One of Us (7 page)

After about ten minutes I stood up and waited outside the bathroom door. Sure, women can spend untold amounts of time in the tub, but three o'clock in the morning is rarely the chosen time. Women usually save that kind of indulgence for when you're already late for going out. I was prepared to be accommodating, because I know how important feeling clean can be, but I really didn't have time for this. The cops outside would be long gone, and I wanted to move. I had to talk to people, make arrangements. My head seemed to be fairly stable, but that wouldn't necessarily last. I also wanted to check the news.

Then I realized what was missing. I leaned closer and listened. No humming, not even the smallest swish of water being moved by a lazy hand. I tried the bathroom door. It was locked.

I kicked it down.

Laura Reynolds was lying in a tub of cooling water, still wearing her panties and bra. The rest of her clothes were folded neatly on the toilet seat. Her head had flopped down onto her shoulder, and her eyes were closed. Her sharp, pretty face had gone smooth and still. The water was red, and there was blood all over the tiled floor. Her skin was white, lips blue.

I started moving very fast.

I yanked the plug out of the tub, grabbed a couple of hand towels from the rail. Her right arm lolled just under the water. As I pulled it up, I saw that the cut wasn't as deep as it could have been, and that she'd missed the major tendons. I wrapped it tightly in the towel and hung it over the edge of the tub, then reached across for the other arm.

The cut there was a lot deeper. Probably the opening slice.

Though maybe not: could be the weaker cut had been the first, and when she'd seen the tunnel open in front of her had decided she might as well run down it as fast as she could. Blood was still slicking out of the wrist in major quantities, and once the towel was around the gash I saw this wasn't going to be enough. Hot water and alcohol had thinned her blood, and it was eager to come out and play. A hotel terry robe hung on the back of the door, and I tugged the belt out and cinched it tight around her upper arm. She stirred then, for the first time; one of her eyelids flickered like some bug's sluggish wing.

Bracing myself with one foot on the tub, I bent forward and tried to pull her up. Though she was slim, she was hard to maneuver, and I nearly pitched forward onto my face. Eventually I got her slumped against the back wall, and held her there while I grabbed the robe and wrapped it around her shoulders. I tried getting her arms through the holes, but it was too difficult and I didn't want to dislodge the towels. In the end I just tipped her over my shoulder and carried her into the bedroom.

She moaned quietly as I laid her on the bed, but gave no sign of moving. I reopened her suitcase, grabbed a few handfuls of clothes, and shoved them into the pockets of my coat. Then I hauled her back over my shoulder and carried her out into the corridor. A quick look either way told me no one was there, which was good, because this was going badly enough as it was. It didn't even occur to me that I should have looked for her handbag until the elevator doors had shut behind me, and at that point I decided she'd just have to live without it.

I was halfway across the lobby downstairs, when I heard an exclamation behind me. I turned unsteadily—unconscious and seminude bodies are difficult to manage—to see the flunky staring at me openmouthed, hand already reaching for the phone.

"Private joke," I said.

The flunky eyed the blood-soaked towels. "Excuse me?"

"She's a heavy sleeper. Sometimes I just come along and take her somewhere weird so when she wakes up she wonders where the hell she is."

"Sir, I don't believe you."

"Does this help?" I asked, pulling my gun out and pointing it straight at his head.

"Very amusing," he said, and his hand left the phone and crept back to his side.

"Keep laughing for a while," I suggested. "Or I'll come back and explain it again."

I lurched around the corner to where I'd parked the car, and laid Laura Reynolds across the backseat. Then I got in and drove away, knowing that if I didn't get her to a doctor within a very short time, my life had just gotten even worse.

As I two-wheeled onto Santa Monica Boulevard, I nearly totaled us both, swerving to avoid a small group of freezers making their way across the road. I could have just driven straight at them, but I make a policy of not tangling with refrigerating appliances. They're really heavy.

WHEN WE WERE safely heading in the right direction, I called Deck. It took him a while to understand what I was saying, but he agreed to do as I asked. Then I flipped the phone to the Net and tried Quat again. It rang and rang. I frowned, cut the connection, redialed. Okay, it was late, but Quat was always up, and whenever he was awake he was on the Net. Still no answer.

I left the phone on callback with a redirect to the apartment, and concentrated on the road as we crossed Wilshire into Beverly Hills. You should know that I'm not a big fan of driving. Never have been. I realize this undermines me in the view of any red-blooded American, but so be it. Lots of people still bemoan the fact that kids spend all their time playing computer games: I say it's the only thing that's going to prepare them for real life. Driving equals long stretches of boredom, during which lunatics will randomly pop up and attempt to kill you— interspersed with pockets of hell where absolutely everything is out to get you. They call these pockets "cities," and they're best avoided unless you happen to live there. Give me a fistfight in a bar, and I'll hold my own. Send me around the beltway at rush hour—fuck off. I'll take a cab. Or walk.

After the turn onto Western, I pulled over to get a proper look at Laura Reynolds. She was still breathing, but the rise and fall of her chest was shallow. The blood around the cut on her right arm was congealing nicely, but the other still looked raw and fresh. I loosened the tourniquet, then retightened it before setting off again. I really hoped Deck got hold of Woodley, or I was fucked. The only alternative was taking her to a hospital, in which case I'd lose her. I couldn't stand guard the whole time, and she'd already proved she was determined to escape one way or another.

When I turned off Los Feliz I was happy to see there wasn't much of a line for entry into Griffith. There're only twenty entrances around the entire district, and at certain times of day getting in can be a major pain in the ass. As we approached the wall, I saw a knot of armed guards peering in the direction of the car, and was pleased to note that even at this late hour security was working for the inhabitants' protection.

In 2007 someone decided that Griffith Park wasn't operating to its full potential. They felt the whole "park" thing, in fact, was a little bit twentieth-century. It was all very well having a huge open space with a couple of golf courses and areas for boy scouts to tramp around, but there were other uses the land could be put to. Upscale residential, for example. The nice areas of LA were pretty full by then, and the well-heeled craved some new lebensraum—especially after plate analysis revealed that come the next quake, Brentwood was going to end up in Belgium. Of course there was a pitched battle with the local history fanatics and the poorer people who liked having a place to barbecue, but the problem with those guys is they don't have much money. The developers did. The developers won, more or less. A solution was reached.

An area was marked off, bordered by the Ventura and Golden State freeways on the north and east, and Los Feliz in the south. A hundred-yard wall was built along this entire stretch, and along the boundary with Mount Sinai Memorial Park in the west, creating an entirely closed-in area. The exterior of this wall was painted with high-resolution LED; the whole surface was wired into a central computer. Certain interior features, like Mount Hollywood and small areas of the old wild lands, were left untouched. Even the developers realized the Hollywood sign was sacred. This, along with stored images of how the park used to be before the development, was seamlessly displayed on the videowall—creating the illusion that nothing was there. From wherever you stood in LA, you could still see the Hollywood sign, and the Hills and park to the northeast. Unless you walked right up to the wall and punched it—which the guards were there to prevent you from doing—the illusion was perfect. It was like nothing had changed.

Inside the district the same idea was deployed in reverse, with views of Burbank, Glendale, and Hollywood constantly updated right up to the sky. LA got a whole new district, but kept the same view, and access tunnels leading from the outside to the three preserved areas meant that there was technically still a public park. The environmentalists were a bit pissed about the whole thing, claiming this wasn't the point, but they never have any money at all and weren't even invited to the planning meetings.

As we approached the gate—a ten-by-six-foot hole in the otherwise flawless panorama—I laid my finger over the sensor in the dashboard. This relayed my name, genome, and credit rating to the matrix built into the car's shell, for reading by the entrance computer. The matrix was treble-encrypted with a top-of-the-line government DES algorithm, and thus had probably taken someone a good twenty minutes to crack. I don't believe that all the people you see driving around Griffith have the money to live there. Particularly those who hang around my block.

I passed, and was allowed through the barrier. The outer doors shut behind me, leaving me in the access tunnel through the wall. The car hummed as it was conveyed toward the inner door. At the end the doors opened gracefully, and I drove out into the world again.

I locked the car to Griffith's auto system and told it to get me home as quickly as possible.

On the inside, Griffith looks like it was designed by someone who took acid in Disneyland. The hills provide perching space for split-level houses of high cost and loveliness, but the rest is wall-to-wall fun. The valley areas are split up into regular grids of stores and restaurants, and you're never more than a five-minute drive from a Starbucks or Borders or Baby Gap, the building blocks of Generica. Extensive areas are pedestrianized, and each storefront has been built up into a hysterical shout of commerciality. Restaurants in the shape of food and stores in the style of their products: The shoe stores look like shoes, the video stores are thin and rectangular, and Herbie's Croutons— where the owner, Herbie, sells over two hundred different flavors of small cubes of toasted bread—looks like an enormous crouton. You don't even have to be literate to know where to shop: the perfect post-verbal landscape. There's a spanking new subway, complete with designer graffiti, a cluster of big hotels in the middle, and enclaves of specialty shops nestling in the canyons. Nothing in Griffith is older than ten years: Even the smog is artificial and guaranteed free of pollution.

It's trashy, superficial, and vacuous. I call it home.

When the car turned into my square, I took it off auto and drove it myself. I can get all brave when the parking lot is in sight. My building. The Falkland, used to be one of the choicest hotels in the area, but then one day someone decided that two hundred yards down the road was far cooler. Everyone checked out virtually overnight; some even carried their suitcases by themselves. Within a week The Falkland was abandoned. By the time I opted for having a stable place to hang my hat, the building had applied for and been granted "characterful" status—then turned into private apartments. A SWAT team of interior decorators was called in to make the place look run-down. They did quite a good job, but if you rub hard on the walls in the apartments, you can tell the grime's just color-wash, an environmental laughter track.

I let one of the building's regulars valet-park my vehicle, as always mentally waving it good-bye. I could afford a collapsing car now if I wanted, but I don't really trust them. I've heard too many stories about people who've slipped one into their pocket, popped into a restaurant for some lunch, and then found the car reexpanding at the table. The last thing you want when you're halfway through your tagliatelle is two tons of vehicle in your lap.

Laura Reynolds was still unconscious but also still alive, and I hauled her over my shoulder and hurried into the building. The whole first floor had become a kind of freak-show bazaar, thronged with fun seekers and working girls—with a constant backdrop of noise coming from a hundred different stalls. At first glance it looks kind of cool, in an If-you're-over-forty-this-is-your-worst-nightmare kind of way, but take my advice: The drugs are generally cut to shit and you don't want to tangle with the girls. Most are method prostitutes: The nurses carry catheters, the meter maids give you tickets enforceable by law, and the schoolgirls like awful bands and always come straight from an argument with their mothers. The only highlight is the homeopathic bars, where you can get wasted on just one sip of beer: A healthcare firm has ambulances out the back with engines running twenty-four hours a day.

Deck was standing right inside the door, looking tense. The antismoking laws are even tougher inside Griffith, and it drives him berserk. He was also alone.

"Where the fuck is he?" I said, heading straight for the elevators on the other side of the lobby.

"On his way." Deck held his arm out to keep the doors open as I maneuvered myself and my charge into the elevator. Luckily by then I'd remembered my apartment number. "He wasn't exactly awake when I called." Two guys tried to get in the elevator with us, but Deck dissuaded them. He's a good couple of inches shorter than me, and on the wiry side—but it would be a mistake to read anything into that. His face is a little wonky, but his ease with his scars communicates an entirely valid confidence in his ability to handle himself. He's kept in practice at the whole violence thing, working occasional muscle for local businessmen while holding part-time square-john jobs. We made a policy of never working together back in the old days, but I know that if I ever needed someone covering my back. Deck would be that man.