Maybe it was some gang making good on the contract Howie had warned me about, and then just picking the spares up as booty. All of them, except maybe the half-spare, could have been sold on for some purpose. Jenny alone was worth good money.
I needed to know which was true. If it was SafetyNet, chances were it was all over. If not, then maybe there was still time to get the spares back before anything happened to them.
But first Mal needed burying. I wasn’t going to leave him spread over his apartment to rot.
I rose quietly, used the men’s room for a shave, and then sat for a while on a bench in the street outside the bar, with a café au lait bought from a food stand on the corner. I knew there were only two questions worth answering—who the killers were and where they’d gone—but I felt as if I’d missed some train in the night. It was like I knew the rules but not the game anymore; or maybe it was the other way around.
The newspost on the corner kept distracting me, burbling the day’s current factoids. Another woman had been found dead, this time on the 104th floor. The story rated slightly longer than the previous day’s, because the victim lived on the right side of a certain horizontal line. Her face had also suffered “unspecified damage.”
I frowned—two homicides with the same MO, on different floors, on consecutive days. “Unspecified damage” smacked of the cops holding back something distinctive to weed out hoax confessors. For just an instant my mind clicked into an old frame of reference, stirred sluggishly toward interest.
Then I told myself it was none of my business anymore.
The rest of the bulletin was fluff. New advances in some technology or other, recent statistics on something else. Some guy believed to be a mob figure had been found dead, and someone had discovered that Everest wasn’t the highest mountain after all.
“Beignet?”
“No,” I said. I hate breakfast. I turned to see Howie standing beside me, contentedly munching.
“You should eat something. It gives you a good start on the day.”
“It gives you brain tumors,” I said. “I read it somewhere.”
Howie sat on the bench next to me and took a sip of my coffee. He chewed for another few moments, ostensibly watching the newscast. Then he turned his round face toward me.
“I know this is turning into a constant refrain,” he said, “but what you’re thinking about is not a good idea.”
“What am I thinking about?”
Howie pointed at me with a beignet “You should go bury Mal, if that’s what you’re going to do. Then find some wheels, and I’ll get Paulie to deliver Suej to wherever you are. You could be in the mountains by lunchtime, who knows where by tomorrow. That’s what you should do. To be frank, Jack, you’re not the guy you used to be—and I mean that as a compliment. I don’t look at you and think ‘Christ—a psycho’ anymore. You’ve already fucked off the guys who owned your Farm. Topping that by paying a visit to a certain spaghetti-eater of our mutual acquaintance isn’t such a hot idea.”
“What makes you think I’d do that?”
“Your head gives you away. It glows when you’re about to do something stupid. And that would be really stupid.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It would.”
When I was outside Mal’s door I hesitated for a moment. I’d seen a lot of bad things happen to friends, admittedly usually while on Rapt, but none of them had ever truly gone away. Sometimes I could feel them, just out of sight, as if I could turn my head quickly and catch them for a moment, bright and backlit and eternal.
On the other hand, if I didn’t do this now it wasn’t going to happen at all. I unlocked the door and opened it. The apartment was cold and it hadn’t really been that long: While I wasn’t expecting the smell to be bad, I wasn’t anticipating enjoying it.
I was surprised to find it wasn’t there at all. Slightly relieved, I shut the door behind me and crossed the room. I stopped abruptly halfway.
Mal’s body wasn’t there.
I stood there stupidly, turning my head this way and that, trying to see it differently. I couldn’t. His body simply wasn’t there. Closer inspection revealed that the floor was clean, with no sign of the blood, bone chips and brain smear which had been there the night before.
I checked the John, Mal’s sleeping area, the cupboards. The latter were stuffed full of Mal’s patented brand of junk. Everywhere else was empty.
Mal’s body had been taken away, taken by someone who’d unlocked the door and then locked it again behind him.
The only person who could have known about it was someone connected with the killer—whose own body had not been in the bottom hallway when I’d entered the building.
Leaving Mal’s apartment unlocked, I ran downstairs a flight and knocked on the door from behind which, for once, no music was coming. After a pause it opened. The rat-faced man stood and glared at me.
“What you want?” He looked nervous as hell.
“Have you seen anyone go upstairs in the last twenty-four hours?”
“No. Been too busy fucking your mother,” he said, and pushed the door back at my face. I stuck my foot in the jamb. It probably hurt, but I was too wired to notice. Rat-man’s head appeared again. “Co ’way before trouble starts, man,” he advised, face pinched.
“It’s already started,” I said, kicking the door straight back at him and crunching it into his nose. He clattered back into the hallway and fell somewhat awkwardly on his head. I strode a couple of paces into the apartment, which smelt bad, looking for more fun. Rat-face’s friend appeared in another doorway, recognized me, darted back the way he’d come. I followed, and found myself in a room with a gun pointing at my head.
Sitting at a table in the corner was a large black man, head shaven, the whites of his eyes luminous in the gloom. A line of blue LCD’s was tattooed into his scalp from front to back, blinking softly in the twilight. His features were broad and brutal, and his skin was greasy. He had a gun in his right hand. He stared impassively at me. Narcotics were spread out in front of him, arranged into piles of various sizes. I’d interrupted a buy—no wonder people were kind of edgy. I stood still. It seemed the thing to do.
After a moment the big man lowered the gun. He looked at me, moving his head slightly as if trying to catch a glimpse of me in a different light. Something about him struck me as strange, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it might be.
Rat-face reappeared raggedly from the hallway and started squawking, hungry for blood. “Say adios to your brain, motherfuck,” he snarled, and my head was suddenly knocked forward as he jammed the barrel of his gun into my neck.
“Ain’t no call for that,” the big man said mildly. “Leastways not until we find out what he wants.”
“I want to know if anyone saw someone go upstairs since last night,” I said, trying to avoid looking at the man’s flashing head. I thought I could hear it blinking on and off like a turn indicator.
“Well?” the big man said, raising his eyebrows at the other two men, Rat-face and his friend. In variously bad tempers but with apparent sincerity, the men denied having seen anyone. The big man looked back at me. “This be anything to do with the dead dude in the hallway?”
“Yes,” I said. “And who the fuck are you?”
“No one in particular,” the big man said, “Just passing through, doing a little deal with my new friends here. I ain’t seen anyone either, and I didn’t recognize the bag of bones lying downstairs. You want him, you can find the body in the bins behind the back of Mandy’s Diner out on the edge.”