One of Us (12 page)

When I was through the wall and back in real LA, I slowed to something approaching legal speed, and retraced my route of the night before back out to the boulevard. I didn't know what else to do. The only thing I could think of was that Laura had somehow convinced Deck to take her back to the hotel to collect her moisturizing creams and exfoliants. Long shot, I grant you, but it was either that or they were still in Griffith somewhere, and I sincerely believed it would be better for me to spend the next couple hours elsewhere. I had no idea who the guys in gray were, or what they wanted—but it was clear they were pretty hot at finding people: even people they'd never seen before. I wanted lots of distance between us. I reasoned that Deck knew my number: He'd call when he could. Assuming no one was stopping him.

I wasn't surprised to see the same flunky behind the desk at the Nirvana Inn, and he didn't seem surprised to see me.

"Chip," I said, reading the name on his badge. "How the devil are you?"

"Excuse me?" he said after a pause.

"Good to hear it. Now, question: Has Ms. Reynolds been back here this morning with a guy?"

"No, sir," Chip replied. "But a guy came with another guy, and they were looking for her."

"What did these guys look like?"

"Medium height. Kind of grim, with matching outfits. Arrived about ten minutes after you left last night."

I stared back at him. "And what did you tell them?"

"That Ms. Reynolds had just been abducted. I gave them a thorough description of you, and read them your registration number from the external security camera."

"I see. Why?"

He shrugged. "They threatened to kill me, too. And they were even more convincing."

That at least explained how the men in the gray suits had tracked me down. "Fair enough. Any cops been by?"

"No," Chip said cheerfully. "Guess I've got that to look forward to."

"Not necessarily. But if they do, will you do me a favor?"

"Maybe. What?"

"Forget I was here."

"And why would I do that?"

I pulled my wallet out. The only big note I had left was a fifty. "Partly this," I said, placing it on the counter. "Mainly just because it would help me out, and right now I'm a person who could use some assistance."

The money vanished. "I'll see what I can do."

"Thanks," I said, and turned to go. The adrenaline that had shot me across from Griffith was turning sour, and I wasn't in the mood to play tough guy any longer. Either he'd help me out, or he wouldn't. Not much I could do about it.

I was a couple of yards from the door when he called out to me. I turned to see him holding something in his hand. "Her bag," he said. "You left it in her room."

I took the suitcase from him, looked inside. The remainder of her clothes, her purse, even the half bottle of vodka.

"How come you didn't give this to the other guys?"

"They didn't ask for it. Plus I don't think you're the only person who needs some help."

I looked at him. He was young, wholesome, firmly of the genus "Hotel Staff Who Rate Their Chances At Making Duty Manager Within Five Years," but evidently more than that.

"What do you mean?"

"That woman. Ms. Reynolds. She seemed nice, but in a jam. Anyone who's skinny and pretty and drunk before she goes out for the evening isn't thinking happy thoughts. It's a hard call, but I reckon you're closer to being a friend to her than the other guys. I sure don't think they had anyone's happiness on their minds."

I zipped up the suitcase again. "Thanks," I said. "See you around."

"With the greatest of respect," Chip replied, "I sincerely hope not."

The car was parked in the lot of the diner opposite. I tried Deck's number once more, with the same result. I could either go wait outside his house, or I could go back to Griffith. Someone once taught me that if you don't know where you're going, there's no point hurrying there, so I rooted around in Laura's handbag for a moment, then locked the car and went to get some food.

During the day the diner looked considerably less dangerous, though probably still not somewhere you'd want to take someone of a nervous disposition. Me, for example. It was also empty, apart from a well-dressed guy slumped over a cup of coffee at the far end. The cook nodded at me as I came in, so I felt welcome, which was nice. The way things were going, I would be living in places like this for the rest of my life.

The menu informed me that the pigs that had ended up in the sausage patties had all been organically farmed, and that everyone had been real nice to them throughout their life. It seemed unlikely to me that the diner's clientele would give a shit—these are guys whose hair is still wet from climbing out of the primordial soup. But that's LA for you: Maybe they all practiced mugging without cruelty. Personally, I care only for pigs that have been kept in matchboxes and had people whisper nasty things to them in the night, but I ordered a small breakfast anyway. I could always beat up the sausage on my plate. From the look on the waitress's face, it was clear she was working there only to fill in time before the world ended in the depressing way she'd always anticipated. Taking my order seemed to deepen her sadness.

While I waited for my food to arrive, I took a look through what I'd taken from Laura's purse. Her organizer.

Luckily the unit wasn't finger-coded, or I'd have had no chance. It was password-protected in the conventional way, but that didn't take long to crack—especially as I had a vague idea of what the password was from her loaned memories of Ensenada. I plugged her organizer into my own, which is packed full of software of dubious provenance which I've picked up on the Net. By the time I was halfway through my first cup of coffee, the OS had rolled over and I was in.

The fact that she'd passworded it at all said a lot about Laura Reynolds. Every organizer gives you the option, and the world is divided into those who do and those who don't password. If you do, then every time you turn it on you've got to scribble or type in that sequence of characters before you can even get someone's phone number. A bit of a pain, and no real protection against someone who knows what they're doing. Secrets are difficult to keep, and anyone who runs their life around them is forever teetering on the edge of disclosure. Plus this: Making something secret makes it too important, elevates it to the point where it runs your life from the shadows. If you hide what's at your core from other people for too long, sooner or later you end up hiding it from yourself and waking up with no idea of who you are.

Laura Reynolds's password was 16/4/2003. I worked out she'd have been around fourteen, fifteen back then—assuming I was right in pegging her age in the late twenties. I checked that date in the calendar, but it was blank. Of course, she wouldn't have had this organizer then—it was an Apple Groovy
^TM
, quite new—but she could have filled it in anyway. People often do that in the first flush of new organizer joy, sketching in the story of their life thus far. I also did a search for the phrase "My Birthday": Everybody puts them in, privately making the day special for themselves—as if the organizer is their own private world, and they're free to be vulnerable there. Laura's birthday was 11/4, so that wasn't it either. Whatever. It evidently meant something to her.

I knew there'd be no entries for the period when she'd been in Ensenada, and found there was nothing on the day when she dumped the memory of the murder on me either. I trawled through her address book for a while, but nothing jumped out: Then I did a search to see what names were most frequently cross-referenced in the calendar. It seemed Laura hung out with a girl called Sabi pretty regularly, but that was it. The rest was just business appointments and working lunches. I didn't recognize any of the company names. I didn't even know what Laura did for a living.

My food arrived, and as I chomped rapidly through it I set the organizer to do a general search on my name and that of Ray Hammond. The sausage was pretty good, if you're interested, though something about the eggs made me suspect the hens had had a rather harder time of it than the pigs. The guy down at the end now appeared to be asleep, his forehead gently resting on the table. Just looking at him made me want a beer.

Checking the search results didn't take long. There weren't any. Either there'd never been anything about me or the dead cop in Laura's organizer, or, more likely, she'd erased it. I couldn't even find the email from her hacker listing Hammond's address, or any Net addresses with distinctive hacker domains. There were no records in the calendar of the days when she'd used REMtemps's services. Sometime between the memory dump and last night, Laura Reynolds had done a pretty thorough job of clearing out her life, maybe believing that if it wasn't down there to read, then it hadn't really happened.

Finally, much later than it should have, it occurred to me to check the owner information in the organizer. No address was listed—sensibly, but again secretively—but there was a phone number, an email address, and the promise of a small reward to whoever returned the device. I decided to claim it, and dialed the number. It rang a couple of times, and then picked up.

"Laura?" I said, surprised.

There was no answer. I realized it was probably her machine, and waited to leave another fruitless message, promising myself that I'd talk to someone at some point in the day who was actually there. I was beginning to feel like I was in a parallel universe where nobody could hear me except machines.

The line remained quiet. "Laura, are you there?" I said, suddenly less confident. "Deck?" I tried. "Can you hear me?"

"Nobody's here," a voice said. It was male, deep.

"Who's that?" I asked, thinking: boyfriend? cops?

"You know who it is," the voice said. The more I heard it, the less I liked it. It sounded too clear, as if it weren't coming into my head via the phone. Something told me this was neither a policeman nor an insignificant other.

"No, I don't," I said. "You going to tell me, or what?"

There was a long pause. "You'll remember," it said.

"Look, is Laura there?" I asked petulantly. My own voice didn't sound at all deep anymore.

"Around the school we went," the voice said. The line went dead.

I remained absolutely motionless for a moment, the phone still at my ear. It felt as though something were going to swirl out of the blackness, as if a word were finally going to make it off the tip of my tongue. A memory. There was so much in the way, other people's and my own, but it was coming.

"You okay?" asked a voice, and the sensation disappeared. I blinked and saw that it was the slumped man who had spoken. He'd raised his head from the table and was looking at me. A little older than me, mid-length wavy fair hair. Strong features, strangely reassuring, and his eyes were clearer than you'd expect in someone who obviously had a hangover from hell. "You look like you've seen a ghost," he said.

I left what was left of my money on the table and ran.

I DROVE AIMLESSLY and fast, not knowing where to go. Just being on the move seemed important. Eventually I turned off the boulevard and pootled through residential for a while, then pulled over to the curb, cut the engine, and sat. As soon as the car was stationary, my hands started shaking.

I hadn't recognized the voice on the phone, but it had sounded familiar. Generically familiar in the same way as the two men who seemed to be chasing Laura were also familiar. But I ran a check on her area code—the phone must have rung on the other side of Burbank. They say that nowhere in LA is more than a half hour from anywhere else, but they also say that the moon is made of cheese and the Empire State Building is a phallic symbol. I didn't believe the men in gray suits could have gotten from my apartment to Laura's house in the time provided, but I didn't know where that conclusion left me.

I'd started the morning with a simple, albeit difficult, task. Getting hold of a transmitter. Not only had I made very few inroads on it, but the problem seemed to be broadening, seeping sideways into areas I had no understanding of. It was as if something were holding me in place, preventing me from going forward. There was a structure here, but I couldn't see it. Without Laura Reynolds to revolve around, nothing that was happening seemed to make sense.

As I sat there, staring out the windshield and wondering what to do next, the door to a house on the other side of the street opened. It was a good-looking house: two-story, not too fancy, nice deck. A youngish woman in a lilac-colored dress peered suspiciously across the road at me: keeping an eye on her neighborhood, keeping the chaos at bay. A tiddly kitten came trotting out of the door from behind her, and the woman called to it. The kitten scooted vaguely around on the deck for a moment, obviously rather taken aback by the magnitude of the space it now found itself in, and then galloped back indoors. I hoped it had a sibling to whom it could spend the afternoon fibbing about its adventures. The woman in the lilac dress took a last look at my car, then followed the kitten inside and shut the door.

For a moment I wished more than anything that I lived there with her. That she knew my name, that the kitten was ours, that I had woodworking tools and knew where I kept them. From the outside, other people's lives always look more rounded than mine, more meaningful, more whole. At least, I hope it's only from the outside.

Sometimes it feels as if reality is streamed, and that I'm sitting in the back of the class that knows nothing but transience, hotels, and takeout food. As if there's some test you have to take before they'll let you move up a grade to where the nice folks live, but I can never find out where it's being held.

For want of anything else to do, I bit the bullet and dialed REMtemps. I still had the dream receiver in the trunk of the car, and I wanted one less thing hanging over my head. Sabrina put me on hold for a little while, and then Stratten himself came on the line.

"You're a hard man to get hold of, Mr. Thompson," he said.

He sounded impatient but not unfriendly. I played it casual. "Man of mystery. Anyhow, I'm back in town, and—"