Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (9 page)

“But at least the Japanese had a country willing to mix it up, death-obsessed frat house toga party though it was.” He shook his head. “What about our so-called opponents now? We finally had to go out and squat right in the middle of their territory, stick our ass in their faces, and still . . . nothing. It really does look like our enemy was a stage creation, like the burning of the Reichstag or the killing of Kirov. Maybe we should just see about dealing with our cultural gangrene on our own, but I’m betting we’ll just see ever more complex manufactured disasters. Watch for an asteroid on an orbit intersecting with Earth next. That’ll give us all something fun to work with. I’ll see about getting these on the griddle.”

They watched him march gravely into the kitchen. “Hey, Bernal,” Spillvagen said. “If anything, you look worse than you did this morning. You look like you’ve actually been catching flak with that jacket. When’s the last time anyone actually used it for that? And that aftershave .. . very manly.”

At this hour, there was no one else in the diner to smell the burnt rubber stench. He hadn’t thought about it, but now Bernal fingered the cuts in his leather jacket. It had had its day. He’d have to hang it up as a souvenir.

“So,” Bernal said. “Whatever happened to poor old Uncle Solly’s head?”

“What, are you on first-name terms with him now?” 

“Your friend Yolanda and I had quite the little chat.”

“Yolanda’s a psycho! She’s claiming something happened, just to screw some money out of the cryobank.” 

“So, did it?”

“Did it what?”

“Did something happen to the head?”

“No! I mean, nothing permanent. Nothing you’d call actionable.”

“I can see why Yolanda’s so pissed off at you.” 

“Why?”

“No one likes being stonewalled when they know there’s real information to be had.”

“Okay,” Spillvagen said. “We had a bad concatenation of events. A real failure cascade. First, an electrical fire. There was some kind of flammable insulation packed in the party wall. Old stuff, from when they built the mall. Burned out the wall. Tripped breakers and dumped our power. I mean, all of it. Hit the redundant systems, it was dark, the emergency doors didn’t work, smoke alarms, nothing. Weirdest damn thing you ever saw. Halon came on, though, and put the fire out. Fire never got anywhere near the dewars. But we got emergency power supplies in, hooked everything up. Cleared out what was near the wall. Not a dewar went above spec on temperature. We got the graphs, everything. Yolanda makes it seem like a really big deal.”

“Yolanda had a picture. Of someone at Solomon MacParland’s funeral. It was—”

Spillvagen sighed. “Of course. That was what your friend was after. I should just have given it to you.” 

“Muriel?”

“Yeah. She was all up on me about this company, Hess Tech, and this Madeline Ungaro woman. There was a lot of business flotsam in that mall. The stores had all closed, the owners had debt service, needed paying tenants, and weren’t too picky about who it was. Lucky there wasn’t, I don’t know, a lead smelter in there, or a biohazard facility. You never know what’s inside an old mall.”

The food had arrived. Bernal put ketchup on his fries. They were a little limp, but, hey, the place had beer, and he’d made out worse in the past.

“Like a cut-rate cryobank.”

“Nothing cut-rate about it.” Spillvagen took the top bun off his burger, shook his head at what he found there, and replaced it. “Shouldn’t do that. Should just accept the cowgirl as my personal savior and stop asking uncomfortable questions, like ‘Is the food edible?’ Look, I’ve had my differences with the Long Voyage administration, but I have to give them this: their gear really was state of the art. Like the field kit. People with contracts don’t die only when it’s convenient. Our unit took care of that. Someone gets hit by a car, is bleeding to death out in the hills, the unit could be out there, sitting by him, waiting for the moment of death. As soon as the EMTs admit they’re useless, the guy is sincerely dead, the field kit goes to work. The field kit pumps cryoprotectant right into the carotids, dropping the temperature slowly but steadily, bringing the body down to cryogenic temperature. I’ve heard of teams having to stop by the liquor store to buy out their supply of ice, trying to get the body cooled before the inevitable process of decay. Long Voyage had it down to a science. The best way to cool is from inside. Believe me, that fast perfusion really can cool you. Meanwhile, under pressure, cryoprotectants are penetrating the cells, preventing that nasty crystal formation. If it’s a neurosuspension, just the head with no body, it takes only a few seconds. Think of that! And the unit would maintain the body, the head, whatever, at cryogenic temperature for as long as you needed to get it back to the bank. So, don’t give me ‘cut rate.’ ”

“What did you tell Muriel about Hess Tech?” Bernal said.

“What I’ve already told you. I had no idea what they did, and I’m not sure I even saw Ungaro around. Okay, we did think about expanding into their space when they left, but the issues after the fire cut into our new business. And, you know, retention isn’t really our problem. It’s getting new customers....”

Something caught Bernal’s attention, out of the corner of his eye. He glanced around, trying to figure out what it was.

“They were right next door?”

“Yes. But that’s about it. Muriel was on my case about it, but I didn’t really notice them much. What’s up with that? What did this Madeline Ungaro do to Muriel?”

Bernal caught a swing of bobbed black hair, and a slender figure dressed in a blue coverall carried a toolkit across the end of the hallway leading past the kitchen to the bathrooms. He recognized it.

It was Patricia, the pretty, dark-haired tow-truck driver who had picked up Charis’s Hummer that morning.

“Did Muriel say Ungaro had done something to her?” Bernal said.

“No, nothing like that. But it was really an important issue for her.” Spillvagen looked apprehensive. “Muriel turned me on to this restaurant. Left that menu one day by accident, I checked it out, decided I liked it. What else? That’s what I got. Honest. I don’t really notice much, tell you the truth. Melissa’s always on me for that. Tells me to pay attention. I do my best. If I think of something else, I’ll let you know.”

Bernal realized that the other man was frightened. Of him. Yolanda had made fun of him, but Spillvagen was genuinely intimidated. Bernal fought down a brief feeling of satisfaction and almost apologized.

But that, of course, would have been a mistake. As Muriel had once said, human relationships were reciprocal, although what was being traded was not always obvious. Suddenly backing down here wouldn’t make Spillvagen like him, but it would justify Spillvagen in keeping things from him. And he was in no way persuaded that Spillvagen had given him the whole story, though that last bit about Muriel having the Near Earth Orbit menu was interesting. It wasn’t her usual kind of place.

“You do that.” Bernal stood up, not offering to pay his share of the bill. “I hope you manage to keep Yolanda out of your bushes.”

The hallway was empty now, and Bernal pushed the bar on the rear access door and went out into the dark parking lot. There wasn’t much traffic out on the road.

A panel truck stood parked against the cinder-block wall that screened the trash from view, its rear doors open and an assemblage of gear spread out on the ground behind it. A dim figure was extending a ladder to the roof. Bernal looked up. The cowgirl blazed bright above, the rocket shining between her thighs, her gaze fixed upward at something no one else could see because they just weren’t big enough. Those below could only wonder at her glory.

“Patricia?” Bernal walked up to her. She looked at him. Her pale eyes were made for display in the dark. Washed out in sun, they seemed to glow in the cowgirl’s reflected light.

“Who are you?” She wasn’t worried. A tow-truck driver knew how to take care of herself.

“You towed a car this morning. Remember? Out on Collins.”

She returned her attention to the ladder, leveling its feet and locking it to the roof edge. “I tow a lot of cars.”

“It was a Hummer. You wanted to tow it to your yard, and she wouldn’t let you. I just... I have a few questions about it. You don’t have to stop what you’re doing.”

Despite her slight build, she was clearly strong; she smoothly lowered a set of gas canisters in a rack without making a sound. She wheeled them up to the ladder’s base.

Just as he thought she would climb up without responding again, she tilted her head and looked at him solemnly. “You look like you’ve had a rough time. Kind of like me.”

“Someone hit me.” He didn’t see any reason to go into the details.

“Here. You can help me.” She opened the truck’s cab, got out a small vinyl bag that looked like it had once held skin products, and handed it to him. “While you do, we can talk about a towed Hummer, if you want.” She pulled her shirt away from her neck, revealing a long, shallow cut.

He unzipped the bag. It was full of adhesive bandages, antiseptic, antibiotic, and some concealer and foundation suitable for pale skin: the complete kit for the fashionable victim.

“I don’t even know why I got that call,” she said. “Come on, it will only take a second. I got to stay on it, or I’ll get an infection.” Patricia was skinny and birdy, with a thin collar bone and a slender neck, a type Bernal was attracted to. He put a gob of antibiotic on his finger and rubbed it across the cut that ran down toward her breast. Either she had a high metabolism, or there already was infection, because her skin felt hot under his fingertip.

“Thanks. Big help. She had me haul her out to Cooper Road, no repairs. Shouldn’t complain. Paid me in cash, off the record.”

“Where on Cooper Road?”

“Thirty-seven. Used to be Hemmett Oil. We ended up with some of their pumps at Ignacio’s yard. Refurbished them and sold them off to Slovakia.”

“She talk about what she was doing there?”

“You were with her. Don’t you know?”

“I don’t.”

“Well, she talked about a lot of stuff. Spring training, Some show at Foxwoods. Did I think it had been a dry spring. That kind of stuff.”

“Nothing else?”

“That’s enough. Now it’s time for me to help you.” She touched his jaw with just enough pressure to get him to turn it. Her fingers felt warm too. She sprayed some stinging antibiotic on his fresh cuts.

“Something happened to you,” she said. “I don’t mean whatever tore you up. That’s nothing. You got some damage.”

It had been two years. Bernal himself had trouble seeing the traces. He thought he’d healed well. “Something blew up in my face. I mean, a few years ago, not just today.”

“You have a real problem with that? Things blowing up?”

“Didn’t use to.”

“Oh, Jesus, he’s here. What’s he doing here? Why won’t he just let me get my work done?” She stared at the black SUV that had just turned into the lot. “Look.” She was suddenly urgent. “Do me a favor. Take this up. Will you? I’m kind of doing Bob a favor here, and Ignaz doesn’t know about it.” She picked up something that might have been an old reel of film, but unbalanced and weirdly heavy. “Haul this up to the roof, stick it somewhere.”

“Sure,” Bernal said.

“Careful with it. It’s kind of delicate. And . . .”

“Yes?”

“It would really help me if you came out, in a bit, and mentioned the AC. That I’m working on the air conditioning, bringing in the Freon. Could you do that?”

“Um, sure.”

She turned to go. “Wait a second,” he said.

She stopped but did not look back at him. Her slim form was silhouetted by the harsh blue headlights of the SUV.

“Will you be okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

She squared her shoulders, waited a second, and then stepped out into the parking lot.

Bernal almost dropped the thing twice on the way up. But he finally made it over the lip and onto the tar-and-gravel roof. It was surprisingly crowded up there, with heavy air-conditioning units, grease traps, and power supplies for the cowgirl’s lights. There was a line of other gear, strapped under a tarp. Bernal set the new piece at the end of it.

He looked out at the parking lot and caught sight of Norbert Spillvagen driving away. He’d had enough, Bernal thought, and grinned as a silver Lexus GS peeled out of the parking lot after the orange pickup, clipping bushes as it took the corner too sharply, and accelerated down the road. Spillvagen had clearly underestimated both Yolanda’s persistence and her skill as a tail.

“Pat really helps us out.”

Bernal jumped at the voice, then saw the glow of a cigarette end. Bob had come up to the roof for his break.

“Yeah?”

“Regulations. Trying to drive us out of business. Big business interests, after the diner. Any environmental regulation is easier for a big conglomerate with a million locations to comply with than a small, independent business. Always that way, and it’s not accidental. Environmentalists are cat’s-paws of the big guys. And they hate diners. You know that? They just got a thing about people being comfortable. Want us hoeing rows of rutabagas in the hot sun.” He took another puff. “Pat helps me out, gives me those classic CFCs. Illegal cooljuice. And I let her store crap up here. Like that.” He waved his cigarette at the tarp.

“Like what?”

“Ah, I don’t care. Stuff she steals from her boss, I guess. We got an arrangement, her and me. I save some bucks by not upgrading to new compounds that supposedly spare the ozone layer, like anyone believes that, and she gets to transship product. Makes the world go round, right?”

“Is that what the problem is about?” Bernal paused at the lip. The parking lot was dim below. He could see a big male figure standing over Patricia’s slumped, dispirited shape. The spark he’d seen in her for a few minutes there was gone.

“Could be.”

Bernal now saw how far from the edge Bob was sitting. He was willing to accept whatever services Patricia provided for him but was not going to go a step farther.

Bernal had a moment of contempt for himself, wondering if he would have wanted to do the same thing, if he hadn’t already agreed to go help Patricia.