Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [104]
We woke an hour later to find the first drops of rain falling on us out of a warm sky. The rain gathered and fell, and we lay in it, arms around each other, laughing and talking in low voices.
In the morning, we walked back across the water hand in hand, and we wrapped the night up in time and walked away from it. I saw Fhee in New Richmond a few more times after that, as a friend, but we never spoke of that night, except perhaps in silences sometimes, and in our loyalty to each other; and in the single rose I placed on her sealed coffin after her head was blown to mist by a mortar fired into a restaurant where she was eating lunch, in an attack on a local gang leader of whose existence she had been, and always would be, blissfully unaware.
In my own terms, a final statement on that night was made when I walked into a whorehouse on the 67th floor and placed three bullets in the head of the man who had ordered the attack on the restaurant. But perhaps there were later echoes in all the things I didn’t say to Henna, in the days I woke up not knowing where I was, in the fact that in the end not even Angela was enough to redeem my marriage or my life.
The second intervention was the Vinaldi case, which took up most of the last year I spent as a cop. I was a Lieutenant by then, and not doing what I was supposed to. It’s kind of a habit of mine. I resisted because I needed something to be right about, something in which I could feel blessed by a touchstone of morality and rectitude that was missing in every other part of my life.
Vinaldi was only an up-and-coming hood in those days, a long way from the godfather he became while I was on the Farm. His rise was inexplicably meteoric, I believed, unless a large proportion of the police were directly supporting him. I decided that I was going to reveal to everyone, to the whole city, exactly what was going on in New Richmond. By then I had come to distrust the city as much as I distrusted my own heart. Fhee had been dead for three years, and my marriage to Henna had petrified into politeness and warmth. Not so very bad, in other words, but not good enough for me. I could no longer remember what I’d thought I wanted, why I was unhappy with what I had. That’s when I knew I was really married.
The campaign against Vinaldi was a life-substitute, nothing more, and I pursued it with the zealotry of the damned.
In effect, I tried to set up a secret, secondary police force, operating covertly within the one which already existed. I recruited the few men I knew I could trust, Mal foremost among them. He was a Sergeant by then, primarily concerning himself with prostitute-related homicides in which there was bodily mutilation. He’d seen enough unpleasantness of that kind in The Gap not to be able to stand it in the real world, and was implacable in his pursuit of the guilty. He was also, once I turned him onto it, extremely good at finding out who in the force was helping Johnny Vinaldi make the transition from minor street thug to crime baron. The other men reported to Mal, and he reported to me. I didn’t report to anyone, in the department or anywhere else. I cleared enough homicides and kept the squad in sufficiently good order that no one poked their nose into what I was doing the rest of the time, especially as by then I was enough of a Rapt junkie for most of the brass to assume I was harmless.
I’d taken Rapt on and off since The Gap, but in the last years it got worse and worse as I tried to find something that would clear my head, something real enough to take me back in time. So much of Rapt’s attraction for me is the fear it engenders, and I found that I needed more and more of it to keep me sane. A life without fear is no life at all, and at the