Spares (28 page)

“Take it somewhere and burn it,” I told Howie. “Burn it until it’s gone. And ignore anything it says. It isn’t even a real bird. It’s just a fragment of something else.”

“I am so a bird,” the bird said suddenly in a voice that sounded like two rusty nails being rubbed together. “And I know what you did. You’re going to be punished, Jack Randall. You’re going to die for that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and shot it. The chest blew apart, spreading shit over the room, and the head fell to the floor.

“Was that something out of The Gap?” Howie asked, looking down at the still-moving beak. “I mean, I assume that’s what all this is about?”

“It is, but that isn’t,” I said. “It’s something from
nowhere. Just a dream. It got created accidentally on the edge, and couldn’t hack it. Something formed out of nothing, without being honed by evolution. It can’t even hold itself together.”

“Oh, you wrong,” Ghuaji said suddenly from the floor. “You wrong, man. It all going to hold together.”

I turned and held my gun steadily at his head, losing patience abruptly and completely. “Were you the one who shot Mal?”

The man shook his head slowly. “Yhandim. Yhandim going to kill you too, and Vinaldi. Most especially Vinaldi.”

Vinaldi rather charmingly spat at him, and Ghuaji still did nothing but smile. His wound was looking worse.

“Yhandim’s going to be real busy then,” I said. “He should consider delegating. Howie, get Dath and lose this guy before
I
blow his fucking head off.”

Before he left Howie handed me a sheet of telefax printout, with Nicholas Golson’s name on it. “He called.” Howie shrugged. “Said there was something you might want to know.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” Howie said. “Just as soon as you come up with a plan. I don’t expect you to keep to it, but it would be nice to know there was one.”

“When I’ve got one you’ll be the first to know,” I said.

I tried to use my fake pass to get up to 104, though Vinaldi had offered to just ride me in as a guest. The man on the gate was a little more eagle-eyed than most, and tossed my pass, so I ended up relying on Vinaldi anyway. The key thing about pride is that it ends up making you look more of an idiot than you would have in the first place. By that stage I didn’t really care. We’d already been to 66 and I was hyper with fury and fear. Nearly’s door was locked, but there was no response when I pounded on it. The lock had been shorted, and was quietly
singing a very old song about rainbows. Vinaldi used the key he’d acquired through nefarious means from the contractor who’d redeveloped the floor, and I ran in to find the apartment empty. Small signs of a struggle—furniture overturned, a broken coffee cup-but no suggestion of fatalities. Mildly reassuring, but not very. My record on tracking down Yhandim and the people he collected was not exactly great so far. I also thought it would probably have taken more than one person to hold both Suej and Nearly if they were squirming, and I was mortally sure that Nearly would have squirmed like a pig in a can. So Ghuaji wasn’t Yhandim’s only accomplice.

Vinaldi’s spies had no reports of sightings. I wasn’t surprised. Now that Yhandim had everything he wanted, I reckoned the only time we’d see him again would be in the two seconds or so before we died. Maybe he wasn’t even planning to bother with me anymore, now that he had Suej. But I was planning to bother with him. As I stood in Nearly’s apartment and noticed the bags from Suej’s shopping trip lying crumpled in the corner, I imagined just how badly I was going to bother him.

But first we had to find him.

“Why the fuck are we dealing with this guy?” Vinaldi asked, as he followed me up the stairs to Golson’s apartment. I didn’t answer, but simply banged on the door loud enough to wake the decomposed. It was only nine o’clock by then, and I didn’t make Golson as an early riser.

After a few minutes the door opened and Golson appeared sleepy-eyed and vague in a dressing gown. I forbore formalities as usual and pushed my way into the apartment, Vinaldi close behind.

“Hey, dude, what’s the problem?” Golson squeaked, scurrying behind us. In the living room we discovered that someone was in his bed, a midrange redhead with big brown eyes.

“Hi, Johnny,” she said, simpering like this was an audition or something.

I turned to him. “You two know each other?”

Johnny shrugged.

“Sure,” the girl piped up, running a hand through her hair, tucking the sheets around her and generally primping for Vinaldi’s benefit, “I go to Club Bastard all the time.”

“Get dressed and get out of here,” I told her. “You don’t want to be Johnny’s lay. They’re suffering from short life expectancy at the moment.” Vinaldi looked at me angrily, and I shouted at him. “You telling me Louella Richardson and Laverne Latoya weren’t in your book? Why the fuck d’you think Yhandim’s going round whacking them?”

The girl was up and in the bathroom before Vinaldi had time to answer, leaving us with just the boy Golson.

“What have you got for me?” I asked. “And hurry.”

“Not much,” he admitted. “But you said tell you anything weird. This is it.” He held a small card out to me. I took it and turned it over. A credit-card-sized sliver of cream-colored plastic with gold trim around the edge. Didn’t look especially weird to me, or particularly interesting.

“What the hell is it?” I asked.

“It’s an invite,” Vinaldi said. “Can see you don’t get out much.”

“I get out lots,” I snapped. “I just turn up uninvited. Why isn’t it doing anything?”

“It’s keyed to my DNA,” Golson said. “Here.” He laid his index finger along one edge of the card. The word “invitation” swam up out of the whiteness. This held for a moment and then faded, to be replaced by an inch-square video of a well-preserved but clearly grieving woman in her fifties. Speaking with baffled dignity she invited the holder of the card, plus a guest, to a memorial service for Louella Richardson.

“Okay, so they’re having a funeral,” I said. “This is hardly news.”

“It’s not that,” said Golson. “It’s this. I’m out last evening with people and I find out that virtually everyone
who knew Louella is invited. I’m not talking just close friends, I’m talking people who held the door open for her one day six years ago. It’s the day after tomorrow, and it’s happening somewhere kind of weird.”

“Where?” I said.

“Two-oh-three,” Golson said, gleefully. “In the Maxens’ private chapel.”

I blinked. That was genuinely strange. The Maxens were so reclusive that no one even knew exactly how many of them there were. Invitations above the 200th floor were rare to the point of unheard-of—unless you were one of the few people who had something Arlond Maxen needed. I looked at Vinaldi, and was surprised to see an extreme but unreadable expression on his face. Storing that to ask about later, I turned to Golson, who was clicking his finger rings along the surface of a table in a way I found very stressful.

“Any word why?”

“Well, Val says that Yolande Maxen was one of Louella’s shopping clients. Maybe they’re all cut up about it because of that.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “The Richardsons weren’t special friends of the Maxens?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Word is the Maxens aren’t special friends of anyone at all.”

It wasn’t clear whether this made any difference to anything, but it was certainly odd.

“You really slip it to Louella?” Golson asked Vinaldi, his voice full of manly respect.

Vinaldi’s voice clearly betrayed that he had. “It’s no business of yours, you twelve-year-old ass-wipe, and it’s disrespectful to talk like that of the dead. Didn’t your father, whoever the fuck he may be, teach you anything at all?”

“Hey man, whatever you say,” said Golson, holding his arms up placatingly and flashing an orthodontic smile. “Shit, I’m just impressed. Your secret’s safe with me.”

Then it happened. In the way that it does, regardless
of events, clues or intuition. Your mind just burps it up. Sometimes.

“Where’s your deck?” I asked. Golson pointed and I leaped over to the side of his bed, pulling Mal’s disk from my pocket. I slammed it into the spare slot and slapped the button.

“What?” Vinaldi asked, coming to stand behind me.

“The guy who killed Mal had no rap sheet,” I said, drumming my fingers on the desk as I put it together. “Maybe now we know why.”

“Yo, Jack,” said Mal’s versonality. “How’s it going?”

“Give me the picture of that stiff,” I said, and it popped up onto the screen.

“Hil Trazin,” Vinaldi said immediately. “He was there too.”

“Okay, so all these guys are out of The Gap. Somehow. They’ve got a job—search and destroy for SafetyNet—but these are people with a grudge against you, and so half the time they’re moonlighting trying to fuck you up. One of them, probably Yhandim from what Ghuaji said, is getting way out of hand and not just whacking your associates but climbing through your ex-lays as well. Computer, get me the info on SafetyNet again.”

“I don’t get it,” said Vinaldi. “What’s this got to do with—”

“The homicide files on all five victims are security locked from the top of the NRPD. Which means the real job they’re supposed to be doing is for someone with more power than God. This person bought protection for Yhandim while he was looking for the spares, because one of them was important to him.”

“Company information,” said the computer. “SafetyNet still looks a mess.”

“Trace back every single company with a stake in it,” I said. “All the way back to the bone. I want to know if anyone’s got a majority shareholding.”

While the computer chugged away I lit a cigarette. Golson pointed out that they were bad for me, and I suggested that he fuck off.

“Do you know what the answer’s going to be, and if so just give me in ASCII,” said Vinaldi. “The suspense is giving me hives.”

“Not for sure,” I said, but then the answer burped up onto the screen. The majority shareholder in SafetyNet, through about a billion holding companies and subroutes, was an outfit called Newman Sublinear. Didn’t mean anything to me, but it sure as hell did to Vinaldi.

“That’s a Maxen company,” Vinaldi said quietly. “Administered by Arlond Maxen himself.”

I’d already noticed that the more serious Vinaldi was the simpler his sentences got, so I knew he was telling the truth. “How do you know?”

“I just do.” Vinaldi turned away. “Jesus shits.”

“Either of you guys want coffee?” Golson inquired, baffled but enjoying the show. I yanked Mal’s disk and stood up.

“So,” I said, “Maxen’s behind SafetyNet, which figures. He’s somehow pulled these guys out of The Gap. They must owe him for something, otherwise why’d they be doing his work? In the meantime they’re running after you for old times’ sake, and Louella Richardson gets chopped up in the undertow. Maxen realizes what’s happened, gets guilty, throws money at her Memorial.” But not, I thought to myself, at one for Laverne Latoya, or any of the other girls who died below the 100 line. “It’s Maxen. He’s behind
all of it”

“Hey, cool,” said Golson brightly. “Then you guys are in really deep shit. Sure you don’t want coffee? It’s cinnamon apple—”

“Shut up!”
shouted Vinaldi and I simultaneously.

“So what now?” Vinaldi asked, deferring for once to me.

“We go see a guy who I think’s going to be hurting
by now,” I said, turning to Golson. “And
you
keep your mouth shut about everything you’ve heard, or forgetting women’s names is going to be the least of your troubles.”

“I believe that,” Golson said with sincerity, and jumped out of the way as we ran for the door.

“What makes you think Ghuaji’s going to talk now?” Vinaldi asked, as we stormed into Howie’s for what—for me—seemed like the twentieth time in two days.

“Three things,” I said, shouldering my way through the people inside. “First, his skin was fucked. It looked and felt funny. I saw something similar a couple of days ago on the body of the guy who killed Mal. Second, the wound in his head seemed to get worse rather than better while we were here this morning. Three, he said something about top-ups, and there were leaves on his boots.”