Spares (12 page)

When I was outside Mal’s door I hesitated for a moment. I’d seen a lot of bad things happen to friends, admittedly usually while on Rapt, but none of them had ever truly gone away. Sometimes I could feel them, just out of sight, as if I could turn my head quickly and catch them for a moment, bright and backlit and eternal.

On the other hand, if I didn’t do this now it wasn’t going to happen at all. I unlocked the door and opened it. The apartment was cold and it hadn’t really been that long: While I wasn’t expecting the smell to be bad, I wasn’t anticipating enjoying it.

I was surprised to find it wasn’t there at all. Slightly relieved, I shut the door behind me and crossed the room. I stopped abruptly halfway.

Mal’s body wasn’t there.

I stood there stupidly, turning my head this way and that, trying to see it differently. I couldn’t. His body simply wasn’t there. Closer inspection revealed that the floor was clean, with no sign of the blood, bone chips and brain smear which had been there the night before.

I checked the John, Mal’s sleeping area, the cupboards. The latter were stuffed full of Mal’s patented brand of junk. Everywhere else was empty.

Mal’s body had been taken away, taken by someone who’d unlocked the door and then locked it again behind him.

The only person who could have known about it was someone connected with the killer—whose own body had not been in the bottom hallway when I’d entered the building.

Leaving Mal’s apartment unlocked, I ran downstairs a flight and knocked on the door from behind which, for once, no music was coming. After a pause it opened. The rat-faced man stood and glared at me.

“What you want?” He looked nervous as hell.

“Have you seen anyone go upstairs in the last twenty-four hours?”

“No. Been too busy fucking your mother,” he said, and pushed the door back at my face. I stuck my foot in the jamb. It probably hurt, but I was too wired to notice. Rat-man’s head appeared again. “Co ’way before trouble starts, man,” he advised, face pinched.

“It’s already started,” I said, kicking the door straight back at him and crunching it into his nose. He clattered back into the hallway and fell somewhat awkwardly on his head. I strode a couple of paces into the apartment, which smelt bad, looking for more fun. Rat-face’s friend appeared in another doorway, recognized me, darted back the way he’d come. I followed, and found myself in a room with a gun pointing at my head.

Sitting at a table in the corner was a large black man, head shaven, the whites of his eyes luminous in the gloom. A line of blue LCD’s was tattooed into his scalp from front to back, blinking softly in the twilight. His features were broad and brutal, and his skin was greasy. He had a gun in his right hand. He stared impassively at me. Narcotics were spread out in front of him, arranged into piles of various sizes. I’d interrupted a buy—no wonder people were kind of edgy. I stood still. It seemed the thing to do.

After a moment the big man lowered the gun. He looked at me, moving his head slightly as if trying to catch a glimpse of me in a different light. Something about him struck me as strange, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it might be.

Rat-face reappeared raggedly from the hallway and started squawking, hungry for blood. “Say
adios
to your brain, motherfuck,” he snarled, and my head was suddenly knocked forward as he jammed the barrel of his gun into my neck.

“Ain’t no call for that,” the big man said mildly. “Leastways not until we find out what he wants.”

“I want to know if anyone saw someone go upstairs
since last night,” I said, trying to avoid looking at the man’s flashing head. I thought I could hear it blinking on and off like a turn indicator.

“Well?” the big man said, raising his eyebrows at the other two men, Rat-face and his friend. In variously bad tempers but with apparent sincerity, the men denied having seen anyone. The big man looked back at me. “This be anything to do with the dead dude in the hallway?”

“Yes,” I said. “And who the fuck are you?”

“No one in particular,” the big man said, “Just passing through, doing a little deal with my new friends here. I ain’t seen anyone either, and I didn’t recognize the bag of bones lying downstairs. You want
him
, you can find the body in the bins behind the back of Mandy’s Diner out on the edge.”

“You moved it there?”

“Surely did it was lowering the tone.”

“Okay,” I said, starting to back out of the room.

“Now
I’m going to blow his face off,” said Rat-face, getting excitable again. The big man tutted.

“No, you
ain’t:
Can’t you get that into your head?”

Rat-face stuffed his gun into the front of his pants and squared up to me instead. “Okay, well, Marty and me’ll just beat the shit out of him, then. Okay?” He glanced at the black man for confirmation, and I wondered what the power structure was here.

Friend Marty looked less than enthusiastic at the prospect, and quietly relieved when the big man shook his head. “You welcome to try,” he said, “but the dude has the Bright Eyes and in my experience they tend to be some crazy motherfucks.”

He winked at me, and went back to sorting his piles of drugs. Rat-face glared. Marty had taken a step backward at the mention of Bright Eyes, and took another as I turned to him. I walked unmolested through the gap and out of the apartment.

Back in Mal’s I stood for a while, wondering what to do next. Then I noticed something, and walked slowly to
where Mal’s display hung on the wall down by the window. When the sheet of cloth was pulled away it confirmed what I’d suspected.

The display had gone. The board was still there, covered in tiny holes where pins had been, but all of the photos and notes had been removed. I let the cloth fall again.

Who’d done this? Not Mal. He wouldn’t have had time before being killed. And why would he take it down? He was a cop. It was his work. He was entitled to have what the fuck he liked on his walls. So who?

Whoever cleaned the place up.

Or, I thought, maybe it had happened earlier than that. When I’d come back to find Mal dead, checking whether his board was still intact had been the last thing on my mind. Perhaps the fumbling that Suej had heard was a scrabbling as they ripped everything off of the board.

Either way, it posed questions: Why remove evidence of what Mal had been working on? What did that have to do with me?

Answer, nothing.

So maybe it wasn’t me they’d been after. Maybe Mal had been the target all along.

I lit a cigarette and stared out of the window until I’d finished it. I was thinking, I guess, though it was like swatting flies off a piece of meat. Then I locked the door so I wouldn’t be disturbed, and tossed Mat’s apartment. Not all of it, you understand; the cupboards alone would have taken months. Just the places a cop would hide things.

I found nothing, not even a computer, which I knew Mal had. My eyes turned upward, and I saw the loose panel in Mal’s ceiling, a panel which was presumably the entrance to the place where he’d tried to hide the spares before opening the door to his killer. The hiding place that the people who’d whacked him hadn’t found.

I grabbed a chair and, standing precariously on its back, opened the panel. I boosted myself up into the
darkness, and rested for a moment on the edge with my legs dangling down. I couldn’t see anything, but it felt right. Mal was a secretive bastard—when, he played poker he kept his cards
inside
his chest. I stood and wandered around like a; zombie, arms outstretched, groping for a switch. Eventually found one, a pull cord which lit a hanging bulb and threw the area into harsh shadow.

It was surprisingly neat—untypical Mal. A pile of boxes lined one wall—autopsy reports and other documents, hardcopied from police E-files. Illegal—Mal out on a limb about something. Down the other end was a desk, and on it a computer. Nothing in the desk drawers. Everything looked bright and shiny, as if this was some new venture, a recent hidey-hole. The computer was his old one, a cellular Matrix connection plugged in the back. A digipic lay next to it.

On the wall above the desk, photographs. Three women dead; close-ups showing that their eyes were missing.

Unspecified facial damage.

I sat down heavily on his chair, and I found I was swallowing involuntarily. I forced myself to concentrate on the images, on these three women and not on any others.

Three murders, plus one in the early hours of today which he’d been too dead to know about. And maybe… I checked the fact sheets tacked under the pictures. Mal didn’t have yesterday’s either—too busy dealing with me and the spares. Five murders in ten days, each with the same MO.

He’d said he wanted to tell me about something.

I yanked the hard drive from the computer, slipping Mal’s digipic into my pocket alongside it as an afterthought. Then I climbed back down into the apartment, resealed the roof, and left for Mandy’s Diner.

Howie’s bar was nearly empty.

I have a talent for arriving between shifts, for finding
gaps and walking into them. As I went in the back way I heard a voice call out from Howie’s office.

“Is it nice?” he asked.

“Is what nice?” I said, turning to look at Howie through the doorway. He was standing by his desk, holding a sheaf of invoices.

“The truck you’ve bought. The
truck you went out to buy
Is it a nice color? Is it comfortable? Did you check it thoroughly for rust spots and thunking noises?”

“I haven’t bought it yet.”

Howie sighed. “I know you haven’t, Jack.”

I walked into the office and stood in front of him. “Have you been out to Mal’s today?”

“Of course I haven’t. The Portal is from hunger. I only go out there to collect money from recalcitrant subcontractors.”

“Mal’s body has disappeared.”

There was a pause. “Say again?”

“The floor’s been cleaned. It’s like it never happened.” I didn’t mention Mal’s private photo display.

Howie shrugged. “So someone buried him as a random act of kindness, and tidied up as an encore.”

“I locked the door when we left yesterday. It was still locked when I got there.”

Howie looked at the papers in his hand. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m asking if we can stay another night.”

“Are we on the same page here, Jack? Someone who is both very organized and quite tidy is trying to kill you, and you want to hang around?”

“I also need to borrow your computer.”

“To work out how much gas it’ll take you to get a long way from here?”

“Turn speech recognition on, Howie. You know I’m going to stay.”

Howie sighed and jerked his thumb in the direction of his machine. “Help yourself. Then come out into the bar and have a beer. You look like you need it.”

When he’d gone I flipped the drive out of his computer
and slotted Mal’s in. Then I connected the digipic up to the serial slot and turned the whole lot on.

“Password,” the computer said, bluntly.

“Pardon me?” Tasked. I knew perfectly well what it meant. I was just surprised to hear my own voice coming out of the speaker.

“The password, ass-wipe.”

“I don’t know it,” I said.

“So take a guess. I’ve got nothing better to do.”

“Samoy,” I offered, off the top of my head and with no little irony.

“Correct,” the machine said, and started whipping through the start-up procedure.

I shook my head. “Oh, Mal,” I said. Security had never been his strong point.

“You can stop congratulating yourself, smartass,” the machine snapped. “‘Samoy’ isn’t the real password. The real password is a thirty-digit combination of numbers and letters which is a real bastard to pronounce.”

“So why are you letting me in? And what is your fucking problem?”

“Mal left a loophole. He figured the only guy who’d come up with the name of the second-best brand of Japanese pickles would be you. I’d compared your voice patterns with mine before you even got that far. I was just pissing you around. And you’re the one with the problem, dickweed.”

“Look,” I snarled, “do you want a fight?”