One of Us (18 page)

The hill began to level out, and the school yard became visible over on the right. This was a large, square compound, taking up a whole block. At the far end were the classrooms; in front of them was a big playground lined with grass and trees and with black metal railings all around. The boy stopped when he was opposite the playground, and looked across. He didn't have any particular feelings about the place other than it was where he spent most days. Inside, on a school day, would be lots of children, some he knew and didn't mind, others he didn't know or mildly disliked. A big container for people who were different from him, who had different parents and different lives. The only particularly interesting occupant was Miss Bannerham. The boy was just old enough to have a crush on her.

He didn't think of it in those terms, however, knew only that he minded her class less than the others, and that if Mom hadn't been his mom, he wouldn't have minded it being Miss Bannerham. At home, in a safe place, he had a badge she had given him. Some people had come to the school two weeks ago to grade the teachers. The boy had been somewhat surprised to find that even teachers had to take tests, but Miss Bannerham didn't seem to mind. She gathered the children at the front of the class, on the floor, and told them about some stuff. The grown-ups had stood at the back, and they listened, too. The boy had asked questions, and answered questions: It had been an interesting class, and it was fun to know things. At the end of the day, when he was gathering his books and there weren't many kids left in the classroom. Miss Bannerham came up to him, took him to one side, and gave him the badge. It was narrow and silver and had the word "merit" on it, and she said that he could keep it for a month. He kept quiet about the badge at school, sensing vaguely that was the best policy, but he showed it to his parents and they seemed pleased.

The boy had spent the day on the gray beach, battling the wind and looking for sand dollars. His family had a policy, devised and administered by his father, that anyone who found an intact sand dollar was entitled to a—as he put it—"beverage of their choice" the next time the family went into town for dinner. The boy's beverage of choice was always a Coke, which he would have gotten anyway, but he understood that wasn't the point.

All he'd found that day were fragments, and a small dead, squishy thing that he hadn't liked the look of, but that didn't matter. He felt pleasantly tired, and decided to walk around the school and then go home.

He peered in through the railings as he passed the playground, looking at the trees. They had been demonstrated, to everyone's satisfaction, to be the best place in the whole area for finding Knights. These were large beetles which most of the boys coveted and kept in jars with holes punched in the lid, and though their real name probably wasn't Knights, that was what they were called. Many happy hours were spent conducting battles between these insects: The contests were actually rather peaceable affairs in which the insects' characteristics—length, width, coolness of wings—were minutely compared. In general, the bugs were green, but every now and then someone would find a black one, and these always won the contests hands down. Black Knights always did. The boy's best friend. Earl, already had a Black Knight, and it was the boy's view that it was about time he did, too.

Nursing a vague hope that he might make such a find soon, the boy continued along the path as it went by the school buildings. There wasn't much to see along that stretch, or after he'd turned the first corner: just dark windows in a darker building. He whiled away the time considering something he'd heard a TV preacher say earlier in the day—that the Lord would have mercy upon people who'd done bad things, and would cast their sins into the sea. This didn't seem to tally with the boy's mother's view, which was that people who dumped things in the sea were themselves bad, especially if they damaged sea gulls' wings. The boy had nervously asked his dad where specifically the sins were cast, because he didn't want to swim through them by accident and come out bad. His father had laughed uproariously and stopped shouting at the TV for a while.

The boy turned the second corner and walked up as far as where the playground began again; then he stopped and looked at the trees, now just the other side of the railings. It was quite dark by then, with only a streetlamp at each corner of the block, and the trees looked big and old. He could probably have made it over the fence and into the grounds, thus stealing a march on the next day's bug hunters, but he didn't really fancy it. In the dark the trees looked a little, well, frightening. The boy knew they weren't really so, because he'd climbed into their lower branches often enough during the day when they were huge and green and friendly, but things always looked different at night. He wondered which was true, the way things looked during the day, or during the night, and concluded it probably depends.

Anyway, the bugs would almost certainly be asleep.

Thinking that if he headed back now there might still be some Doritos left, he turned the final corner into the last straightaway, back toward where he'd turn left to go back up the hill. By then he was in that state of near-hypnotic abstraction, so at first he didn't notice the footsteps behind him.

When he did, he turned around, expecting someone out walking their dog. He was surprised to see that the sidewalk was empty.

He walked on a little, and heard the footsteps start up again. They weren't hurrying or running, merely walking at the same pace as he was. He knew it wasn't an echo of his own footsteps, however, because he was wearing the sneakers that made no sound at all.

Heart beating a little faster, the boy stepped up his pace. The footsteps got a little quicker, too, and he began to get a little afraid. He'd been warned about vaguely dire things that could happen if you talked to the wrong people or got in the wrong sort of car. Neither of his parents had been very specific about what these things were, or of what makes or model of car were the wrong ones, but the boy suddenly felt that this was probably one of the circumstances his parents had been talking about.

He hurried along the sidewalk, faster and faster, but knew that he wasn't getting farther away from whatever was following him. If it was a grown-up, there was no chance of outrunning them. They had longer legs.

So he stopped, took a deep breath, and turned around.

This time he did see someone.

A man stood way back at the corner, under the streetlight. He was wearing a dark suit. The man's face was in shadow, and the boy couldn't see it clearly: The lamp seemed to shine from behind the man's head. He seemed too far away to be the one making the footsteps, but there was no one else in sight. The man started walking, and the boy stayed rooted to the spot.

Later he was back at home, eating Doritos and watching the television with his mom as his father slept in his chair like a felled dinosaur. They made it to the end of some dumb film and then everyone went to bed.

I WOKE TO FIND Laura sitting on the floor cross-legged, eating toast. She held out a cup of coffee to me. I croaked something unintelligible and sat upright. It took a minute or so for me to place myself, and when I finally did, I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the dream receiver. One look at the display told me what I already knew. I hadn't been working. The dream was my own.

"Deck's in the shower," Laura said, still holding out the coffee. Her eyes looked puffy.

I took it, sipped. It was hot, and tasted like coffee. So far, so good. "When did he get back?"

"About an hour after you crashed. Said he took a scenic route. You okay? You went out kind of fast." I nodded. After stowing the transmitter in one of Deck's closets, I'd watched out of the front window for a while, but saw nothing except an abandoned washing machine trudging off down the road. Laura clearly expected me to say something about how the transmitter had gotten here, and the person who'd brought it, but I didn't. I found I could barely speak. I sat on the sofa and next thing I knew I'd slipped back twenty-five years, as if there were too much to deal with in the present day and my mind had run yelping for simpler times. The dividing lines seemed to be blurring. What I'd woken from wasn't just a dream, but also a memory—one I'd forgotten for a long while. As I sat with Laura's eyes looking quizzically up at me, the memory was suddenly fresher and more real than the warmth of the cup in my hand or the sound of falling water in Deck's bathroom.

Around the school we went.

I picked up the phone, dialed a number on the Net.

"Hello?"

"Yeah, hi, Quat. It's Hap." Laura stared at me with a "what the fuck are you doing?" look on her face.

There was a pause. Then Quat said, "Hey—how you doing, man?"

"Fine," I said. "Transmitter worked a dream. The guy hasn't shown up to take it back, though."

Very smooth: "I'll give him a call."

"You do that. Listen—something else weird's happened: I can't get any cash out of the ATM. Can you look into it?"

"Sure, sure," he said. "Look, Hap, where are you exactly?"

"Around," I said, holding the phone very tight. "One more thing: You know anything about that cop who got whacked?"

I put the phone down on silence.

"What the hell was that all about?" Deck asked from the doorway.

"Just noise," I answered. "He knows I'm lying, but not to what degree. And I do have the transmitter, after all. Now he doesn't know what's going on, or what I know."

"But you don't know shit," Deck said.

"Not yet I don't." Overnight, and in my sleep, things had changed. Quat's betrayal didn't seem the most important thing anymore. Neither did the reasons behind it—whatever they might be. I was very panicky about my money, and I should also have been concerned as to why Stratten hadn't stuck to his word and sent me a night's dreamwork, but I wasn't. Not yet.

I wanted to know who the men in the gray suits were, and what they were doing, and why I knew them. Which was okay, because all lines of inquiry seemed to be leading in the same direction.

DECK STOOD GUARD outside in the street as I broke into Ray Hammond's apartment. Laura came with me. Her choice, not mine. On the way over I'd checked the news and found the Prose Cafe gun battle was all over it. Travis made it out with a flesh wound. Barton was in critical condition and not expected to last, the other two cops were dead.

The "persons unknown" had disappeared, with no bodies left on the scene. Citywide APB on them; no mention of me.

There was no tape across the door to Hammond's crib, and no cop standing guard, which implied that the LAPD didn't know what he had been doing in the area. I asked Laura about that, and she said Hammond had a regular address over in Burbank. She wouldn't say why she hadn't hunted him down there, only that she'd worked out he spent some of the time elsewhere, and got the hacker—Quat, as it had transpired—to find out where. Presumably the cops had done a house-to-house, and had given up on getting no reply from the entry phone to this apartment. If they came back for a second sweep, or anybody else weird turned up. Deck would let us know. Until then, Ray Hammond's apartment was ours.

The lock on the door was complex and expensive, but no match for my organizer. Within two minutes it was open, and we were inside.

The apartment was small. The door led straight into a square living room with a kitchen to one side. The window would have looked over the street below had the curtains not been drawn. Two other rooms out back, a bedroom and the other nearly filled by a desk. A bathroom you could very nearly get all of your body into at once.

The kitchen said this wasn't a place in which Hammond had spent much quality time. Three cans of beer and some leftover Chinese in the fridge, the noodles covered in a bacterial culture so advanced, they probably had their own constitution and strong views on environmental issues. Precisely one plate and one set of cutlery in the drawer. The rest of the apartment said that Hammond liked his downtime in an austere environment. The furniture was cheap and functional: a sofa and one chair in the living room, a twin bed, a couple of small tables with nothing on them. The closets in the bedroom were empty, there were no toiletries in the bathroom, and dust lurked in every corner. There were no pictures on the walls of any of the rooms. It was like a suite in a motel no one ever used, two weeks after the maid had been sacked and taken her severance pay in reproduction art.

I left Laura in the living room and went into the study. A shelf hung above the desk, a single book on it. A small Bible, well-thumbed. A quote had been written out on the inside front cover:
And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.

Strange. I slipped it in my pocket.

Apart from that, the room was bare, but as I glanced under the desk I noticed something. On the floor near the wall there were a few lines in the dust, where the carpet showed through. As if cables had lain there until recently. The closets told a similar story: clean rectangles in fine dust, where file boxes had been stacked. I went back into the living room, flipped over the cushions on the sofa. Neat diagonal cuts across the underside of each: Somebody had been looking for something concealed.

"Someone's already tossed the place," I said. "I think there was a computer on that desk, and it's gone, along with files. They were looking for something else, too, something you could hide in a cushion. Do you have any idea what that might be?"

There was no reply. I looked up to see Laura leaning against the kitchen counter, head slumped forward. "Laura?"

She slowly lifted her head. Her eyes were unnaturally dull, mouth turned down at the corners. She looked like a fourteen-year-old girl seen through the prism of a lifetime of disappointment. "Can I have a cigarette?" she said.

"Thought you'd quit."