top left photo is the one from the news sites. Rendered in black and white, it’s fairly artsy for what it is. The shot shows E
ddie’s arm hanging over the side of the log-in chair, dangling limp and lifeless. On the underside of Eddie’s forearm, a tattoo is partially visible. I can make out some lettering, but there isn’t enough to read.
“Any idea what the tattoo on his forearm said?” I ask.
“It was a quote,” Lori replies. “I think it was from a poem. A poor life this, if full of care, or something like that?”
“We have no time to stand and stare,” I finish.
“That’s right. He got it just before he started getting heavily into virtual work.”
I nod and enlarge the second photo on the screen. This one is a full-body shot of Eddie in the chair. He still has the needle that killed him in the hand that wasn’t visible in the last photo. Devin would have likely made use of Eddie’s semi-comatose state to make sure that it was his own hand that pumped the shit into his veins, so that’s not surprising. If Devin left his own fingerprints on it, Hoover would have told me from the get-go. Eddie’s headset looks like a pretty recent model, but that fits with the rest of his gear. His clothing is understated; just a pair of comfortable jogging bottoms and a T-shirt with some sort of logo on. I’d question it, but I’ve seen it before in the window of one of the local mainstream stores. It’s not a licensed product; it’s just a pattern that they plastered on this year’s run of discounted designs.
The third and final photo is taken from an angle to the side of Eddie’s head. The closeness to his head has resulted in a slight blurring of the headset and sagging lower jaw. Hanging just below this, the hand holding the needle is in better focus. There’s probably a market for stuff like this. If she wanted to, Lori could declare it a visual comment on the millions of faceless sufferers of addiction and substance abuse that you pass every day without ever knowing it, and the critics would eat it up in an effort to seem edgy. If it weren’t for the circumstances, I’d be tempted to suggest it to Lori as a way to make a quick buck.