Travis paused. "I don't know."
"Speaking of which—you seen Romer around much today?"
"No, I haven't. Why?"
"When Helena and I were in Florida, we were attacked by two guys with guns. Somebody tipped their boss off that we were around. They even implied as much."
"Yeah, go on, Hap. Tell me you're accusing a police officer of being an accessory to attempted murder."
"Well, you put it together some other way, Travis."
"Better still, why don't I send someone to Florida to talk to these alleged goons, who allegedly attacked you and your allegedly dematerializing ex-wife? See what they have to say?"
I breathed out heavily. "That's not really an option." I already felt bad about shooting my goon, even after his threat to my parents. Travis looked up at the ceiling.
"It was self-defense," I added petulantly.
"Hey, and you know what, Hap? I've got your gun collection. Ballistics will match them with the shells I assume we're going to be pulling out of these Florida guys, and you've just dug your pit so deep, you won't even be able to see the sky."
"They were scumbags."
"Uh-huh? And you're what, exactly?"
"They were trying to kill me."
"And they didn't know there was a line? You should have given them a number. They might have waited."
"You have to let me go, Travis."
Travis barked laughter. "Oh, I will. Unfortunately, there are a few serial killers ahead of you."
"You owe me a night and a day."
"Give it up. Hap. It's not like it's going so well, according to you. You go looking for these friends of ours and what happens? You lose someone else."
I glared at him. "I'm going to tell you something, and then you're going to let me go."
"Hap ..."
"Just fucking listen. Did you get any other names from Hammond's study?"
"What's it to you?"
"Did you or not, Travis? I put you on to this in the first place."
"Yes. We found another thirty sheets. They're being decoded now."
"Bullshit. You already know who's being blackmailed. Put them under immediate police protection."
"Why?" Travis squinted at me suspiciously.
"It's not the guys in the suits who've taken over Hammond's racket. It's his original partner."
"Which is who?"
"Stratten."
Travis opened his mouth, closed it again.
"Hammond was given his initial openings by Stratten," I said, "who leeched them out of transcripts from memory-dumping sessions. Stratten sent Hammond to do more research on black-mailable aspects of these people's lives, and then to lean on them. But Hammond started to go flaky at the end. He had to be forced to continue—probably because at heart he wasn't too bad a guy."
"And what makes you think that?" I could see the wheels turning in Travis's head. Any good cop knows intuitively when he's hearing something that might be true. Cops deal with lies so much of the time, they begin to smell their absence.
"I have new information," I said, thinking of the experience I'd had on the plane. "I think aspects of Ray Hammond's life started to go a little weird. The guys in the suits were after him, but not because they wanted to kill him. Hammond knew about them, and he was getting scared. Come on, Travis: a blackmailer using a code based on the Bible? This is kind of an ambivalent attitude here."
"Which you can explain?"
"Hammond was lapsed religious. Maybe Catholic. He's doing something he knows is bad, mostly because he desperately needs the money to keep someone in a life to which they have become accustomed. Monica Hammond is a hard case, and you've seen her taste in clothes. Some people are upgrade fanatics— software, car, partner, life. Keeping those people happy is real expensive. Hammond didn't feel great about working for Stratten, but he did it. Then he started to get visitations."
Travis shook his head. "From these aliens, right?"
"But he didn't interpret them that way, because, like you, he can't believe they're what they so obviously are. So he finds something else to hang his fear on, and some other way of explaining it. In the front of a Bible I found at Hammond's apartment there's a quote he's copied out. Something about a lamb with seven eyes 'which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.' It just so happens we have six guys in suits, plus the man I met in Hammond's study, who I also saw again in Florida." I wasn't going to tell Travis about my long-term relationship with that man. Something told me the lieutenant wouldn't be a sympathetic audience.
"That's kind of tenuous, Hap."
"Hammond starts to get a kind of religious mania, partly fueled by the guilt he's already feeling. Then he gets killed. So Stratten comes to LA to pick up the reins. Aided and abetted by Quat."
"Any evidence for this? Just one shred of evidence?"
"I visited REMtemps. Stratten left Jacksonville last week, flew here to LA. Why? Check the translations. I'll bet you find at least one entry in every single record that can't have come from Hammond just watching these people. Something that happened too long ago, or too privately. Something Stratten fed Hammond from his voyeur kick of invading other people's pasts. Also, by all means get in touch with the cops in Florida—they'll tell you that at least one of the dead guys worked for REMtemps security."
"Big deal. I already know Stratten wants you dead."
"Yeah—and he really does, doesn't he? A contract plus these two goons, plus trying to set me up at the Prose Cafe. I mean, this is quite a hobby he's got here, despite the fact that he already knows you've got me by the balls. At the very least, for Christ's sake, I have rights, too. This guy is trying to get me whacked."
Travis looked at me hard. "And I just figured out why. You know something else about Hammond's murder. Something you're not telling me. So tell me."
"Not yet." Admittedly it was a risk, but I was running out of time.
"You don't believe it's the guys in the suits, do you?"
"I know it isn't."
"But you won't hand over who did it."
"Again: not yet."
"Withholding evidence pertaining to a homicide investigation is an extremely serious offense."
"Add it to your list. In the meantime, you can either keep me locked up here, in which case you get nothing from me ever—or you let me out and I'll tell you tomorrow night."
I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind Travis. I looked even worse than the last time I'd been sitting in this chair. Exhausted, disheveled, wild-eyed. I looked like a spook, and I knew one thing for sure—I didn't have enough to bargain with. I hadn't put Travis in a position where he had to do what I asked—unless he chose to. It was up to him, and what he felt about me.
"I just handed you half the truth on a plate, Travis. What's it going to be?"
He looked at me for a long, long time.
ALL I WANTED was to go straight to my apartment, but I knew I ought to go check Deck's place. It was the last thing I needed, but he would have done it for me. That's the problem with having good people as friends: They make you feel insufficient the whole time. Next time around I'm going to consort solely with bastards. I called Woodley on the way, and arranged for him to meet me there. I also called my answering machine, which was extremely rude to me before confirming that no one had called. My popularity had evidently slipped to an all-time low, possibly due to the fact that all my friends had now been abducted by aliens and were thus not within reach of a phone.
I let myself in Deck's back door. The interior looked as it had, and the temporary front door was still in place. The apartment seemed so empty, I would have welcomed even my alarm clock's presence. I looked in Laura's purse, but the clock wasn't there. So I poured myself a drink, sat down on the sofa, and waited.
How much did Travis believe of what I'd told him? The Stratten stuff, probably—but as I'd said to Helena, it was going to take a lot more than my word for Travis to try to bring down someone with that much juice. Without a lever on Stratten, Hammond's involvement in the blackmail scam would be covered up to stop it reflecting badly on the LAPD. It was too big a can of worms for Travis to open up, unless he already had a show bad guy in a cage—which would never happen. Unlike Travis, I didn't have to work within the law, but I couldn't see how I could do anything either. In the real world Stratten had more guns and money; on the Net he had Quat, who was more than a match for just about anything I might try to set on him. There was one thing I could try, out of pure vindictiveness, but I couldn't see how it would help. At some point Quat was going to pay, but that would have to wait.
Travis sure as hell didn't believe that Helena had been kidnapped, but then, nobody ever does. It's much easier to assume that the person is out of their mind or lying—because most of the time that's the truth. I wondered in how many informal support groups around the country, full of mad people barking and gushing about how devil aliens wanted to spawn with them, there was one person who really had been taken and returned— and who just sits there quietly, knowing that the wackos around them are going to be no help whatsoever. Because I'll tell you this: If you really have been abducted, you won't remember anything about it. I can work my memory better, I believe, than virtually anyone else alive—yet, like the man said, it's not something you can write down or even put into words. You'll know that something happened—and either store it privately or blank it altogether—but you'll never recall being away.
I tried to bludgeon some sense out of what had happened on the plane. I tried to work out if time could have anything to do with it—stopped clocks and lost hours are a common feature of abductions, I knew. Maybe the reason you can't recall what has occurred is that time really has stopped, and everything happens at once. You'd have no way of sorting it into chronological order—like when I accepted Laura's three-day memory in one shot. Far worse, there is no order to find.
Maybe I'd been wrong in assuming that time always ran forward. Perhaps it didn't have to be that way.
And the more I thought, the more I wondered if memory also had something to do with it. I could obviously tap into Laura's mind somehow even though she was over there, and the second time it had happened was immediately after—or indeed, almost part of—accessing a buried memory of my own. The guy in the dark suit had said we were linked because of what I carried in my head. Perhaps that also explained why I was the only person who had any idea of what had happened on the flight. Plus two more things:
When Deck and Laura disappeared, that weird thing had happened with their faces—almost as if I were forgetting them. And on that afternoon long ago, I'd seen two people who were dead. Not just felt their presence, but actually seen them. My grandparents. Perhaps that explained why I had blanked that portion of the event. I'd seen something that didn't fit into the world.
My head ached, a serious, pounding throb that I was surprised I couldn't see in a mirror. Plus I was drinking hard, because I suspected that what I was going to ask Woodley to do—if he ever arrived—was going to hurt.
The guys in suits had come looking for me, and instead they got Helena. In the last few moments on the plane I knew for certain that I'd answered the question I'd asked myself so many times. It was Helena or nothing. I'd had my shot, significant-other-wise, and I now had a simple choice. I either gave up dating altogether, or I went back and tried to get back what I'd lost, if any of it was still there to save.
On the fifteenth of March 2014, as you might have gathered, I was involved in the armed robbery of a Los Angeles bank. It wasn't something I'd ever done before. I was talked into it by an acquaintance of ours named Ricardo Pechryn, whom Helena had met through some mob-related business or other. Pechryn was flamboyant, good-looking, and charismatic: one of those guys who's always either going to make it big or wind up in little pieces. Ricardo had inside knowledge of this bank, and knew that on that particular day it was going to have a lot of money in the form of "eds"—Extremely high denomination virtual bonds— which are so portable that you can offload them overseas at up to fifty cents on the dollar. He could also, he claimed, rely upon his contact to disable the alarm system long enough for us to grab the money and get away.
I didn't like the idea. It wasn't my kind of thing. Charging in and grabbing money felt too Wild West and atavistic: Anyone with any skill was doing their thieving on the Net, from the safety of another country. But in the end I agreed.
"What," you may be shouting, "are you fucking insane?"
In a way I was. I wanted out. Though I was keeping Helena from seeing it, I couldn't stand the way our life had become. I didn't like what she did, but mainly I couldn't stand being in thrall to people whom I hated, and who I knew would drop us at a moment's notice if it suited them. If Helena made one slipup, left a single clue that connected her to one of the hits, that was it. She would then be a potential lever on the mob for the police, and she'd be killed instantly—with me taken along for the ride. Helena was good at her job, but nobody's perfect. Sooner or later it would happen. But still, we carried on, shaking people's hands and turning up for the restaurant parties, going through the ludicrous rituals of fake courteousness that overlie murderous pragmatism. You have to know who's made and who's not, and treat everyone with exactly the right amount of servility or lack of it. You get sent presents, on the understanding you're going to send presents back, knowing each one's going to be monitored to make sure it shows the proper amount of respect. I've known people to lose an eye for getting it wrong, and frankly, that's a little too much pressure for me when I'm standing in a crowded store on Christmas Eve. I guess it's not that different from working for any other major corporation, except that the dress code's stricter and the trade is in drugs and money and death. You join the company like you join a congregation, and after that your life is theirs.
And if you're me, you do all this knowing that as far as everyone else is concerned, your wife is the swinging dick of the family, and you're merely some kind of hanger-on whose chief skill in life is making potato salad. They slung me scraps, little pieces of work, just to make sure I was on the leash. I took the scraps. I had to. Like I said, it's not an arrangement you walk away from lightly. But I started skipping as many social events as I could, letting Helena go by herself. She was sad for a while, but then she didn't seem to mind so much. As long as she was involved with the Life, she could forget the one she used to have, and sometimes I was far from sure which life I was a part of.