Necropolis (19 page)

I knew what was coming.
 

“You were going to kill Hector,” she said.

The words wrapped cold chains around my guts. I didn’t know what to say. So we watched the BQE flow by, a stream of steel and concrete. Traffic was light.

“No smarty has ever committed murder?” I asked finally.

“Never,” she said. But a tick jumped under her eye and I got that weird feeling again. “To regard another entity as better or worse in terms of value is ridiculous, because separation and permanence are illusions.”

“Huh?”

“What you think of as ‘you’ is a mental abstraction, a bunch of intellectual definitions. What
I
think of as you is also an abstraction. Neither is what you really are.”

My heard was starting to hurt. “So what’s the real me?”

“That’s the point. There
is
no ‘real’ you. What you are is not definable because it’s changing moment from moment. And who you
think
you are is in constant flux as well. Is the Real You the ‘you’ you are when you’re liking yourself? Or the ‘you’ you become when you screw up? Was the ten-year-old Paul the real Paul? Is it you today? Or is it you ten seconds from now?”

I shook my head, completely lost.

“Do you see how pointless it is for humans to claim they have a soul and consciousness but that smarties are only mechanical mimics of human behavior?” she continued. “You can’t even define your own consciousness, so how can you make a judgment on ours?”

My voice came out sounding defensive. “So if you’re so evolved, why do smarties still feel emotions like hurt and regret and… affection? You were crying a minute ago.”

She flushed. “I never said we were perfect.”

“Fair enough. What did you mean about separation being an illusion, too?”

 
“At this moment, our molecules are crossing the space between us. Co-mingling.” Her eyes twinkled. “Can you say where you end and I begin?”

“We’re intermingling?”

“Separation is another delusion of the ego.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Think of separation and identity like this: a wave can convince itself that it’s separate from the ocean, but only for a moment.”

“So we’re just two waves?”

She nodded.
 

“Hmmm.” I front-loaded a smile. “So wave on into the database and run the make for me, baby.”

She barked laughter, like a seal. “You’re incorrigible!”

“That’s what you love about me.”
 

She punched me in the shoulder. “Autodrive.”
 

***

And left me to wonder how she had managed, in a few minutes, to move me from murderous rage to feeling some kind of strange stillness inside, however fleeting.

If, as she implied, those landmarks from the past—those people and things I’d loved and felt lost without—if they hadn’t been going to remain the same anyway… even if I
hadn’t
died, they’d have still changed and eventually gone away, as all things do—if the world was going to be what it was, whether I wanted it to or not…
 

If all of that was true, what would my choices be?
 

Change what I could, and just accept what I couldn’t?

Was that sanity, or giving up? And was it possible for me to live that way?

***

Sixteen minutes later, after my inability to sort through my jumbled thoughts had me back to being nice and pissed off, Maggie smacked her hands together. An image popped into existence. Sure enough, there the bastard was, with his dead eyes and diagonal scar. “Ewan McDermott,” she read. “Former IRA soldier, turned mercenary after the British-Irish peace accord. Worked for drug cartels, mostly. Homeland Security had him on a watch list, but he got into the country anyway on fake papers.”

“Oh yeah, that makes a
lot
of sense,” I said wearily. “An international merc puts out a hit on me.”

“Who would want you dead? I mean, no offense, big daddy, but you’re a nobody.”

“You’re nobody ’til somebody hates you,” I warbled softly.

“Could it have been a case you were working in your first life?”

“I had three open cases when I died. A drive-by, a domestic, and a mob hit. Case one: Jamal Johnson, ‘Firebird,’ to his friends. A stone banger at age thirteen. Died in his front yard as the result of an Uzi on automatic. No suspects. The domestic was Cynthia Bowles. Took a paring knife to her hubby when she discovered three grand in internet porn charges on their VISA bill.”

Maggie laughed.

“The hit was Felix somebody. A Gee CI.”

“A whosit?”

“FBI confidential informant. Former mob stooge. Death came by way of two taps to the back of the head. A dead canary in his mouth. Along with his penis.”

“I thought organized crime was the FBI’s turf.”

I chuckled. “I had a prickly lieutenant. We were still working out jurisdiction.”

“Could your hit be connected to the mafia?”

“The
familia
would definitely not use an Irish shooter.”

“Then what the hell?”

My restless hands hardened. “I know. It breaks the rules. Why bother to make this thing look like a botched robbery? And why does a professional assassin, presumably hired by someone, hire someone
else
to do his wet work?”

The paroxysm surged suddenly, like it had been lying in wait. I brought my fist down on the dashboard. The glove box fell open. The vehicle swerved and a dash light went on. “Is there a problem?” asked the sedan.

“Mind your own business,” Maggie said to it. “Just drive.”

“You don’t have to get snooty,” said the sedan. The light went off.

“None of it makes any goddamned sense!” she said.

“And the only person with answers is this McDermott—”

“Who, dead or alive, is buried so deep we’ll never find him.”

Maggie tried a smile. “So you’ll take me to the Bahamas now, Daddy?”

Despite my frustration, I had to laugh. I flicked my cigarette lighter. “Guess I’ll work on the Crandall case.”

Maggie went ballistic. “Donner, your best friend just got murdered. You just found out you were assassinated by a merc and your cop buddies covered it up. Someone tried to blow you up! Don’t you think you should take time to, I don’t know,
regroup
?”

“I was hired to do a job.”

She regarded me with piteous admiration. “A real old-schooler, aren’t you? Truth, justice and the American way.”

“That’s me, Super-Corpse,” I growled. “Up, up and decay.” I looked out the window. “Pull over here.”

The car complied.
 

“Download yourself someplace safe.”
 

“Where are you going?”

“First I’m going to get twelve hours’ sleep. Then… I’m going to hack a building.”

26

DONNER

T
hat night, in the seedy hotel room that I’d rented, the dreams found me.

***

She walks across a plain of cracked earth. Purple lightning flashes against a black sky. I can make out her favorite dress, a yellow thing, blowing in the wind, showing off her figure. She waves. But my feet are rooted to the ground. I look down, and they are rooted literally, twisting tendrils of vine wrapped around my ankles, growing into them, the tops of my feet beneath the soil.

I try to call out, but my tongue is swollen. All I can do is croak.

Elise stops.

Insanely, there’s a boom box sitting on a burnt-out stump. “Is there a problem?” it asks. “Don’t get snooty.”

Its play light comes on. A song starts. Blues. Keb’ Mo’. “Proving You Wrong.”

It hurts Elise to hear it.
 

The wind has vanished. A shadow rises from the ground, an opaque thing with an amorphous body and black, swirling limbs. I try to scream. The phantom limbs wrap around her, and she cries out in panic, her eyes going to me.
 

Help me! she cries in terror. For God’s sake, why are you doing this to me?

But I can’t move. And even as it engulfs her, I recognize this swirling black shape.

It’s my pain.

And as I watch, she is drawn down, down, until earth fills her screaming mouth.

***

I woke to someone banging on the wall behind my headboard.

“Shut up, shut up! Stop screaming or I’ll call the cops!”

I put my face in my hands.

“Crazy motherfucker!”

Toward morning, I managed a couple sweaty, half-conscious hours, then gave up.
 

The dream came back to me.

There’d been a day when Elise had ordered me out. A separation. We reconciled eventually. But on that day, I’d left a boom box on a chair with a “play me” note, some kind of stupid dramatic statement. The song had been the song in the dream, “Prove You Wrong.” “I’ll prove you wrong,” the refrain went. Elise thought it’d been left to hurt her. That it meant I’d prove her wrong about kicking me out. But it hadn’t been. Of course in my stupidity, I hadn’t thought that she wouldn’t exactly be in the frame of mind to listen through
all
the lyrics. They’d actually meant
I’ll prove you wrong in thinking that I can’t change
.
I’ll change and be the man we both deserve
.

Like many of my well-intentioned gestures, it had ended up hurting instead of helping.

Was Maggie right? Did people never truly see each other? Did they never really know who the other person was? I’d seen Elise through the veil of my needs, but now I realized that she’d already changed. I’d already broken us.
 

Too hard to think about.

So I spent the day nursing a shot glass and smoking and watching crap on the tiny display that some genius had epoxied to the wall. Entertainment programming hadn’t improved in forty years.
 

When the clock read 1:10 AM, I got dressed.

***

The Chelsea lab was wrapped three-sided around a courtyard, used for exercising the employees when they weren’t pulling overtime. Picnic tables and a white gazebo. In the summer, brass bands in gartered sleeves and boater hats played “Sentimental Journey” and there was free lemonade spiked with endorphin productivity enhancers.

I stood beneath a lamp post and fired a wooden match with a thumbnail, just a guy making his way home, pausing to light an illegal smoke. I let my disinterested gaze wander into the courtyard. Lights and security eyes everywhere. Crossing the space would be like walking a prison yard. I exhaled smoke and started moving. People didn’t stroll at 2 AM. Anyone not moving with a purpose would be a subject of interest to police and predators alike.

I didn’t like it. A pro would’ve cased this building for weeks, getting the routines down pat. They’d know every alarm system, air duct and firewall, know when the cleaning service worked and what access they had. How many security rounds were made, when, and by whom. Which guard was on what floor, whether he was lazy or alert, how long he’d worked there, when he got coffee, took a pee, whether he had any vices to distract him. They’d have ID good enough to pass a once-over and serious firepower if that failed. Multiple exit strategies. And they’d have a crew. Nobody was insane enough to take a building like this solo. Too many variables, too many special skills needed.
 

And I was about to try it all on my lonesome.
 

I remembered a seasoned old burglar, one of the last of the true career artists, before the smash-and-grab meth-heads changed the scene forever. The Dean, they’d called him. He’d worked the city for twenty-seven years without taking one prison jolt. We’d known he existed, but only as a shadow, an urban legend. He had a jacket three inches thick, over sixty unsolved but suspected cases, but not one arrest. He’d finally gone down at age fifty-eight not because of a mistake, but because of frailty: a heart attack in the middle of a job. The mark came home from his business trip and found the Dean lying beside the cracked safe in the bedroom, gasping for air. After he got out of the hospital and was brought into Booking, we were all there. Everybody wanted a look. He was royalty.

I could feel him looking down on me in disgust.

2:09.

The metal wall was behind a grove of cherry trees. It would have been the corner if this building had corners. The area, only about two feet square, appeared to have contracted beyond the lights and cameras, just like Armitage had said.

Only one way to find out. I slid fast and direct off the pavement to a spot behind the trees. No way to hide the detour.
 

I waited to see if I’d caused a reaction.

The neighborhood stayed asleep.

2:14.

This building topped off at ten stories, thank God. A smaller, three story section faced me. I pulled the grappling pistol from the valise, aimed and fired. A filament cable hissed up and out. The fusion piton melted into the concrete just below the lower roof. I checked the tension, hung the bag around my neck, and hit “rewind” on the side of the gun.