One of Us (8 page)

As we stood outside the door, he took Laura from me and held her upright while I fumbled with my keys.

"You going to explain this to me at some stage?" he asked mildly.

"At some stage, yeah." I pushed the door open, listened for a moment, then helped Deck drag Laura Reynolds inside.

CHAPTER FOUR

We got her laid out on the sofa, and I was halfway through making coffee, when there was a buzz at the door. I had my gun out before I knew what I was doing, and Deck held his hands up.

"Be cool," he said, squinting through the peephole and kicking aside the small pile of newspapers that had arrived while I was away. "Just the old guy."

Woodley lurched in. "I take it you understand this is going to be double rate?" he rasped, setting his two bags down on the floor. "It's nearly four in the morning."

"Just shut up and get on with it," I told him. "You'll get four times the rate if you understand that mentioning this to anyone could be fatal. For you, not her."

Woodley harrumphed for a moment, trying to hide a satisfied leer. If there's anything the old fart likes more than money, I can't imagine what it would be. He peered at Laura Reynolds: When he saw the blood-soaked towels, he blanched, and waved a hand vaguely at Deck. "Let them out, would you, young fellow?"

Though I'd managed to remain relatively calm during the drive home, seeing Woodley dithering around brought it home just how ill Laura Reynolds was. I grabbed one of his bags and shoved him in front of me toward the bedroom. Meanwhile Deck opened the other bag and let the remotes out—small crablike machines the size of tarantulas. Attracted by the smell of blood, they clambered straight up onto the sofa and started nosing around.

Deck and I had used Woodley on and off for five years, back in the bad old days. He had once, he claimed, been a telesurgeon for covert army operations—conducting surgery remotely through satellite links. There was no way I'd found of establishing whether this was true, but it was certainly the case that he couldn't stand blood. We'd shown him some once, just to check. He didn't mind the sight of it as long as it was mediated through the remotes' cameras; he just didn't like the reality of the actual stuff. After he was court-martialed (unfairly, so he claimed, though he declined to specify exactly what the unfair charges had been), Woodley couldn't get a proper license, so he hacked out a living catering to people like me. People who every now and then needed something biological sorted out, and who couldn't go to a hospital. Old fool he might be, and I strongly suspected he collected string and slept on the beach somewhere, but, boy, could that guy stitch. Nicely healed scars in my shoulder, chest, and right leg—all of which had once been bullet wounds—were testament to that.

I stood where I could see both Laura and Woodley, and watched as he got down to work. The old man's hands were trembling big-time, but that wasn't a cause for concern: The controls had antishake mechanisms built into them. He put the glasses and gloves on, and within moments the remotes were speeding up and down her arms. After a while one of them hopped off the sofa and delved in the bag, reappearing with a fridgipacked bag of plasma. Woodley clucked and frowned with concentration.

Deck appeared next to me, handed me a cigarette. I fitted a prism filter on the end and lit it gratefully. The filters are a pain in the ass, stealing half the flavor, but it's the only way of smoking indoors without the wall sensors ratting on you. The filters dissolve after use, which is convenient, because possession of them is a misdemeanor. Smoking in LA these days takes more planning than conducting a minor war.

"So?" Deck asked.

"Later," I said.

Deck smiled, settled back to watch the remotes. He's a patient man—far more so than me. You could dump Deck in the middle of Gobi Desert and he'd just look around and say, "Is there any beer?"

"No," you'd reply, obviously.

"Water?" You shake your head, and he'd think for a minute.

"Anywhere to sit?" And then he'd walk over to the nearest fairly comfortable rock and sit there for as long as it took for either beer, water, or a parallel universe to appear.

After a while I got fidgety, and checked the answering machine. This works pretty well, considering, hardly ever telling me that 67°o*3~ has called about the ;,,,t[{+®3, and so I was surprised to see I had no messages. I'd been away for two days. I'm not an especially popular guy, but people tend to call me at fairly regular intervals to bug me about something trivial. I experimentally banged the side of the machine.

"Piss off," it said. The answering machine's been sulking since I threw my coffeemaker out. I think they had something going together.

"Nobody's called?"

"Since midnight, no. Most people tend to sleep sometimes."

I stared down at it. "What are you talking about?"

"Which was the difficult word?"

"When did you last give messages?" I asked very slowly.

"11:58 P.M. yesterday."

" Tonight."

"I remember it clearly. You pressed the button lightly for once."

"Problem?" Deck asked.

I didn't bother to ask the machine if it was sure about the time. If there was any useful cross-breeding that could have taken place in my apartment, it would have been between the answering machine and my alarm clock.

"Someone's been in the apartment tonight," I told Deck.

"Has been?"

It's not a huge apartment. We checked the few remaining spaces. Deck walked carefully into the spare bedroom, tossed the closets and looked under the bed—and came out shrugging. I did the same in the main bedroom.

"Nearly finished," Woodley said as I passed behind him, expecting me to hassle him. "And for your information, she's an occasional user. Smack—but not for a while—and a little bit of Fresh."

This didn't surprise me. "What do I need to do now? Recovery-wise?" Nothing appeared to have been stolen. You'd have to have pretty specific needs to want to steal something from my bedroom. The memory receiver was still in the closet, and that was all that really mattered.

The old guy shrugged. "Don't ask me. Didn't do that bit. Boys I used to operate on were just given a gun and told to go back out again."

"You're a doctor, Woodley. You must have some idea."

He shrugged again. "Chicken soup. Keep her off the bottle for a few days. Or give her a stiff scotch. Whatever works. Don't let her go bungee-jumping."

"Woodley—" I stopped abruptly, staring at the head of the bed. The sheets and cover had been turned back very neatly, as if by a maid. It was so unexpected, so bizarre, I hadn't even noticed it at first. "Did you do that?"

"Like to think I operate a one-stop service, dear boy, but it doesn't extend to making your bed."

I paid him off, and waited impatiently while he gathered his stuff together. I ran an eye over the living room, and came up empty. Nothing obvious was missing, and trust me—the decor's so austere, you'd notice if anything was gone.

When Woodley had left, I grabbed Deck and pulled him into the bedroom. "The bed," I said, pointing at it.

"We've been friends a long time," he said gently. "But I just don't care for you that way."

"Someone's turned back the sheets."

Deck raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. Does it seem something I'm likely to do?"

"Not unless there was money hidden underneath."

"Exactly."

"So someone's picked up your messages and turned back the bed. You got an imaginary girlfriend or something?"

"Not even a real one."

"Nobody else got a key? The building's super, for instance?"

"The super is in prison for breaking and entering."

"That's a no, then. Anything missing?"

"Not that I can see."

"Okay, so, to recap: Someone's broken into your apartment and done a bit of tidying. You're twitchier than a pig in a tin, and you're waving your gun around like a flag. There's a woman on the sofa with wrists like a roadmap, and you just paid Woodley quadruple rate to keep his mouth shut. Maybe now would be a good time for you to tell me what's going on."

I took my bathrobe off the hook on the back of the door and got Laura Reynolds into it. I stuffed the bloody one in the trash where, knowing my housekeeping, it would probably remain for two years. Laura still seemed to be unconscious, but that was probably due to medication: There was a lot more color in her cheeks, and with a combination of neat stitching and skinFix, her arms looked a little better. Now that the blood had been swabbed away, you could see both that the wrist cuts were fairly manageable, and that they weren't the first. Old white lines in very similar places said that tonight's dive for the tunnel hadn't been the first of its kind. Didn't make it any less important for her, I guessed, or any smarter.

I carried her into the spare bedroom as gently as I could and got her into the bed. I laid a couple of my old coats on top of the bedding and turned the heat up a little.

Then I went back into the living room and got the answering machine to repeat the messages someone had already picked up. There were only three, and they were all from Stratten. The first was polite, the second businesslike. The third said just Call the office. Now.

Time was running out. I got a coffee and told Deck the score.

IN THE FIVE MONTHS I worked memory, Ms. Reynolds had been one of my most regular clients. Though I didn't know her name then, she'd dumped the same memory on me six times.

The memory was this: She'd been down by a stream, in a patch of forest behind the house where she lived. I don't know how old she was, but probably early to mid teens. The day was hot and it was late afternoon, and she'd come down into the woods for something important. The main impression I got was of anticipation, and vulnerability, and the memory always made me feel very young.

She was standing there, waiting, when suddenly there'd been a shadow over her, and she'd looked up to see her mom. Her mother was a very tall woman, quite thin, with a mass of reddish-brown hair. Laura had slowly looked up, until she'd found her mother's face. What she needed a break from every now and then was the expression she saw there. A look of fury—mixed in with a little glee.

The memory always ended abruptly at that instant, and I don't know what the look meant or what had happened afterward. I'd always been kind of glad I didn't. It was one of the memories I could understand someone wanting to get away from once in a while.

Then last week I came back from lounging around a hotel pool in Santa Barbara to find I had an email message from an address I didn't recognize. Before I even read it I ran a check on the source: Sometimes people set their mail to send back a received signal when it was opened. The domain code didn't set any alarm bells ringing, but even so I got the console to hardcopy without technically opening it.

The mail was from this same woman, the one who wanted to forget that moment down by the stream. We'd never been in contact before—all transactions were brokered through REMtemps on a double-blind confidentiality principle—but her message mentioned the memory, and I worked out who she was. The message said she had something she wanted me to carry, and would make it very worth my while.

I stared at the piece of paper for a few moments, then set fire to it and let it burn out in the sink. I spent the rest of the day around the pool, and the evening in a bar at the beach end of State Street, playing pool and bullshitting with the locals.

When I got back I had another message from the same address. It listed a phone number. It also mentioned twenty thousand dollars.

I watched a movie on the in-house system for a while, but you know how it is. The back brain makes a decision instantly, and no matter how long you put it off, you know what you're going to do.

At about midnight I left my hotel room and went back to the bar. There was a pay phone at the back, out of sight, and I called the number from the message.

A nervous-sounding woman answered the phone. She made me describe her memory in detail. Then she told me what she wanted. She had another memory, one that wasn't usually a problem. Ten years ago she'd gone on vacation with a man she'd just met, to someplace on the Baja she'd known for years. Ensenada. She and the man had stayed there awhile, hanging out, eating seafood, having a good time. Then she'd come back.

"That's it?" I asked.

She'd recently met a new man. She liked him a lot. In fact, she was thinking of getting hitched. But they were going to go away together first, just to make sure. He wanted to go to the same town she'd been to with the other man all that long ago. She tried to suggest going somewhere else, but Ensenada had become a kind of lovers' in-joke between them, and it would have looked weird if she'd insisted.

I still didn't see the problem, and said so. As long as you steer clear of some of the taco stands, Ensenada's a cool place to be.

The woman said she didn't want to go back there remembering what it had been like with the other man. She thought it might make her see things differently this time. She really loved this new guy, and didn't want to compromise their first trip together.

I know it sounds odd, but believe me—that's the way other people's lives work. They're both more bizarre and more trivial than you can imagine. Most clients had far worse reasons for forgetting something for a while: In a way I sort of respected her attitude, and wished I had a woman who took me that seriously.

But all she had to do was ask for me when she booked the storage. I still didn't see why we were doing the cloak-and-dagger stuff.

So she told me. She was going to be away for ten days.

Stratten wouldn't accept a booking for more than a week, I knew that. He seemed to have pretty much cornered the memory market, and I assumed therefore that he was kicking back to a couple of key cops somewhere, but if they heard he was extending the time limit, all bets would be off. Also, the memory the woman wanted to leave wasn't a fragment. It was for the whole period, three entire days.