One of Us (21 page)

I stared down at the table, feeling weak, on the verge of tears. Some instinct in Travis had probably told him that gut-shooting me with Helena's name would have just that effect. I abruptly lost the will to fight. I wanted it all to be over. I wanted to be alone. I wanted, to be frank, my mother—but she was a long way away and we hadn't spoken in weeks.

I looked up and nodded.

Travis smiled. "Good. Don't fuck with me on this, or I'll announce that bullets found in the two cops who died at the scene yesterday match the gun you left behind. You know how we tend to feel about people who whack one of our own."

He stood, opened the door. I pushed myself to my feet, face numb, and shambled toward it. "You can collect your coat on the way out," Travis said as I passed him. "Oh, and one more thing."

I stopped, turned, waited.

"There's a contract out on you. Big money. Two reliable snitches told me the word is that Helena has taken the job." He smiled. "Funny: Always thought she was the one for you. Life's a bitch, ain't it?"

I turned back and walked quickly away, so he wouldn't see the expression on my face.

I WENT IMMEDIATELY to the darkest bar I could find, and sat in the darkest corner. Then I asked the waitress if they could turn the lights down a little, and ordered five beers. While I waited for them, an ancient song came on the jukebox, something about sending lawyers, guns, and money. Sounded like a service I could use. I waited for a 1-800 number at the end, but there wasn't one.

A guy came in just as my drinks arrived, and sat at a booth on the other side of the room. Cheap suit, a tie the store must have sold him for a joke. He ordered a club soda and a bowl of nuts, sat, and examined the ceiling. Not the most subtle tail I had ever seen. I ignored him and got on with drinking.

By the second beer I was a little calmer. I called Deck on the cellular and told him I was okay. He sounded relieved, but said Laura was acting weird. Prowling around his apartment and drinking a lot. Took a half-hour shower, and when Deck stood close to the bathroom door, he could hear her talking angrily to herself: When she emerged, her skin looked raw, as if she'd been scrubbing it all that time. Now she was prowling and drinking again, alternating with chain-smoking and staring into space. I told him to try to distract her, show her his collection or something. I also told him the situation. He didn't say much. There wasn't a lot worth saying.

I spent the third beer considering the mess I was in, and chewing absently on nicotine pretzels. I tried to think rigorously, but the structure kept collapsing in the face of the obvious truth. I was fucked. If I tried to bug out of town, Travis would certainly follow through on his threat, and the cops would find me and shoot me on sight. All I could do was what I was told, and I knew the deal was final. I was free for precisely as long as it took for the guys in suits to find me, which by past experience wasn't that long. Added to which, some asshole had put out a whack on me.

As I drank the fourth beer, I found myself doing something I hadn't intended. Thinking about Helena. About the person I'd been looking for as I traveled around, knowing I'd already found her. About a cheap honeymoon in Ensenada a long time ago, mornings in motels and evenings in bars; about walking Venice in the warm afternoon, and cool nights in the house we shared there for a while; about our cat, and how soft his fur had been. About it being the nearest I'd ever come to being allowed to join the real world, to stepping out of my dreams and being awake.

It came on slowly at first, fragments that felt like recollections of somebody else's life. Then faster, and fuller, until the room shaded away and I was immersed in a reality that could have been, a life that other people and death had taken away from me. I began drinking faster. I'd been a criminal most of my life, but not a bad one. I'd sold Fresh, not smack—though the profits from the latter were much higher—and only to people who knew the mistake they were making. I'd stolen and cheated, but usually from people who could afford it. I'd care-taken trivial and accidental sins that had never nudged the Earth in its orbit one iota, merely afforded their owners a few moments of peace. I'd only ever killed in extremis, only once for money and only people who had deserved it.

Sure, there were better ways of living. I could have been one of those people who spend their entire lives wearing stripy shirts and going to brainstorming meetings and saying "No idea is a bad idea" and giving each other high-fives when they won that big account. The people who never actually do or achieve anything real in their entire lives, who live instead in some bizarre parallel universe where half a point of market share for some frozen-food manufacturer actually matters. The people who live in the same city all their lives, pulled along tracks too boring to understand, who die in the place they were born, and then are buried to make room for someone just like them. Within my own terms, in my own stream of reality, I'd behaved as well as I could—and at least I'd done stuff. I'd been places. I'd seen things. I'd had a speaking role in my own life.

For the second time in as many hours I had a sudden vision of my parents, the spring from which I had run. Mom no longer worked in the bar, but pottered with Dad around the motel, killing bugs, changing sheets, and making sure people were adequately air-conditioned. They'd never retire, would always be verbs, forever changing the world in ways however small. I was thirty-four years old, and yet if I had to be brought to account, it wouldn't be Travis, or a judge, or God I would stand in front of. It would be them—my parents. They were the higher authority.

With the fifth beer I thought about the things I'd done, and whether I could tell my parents about them. About the good, and the bad, the deaths and the shadow times.

I decided I could. My mother would say "Oh, Hap," and my father wouldn't meet my eyes for a while. Within a few days it would be forgiven and understood. In the whole of your life there are maybe a handful of people who genuinely share your world with you, who for more than a moment inhabit the same place—as if you and they are imperfect facets of the same being. You owe them, and yourself. No one else.

I finished the last beer, walked over to the table on the other side of the bar, and grabbed the man in the cheap suit by the hair.

"Tell Travis if he puts a tail on me again, I'll kill them," I said, and smacked his head down on the table.

I left him facedown and unconscious in a sea of mixed nuts, and went to work.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ray Hammond's real house was over on Avocado, a big two-story set back from the road. Not a showy neighborhood, but certainly not a hovel. I got the address from Vent, who has a list he bought from a cop. A car I borrowed from outside the bar got me there fast: I ditched it half a mile from the house, in a brightly lit lot where it probably wouldn't get trashed, and ran the rest of the way.

I slowed to walk past the house on the other side of the street, covertly checking it out. I'd realized on the trip that I had no idea of Hammond's domestic situation, or whether someone might still be living inside. There were no uniforms standing guard outside the house, and no obvious unmarked cars parked within two hundred yards of it. A light glowed from within what looked like the living room, but the rest of the windows were dark. When after two passes the street remained deserted, I hurried across and walked straight up to the front door. There's no point messing around in these circumstances. You want to look like Joe Citizen dropping in on a friend, not like you're expecting to be felled by a marksman.

I rang the bell, waited. No reply. Rang it again, then leaned on it for ten seconds straight. No response, and no sound of movement from within, which tallied with what I was expecting. Most people, when they're in, have more than one light on. Sure there are oldsters and environmental fanatics who turn off the light in each room as they leave it, but most people don't. Night means "leave the lights on, goddammit, give me a flame to gather round." The chances were high that the living-room light was on a timer or an internal security system. Either that or any inhabitants were utterly deaf, which would work to my advantage.

I made my way around the side of the house, shielded from the neighbors by a high hedge that ran along the boundaries of the property. All the windows had locks, which peered at me as I passed, little orange eyes swiveling to follow my progress. I kept my face turned away, in case they had strong views on the likenesses of people who were allowed to prowl around the house at night, and made it to the back without incident.

The yard was compact and tidy, a big tree in the center and an old cable drum in place for use as a table. I scoped out the back door: one major lock, no sign of wires around the edges. I jacked the organizer into it and told it to get to work. Lights flickered on the organizer's display, and streams of numbers rocketed back and forth and up and down across the screen. I'm sure that's not entirely necessary, and that the organizer does it just to make sure I know it's doing something hard.

After thirty seconds it told me that it couldn't break the lock, but that it might be susceptible to a bribe. I tapped in the deceased Walter Pitt's bank details and let the lock transfer two hundred bucks into itself. God knows what it was intending to do with it, but after a few seconds there was a click and the door opened.

I found myself in a short back corridor with a doorway off to one side. I shut the outer door, stood, and hstened for a moment in the darkness. My heart lurched when I heard a soft and rhythmic shuffling sound, but a second later I had an idea what it might be. I padded over to the doorway and looked inside.

It was the kitchen, designed free range, and the appliances were on the move. The fridge and microwave were trudging heavily in opposite directions along the far wall; a coffeemaker and food processor were walking a circle together in the middle of the floor. A large freezer stood against the other wall, rocking back and forth.

"Hi," I said quietly. Everything except the freezer stopped moving. "Anybody home?"

"No," whispered the food processor. "We're a little worried."

"How come?"

"Well, we haven't seen Mr. Hammond for days," the coffee-maker said confidingly, walking up to stand at my feet. "And then last night Monica—that's Mrs. Hammond—just left, without saying where she was going, and we haven't seen her since."

"Was she carrying a suitcase?"

"Yes. Only a small one, though."

"Well," I said, trying to be reassuring, "maybe she's just gone to stay with a friend for a couple of days."

"You think so?" asked the freezer, stopping its rocking for a moment.

"Bound to be," I said. "Otherwise she'd have taken you guys."

"Maybe you're right." The freezer sounded relieved. "Thank you."

"You hungry?" asked the fridge. "Got some cold chicken in here."

"Maybe later," I said, and backed out into the hallway again.

So Hammond had a wife, and up until today she'd been in residence. I guess I could probably have discovered that from an intelligent perusal of last week's papers, but I hadn't gotten around to it. The fact that she'd gone explained why there were no cops outside. The fact she'd been here, probably guarded, could mean something else: Whoever had tossed Hammond's other residence might not have had a chance to do the same thing here.

It might also go some way to explaining why Laura had chosen to gun Hammond down in Culver City: and to suggesting what the nature of the relationship between them had been.

I walked quickly down the corridor, keeping an eye out for security devices. The front of the house consisted of a reasonably sized open space in front of a staircase, which led up to the second floor. There were doorways on either side. I poked my head in the room with the light, saw that it was indeed the living room, then peered through the other door. Dining room, and not terribly interesting. Or sumptuously furnished: The Hammonds' tastes ran a little austere, though what little there was looked expensive.

I ran lightly up the staircase and along the upper hall, finding nothing but bedrooms on the right-hand side. The biggest showed signs of recent occupancy—and also that someone had left it in a hurry. Women's clothes were scattered over the bed, and the wardrobe doors were open. I turned the light on for a moment, snouted around in the bottom. All I could see was shoes, and plenty of them. What is it with women and shoes? I can understand needing different colors to go with different outfits, but like most of her sex, Mrs. Hammond had seven pairs in burnt umber alone. On impulse I checked the labels of some of the clothes left on the bed. Fiona Prince, Zauzich, Stefan Jones. Ready-to-wear, admittedly, but far from cheap. I wondered if Travis had seen any of this when he came to interview the widow, and whether he'd come to the same conclusion I was reaching: Ray Hammond had been on the take.

I turned off the light and checked out the other side of the hallway. A bathroom, the shelf above the sink in mild disarray. Not a panicky departure exactly, but one where time had obviously been of the essence. Some key female accessories were still in place, however, implying she probably intended to come back. Then another small room, empty, purpose unclear. Maybe a nursery in the architect's original design, but not used for one now.

One more room remained, at the front of the house. The door was shut. I took a deep breath and turned the handle, sincerely hoping it wasn't alarmed. The handle turned, nothing went off, and I pushed the door open gently.

Beyond was Hammond's study. A desk up against the front window, and the outline of a big chair. A wall full of books, and another lined with filing cabinets. My heart sank. If there was anything hidden in here, finding it was going to take days.

Then the light went on, and the chair swiveled to reveal a man in a dark suit sitting there.

"Hello, Hap," he said. "Nice to see you again."

I BLINKED, discovered Deck's gun was already in my hand, and pointed it at the man. The gun didn't make me feel better, or seem to worry him much. I kept pointing it anyway.