Spares (27 page)

“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.