The Peripheral (21 page)

COMPLICATED

E
yes closed, she didn’t recognize the sound of rain on the foam over the Airstream, a dull steady smacking. Eyes open, she saw the polymer-embedded LEDs.

“With us now?” asked Deputy Tommy Constantine.

Turned her head so fast that she almost lost the white crown, managing to catch it with both hands as it tipped off her head.

He was sitting beside the bed, facing her, on that beat-up little metal stool, in a black Sheriff’s Department jacket beaded with rain. He held his gray felt hat on his knees, protected by a waterproof cover.

“Tommy,” she said.

“Sure am.”

“How long have you been here?”

“On your property, about an hour. In here, a little under two minutes. Edward’s up to your house to get a sandwich. Didn’t want to, but he hadn’t eaten since noon and I told him it was the better part of valor.”

“Why’re you here?”

“Thing is,” he said, “strangers keep getting killed out this way.”

“Who?”

“Right on your property, this time. Down in the woods, there.” He indicated the direction.

“Who?”

“Young men, two of ’em. Your brother figures them to have been pretty much like him, or anyway like these boys he always has around. Who I am by the way increasingly unconvinced are just out here in the pissing rain all night, every night, for some kind of drone
competition with their opposite numbers two counties over. Burton figures these two particular veterans to have been operators in the military, specialists, because they got all the way in under your drone cover, just like that, and would have made it the rest of the way if somebody, I’m inclined to guess Carlos and Reece, hadn’t been posted down there with rifles, the old-fashioned way.”

She was sitting up now, stocking feet on the floor’s polymer coating, with the crown on her lap, and it struck her how she and Tommy were sitting there, both holding stupid-looking hats. And how she really did wish, even in whatever this was about, that she had lip gloss on. “What happened?”

“They aren’t telling me.”

“Who?”

“Burton and them. I’d imagine, one thing being another, Carlos and Reece, with night-vision, took one look at those other two boys, who were also wearing night-vision, and shot ’em both dead.”

“Fuck,” said Flynne.

“What I thought when I got the call.”

“From Burton?”

“Sheriff Jackman. Who I figure your brother did call. Who called me, starting off by reminding me about our new arrangement.”

“What new arrangement?”

“That I’m not officially here.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I’m here to help out Burton. You too, I guess, but Jackman didn’t mention you.”

She looked at him, stuck for what to say.

“Why,” he asked, “if you don’t mind my asking, have you been sleeping, if that was sleeping, with some kind of sugarloaf cake on your head? And what, and this is what I’ve really been wanting to ask somebody for the last little while, the actual fuck is going on out here?”

“Out here?” Her own voice sounded incredibly stupid to her.

“Out here, in town, with Jackman, with Corbell Pickett, over in Clanton, at the statehouse . . .”

“Tommy—” she said, and stopped.

“Yes?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Are you and Burton building some kind of drugs out here?”

“Have you been working for Pickett, all this time?”

He tilted his hat forward a little, to let a couple of little pools of rain roll off the plastic-covered brim. “Haven’t met the man. Haven’t had anything directly to do with him before. He gets Jackman reelected, so Jackman has ways of making it clear to me what’s Corbell’s business and what isn’t, and I do my best, around that, to enforce the law in this county. Because somebody’s got to. And if we all woke up one day and Corbell and that building economy had been taken up to heaven, after a few weeks most people around here wouldn’t have any money for food. So that’s complicated too, and sad if you ask me, but there it is. How about you?”

“We aren’t builders.”

“The basic flow of cash in the county’s changed, Flynne, and I mean overnight. Your brother’s paying Corbell to fuck with elected officials at the statehouse. There hasn’t really been much of any other kind of cash around here, not for quite a while. So pardon my jumping to conclusions.”

“I won’t lie to you, Tommy.”

He looked at her. Tilted his head. “Okay.”

“Burton got hired by a security company. In Colombia. Who say they’re working for a game company. They hired him to fly a quadcopter in what he figured was a game.”

Tommy was looking at her a different way now, but not like he thought she was crazy. Yet.

“Started substituting for him,” she said, “when he was up in Davisville. Now we’re both working for them. They’ve got money.”

“Must have a lot of it, if you can get Corbell Pickett to hop around.”

“I know,” she said. “This is all weird, Tommy. It’s its whole own level of weird. Better if I don’t try to explain much more of it, right now, if you’re okay with that.”

“Those four boys in the car?”

“Somebody fucked up. In the security company. I saw something, by accident, and I was the only witness.”

“Can I ask what?”

“A murder. Whoever sent those boys wants to get rid of Burton, because they figure I was him. Probably our whole family, in case he told somebody.”

“That’s why Burton’s got the drones up, and boys sitting down in the woods.”

“Yes.”

“And the two tonight?”

“Probably more of the same.”

“And all this money coming in?”

“The company in Colombia. They need me to ID the killer, or anyway an accessory, and I saw him and he’s guilty as shit.”

“In a game, you said?”

“That’s too complicated, for now. Believe me?”

“I guess,” he said. “What’s going on here with the money’s unlikely enough, I figured whatever was behind it wouldn’t be garden variety.” He drummed his fingers, very lightly, on the plastic hat cover. “What’s that thing you were sleeping under?” He raised an eyebrow. “Beauty treatment?”

“User interface,” she said, and lifted it to show him. “No hands.” She carefully put it down, still cabled, on the bed.

“Flying?” he asked.

“Walking around. It’s like another body. Wasn’t sleeping. Telepresent, somewhere else. Disconnects your body here, when you do it, so you don’t hurt yourself.”

“You okay, Flynne?”

“Okay how?”

“You seem pretty calm about all this.”

“Sounds batshit, you mean?”

“Yep.”

“Way crazier than I’ve told you. But if I get crazy about how crazy it is, then everything’s really fucked.” She shrugged.

“‘Easy Ice.’”

“Who told you that?”

“Burton. Suits you, though.” He smiled.

“That was just games.”

“This isn’t?”

“The money’s real, Tommy. So far.”

“Your cousin just won the lottery, too.”

She decided not to get into that.

“Ever met Corbell Pickett?” he asked.

“I haven’t even seen him, since he did the Christmas parades with the mayor.”

“Neither have I, in person,” he said, and looked at what was probably his grandfather’s wristwatch, the old-fashioned kind that only told the time, “but we’re about to. Up at the house.”

“Who says?”

“Burton. But I’d guess it’s Mr. Corbell Pickett’s idea.” He carefully put his hat on, using both hands.

THE LIGHT IN HER VOICE MAIL

I
t just seemed to happen, as he most liked it to. Lubricated by the excellent whiskey, his tongue found the laminate on his palate of its own accord. An unfamiliar sigil appeared, a sort of impacted spiral, tribal blackwork. Referencing the Gyre, he assumed, which meant the patchers were now being incorporated into whatever the narrative of her current skin would become.

On the third ring, the sigil swallowed everything. He was in a wide, deep, vanishingly high-ceilinged terminal hall, granite and gray.

“Who’s calling, please?” asked a young Englishwoman, unseen.

“Wilf Netherton,” he said, “for Daedra.”

He looked down at his table in the bar, his empty glass. Glancing to the right, he saw the circle of bar floor, scoured aluminum, that surrounded the round table, set now, with a jeweler’s precision, into Daedra’s granite floor, the demarcation a function of the club’s cloaking mechanism. Unable to see the bar, or the Michikoids, he realized that he was also unable to signal for another drink.

Receding down the length of the dully grandiose hall, like an illustration of perspective, were chest-high plinths of granite, square in cross-section, supporting the familiar miniatures of her surgically flayed hides, sandwiched between sheets of glass. Typical self-exaggeration, as she’d so far only produced sixteen, meaning that the majority were duplicates. A wintery light found its way down, as from unseen windows. The ambient sound was glum as the light, as calculated to unsettle. An anteroom, reserved for cold calls. A point was being made. “Fine,” he said, and heard the echoes of the word deflect across granite.

“Netherton?” asked the voice, as if suspecting the name of being an unfamiliar euphemism.

“Wilf Netherton.”

“What would this be concerning, exactly?”

“I was her publicist, until recently. A private matter.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Netherton, but we have no record of you.”

“Associate Curator Annie Courrèges, of the Tate Postmodern.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.”

“Wilf?” asked Daedra.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve never liked Kafka.”

“Who’s that?”

“Never mind.”

“What do you want?”

“Unfinished business,” he said, with a small and entirely unforced sigh that he took as an omen that he was on his game.

“Is it about Aelita?”

“Why would it be?” he asked, as if puzzled.

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

“She’s vanished.”

He silently counted to three. “Vanished?”

“She’d hosted a function for me, after the business on the Patch, at Edenmere Mansions. When her security came back on, afterward, she was gone.”

“Gone where?”

“She’s not tracking, Wilf. At all.”

“Why was her security off?”

“Protocol,” she said, “for the function. Did you sabotage my costume?”

“I did not.”

“You were upset about the tattoos,” she said.

“Never to the extent that I’d interfere with your artistic process.”

“Someone did,” she said. “You made me agree. In those boring meetings.”

“It’s good that I’ve called, then.”

“Why?” she asked, after slightly too long a pause.

“I wouldn’t want to leave it this way.”

“I wouldn’t want you to imagine you haven’t left it,” she said, “if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

He sighed again. His body did it for him. It was a quick sigh, propulsive. The regret of a man who knew both what he had lost and that he had well and truly lost it. “You misunderstand me,” he said. “But this isn’t the time. I’m sorry. Your sister . . .”

“How can you expect me to believe you didn’t know?”

“I’ve been on a media fast. Only recently learned that I’ve been fired, for that matter. Busy processing.”

“Processing what?”

“My feelings. With a therapist. In Putney.”

“Feelings?”

“Some horribly novel sort of regret,” he said. “May I see you?”

“See me?”

“Your face. Now.”

Silence, but then she did open a feed, showing him her face.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’re easily the most remarkable artist I’ve ever met, Daedra.”

Her eyebrows moved fractionally. Not so much approval as a temporary recognition that he might have the capacity to be correct about something.

“Annie Courrèges,” he said. “Her sense of your work. Do you remember me telling you about that, on the moby?”

“Someone jammed the zip on that jumpsuit,” she said. “They had to cut me out of it.”

“I know nothing about that. I want to arrange for you to have something.”

“What?” she asked, with no effort to disguise a routine suspicion.

“Annie’s vision of your work. Happenstance, really, that she confided in me, and of course she had no idea about us. Having had that glimpse of her vision, and knowing you as I do, I find I must at least attempt to bring it to you.”

“What did she say?”

“I couldn’t begin to paraphrase. When you’ve heard it, you’ll understand.”

“You’re getting this from therapy?”

“It’s been a huge help,” he said.

“What are you asking me for, Wilf?”

“That you allow me to introduce you to her. Again. That I might contribute, in however small a way, to something whose importance I may never fully comprehend.”

She might, he thought, have been looking at a piece of equipment. A parafoil, say, wondering whether to keep or replace it. “They say you did something to her,” she said.

“To who?”

“Aelita.”

“Who does?” If he gestured now, with the empty glass, there was a chance a Michikoid would bring him another, but Daedra would see him do it.

“Rumors,” she said, “media.”

“What are they saying about you and the boss patcher? That can’t be pretty.”

“Sensationalism,” she said.

“We’re both victims, then.”

“You aren’t a celebrity,” she said. “There’s nothing sensational about you being suspected of something.”

“I’m your former publicist. She’s your sister.” He shrugged.

“What is that you’re sitting in?” she asked, appearing fully in front of him now, between two plinthed miniatures, no mere headshot. Her legs and feet were bare. She was wrapped in a familiar long cardigan, teal.

“A cloaked table, in the bar of a place in Kensington, Impostor Syndrome.”

“Why,” she asked, a single comma of suspicion appearing between her brows, “are you in a peri club?”

“Because Annie’s away. On a moby bound for Brazil. If you’re willing to meet her again, she’d need a peripheral.”

“I’m busy.” The comma deepened. “Perhaps next month.”

“She’s going into fieldwork. Embedding with neoprims. Technophobics. She’s had to have her phone extracted. If it goes well, she might be with them for a year or more. We’d have to do it soon, before she arrives.”

“I’ve told you I’m busy.”

“I’m concerned about her, there. Were we to lose her, her vision goes with her. She’s years from publishing. You’re her life’s work, really.”

She took a step toward the table. “It’s that special?”

“It’s extraordinary. She’s in such awe of you, though, that I don’t know how we could arrange it even if you weren’t so busy. A one-on-one meeting would be too much for her. If we could meet you, seemingly at random, perhaps at a function. Surprise her. She’s ordinarily very confident socially, but she could scarcely speak to you, at the Connaught. She’s been desolate about that. I suspect this embedding is an attempt at distraction.”

“I do have something coming up . . . I don’t know how much time I’d have for her.”

“That would depend on how interesting you find her,” he said. “Perhaps I’m mistaken.”

“You can be,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”

And she and her teal cardi and her bare legs were gone, and with them the chill stone light of her voice mail.

He was looking out at the peripherals in Impostor Syndrome again. Their fretful animatronic diorama, viewed in utter silence. He signaled a passing Michikoid. Time for another drink.