Altered States (9 page)

He walked towards the centre of the room, his footsteps echoing hollowly about the walls. When he was standing directly behind the orange-clad figure he made some suitably threatening noises with his firearm – like
click
. Guns only make two noises:
click
and
bang
. The former is usually far more productive. The hooded head, which had been bowed forward, twitched at the sound.

‘Right, I’m going to keep it simple because we haven’t got much time.
You
haven’t got much time.’

Conner walked around to stand in front of the man.

‘Your life depends on how you answer the next three questions. Ready?’

The figure’s head moved a little and there was a muffled sound. Conner knew that Bigby would be gagged and so didn’t expect a verbal response just yet.

‘Here we go. What is the real name of the man who bailed you? Why did he bail you? Where can I find him?’

Conner glanced back toward the office. The thug was not in sight. The glow from the TV still flickered onto the walls. He holstered his gun. Not something he liked doing in such a precarious situation but he needed both hands to lift the bottom of the hood and remove the gag. Bigby did not know who Conner was, of course. And Conner wanted it to stay that way. Didn’t want the eyes of this rug dealer falling on his face.

He walked back behind the chair. The arms of the detainee were gaffer-taped together tightly at the wrists. He bent over to take a closer look at the hands ... then he jumped back.

‘Fuck,’ he expleted.

Suddenly, he was no longer in control. A moment ago he had all the information. He knew where he was. He knew the game. He knew the players. He was in the driving seat.

For a moment he thought about just running like hell. Running away from this dark place. That way he might just stay alive. Might make it into the sodium glow of the streets outside. But however far he ran, he’d still be in the dark. And that wasn’t good enough. Not any more.

He steeled himself for what he had to do. He planted his feet firmly, shoulder-width apart, facing the person before him. His heart was racing as if it knew something he didn’t. As if it knew how this moment would change everything. He took a deep breath then reached out and lifted the hood.

And the face he saw made him jump in horror. Not that it was a horrific face – just unexpected.

It was, in fact, a pretty face. A
familiar
face.

It was Mila’s.

Her head hung low and her eyelids were heavy to the point of being closed. Now he really had no idea what was going on. He’d seen her only a couple of hours before when she walked out of the Crown.

He was spooked – big time.

For the moment he left Mila. He rushed toward the office, pulling out his gun as he did so. The office was empty. The TV was blaring reruns of Friends, but
his
friend had gone. Conner burst through the door onto the street, looking quickly in every direction. A canoodling couple in the shadows jumped and scuttled away, but there was no one else.

His flight instinct kicked in aggressively. There was no time for reasoning. He had to get the hell away from here fast. Somewhere safe.
Then
he could think.

He ran back into the office and started rooting frantically through drawers for anything sharp. The place was abandoned and everything had been taken by the previous occupier.

‘Damn it,’ Conner exclaimed as he slammed the last drawer shut, but didn’t hesitate before hammering the butt of his gun against the office window. It bounced off on the first attempt, but a second blow smashed straight through. He pulled the sleeve of his coat over his hand and picked up a long shard. Then he ran back to Mila and slashed through the tape around her wrists and ankles, with swift, precise motions.

He put her arm around his shoulder and tried to get her to her feet, but she would take no weight. He had no time to teach a rag doll to walk so he slipped his right arm under her knees and lifted her up.

He staggered determinedly to the exit making a mental note to give up smoking the next day.

The street he stumbled onto was the kind of street that few pedestrians dared to venture down and hence even fewer taxis bothered to canvass.

Calling a cab would involve a frustrating conversation with directory inquiries just to get a number – or a visit to the seedy bar across the street with his dead-weight date. That would be followed by a frustrating call to a cab company. Followed by a frustrating wait for the cab to arrive. Conclusion: frustrating.

Stealing a car was an option, with just two minor drawbacks: one, Conner did not know how to steal a car; and, two, there were no cars in this neighbourhood worth stealing – presumably they already had been.

The occasional brave soul did risk their life driving down the street, being sure not to travel slow enough for any opportunistic thieves to whip off the hub-caps. So commandeering a willing citizen seemed like the only option.

Conner stepped into the road. The first two cars swerved around him and blasted their horns in an overly zealous fashion. He stepped further into the road and the next car screeched to a halt; its driver leaping out almost before the vehicle had come to a stop.

‘What the fuck are you –’

‘Shut it!’ Conner said with such authority the driver was silenced immediately. ‘I’m a police officer. Get me to the nearest street with a cab on it.’

The man opened the rear door of the saloon and helped Conner load Mila onto the back seat. Conner followed her in.

The car owner set off with a new sense of civic duty, not quite sure whether having a harassed policeman in the back seat meant he should rigidly adhere to the road laws or actively flout them. He judged correctly that now was not the time to ask the question, so decided to just take the middle road, as it were. He drove a couple of blocks – half-jumping one light and not-quite coming to a complete stop at a give-way – then took a right onto Fifth, where there would be cabs-a-plenty.

Taxis in New Meadows are rather like the hotels – flamboyant and largely impractical. Most of them are themed; a lot of them are stretched; far too many of them are pink with bunny-girls in the back; and one of them is a Lamborghini.

Conner managed to flag down a regular one: yellow in colour with an ethnically-minor driver boasting language skills just sufficient to
completely
misunderstand where you want to go. This would not be a problem for Conner. After he’d bundled his passenger from one car to the other – making a mental note to give up doughnuts the next day – he resorted to the modern day Lingua Franca, the emergent international language of capitalism.

‘McDonald’s,’ he barked. The cabbie looked confused momentarily until Conner affirmed with a sharp, ‘Drive!’; and the cab pulled confidently into the flow of traffic almost embedding itself into a gem-studded stretched Hummer full of GI Jane bachelorettes.

They had to drive almost two whole blocks to reach the nearest big yellow M. At the drive-thru Conner picked up a sweet black coffee and then issued his next globalised instruction to the driver:

‘Holiday Inn.’

All the Holiday Inns were on the outskirts of town, so it didn’t really matter which one. He just needed to be someplace else.

The coffee wasn’t for him, it was for Mila. He assumed she had just been sedated. If so she should slowly start to lift out of her lethargy, and coffee would speed the process. It was a shame he didn’t have any more uppers on him. Conner began to pop the lid of the coffee, which was a task impossible to achieve on firm standing without spilling half the cup’s contents. In the back of a cab, crotch-scalding was a mandatory outcome. Fortunately, McDonald’s heat their drive-thru coffee to the tepid heights of four-and-a-half degrees above body temperature for just this reason. After confirming this via a few splashes to his pants he put the lid back on and started feeding it to Mila through the lid-spout, whilst cradling the back of her lolling head with his other hand.

‘Drink,’ he said encouragingly. She made some kind of moaning-cum-gurgling sound in response which he took as a positive development from straight moaning.

After the coffee was drained he scoped their location and determined they were only about three miles from the nearest Holiday Inn – so it would take another mere twenty-five minutes to get there at their break-neck speed of stationary. He decided to phone ahead and make a reservation to minimize any lobby-based commotion on his arrival with old Ragdolly Anna beside him. Then, finally, he sat back and took a moment to contemplate his predicament.

He opened the car window a crack to get some air, but the air outside was warm and humid. He watched the people on the busy sidewalk pass by the window, and kind of wished it wasn’t because they were travelling faster than he was.

Any one of them could be the enemy now. Someone was messing with him, but he didn’t know who. It seemed unlikely in the extreme that it was some fun-loving Feds warning him to stay away from Bigby. Surely they would use official channels if they knew he was still digging around. It could be the bail-bondsman reaping some revenge for his clerk-beating fun being interrupted. But he’d have to be truly crazy to start kidnapping cops if he wanted to stay in business. Scariest of all, it could be one of the rug trading gangs. Maybe his cover had been blown by one of his informants. But they would have simply dispatched him by now. Subtle games are not their style.

Whoever it was knew a lot about him, which was scary. They knew his actions and they knew Mila. That was why he had to get somewhere neutral fast. Not his place, or Mila’s. Even a hospital would be too risky right now.

Once in the hotel room, Conner stayed with Mila until she could accomplish the feats of sitting and monosyllabic discourse unaided.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘Walking,’ she said slowly with a slight slur. ‘Man ... grab.’ Then she clumsily mimed a syringe motion with her first two fingers and thumb against her upper arm. Conner inspected the puncture wound. She seemed to be livening up as time passed and he was confident that she had been injected with nothing more than a sedative.

‘What else do you remember?’

‘Sleep’. She shrugged and gave half a smile at the thought of slumber.

‘I know,’ he said compassionately, realising that Mila would be providing little in the way of useful information given that she had been unconscious for the whole ordeal.

There was only one thing left. He had to pay a visit to Kent the clerk. He sighed heavily at the prospect. He guided Mila to the bed and pulled the duvet over her.

‘Stay here and don’t answer the door to anyone,’ he instructed, though was fairly confident that such a task was way beyond her current abilities.

Conner thudded on Kent’s apartment door. He’d buzzed a different apartment’s number to get let into the building, just so he had the satisfaction of thudding on Kent’s door. After a moment the door opened and the person behind it was dragged into the corridor by the lapels of his pin-striped pyjamas.

He began making his way back to the Holiday Inn – on foot this time. All his ends were dead. There was nothing more he could do. His heart rate hadn’t dropped below about one-eighty since he first popped a methamphetamine clone two hours ago. Now he was crashing big time.

Back in the hotel room, Mila was fast asleep and breathing normally. Conner grabbed the spare blanket from the wardrobe and collapsed onto the sofa. The multitude of aches across his body had merged into one holistic dull pain. But in a rare moment of positivity he counted this as a good thing. He had no idea who was messing with him, but he knew one thing: if they had wanted him dead, he would be dead by now. The fact that he could still feel pain was very reassuring. Reassuring enough to allow him to sleep.

Dressed to Sell

BlueJay was the trendiest and therefore most expensive place to hang out in town. I arrived in good time, to give me a chance to settle in. The two large bouncers on the door looked me up and down with suspicious eyes. I flashed my most opulent looking smile at them, which proved rather ineffectual so I flashed a fifty at them instead to marginally better results. I received half a nod from one of them that clearly articulated he would allow me to pass but that he was offended by my mere existence. I didn’t argue. I respected the fact that his eyebrows alone were better communicators than most cab drivers around these parts. I stepped into a large atrium.