One of Us

FOR TRACEY, SISTER, FRIEND

AND FOR THOSE WHO HAVE BECOME INVISIBLE SUE, PEGGY, BETTY, CLARICE, AND MABEL

THANKS TO

NICK ROYLE, WHO HAS BEEN THERE FROM THE BEGINNING WITH FRIENDSHIP, ENCOURAGEMENT, AND STRANGE SQUEAKING NOISES; TO MY AGENTS—RALPH VICINANZA, NICK MARSTON, BOB BOOKMAN, CARADOC KING, LINDA SHAUGHNESSY, AND LISA EVELEIGH—FOR THEIR VARIOUS GOOD WORKS ON MY BEHALF; TO JANE JOHNSON, JIM RICKARDS, STUART PROFFIT, KATE MICIAK, NITA TAUBLIB, AND DAVE HINCHBURGER; TO ALISTAIR GILES, SUSAN CORCORAN, JACKS THOMAS, FIONA MCINTOSH, AND BEATWAX; TO DAVID BADDIEL; TO ARIEL AND THE GUYS AT DEANSGATE, AND TO THE BFS; TO ELLEN DATLOW AND ED BRYANT: TO COLIN WILSON FOR LONG-TERM INSPIRATION, AND ERIC BAZILIAN FOR A SONG; TO TIM AND SUZY AND NOT JUST FOR CAT-SITTING; TO HOWARD FOR GRADUALLY DESTROYING OUR HOUSE; TO SARAH AND RANDY AND PETE AND DANA AND CHRIS AND LORRAINE—AND THE USUAL SUSPECTS IN LONDON; TO ADAM SIMON FOR SEEING THE INVISIBLE MORE CLEARLY THAN MOST, AND TO STEVE JONES FOR OCCASIONAL SANITY CHECKS; TO DON JOHNSON AND CHEECH MARIN FOR GETTING US THROUGH THE LONG, DARK NIGHTS OF AN ENGLISH SPRING, AND TO PAULA, AS ALWAYS, FOR BEING MY REAL LIFE; AND TO MY PARENTS WITH LOVE.

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THE INVISIBLE IS THE SECRET FACE OF THE VISIBLE.

— M. MERLEAUPONTY

PROLOGUE

Night. A crossroads, somewhere in deadzone LA. I don't know the area, but it's nowhere you want to be. Just two roads, wide and flat, stretching out four ways into the world: uphill struggles to places that aren't any better, via places that are probably worse.

Dead buildings squat in mist at each corner, full of sleep and quietness. It seems like they lean over above us like some evil cartoon village, but that can't be right. Two-story concrete can't loom. It's not in its nature. The city feels like a grid of emptiness, as if the structures we have introduced to it are dwarfed by the spaces that remain untouched, as if what is not there is far more real than what we see.

A dog shivers out the end of its life meanwhile, huddled in the doorway of a twenty-four-hour liquor store. The light inside is so yellow, it looks like the old guy asleep behind the counter is floating in formaldehyde. When she was younger, the woman would have done something to help the dog. Now she finds herself unable to care. The emotion's too old, buried too deep—and the dog's going to die anyway.

I don't know how long we wait, standing in the shadowed doorway, hiding deep in her expensive coat. She gets through half a pack of Kims, but she's smoking fast and not wearing a watch. It feels as if this corner in the wasteland is all I've known or ever will see; as if time has stopped and sees no compelling reason to start flowing again.

Eventually the sound of a car peels off from the backdrop of distant noise and enters this little world. She looks, and sees a sweep of headlights up the street, hears the rustle of tires on asphalt, the hum of an engine happy with its job. Her heart beats a little more slowly as we watch the car approach, her mind cold and dense. It isn't even hatred she feels, not tonight, not anymore. When the cancer of misery has a greater mass than the body it inhabits, it's the tumor's voice you hear all the time. She's stopped fighting her unhappiness now. All she wants is some peace.

The car pulls up thirty yards along the street, alongside an address she spent two months tracking down, and ended up paying a hacker to find. The engine dies. For the first time, she glimpses the man's face through the dirty windshield. Seeing him isn't climactic, and comes with no roll of drums. It just makes us feel tired and old.

He takes an age to emerge, leaning across to pick up a pack of cigarettes from the dash. I don't know for sure that's what he's doing, but that's what she decides. It seems to be important to her, and what she feels about this man is far too complex for me to interpret. She is calm, mind whirling in circles so small you can't see them at all, but now her heart is beating a little faster, and as he finally opens the door and gets out of the car, we start to walk toward him.

He doesn't notice, at first, still fumbling with his keys. She stops a few yards from the car, and he looks up blearily. Drunk, perhaps—though she doesn't think so. He was always too much in control for that. Probably just tired, and letting it show while there's no one around to see. He's older, grayer than she was expecting, but the slightly hooded eyes are the same. He looks early fifties, trim, a little sad. He doesn't recognize her, but smiles anyway. It's a good smile, and may once have been quite something, but it doesn't reach the eyes anymore.

It's about now that the other car first appears, way off down the other road. I didn't notice it the first time, and she never does. She just stares at the man, waiting. A generic smile isn't enough. We want him to know who we are. The bond operates in two directions. She cannot break it alone.

"Help you?" he asks eventually, peering at her. He stands by the car, back straight. He's not frightened, sees no need to be, but he's beginning to sense this is not a run-of-the-mill encounter. All he sees is a skinny woman in a good coat. But there's something about us that disturbs him, reminds him of someone he used to be.

"Hello, Ray," she says, and then nothing else, waiting for him to remember.

Maybe it's something in her face that does it, puts him in mind of a grin long ago. His eyes open wider. Some measure of confidence returns; his face relaxes a little. A picture of reliability. They look at each other for a while, but by now my attention is on the sound of the car. I know it's coming, big and silver and fast.

"It's Laura, isn't it?" Ray asks eventually. Her name is still there, near the front of his mind. Maybe it always has been, the way his has been in hers. He nods. "Yes, it's you." He gives a short, bewildered laugh, sticking a cigarette in his mouth. "I never forget a face." He clicks the wheel of his lighter and starts bringing it up to his face. His left eyelid droops slowly.

The wink is like returning to a childhood playground, and finding a swing still rocking as if you had only just that moment climbed down. It's enough.

The first shot goes straight through his left eye, blatting a baseball of shit out of the back of his skull. He's still trying to back away as the next bullet tears through his groin, and as another splashes through most of his throat. But then he's on the ground, legs spastically twitching as we step forward to stand over him.

The dog watches it all from its patch by the wall, but it's got problems of its own, and Ray's going to die anyway.

She doesn't stop firing until the gun is empty. The body is still by then, and has nothing worth speaking of above the neck. The cigarette alone is almost intact, clamped between lips that look like something out of an autopsy wastebasket. She decides to leave it that way.

I put my hand in her pocket and pull out another clip. Her hands are trembling a great deal by then, and I think she already knows she has failed. While she's still fumbling to reload, she finally notices the sound of a car hurtling toward her. Her head jerks up.

I know immediately that it's not the cops, and that I've seen the car somewhere before. Laura doesn't. She doesn't know what to think. Her mind is too empty and fractured to make a decision, so her body makes it for her.

We back away, stumbling and dropping the gun. Then we turn and run, expecting to die and asking only why it has taken so long.

We glance back for an instant, and see the car has pulled to a halt in the middle of the crossroads. The doors are open,- two figures are standing over Ray's remains. The men are of identical height, wear matching light gray suits, and have eyes that don't look right.

One picks up Laura's gun; the other shouts "Shit! Shit shit
shit
!" in a voice so deep and loud that I wonder how the buildings around us remain standing. He turns slowly toward us, a streetlamp directly behind his head casting a nimbus of yellow light.

We disappear around the corner before he sees us, and run until we fade into black.

PART ONE

REMtemp

CHAPTER ONE

I was in a bar in Ensenada, drinking a warm beer quickly and trying to remind myself that I hadn't murdered anyone, when my alarm clock caught up with me. Little bastard.

Housson's was jammed to the rafters and noisy as hell, and not just because everyone was talking very loudly. Two local alfalfa barons had come into the bar to celebrate some deal, perhaps a merging of their cash-crop-related dynasties, and an eight-piece mariachi band had joyfully latched on to them and settled in for the night. The rest of the bar was a Jackson Pollock of local color: seedy photographers trying to charge tourists for pictures, leather-faced ex-pats peering around the place like affronted owls, and Mexicans setting about getting drunk with commendable seriousness. Housson's looks like it was last redecorated forty years ago, by someone who had the more functional end of the Wild West in mind: dusty floorboards, walls painted with secondhand cigarette smoke, chairs stolen from some church hall. The only nod in the direction of decor is the fading sketches of ex-bartenders, renowned alcoholics, and similarly distinguished local characters that adorn the walls. One of these had already come crashing to the ground, the casualty of a bottle hurled by a disgruntled drunkard: All in all the atmosphere was just one step short of chaos.

I was tired and my head hurt, and I shouldn't have been there in the first place. I should have been out on the streets, or checking different bars, or even heading back to LA. Anywhere but here. She was nowhere to be seen, and as I hadn't had the time to go to a coincidence dealer before I left LA, I didn't expect her to just wander in. I was still pretty confident the Chicago lead was a deliberate false trail, but didn't have any particularly good reason to believe she'd have run to Ensenada either. I was there just to drink beer and avoid the problem.

The older of the two businessmen looked like he consumed a fair amount of his alfalfa personally, but he'd obviously done a bit of singing in the distant past and was now working steadily through his repertoire, to the delight of the assembled henchmen and underlings. One of these, a slimy little turd I pegged as the accountant son-in-law of one of the principals, was busy eyeing up a group of young women who were cheerily clapping along at the next table. As I watched, I saw him signal to the non-singing baron, who turned and clocked the girls. His smile broadened to the kind of leer that would make a werewolf look bashful and charming; he beckoned the leader of the band over, more money already in his hand.

I was sitting to one side of a table crammed with tourists, the only seat that had been free when I'd entered over two hours before. The girls were red-faced from the day's sun, and fizzing with margarita-fueled bravado; the guys sipping their Pacificos sullenly and panning their eyes around the bar probably trying to work out which of the locals was going to come and try to steal their women first. I could have told them that it was much more likely to be another American, probably one of the boisterous frat rats who were in town for some damnfool motorcycle race, but I didn't know them and couldn't be bothered. In fact, they were getting on my nerves. The girls were dancing in their seats in that way people do when they're letting themselves off a very short leash, and the nearest one kept banging into my arm and causing me to spill beer and cigarette ash onto jeans that hadn't been that clean when I'd pulled them on two days earlier.

When I felt the tap on my shoulder, I turned irritably, expecting to see the waiter who was working that corner of the room. I like attentive service as much as the next man, but, Christ, there's a limit to how fast a man can drink. In my case that limit is pretty high, and yet this guy was still hassling me well before I'd finished each beer. It was good that the waiter was there, because the only way I could have gotten to the bar was with a chainsaw, but I felt he needed to calm down a little. I was in the middle of deciding to tell him to go away—or at least to do so after he'd brought me another drink—when I realized it wasn't him at all, but a fat American who looked like he'd killed a dirty sheep and glued it to his chin.

"Fella asking for you!" he shouted.

"Tell him to fuck off," I said. I didn't know anyone in Ensenada, not anymore, and didn't wish to start making new acquaintances.

"Seems pretty insistent" the guy said, and jerked his thumb back toward the bar. I glanced in that direction, but there were far too many people in the way. "Little black fella, he is."

In those parts this could mean the guy was actually black, or an indigenous Mexican Indian. Didn't really make much difference—I still didn't want to talk to him—but it surprised me that my fellow countryman hadn't felt qualified himself to tell him to fuck off. The guy with the beard didn't look the type to run errands for ethnic majorities.

"Well, then tell him to fuck off politely," I snarled into a moment of relative quiet, and turned back to face the mariachi band.