Spares

What was it like, being a cop? In New Richmond, of all places? A complete waste of time.

I don’t say that for effect, as a heroic declaration of the pride of doing a difficult job in impossible circumstances, or out of a desire to articulate some painfully wrought insight on the state of society. It’s simply a fact. It was completely and utterly pointless. It was like being in a war where you couldn’t trust your own guys, where the enemy were even better equipped, and where you got to go home at night. Being a cop isn’t law enforcement anymore, it’s like being in a kind of Junk War: convenient, prepackaged, and just round the corner from wherever you are.

From a homicide point of view it worked like this. On floors 1-50, in official terms, you have human garbage. Black, white, Chicano, Asian—it doesn’t matter. No one cares what happens to these people, except the Narcs and DEA, because this is where most of the drug industry happens. Unfortunately, well over half the cops in these departments are dirty, so they’ll be more concerned with hiding what’s going on than with solving crimes. Complicating matters is the fact that not all the cops on the take are on the same side. It’s generally reckoned that about a third of the homicides on 1-50 are committed by men with badges. The last time one of these was solved was never.

Floors 50-100, you had to start taking notice. Some of these people have proper jobs. So if one of them gets killed, you have to at least look like you’re trying to find out who did it. But chances are you won’t, because no one saw anything, no one knows anything, no one’s going to help the cops if they can avoid it, and anyone involved is probably holed up on one of the floors where the cops simply won’t go. Every now and then, the mayor’ll get a hair up his ass over the hundreds of unsolved homicides in this sector, and there’ll be a show of strength—which basically involves framing enough losers to bring the percentage solved up to an acceptable level. Say ten per cent. So if you’re lucky enough to get murdered during one of these periods, you’ve got a one in ten chance of being—technically, if not actually—avenged. Otherwise, forget it—most people don’t even bother calling the cops for minor misdemeanors like murder anymore.

Floors 100-184 are different. If someone gets killed there, you’re supposed to solve it. But you don’t, most of the time. Sure, you’ve got the subnet and computer-enhanced suspect tracking, print matching, photo analysis. But most of those crimes will have been committed by people out of 1-50, in which case you’ll never find them. They’ll probably have been killed in some other action before you even get close to knowing who they were. A few of the other murders will be the standard deals of jealousy, hatred and revenge, some of which will go down. The rest will have been committed by people who live above 150, in which case you can’t touch them. As soon as a case starts pointing above this magic second line, toward some wayward son or psychotic patriarch, the case is marked “Beyond Economic Repair.”

185 is the mob floor, frequent social visitors to which include every senior policeman, local politician, and businessman. The mob generally only kill their own kind—unless they feel like killing someone else, in which case there’s a set kickback fee to ensure it never goes any further. Any homicide investigation originating out of 185 is dead before it reaches the station.

Nobody gets killed above 185, except by their own hand or by God. Neither has so far proved indictable.

You join the force, for whatever reason, and within days you’ll be locked into place. You choose which club to join: the one creaming money off the drug trade, or prostitution, protection, or the mob—the NRPD is basically an overhead which crime has to pay, Smart cops get recruited in the first weeks. The others will either leave by the end of the month or get killed in the line of duty. Nobody gets a big funeral for that anymore; it’s understood that it means the cop didn’t get with the program. You go stand at crime scenes, you fill in reports, you take money—half of which you’ll have to kick back to someone else—and you run around with a gun in your hand. At night you swap cop tales over beer, shake prostitutes down for freebies, and then go home to your wife. Sometimes you might get killed. That’s pretty much it.

Some cops were different. Mal was different. Mal would take the call on any homicide, anywhere, and then try to make that sucker go down. I did, too, I guess, which is why I ended up a Lieutenant at the wise, old, experienced age of thirty-two. Within each department there is a hidden and motley collection of cops who are still there to solve crimes, like some tiny vestigial organ hidden in a thriving body of corruption. Mal solved enough prostitute killings that they had to promote him. However much the brass hated real work being done on kickback time, they couldn’t ignore the statistics. I concentrated on the soluble homicides in 50-184, and dunked enough to make lower brass myself.

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.

And then I saw him.

Johnny Vinaldi had aged well, in fact barely at all. He stood about five ten, and was still whipcord thin. A gold necklace sparkled nicely against the major tan of his chest, and his eyes were small and black and hard in the clean lines of his face. He stood, wrapped a spotlessly white toweling gown around himself, and beckoned forward with his hand. He looked perfect, fit, and charismatic, and I wanted to kill him very much indeed.

I opened the gate and shambled out onto the flagstones that surrounded the pool. A couple of the girls were still horseplaying in the shallow end, but pretty much everyone else was watching me. I didn’t blame them. I felt I needed watching.

I stopped about three yards from him. He looked at me, one eyebrow raised. A pause, with only the sound of quiet splashing in the background. There were a lot of things I might have wished to put in that hiatus—the sound of gunfire, for example—but I knew none of them were going to happen. In fact, I hoped they didn’t. I didn’t have my gun, for a start.

“Lieutenant Randall,” Vinaldi said, eventually. “What a nice surprise.”

I gazed back at him. “I hope not. And I’m not flattered by the Lieutenant.”

“A formality,” he said, inclining his head toward me. “A sign of respect.”

“Bullshit.”

“Quite.” He smiled. “Well, as you can see, non-Lieutenant Randall, my friends and I are trying to relax at this difficult time and have a pleasant evening around the pool. Drink a little wine, maybe spark a few ulcers for the fool doctors to keep themselves in business over. You don’t seem to be dressed to join us, so tell me what’s on your mind, and tell me quickly because I have a feeling I’m not going to be very interested.”

“Mal Reynolds.”

Vinaldi frowned. An act of memory, or the facsimile of one. “Your former partner. What of him? I heard he was still living out in the Portal, chasing rainbows and worrying about dead women of ill repute.”

“He’s dead.”

“That I am not especially gleeful to hear. As you know, I bear no particular ill will toward police officers unless they prevent me from carrying out my business, and Sergeant Reynolds was always too worried about the dead to cause problems for the living.”

“He tried,” I said. “We both did. You just managed to get me off the board in time.”

“I, of course, have no idea what you’re referring to.”

I couldn’t prove it, but I knew he understood exactly what I was talking about, and if I’d had my gun at that moment his head would have been spattered across his yellow walls. Maybe this thought was visible from the outside. One of the guys round the pool stood up. He didn’t come any closer, but he was letting me know he was taking a keener interest in the conversation. He was leaner than the others, and looked both dangerous and familiar.

“Jaz Garcia, isn’t it?” I asked, winking at him. “You quit poking underage girls, or does Johnny just buy them in for you now?” One of the women in the pool looked up. She didn’t look illegal, and was probably just surprised to realize she was servicing a statch rapist. Or maybe not. Maybe it gave her a thrill. I felt small and stupid and childish for thinking that, and for being there at all. Garcia’s face set unpleasantly, but Vinaldi held up a hand and Garcia stayed put like a good boy.

“Mr. Randall has been away,” Vinaldi said mildly, his head cocked slightly. “Obviously, he has been keeping low company and forgotten the niceties of conversation amongst normal people.” Then he turned to face me again. “I know nothing about Reynolds’s death. If that’s what you’ve come here to talk about, then you’re wasting my time even more than I suspected.”

“Someone clipped him. At first I thought it was because they were coming after me, and got him by mistake.”

Vinaldi laughed heartily. “And you think it was me? Tell me, why would I do that? You’re nothing. No threat to me, if you ever were. You’re not even a fucking cop anymore. Why would I waste good money having you clipped?”

“It wasn’t me they were after. Mal was investigating a string of homicides,” I said, watching Vinaldi’s reaction carefully. “Whoever killed him did so because they wanted him to stop.”

“And who are these dead people?”

“Five women. Killed in a certain way.”

“We don’t kill women, Randall. Even you know that.”

“Laverne Latoya and Louella Richardson.”

If I hadn’t been looking very closely, I wouldn’t have seen it A tiny flinch in Vinaldi’s eyelid. He turned to his hired help. “Jaz, you heard of these people?”

Jaz trotted out a dutiful “No,” still staring hard at me. Vinaldi turned back and did a theatrical shrug.

“Funny,” I said. “Louella was a regular at Club Bastard the last couple weeks—but maybe she wasn’t really your type. I gather she could read. I think Laverne was one of your dancers. I can check that out later, but you’ve already told me the answer. I found her sister half an hour ago, incidentally, OD’d on Rapt from a Weasel Enema foil. You still deal Rapt, don’t you, Johnny? I wonder if you’d slip someone a little uncut just to make sure they couldn’t tie you to a dead woman.”

Vinaldi had started to breathe a little harder. “Get out,” he said.

“Laverne and Louella got carved up. Their eyes were ripped out,” I said. One of the girls in the pool gasped quietly, a little hand fluttering up to her mouth. “Sound familiar?” Then, not thinking, I threw a curve—just saying the first thing that came into my head. “Where’s your wife? She not joining you round the pool?”

Furious now, Vinaldi took a step closer to me. The veins in his neck were standing out like cords. “She’s wherever the fuck she wants to be, for what business it is of yours.”

“Someone got away from you. Must have been kind of embarrassing.”

“Not nearly so embarrassing as for your friends, if you still have any, to have to comb you out of the fucking sewers.”

I thought he was going to come at me then, but—using more self-control than I could have mustered—he sighed suddenly, and shook his head.

“You’re a sad fuck, Randall. I look in your eyes and I can see that you’re not fucked up on drugs, and maybe that makes you think you’ve got your life together. But then I say to myself that anyone who had his life together wouldn’t be coming up here bothering me. I didn’t put no whack on you or Mal or anybody else. I got better ways of spending the money. Siobhan there, for example.” He nodded toward an expensive-looking blonde lolling in one of the chairs. Below the neck she was some plastic surgeon’s idea of a very wet dream, but too many hours under a Clamorizer had made her face so chiseled it looked like it was carved out of ice. “She’s very high maintenance.”

“I can believe it,” I said. “I’m going now. But one thing…The edges aren’t holding.” I turned and started walking back toward the gate. There was nothing more I could do, not tonight, I didn’t have a gun. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a brain.

Vinaldi stayed motionless. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not just the hits you’ve got to worry about, Johnny. Word’s going round the lower floors. Word says you’re losing it.”

“What do I know from people down there? What should I care?”

“No reason,” I said, opening the gate. I looked back at him for a moment. Tableau: upmarket hoodlum plus human accessories. The two guys at the table were looking at each other. His men knew what I was talking about, and so did their boss. When I was halfway down the path I heard a shout behind me.

“Randall! What’s done in the past is done, understand?” Vinaldi’s voice echoing over manicured lawns. “It’s over!”

I kept walking without turning round. Vinaldi was an intelligent man. He knew it would never be over.

I got off on 72 trembling, and I knew I was going to have to go through with it. My fist hurt from a discussion with the guard by the elevator on Vinaldi’s level, but the fifty dollars was back in my pocket, next to my gun. I felt like I was on a doomed downward spiral, as if I’d reached that stage in the evening when you’ve had too many beers to turn back but know that going forward is going to be even worse. The idea of buying a truck was getting more and more laughable to me, as if it had always been a ludicrous fantasy.

72 had gone down in the world. It was never stylish. It was just a normal suburban neighborhood, done out in corridors. Originally part of one of the MegaMall’s mid-range hotels, it had a couple of small stores in what used to be suites, but apart from that it was entirely residential. When I’d lived there people had been making an effort, pretending it didn’t matter that they lived below the 100 line. Low-paid white collar: a few cops, some bohemian old people, even a couple of teachers. There’d been window boxes lined up by front doors, in lieu of gardens, filled with struggling flowers grown under little ArtiSun lamps. At the right time of year, walking the subcorridors had been like strolling through meadows in spring, if you ignored the fact you were inside.

No longer. I stepped out of the elevator by myself and stood for a while, looking down the long corridor in front of me. One of the apartments on the left-hand side had been burnt out. It looked as if it had been reinhabited, and someone had made a reasonable job of patching it up, but the damage still showed and informed the rest of the view. The carpet was five years dirtier, and the paint on the walls looked like a thousand drunks had pissed on it after imbibing unusual substances. The ceiling lights were still working, at least, but with a buzzing and fitful air, as if they reserved the right to stop at any moment. There wasn’t a single window box to be seen.

I passed doors behind which there might still be people I knew. I didn’t knock on them. I didn’t know which would be worse: discovering the people I knew were all gone, or finding they were still there. I took my turnoff and followed subcorridors that led out to the edge. All were nearly as wide as the main corridor, which I’d always thought gave the floor a feeling of openness. Now it just made it feel deserted.

Things had changed, but not that much until I made the turn into 31st and 5th. The farther I went down 31st, the worse it became. One light in three was working, often with a haunting flickering which did the corridor no favors. As I got closer and closer to the edge of the floor I saw more doors left open, the interior of the apartments stripped and empty. Life had moved away from 72, and it had retreated from this corner in particular. It wasn’t that it looked damaged. If anything, it was in a better state than the areas people were still living in. There’d been no vandalism—there just hadn’t been anyone living here in quite a while.

A hundred yards from the end, the ceiling lights gave out completely. I could still see where I was going, by the threadbare moonlight that seeped through the cracked window in the external wall. Something was rising in my throat, and the hairs on my scalp were shifting uneasily. I heard a small sound, and turned to look in the open doorway I was passing. There was nothing to see, but I thought the shadows moved. Heart thumping, I took a step into the apartment.

A small boy was crouching in the darkness, eyes wide and frightened. He was reasonably well dressed, not a runaway. Someone had combed his hair that morning, and made sure he put on clean clothes: But on the other hand he shouldn’t have been out so late.

“Don’t hurt me,” he said, breathlessly.

“I won’t,” I said. “I don’t hurt people.” He looked at me carefully for a while, then relaxed a little. The room was inky with blues and black, and the boy looked like a collusion of shadows topped by a small and intelligent face. “What are you doing here?”

“I come to sit, sometimes. It’s like a dare. Why are you here?”

“I used to live down the end,” I said, lighting a cigarette.

The boy stared. “Why? It’s really spooky.”

“It wasn’t then.” My eyes dropped, as I considered the idea that what had used to be my neighborhood was now the subject of dares and whispers. I made the effort to smile. “So you guys come down here, to prove you’re not scared?”

“No,” he said, “Just me. My dad…” He trailed off for a moment. “My dad thinks men should be brave. He doesn’t think I’m brave enough because boys keep beating me up at school.”

“Does he know you come down here?” The boy shook his head, and I smiled. “Don’t tell him. Keep it a secret, and that way you’ll always know something about yourself that he doesn’t And if he doesn’t know everything about you, then he can’t always be right, can he?”

The boy took a while to work this out, then smiled back.

“It’s really haunted, you know,” he said, with enthusiasm. “When more people used to live here, a couple of years ago, sometimes they said they saw a little person walking in the corridor. Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Yes,” I said, the back of my neck going cold.

“And there’s someone else who comes here sometimes. I don’t know who he is. I hide. A man, not as tall as you, I’ve seen him twice. He just goes down to the end and stands there for a while. Then he leaves again.” Suddenly, in the manner of small boys, he was on his feet and moving. “I’ve got to go.”

He jumped over to me and stuck his hand out. I shook it, bemused. Then he was gone, running out into the corridor and disappearing into the sound of small feet padding into the distance. By the time I’d stepped out of the apartment, he was round a corner and out of sight.

I went to the window at the end, my heart beating regularly and slowly. I looked at the door on my left. It was closed. Either side of it were the only two window boxes left on the floor. The plants, whose names I’d been told countless times but never learned, were long dead, rotted away to nothing beneath the soil, dried to dust above. I reached out and touched the door near the lock, where the wood was splintered and still looked fresh, with no weather to blunt its message. Then I turned the handle and pushed it open.

The apartment was dark, darker than the one I had just been in. On my right was the kitchen. I felt for the switch on the wall and flicked it, but of course it didn’t do anything. In the light that came through the small square window at the end I could see things still laid out in the kitchen. Pots by the sink; three plates by the stove. Cutlery on the counter and on the floor. Still life with silence. I turned away before I could see any more.

I stood in the bathroom for a moment, looking at my reflection in the mirror. It was darker in there, and I was glad. I didn’t want to see just how much, or how little, I had changed.

The living room. Bookcases along one side, cookery and gardening books jumbled up with my cheap paperbacks and forensic texts. Another wall, almost entirely window, a source of great pride to us. We could have afforded to live a few floors up, but we chose to stay on 72 because we had enough to rent an apartment on the edge here. I’d liked the idea that Angela would be able to see something beyond New Richmond, and on a good day you could see clear to the mountains. Tonight you could barely see the clouds outside, because the window, along with most of the walls and the carpet, was covered in a dried brown smear that was the blood of my wife and daughter.

I didn’t go into the bedroom. I let my back slide down the wall and sat, arms tight round my knees.

I’d come back at nine, late for dinner as always. But also as always, even in those last, bad days, Henna had held it for me, and the kitchen had smelled of something good. I’d been so Rapt as I blundered into the apartment that for a moment I’d seen the smell as a color, a kind of deep warm red. I was also drunk, and I was only going to be staying ten minutes, though Henna didn’t know that yet. The Vinaldi gig was breaking at long last, and I was going back out just as soon as I’d fulfilled my duty as husband and father in the thoughtless and perfunctory way I had.

The apartment was quiet as I entered, which surprised me. Angela’s favorite program was on at nine, some toon featuring a dyslexic cat. Even in my wired and whirling stupor the silence gave me pause, and I walked into the living room with a frown on my aching face.

I thought at first that more of the Rapt had just kicked in, and that the red smell from the kitchen had seeped into the room, blotting out everything else. Then I realized it hadn’t, and screamed so loudly that no sound came out at all.

Angela and half of Henna were in the living room. Angela had been dismantled, each limb removed from her body, then broken into smaller parts. Her face had been peeled off in one piece, and was stuck to the television screen in her drying blood. I couldn’t see her head at first. My wife’s torso was sitting upright in the chair she always sat in, her insides spilling out of the torn lower end. Her lower half was on the bed in the bedroom, legs spread wide. Her head was in the wastebasket, with the rest of Angela’s. I couldn’t find Angela’s eyes.

I saw these things, and then came to just under two weeks later. Someone found me in a disused warehouse area on 12. I was wearing the same clothes and didn’t immediately recognize the person who found me, though I knew her very well. In that period I had developed from a medium-strength Rapt junkie into someone whose body could not survive without it I wasn’t a suspect in the murders, but my job was long gone. It didn’t matter. I barely remembered I’d had one. Five years later I still have no idea what happened during that time, and I don’t want to know; just like I don’t want to think about the fact that I must have turned and walked out of my apartment that night, abandoning the bodies of the two people I loved most in the world.

Somewhere in New Richmond there would be photographs, I knew, Polaroids taken by the killer to prove the job was done so he could collect his fee. I believed I had just spoken to the man who’d paid for those photographs to be taken, a man whom no one in the police department was interested in taking down. The real bodies were long gone and destroyed, leaving only stains on the floor and the chair, and presumably the bed.

But everything else was still there, including the blood on the windows and the dried smear I could still see on the screen of the television. I sat absolutely still for a while, looking at these things and listening for echoes: Angela’s laugh, Henna’s sighs. I could hear neither, and so instead I reached into my jacket and took the burning sensation from my pocket and injected it into my arm.