Spares

At seven a.m. the phone rang. I was asleep on the sofa. Suej was sprawled over most of it, and Nearly was resting her head dopily on my shoulder. I was about as comfortable as if I’d been sleeping in a bookcase, but didn’t entirely mind.

Vinaldi appeared to have stayed awake, and reached crisply from his chair to press the phone.

“Er, it’s Howie,” said a voice, relayed perfectly into the room by the wall coupler. “Is Jack there?”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting up. “Howie, what’s happening?”

“I think you ought to come down here,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Are you alone?”

“No,” I said, though Suej and Nearly were still asleep.

“That’s what I assumed. I need to show you something. It relates to your friend with the lights in his head.”

Something in Howie’s tone struck me as very wrong. I stood up. “I’m on my way.”

“Great,” he said, sounding relieved. “And Jack—I’d leave the girls where they are, if you catch my meaning.”

The phone clicked off. I looked at Vinaldi.

“I’ll come with you,” he said.

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Yes, it fucking will.” Vinaldi looked spruce and calm, as though he spent most nights awake in a chair. “Anything that relates to Yhandim relates to me.”

“I’d rather you stayed here.”

“I don’t give a shit what you’d rather, Randall. I’m coming.”

I looked at him for a moment. Last night had made a difference, but in daylight I wasn’t sure how much. Eventually I nodded. I scribbled a note for Nearly and we left, closing the door quietly behind us. The lock told us to take care—advice which I valued highly. The corridor to the elevator was filthy, overflowing with the detritus of the previous evening. Empty bottles, cracked vials, a used rubber. In the distance I heard the sound of a sweepteam vacuuming it up. Hazy light slanted in from the external window down at the end of the corridor, and for once it looked like it wasn’t raining outside.

We stood in silence in the elevator as it descended, and I thought momentarily about how weird it was to be standing next to New Richmond’s premier villain. Maybe he was mulling over his proximity to one of its key losers. If so, he didn’t say. Perhaps, like me, he was mainly wondering whose head we were going to find this time. Howie had called me, not Vinaldi. I was thinking that was probably a clue.

It was nighttime on 8. I took us the quickest route, which happens also to be the noisiest, going down Bon Bon Street past bars full of revelers encouraging young (and not so young) ladies to remove their clothes. I can only watch that kind of stuff for a short while before being suffused with a feeling of utter futility—a kind of pornui, I guess—but the patrons down on 8 certainly seemed to be going for it. Vinaldi merely swept his gaze over it with a grimly professional eye, probably calculating if any of it was worth taking over. Bon Bon led us into a net of side streets where people were eating and drinking, overspilling out of diners onto the crowded streets. Here Vinaldi looked around more casually as we walked, and I figured it must all seem kind of small beer to him.

“I haven’t been down here in years,” he said suddenly, contradicting me. “Looks kind of fun.”

“What, more fun than Club Bastard?” I said, making the turn into Howie’s side street.

“Having someone drill a hole in your head and pour ants in is more fun than Club Bastard,” he said. “The young people these days, what do they know from fun?”

I felt that my own notions of what was enjoyable were open to question, and also that if age meant maturity, I should probably still be sucking my thumb. I was about to say so when I noticed Vinaldi had disappeared. One minute he was beside me, the next he was gone. Assuming he’d hung back in the preceding street to observe fun in progress, I entered Howie’s bar. I was actually kind of relieved to be able to handle this on my own. All the way down I’d been hoping that if I was going to see anyone’s head it would be the half-spare’s, and realizing that fate would be unlikely to help me out. Yhandim’s MO seemed to favor women rather exclusively, with the exception of the warning sent to Vinaldi. David and Mr. Two might very well be dead by now, but Yhandim’s present to me would have overtones of sexuality. It always does when that level of mangling is involved, and the manglers tend not to be switch-hitters.

“Jack, hi,” said Howie.

The room was entirely empty. “Business is quiet,” I said.

“I closed down for the morning. Putting new windows in.”

I nodded, noticing the piles of broken glass swept up against the bottom of the bar. Howie seemed subdued, not at all his normal self, and I said so. “Yeah,” he replied, smiling tightly. “Difficult times.”

“What did you have to show me?”

“This way,” he said.

On the table in his office was a box, like the two I’d already seen. I approached it with quiet dread, bracing myself.

“When did it come?”

“An hour ago,” Howie said. “Hand delivery.”

I was going to have to open it sooner or later, so I did it immediately. I untied the string around the package. As I did so, the box rocked slightly, as if whatever was inside wasn’t braced securely enough. I pictured Jenny’s head shifting, unstable and slick with drying blood, and almost decided that I didn’t need to see the reality for myself.

But I finished untying the knot. I always do. I always have to see for myself just how bad things can be.

As the string fell away I put my thumbs under the uppermost flaps, aware of Howie’s shallow breaths. I realized belatedly that I’d brought a lot of shit into his life lately and resolved to let him know that I was grateful for him putting up with it, just as soon as I’d gotten through this. I took a deep breath and flipped up the lip of the box.

Something shot out of the hole and straight up to the ceiling, a squawking explosion of movement and odor that sent me backward in shock. Howie muttered “Fuck” quietly and took a step backward of his own. The object had ricocheted moistly off the ceiling and crashed back down again before I’d had a chance to even begin working out what it was. When it hit the surface of the desk it stopped, turned what I realized was its head, and stared at me. After I’d stopped blinking in surprise, I stared cautiously back at it, half-expecting it to lunge for me.

It was a bird, of a kind. A bird or a cat, either way. It was featherless, but stood a foot tall on spindly jointed legs; its face was avian but—like the body—fat and dotted with patchy, molting orange fur. Two vestigial wings poked out of its sides at right angles, looking as if they had been unceremoniously amputated with scissors and then recauterized. Most of the creature’s skin was visible, an unhealthy white mess that appeared to be weeping fluid. The whole body heaved in and out as it sat, as if laboring for breath, and it gave off a smell of recent decay—as if fresh-minted for death. The eyes focused on me, making me instantly, and its beak opened. The hole this revealed looked less like a mouth than a wound, and the eyes, though vicious, were faltering.

“What the fuck is that?” Howie whispered.

“You got me,” I said, though I had my suspicions. The bird tried to take a step toward us, but the effort caused one of its legs to break. The top joint teetered in its socket and then popped out. The creature flopped onto its side. The skin over the joint tore like an overripe fruit, releasing a gout of matter that resembled nothing so much as a heavy period mixed with sour cream.

It was not, all in all, a very beautiful creature.

“He knows,” said a voice behind us, with a chuckle, and I sighed inwardly without turning.

“Who is that?” I asked Howie, knowing I’d walked into a trap.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” he replied, voice breaking. “He said he’d kill me if I didn’t, and he said he wouldn’t kill you if I did.”

I turned to see a man standing behind us in the doorway. It was the man from the bar the previous night, the guy into whose head I’d placed a bullet. A man, in short, who really shouldn’t be standing there with a gun pointing at my head.

“I lied,” he said. “Get your hands up.”

I raised them, noticing that his right temple bore faint traces of an entrance wound. Reassuring, because for a moment I’d considered the possibility that I’d lost my mind. In a metaphoric sense, rather than in the more physical manner which now seemed to be inevitable.

“Who are you?” I asked him, surprised at the level-ness of my own voice. Howie stared at me from the sidelines, face awash with guilt.

“Friend of Yhandim’s,” the man said, grinning his trademark grin. “But you know that. We met before.”

“Why didn’t he come himself?”

“’Cos that’s the whole point, Mr. Man. Yhandim be at your lady friend’s now, picking up what we came for.”

The shock must have showed on my face, because his grin broadened. The movement caused a drop of lymph to ooze out of the wound in his head and run slowly down his cheek. “We got you out the way first with the help of Mr. Howie here, just to make sure the mission ran smooth. You been known to get in the way.”

“Very clever,” I said. “What do you want with Suej?”

“We don’t want nothing with her,” the man said. “She’s someone else’s property and we just fetching it for him. The other lady, though, her we can probably find a use or two for. For a little while at least. Yhandim tends to use them up pretty quick, and he has this problem with people who have normal eyes.”

“What have you done with the others?” I wasn’t really playing for time, not yet. I was just asking whatever came into my mind, as much to know the answers as for any other reason. The gun trained on me didn’t waver, and I knew I’d been lucky to jump the man last time. What little time there was left seemed already to be condensing down to a line a minute hence, a barrier I had no real confidence of crossing.

“Don’t matter to you,” the man said. “You ain’t going to be around to care.”

“I’m surprised I’m still alive now. Also, that you are, too. Doesn’t that hole in your head at least hurt? Or the one in your neck, or shoulder?”

“You don’t understand nothing at all,” he said, with a trace of anger. “You got out. You don’t understand shit.”

“Why don’t you explain it to me,” I said, trying to be soothing. “You must be keeping me alive for something. I was there. Maybe I’d understand.”

The man laughed suddenly, destroying whatever hope I’d had. He wasn’t stupid. He was just completely and utterly insane. He clicked back the hammer on his gun, and I realized the line was right in front of me. “You alive because we need to find someone else,” he said. “And we think you know where he is. You going to tell me now, and then I going to kill you.”

“Who?” I said, though I knew.

“Vinaldi,” the man said, with a snarl of utter hatred. “We want to see that boy real bad.”

“Hey, you should have said so,” said a voice, and Vinaldi stepped suddenly into sight behind the man. As he whirled around to face him, Vinaldi swung a heavy wooden barstool into his face with an elegant precision I couldn’t help but admire. One of the wooden legs shattered, bones broke like eggshells, and the man crumpled to the floor.

Vinaldi smiled grimly at me as he strode into the room. “You’re out of practice, Randall, I knew this was going to be a trap. That’s why I insisted on coming along.” He stepped over the guy on the floor and pulled out a gun, his face suddenly dark and implacable.

“Don’t you fucking shoot him,” I shouted, pulling my own gun, grateful to have it in my hand again.

Vinaldi looked up at me. “What the fuck are you yelling about? Of course I’m going to shoot him.”

“If you do I’ll shoot you,” I said, holding my gun steady as I walked toward him. “And as for being out of practice, if you’d stayed the fuck back at Nearly’s then they’d be all right now.” Vinaldi frowned, but flicked his safety back on. I turned to Howie, who was still pressed against the wall, probably wondering whom he was now in most danger from. “Howie, go get some tape.”

“Jack, I’m…”

“Yeah, I know. It’s not a problem.” He wasn’t convinced. “Seriously. In your position I’d have done the same. Now please go get us some tape.”

As Howie ran out, I knelt beside the man and listened to his breathing. It was ragged, but steady.

“Randall, what are you doing?” Vinaldi said, with more than a trace of impatience, “Here is a man who had nothing but your death, and mine too, I might add, on his mind, and you decide this is the time to go round supporting the right to life? You should be running after your women, not worrying about this scum.”

“Yhandim has already got Nearly and Suej,” I said. “He was probably in there two minutes after we left. This guy may know where they’ve been taken. He may know where the other spares are. He may even know what the fuck is going on. You spread his face over the walls and we’re never going to know—added to which I’ve already parked metal in this man’s head and he’s still up and around. Doing it again may only make him pissed.”

Howie came back in with the tape and I rolled the body onto its chest. Using large quantities of very secure masking tape, I quickly bound the man’s hands and legs. His fatigues seemed even dirtier than they had the night before, and fragments of leaves were stuck in the soles of his boots. While I was working, I glanced at the back of his head and noticed a messy exit wound there, blood and tissue melted into his hair. It wasn’t as big as it should have been, and it didn’t seem to have inconvenienced him much. Maybe a lucky deflection off the inside of his skull. Yeah, right. And maybe the strange, tacky texture of his skin was because he used too much moisturizer.

Only when he was completely immobilized and rolled onto his back did I stand up and take a hurried swig from the bottle of Jack’s Howie was inhaling. My hands were shaking. Proximity to death does that to me. If you’ll take my advice, avoid it.

“What’s his name?” I asked Vinaldi, handing him the bottle. He looked at it, realized it was before eight in the morning, then took a mouthful anyway. “He get left behind, too?”

Vinaldi nodded reluctantly. “His name’s Ghuaji,” he said, then handed me the bottle. “Pour some of this down his throat.”

I did so, and Ghuaji coughed, spluttered, and swam back up toward the light. His eyes flicked against the blood pooling down from his flattened nose. I thought about wiping his eyes for him, then realized I couldn’t be fucked. I leaned in very close, and spoke very clearly indeed. Déjà vu again: last night, not to mention the man outside Mal’s apartment.

But this time I had to get it right.

“You’ve got five minutes,” I said. “That’s about how much I can spare. After that Howie here is going to drop you down an xPress elevator shaft to see if you bounce. Understand?”

His voice was thick, and too weak to make out. But he’d heard me. I could tell by the way he spat a bloody tooth into my face.

“Super,” I said. “I have four questions. Answer all of them and we could have a basis for negotiation. Any less and it’s bargain bucket of pain approach. Okay. One: Where has Yhandim taken Suej and the other woman? Two: Where are the other spares? Three: Who is behind all this shit and four: What is his fucking problem? Answer in any order you like but don’t take your time because I don’t have any and yours is running out real fast.”

Ghuaji smiled up at me, and I cocked my gun. This didn’t do anything except broaden his smile. I felt panic rising behind the calm I was trying to project.

“The birds are here,” he said. “Surely you seen them.”

A chill, but I hid it. “What about them? How come they’re coming through?”

“Yhandim’s got a plan, ain’t not even nobody knows about it. The leaves will be with him, man. He been up all night, talking to the boys. It’s going down.”

“I tend to find,” Vinaldi said sagely from behind me, “that blowing pieces off a man’s body one by one will reduce the obscurity of his answers.”

“Johnny, thanks for the fortune cookie, but…”

“Seriously, I can recommend it, and Jaz, God willing he comes out of the MediCenter as a functioning human being, will back me up on that to the hilt.”

“You think that’s going to scare a man who’s been in The Gap all this time?” I said, turning to him but speaking for Ghuaji’s benefit. “A guy who’s been in-country half his life? I like the way you’re thinking, but I think maybe this isn’t the guy for it.”

It seemed to work. When I turned back to him, Ghuaji’s eyes focused more clearly on me, and when he next spoke it was with a hint of wistfulness.

“It’s home. I miss it every second, man. Top-ups just ain’t enough.”

It was then I knew that not only was the man off his head, but that he wouldn’t tell us anything he didn’t want to even if we whittled his body down to the bone. Anyone who could miss The Gap wasn’t even human anymore.

I reached down and tilted Ghuaji’s head slightly, looking at the bullet’s entrance wound. It went through the skin and skull, but not much deeper than that. It must have started healing immediately, and can’t have held him up long enough to allow the police to get to the bar before he escaped.

“You see that?” I asked Vinaldi. He nodded, and I saw a little fear in his eyes, and Howie’s, which I suspected was probably mirrored in my own. On the other hand, I thought the wound looked a little worse than when I’d first seen a droplet ooze out. The healing was reversing.

I had one more try. “You’re not going to answer the questions, are you?”

“You a clever guy,” he croaked.

“Okay, well here’s the deal. I’ve changed my mind. We’re not going to throw you down the shaft just yet, because later we may be able to get you to reconsider. Howie’s going to put you in the back, and someone’s going to watch over you. You show any sign of being antisocial, this employee of Howie’s is going to chainsaw off your legs. You’re healing in a very weird way, my friend, but I think that could keep even you out of action for a while.” I watched him carefully, and added: “Especially without a top-up.”

A tiny flicker. Enough.

I stood and nodded to Howie. “Have Paulie sling him in the back—away from the food—and sit over him. I’m not joking about the chain saw. Don’t take any crap from this guy.”

“Paulie’s dead,” Howie told me. “He was here when this guy arrived.”

“Shit, I’m sorry,” I said.

Howie nodded distantly. “That’s okay. Dath can do it. He’ll enjoy fucking this fucker up. What do you want to do with that shit?”

He pointed over at the mess on the table. While our attention had been diverted, the bird’s other leg had come off, and most of its back section had collapsed in on itself. Vinaldi stared at it, face drawn, and just when I’d decided it was dead the bird’s head made a small vicious movement, pulling its front half away from the rest. Using the stumps of its wings like paddles it tried to crawl along the desk, trailing the remains of its insides behind it and shedding skin and fur like snow from shaken trees.

“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.