One of Us (40 page)

"You can feel proud of yourself," Stratten said. "For an idiot, you've managed to cause me a quite stunning amount of inconvenience, Mr. Thompson. I've tried to call on a number of people in this city in the last twenty-four hours, only to spot plainclothes cops loitering quietly a little distance away. I had Hammond's little private hidey-hole cleared minutes after his death, so I guess the police had to have found out about my business from somewhere else. Judging by the message you sent via Sabrina, I suppose it's going to have been you."

"Ten points," I said. "And now there's a cop who knows all about you, too."

"Knowing means nothing, Mr. Thompson. It's proof that counts. I imagine there is none, or I'd already have heard from Lieutenant Travis."

"He's a smart guy," I said. "He'll get around to it."

"Then I'll have him killed," Stratten said mildly. He motioned to the spare goon. The goon nodded and left the room. I didn't like the look of that. It made it seem like something bad was going to happen.

"Why didn't you just come for me at Jamison's?" I asked purely and simply, to play for time. It wasn't clear why I was bothering. There wasn't any cavalry to arrive. Suddenly the decision not to warn Travis what we were doing seemed like the height of stupidity.

"I was busy," Stratten said. "It took a little time to dispose of that useless shit, Romer. You may be a meddling pain in the ass, but at least you were good at your job. Romer told me you'd have some little friend along to help you out, as indeed proved to be the case. I wasn't going to charge into a playing field you'd laid out. I like to arrange matters to my exclusive advantage." He pulled a package out of his pocket and tossed it onto the sofa beside me.

"You know that if you kill me, the cops are going to come after you?" The package was a manila envelope. It looked like it held some papers and a couple of computer disks.

"I doubt it," Stratten replied. "And it won't matter anyhow. Thanks to you, the whole operation here is fucked up beyond recovery. A tactical withdrawal is required. Which is a very great shame, because the people in this town have the best secrets and they're prepared to pay the most to keep them that way."

Deck's eyes swiveled across at me. His face told me he'd worked it out, too. A stage was being set. Two scuffling hoods found dead in Hammond's house, with the original blackmail disks, each killed by a gun the other held in his hand. Just then the third heavy reappeared in the doorway, carefully holding the carving knife from Romer's chest. With my prints all over it, the picture would be complete.

"No one's going to believe this," I said.

"Wrong." Stratten smiled, and pulled out a gun fit with a silencer. "No one's going to care."

"Let me do it," said Monica.

Stratten turned to her, considered, smiled again. He beckoned her over and held the gun out to her. Monica took up a position a couple of yards in front of the sofa, looking coyly at me. She took the gun in a two-handed grip, then pointed it straight at my head.

"Don't make it too neat," Stratten said, moving to stand behind her. He was smiling broadly, enjoying himself. "Remember— think 'squalid gun battle,' between two three-time losers who've just lost for good."

Deck stared down at the carpet. He couldn't move without getting his head blown off, and neither could I. He didn't want to see what was going to happen next, and I couldn't blame him.

Monica squinted down the gun, moved it so it pointed at my throat. She giggled, and when she did, she looked about twenty years younger. Stratten rested his chin on Monica's shoulder to watch, and his hands slid around her chest to cup her breasts.

The barrel of the gun kept circling, inched down to my chest. Monica smiled as Stratten's hands caressed and squeezed. A soft glow began to spread across her cheekbones, and the gun finally came to rest pointing at my face.

"Good-bye, asshole," Monica said.

There was the sudden crunching sound of a heavy impact.

At first I thought I'd heard myself being shot. Then I saw the goon with the carving knife hurtling across the far end of the room, like he'd been yanked on a rope.

Stratten turned to see what had happened. The Hammonds' refrigerator was standing in the doorway, its door swinging shut.

The guy behind me muttered, "What the fuck?" and let his grip slacken for a moment. That was enough.

I launched myself straight at Monica, crouched low, keeping under the line of the gun. I plowed into her stomach, knocking her and Stratten flying. Monica pulled the trigger as she fell, and the gun went off at my ear, deafening me. I saw Deck kicking out viciously behind him, catching his man in the kneecap. In a second he was on his feet, and planted a foot on the man's face. Deck looked really pissed. If there's anything he really hates, it's guys jamming guns into his head.

As I hauled myself up out of the tangle of limbs on the carpet, ears singing, I heard a muffled scream and tried to work out what the hell was going on. Then I saw the freezer run in from the doorway, quickly followed by the washing machine. The fridge had already toppled itself over onto the first goon, and the guy was wriggling like a trapped bug under it, screaming his head off. I saw the microwave go darting around the end of the sofa, and the goon's noise abruptly stopped dead. They've got sharp edges, microwaves.

Stratten snatched the gun from Monica and pointed it straight at Deck, who was busy thumping his goon: But as my kick hit Stratten in the back, the shot went wild. Another bang exploded behind me, and I turned to see the man who'd held the gun in my ear firing maniacally at the food processor, which was running straight at him. The food processor took a bullet in the control panel and faltered, but by that time the washing machine was coming up fast behind. The man kept backing away into the corner of the room, still firing, and the bullets sang off the metal casing and ricocheted around the room.

Deck was trying to grab hold of Monica. She was kicking and clawing like a wild animal. The fridge advanced on Stratten, blood-streaked door snapping open and shut, and the freezer was trying a pincer movement from the other side. But the remaining henchman had regained his composure quickly, and was methodically firing into the fridge's back panel, trying to find its brain. The sound of glass shattering behind me said that the washing machine had probably just died, too.

And suddenly I had an idea.

"Now," I panted to the clock, which still sat in my shirt pocket, "would be a very good time to wake me up."

The alarm went off immediately, a piercing siren that almost brought me to my knees. But nobody took any notice, because they couldn't hear it. Even I couldn't, not really, though I felt it resonate through all the bones in my neck as the clock hammered out a signal on a wavelength that reinforced the perpetual beacon I carried in my spine.

Stratten and his henchmen were still shooting at the appliances, and Deck and Monica were fighting it out on the floor. It looked to me like Monica was winning, but that was something I never told Deck. It was as if I were watching some curious event on television with the sound turned off: I couldn't hear any of it.

The alarm got louder and louder, until my entire body seemed to pulse. Stratten fired another shot, then seemed to realize something had happened. He turned slowly away from the fridge to look at something no one else could see.

The air in the corners of the room shuddered, like a momentary flicker of horizontal hold.

The henchmen stopped shooting, muscle-bound brains suddenly unsure. Deck stared up at my face, though what he saw there, I don't know.

Monica kept on clawing at him, oblivious.

The air shuddered again, and then bowed, like melting glass in a strong wind. The furniture and ceiling twisted and dissolved, a tapestry unpicked back to threads, which smoked and burned. The ceiling of the room seemed to blow outward, as if sucked into the sky, and an enormous cloud pushed its way into the world, boiling through the gaps between atoms and surging around us with a roar like distant thunder. Faces were bleached by a light that seemed to come from nowhere, leaving only staring eyes. At the last moment one of Stratten's henchmen tried to run, and was instantly vaporized. The other's head exploded into light, leaving only a body which toppled over and disappeared. My feet were still on Earth, but everything else was being pulled into a new stasis. This was somewhere between worlds. We weren't being taken anywhere.

It was coming to us, like rain out of a cloudless sky.

Where once the outside wall had stood, a vision slowly came into view, swirling together out of moisture and cloud, from noise and emptiness. A line of six men in pale gray appeared, standing implacable like a range of mountains. In front of them stood another man, in a dark suit, his face different now. A face that betrayed the ages, a face that was beyond time and yet had time's mark upon it.

Seven spirits of the invisible had come down onto Earth, and I couldn't tell if it was terror or joy that I felt.

There was a lifetime of quiet.

Stratten stood motionless, staring at the men. Then he abruptly swung his arm up toward me and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. Another dry click.

"No," said God. "Mr. Thompson's one of us. He's not dying here."

Stratten ignored him and tried once more, with the same result. In a way I almost admired him.

"But you, Mr. Stratten," God added, his face stony, "have truly pissed me off."

Stratten finally got the picture.

The six angels started to walk forward. I saw that their faces weren't the same after all, but a continually shifting flicker of myriad features, each gone too quickly to focus on. There was no expression you could read there, no sense to be divined. They were beyond anything that could be said, because there was nothing shared in our minds. I understood then why God had so little control over them. They were unknowable.

Stratten recognized them, I think, from dreams of his own which he'd never been able to get out of his head. He knew they were coming for him, and whirled, tried to believe there was somewhere to run. But all of our world had condensed down into one small place, and there was nowhere for him to go.

Clumsily he tried to back away, staring horrified at spirits he probably saw very differently from me—for there is no more fearful evil than a good that hates you.

He fell on his knees in front of them.

Something started to happen. I saw it as a physical change, almost as if Stratten were flattening out. I stopped seeing him as a point in space or a physical being. Instead, I perceived a long process, things done and experiences seen. I saw small flickers of some of them, like a memory dump down a faulty line. Stratten's face began to smear, as if pulled two ways, into both the past and the future. Instead of being caged in a box of visibility, his essence was becoming fluid again, like a river raging in flood and bursting its banks. His solidity had come from this compression, and, I realized, so had all of ours. Now it was leaving him.

I stood frozen for a few moments, hypnotized. But then:

"No," I said. "He's mine."

The heads of the angels all turned to me at once, and I wondered how I could ever have seen them as carrying guns, or how people framed them as little gray spacemen or beings with harps and wings. I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high it would have three sides. In reality, the angels were nothing, nothing that I or anyone else could ever understand. They were an absence of reference, their bodies burning flames of some new color no one had ever seen.

I felt their eyes looking at me, until they blurred and turned into one. What I saw through their eyes was both too large and too infinitesimal to comprehend. It was like a book, on the one hand small and contained, but on the other reaching out to touch everything that had ever been. Somebody had made the paper, someone else laid out the cover, still others designed the typefaces the story was recorded in: All of this had happened in different parts of the world, and at different times. Inside, the words, each a solidification of something intangible and fleeting, of objects and thoughts, filtered and shaped through countless generations of minds with a need to frame utterance. The angels' eyes led to infinity, to all that had ever been. Every thing, no matter how small, is a gate to everything.

There was a pause, and then the angels took a step back. They waited, for once deferring to one who had only ever been first among many.

The man in the dark suit inclined his head to me, and the angels' eyes were extinguished.

THEN THEY WERE GONE, and we were back in a room littered with injured appliances, the walls flecked with blood and pitted with bullet holes. The heroic fridge lay tilted back against the wall, its door moving feebly now. The food processor sat in the corner, lights flashing out of sync. Monica Hammond was sprawled unconscious across the arm of the sofa. I hadn't even noticed her when we were gone. Maybe she hadn't been with us. Perhaps that place wouldn't even tolerate her presence.

Stratten still knelt in the middle of the floor, head bowed, at the heart of an understanding of everything he had been. Time had stopped for him, but I knew him well enough to believe it would start again soon if we weren't careful.

Deck picked up a gun from the floor and pressed it carefully against the back of Stratten's skull. "As the last two assholes standing," he said, "shall we share the honor?"

"No," I said. "I've got a better idea."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Two days later I was sitting outside a coffee shop on the Third Street Promenade, when a shadow fell over the table. I looked up to see the man in the dark suit. I'd been watching the passing shoppers, not thinking much, and my coffee had already gone cold. I gestured for him to sit down, ordered two coffees, then waited for the man to speak. He told me this:

In the begirming, he said, the earth was without form, and void. Past and present were the same, and the visible and invisible were one. New events came into being, like planets born on the surface of a bubbling star, but everything prior to the newness still existed, like an ever-expanding ring into which new jewels were set. Experience accumulated, growing richer and deeper, and we moved among it as momentary currents in an ocean. We were far less corporeal then, and communed more widely. We didn't use words as weapons to bludgeon reality into form, and the spirits of those who had passed were all around us.