One of Us (35 page)

"Where is it now?"

"In your spine." My neck went cold. "It has broken down into components too small to see, and implanted itself in the cells of the spinal cord leading up to the skull—rather like a localized virus. Fiendishly clever, actually. Impossible to detect unless you already know what you're looking for, and impossible to remove. You're stuck with it."

"In other words, you're one of them," said Deck quietly.

Yeah, I thought. I am. They'll always be able to find me, and that past will never go away. So be it. Perhaps that was even the way it should be.

"Do you want me to check the health of your other friend while I'm here?" Woodley asked, oblivious. "The one with the unfortunate wrists?"

"Can't," I said, mind elsewhere. "She's been abducted by aliens."

"I see," he said mildly. "What an interesting life you lead."

I paid him, he thanked me courteously and toddled off into the night. From the window, Deck watched him go.

"Hap," he said. "There's a white Dirutzu down the block, lights off, with a guy sitting in the front seat."

"Oh, good," I said. "I want a quiet word with that guy. You got any spare guns?"

"Only one. And firepower doesn't exactly imply quietness."

"That," I said cheerfully, "is entirely in his hands."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

We went out the back, then at the bottom of the steps clambered over the garages and split to go different ways down the street. I went west, keeping out of sight until I saw Deck emerge about fifty yards from the white car.

Deck wandered down the sidewalk for a distance, weaving ever so slightly, then lurched into the street. Meanwhile I quickly crossed the street and hurried toward the car, keeping on Romer's blind side. It took a little while for him to notice the drunk staggering down the middle of the street, but when he did, he kept a pretty close eye on him—close enough for me to drop down to a crouch and scoot around the back of the car. I sidled around toward the driver's door like a crab, bent over double. Deck clocked I was close and started acting up even more, waving his fists and shouting at the moon.

When I was in position, I simply stood up, leaned on the door frame, and spoke through the open window. "You have to be the worst fucking tail man I have ever seen," I said.

Romer's face spun toward me; his mouth dropped open. Then he turned back to see that Deck was now standing right in front of his car, gun pointed at his face.

"See what I'm saying? Just dreadful. Now," I added, taking my organizer out of my pocket and flashing it at him, "what I have here is a scout-class scanner." Not true, but he wouldn't know that. I pressed a button and placed it on the top of the car. "You do anything that sends out a signal to anyone, in any form, and I'm going to know about it. And then my friend's going to blow your head off. Understand?"

Romer nodded quickly. There were still a few nicks in his face where he'd been dented by especially hard peanuts. He obviously believed that a man who'll commit an assault with cocktail snacks is capable of anything.

"What do you want?" he asked, voice jumping all over the place.

"I want you to answer a couple of questions," I said. "And then I want you to fuck off. You followed me to Florida, didn't you?"

A jerky nod.

"And you did that not because you're LAPD, but because you're on Stratten's payroll—right?"

"No," Romer said hastily. "Absolutely not."

"Shit—you hear that?" I asked Deck.

"What?"

"I thought the scanner made a sound."

"Like he pressed an alarm or something?" Deck asked, face stern.

"Sounded that way to me."

Deck ostentatiously flicked the safety off his gun.

"I didn't," Romer said. "Look, Jesus, man—I didn't touch anything."

Deck: "You're sure about that?"

"Yes," he said. "Honestly."

Me: "What—like you're sure you're not working for Stratten?"

Romer's eyes flickered. He tried to protest, but he knew how these things worked, and that I'd already seen the truth. "Okay." He shrugged, trying for chummy. "So I tipped Stratten off."

"And now you're doing collection work for him, too, right? Picking up blackmail money?"

"Yeah."

I smiled. "See? That wasn't so hard. You got a cell phone?"

He frowned, confused. "Well, obviously."

"It was a rhetorical question. Tell me what the number is."

When he'd reeled it off, I retrieved the organizer from the roof of his car. "Thanks," I said. "And for your information, this isn't a scanner. It's an organizer with voice-record function. I now have a digital recording of you confessing to criminal association with a known felon, and being an accessory to attempted murder."

I tapped a couple of keys, waited a second, then winked at him. "And it's now backed up in three places on the Net."

Romer blinked at me, his face white. He tried to speak, but it came out a croak. He knew he was fucked.

"I'm going to be calling you real soon," I told him. "And you're going to help me out. You're not going to screw me around, because you know what will happen if you do. Right?"

In the end he managed it. "Yes."

"Good. Now, piss off." Deck and I stood back as Romer started the engine up and drove off slowly down the street. It looked like his mind wasn't really on the driving.

"Good job," Deck said approvingly as we watched. "You didn't say anything about recording him."

"Thought of it only at the last minute."

"With that conversation on disk, he's yours for life."

"Yeah," I said ruefully. "Makes me wish I'd spent the extra hundred bucks."

He raised an eyebrow: "What do you mean?"

"This model doesn't have voice record."

DECK CRASHED as soon as we got back inside. It was very late, and he'd been through about the weirdest experience imaginable. I guess it was only reasonable that his head should call a time-out. I slumped fitfully in a chair for a while, then left a note reassuring him I hadn't been abducted, and went for a walk.

The streets had that eerie feeling you really appreciate only before dawn, when there's no one around. The wide, empty streets put me in mind of the memory of Hammond's murder that I still held in my head, but Santa Monica is a hell of a lot nicer than Culver City. It's one of those places you end up on purpose, not just because you haven't got the strength to keep on moving. I padded quietly along the sidewalk, walking block after block until I could see the Palisades ahead of me. If you can find a stretch that isn't wall-to-wall strange people, it's a good place to stand and look out at the night, and also a good place to think.

Eventually I found a spot, right near the northern end. About fifty yards away, a group of young derelicts sat around a fire, drinking and swearing with vague ferocity, but they'd seen me as I passed and didn't seem in the mood for trouble. Who is, at that hour in the morning? It's the last thing you need. The wee hours are the lonely, vulnerable time, when everyone reverts to being about five years old. All you want is sleep, or a fire to huddle around. It's a time for monsters, and you don't want to make too much noise, or they'll come and seek you out.

I stared down at the beach below for a while, then raised my eyes to look over the sea. I was trying to work out a plan of action for the next day, but it was slow in coming. Something about the time, or the light, made the problem seem curiously distant—as if it concerned the life of some guy called Hap whom I'd never met but felt a degree of responsibility for. I felt like I was watching the world with benign curiosity, probably much as the aliens did, and I remembered I had felt the same way once before. At about eight in the evening on Millennium night.

I was sixteen back then, and I was going to a party with my girlfriend and Earl. Earl was driving, and his new squeeze was in the passenger seat. I was in the back, holding hands with mine. That was such a big thing at that age, clasping the hand of someone you loved. A heady declaration, the closing of a circuit, the joining of two souls. When you get older you don't seem to do it so much. Your hands are generally busy with other things, and every relationship goes through an accelerated evolution. Everyone you meet has an apartment, and either self-confidence or a desperate lack of it: Either tends to make you rush through the hand-holding stage. Sure, you may do it later, but it's not the same. It's like eating your appetizer after your dessert. When you're a grown-up, the only time you get to trace slowly through that delicious progression is when you're having an affair, which I guess is why so many people have affairs. A trip back in time, to when everything had weight, through the medium of unfaithfulness. Perhaps that had been why Helena had her fling with Ricardo. Helena is very far from being stupid, and must have known that Ricardo's only long-term potential was as shark food. But relationships and marriages can get too comfortable. You slide from the hurly-burly of the chaise longue to the sepulchral quiet of the shared bed, the only sounds the comforting ones of tea being sipped and pages of novels being turned: And sometimes the only thing that will make you feel alive again is the reality of a different body, a new pair of lips, an unexpected hand. It doesn't even have to mean anything—in fact, it's better if it doesn't. All you want is a little aerobic session for your hormones, to stir them up and keep them flowing. When you first fall in love with someone, you touch their face, because you need to know this magical person is real; when you've loved them awhile, you don't anymore, because you know that by now and it's the magic that's hard to find. Life occasionally loses its luster, and it occurred to me that my sharp answer to Laura had maybe also held some truth. The death of the cat Helena and I owned may have had as much to do with what happened later to Helena and me as anything else. He was a beautiful animal, and we learned his ways, and he was as much a part of our life as the air we breathed. Even while he was alive I knew that I cared about him so much that every now and then I would reassure myself that he had as happy a life as possible, and that he enjoyed being with us, so that when the time came I could be more reconciled to him going away. But the time came too soon, and such self-reassurance wouldn't have made much difference anyway. When I held his dead body, it didn't help—and I could have collected as many pebbles as I liked and it wouldn't have changed a thing. His fur was the softest thing I have ever felt, and to bury it in the ground seemed such a waste. For weeks afterward all I felt was a dull pointlessness, an utter lack of life. Maybe Helena did, too. Maybe she was just trying to find some, to stop the world from becoming a weightless ghost. I still wished she hadn't done it, but I supposed I could understand. Anger comes harder as you get older, because you comprehend more of what it's like to be someone else, and you realize you've all got your legs in the same traps.

Anyhow, we were all pretty excited that evening. It was the end of the Millennium, for crissake, the actual night itself. The last week had been one long anticipation, with weirdness simmering all around: CNN kept breaking stories about strange cultists found dead all over the country, and running humorous shorts about the latest messianic predictions. The rest of us were trying to pretend we weren't even a little bit afraid of waking up the next morning to find a black void outside our windows. Everyone talked loudly, laughed too much, and turned their radios up—as if we wanted to make sure we would be noticed when the new era came along, so that it would be sure to drag us along with it.

The other three in the car were singing and yelling, tooting the horn at everyone we passed; their faces were red with excitement and beer as they kept babbling about what they wanted to be doing when the clock struck the change. I'd already decided. I had a phone with me so I could call my folks at five minutes after, and at the moment itself I wanted to be holding my girl in my arms, though in the end that didn't happen. As I sat among the others in the car, careening toward a good time, I found myself settling into an odd mood. Not a bad one, just a little different from what the others were feeling. Quiet, calm. Focused, and deeply alive. I didn't want to shout or dance or take drugs. I wanted to be somewhere silent and feel the universe gather around me like a cloak. It didn't feel like I should run toward what was coming, anxiously embracing it and pleading to be its friend, but that I should let it come to me as an equal. Actually, that's not quite it either, but it's as close as I can get.

I spent much of that evening standing on the deck of the house where the party was being held, looking up at the skies. I didn't partake of any of the dope being liberally smoked: I just watched, and listened. Of course it occurs to me now that some part of me might have been expecting visitors, on that night of nights, but I certainly didn't realize that at the time. I felt poised between two worlds—what had been and what would be—and that seemed about right. And anyhow, I had fun. People kept staggering out and giving me beers, and my girl stayed with me most of the time. At the stroke of midnight someone grabbed her in the doorway and pulled her into a hug, not knowing she'd been on her way to me. I stood and smiled as she squealed and laughed.

I got my hug at about two minutes past. It was close enough. Six months later we'd split up anyhow.

That night I'd felt that what was upon me was too serious to screw around with, and I felt the same tonight. Events seemed to be coalescing around me, and I wondered how much power I had to change them, or whether I would simply end up at the center of forces I didn't understand. As usual. On Millennium night the guys holding the party had rigged televisions up all over the place, showing satellite feeds of foreign stations. We cheered when people in other time zones jumped and shouted, but we knew in our hearts that they were wrong, and that it was our time that made the difference. Then, as always, we were living on personal time: And personal time doesn't always run in the same direction, or at a constant speed.