One of Us. Michael Marshall Smith
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– the dates on screen made it clear her ‘holiday’ had taken place only a couple of days before she contacted me. Finally she got the email she was waiting for. It was short. Just an address. She walked straight out of the bar and got in her car, and was back in LA early evening.
The next part of the memory, the murder at the crossroads, took a long time in coming. I'd never experienced anything like it before. Though it was very recent, it was already distorted, and shot through with darkness. It was as if a process of blanking had already started, before she decided to get rid of it. I don't know why she wanted to lose the time in Ensenada as well: when you take other people's memories, you don't always get all the thoughts that happened during them. It's like some people's sense data and internal workings take part in different parts of their head, like they've trained a part of their mind to remain distant at all times. All I got during the time in the Baja was a draining feeling of misery, of a desire to be either drunk or dead – mixed with dark elation. Not a good way to feel, sure, but I got the sense that this was how she felt about half the time. Ditching two days of it wasn't going to make much difference. Perhaps she'd spent those two days working herself up to what happened – reliving certain things in part of her mind, girding herself. I don't know.
But in the end I was able to form a coherent idea of the last night, and what had happened, and learn her name when the guy used it just before she killed him. I told Deck everything I could remember, from the way the crossroads had looked, to the way the man called Ray winked, to the number of shots she pumped into his body. The feeling of emptiness as she stared down at the corpse, reloading the gun for the sake of it.
The numb despair, as she ran away, at realizing that it had made no difference.
Laura Reynolds was breathing easy, apparently now asleep. Retelling the memory made me feel something new towards her, though I wasn't sure what. Guilty, perhaps. I'd taken something that had previously only been in our heads, and brought it out into the world. I'd never done that before, and regarded the confidentiality of my profession with a kind of half-assed pride. I hedged the feeling down, told it to go away. She'd deliberately dumped something on me which could get me sent to prison for ever.
Deck was standing at the window when I got back, looking down at the street. The sky was beginning to lighten round the edges, and somewhere the smog machines were stirring into life. Looked like we were heading for a hot day, unless the chemicals in the sky decided they fancied a blizzard instead. Being a weather man in LA isn't the joke job it used to be.
When Deck spoke it was as if he was working up to something, clearing the side issues out of the way first. ‘Who do you think the guys at the end were?’
‘I have no idea. They're weren't cops, I'm pretty sure of that.’
‘Why?’
‘Don't know. Something about them. Plus they looked familiar.’
‘Plenty cops look familiar to me.’
‘Not like that. An old memory.’
‘Yours?’
‘I think so. I don't think they sparked anything in her at all.’
‘Could it be them who've been in here?’
I shook my head. ‘They didn't see me, remember? – I wasn't actually there. I didn't do anything. It just feels as if I did.’
He looked at me. ‘You know what will happen if you're caught with that in your head?’ He's warned me about this since I started memory work.
‘Murder One. Or Half, at least.’
He shook his head. ‘You don't know the half of it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Deck walked past the door, and rootled through the pile of yesterday's news. I guess I should cancel the hardcopy paper, save a few trees somewhere: but reading it off a screen isn't ever going to be the same. He found the edition he was looking for, and handed it to me.
I scanned the front page:
There might be an earthquake at some stage.
A property entrepreneur called Nicholas Schumann had killed himself in a spectacular way: financial problems cited. I remembered the name, vaguely: he might even have been one of the wheels who redeveloped Griffith. Must have taken some piece of phenomenal stupidity for him to have lost all that money.
The weather was still fucked, and they didn't think they could fix it.
‘So what?’ I said.
‘Page three,’ Deck said
I turned to it, and found an article about a murder which had happened six days earlier. It recapped how an unarmed man had died from multiple gunshot wounds in the street in Culver City. It implied that the cops had a number of leads, which meant for the time being they had jack shit, but they were working it hard. It gave the age of the deceased, his profession, and also his name.
Captain Ray Hammond, LAPD.
I closed my eyes.
‘She killed a cop,’ Deck said. ‘Better still, take a look at the last line. I wouldn't even have remembered the piece, except for that. Guess who's in charge of the case?’
I read it aloud, the words like the sound of a heavy door being triple locked. ‘Lieutenant Travis, LAPD Homicide.’
I looked slowly up at Deck, suddenly properly afraid. Up until now, the situation had merely been disastrous. Now it had sailed blithely into a realm where adjectives didn't really cut it any more. It would have taken a diagram to explain, one showing the intersection of a creek and some shit, and making clear the lack of any implement for promoting forward propulsion.
Deck stared back at me. ‘You're fucked,’ he said.
I crashed at six. One minute I was sitting on the sofa talking to Deck, next thing I was out. I'd been awake for forty-eight hours, and my brain was carrying more than the usual load. I was too exhausted to dream much, and all I could remember when I woke up a little after nine was another image of the silver car from the end of Laura's memory. I was standing by a road, I don't know where, but it seemed familiar. On either side was swampy woodland, and the road stretched out straight to the horizon, shimmering in the heat. Something hurtled towards where I was standing, moving so fast that at first I couldn't tell what it was. Then I saw that it was a car, the sun beating down on it so hard that it almost looked as if it was spinning. As it got closer it began to slow down, and when it drew level I woke up.
I didn't know what it meant, other than that part of my brain was evidently trying to get some things in order, and had been since Ensenada. I wished it well. My mind wasn't exactly razor-sharp before it became a flop-house for other people's hand-me-downs, and I now had far more pressing things to worry about.
‘She's moving,’ Deck said.
I stood at the bedroom door and waited impatiently while Ms Reynolds stirred towards consciousness. It looked like it was a long journey, and it took a while. Now that I was properly awake, panic was beginning to resurface, but I didn't poke her with a stick or anything. For the time being I was still hoping the whole situation could be resolved amicably.
Eventually her eyes opened. They were pretty red, a combination of hangover and the remnants of having been in shock. She stared at me for a while without moving.
‘Where?’ she croaked.
‘Griffith,’ I said. I had a glass of water in my hand, but she wasn't getting it just yet.
‘How?’
‘I brought you here.’
She sat up, wincing at the pain in her arms. She must have temporarily forgotten what the source might be, because when she looked down and saw the stitches her lips