One of Us (22 page)

The man held up a small electronic notebook. "Are you looking for this?"

"I've no idea," I said petulantly. "What is it? And who the fuck are you?"

Then I recognized him, and answered the question myself. It was the guy from the diner, the one who'd been sitting at the table down at the end, apparently deep in post-alcohol stress. The one who'd spoken to me after my phone conversation with the man at Laura's house, who'd looked a little out of place, and yet who had been sitting there, opposite Laura's hotel—almost as if he were waiting for someone.

"My name," said the man, screwing up his eyes for a moment, "is Hap."

"No, it's not," I said steadily. "That's my name. Try again."

The man frowned. "You're absolutely right, of course. Sorry. My name is Travis."

"Stop being an asshole," I suggested, "and tell me who the hell you are. And turn off the light, for Christ's sake."

"What light?"

The light switch, in keeping with common practice, was on the wall behind me, next to the door. He couldn't have reached it from where he was sitting. The light had an unusual quality, almost tangible, as it might appear if I were swimming in clear water at night and someone turned on a powerful searchlight overhead. It didn't seem to reach into the corners of the room, or to display objects in the usual manner, as if its role wasn't actually visual.

Keeping Deck's gun trained firmly on the man in the chair, I reached behind and flicked the switch. The overhead light came on, and the room suddenly looked more normal, full of edges and a little dusty. Though not any brighter.

The man winked. "And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day" he said, "for there shall be no night there."

"I really am running out of patience," I said.

The man rolled his eyes, reached into his pocket, and brought out a small torchlike object. "Ambient light projector," he told me. "You can get them at Radio Shack."

"Great. I'll look out for one. Now, for the last time: What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you," he said, standing. "You're later than I expected, and I've got to go. Things to do. Anyway—it's here." He placed the notebook on the chair, winked at me again. "You'd never have found it on your own. It was taped under the corner of the desk."

"Which is the first place I would have looked," I said irritably. "For whatever it is."

The man smiled and walked toward me. He stopped about a yard away, with my gun almost touching his chest, and waited patiently. I didn't know what to do. Shooting him seemed excessive, but I didn't know whether I should just let him go. In the end I let the gun drop. I was panting slightly, tired and strung out and empty. The guy had to be a cop or someone connected with Hammond, and he was obviously several steps ahead of me.

"What's going on?" The question spilled out of me like a final breath. I felt like I could do with some clues, maybe a password to help me up to the next level.

The man pulled out a wallet and handed me a card. "I wouldn't hang around," he advised. Then he walked past me out the door, and I just let him go.

It was a moment before I thought to look at the card, to turn it over in my hands. Both sides were blank.

I ran out the door, through the hallway and down the stairs, but he was gone. I dithered about whether to chase after him, then remembered the notepad was still upstairs, that time wasn't on my side—and also that Deck could probably do with some backup. I returned to the study, made it dark again. I was intending to just pocket the notepad and go, but on impulse I found the pad's backlighting switch and turned it on.

A screen full of numbers, separated by commas. There didn't seem to be any discernible pattern, just row after row of figures. I leafed through a few other pages of the notebook, but they were all blank. Hammond had used a fifty-dollar device to store just one page of stuff: Ergo, it was probably important. Or maybe it was his golf scores. I'd worry about it later.

Before I went I cast an eye over the shelves of books. For a cop, he had a hell of a lot of them. Criminology texts, history, novels, spines battered and used. Also religious books, interpretations of the Bible, one hundred and one ways to be a happy camper: rows of the fuckers, looking newer than most of the other books. I picked a book out at random from the nonreligious section, opened it. The light from the street was just sufficient for me to see that the page showed a number of pictures of gunshot wounds. Not very nice, but quite interesting. It was certainly a better deal to see them by opening a book than looking down at your own shoulder. Not for the first time, I wondered whether it might have been a better career decision to have been a cop rather than a criminal. I'd thought about it at one stage. As usual, I decided that I'd probably had better pay and working conditions, and enjoyed slightly higher social status. Being a cop got you a nice uniform, on the other hand—and presumably people didn't arrest you the whole time and say dispiriting things about your life. Didn't make much difference: probably a little late to apply to the academy anyhow.

As I put the book back on the shelf, I noticed something. The next book along had a piece of paper stuck in it, a tiny corner protruding above the height of the pages it was sandwiched between. I pulled the book out, opened it.

And knew I'd found something important.

The page was about five inches by three, and laserprinted almost edge to edge. The text was nonsense, a jumble of letters with no spaces. A code. As I looked more closely, I realized that the letter X appeared far more times than it should have even if it was standing in for E. Chances were it was doubling as a space character, in which case the text was printed in word-shaped chunks.

There was no printer on the desk, which meant maybe that the sheet was a product of Hammond's activities in his other apartment. In other words, that it was a backup of whatever information the people who'd cleaned that place out were looking for. Two of the edges were slightly uneven, suggesting it had once been part of a larger sheet. You could probably have gotten four out of a normal piece of paper—implying there might be more?

I slid the book back, pulled out another from a higher shelf. No paper, nor in the next two I tried. There were hundreds of books on the shelves, and I knew it had to have been the coincidence shot which Vent had sold me that had enabled me to find the first one right off. Searching all the books would take the rest of the night, so I decided to just quickly toss one section.

It still took over half an hour, but netted me three more pieces of paper. The letters on each were different, but otherwise they looked identical. Two words in bold at the top, maybe a name. Then a solid block of impenetrable text.

What could be secret and important enough that a cop would go to all this trouble both to hide the information and also to back it up? Not official business, that's for sure.

I slipped the sheets in my pocket and left the house, pausing only to take a piece of fried chicken from the fridge and wish the appliances good luck.

DECK WAS SITTING at the table, looking stressed. Laura was lying on the sofa with a large drink in her hand. She looked angular and jumpy, and was clearly in a strange mood. She was dressed in women's jeans and a baggy sweater, presumably an outfit left in Deck's closet by some special person who'd decided to go be special to someone else. The clothes were far too big for Laura, and she looked like a pretty scarecrow dressed in its Sunday best. She'd pulled the sleeves of the sweater up, and the scars on her wrists looked raw. The fear in her eyes had gotten worse, like someone who knew she was going to start pounding her head against the wall again but was powerless to stop herself.

"Yo, Hap," she said. "The prodigal loser returns." The sentence came out like someone trying to speak Dutch with a speech impediment, and I raised an eyebrow at Deck.

"You try stopping her," he said.

I perched on the arm of the sofa. She craned her neck to look up at me. Her eyes were holding, but only just. "Hi, Hap," she said. "How you doing?"

"Not as well as you, by the look of it. You think maybe it's time for that coffee yet?"

"Hmm. Do I want coffee?" She mimed deep thought, a performance slightly marred by missing her chin with her index finger. Then suddenly she shouted,
"No, of course I don't want any fucking coffee!"

"Laura, it's going to be really hard for us to talk if you have any more to drink."

"We're going to talk, are we? How nice. What about?"

"Whatever you want. About what's going on with you. About what we can do to help."

"What are you going to do—save me?"

Suddenly I felt tired and worn out and not in the fucking mood. "Laura, do try to remember that people other than you have problems. I've spent the entire afternoon in a police cell. That incident I told you about? It's back on the database, and Travis knows it. To stop myself from going down on a recall rap, I have to help him catch the psychos who are after you, because he thinks they killed Hammond, and my only payment for doing that is the freedom of my ex-wife—about whom I have complicated feelings, not least because Travis let it slip that she may be hoping to cash in on a lucrative contract that is out on me. By anybody's standards, that's a lousy afternoon, so what say you give me a break?"

She giggled. "Why did you split up with your wife?"

"Because our cat died," I snapped. "Now, are you going to have coffee, or what?"

"No, but I'll accept a massage."

"Excuse me?"

"My neck hurts," she said, pulling herself laboriously upright on the sofa, "and it might help if you would massage it."

"We're not going to have sex, are we?"

She blinked at me, looking mildly sober for a moment. "Er, no."

Deck sniggered in the background, got up, and went into the kitchen. He knew what was coming. He'd heard it before. I explained to Laura, at some length, my feelings on the subject of massage. That I disliked having it done to me, that I found it both boring and irritating, and why. I also explained my views on the sneaky and underhanded way women had gotten massage redefined as foreplay, so men had to do it to them more often. After centuries of it being something you did to athletes, or if you'd sprained something, suddenly all the good sex advice— propagated either by women or bearded idiots who do what they're told—said that massage was an essential element of making love. And so now, not only did men have to ensure that women had orgasms (their right, to be sure, and a pleasurable task, but, ladies—have you tried it? It's either very easy or like playing pool with the lights off: never anywhere in between. I think every woman should have to try giving another woman an orgasm. We'd hear a bit less on the subject then, I bet) but suddenly bone-crushingly dull and detumescing things like massaging someone's foot are now part of the whole sexual ritual, and if a man doesn't spend thirty minutes happily kneading his girlfriend's calves, then he's some kind of sexual caveman. Men haven't suddenly come up with some whole new thing, have they? Some new sexual hoop for their partners to jump through? They haven't decreed that being nice about their jokes and serving them beer and pretzels are now essential parts of the sexual enterprise, or that they simply can't get nicely relaxed and in the mood unless you watch the ball game together beforehand.

It's just not
fair
, dammit—and I for one am not standing for it. Or taking it lying down. Whichever.

I went on awhile, I have to admit. Intentionally. After the first couple of minutes Laura's shoulders started to slump, and when Deck brought her a cup of coffee, she took it without a murmur.

"I'm not surprised your wife left you," she said, curling her legs up beneath her. "Sounds like you were kind of a drag."

Deck spoke quietly: "You don't really think Helena's going to whack you?"

"Probably not," I said. "She saved me at the Cafe. She brought the memory machine back here. And probably it was she who was in my apartment and turned the sheets back: a message I was just a bit too dense to get."

"Which implies she's been looking out for you for a few days."

"Big fucking deal," I said. "Too little, too late."

"Hap, if she really wanted to kill you ..."

"Yeah, I know," I said irritably, "I'd be dead already. Do you have any idea what it was like to have a significant other who's universally acknowledged to be tougher than you are?"

"No, but then, I've never been married."

"Very droll. You get that off a cereal box?"

"I might have if I could read."

"Jeez," said Laura, "I'm amazed you guys ever go out. You can have so much fun just staying in
talking
."

"Laura," I said, "what happened to you? This morning your company was almost bearable. Now it's like eating a ground-glass enchilada. You want to talk about that?"

"Oh, God," she sneered, "Doctor Hap is back in session."

"What's the problem?" I said for the hell of it. "Feeling bad about Monica Hammond?"

I don't know what reaction I was expecting. Maybe a realization on Laura's part that I knew slightly more about her life than she figured. Perhaps just shutting her up for a moment.

That wasn't what I got. She went absolutely berserk.

She launched herself off the sofa, already screaming. I fell backward awkwardly and landed with her on top of me. I was so astonished, it was a few moments before I could even put up a defense, by which time I was seeing stars. Laura was frenzied, beating at my face with her fists and shouting words I couldn't distinguish. I tried to grab her hands, but they were moving too fast and too unpredictably.

Then Deck was behind her, and managed to get hold of her shoulders. He pulled her backward until her fists were out of range, at which point she started kicking at me instead. Deck got an arm fairly gently around her neck, and eased her back far enough for me to drag myself away. Laura was still shouting, but more slowly, her voice dropping in pitch to somewhere near its normal range. I still couldn't make out what she was rasping, though it sounded like four words repeated over and over.