One of Us (10 page)

I didn't know what it meant other than that part of my brain was evidently trying to get some things in order, and had been since Ensenada. I wished it well. My mind wasn't exactly razor-sharp before it became a flophouse for other people's hand-me-downs, and I now had far more pressing things to worry about.

"She's moving," Deck said.

I stood at the bedroom door and waited impatiently while Ms. Reynolds stirred toward consciousness. It looked like it was a long journey. Now that I was properly awake, panic was beginning to resurface, but I didn't poke her with a stick or anything. Foolishly, I was still hoping the whole situation could be resolved amicably.

Eventually her eyes opened. They were pretty red, a combination of hangover and the remnants of having been in shock. She stared at me without moving.

"Where?" she finally croaked. I had a glass of water in my hand, but she wasn't getting it just yet.

"Griffith," I said.

"How?"

"I brought you here." She sat up, wincing. When she looked down and saw the stitches in her wrists, her lips tightened and her face fell: a small and private look of sorrow and disappointment. I couldn't tell whether this was because it had happened, or because it had failed.

I gave her the water, and she drank.

"Why would you do that?" she asked when she'd finished.

"You were going to die. As it is, you're not allowed to go bungee-jumping. Doctor's orders. Want some chicken soup?"

She stared at me. "I'm a vegetarian."

"Right—your body is a temple. Full of money changers like vodka and smack."

"Look, who are you?"

"Hap Thompson," I said.

She was out of the bed with a speed I found frankly impressive, though once on her feet, she swayed alarmingly. "The front door's locked, and the windows don't open," I added. "You're not going anywhere."

"Oh, yeah? Just watch me," she said as she pushed past and swished out into the living room. Deck looked up, and she glared at him, face pale and furious. "Who the hell are you?"

"Deck," he said equably. "Friend of Hap's."

"How nice for you. Look, where are my clothes?"

I picked up my coat from the sofa and fished in the pockets. Two bras, a pair of panties, and a dress of some thin green material. I held them out to her. Laura looked at me as if I'd offered to crack a walnut between my buttocks.

"And?"

I shrugged. "It's all I could carry."

"And my purse is where?"

"Back in the hotel room."

"Are you some kind of monster? You kidnap a woman and don't bring her purse?"

Deck grinned at me. "She's real friendly, isn't she?"

Laura turned on him. "Look, fuckhead—do you mind if I call you that?—kidnapping's a federal offense. You guys are lucky I'm not on the phone right now, talking to the police."

"Memory-dumping's a crime too," I said. "Not to mention murder. You and I both know the last thing you're going to do is get in touch with the cops."

Her eyes went blank, and she did a good impression of total lack of recall. "What murder?" she said. For a moment it was hard to believe this was someone I'd fished out of a bloody bath in the wee hours. She looked like the kind of bank officer who could make you shrivel to a raisin with a raised eyebrow. Either Woodley had done a superb job in patching her up, or she was as tough as all hell.

"Nice try," I said, holding her eyes, "but it's not going to work with me. I do this for a living. You lost the event itself, but you still know what you lost. You'll remember seeking me out, and you'll remember why."

"You took the job. You got paid."

"You lied. And I got only a third of the money."

"I'll get you the rest."

"I'm not sure I believe you have it, and anyway, I don't want it. Don't worry—you'll get a refund. Judging by last night, it looks like the memory dump didn't really work out for you anyway."

Laura glared at me, and then marched over to the front door. She gave the handle a tug. It was, as advertised, locked. "Open this door," she commanded.

"Coffee?" Deck asked me, poised with kettle in hand over in the kitchenette.

Laura kicked the door, nearly toppling herself over in the process.
"Open it."

"Lovely," I told Deck. "Think I've got some mint mocha left somewhere."

She stomped back to me. I thought I was going to catch a slap in the face, but she just snatched her clothes and banged off into the bathroom, where she slammed and locked the door. I decided "tough as hell" was the answer to my question.

"She going to be okay in there?" Deck asked me.

"Unless she can break the window and absail ten floors."

"No," he said patiently. "I mean—
okay
."

I knew what he meant. "I think so." I suspected that trying to kill yourself first thing in the morning, with a hangover and two men annoying the hell out of you, was different from doing it in the wee hours of the a.m. with no one around.

Deck found the coffee, poured it into a cafetiere. I used to have a coffeemaker like everybody else. You tell them where the coffee beans are, and how to use the tap, and it's ready whenever you want it. But through a design error the hole the coffee comes out of is rather closer to the machine's posterior than you would hope, and after seeing the little biomachine squatting over a cup, grunting with effort, I tend to sour on the idea of a hot beverage. When it goes wrong, as they invariably do, the result tastes very strange indeed. My machine got sick, with what I suspect was the coffeemaker equivalent of food poisoning, and I just couldn't have it in the house any longer. I put it in the alley behind the building late at night and it was gone the next day. Maybe it made its way down to Mexico to be with its comrades. If so, it must have been in a different group from the ones I'd passed on the way to Ensenada. Coffeemakers tend to hold grudges, apparently, and between them they could easily have forced me off the road. Or maybe they just didn't get a good look at my face.

Deck handed me a cup. "She's not going to just take it back."

"No kidding." Having met Laura Reynolds properly, I was now wishing I had woken her up with a pointy stick. I was also finding it hard to believe I'd ever expected things might go differently. "So we go with that time-honored favorite. Plan B."

"Which is?"

"Exactly the same as Plan A, except we just have to keep her locked up while I get hold of the transmitter." The sound of water and occasional bad-tempered stomping made it clear that Laura was now taking a shower. I was looking forward to being harangued when she got out, for not bringing her shampoo and cotton balls.

"By the way," Deck said, "that weirdo called. Quat."

My next move, on a plate. "Shit—why didn't you say?"

Deck shrugged. "Didn't know it was important, and he was done before I could pick it up. You set a call-back, apparently. Just said he was around, you wanted to talk to him."

I started moving. "Can you do me a favor?"

"Absolutely not. Fuck off." I waited. Deck grinned. "Babysitting, I assume."

"I have to go see him."

"Why not just call?"

"He won't do business that way."

"How long will you be?"

"Very quick."

Deck settled himself on the sofa, pointed a finger at me. "Better be. I suspect Laura Reynolds is a person who's going to take some handling if she gets het up. This is going to take your charm and winning ways."

"Half hour at the most," I said.

THE LOBBY DOWNSTAIRS was quiet, just a few people setting up their stalls. During the day most of them sell arts and crafts—inexplicable things fashioned out of pieces of wood originally used for something else, which you buy and take home and move from room to room until you realize the attic is the best place for them. Someone else's attic, preferably. It is my firm belief that in the afterglow of our civilization, when all we have made is come to naught and our planet slumbers once more, home only to a few valiant creatures—bugs, probably—who have the courage to struggle through whatever nemesis we have wrought on Mother Nature, some alien race will land and do a spot of archaeology. And all they'll find, particularly in coastal areas, is layers of mirrors made from reclaimed floorboards with homespun wisdom etched on them with a soldering iron, or pockets of driftwood sculptures of fishing boats that rock when pushed, and the aliens will nod sadly among themselves and admit that this was a civilization whose time had indeed come.

I quickly located Tid, the guy who'd parked my car, and gave him the usual ten-spot. I like to think this is a voluntary arrangement, showing great generosity on my part, but I suspect that without it I'd never find out where my car had been put. Tid's a small, disreputable-looking man who seems to live solely on M&Ms, but we'd always gotten along well enough. Money's like that: promotes straightforward relationships. This time I slipped him an extra twenty, and asked him to do me a favor, and then ran down to the parking lot under the building.

The car was parked over on the far side, nestled into a dark corner. This was perfect for me, because I wasn't going anywhere. I got inside, set the alarm, and locked the doors.

Most people go on the Net via their homes, obviously. Though my account was now billed to the apartment, I still had the rig in the car because over the last couple of years the car had remained the most stable environment in my life. I'd bought it after my first couple of months' work for REMtemps, and had it fully kitted out. As I accumulated more money, I upgraded and tweaked to the point where even I couldn't remember where all the wires were. Ripping the rig all out and reconstructing it in the apartment was one of those things I never quite got around to, like throwing away pens that didn't work properly. Or getting a life.

The console in the car plays images directly into the brain, so I don't have to wear VR goggles. All I had to do was flip the switch, close my eyes, and be transferred to the other side.

The light changed, and instead of being underground I was in my standard driveway home page, facing out toward a leafy residential district of smalltown America. I put my foot down and pulled out into the road. My netcar looks like a souped-up '59 Caddy, complete with retro fins and powder-blue paint job, but the engine characteristics are bang up-to-date. I don't mind driving fast on the Net, because of the in-built anti-collision protocol—in fact, sometimes I speed straight at other people just for the pure hell of it. It's especially fun if you come across one of those die-hards who refuse to get with the new metaphor, and insist on trawling the Net on surfboards. You see them occasionally, old hippies scraping along the road on boards equipped with little skateboard wheels, complaining about the traffic and muttering about the good old days of browser wars.

I turned left out of my street and tore down the trunk lines for a while, then hung a right and cut up into the personal domain hills on the other side. You have to slog through a lot of cyber suburbia these days—family sites full of digitized vacation videos and mind-numbing detail on how little Todd did in his tests—before you get out into the darker zones. It used to be that you could type in a URL and leap straight to anyone's home page. But when they folded out into three-dimensional spaces and started to look like real homes—and their owners started spending actual time there—things changed. They wanted you to walk up the path and ring a doorbell like a civilized person. With most other places you can still just jump straight to the general district, but not where I was going—and the jams at the jump links are often so bad, you're usually better just putting your foot down and going the long way around. Thus what had started as an alternative reality ended up just being another layer of the same old same old, operating on more or less similar rules.

Humans are like that. Very literal-minded.

I reminded myself, as usual, that I ought to visit my grandparents soon. Now was not the time. It seldom was. They retired to the Net six years ago, about two weeks ahead of the Grim Reaper. Bought themselves a scrabby virtual farm way out on the edge of Australasia.Net just before they died, and had themselves transferred. Unfortunately they were ripped off by their Realtor, and the resolution is fucked. It's just polygons and big blocks of color out where they live, and voices sound like they're coming through speakers that had an earlier life in a thrash ambient band. I guess I could phone them from out in the real world, but that gives me the creeps: too much like pretending they're still alive. They are—were, whatever—good people, and I'm glad that in some sense I still have access to them, but there are barriers I suspect shouldn't be breached. We still don't know as much about the mind as we think we do, and there's something a little off about them now, as if the rough edges got lost in the translation. Show me a person without a bit of sand in their nature, and I'll show you someone a little creepy.

I started to lose speed, which meant that traffic was starting to build—people checking their mail and doing the early morning shopping online. The roads still looked empty, but that's because I like it that way and usually set my gear to filter out all cars except those of people I know.

Deck hates the Net—won't come in unless he has to. Says he doesn't trust mediated experience. I asked him what magazine he got that out of and he admitted it was something an ex-girlfriend used to say. But I quite like it, enjoy the feeling of going places without actually having to get out of the chair, and of there being some other place you can go to in the flick of a switch. Mainly I use it to access people who refuse to do business in the normal way. Quat, for example, who won't make any transaction over a phone. Doesn't trust them, which is a complete pain in the ass when you need something in a hurry.

As I drove, my mind worked overtime, trying to predict the angles now that I knew more about the guy that Laura had killed. The bottom line was simple: There was even more reason for me to get her experience back into her head and out of mine—like immediately. If there's one thing that really ticks cops off, it's people whacking one of their own. I didn't know how much difference it would make that I hadn't been the one who actually pulled the trigger, but I suspected that if they got hold of me, they'd choose not to get mired in metaphysical complexities.