One of Us. Michael Marshall Smith
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video game, with no instructions.
I sympathized, just for a moment. I felt pretty much the same way.
‘That's her, isn't it?’ said the clock, who was standing on the counter next to my cooling cup. I'd let it ride back with me in the car to LA. It seemed only fair.
I nodded. ‘I owe you one.’ The clock had refused to tell me how he'd known where the woman was, saying it was a timepiece secret. I'd get it out of him sooner or later, but for the time being it didn't really matter. I'd found her.
I stayed put for a while, in case the flunky I'd talked to in the hotel forgot the fifty I'd laid on him and told the woman someone was looking for her. When five minutes had passed without incident I slipped off my stool, stumbling slightly. I leaned on the counter for a moment, blinking rapidly and waiting for my head to clear.
The clock looked up at me dubiously, still dabbing the mud off itself with a napkin and glass of water I'd acquired for it. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Just watch me,’ I said, not really knowing. My first plan was to simply talk to her. Tell her that what she'd done was bad, and get her to take the memory back. I'm an eternal optimist. If that didn't work, then it was going back into her head by force. Either way, she was coming with me. I had to get her in the same room as my receiver, and get hold of a transmitter from somewhere – hence my call to Quat. If she needed persuading, I'd use the gun, but I wasn't going to pull it out in this diner. The homeboys holding up the counter all looked far tougher than me: one flash of my piece and my guess was they'd be packing bazookas. If they were on contract I'd probably be okay, but if they were freelance they might just whack me speculatively and see if anyone was interested in paying after the fact. The sad thing about my life is that some people might well be. I slipped the clock in my pocket, left a couple of dollars by my cup, and left.
It was cold outside, and I took a second to lay a perfunctory curse on the head of a certain production company. Couple years ago they were shooting Northern Maine on the Mitsubushi lot, and couldn't be bothered with all the sprinklers and wind machines and stuff. So they got permission to change the microclimate for the afternoon instead. It got fucked up, naturally, and now you can never tell what the weather's going to be like. It's even more like living inside a madman's head than it used to be, but the movie went over big in Europe, so nobody likes to complain.
I jogged across the street, keeping my hands in my pockets and my head down, just part of the scenery, someone wanting to get someplace out of the rain. Up at the next corner I saw a car had been pulled over, police vehicle angled just ahead of it. Two guys stood with their hands on the hood, legs spread. One of the cops was methodically stamping on something on the floor, and I relaxed. Just a routine cigarette bust.
The hotel's foyer was quiet and dimly lit. A few plants lolled listlessly in pots around the walls, and the floor seemed fairly clean. It was one of those places where you wonder what the point of it is: not expensive enough to be worth going to on purpose, not sufficiently cheap to be the only place you could afford. Just part of the string of islands that salesmen and other salaried itinerants hop between, every room sanitized and bible-positive for their protection and comfort. I've stayed in a million such places myself, and they're like their own little country. Drab, anonymous suites; staff bored out of their tiny minds; the restaurant populated each night only by a scattering of men of uncertain ages, sitting at tables by themselves. Hair damp from a shower after a long day's drive, jeans with a crease ironed in, staring into the middle distance as they chew, their eyes dull from a preliminary check on what will be on the porno channels later on. I was always somehow surprised that such hotels didn't have their own graveyards out back, that their customers were evidently allowed to rejoin normal society after they'd finally had their coronaries.
The flunky I'd leaned on was nowhere to be seen, but that was okay. If I had to come back this way with a struggling woman in tow, I needed as little external input as possible. Laura Reynolds had a room on the second floor, so I took the stairs. It doesn't do to make elevators feel too important. More plants lurked at each bend in the staircase, suspiciously still, as if they'd been gossiping with each other only seconds before.
The corridor was long and quiet. I stood outside her room for a few moments, but couldn't hear anything inside. I realized then that I should have cornered the flunky after all, got a copy of the key to her room in case she refused to let me in. Probably he would have raised some footling objection, but I'm an old hand at dealing with that kind of thing. Used to be, anyhow. That I was out of practice was demonstrated by the fact that I'd completely forgotten about the whole issue of entry to the room. Sure, you can kick the door down, but it's not as easy as it looks and tends to be hard on the feet. Also it makes a shitload of noise, which is seldom desirable. Muttering irritably, I turned the handle anyway, already reconciled to tramping back down the stairs and making a nuisance of myself.
The door was on the latch.
I stood very still for a moment, waiting for the shouting to start. It didn't. So I carefully pushed the door open.
Inside was the usual stuff, the unnatural flora of mid-range hotel rooms. The corner of a bed. A battered dresser, with an old-looking teleputer squatting at the end. Beyond, a circular table with a lamp, and a pile of pamphlets that could only be invitations to the local attractions. Whatever the hell they were supposed to be. I still couldn't hear anything, not even the tuneless humming or occasional sighs most people feel obliged to undertake when alone, to smooth the quietness out.
I stepped into the little corridor, and closed the door quietly behind me. On my right was an open closet, with a few dresses on those hangers designed not to be stolen, presumably on the assumption that people paying seventy dollars a night for a room make a point of stealing a dollar's worth of coat hangers everywhere they go. Why would they do that? The next hotel's going to have its own stock, isn't it? And it means you can't use them to hang a shirt in the bathroom while you shower, which is as close to ironing as I ever get.
I took a cautious step into the main room. The door to the bathroom was shut, and I heard a faint splashing sound.
I let go of the gun in my pocket, and took a look around the room. A small suitcase lay open on the second bed, the interior a jumble of good underwear. A bottle of vodka stood on the bedside table, already missing about a third of its contents. Other than that she had made as little dent on the room as a ghost that walked especially lightly and tidied up as it went. A bedside combined clock-and-teamaker was staring at me with wide eyes, but I held my finger up to my lips and it remained silent.
I padded back to the door, and locked it. Then turned to the closet, took the dresses off their hangers with hardly any struggle at all, and folded them fairly neatly into her bag. I zipped it up, poured myself a smallish drink, and sat in the armchair to wait. Chances were she'd come out wrapped in a towel – most people do, even when they're alone. If not, I'd avert my eyes. I wasn't going to just charge straight into the bathroom. I try to be polite, and a few minutes' grace would help ensure the cops were gone from the corner outside.
I beguiled the time reading the hotel's literature, learning at some length of the management and staff's yearning to fulfil my every need. Probably they actually meant the person who was paying for the room, but I scrawled a note on the suggestions sheet anyway, asking for some proper coat hangers. I also discovered that the tariff included a complimentary continental breakfast, which annoyed me, as usual. Continental breakfast? Continental shit, more like. You sleep for eight hours, traverse great Jungian gulfs of unconsciousness, and what do they offer you on re-entry to our dread prison-world?
A croissant.
I mean, what? No sausage? No eggs, no fucking hash browns, even? What use is a croissant to anyone, especially first thing in the morning? And yet everybody sits there picking at it, pretending it's food, despite the fact that they would never eat it at home. Hotels around the world have seized on the continental breakfast not because it has any value, or because it's what anyone wants, but because it's cheap and requires no effort. If a hotel offers a complimentary continental breakfast, what they're really saying is: ‘There is no proper breakfast.’ Or: ‘There is, but you have to pay for it.’
When I realized