One of Us (20 page)

Then I remembered the passage that had been copied out on the inside front cover. I found the place and held it out to Laura. "Does this look like Hammond's handwriting?"

She glanced at it. "Yes. Probably."

"You don't know?"

"It's been a while." She set her knife and fork down and refilled her glass. Her food had been barely touched, though it had been shifted around the plate a little. She caught me looking. "And I'm just not very hungry, okay? Don't go all sensitive and 'I know about eating disorders' on me, because as it happens, I don't have one."

I smiled, held up my hands. She grinned back, but something had changed in her face. Her eyes glittered, and what was animating them was not humor anymore, but fear.

"You want some coffee?" I asked. She shook her head and looked away. Deck volunteered to get the bill—which was just as well, because I'd left the finger in his apartment. They're not really something you can pull out in a restaurant.

Meanwhile I went into the back of the restaurant to use their John. Tables full of wanna-bes lifted their eyes covertly as I walked past, checking to see if I was someone famous enough to be worth schmoozing. The general consensus appeared to be that I wasn't, and I sent each and every one of them a smidgen of ill will. I'd been introduced to Applebaum's by an acquaintance of mine called Melk, who's wasting his life scuffling around the edge of the Business. He currently works as an Emission Manager, better known in the trade as a fart wrangler: hired by movie stars to walk behind them at parties, and—should the unfortunate occur— surreptitiously flap an unfurled napkin to disperse the smell as swiftly as possible. The best wranglers can make it seem like it never happened, even corral it up and redirect it so a rival actor gets the blame. This is not a job for a grown human being, and Melk is one of the bigger fish who frequents Applebaum's—so imagine the troughs of loserdom that the other patrons inhabit. I'm not a particularly self-confident guy, but I felt I could live without their validation.

An attendant in the anteroom tried to give me all manner of unguents and towels to take into the rest room with me, but I told him to fuck off. He backed off bowing and scraping, probably assuming my rudeness meant I headed a studio and was in Applebaum's as a result of a terrible restaurant-booking accident.

Then suddenly I found myself facedown on the floor, with someone kneeling in the middle of my back. For a second all I could do was gasp, the air punched out of my lungs: By that time my hands had been yanked behind my back and cuffed.

Two polished black shoes appeared close to where my nose was resting on the tile. "Don't you
fucking
move," said a voice from above.

I craned my neck, looked up, and saw a cop pointing a thirty-eight down at me. His hands were very steady. "You're coming with us," he said.

"Yes, I am," I said accommodatingly, and let myself be hauled to my feet. Both cops were young and shiny, one with a blond crew cut, the other brown-haired. Apart from that, I couldn't see any significant difference between them. They each grabbed one of my arms and led me back out into the restaurant.

The wanna-bes gaped at us as we passed through, trying to decide whether this turn of events made me a smaller or bigger fish. Someone who I assume was either an attorney or an agent lobbed a business card at me.

I had my face ready-set as we emerged onto the patio, knowing that Deck would have the sense to blank me as we passed. Turned out he'd gone one further. They'd disappeared altogether, money for the meal left by Deck's empty plate.

Blond-hair opened the back door of the black-and-white parked at the curb; Brown-hair shoved me and climbed in beside me.

I sat looking out the window as the car pulled away, and waited patiently for my life to get worse.

"HOW DID YOU FIND ME?" I asked when he finally arrived.

Travis gave me a pitying look. "We're the cops. Hap. It's our job."

I was sitting in an interview room in the Hollywood precinct, and had been for five hours. No one had offered me any coffee in all that time, and I was thinking of filing a complaint. The room had bare gray walls obviously designed to make you feel grim, the monotony enlivened only by large no-smoking signs. But since smoking is now more or less illegal, it's mainly criminals and cops who do it, and there was a large and overflowing ashtray in the center of the table in front of me.

Travis leaned with his arms folded against a mirror that covered all of one wall. He caught me glancing at it.

"Nobody behind there," he said.

"Right," I said, not knowing or caring if he was telling the truth. Come one, come all. It didn't make much difference now. "How's the arm?"

"Painful," he said. The upper right sleeve of his shirt bulged where there was a bandage underneath. "But then, you'd know how it feels, wouldn't you? You caught a few once, as I recall. That's what the witnesses said, anyhow."

I didn't reply. Travis looked at me for a while, then reached into his pocket. He pulled out a piece of folded paper, straightened it out, and laid it on the table in front of me. "Take a look at this."

It was a printout from the LAPD Crime Databank, with today's date at the top. It related to an armed robbery and multiple homicide on 3/15/2014, a little over three years ago. Strong eyewitness testimony led to the naming of three suspects: Ricardo NMI Pechryn (since deceased), Harry "Hap" Thompson, and Helena Ruth Goldstein. Mandate to use force if necessary to secure an arrest: advice to use special care and SWAT backup when attempting to apprehend Goldstein.

Quat had put it back on the database. I closed my eyes.

"Kind of a blow, isn't it?" Travis agreed. "Odd, too. Gone all that time, then I check the file this morning and there it is. There's probably an explanation, but to be honest, I don't really care what it is. Welcome back to my personal Most Wanted list. Hap."

"Great to be here," I muttered. Quat had evidently realized that with the hacker and two other on-the-spot witnesses dead or in a coma, the conspiracy-to-lease-memory-equipment rap looked shaky. So he'd tied me up neatly with this instead. Why?

"The bottom line is that you're screwed, Thompson. Do you accept that?"

"Yes." It couldn't be just for the money. There had to be something else behind what Quat was doing to me. One thing was certain: If I ever found him in the real world, he was dead.

Travis raised an eyebrow. "So?"

"So you let me call a lawyer, you put me in a cell with a bunch of wackos who'll beat the shit out of me just to relieve the monotony, and we take it from there. If you're expecting me to hand over Helena, you're out of luck. I haven't seen her in three years."

I was going to go on, but I stopped: tongue-tied by saying her name. I had deliberately not thought about her since the delivery outside Deck's house the night before. Deliberately, and with great force, not thought about her. I had no intention of starting now.

Travis shook his head. "Not why you're here—for the moment. I want to talk to you about something else. I just wish you to understand that our discussion is taking place within certain parameters."

I took a cigarette from the packet in front of me, lit it. "So talk."

"Tell me what you know about Ray Hammond."

I shrugged. "Ranking cop, gunned down in Culver City a week ago. Gangland hit, I heard."

Travis shook his head. "Try again."

"That's all I know."

"Bullshit. I'm in the middle of arresting you for an entirely unrelated matter, and four people—who in retrospect I realize strongly resemble the suspects in Hammond's murder—walk in and demand we hand you over. Three cops get killed or badly injured in the ensuing firefight, which speaks of an extremely strong desire for your company on somebody's part."

"Not everyone's got a hard-on for me like you have," I said. "I'm actually quite a popular guy."

"Evidently." Travis pulled out the chair on the other side of the table. "Though they didn't seem overly concerned as to whether you made it out alive."

He balled one fist and laid it on the table. "This is a rock. Hap," he said, and then placed another fist about six inches away from the first. "And this is a hard place. Can you guess where you are?"

I looked in the mirror and saw myself sitting there alone. I looked tired and old and pale, and I suddenly got a flash that there probably wasn't anyone in the observation room, that for some reason Travis was talking to me alone. That might mean there was something on the horizon other than a walk down to the holding tank. It was time to be polite.

"I don't know who they are," I said, and Travis sat down. "Yesterday morning two of them came to my apartment. I managed to get away, spent the morning outside Griffith. The only other time I've seen them was in the room at the Prose Cafe."

"Where you had come to pick up a memory machine?"

There was no point in lying. "Yes."

"You want to tell me why you need one?"

"No," I said, "I don't. You want to get anywhere near that, I'm not saying anything else until I call a lawyer."

Travis leaned toward me. "You know what I think? I think you've been working as a memory caretaker." He reached below the table and picked up a box. Inside it was the dream receiver, tagged in an evidence bag. "Found this in your jacket when you were processed. Now: Because of that asshole lawyer who's quantumized the dream-transfer issue, I have no way of knowing whether possession of this device is legal or not. Given that all memory caretakers so far apprehended have started life as proxy dreamers, however, and the fact you were trying to get hold of a memory machine, I can try damned hard to use this as evidence that you are or have been involved in a conspiracy to commit illegal activities with regard to recall."

"Shall I make that phone call now?"

"What else do you know about the guys in the suits?"

"Nothing."

"Why are they after you?"

A lie: "I have no idea."

"We have reason to believe that there may be another two men involved, in addition to the four at the Cafe. Would you agree?"

Throw him something: "It's possible."

"Why do you say that?"

Carefully: "Two guys came to my apartment. Four were at the Cafe. Either two of them were the same, or not. If not, there's six."

"You're not saying that, for example, because you've talked to the old guy in the store near the murder scene."

"What old guy would that be?"

"Because if you had done so, that would imply you had an interest in Hammond's death."

"Which I don't."

"Despite the fact that the chief suspects have a strong interest in you."

"You got it."

"How did they know where to find you on these two occasions?"

The truth: "I have no idea."

Travis nodded, looked up at the window in the wall behind me. I stubbed out my cigarette, waited.

"I'll lay it out straight," he said eventually. "Because I liked you once, and also to make sure you understand this is my final offer. Your crime's back on the 'base, the witnesses are all still in good health and of sound mind, and we have your dream receiver. Whatever happens, you're going down."

"You need to get one of the girls from Marketing to help advise you on pitching technique. So far this isn't sounding like such a great deal."

Travis ignored me. "But that's a bank job that happened three years ago, and nobody but me cares that much anymore. The victims had six relatives between them. Two are dead in a car wreck, one's a junkie who didn't like her brother much anyway, and the other three are poor and black. They still call the station every now and then, but nine times out of ten I don't even get the messages.

"On the other hand, we've got a high-ranking cop brutally murdered a week ago. I think you can imagine which is rated a higher priority."

"And you can't find the suspects no matter how hard you try, but they seem to be able to find me."

"You're a clever guy, Hap. I always said so. Want to put the rest of it together?"

"You release me, let me wander around town and wait for the guys with the guns to catch up with me. I give you a call— assuming I have time before I get blown away—and you come and catch the bad guys."

"You're wasted as lowlife. Hap. With a mind like yours, you could have aspired to greatness."

"Fuck you, Travis. What do I get for risking my life to make you look good?"

"I lose the dream receiver. And you aren't submitted to a truth test regarding your work as a memory caretaker."

I shook my head. "Not nearly enough. You've already admitted the dream machine is circumstantial. The only remaining witness to my allegedly attempting to procure a memory machine is in a coma, and you don't have probable cause for involuntary sodium verithal."

"You been watching a lot of TV or something, Hap? I don't know how you appear to yourself in your own head, but to the outside world you're just a minor hood nobody's going to give two shits about. Someone's got to pay for what happened in that bank, and Pechryn is already dead. That puts you in the bull pen all by yourself, and you have precisely no one on base. I can get two hundred cops to stand in a line and confirm in unison that you agreed to the verithal test. I can get them to sing it to the tune of 'I Got Rhythm' if that fucking helps."

"Try something else," I said wearily. I had just remembered that given the current state of my bank accounts, I'd be relying upon the state for my defense. I knew that I was going to deal. I knew, too, that whatever happened, I agreed with Travis now was as good as it was going to get.

Travis tapped his fingers on the table for a moment.

Then: "Helena walks," he said.

At that moment it felt as if time had drained away—two separate measures of time, to two different periods in my life. One an instinct that said no, that simply wasn't fair; and another that agreed to the idea without thinking.

"Yes or no," he said. "I wipe her name out of the file. To be frank, I don't fancy trying to arrest her anyway. That's my final offer."