Spares

It took a long time for the pennies to start dropping. I’ve no real excuse for that; guess I’m just a stupid man. At least when they did they fell together, like a scattered handful of change.

We were sitting in a bar on 67 at the time, it was mid-evening and I was within shouting distance of drunk. I can’t help it. That’s the way I am. The bar was long and old fashioned; the walls wood paneled, with hanging TV screens burbling in corners. Someone had gone to the trouble of building small rectangular contraptions to house the flat LCD sheets so they resembled antique TV sets, and the overall effect was of a bygone age. The patrons were talking fast and hard, and seemed to be having a good time. As far as I could tell, I was having one too.

Nearly and I were drinking steadily, sitting with Suej in a raised booth. I was vaguely considering the idea of food—a burger the size of Texas with everything on it, possibly; Nearly had already eaten a salad and a twenty-degree slice of pecan pie. I think the afternoon had quieted us all down, and we weren’t talking much. I’d learned a small amount of Nearly’s history, but hadn’t told her any of mine. She was twenty-six and had been in the life for four years, operating toward the higher end of the scale. She reckoned that by thirty she’d have enough to get out, and I was trying not to picture what she’d look like by then. I gathered that Suej must have given her the bones of my last five years, because Nearly’s attitude toward me seemed to have altered. I couldn’t put my finger on what the difference was. I’d obviously changed from being just a big violent dude with a drug problem, but to what I wasn’t sure.

It was during a break in the conversation that the first small revelation came. I was looking vaguely in Suej’s direction, watching her finish her burger, her jaws chomping gamely as her eyes followed people with fascination.

And blearily I thought: Maybe she’s the key.

The guy with the blue lights had to have been part of the team who killed Mal and took the spares. Yet when I’d returned to Mal’s building, far from taking me out, he’d stopped Rat-face from trying to kill me. He must have known I would try and avenge Mal, and it had probably been he who’d kept me in New Richmond by hiding Mal’s body. I could only think of one possible reason for wanting me to be still alive and in the city: Blue Lights hadn’t yet gotten something that he’d been sent to find, and I was the key to him getting it.

He had all the spares, except one.

“My treat,” said Nearly, necking the last of her wine. “But I’m going to the John first.” She winked, a pantomime gesture which involved most of her face and half her upper body, and I guessed a pharmaceutical top-up was on the agenda. I watched her as she made her way across the floor to the ladies’, drawing a quiver of appreciative glances. She was living proof that being top-to-bottom slim didn’t stop you from looking like a woman. Meantime, my mind was working. For the first time in two days I felt awake.

Suej was important: to make up the set, or in her own right? If the set was the issue Nanune wouldn’t have died the way she did. I suddenly believed that whoever had set Blue Lights on us was mainly interested in Suej, and that he’d been waiting for me to lead him to her. By keeping her stashed I’d inadvertently been doing the right thing, which figured. My good moves are generally accidents.

Did that make him SafetyNet? Not necessarily. I couldn’t believe that the corporation would allow an operative to conduct business in the way he did. Plus three other missing links:

1) The day we blew the Farm, it was Jenny they had wanted. Her twin had to have been near death for the operations they were considering. So how come Suej was the issue now?

2) What was Blue Lights’s problem with Vinaldi? How could Vinaldi fit with a SafetyNet scenario?

3) Nanune’s desecrated head and the stealing of Mal’s display pointed to either Blue Lights or his accomplice being behind the facial damage homicides—as did the tie-ins to Vinaldi. In that case, why were the NRPD files security locked? Blue Lights wasn’t a cop, I’d lay money on that—so how did he rate protection? The shooter I’d killed outside Mal’s apartment had no rap sheet, and I’d a hunch Blue Lights wouldn’t have either. Which meant either that all the trouble was coming from out of town or that someone was going to a lot of trouble to make it look that way.

Fine thinking as far as it went, but it didn’t go far enough. Instead of making me feel like I was getting somewhere, it made me unsettled and nervous. The downside of Suej being the key was that it meant that the other spares were probably expendable, and none of it got me much closer to understanding what was going on or how I could rescue them. There was at least one part of the puzzle still missing, and until I knew what it was I couldn’t go after the spares, or even ensure that Suej was safe. I couldn’t do anything.

I looked up to see Suej’s eyes on me.

“Are you okay, Jack?” she asked; I stopped drumming my fingers on the tabletop and smiled.

“Sure,” I said. “How was the burger?”

“Good.” She grinned. “Nicer than Ratchet’s.” Ratchet had been a droid out of the top drawer, but, as discussed, cooking hadn’t been one of his key skills—and especially not short-order stuff. On the other hand, it wasn’t supposed to have been, and it was surprising he’d been able to cook at all. For the first time since leaving the Farm I experienced my recurrent curiosity as to what exactly Ratchet had been. I also felt a sudden twinge of loneliness and melancholy on realizing that the machine which had saved my life was probably unrecognizable now. Trashed or reprogrammed by the company, his mind dead forever as punishment for exceeding his role. There ought to be a warning on my forehead, I thought: Think carefully before entering this man’s life, because very few people make it back out alive. Then I thought it was time to can the self-pity before I started boring even myself.

“Can we go there?” Suej asked, and I turned to follow her finger. One of the monitors was showing a news report about some mountain, huge and covered with snow. Suej probably thought the mountain was somewhere just outside New Richmond, back near the way we’d come down from the hills.

“Maybe,” I said. I was about to make it sound more convincing when suddenly I stopped.

Mount Everest.

“You’re not okay,” Suej said, immediately. “I see it in your face. What’s wrong?”

I’d realized what Nearly had inadvertently reminded me of the night before: the report I’d already seen about someone discovering a mountain higher than Everest. Presumably I was now seeing it again.

But that was bullshit. Mount Everest was the highest mountain on Earth. Of course it fucking was.

And now the gates were opening, I realized something else: Wall-diving. Jumping out of windows with nothing but some weird fiberglass rod for company. How likely was that? Did that make any sense at all?

“Jack, what’s wrong?”

Ignoring her, I looked toward the ladies’ room. A sudden influx had turned the area round the bar into a crush of people. Nearly was a way back from the counter, talking to some guy. From her body language I could tell the conversation wasn’t especially welcome, but no more than that.

“I’m sorry, Suej, but we’re going to have to go,” I said. Suej pouted, but she knew something was wrong. She stood up with me and I waited while she gathered her bags, and then she let me lead her down into the throng.

When we got to Nearly, she was alone. “We have to leave,” I said. “We have to leave right now.”

Nearly looked at Suej, then back at me. “Says who? I’m thirsty.” I grabbed her arm and tried to pull her away, aware that I was appearing a Neanderthal. She yanked it back again. “What is your problem?”

“What’s the highest mountain in the world?” I asked, fighting to stay patient. Nearly just stared at me, buffeted by the people around us. “Quickly.”

“Well, Mount Fyi, of course. They just found out. Do I win a prize?”

“No. That’s why we have to go.” I looked around the crowd. The man Nearly’d been talking to had disappeared, “Who was that guy?”

Nearly looked confused, then realized whom I was talking about. “Said he was a John of mine from a couple of years back; wanted to play tonight. I told him to go away. Why?”

“Didn’t you recognize him?”

“No, but—how can I put this?—it’s not like I keep a lock of each one’s hair.”

“Nearly, trust me. We really have to go.”

She stood her ground for a moment longer, then rolled her eyes. “Jesus, you’re no fun at all,” she grumbled, and allowed me to pull her toward the door.

Too late.

I suddenly sensed time rushing toward me again, without really knowing what I was reacting to. Maybe it was some sound from deep in the crowd. Or perhaps I felt the crush of people parting. Some sixth sense from long ago, stirring sluggishly. I instinctively put myself between Suej and the rest of the bar, shoving Nearly toward the door. As I surreptitiously pulled my gun out I felt Suej move behind me and glanced to see that Nearly had taken her hand and was taking her with her. I didn’t know whether she’d started to believe me or was just doing what she was told for once. Either way, I was grateful.

I quickly slipped a few yards to the right through the crowd, keeping my gun hidden and low. Scanned the faces, and kept moving in unpredictable directions six feet at a time, turning my head as far round as I could, trying to feel where he’d be. It was like moving through grasping and twisted trees. I used to be good at that. But he was obviously better than me.

“Shutdown,” a voice whispered an inch behind my ear.

With a whole-body spasm I crunched my heel backward and felt it connect solidly with his shin. Whirling on my other foot I brought the gun up, cracking it against people in the crowd. Surprised mouths opened in front of me. The man had gone but at least people were getting the fuck out of my way. I searched the crowd, saw no one, then my head snapped toward the door. He’d twisted behind me and was ten feet away, carving his way through the throng toward Suej. But it wasn’t Blue Lights: It was someone new.

I could see Nearly’s head just outside but she didn’t catch my desperate signals. Suej was looking somewhere else entirely, staring at the wooden frame of the door, I forgot the secret of slipping through people and threw myself forward, fighting the crowd as if it was a thicket of undergrowth. A mass of arms and legs and red angry faces. Hard elbows, jabbing into me.

He was getting to the door much more quickly than I, slipping through the crowd as if it wasn’t there. There was something in the way he moved, a murderous grace, which told me he’d been trained for this. I had been, too; and once upon a time maybe could have caught him. But not now. It was far too long ago.

When I started going backward, I knew I was going to have to do something unusual. I changed course and headed for the bar like a lumbering missile, slamming people out of the way with both hands. I made it to the counter and hoisted myself up, sending rows of glasses flying. I scrambled to my feet, slipping on spillage, and whirled to face the crowd.

“Stay there or I’m going to blow your head off,” I shouted at him. Not very original, but there you go. Some phrases are hard-wired into the male psyche. When the need arises, out they come. The guy knew this, and gave it about as much heed as it deserved, continuing toward the door. The crowd were less sanguine, and dived to get out of the way; opening a channel to the exit, exactly what I didn’t want.

Nice one, Jack, I thought: tactical mastery as usual.

A second to make a decision. I needed the guy alive—I wanted to talk to him. But if he got to Suej, everything was over anyway.

I shot him, carefully.

The bullet caught him in the neck and spun him round, but he was a big fucker and kept on going. I parked another in his back and launched myself off the bar, flying raggedly over rows of heads and smashing down onto him. We crashed to the floor, a space suddenly clear around us; I tried to turn the fall into a roll but he was quicker than me and kicked me back down again as he pulled out his gun. I twisted immediately and took some splinters in the face as the patch of floor where my head had been exploded.

I decided I was tired of being shot at in bars and that I didn’t need to talk to him that much.

My gun was half empty before he staggered; I pushed myself to my feet with one hand, still firing with the other. The problem with guns is that they don’t kill people as quickly as you might think. Shooting people doesn’t send them flying backward in a graceful arc. It just tends to really annoy them. I lunged forward and grabbed his neck, my hand slipping in the biology spilling out of the hole there. I got him on his back and knelt over him, hand still on his throat and a knee on each arm, gun firmly pointed at his forehead. His face was thin and not very clean, eyes deep set and dark. Under his coat it looked like he was wearing army fatigues which hadn’t been troubled by water in a while.

I knew I didn’t have long before the cops arrived, so I made it simple for him. “Tell me who you are and where you’re from or I’m going to spread your brains all over the next floor down,” I panted, feeling warmth spilling out of his neck onto my fingers.

He bucked and nearly threw me off so I put another bullet through his collarbone at close range.

“You know where I’m from,” he said, through a mouthful of blood. He seemed to be grinning.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “And it’s pissing me off. Are you SafetyNet, or what?”

The man laughed, sending another gout of mess up through the remains of his lungs. “Ain’t no safety net there, Randall. You know that.”

From behind, I heard someone whisper “They’re coming,” and knew that time had run out. I stood up and left him lying there, knowing he wasn’t going to tell me anything. Then as an afterthought I shot him in the head. Not very polite of me, I know, but then he didn’t want the best for me either.

“Jesus—what is it with you and public places?” Nearly shouted. “Were you, like, mistreated in a bar as a kid?” I’d obviously slipped back in her estimation to big violent dude with a drug problem, maybe even further than that. “Wherever you go it’s the same fucking movie. Don’t you-get tired of it?”

“One, he could have been the guy killing women,” I said, pushing her and Suej quickly along the street. “Two, he could have killed Mai. Three, either he or his friend cut Nanune’s fucking head off, and four, I don’t want to discuss it.”

We ran out into Road 2, the smaller of 67’s main drags. I could hear sirens in the distance, cops on platforms surfing toward us from the station on the other side of the floor. The platforms are simply that, four-inch slabs with Hovers underneath; one cop drives using the lectern at the front, the others do what the hell they like. I kept us moving away from the bar for as long as possible, and then, when I saw a flashing light turn the corner into our road, yanked the girls into a sidestreet. The platform rocketed past like a very low-flying bird with parasites on its back, and I hoped the bar wasn’t about to experience an “incident.” The cop piloting was bombed out of his mind and the others were waving their guns around like cowboys on a runaway riverboat.

When the platform was safely past, we ran back out onto the street and sprinted across it, into another side road and then through to the waste ground behind. Once it had been a botanical garden. Now it was just a mess, some descendants of the original plants still struggling for life, most dead and gone. Yellow streetlights were strung along the edges of the grounds, but the interior was dark and abandoned.

“Where are we going?” Nearly panted. “And are you going to shoot anyone when we get there? if so, I think I may pass and take in a movie instead.”

There was an elevator on the other side. I pointed to it.

“Down to your apartment,” I said as we ran into the gloom. “There’s stuff I left there. Then Suej and I are disappearing. Probably for good.”

“Well hey, it’s been nice knowing you,” Nearly said angrily. “And when I say ‘nice,’ I don’t mean it.”

I was about to try to say something conciliatory when Suej suddenly ground to a halt in front of me. I almost collided with her and instead skidded to a stop, a growl ready on my lips.

It never made it out.

We were in the middle of the waste ground by then, two hundred yards from anything in any direction. The sirens still blared in the distance, but apart from that it was quiet and still. Suej was staring into space with her mouth open. There was nothing there.

“Suej?” I said. “What—?”

Then something morphed out of the shadows. A flicker at first, a shimmer like shadows changing places to music I couldn’t hear. At the threshold of audibility a sound, like many hands clapping but speeded up and far away.

Then a shiver went through the ground and the space between us fractured into noise and light.

Suej shrieked as the birds exploded into being, a hundred mad, happy orange sets of wings and ear-splitting cries crashing into fluttering life, Living flames shot up into the air, but went nowhere; movement and noise contained into stillness, as if everything in the world was trying to be in the same place at once. It was impossible to discern the beginning of one scream and the start of the next, or one bird and another.

I found Suej’s hand in mine. She was pulling me toward the elevator. Her face was white with shock and surprise, and she ducked and twisted against things that weren’t even there. Nearly just stared at us, following, as we stumbled toward the elevator. Behind her the birds slithered and ran into invisible tracks in the air, tearing passage back the way they’d come.

We fell into the elevator and stared out into darkness as the doors closed and sealed us in.

“What the hell’s wrong with you guys?” Nearly shouted, stamping her feet. I ignored her and put my arms round Suej’s shoulders, as much for my own comfort as hers. She was trembling like an animal caught in headlights, rooted to the spot. I thought she’d been struck mute but suddenly she looked up, blue eyes staring straight into mine.

“You know what that was.” Her voice spiraled into accusation and terror. “You know”

“You saw the forest in the elevator before, didn’t you?” I asked. She nodded feverishly.

“What are they?” she wailed. “Where are they from?”

“Hello? Calling planet Jack…” Nearly shouted, as the doors opened onto 66. She was beside herself with anger and fear. “What are you guys talking about?”

“You didn’t see them?” Suej asked her incredulously, and Nearly just stared as if finally realizing that she’d spent the day with two people who should have been weaving baskets and knocking back Thorazine. I stepped quickly out of the elevator, my arm still round Suej. I was trying to work out what was happening, but it was all coming at me too fast. Some final penny had been thrown in my lap, some huge great hundred-dollar special edition coin out of the sky. I’d have done anything to be able to hurl it back before I worked out what it meant.

“See who?” Nearly demanded, hurrying along beside us.

“The birds,” I said, knowing she hadn’t. Suej shouldn’t have been able to either, and come to that, neither should I. They shouldn’t have been there at all, just like the scene in the elevator which I’d assumed was a Rapt-induced flashback. I was shaking violently, not feeling very tough at all.

“Suej,” I said. “What were you staring at in the bar, on the way out?”

“The door frame,” she said. “The wood was acting funny.”

Everest, wall-diving, the mad, happy birds. It was all leading to one place. The forest.

I wasn’t going back there again.

A rasping sprint along deserted corridors to the corner of Tyson and Stones; a huddle outside Nearly’s door. She was scrabbling for her keys and I was staring wildly around when the door lock spoke to us.

“There’s someone inside,” it said. “Just thought you might like to know.”

“Who?” Nearly yelped, as I pulled out my gun. Sometimes I don’t know why I don’t just have it surgically implanted in my hand.

“He didn’t say,” the lock replied mildly, as if its mind was on other things. “He had keys, so there wasn’t much I could do.”

“Howie?” I asked Nearly, trying not to panic.

She shook her head, backing away from the door. “He’s my manager, not my boyfriend.”

I took Nearly’s keys and stood in front of the door. Fresh clip into the gun. Not many left, but the way things were going I wouldn’t be around to need them for much longer.

Nearly tugged at my sleeve. “This is going to be bad news,” she opined. “Let’s find somewhere else to be. Seriously, I hear Florida’s nice…”

“It is, but I have to get Mal’s disk back,” I said. “It’s all that’s left of him.”

Nearly, very nervous now: “Like, I respect that and everything, but I really think we should…”

I put the keys in the door and turned. “Best of luck,” said the lock, and I took a step into the corridor beyond. A quiet sound from the living room, like feet moving on carpet.

“Who’s there?” I inquired. No reply. I walked a couple more steps down the hall. “I have a gun and I’m in a strange kind of mood,” I added. “So whoever you are, don’t fuck me around.”’

Still nothing, except that scuffling sound. It wasn’t going to go away, and neither was I, so what else could I do but just take a deep breath and burst into the room.

Johnny Vinaldi looked up impatiently, pacing around the floor.

“Where the hell have you been?” he said, and I just stared at him openmouthed.

Nearly dithered between coffee and a line of coke, and in the end opted for both. Suej went into the kitchen to help with the former, and I stayed in the living room with Vinaldi.

“He got away,” he said. “How, don’t ask me to tell you. He’s surrounded by a boatload of the guys I think of as my least disappointing men, not to mention hundreds of teenage dancing people, and he blows out of the club like a lungful of smoke and just disappears.”

“But he didn’t get you,” I said, lighting a cigarette. I didn’t know whether “I wanted to be having this conversation. Events had pushed Vinaldi and me together in ways I didn’t understand, but I still wanted him dead. Each sentence I spoke to him felt like unfaithfulness. I wasn’t going to waste many words.

“True, and I’m enormously psyched about that, as you can imagine, but Jaz—whom I know you have little respect for, and I can understand that but he is loyal to me beyond reason and good at hurting people, so what can I do?—is in the MediCenter with bullets in disturbing places. His brother Tony is dead, and three others are not as healthy as they used to be.”

“I just killed a guy who I think was an associate of the man with the lights,” I said. “In a bar on sixty-seven.”

Vinaldi looked up at me then, finally stopping his pacing. “I’m impressed,” he said, with apparent sincerity. “It’s been a long, long time for us. These guys, I think they’re still there.”

“Johnny, why are you here and what are you talking about?” I still had my gun in my hand and I wasn’t completely sure that I wasn’t going to use it on him.

“I know who the man who came to my club was,” he said, lighting a cigarette of his own. The clattering in the kitchen seemed a hundred miles away. “And that’s why I know now it wasn’t you who sent me that box or was violent to me in the shadows of my business.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“Jeq Yhandim,” Johnny said, suddenly looking older. “I knew him in the war.”

“The war? You?”

“You remember—the ‘training exercise.’ I was a Bright Eyes, too.”

“Bullshit,” I shouted, angry and light-headed with disbelief, but Vinaldi just shook his head.

“I had them removed after I got back. It was very expensive and quite painful and I wouldn’t recommend it as an experience.”

I tried to get my mind round this, to understand how it changed things. In some ways it made all the sense in the world. Vinaldi’s weirdly distanced and confident slant on life was perfectly consistent with what he was telling me—plus he dealt Rapt, which, as discussed, is not everyone’s idea of fun. It also helped some other things fall into place.

“What’s the highest mountain in the world?” I asked.

He frowned, said “Everest,” and that’s when I finally accepted what was going on.

“I’ve just seen the birds.” I watched him as I said this. His eyes sprang open wide. For a moment he didn’t look like the most successful gangster in New Richmond, but like the scared boy he must once have been. Seeing that look made it harder to hate him; I knew the expression only too well, had seen it on my own face many years ago. It also made it impossible for me to doubt that he had been in The Gap. The birds are like little pockets of marsh gas—bright lights which show something invisible is gathering. Vinaldi couldn’t have understood this without having been there.

“Christ on a bike,” he said.

“You could put it like that. I also saw the forest. For a moment it was like I was actually there. And there’s been reports all over the news about someone discovering a mountain higher than Everest. Mount Fyi, which doesn’t exist. You heard of wall-diving, incidentally?”

“Yeah, a couple of days ago. People jump…” Vinaldi stopped suddenly, brow furrowed. “Wait a minute. People can’t just leap out of windows with a stick. That’s fucking ridiculous.”

“True, but I met someone yesterday who does it,” I said. “Or thinks he does.” Internally I clocked the fact that Golson lived next to an apartment where either Yhandim or his accomplice had murdered someone.

“It’s The Gap, isn’t it,” Vinaldi said. “It’s the fucking Gap. It’s got to be. It’s making people think things that aren’t true.”

I told him that it was true now. That it was seepage, stuff that should be unconscious becoming conscious. The planet’s dreams, seeping through the wall like hallucinations on the edge of sleep.

“Randall,” Vinaldi said, shaking his head, “you’ve been taking far too many drugs.”

“Worse than that,” I added, remembering the small creature I’d half-glimpsed the night before near Shelley Latoya’s apartment. “It’s changing stuff for real.” Then another fact presented itself; Blue Lights had access to narcotics. I’d seen him dealing. Maybe Shelley hadn’t overdosed herself, after all.

“Why is this happening? What’s going on?”

“You tell me,” I said. “And start with Jeq Yhandim.”

Vinaldi’s eyes flicked away, and before he replied he walked over to the rearWindow, which was showing a view of the mountains in the distance, relayed from a camera somewhere high on the north face of the city. The look in his eyes was one I’d seen before, as if he were staring with calm enmity at something a great distance away. The “ten-click glare,” we used to call it. I got the idea before he even started that he was about to reveal something he didn’t talk about very often. Maybe never at all.

“He was in my unit,” Vinaldi said eventually. “We lost him.”

“Lost him?”

He turned to me then, and the words came out in a rush.

“You know what it was like. We were very deep in-country, of course. We were fucked up beyond all recognition, naturally. Suddenly, they hit us and the Lieutenant’s completely lost what little mind he has and is Gone Away all the time, and so it’s down to me and I can’t even tell which way is up.”

I nodded to show I understood. I did—all too well.

“Everyone’s running all over the place getting cut into little pieces and I’m trying to do something about it but I can’t think what it should be except just turning and running like hell. So that’s what we do. Half of us get killed in ten seconds and the rest run into each other, all fleeing in different directions. We just kept running, got out of there, happy to be even half alive.” Vinaldi stopped there, as if not wanting to go on.

“And?” I said.

He breathed out heavily, running a hand across his face. “Some people got left behind.”

He sat down, looking away. I remained standing, staring at him. “Left behind?”

“Some people didn’t get back with us, but they didn’t get killed.”

“When did you find this out?” I asked, still not really understanding.

“Tonight,” he said. “I didn’t realize until tonight.”

“Johnny, what are you telling me?”

“I’m saying Yhandim and some others got left in The Gap when everyone else left. He didn’t make it back to the camp, and he wasn’t there when we got side-lifted out at the end. I’d always assumed they were dead but, as you saw, he came for me last night. He never left The Gap. He’s been there for nearly twenty years.”

I’d known there was something about the man in the bar on 67, that he was still living some life which I’d left behind. What I couldn’t have believed was the reason for it. I still didn’t understand why Yhandim took the spares or wanted Suej. But I knew that he’d survived in The Gap for nearly two decades after everyone else had left.

And now he’d found some way of coming back from the dead, and Hell would be following after.

Much later, when Nearly and Suej had fallen asleep on the couch and Vinaldi and I were sitting on opposite sides of the room in silence, I passed a watershed. I’d put Mal’s disk in my pocket, along with the computer chip. Rachet must have given it to me for a reason, so I figured it was worth hanging onto. I was ready to go somewhere, or do something, but I didn’t know where, or what it was going to be.

Vinaldi’s eyes were very far away, maybe reliving something from The Gap. He’d called into whatever it is hoods have in place of an office and told people he’d be out of contact for a few hours. He had people on virtually every floor looking out for Yhandim, all of them carrying the finest in haute couture weaponry. Until someone called, there was nothing he and I could do except sit and watch each other. There were things I’d rather have done. Having Vinaldi sit there was like an open cancer on my face in the mirror; I didn’t want it, but if it was there I couldn’t help looking at it.

I knew there was one question I had to ask before anything else happened. I’d been sure of the answer for the last five years. Tonight, I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure why I felt different; perhaps it was something in Vinaldi’s attitude toward me, or maybe The Gap was simply an older wound, which for this evening was taking precedence. Either way, I asked it.

“Johnny,” I said, “did you put out the order to have Henna and Angela killed?”

My voice sounded dry and constricted, but it came out evenly enough. Vinaldi came to attention immediately. I got the impression that he knew this was something which would come up sooner rather than later.

He looked me in the eyes, and then he looked away.

“No,” he said. And the strange thing was, I believed him.