Nine

 

A boy is out walking by himself, early on a Sunday evening. He heads slowly down the hill towards the school, not going anywhere in particular, just following his feet. Behind him, half a mile back, is the place where he lives: an old condominium, one of the first built on this stretch of the coast, now mainly empty for the winter season. He doesn't know yet that it will define his idea of living space for ever, that he will always seek out places with clean rooms and empty corridors, where you nod to strangers at a distance and know that you'll be leaving again before you even step in the door. It's just home, and always has been. His father is the caretaker there – air-conditioner supremo, banisher of bugs and cleaner of pools. His mother works in a bar/restaurant a mile down the beach, and has done all her life. She's there now, ferrying burgers and frosted glasses of beer, yakking with her friend Marlene and listening to the guitarist play ‘The Great Filling Station Hold-up’ for the first, but not the last, time of the evening.

The boy left his father sitting comfortably in front of the tube, watching a tape of an old Braves game for like the eighteenth time. The Doritos and bean dip were in place on the side table, a beer in his favourite glass by his hand: he was, as he always put it, not moving for no man now. Neither parent would mind the boy going out walking by himself. He's always done it, and nothing bad's ever happened to him yet.

The sidewalk down to the school is very familiar. It is the site of a raging torrent every time it rains hard, and the marching path of a procession of ants a couple months ago. The boy spent an hour squatted down by the column of little creatures as they flowed silently past, wondering where they were going, and why. In school that week Miss Bannerham had told them a story about butterflies, how some particular brand began the year hanging in South America, and then – all at once, and all together – flew up the world as far as Canada or somewhere. Someplace north, anyhow. It was a long journey, and along the way they mated, and laid eggs, and died: the butterflies which made the return leg later in the year, back to the exact same trees the journey had started in, weren't the same bugs who'd begun the trip. Some were born to fly north, others didn't know any direction but south: between them they followed a cycle that went on and on, year after year, filled with apparent purpose and yet with no aim that he could see.

Miss Bannerham said it was something to do with a particular plant they needed, or temperatures, or something, but the boy didn't believe it. If the plant was so important, why didn't they all just set up camp right next to one, and put their feet up for the whole year? If you liked the sea, you lived on the coast: it made sense. You didn't go live in Utah or somewhere.

The ants were the same. They were up to something, he knew, but they weren't letting on what it was.

That particular evening the sidewalk was still, and dry, and frankly not much to look at. The boy carried on down the hill, hands in his pockets, peering at the houses he passed. Deep yards, trimmed grass, mostly one-storey houses. The light had faded enough that lights shone in many of the living rooms: he caught brief glimpses of people sitting, moving, watching TV. A torso and an arm would move smoothly across the window, then disappear; someone would stand, sit down again; an occasional murmur of sound rose and fell, no more intelligible than the beat of distant wings. Maybe it was all supposed to be easier to understand than the ants and the butterflies, but the boy didn't see how. It was other people stuff, parts of lives he'd never comprehend.

The hill began to level out, and the school yard became visible over on the right. This was a large, square compound, taking up a whole block. At the far end were the classrooms; near side a big playground lined with grass and trees and with black metal railings all around. The boy stopped when he was opposite, and looked across. He didn't have any particular feelings about the place, other than it was where he spent most days. Inside, on a school day, would be lots of children, some he knew and didn't mind, others he didn't know or mildly disliked. A big container of people who were different from him, who had different parents and different lives. The only particularly interesting occupant was Miss Bannerham, who the boy was just old enough to have a crush on.

He didn't think of it in those terms, just knew that he minded her class less than the others, and that if Mom hadn't been his mom, he wouldn't have minded it being Miss Bannerham. At home, in a safe place, he had a badge she had given him. Some people had come to the school two weeks ago, to mark the teachers. The boy had been somewhat surprised to find that even teachers had to do tests, but Miss Bannerham didn't seem to mind. She gathered the children at the front of the class, on the floor, and told them about some stuff. The grown-ups had stood at the back, and they listened too. The boy had asked questions, and answered questions: it had been an interesting class, and it was fun to know things. At the end of the day, when he was gathering his books and there weren't many kids left in the classroom, Miss Bannerham came up to him, took him to one side, and gave him the badge. It was narrow and silver and had the word ‘Merit’ on it, and she said that he could keep it for a month. He kept quiet about it at school, sensing vaguely that was the best policy, but he showed it to his parents and they seemed pleased.

The boy had spent the day on the grey beach, battling the wind and looking for sand dollars. His family had a policy, devised and administered by his father, that anyone who found an intact sand dollar was entitled to a – as he put it – ‘beverage of their choice’, the next time the family went into town for dinner. The boy's beverage of choice was always a coke, which he would have got regardless, but he understood that wasn't the point.

All he'd found that day were fragments, and a small dead squishy thing that he hadn't liked the look of, but that didn't matter. He felt pleasantly tired, and decided to just walk round the school and then go home.

He peered in through the railings as he passed the playground, looking at the trees on the far side. They had been demonstrated, to everyone's satisfaction, to be the best place in the whole area for finding Knights. These were large beetles which most of the boys coveted and kept in jars with holes punched in the lid, and though their real name probably wasn't Knights that was what they were called. Many happy hours were spent conducting battles between these insects: the contests actually rather peaceable affairs in which their characteristics – length, width, coolness of wings – were compared. In general the bugs were green, but every now and then someone would find a black one, and these always won the contests hands down. Black Knights always did. The boy's best friend Earl already had one, and it was the boy's view that it was about time he did too.

Sending out a vague hope that he might make such a find the following day, the boy continued along the path as it went by the school buildings. There wasn't much to see along that stretch, or after he'd turned the first corner: just dark windows in a darker building. He whiled away the time considering something he'd heard a TV preacher say earlier in the day – that the Lord would have mercy upon people who'd done bad things, and cast their sins into the sea. This didn't seem to tally with his mother's view, which was that people who dumped things in the sea were themselves bad, especially if they damaged seagulls' wings. The boy had nervously asked his dad where specifically the sins were cast, because he didn't want to swim through them by accident and come out bad. His father had laughed uproariously and stopped shouting at the TV for a while.

The boy turned the second corner and walked up as far as where the playground began again; then stopped and looked at the trees, now just the other side of the railings. It was quite dark by then, with only a streetlamp at each corner of the block, and the trees looked big and old. He could probably have made it over the fence and into the grounds, thus stealing a march on the next day's bug-hunters, but he didn't really fancy it. In the dark the trees looked a little, well, frightening. He knew they weren't really so, because he'd climbed into their lower branches often enough during the day when they were huge and green and friendly, but things always looked different at night. He wondered which was true, the way things looked during the day, or during the night, and concluded it probably depends.

Anyway, the bugs would almost certainly be asleep.

Thinking that if he headed back now there might still be some Doritos left, he turned the final corner into the last straight, back towards where he'd turn left to go back up the hill. By now he was in a state of near-hypnotic abstraction, and at first didn't notice the footsteps behind him.

When he did he turned round, expecting someone out walking their dog. He was surprised to see that the sidewalk was empty.

He walked on a little way, and heard the footsteps start up again. They weren't hurrying or running, merely walking at the same pace as he was. He knew it wasn't an echo of his own footsteps off the wall, however, because he was wearing the sneakers that made no sound at all.

Heart beating a little faster, the boy stepped up his pace. The footsteps got a little quicker too, and he began to get a little afraid. He'd been warned about vaguely dire things which could happen if you talked to the wrong people, or got in the wrong sort of car. Neither of his parents had been very specific about what these things were, or of what makes or models of car were the wrong ones, but the boy suddenly felt that this was probably one of the circumstances they'd been talking about.

He hurried along the pavement, faster and faster, but knew that he wasn't getting further away from whatever was following him. If it was a grown-up, there was no chance of out-running them. They had longer legs.

So he stopped, took a deep breath, and turned round.

This time he did see someone.

A man stood way back at the corner, under the street light. He was wearing a smart suit. His face was in shadow, and the boy couldn't see it clearly: the lamp seemed to shine from behind his head. He seemed too far away to be the one making the footsteps, but there was no-one else in sight. The man started walking, and the boy stayed rooted to the spot.

Later he was back at home, eating Doritos and watching the television with his mom as his father slept in his chair like a felled dinosaur. They made it to the end of some dumb film and then everyone went to bed.

I woke to find Laura sitting on the floor cross-legged, eating toast. She held out a cup of coffee to me. I croaked something unintelligible and sat upright. It took a long minute for me to place myself, and when I did I reached in my jacket pocket and pulled out the dream receiver. One look at the display told me what I already knew. I hadn't been working. The dream was my own.

‘Deck's in the shower,’ Laura said, still holding out the coffee. Her eyes looked puffy.

I took it, sipped. It was hot, and tasted like coffee. So far, so good. ‘When did he get back?’

‘About an hour after you crashed. Said he took a scenic route. You okay? You went out kind of fast.’ I nodded. After stowing the transmitter in one of Deck's closets I'd watched out of the front window for a while, but saw nothing except an abandoned washing machine trudging off down the road. Laura clearly expected me to say something about how the transmitter had got there, and the person who'd brought it, but I didn't. I found I could barely speak. I sat on the sofa and next thing I knew I'd slipped back twenty-five years, as if there was too much to deal with in the present day and my mind had run yelping for simpler times. The dividing lines seemed to be blurring. What I'd woken from wasn't just a dream, but also a memory – one I'd forgotten for a long while. As I sat with Laura's eyes looking quizzically up at me, it was suddenly fresher and more real than the warmth of the cup in my hand or the sound of falling water in Deck's bathroom.

Round the school we went.

I picked up the phone, dialled a number in the Net.

‘Hello?’

‘Yeah hi, Quat. It's Hap.’ Laura stared at me with a ‘what the fuck are you doing?’ look on her face.

There was a pause. Then Quat said, ‘Hey – how you doing?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Transmitter worked a dream. The guy hasn't shown up to take it back though.’

Very smooth: ‘I'll give him a call.’

‘You do that. Listen – something else weird's happened: I can't get any cash out the ATM. Can you look into it?’

‘Sure, sure,’ he said. ‘Look, Hap, where are you, exactly?’

‘Around,’ I said, holding the phone very tight. ‘One more thing: you know anything about that cop who got whacked?’

I put the phone down on silence.

‘What the hell was all that about?’ Deck asked from the doorway.

‘Just noise,’ I said. ‘He knows I'm lying, but not to what degree. And I do have the transmitter, after all. Now he doesn't know what's going on, or what I know.’

‘But you don't know shit,’ he said.

‘Not yet I don't.’ Overnight, and in my sleep, things had changed. Quat's betrayal didn't seem the most important thing any more, nor the reasons behind it – whatever they might be. I was very panicky about my money, and I should also have been concerned as to why Stratten hadn't stuck to his word and sent me a night's dreamwork, but I wasn't. Not yet.

I wanted to know who the men in the grey suits were, and what they were doing, and why I knew them. Which was okay, because all lines of inquiry seemed to be leading in the same direction.

Deck stood guard outside in the street as I broke into Ray Hammond's apartment. Laura came with me. Her choice, not mine. On the way over I'd checked the news and found the Prose Café gun battle was all over it. Travis made it out with a flesh wound, Barton was critical and not expected to last, the other two cops were dead.

The ‘persons unknown’ had disappeared, with no bodies left on the scene. City-wide APB on them; no mention of me.

There was no tape across the door to Hammond's crib, and no cop standing guard, which implied that the LAPD didn't know what he had been doing in the area. I asked Laura about that, and she said he had a regular address over in Burbank. She wouldn't say why she hadn't hunted him down there, only that she'd worked out he spent some of the time elsewhere, and got the hacker – Quat, as it had transpired – to find out where. Presumably the cops had done a house-to-house, and given up on getting no reply from the entry phone to this apartment. If they came back for a second sweep, or anybody else weird turned up, Deck would let us know. Until then, his apartment was ours.

The lock on the door was complex and expensive, but no match for my organizer. Within two minutes it was open, and we were inside.

The apartment was small, the door giving straight into a square living room with a kitchen over on one side. The small window would have looked over the street below had the curtains not been drawn. Two other rooms out back, a bedroom and the other nearly filled by a desk. A bathroom you could very nearly get all of your body into at once.

The kitchen said this wasn't a place Hammond had spent much quality time. Three cans of beer and some leftover Chinese in the fridge, the noodles covered in a bacterial culture so advanced they probably had their own constitution and strong views on environmental issues. Precisely one plate and one set of cutlery in the drawer. The rest of the apartment said that Hammond liked his downtime in an austere environment. The furniture was cheap and functional: a sofa and one chair in the living room, a single bed, a couple of small tables with nothing on them. The closets in the bedroom were empty, there were no toiletries in the bathroom, and dust lurked in every corner. There were no pictures on the walls of any of the rooms. It was like a suite in a motel no-one ever used, two weeks after the maid had been fired and taken her severance pay in reproduction art.

I left Laura in the living room and went through into the study. A shelf hung above the desk, with a single book on it. A small bible, well-thumbed. A quote had been written out on the inside front cover: ‘And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.’

Strange. I slipped it in my pocket.

Apart from that the room was bare, but as I glanced under the desk I noticed something. On the floor near the wall there were a few lines in the dust, where the carpet showed through. As if cables had lain there until recently. The closets told a similar story: clean rectangles in fine dust, where file boxes had been stacked. I went back into the living room, turned the seat cushions on the sofa. Neat diagonal cuts across the underside of each: somebody looking for something concealed.

‘Someone's already tossed the place,’ I said. ‘I think there was a computer on that desk, and it's gone, along with files. They were looking for something else too, something you could hide in a cushion. Do you have any idea what that might be?’

There was no reply. I looked up to see Laura leaning against the kitchen unit, head slumped forward. ‘Laura?’

She slowly lifted her head. Her eyes were unnaturally dry, mouth turned down at the corners. She looked like a fourteen-year-old girl seen through the prism of a lifetime of disappointment. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ she said.

‘Thought you'd quit.’

She smiled wanly. ‘Only about a hundred times.’

‘It's my belief some people are smokers and some aren't,’ I said. ‘You work out which and stick with it. Saves everyone a load of grief.’

I glanced round the walls for sensors, was surprised not to see any. Then I remembered Hammond had been both a smoker and a ranking cop. Presumably he cut himself a dispensation. I lit a couple of Camels and handed one to Laura. ‘Hammond is the key to all of this,’ I said. ‘You killed him. Any chance of explaining why?’

‘I don't remember doing it.’

‘I know. I don't need the detail: I need to know the why, and you still remember that.’

‘It was personal,’ she said.

‘No shit. Nobody uses a whole clip over a parking ticket.’

‘It's not relevant to what's happening now.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Look, it just isn't. Are you done here? Can we go?’

‘At some point you're going to have to tell someone,’ I said. ‘And I don't mean the cops. I just mean somebody. You drink too much, and your mouth's generally trying to make a smile it doesn't mean. You go to Mexico for a two-day holiday and spend the whole time wallowing in misery, when you're not getting yourself in bad situations in bars. When you dumped the memory of the murder on me it was already fucked up, like you're used to blanking things. You've got to find a way of letting some of this stuff out of your head.’

She smiled sardonically. ‘Thanks for the consultation, doctor. Shall I come along to be patronized again, next week, same time?’

‘Just trying to help.’ I shrugged. ‘Despite the fact you're a complete pain in the ass, I like you.’

Mistake. She turned away and ground her cigarette out in the sink, barely half-smoked. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Every guy always does.’

Her eyes changed, went opaque, and it was clear the conversation was over.

The apartment was a dead end. I cleaned up the sink so no-one would know we'd been there, and locked the door behind us as we left. We collected Deck from outside, and on a whim I walked up to the crossroads and peered through the window of the liquor store. The old guy was still sitting behind the counter, as he had been in the memory, looking like he'd been stuffed. I left the others outside and went in.

‘How's your dog?’ I asked.

The old man looked up at me, squinted: he obviously couldn't see too well. ‘He died. Who are you? Do I know you?’

‘Course you do,’ I said. ‘I'm in here all the time.’

‘Oh. Well, nice to see you again.’ He leaned forward, started to stand up. As soon as he'd begun I wanted to tell him not to bother: whole cities have been built with less effort. His face was deeply lined, the skin dry as powder, and the closer he got to standing, the less healthy he looked. But it was clearly important to him, so I waited the process out. I glanced outside, saw Deck and Laura standing talking. Eventually the old guy was more or less upright, leaning on the counter. ‘What can I get for you?’

‘Nothing, actually,’ I said. ‘You know that cop who got shot? Happened just along from here, didn't it?’

‘That's right,’ he replied proudly. ‘Saw the whole thing. You a cop?’

I debated saying yes, and committing a felony, but decided I'd already got enough marks against my name. ‘No. Just interested. And you didn't see it all. You were asleep.’

Hands shaking: ‘How do you know that?’

‘I just do. Plus you can't see the spot where the body fell from here. So tell me what you actually saw.’ I didn't offer him money. It would have been demeaning: talking was all this guy had left.

He licked his lips. ‘Tell the truth, I was a little tired that night. May have nodded off around one. Anyhow, I heard this noise, and woke up. Thought at first it was the door banging, but there was no-one in the store and the noise kept going on. Realized it was a gun going off. By the time I got to the door it had stopped. I decided to stay inside.’

‘What happened then?’

‘Heard a car come roaring down the road, then somebody ran past my door. Just in front of me, but I don't see too well. Sounded like a woman's footsteps to me, though: went off and round the corner. Then I hear shouting, some guy cussing fit to burst. So I went back to my chair, got my glasses, came and looked again.’

‘You couldn't see anybody from here, though, right?’

‘Not at first,’ he said. ‘I'm coming to that. At first there's just these two voices, saying something I can't hear. Then two more cars roll up.’

The hairs on the back of my neck began to rise. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Kind of a shiny grey, with those blacked-out windows the pimps and drug-dealers like. Two guys get out of each car.’

‘Medium height, wearing suits?’

‘That's right.’ He peered at me. ‘You know them?’

I shook my head. Six. There were six of the bastards now. ‘What happened then?’

‘Not much. The guys go round the corner, stay there a few minutes. I'm wondering if I should go offer to help, but I figure there's enough of them – what can I do? And I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm kind of old. Then they come running back, get in the cars, drive off. Second later the first car goes past, shiny grey, just the same. And that's it. I called the cops.’

‘And you told them about the guys in the cars?’

‘I certainly did. Gangland slaying, I called it. They quoted me in the paper – though they kept the number of guys a secret.’

Big, bad news. After last night, Travis had a way of connecting me to Hammond's murder: Hammond→anti-social guys in suitse→Hap. Not actually the right way, because he didn't know Laura Reynolds' role in the loop, but a way. It was enough.

‘Thanks,’ I said, distractedly. ‘You've been a big help.’

‘Pleasure,’ he said. ‘And since I know you, I'll tell you something I didn't like to say to the cops. They'd have thought I was losing my mind, or just that my eyes weren't right. The guys I saw: it wasn't just like they all bought their suits from the same place. Their faces looked the same too.’ He looked at me levelly, and for a moment I saw the man he'd once been – and made a silent bet that this was one liquor store which hadn't been knocked off very often. ‘You believe me?’

‘Yes I do,’ I said. ‘And I'll return the favour with a piece of advice. You see them again, you hide.’

When I got outside Deck was leaning against a lamp-post. Laura was standing ten yards down the way, round about the position Hammond's body had fallen.

‘What's up with her?’ I asked.

‘Told her one of the reasons it took me so long to get back last night.’

‘Which is?’

‘Went by your apartment. I figured if all the weird dudes were at the Café raising hell, might be a good time. Somebody had already tricked the lock – I guess after those two guys lost you, they checked out your place. I went in, dug your memory receiver out the closet, closed the door. Didn't tidy up or anything.’

I smiled, thinking not for the first time how dire the world must be if you don't have someone like Deck sitting in the dug-out with you. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But you were lucky. Turns out these guys come in six-packs.’

Deck raised his eyebrows. ‘Shit. Anyhow, so I mentioned this to Laura. She knows you can put it back into her head.’

I reached out, touched him on the shoulder. ‘Wait here a second,’ I said.

I walked down the road until I was a couple of yards from Laura. She was staring at the remainder of a large bloodstain on the sidewalk, arms folded, shoulders slumped.

‘So when do you want to do it?’ she asked.

‘I don't,’ I said.

She looked up slowly, then frowned. ‘What?’

‘There's no point. Travis is already on my case, and the cops can connect me to Hammond's death through the guys who are chasing after you. It's too late for the transfer to do me any good.’

‘But you didn't do it.’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe not. But I've got used to having it in my head. There was a place there waiting for it.’

‘And that's it?’

‘That's it.’

Laura breathed out heavily. For just a moment she looked like the person she really was, all the spikes retracted and forgotten. She glanced down the road into the distance then back at me. ‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘Find out what's going on.’

‘You care?’

‘Yes, I do. If I were you I'd ring in sick, go take a vacation in Europe for a while. What do you do for a living, anyhow?’

‘Work for a bank,’ she said, and smiled up at me, one eye squinted against the sun. ‘Client liaison. Kind of stupid, huh?’

‘It's a living.’

‘It's a coma, is what it is.’ She looked over at Deck, who was still leaning against the lamp-post, gazing at nothing in particular. ‘You know what? I think I've resigned.’

‘You want a ride someplace?’

‘Yeah. Wherever you guys are going.’ She laughed at the confusion in my face. ‘Come on, Hap. I've still got the four weirdos of the apocalypse after me, and they know I did what I did.’

‘There's six of them,’ I said. ‘Actually.’

‘Whatever. You've got a hair up your ass about working it out somehow: I figure I'm safer with you guys.’

‘Could be a bad decision.’

‘My favourite type,’ she smiled, and nodded towards Deck. ‘Come on: let me buy you a beer.’