One of Us (9 page)

No one had ever tried anything that long before.

I thought I was going to say no, but instead found myself telling her the money she was offering wasn't enough. I would have to go on leave from REMtemps for a week and a half. I could earn twenty thousand anyway in that time, without the risk of pissing Stratten off.

"Fifty grand," she said.

I have a way of dealing with temptation. I just succumb and get it over with.

Early the following afternoon I sat in my room and waited for the memory transmission. A third of the money for the current job was already in my hands, and on its way to three different accounts. The rest would come later. The woman had found a hacker with a lashed-up transmitter, and this dweeb had been able to acquire the code of my receiver. This spooked me a little. I made a mental note to find some way of hinting to Stratten, when this job was done, that the system wasn't as impregnable as he thought. If he wasn't careful, the black market was going to start cutting into his business. Worse than that, memory temps could find themselves stuffed with all kinds of shit they weren't expecting or being paid for.

I spoke on the phone with the woman and arranged a time for her to take the memory back. It was a different phone number from the one she'd originally given me, presumably the home of the hacker.

Then I closed my eyes and got myself ready to receive.

It came seconds later. A pulse of noise and smell that filled my mind like the worst migraine you've ever had, magnified a hundredfold. I grunted, unable even to shout, and pitched forward out of the chair onto the carpet, hands and legs spasming. I seemed to go deaf and partly blind for a while, but that was the least of my problems. I knew I was going to die.

After a few minutes, however, the shaking lessened enough so that I could crawl to the bedside table and grab a cigarette. I hauled myself up onto the bed and lay facedown for a while, waiting for the pain to go away. It started to, eventually.

Half an hour later I was sitting up and drinking, which helped. My sight was clearing and I could hear once more the sound of people larking around by the pool below my window. I still felt like shit, but at least I was going to live.

The brain is designed to accept life piecemeal not as sights, sounds, feelings, and tactile impressions condensed into a single bullet of remembrance. Our minds are structured by time, and like things delivered sequentially. I hadn't really considered the difference between getting a quick, single fragment of someone's life and taking on three days' worth of experience in one hit. It was like having the world reconfigured as a place where time and space meant nothing, and everything was one. If I hadn't already spent years bench-pressing with my mind, I'd probably have been slumped in a corner, drooling and staring into nothingness.

As it was, my head was still humming and thudding, trying to wade through what it had received and sort it into chronology and types. I could feel countless threads of data squirming over each other like snakes, searching for some kind of order. Sunburn on my shoulder; salt on my lips from a margarita; a flash of sun on a car window. A thousand sentences all at once, some of them leaving my head, others surging in. My brain was lurching under their weight, misfiring like a heart on the verge of arrest.

I reached unsteadily for the phone. Large amounts of room service was what was on my mind, but first I had to call the woman and let her know that the transmission had gone through. I'm quite professional about these things. I dialed the number and waited as it rang, holding the glass of iced gin up against my forehead and panting slightly.

There was no answer. I redialed. This time I gave it thirty rings before putting the phone down again. I knew she wasn't going away to Ensenada until the next day, so maybe it was no big deal. By then it was forty-five minutes since the dump. Probably she was out, making arrangements—or perhaps she'd gone home.

I munched slowly through a burger delivered by an offensively self-confident bellboy, keeping half an eye on what was going on in my head. It felt like a hard drive running optimization software, without enough slack to swap all the data around. Fragments of her golden vacation were lodging into place, but the rest was still jumbled and hazy.

When I had finished the burger, I called the number again. I let it ring for a long time, and was about to put it down, when someone answered.
"Hello,"
said a voice I didn't recognize.
"Who is this?"
There was a weird sound in the background, like a loudspeaker's echo.

"Hap Thompson," I answered, slightly taken aback. "Is my client there?"

"How the fuck do you expect me to know, dickweed."
snarled the voice, and the connection was severed.

I tried the number again immediately. It rang, but there was no answer. I called the operator. She told me there was no problem on the line but wouldn't give me the address.

I called Quat. He said he'd call me back. I stumbled around my room for ten minutes, gobbling aspirin like candy.

Quat called, hack done. The number was from a booth in the first-class departure lounge of O'Hare Airport.

I called the other number I had for the woman. The line was dead. Then I blacked out.

WHEN I CAME TO, I was pretty scared. Two reasons. The first is that it had never happened to me before, except the tiny blips you got immediately after receiving a memory. The second was that my client had obviously fucked me over.

I checked out of the hotel and drove back fast to LA along Highway 1, bolting myself into my apartment. I panicked when I found a note had been stuffed under the door, but it was only from my old neighbors, the Dickenses. They were a nice young couple with three kids, originally from Portland. A year ago someone came up with an idea to sell everyone on how well the country was doing. They invented an imaginary family: parents of a certain age, such-and-such background, current and past employment, recreational habits, kids' sexes, ages, eye color, and SAT scores—they were extremely specific. Then they hung an entire campaign around it, staking their reputation on claiming that such a family was so many dollars better off every week— figuring nobody could disprove it. Problem was, they screwed up. There was such a family—the Dickenses. Some suit in the Statistics Bureau panicked and took a contract out on them, and they'd been on the run ever since. The note from the Dickenses just said they'd seen someone sniffing around, and that they were gone. They left me their keys, and said I could have the milk in their fridge.

I hid the memory receiver in the bedroom and spent the rest of the day in the bathtub, drinking. By the time I climbed out of the tub, I could piece together most of the first two days of the memory. The woman had been down in Ensenada, but she'd been by herself: Mainly she'd spent the time drinking margaritas in Housson's. The first night had been pretty quiet, and by midnight she was back where she was staying, a small, run-down beach resort called Quitas Papagayo, about a half mile up the coast. I'd stayed there myself a long time ago, and even then the Papagayo's glory days had been thirty years behind it. On the second night, drunk, she'd nearly ended up going home with an American sailor. On the whole, I was glad she changed her mind, and bawled him out in the street instead. She kept screaming at him as he hurried away up the street, then she went back into the bar and drank until it closed. God knows how she got home: She couldn't remember. Hardly the vacation of a lifetime, though I've had worse, I've got to admit.

And it hadn't been ten years ago either. She'd taken an organizer with her, and checked her email obsessively—the dates onscreen made it clear her "holiday" had taken place only a couple of days before she contacted me. Finally she got the email she'd been waiting for. It was short. Just an address. She walked straight out of Housson's and got in her car, and was back in LA early evening.

The next part of the memory, the murder at the crossroads, took a long time in coming. I'd never experienced anything like it before. Though it was very recent, it was already distorted, and shot through with darkness. It was as if a process of blanking had already started before she'd decided to get rid of it. I don't know why she wanted to lose the time in Ensenada, too: When you take other people's memories, you don't always get all the thoughts that happened during them. It's like some people's sense data and internal workings take place in different parts of their head, like they've trained a part of their mind to remain distant at all times. All I got during her time on the Baja was a draining feeling of misery, of a desire to be either drunk or dead—mixed with dark elation. Not a good way to feel, sure, but I had the sense that this was how this woman felt about half the time. Ditching two days of it wasn't going to make much difference. Perhaps she'd spent those two days working herself up to what happened—reliving certain things in part of her mind, steeling herself. I don't know.

But in the end I was able to form a coherent idea of that last night in Ensenada, and what had happened, and to learn her name when the guy used it just before she killed him. I told Deck everything I could remember, from the way the crossroads had looked, to the way the man named Ray winked, to the number of shots the woman pumped into his body. The feeling of emptiness as she stared down at the corpse, reloading the gun for the sake of it.

And the numb despair, as she ran away, at realizing that it made no difference.

LAURA REYNOLDS was breathing easy, apparently asleep. Retelling the memory made me feel something new toward her, though I wasn't sure what. Guilty, perhaps. I'd taken something that had previously been only in our heads—hers and mine—and brought it out into the world. I'd never done that before. I'd always regarded the confidentiality of my profession with a kind of half-assed pride. I hedged the feeling now, told it to go away. After all, she'd deliberately dumped something on me that could get me sent to prison forever.

Deck was standing at the window when I got back, looking down at the street. The sky was beginning to lighten around the edges, and somewhere the smog machines were stirring into life. Looked like we were heading for a hot day, unless the chemicals in the sky decided they fancied a blizzard instead. Being a weatherman in LA isn't the joke job it used to be.

When Deck spoke, it was as if he were working up to something, clearing the side issues out of the way first. "Who do you think the guys in the suits were?"

"I have no idea. They weren't cops, I'm pretty sure of that."

"Why?"

"Don't know. Something about them. Plus they looked familiar."

"Plenty cops look familiar to me."

"Not like that. Like an old memory."

"Yours?"

"I think so. I don't think they sparked anything in her at all."

"Could it be them who've been in here?"

I shook my head. "They didn't see me, remember? I wasn't actually
there
. I didn't do anything. It just feels as if I did."

Deck looked at me. "You know what will happen if you're caught with that in your head?" He'd warned me about this since I started memory work.

"Murder One. Or Half, at least."

He shook his head. "You don't know the half of it."

"What are you talking about?"

Deck walked across the room, and rooted through the pile of yesterday's news. I guess I should cancel the hard-copy paper, save a few trees somewhere: But reading it off a screen isn't the same. He found the edition he was looking for and handed it to me.

I scanned the front page:

There might be an earthquake at some stage.

A property entrepreneur named Nicholas Schumann had killed himself in a spectacular way: financial problems cited. I remembered the name vaguely: Schumann might even have been one of the wheels who redeveloped Griffith. Must have taken a piece of spectacular stupidity for him to have lost all that money—or spectacular greed.

The weather was still fucked, and they didn't think they could fix it.

"So what?" I said.

"Page three," Deck said.

I turned to it, and found an article about a murder that by then had happened six days earlier. The story recapped the murder of an unarmed man dead from multiple gunshot wounds in the street in Culver City. It implied that the cops had a number of leads, which meant for the time being they had jackshit, but they were working it hard. It gave the age of the deceased, his profession, and also his name.

Captain Ray Hammond, LAPD.

I closed my eyes.

"She killed a cop" Deck said. "Better still, take a look at the last line. I wouldn't even have remembered the article, except for that. Guess who's in charge of the case?"

I read it aloud, the words like the sound of a heavy door being triple-locked. "Lieutenant Travis, LAPD Homicide."

I looked slowly up at Deck, suddenly properly afraid. Up until then the situation I found myself in had merely been disastrous. Now it had sailed blithely into a realm where adjectives didn't really cut it anymore. It would have taken a diagram to explain, one showing the intersection of a creek and some shit, and making clear the lack of any implement for promoting forward propulsion.

Deck stared back at me. "You're fucked," he said.

CHAPTER FIVE

I crashed at six. One minute I was sitting on the sofa talking to Deck, and next thing I was out. I'd been awake for forty-eight hours, and my brain was carrying more than the usual load. I was too exhausted to dream much, and all I could remember when I woke up a little after nine was another image of the silver car from the end of Laura's memory. I was standing by the side of a road, I don't know where, but it seemed familiar. On either side was swampy woodland, and the road stretched out straight to the horizon, shimmering in the heat. Something hurtled toward where I stood, moving so fast that at first I couldn't tell what it was. Then I saw that it was a car, the sun beating down on it so hard, it almost looked as if it were spinning. As it got closer it began to slow down; when it drew level, I woke up.