Crash!
And also some nasty, rainy, itchy sensations all over his flank. He didn’t like that. He stumbled as he barged into a large room and was immediately assaulted with a suffocating splurge of smell, screamy noises, and splashy lights. He charged into a huddle of screaming creatures, which roared and screeched and then went all cracked and squidgy. One of them got stuck on him and Desmond had to shake his head to dislodge it. Before him now was another large glinting rectangle, and a little way beyond it the ground shimmered with a pale blue light. Desmond lunged forward again. There was another crash, and another shower of sharp and worrying pain. He hurtled onwards and out into the open air once more.
The light in the ground was a strange pool of water, with screaming things in it. He had never seen water glow like that. And then there were some more blinking lights in front of him. He didn’t pay any attention to the little lights. He didn’t even pay any attention to the banging noises that went with each blink. Bang bang, so what? But what did catch his attention was the sudden acrid smell and the flowers of pain that started to bloom in his body. A flower was planted in his shoulder, and another. His leg began to move oddly. A flower was planted in his flank, which felt very odd and worrying. Another flower was planted in his head, and gradually the whole world started to become more distant and less important. It began to roar. He felt himself tipping forward with enormous slowness, and gradually found himself enveloped in great waves of warm, glowing blueness.
As the world ebbed from him he heard a gabbling, hysterical voice making sounds that made no sense to him, but they sounded like this:
“Get the paramedics! Get the police! Not just Malibu, get the LAPD. Now! Tell them to get a helicopter up here! We’ve got dead and wounded! And tell them ... I don’t know how they’re gonna deal with this, but tell them we’ve got a dead rhinoceros in the swimming pool.”
Chapter 10
Though it was now embarrassingly clear to Dirk that only he and not his actual quarry was aboard the flight, that he had been thrown four thousand miles and a couple of thousand crucial pounds off course by a childishly simple ruse, he nevertheless determined to make one final check. He stationed himself right by the exit as everyone started to disembark at O’Hare Airport. He was watching so intently that he nearly missed hearing his own name being called over the aircraft’s PA, directing him to go to the airline’s information desk.
“Mr. Gently?” said the woman at the desk, brightly.
“Yes ...” said Dirk warily.
“May I see your passport, sir?”
He passed it over. He stayed poised on the balls of his feet, expecting trouble.
“Your ticket through to Albuquerque, sir.”
“My—?”
“Ticket through to Albuquerque, sir.”
“My ticket to—?”
“Albuquerque, sir.”
“Albuquerque?”
“Albuquerque, New Mexico, sir.”
Dirk looked at the proffered ticket folder as if it were a piece of trick rhubarb. “Where did this come from?” he demanded. He took it and peered at the flight details.
The woman gave him a huge airline smile and a huge airline shrug. “Out of this machine, I guess. Just prints those tickets out.”
“What does it say on your computer?”
“Just says prepaid ticket for Mr. Dirk Gently to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be collected. Were you not expecting to go to Albuquerque today, sir?”
“I was expecting to end up somewhere I didn’t expect, I just wasn’t expecting it to be Albuquerque, that’s all.”
“Sounds like it’s an excellent destination for you, Mr. Gently. Enjoy your flight.”
He did. He sat and ruminated quietly to himself over the events of the last couple of days, arranging them in his mind not in such a way that they made any kind of sense yet, but in suggestive little arrays. A meteor here, half a cat there, the electronic threads of invisible dollars and unexpected airline tickets that connected them. Before touching down in Chicago, his self-confidence had been in tatters, but now he felt a thrilling tingle of excitement. There was something or someone out there that he had engaged with, something that he uniquely had found and that he was being drawn towards. The fact that he still had no idea who or what it was no longer troubled him. It was there, he had found it, and it had found him. He had felt its pulse. Its face and its name would emerge in their proper times.
At Albuquerque airport he stood silently for a while under the high painted beams, surrounded by the dark, staring eyes of the drunk-driving lawyers peering from their billboards. He breathed deeply. He felt calm, he felt good, he felt able to meet with the wild, thrashing improbabilities that lie an atom’s depth beneath the dull surface of the narrated world, and to speak their language. He walked unhurriedly to the long escalators, and sailed slowly downwards like an invisible king.
His man was waiting for him.
He could tell him immediately—another still point in the scurrying airport. He was a large, fat, sweaty man with an ill-fitting black suit and a face like a badly laid table. He stood a few feet back from the foot of the escalator, gazing up it with an inert but complicated expression. It was as well that Dirk had been ready to spot him because the sign he held, which read D. JENTTRY, was one he might otherwise easily have missed.
Dirk introduced himself. The man said his name was Joe and that he would go and get the car. And that, rather anticlimactically, Dirk felt, was that.
The car drew up at the curbside, a slightly elderly, black stretch Cadillac, gleaming dully in the airport lighting. Dirk regarded it with satisfaction, climbed into it, and settled into the backseat with a small grunt of pleasure.
“The client said you’d like it,” said Joe distantly from his driving coop as he quietly rolled the thing forward and out on to the airport exit road. Dirk looked around him at the scuffed and threadbare velveteen blue upholstery and the tinted plastic film peeling from the windows. The TV, when Dirk tried it, was tuned to nothing but noise, and the asthmatic air conditioning wheezed out a musty wind that was in no way preferable to the warm evening desert air through which they were moving.
The client was dead right.
“The client,” said Dirk, as the great rattling thing cruised out onto the dimly lit freeway through the city. “Who exactly is the client?”
“An Australian gentleman, he sounded like,” said Joe. His voice was rather high and whiny.
“Australian?” said Dirk, in surprise.
“Yes sir, Australian. Like you.”
Dirk frowned. “I’m from England,” he said.