Spares (18 page)

And then I saw him.

Johnny Vinaldi had aged well, in fact barely at all. He stood about five ten, and was still whipcord thin. A gold necklace sparkled nicely against the major tan of his chest, and his eyes were small and black and hard in
the clean lines of his face. He stood, wrapped a spotlessly white toweling gown around himself, and beckoned forward with his hand. He looked perfect, fit, and charismatic, and I wanted to kill him very much indeed.

I opened the gate and shambled out onto the flagstones that surrounded the pool. A couple of the girls were still horseplaying in the shallow end, but pretty much everyone else was watching me. I didn’t blame them. I felt I needed watching.

I stopped about three yards from him. He looked at me, one eyebrow raised. A pause, with only the sound of quiet splashing in the background. There were a lot of things I might have wished to put in that hiatus—the sound of gunfire, for example—but I knew none of them were going to happen. In fact, I hoped they didn’t. I didn’t have my gun, for a start.

“Lieutenant Randall,” Vinaldi said, eventually. “What a nice surprise.”

I gazed back at him. “I hope not. And I’m not flattered by the Lieutenant.”

“A formality,” he said, inclining his head toward me. “A sign of respect.”

“Bullshit.”

“Quite.” He smiled. “Well, as you can see, non-Lieutenant Randall, my friends and I are trying to relax at this difficult time and have a pleasant evening around the pool. Drink a little wine, maybe spark a few ulcers for the fool doctors to keep themselves in business over. You don’t seem to be dressed to join us, so tell me what’s on your mind, and tell me quickly because I have a feeling I’m not going to be very interested.”

“Mal Reynolds.”

Vinaldi frowned. An act of memory, or the facsimile of one. “Your former partner. What of him? I heard he was still living out in the Portal, chasing rainbows and worrying about dead women of ill repute.”

“He’s dead.”

“That I am not especially gleeful to hear. As you
know, I bear no particular ill will toward police officers unless they prevent me from carrying out my business, and Sergeant Reynolds was always too worried about the dead to cause problems for the living.”

“He tried,” I said. “We both did. You just managed to get me off the board in time.”

“I, of course, have no idea what you’re referring to.”

I couldn’t prove it, but I knew he understood exactly what I was talking about, and if I’d had my gun at that moment his head would have been spattered across his yellow walls. Maybe this thought was visible from the outside. One of the guys round the pool stood up. He didn’t come any closer, but he was letting me know he was taking a keener interest in the conversation. He was leaner than the others, and looked both dangerous and familiar.

“Jaz Garcia, isn’t it?” I asked, winking at him. “You quit poking underage girls, or does Johnny just buy them in for you now?” One of the women in the pool looked up. She didn’t look illegal, and was probably just surprised to realize she was servicing a statch rapist. Or maybe not. Maybe it gave her a thrill. I felt small and stupid and childish for thinking that, and for being there at all. Garcia’s face set unpleasantly, but Vinaldi held up a hand and Garcia stayed put like a good boy.

“Mr. Randall has been away,” Vinaldi said mildly, his head cocked slightly. “Obviously, he has been keeping low company and forgotten the niceties of conversation amongst normal people.” Then he turned to face me again. “I know nothing about Reynolds’s death. If that’s what you’ve come here to talk about, then you’re wasting my time even more than I suspected.”

“Someone clipped him. At first I thought it was because they were coming after me, and got him by mistake.”

Vinaldi laughed heartily. “And you think it was me? Tell me, why would I do that? You’re nothing. No threat to me, if you ever were. You’re not even a fucking cop
anymore. Why would I waste good money having you clipped?”

“It wasn’t me they were after. Mal was investigating a string of homicides,” I said, watching Vinaldi’s reaction carefully. “Whoever killed him did so because they wanted him to stop.”

“And who are these dead people?”

“Five women. Killed in a certain way.”

“We don’t kill women, Randall. Even you know that.”

“Laverne Latoya and Louella Richardson.”

If I hadn’t been looking very closely, I wouldn’t have seen it A tiny flinch in Vinaldi’s eyelid. He turned to his hired help. “Jaz, you heard of these people?”

Jaz trotted out a dutiful “No,” still staring hard at me. Vinaldi turned back and did a theatrical shrug.

“Funny,” I said. “Louella was a regular at Club Bastard the last couple weeks—but maybe she wasn’t really your type. I gather she could read. I think Laverne was one of your dancers. I can check that out later, but you’ve already told me the answer. I found her sister half an hour ago, incidentally, OD’d on Rapt from a Weasel Enema foil. You still deal Rapt, don’t you, Johnny? I wonder if you’d slip someone a little uncut just to make sure they couldn’t tie you to a dead woman.”

Vinaldi had started to breathe a little harder. “Get out,” he said.

“Laverne and Louella got carved up. Their eyes were ripped out,” I said. One of the girls in the pool gasped quietly, a little hand fluttering up to her mouth. “Sound familiar?” Then, not thinking, I threw a curve—just saying the first thing that came into my head. “Where’s your wife? She not joining you round the pool?”

Furious now, Vinaldi took a step closer to me. The veins in his neck were standing out like cords. “She’s wherever the fuck she wants to be, for what business it is of yours.”

“Someone got away from you. Must have been kind of embarrassing.”

“Not nearly so embarrassing as for your friends, if you still have any, to have to comb you out of the fucking sewers.”

I thought he was going to come at me then, but—using more self-control than I could have mustered—he sighed suddenly, and shook his head.

“You’re a sad fuck, Randall. I look in your eyes and I can see that you’re not fucked up on drugs, and maybe that makes you think you’ve got your life together. But then I say to myself that anyone who had his life together wouldn’t be coming up here bothering me. I didn’t put no whack on you or Mal or anybody else. I got better ways of spending the money. Siobhan there, for example.” He nodded toward an expensive-looking blonde lolling in one of the chairs. Below the neck she was some plastic surgeon’s idea of a very wet dream, but too many hours under a Clamorizer had made her face so chiseled it looked like it was carved out of ice. “She’s very high maintenance.”

“I can believe it,” I said. “I’m going now. But one thing…The edges aren’t holding.” I turned and started walking back toward the gate. There was nothing more I could do, not tonight, I didn’t have a gun. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a brain.

Vinaldi stayed motionless. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not just the hits you’ve got to worry about, Johnny. Word’s going round the lower floors. Word says you’re losing it.”

“What do I know from people down there? What should I care?”

“No reason,” I said, opening the gate. I looked back at him for a moment. Tableau: upmarket hoodlum plus human accessories. The two guys at the table were looking at each other. His men knew what I was talking about, and so did their boss. When I was halfway down the path I heard a shout behind me.

“Randall! What’s done in the past is done, understand?”
Vinaldi’s voice echoing over manicured lawns. “It’s over!”

I kept walking without turning round. Vinaldi was an intelligent man. He knew it would never be over.

I got off on 72 trembling, and I knew I was going to have to go through with it. My fist hurt from a discussion with the guard by the elevator on Vinaldi’s level, but the fifty dollars was back in my pocket, next to my gun. I felt like I was on a doomed downward spiral, as if I’d reached that stage in the evening when you’ve had too many beers to turn back but know that going forward is going to be even worse. The idea of buying a truck was getting more and more laughable to me, as if it had always been a ludicrous fantasy.

72 had gone down in the world. It was never stylish. It was just a normal suburban neighborhood, done out in corridors. Originally part of one of the MegaMall’s mid-range hotels, it had a couple of small stores in what used to be suites, but apart from that it was entirely residential. When I’d lived there people had been making an effort, pretending it didn’t matter that they lived below the 100 line. Low-paid white collar: a few cops, some bohemian old people, even a couple of teachers. There’d been window boxes lined up by front doors, in lieu of gardens, filled with struggling flowers grown under little ArtiSun lamps. At the right time of year, walking the subcorridors had been like strolling through meadows in spring, if you ignored the fact you were inside.

No longer. I stepped out of the elevator by myself and stood for a while, looking down the long corridor in front of me. One of the apartments on the left-hand side had been burnt out. It looked as if it had been reinhabited, and someone had made a reasonable job of patching it up, but the damage still showed and informed the rest of the view. The carpet was five years dirtier, and the paint on the walls looked like a thousand drunks had
pissed on it after imbibing unusual substances. The ceiling lights were still working, at least, but with a buzzing and fitful air, as if they reserved the right to stop at any moment. There wasn’t a single window box to be seen.

I passed doors behind which there might still be people I knew. I didn’t knock on them. I didn’t know which would be worse: discovering the people I knew were all gone, or finding they were still there. I took my turnoff and followed subcorridors that led out to the edge. All were nearly as wide as the main corridor, which I’d always thought gave the floor a feeling of openness. Now it just made it feel deserted.

Things had changed, but not that much until I made the turn into 31st and 5th. The farther I went down 31st, the worse it became. One light in three was working, often with a haunting flickering which did the corridor no favors. As I got closer and closer to the edge of the floor I saw more doors left open, the interior of the apartments stripped and empty. Life had moved away from 72, and it had retreated from this corner in particular. It wasn’t that it looked damaged. If anything, it was in a better state than the areas people were still living in. There’d been no vandalism—there just hadn’t been anyone living here in quite a while.

A hundred yards from the end, the ceiling lights gave out completely. I could still see where I was going, by the threadbare moonlight that seeped through the cracked window in the external wall. Something was rising in my throat, and the hairs on my scalp were shifting uneasily. I heard a small sound, and turned to look in the open doorway I was passing. There was nothing to see, but I thought the shadows moved. Heart thumping, I took a step into the apartment.

A small boy was crouching in the darkness, eyes wide and frightened. He was reasonably well dressed, not a runaway. Someone had combed his hair that morning, and made sure he put on clean clothes: But on the other hand he shouldn’t have been out so late.

“Don’t hurt me,” he said, breathlessly.

“I won’t,” I said. “I don’t hurt people.” He looked at me carefully for a while, then relaxed a little. The room was inky with blues and black, and the boy looked like a collusion of shadows topped by a small and intelligent face. “What are you doing here?”

“I come to sit, sometimes. It’s like a dare. Why are you here?”

“I used to live down the end,” I said, lighting a cigarette.

The boy stared. “Why? It’s really spooky.”

“It wasn’t then.” My eyes dropped, as I considered the idea that what had used to be my neighborhood was now the subject of dares and whispers. I made the effort to smile. “So you guys come down here, to prove you’re not scared?”

“No,” he said, “Just me. My dad…” He trailed off for a moment. “My dad thinks men should be brave. He doesn’t think I’m brave enough because boys keep beating me up at school.”

“Does he know you come down here?” The boy shook his head, and I smiled. “Don’t tell him. Keep it a secret, and that way you’ll always know something about yourself that he doesn’t And if he doesn’t know everything about you, then he can’t always be right, can he?”

The boy took a while to work this out, then smiled back.

“It’s really haunted, you know,” he said, with enthusiasm. “When more people used to live here, a couple of years ago, sometimes they said they saw a little person walking in the corridor. Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Yes,” I said, the back of my neck going cold.

“And there’s someone else who comes here sometimes. I don’t know who he is. I hide. A man, not as tall as you, I’ve seen him twice. He just goes down to the end and stands there for a while. Then he leaves again.” Suddenly, in the manner of small boys, he was on his feet and moving. “I’ve got to go.”

He jumped over to me and stuck his hand out. I shook it, bemused. Then he was gone, running out into the corridor and disappearing into the sound of small feet padding into the distance. By the time I’d stepped out of the apartment, he was round a corner and out of sight.