One of Us (17 page)

I stole a car half a mile the other side of the gate, and took Mulholland and Coldwater over to Sunset. Cut through Westwood down as far as Wilshire, and then just kept driving until we hit the coast. The roads were empty, the sky clear. As we hit Ocean Avenue, a column of sea view opened in front of us, stretching to infinity and blocked only by the leaves of trees along the Palisades. I turned right into the avenue and pulled to a halt, looking out at the water. Dark blue and lit by moonlight, the ocean looked like a texture generated by a computer program, only less complex and more sane: apparent simplicity masking questions that never ended, instead of the Net's fake detail built on top of nothingness. Of course there's actually a hundred-foot drop the other side of the rail, then a busy road and a beach before you reach the water: There's probably a metaphor for life in there somewhere, but I've never had the energy to look for it.

"I grew up by water," I said. "It makes me feel better."

"I don't," Laura said. "It makes me feel wet. Look—my ass hurts and I'm bored, so can we just get where we're going?"

Deck lives in a small apartment building a few blocks back, in a nice street lined with trees. He cashed out his chips from hard crime in a sensible way, and now lives in low-key respectability. These days he mainly just shifts stuff around for the fun of it, creaming off enough money to get by, keeps in practice at thumping people just for old times' sake. I drove the car around the back of his building and parked it close to the wall and out of sight. Deck's lights weren't on, which meant we'd probably beaten him home. That shouldn't have been the case, but I didn't know what route he'd taken or where he dumped my car.

We took the back staircase up to the third story, and I used my keys to let us into the kitchen. Deck's a caveman on such matters, won't trust finger or even voice recognition. It's a matter of some irritation to me that he gets burgled less frequently as a result. You can crack a code or fake a voice pattern silently: Forcing a lock is always going to make noise.

A dim side light came on automatically as we entered the apartment. "Beer's in the fridge, hard stuff in the cupboard above," I told Laura, and walked into the living room, where I sat in the dark on the sofa and closed my eyes.

At long last I got the shakes: the roar in my ears an echo of gunfire and deep voices. As the retorts finally faded, the line of men came once more in front of my inner eye. I could picture them too sharply, almost as if I were dreaming—Laura's memory was overlapping with my own experience. There was something else there too, something occluded and blanked, and I could feel it getting closer all the time. For a moment I almost had it again, a vision of light around a head like a halo. Then it vanished.

A couple of minutes later I heard a rustling and opened my eyes to see Laura standing a few yards away. She was holding a large glass of something in one hand and a beer in the other.

"Would you like one of these?" she asked.

I took the beer and drank slowly while she looked around the room. The walls of Deck's apartment are covered in old film stills, ratty posters, and various other shit that he's collected from all over the place. I'm sure there's an order to it somewhere, but I'll be hanged if I've ever been able to find it. Deck's my best friend, but for some reason his collection irritates me. I think it makes me feel vulnerable. It feels like a taunt of insufficiency, a demonstration of what I lack. Most people bring something with them to the party of the present day, some wine bottle to present to their hosts: Deck has his stuff, his calm, and a compendious knowledge of where to buy the best chili dogs; other people have friends, a style of being, an idea of who they are and why.

I don't seem to have any of these, and wade through life full of insecurity and vertigo, usually manifested as impatience and a panicky feeling of rootlessness. Have I actually been here all this time, I wonder sometimes: And if so—what the hell have I been doing?

Laura perched on the other end of the sofa. She'd found a rubber band from somewhere and pony-tailed her hair. "What happens now?"

I lit a cigarette. They're more relaxed in Santa Monica about such things, and smoking in the privacy of your own apartment is merely a misdemeanor and generally overlooked. "We sit here until either Deck turns up or I lose patience and fall asleep. At which point you run away, leaving me with a murder in my head and no way of removing it. During the night I dream a lot of other people's shit which I won't even end up getting paid for, because the account that REMtemps pays into has been frozen. Then the cops find me and bang me up for the rest of my life for something I didn't even do."

She laughed sourly. "Feeling kind of sorry for yourself, aren't you?"

"Yes—and with good reason. Aside from anything else this evening, I've been shot at and seen a guy blown to pieces. He may have been a long-haired snitch bastard, but that doesn't make it a great spectator sport."

"What are you talking about?" she said. "Who was long-haired?"

"The hacker," I said. "Remember him?"

"Quite clearly. He had short hair."

"Not mid-twenties, big nose, thoroughbred geek?" I asked, and stared at her.

Laura said it first: "Then he wasn't the same guy."

"So who the hell was he?"

"How should I know? How did he find you?"

"He didn't." Suddenly I glimpsed the first step along a line of truths that had been in front of me all the time. I pulled the organizer out of my pocket, kicked up the bare-bones Net software. Meantime the cellular card automatically established a 2D connection, and the operating system bade me a cheery good evening.

"What are you doing?" Laura demanded.

"I thought that nerd was too good to be true." I was furious at myself. "He was straight out of central casting—even had a sweatshirt with the stupid slogan on it. But Quat said he'd be pretty distinctive, so I didn't think anything of it. Then he had this weird attitude, half scared, half cool. When it all went berserk, I assumed it was just because he knew he'd been setting me up."

"But?" I was tapping my way through a circumventory login. I then told the organizer to use a random whereis server to find my account demon and haul it in—and to abort if it looked like it was going to take longer than thirty seconds.

"Hap, what are you saying?" Laura yelled. I shushed her, watched the timer. With ten seconds left, the organizer announced that the demon was coming home: Two seconds later the results were there on the screen.

The demon listed the six bank accounts it administered in my name: two real, two virtual, two nothing more concrete than randomized streams through gaps in the money market. All empty. Zeros straight across the board.

Laura gawked at the column of emptiness. I killed the Net connection before the cellular source could be traced.

Then stared straight ahead, seeing nothing at all.

I had nothing to my name, and there was just one man in the world who could have taken it. The same man who'd been the only person able to dial into my phone that morning, and who suddenly did business over the wire so he could put me in a certain place at a certain time. A man who I'd trusted with all my business for over a year, who knew everything about me.

"It's Quat," I said. "He's fucked me over."

"Your hacker? Why?"

"The transmitter your guy used—was it a suitcase full of junk?"

Laura nodded."I couldn't believe it was going to work—but it did. Look, I'm tired of saying why, so can you just assume my participation in this conversation from now on is a generic question mark?"

"Did you get Hammond's address through the same guy? From the same hacker who set up the transfer?"

"I put a veiled ad in the adult personals for hacker services: A few hours later this guy comes through." Which implied Quat had been her hacker, that he'd had access to a machine all the time, and that he knew about Hammond's murder. "Does that mean this Quat guy got killed?"

I shook my head, thoughts still whirling. "The guy in the Cafe was just an actor—method nerd going through his lines. Quat set me up."

I put it together as best I could.

Laura wants Ray Hammond dead, for whatever reason, but doesn't know where he's at. She finds a hacker—Quat—or he finds her. Quat gets Hammond's address. Next day he reads that the guy has been whacked—then Laura wants an illicit memory dump. Quat had to know that it was the murder, and he arranges to send it into my head. I blow town for two days—he doesn't know where I am, and he's strangely difficult to get hold of. As soon as I'm back I get in touch with him: He holds off giving me a machine he already has, just long enough to set me up with the cops.

It worked, though there were some weird co-incidences in the mix that didn't sit comfortably. And there was still a big question, to which Laura returned immediately.

"Yeah, fine," she muttered, "but why would this Quat guy want to do that to you? You stiff him over a bill or something?"

"No. He had control over all my money. I couldn't have stiffed him even if I'd wanted to. I trusted him with everything."

Laura abruptly downed the rest of her drink in one swallow, looked at me bright-eyed. "Then we're both screwed."

There was a noise from out back of the kitchen. Deck, I assumed. Then I heard the sound of someone's feet going back down the stairs.

I stood, pulled out the gun. Walked into the other room and squinted through the kitchen windows. I couldn't see anyone out there. Gun held out in front, I edged toward the back door, wishing it had a glass panel in it. When I got there, I took the handle as quietly as possible, breathed deeply, and yanked it open.

Nobody there.

The night had cooled, faint condensation hanging in the air and turning yard lights into sparkles. I looked down, saw a small suitcase at my feet that looked familiar.

I ran to the end of the walkway and stuck my head out but couldn't see anyone heading away from the building. At a slight sound I whirled back around, and nearly blew Laura's head off. She was peering into the suitcase.

"The transmitter?" she asked.

I nodded, swallowing compulsively. "What's this?" she added, reaching forward to pick up a small scrap of paper from inside the case.

I took it from her. She craned her neck to read it with me. On it was written just one word: Helena.

"Who's Helena?" Laura asked.

I realized who'd saved me at the Cafe.

"My ex-wife," I said, and went back inside.

PART TWO

MISSING

CHAPTER NINE

A boy is out walking by himself, early on a Sunday evening. He heads slowly down the hill toward 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 motel, one of the first built on this stretch of the coast, now mostly empty for the winter. He doesn't know yet that the motel will define his idea of living space forever, 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 will 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 rodents, and cleaner of pools. His mother works in a bar/restaurant a mile down the beach, and has done so 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 Holdup" 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 favorite 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.

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 few months earlier. The boy spent an hour squatted down by the column of tiny 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 the butterflies mated, and laid eggs, and died: The butterflies that 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 the boy could see.

Miss Bannerham said it was something to do with a particular plant the butterflies needed, or temperatures, or something, but he 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, 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 walked on down the hill, hands in his pockets, peering at the houses he passed. Deep yards, trimmed grass, mostly one-story homes. 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.