Slaughtermatic (7 page)

The bank front was burning like an exotic drink. ‘Hot enough for yuh Harpo?’ shouted Blince over the roar. ‘Rome in the last days, am I right? Explains a lot. If Rome wasn’t built in a day why’s it such a goddamn mess, know what I mean? You trooper boys - get this chestnut gun outta here and hose down the crime scene.’

The Duvall gun was backed up and a fire crew moved in as Blince and Specter strolled to the snack stand. ‘If yuh wanna follow this up, Harpo, we’re headin’ for the uptown den. Terry Geryon’s your man. Main den’s been Parkered. Hey, what am I thinkin’ here - Benny? Put out an APB on Parker. He’ll rue the day he rocketed outta the birth canal. And let’s clear it up once and for all Benny, can potatoes only be grown from potatoes?’

‘
I guess so, Chief,’ said Benny, itching to be gone.

‘
You guess,’ Blince rumbled ominously. ‘Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you.’

Benny smirked uncertainly.

‘
Eh?’ Blince stared at him. ‘Think you’re charmin’ the cats outta their ruby-red pyjamas.’

‘
I gotta go put out the all-points, Chief.’

‘
Listen Benny, I don’t like this any more than you do hey!’ But Benny had scuttled away. Blince turned to Specter. ‘This from a guy who wanted to play incidental trumpet for the movies. Make any sense to you?’

‘
Listen, Henry, about this here bank job - Cubit turns up, I wanna misrepresent him. I need a high-profile case for the networks. Last one I had was the O’Leary murder, remember? Even the murder was televised and there was no doubt who did it.’

‘
Sure I remember - two-year sentence, right?’

‘
And that was just the opening remark.’

‘
Sure, but Harpo,’ said Blince, opening a soda on the vendor’s teeth, ‘I don’t want anyone huggin’ and relieved in the perjury room. Somebody’s gotta top Olympus or there’s no resolution.’

‘
It’s my job to correct the truth, Henry, and if that requires blinding these here Seceded States, who’s to say what? This whole town’s the smoking gun of ignorance, after all. We’ll receive massive duplicity.’

‘
You mean publicity.’

‘
I guess I do, at that.’

The bank had been dampened down and they wandered over to take a swatch.

Inside, Blince swept a floodtorch around the bank floor - every surface was covered in a black tar and his boots made the tack-and-rip sound of velcro as he proceeded to the vault. The air smelled of steak and he began to wish he could get out for a decent meal. As he emptied four beans into the relevant safe box with a trooper snub, Specter appeared at the vault room door.

‘
It’s a neat job.’

‘
Neat as a Swiss roll pushed into a determinedly closed mouth,’ muttered Blince, taking out the severed hand. ‘You know they used to cut off the dukes of thieves in the old days?’

‘
What goes around comes around.’

Blince threw the hand back and took out the vinyl-bound thesaurus, scrolling. ‘Well looky here. Shoot at someone for two hours, you think you know ‘em. “Dishonest, unsqueamish, slippery, artful.” This hits the screen, we got eight seasons right here.’

And right there Specter started to doubt his strategy. Blince’s pursuit of retribution was blind - like a marching toy, he had to hit something before he could change directions.

Re-joining the clean-up brigade outside, Specter got a beer and watched a gang of speed urchins swarm over a tank which was stoved into the base of an elevator. Though too poor to interest him, even these brats could recognize a valuable corpse.

Yet when word came through from the data boys that Dante Cubit’s ID matched one of the bodies swept away earlier, only Specter and Tredwell Garnishee received the news with a semblance of solemnity - then quit the scene in a screech of spike-tyres. Everyone else was swell, and amid fistfights and racist dancing, agreed that the entire affair had been a waste of time.

On the comer of Crane, a bodyvan spun out and plunged into a store front, the rear doors bursting open to spill the dead like worms from a can. Dante Two crawled away from the corpse heap and lay bleeding in the road. It was what he called his ‘Italian look’. At his belly the gore blot spread like a Rorschach butterfly.

Flat out and counting the stars, he wondered at his body’s perversity in leaking neither more nor less blood than it had at its disposal. Would Rosa be angry?

PART TWO

1

IN THE DELAYED REACTION

In the Delayed Reaction Bar on Valentine the fashion cycle had narrowed to a point and revivals of the present moment blended with those of every other moment to make a dead, slate-dark sludge. This sludge was baked dry and sold to fugitives who could not articulate a time when things were different. The clockhands were still and the room spun around, confusing people’s aim - ammo ended up in folks who were slow to grasp its value and their unworthiness to receive it. The ballistic jukebox played a perennial favourite as the Entropy Kid and Corey the Teller pushed into the bar - the steady spatter of an Ingram M11 sub.

Once again the barman welcomed the Kid back into the ‘land of the living’. Whatever your strife, Toto knew it to the bone. He had bought the place knowing the trustiest rule of social disintegration: bars burn last.

‘
Gimme an October Surprise,’ the Kid whispered.

‘
I’ll have a shake,’ announced Corey sunnily as Toto spun a mixture of antifreeze and a solution for stripping the velvet from giraffes’ antlers.

‘
Who’s the prefab?’ Toto asked, switching off the centrifuge, but the Kid stared morosely at the bartop. Contradictions tore at his head - she asked him to open up and was disgusted when he did. She said she didn’t want to change him yet wanted him to be happy. She stuck as close as a tattoo. She thought with her hair. The Kid toyed nervously with his gun.

The lights went down for the Migraine Cabaret. Performers came on in lime-green face paint and shuffled slowly about the performance space, closing curtains and lying down. Two merged their checkerfield hallucinations and played chess on the rippling result. The crowd gamely bellowed in bewilderment and impatience.

The lights came up. Corey was still alive.

The Kid’s despair had continued like a fire crossing a bridge - to his mind it vaulted a gasoline river anyway. He led a charred life. Action was consumed and futile. Aiming the Kafkacell at himself only shorted the circuit. Aversion surgery prevented his using another weapon. Every suicide line he called turned out to be an anti-suicide line. He was trapped.

‘
What you get,’ said Corey, watching him, ‘tryin’ to escape from a clench that don’t exist.’

‘
Yeah, things ain’t been the same since they clenched Panacea,’ mused Toto, wiping a glass.

Had anyone ever escaped from the Mall? thought the Kid absently, gulping antifreeze. Not even Billy Panacea, burglar extraordinaire? It’d take outside help.

He remembered his break-out attempts at the braincut unit where he was bonded to the Kafkacell. He and his cellmate Dice ‘Killer’ Agnew had disguised themselves as guards and been beaten up during an escape by the other prisoners. Dice got inhuman after surgery, and escaped without him. The Kid awaited contact from outside, but there was zip. All he had was surgeons and guards to complain to. One sympathetic doctor involved him in regression therapy and the Kid discovered seemingly repressed moments of happiness in his childhood, but it was a classic case of false memory syndrome.

‘
Look behind you, Kid,’ said Toto.

A clown wearing forensic gloves lugged a rotary cannon from his table and walked out.

‘
Missed him,’ said the barman. ‘That was the Carny. In for the convention.’

The Kid was surprised and impressed - as slaughter went, this harlequinade assassin was the true spice. The Carny would scream like a demon as he let fly at motivational speakers, celebrities and diplomats, seeming to shoot from the heart. Nobody could guess what inferno took place in his cosmetic skull.

‘
Agreed to speak,’ said the barman. ‘Quite a coup for the bigots’ bunfight.’

An idea began a miraculous germination in the baked interior of the Kid’s mind. The bartop had begun to whirlpool, creaking.

‘
Speaking of which,’ said Toto, ‘you hear about Download Jones? Blew his gourd - redecorated the den in full and final fashion.’

‘
Cod-eyed?’

‘
Eyeless - heart of the blast, remember. Brotherhood escorted him backfirst into the den and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, blam - ask round you don’t believe me. You know Jones - acutely paraphernaic. Not only that jawtrigger but some kinda virus bomb, supposedly - needs a daily re-set. Guess if it’s true we’ll hear them socketeers a-sobbin’.’ Toto roared with laughter. ‘Everyone sayin’ Jones hacked the Mall - Blince and his yes man did the bust.’

‘
Cod-eyed?’

‘
Na. They went to supervise a heist on Deal - big party goin’ down there. Regular jamboree. You and Danny still doin’ a job there sometime?’

‘
We just did the job, you son of a bitch - the jamboree you describe is what you get when something fails absolutely, all the way down the line. Smithereens, Toto, that’s what’s going down in Deal Street - the smithereens of my life, and yours.’ And he lunged across the bar at Toto’s unprotected throat, shaking him like a street mime.

‘
Ho-ho-hold your horses, Kid - I didn’t mean nuthin’ by it.’

‘
Yeah, what’s got into you?’ asked Corey, prising the Kid’s hands from the barman. She was just glad nobody had seen them escape, borne aloft by tyrants.

‘
Sold down the river,’ whispered the Kid, guzzling the rest of his drink. The heist, that stupid heist which had happened, God help it, for real despite Dante’s virtual paranoia, had gone totally to seed and thorn. He reached into both pockets and came up with handfuls of painkillers, which he began popping like beer nuts. He gazed around blearily, images doubling. The graffiti coding on the wall was visually reconfigured, as the artist had intended, to reveal an atomic missile hack.

‘
Rosa was there,’ said the barman in slowtime. The bar was underwater. Corey’s face looked plastic. ‘Ask the Rose.’

Someone selected a burst of Ruger Mark 11 on the jukebox. There were groans and some violence from the clientele - the Ruger was considered close-range, elevator gunfire.

Harpoon Specter entered the Portis Thruway and the maelstrom of his self-regard. The Cubit affair would put his ass on the map. Two versions of the same guy, both guilty of intent but only one guilty of theft. Court TV - one Cubit on the show and the other a surprise witness. He’d skip the brandcuffs, let Cubit yell his head off re the facts - the existence of doppelganger matter created by timefolds, and the annihilation caused when twinned objects met. It had happened once, obliterating a city - Cincinnati as luck would have it - but the authorities attributed the blast to just another private plutonium jag. What if he could get the two Cubits to hug in Los Angeles, at a post-trial press conference?

Then he remembered that at least one of the Cubits was dead of bullet inhalation. But even with two corpses, couldn’t he box them up and send them to the target state with instructions for single-plot burial? There were planting parlours who’d honour it, for twins. Then, boom. The idea was itching like a lifeline in his palm. He’d have to get a rundown on the Deal Street bodytags.

Specter sped out of the Thruway and the mass of Olympus Dump filled the windshield, overshadowing downtown and the Beretta Triangle. At Pill and Crane he hit the brakes - a bodyvan was hunkered down in a store front. Taking up the Roadblocker, he stepped out and strode across the street. The only other movement was the contradictory flashing of a busted stoplight and its reflection in a bloodslick.

He gave the van the once-over. No Cubit among the bodies. The driver dead, his neck broken. A thesaurus on the ground near the open van doors - Cubit’s ballast, version number two. Specter was picking it up when a cop roller slashed to a stop, lights pulsing, and Tredwell Garnishee ducked out with an armoured arm rifle. ‘It’s not like that,’ said Specter before Tredwell had spoken.

‘
Step away from the vehicle, Mr Specter.’

‘
Well, well, the nodding dog,’ said Specter, bringing the Roadblocker to bear. ‘How are the mighty fallen.’

‘
Fine, thanks. And now I must ask you to drop your steamer and step aside.’

‘
Oh, I get it. One more rogue cop in this town? And packing what looks like a fair gun.’

‘
This is a Zero Approach Arm Cannon, Mr Specter. I have pulled both the trigger and the BOD pin. One false move.’

‘
Benefit-of-the-doubt capability - you have a doubt?’

‘
No sir. Merely a code of behaviour.’

Specter stepped slowly away from the van, keeping the shotgun raised. ‘Boy, to have a code of behaviour - how that must feel. Address book resembles a wafer, am I right?’

‘
Where’s Cubit?’

‘
Curled in a doorway somewhere, bleeding to death. Time’s of the essence, Tredwell. That your real name? Somehow it’s too distressing to believe.’

‘
No doubt the sack of shadows you call a philosophy spares you the pain of believing anything.’ A tank taxi sped by and they resisted the urge to look away from each other. ‘Parallel universes do not meet, Mr Specter. Or shall we say, they should not be allowed to.’