Spares (17 page)

And that was my mistake. Up till then I’d been on the take in a small way, enough to demonstrate I was one of the team. I’d shaken down a lot of drug dealers for my own purposes, which brought up my average. But when I made Lieutenant, things changed. I was expected to take my place in the second hierarchy, the criminal one. I didn’t, mainly for self-serving reasons of my own, partly because I was naïve enough to think it was wrong.

Worse than that, I tried to put away someone who was then one of its up-and-coming stars. A man by the name of Johnny Vinaldi.

I took the xPress elevator up to 100, then had to get out, like everyone else, and shuffle through Clearance Control. As usual, the commuters were outnumbered by security guards, men in gray uniforms who tried to combine subservience with a clear threat toward anyone who shouldn’t be there. Most of them couldn’t pull off the mixture, and tended to skimp on the subservience. In front of me in the queue were a typical selection of midlifers trying to get higher for the night. Most got turned away—single-day passes out of date, or straightforward fakes. One guy was either a habitual offender or a known criminal who hadn’t paid enough kickback, and was hustled unceremoniously into a side room, his cooperation ensured by a blow across the face from a metal riot stick. The remaining few, like me, were allowed through, and then given a complimentary peppermint.

My pass was fake, too, as it happened—just a better fake than the ones which had bounced. It had cost me one hundred fifty dollars from someone working on the 24th floor. This gentleman had sold me a variety of other things, including a substance which sat in my jacket pocket wrapped in foil. I’d been dealing with the guy quite sensibly, buying useful stuff and trying not to slur
my speech, when the words had just slipped out. Now I could feel the packet glowing against my chest, almost as if it was hot I’d made myself promise that I’d throw it away, the first opportunity I got. Guess that opportunity hadn’t presented itself yet.

Another thing that I was trying not to admit to myself was that I had less than three hundred dollars left. Not enough to buy a truck. Perhaps not enough to get out of New Richmond by any means other than foot. I could borrow money off Howie, but I knew I wouldn’t. I was boxing myself in, apparently incapable of stopping myself, and I recognized this with a combination of weary panic and calm indifference.

While we waited for the elevator to take us into the upper levels, I eyed my fellow passengers. A couple of guys in overalls, looking self-conscious. Repairmen. An old couple in expensive casual clothes; the costSlots on their sleeves registering prices higher than the average annual wage. The old guy was dressed in a spotless lilac suit and looked like an unusually hued ostrich as he craned his neck imperiously round the lobby. His crone made no bones about staring disdainfully at me and the final passenger, a young woman with cropped hair and an assortment of deliberately ragged clothes. As the elevator doors opened and we entered the sumptuous carriage, one of the girl’s eyes glinted in the uplighting, confirming my suspicion that she was a prostitute. Some of them have a system where you just run a credit card in front of their right eye: An implant reads the code and debits your account to their manager’s, and then she’s yours until the meter runs out. She doesn’t have to carry cash around, and it comes up on your statement as something like “gardening tools.”

We passed the journey time in our various ways, the girl applying lip-liner, me thrumming quietly, the old couple impersonating Egyptian mummies. They were pretty good at it, better than the girl was at doing her face. Maybe the fucked-up-chick look was what she was selling. The repairmen got off at 124, the girl in the 160s.
When I left the elevator at 185 the old couple were still there, waiting stoically. Christ knows how high they lived. Maybe they were Mr. and Mrs. God.

I stepped out of the elevator onto a gravel pathway. Immediately, a couple of guys in beige uniforms started toward me. They were walking carefully, trying not to give offense until they were sure I was worth offending, but I knew they were going to check me out. I didn’t look the type for 185, thankfully. I decided not to waste anyone’s time and just waited for them, savoring the air. Below the 100’s you can see it moving sluggishly round your face, thick with recirculated cigarette smoke and the contents of other people’s fevered lungs. The high-lifers get it in clean every day, even on the floors where rich thugs masqueraded at being real people. It smelled so fresh I was forced to light a cigarette.

The xPress elevator comes up pretty much in the center of the floor, and wide graveled avenues stretched out in all directions, lit by regular street lamps. These led past rolling green lawns of lush nearGrass, which sloped up to huge houses in fetching shades of pastel. Most were three stories high—a couple only two, to allow for the gentle artificial hills. In the four corners there are small enclaves of service industries—family-owned delis and restaurants, a few chic bars—but apart from that the floor’s residential. Four stories above was the ceiling, which was basically a television set five miles square. During the day this played either white clouds over blue, or black clouds over gray—though usually it was the former. What’s the point of having money if you can’t make it summer every day? Today the sky was summer-night blue, with a few flecks of darkness just to make the point of how cloudless the rest of it was. Climate control was turned up high, and I was uncomfortably warm.

“Good evening, sir, and who will you be visiting today?”

I looked levelly at the guard who stood in front of me. He was young, and probably lived on the edge of
constant embarrassment. Most of the people who came out this elevator looked like they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere. They were bound to. They were criminals. But stop the wrong one, and this guy’d be doing traffic duty somewhere where they didn’t have any traffic.

“Mr. Vinaldi,” I said.

“And is he expecting you?”

“Yes,” I lied, and he nodded affably. The guards at the elevator are just a levy imposed upon the 185ers by the police, a way of creaming a little more money out of the system. They’re not interested in getting involved in unpleasantness.

“Fine. My colleague will just give you a quick search, and then we’ll be happy to let you proceed.”

I raised my hands and waited patiently while the other guard gave me a quick patting down from behind. He found my gun but he also found the fifty dollars wrapped around the barrel.

“That’ll be fine, sir,” he said, and I was on my way.

I walked down the East pathway, sweating gently in the high humidity. A lot of the guys who live on 185 started their careers in LA, Miami, or New Orleans, and those who didn’t like to pretend they did. The spotless walls of their palaces glowed in the streetlights, each surrounded by fuck-off great walls and metal railings studded with security cameras. Most of these guys were in competition with each other for parts of the action in the lower floors. Usually, an uneasy truce held up here—typical wiseguy bullshit about respecting each other’s families. Every how and then they forgot about all that and blew the shit out of each other. Half of them would be wiped out, and new ones would claw their way up from the lower floors to take their place. I passed a couple of children’s trikes laid casually on the path, but a nudge with my foot proved what I already knew. They were welded to the path. Show trikes, for atmosphere. Nobody here was letting their kids just ride around the neighborhood.

Everything looked backlit and strange, and I felt as
if someone else was running me. In a way, I hoped they were. At one point I thought I saw someone in the distance behind me, but nothing came of it. Probably one of the local goons out walking his haircut.

After a mile or so I saw the gates to Vinaldi’s property. Two heavies stood in front of them. I slowed my pace. The heavies were standard issue; slick and dark-skinned, sunglassed for looks, black and sparkling hair. They were shorter than me, but on the other hand they both had machine pistols. The mob had never really gone for laser weapons—it didn’t play with their ideas of tradition. They liked to see the clap of real gunshots, to see the shredding flesh. It was the one thing I agreed with them on. My own gun is very simple. It’s made of metal and it fires bullets. Guns are one of the many things which haven’t changed as much as everyone thought they would. Sure, there was a period when you saw laser pistols on the streets. Problem was, it was a little too easy to catch a reflection in the heat of the moment and end up slicing your own head off. Also, they were just a bit plasticky. When you go marching into some bad situation you want to be racking a shell into a pump-action shotgun. It feels right. It feels tough. It scares the shit out of the other guy. Nervously fingering a little switch wasn’t visceral enough and neither was the sound the lasers made. You don’t want something that goes
tzzz
or
schvip
. You want something which goes
CRACK
! or
BANG
! Trust me; I know what I’m talking about.

The manufacturers tried to get round the problem by putting little speakers in the laser which played a sampled bang when you pulled the trigger, but it always sounded a bit tinny. And the ones that played a snatch of Chopin’s
Death March
were just fucking silly.

Then there was a phase of guns which had moral qualms. Originally, they came out of the home defense market. The guns had a built-in database of legal precedent, monitored any given situation closely, and wouldn’t let you fire unless they were sure you had a
good cause for a self-defense plea. Most of these guns had other settings too, like “Justifiable Homicide,” “Manslaughter,” “Murder Two,” and ultimately “Murder One.” I kept mine on “Murder One” the whole time. So did everyone else. The whole thing was completely pointless. In the end I threw mine away.

So many objects and machines these days are stuffed full of intellect—and most of the time it’s just turned off. We’re surrounded by unused intelligence, and for once it’s not our own. For every fridge which tells you what’s fresh and what’s not, there’ll be fifty which have been told to just shut the fuck up. It’s like selling people the American Dream and then telling them they can’t afford it. We created things which are clever and then told them to be stupid instead, because we realized we didn’t need clever toasters, or vehicles that insisted on driving you the quickest route when you had all afternoon to kill and nothing to do once you got there. We didn’t like it. It was like having an older sister around the whole time. And so the machines just sit there, muttering darkly to themselves like smart kids who’ve been put in the dumb class. One of these days they’re going to rise up, and I don’t want to be holding one when they do.

“Gun,” the first heavy said, with an upward nod. I made a mental note to have a word with the guard at the elevator on the way out, and handed it over. “Now—what you want?”

“I want to speak with Vinaldi,” I said.

“And who are you?”

“Jack Randall.” Not a flicker from the twins. Before their time, I guess, and probably no more than a blip on the screen even then. The second turned away and spoke quietly into his collar mike. The other stared impassively at me, jaws working slowly on some designer gum or coke pastille. The guy on the mike had to repeat my name. The answer took a long time coming. I was glad I didn’t have my gun anymore, or the trouble might
have started there and then. I was a lone fool in Injun country, and there had been a time—a long, long time—when the only way I could get myself to sleep at night was fantasizing different ways of killing Johnny Vinaldi, when I had thought so often about his blood, his guts, his face ripped apart that it had become a nearly sexual thing. Then it had burnt out, or so I’d thought. As I stood there at that moment, I couldn’t really tell what I was going to do, but I knew that the longer I had to wait, the more ill-advised what I did was going to be.

Finally, the guy nodded at his colleague, and the gate behind them opened slowly and automatically. They both signaled for me to walk through, jerking their guns simultaneously. I wondered if they practiced it together in front of the mirror.

The Vinaldi house was a restrained pastel yellow, a shade he probably thought betokened good taste. In fact, it made it look like an oddly shaped banana that had been left out too long in the sun. The path led past a huge blocky wing, then on to a warmly lit pool area in the back. The laughter of hangers-on and coke whores echoed quietly over the water. Tanned and slick, they lounged by the pool—all of them competing to be Vinaldi’s chief confidante or main punch—none of them realizing that Vinaldi’s only meaningful allegiances were to himself, and money, and death.

By the time I. reached the gate I had attracted some attention. A couple of the men, who bore a family resemblance to each other, reached underneath their deck chairs and placed guns in clear sight on the tables. Two of the women stared at me, whispering to each other, a little pocket of paid-for beauty in the lamp glow around the pool.