you have no recollection of going to, somewhere you can't even understand, and all you know is a churning confidence that you have done something wrong which you don't even remember.
Then I realized where I was, lying on the floor to Howie's storeroom, and fragments of dreams danced in front of my eyes. Trees, alive with flame, blackening leaves flicking back and forth with faces which were not there. Then real faces, faces ruptured with fear, studded with eyes which wore terror like milky cataracts. A smell, like the worst of the tunnels, but with a downwards slope towards death, a stench which had nothing to do with healing and everything to do with a final dissolution. A flock of mad, happy orange birds, disappearing behind a hut.
I screwed my eyes up and pushed my fists into them, morphing the flames into geometric patterns which swirled and jumped. Then I let go and they disappeared. I sat up, reaching for a cigarette, and looked around.
Suej was still asleep. After Howie and I had finished I carried her through and laid her on the sacks which looked softest. She woke and we had a talk, mainly about David and where he might be. It felt different, being with her. She was just one person in the world now. After years of being there for her and the spares all the time, I'd started to go away. Maybe it wasn't my fault. Perhaps it was just an inevitable consequence of returning here, like my increasing desire for Rapt. Ratchet once told me that you remember things best in the state that you learnt them in the first place. Being back in New Richmond and trying to remember how to behave while straight was like trying to balance a chainsaw on my chin while bombed out of my mind.
I'd lain on the floor thinking of Rapt the previous night, thinking of it for hours. Thinking of how the worst addictions are the easiest to get hold of. Like alcohol. There it is, in stores, in bars, in people's homes. It's right there. You can see it, reach out for it, fall into it. People don't have Rapt in their drinks cabinets, but it's not too hard to get hold of it if you know where to go, and I knew.
I could hear the sound of revelry from the bar, and checked my watch. Seven a.m. The first shift. I watched the smoke from my cigarette curl into the air, and wondered what I was going to do. Just about every part of my mind knew that I shouldn't be here, that I should take Howie's advice and get out. I'd had no right to bring the spares into this in the first place, into a city they didn't know and problems they couldn't understand. Now the city had stolen them, and at three a.m. there'd still been no word on where they might be.
I was finding it increasingly hard to believe it was SafetyNet who'd taken them. Before we'd gone to sleep I'd pressed Suej hard on exactly what happened when the men came to Mal's apartment. There was something about the way she described events that made me wonder if they hadn't been bargaining on finding the spares. I was also intrigued by the fact they'd blundered round the apartment before they went. I'm not a small guy – it would have been fairly evident if I'd have been standing there, not least because I would have been firing a gun. Finally, only leaving one guy to finish me off: why not two, or more?
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 any more; or maybe it was the other way around.
The news post 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 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 a moment my mind clicked into an old frame of reference, stirred sluggishly towards interest.
Then I told myself it was none of my business any more.
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 tumours,’ 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 towards 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” any more. You've already fucked off the guys who owned your Farm. Topping that by paying a visit on 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 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, waving 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 them.
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