Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [130]
At 100 I showed my fake pass to the guys standing there. Their eyesight wasn’t as good as the one who’d stopped me with Vinaldi, or maybe they just cared less; either way, I got through and made it up to 104.
Golson was still half asleep when he opened the door, but woke up rapidly on seeing me.
“Whoa, big dude,” he said. “You’re turning into a regular feature.”
“You got someone with you?”
“Yeah,” he said, smirking. “Sandy came back for some more.”
“Get rid of her,” I said, shouldering past him into the apartment. It was beginning to feel like a second home. Golson scuttled after me as always, making small and unimportant bleats of disagreement.
“Hey, man—I can’t do that. I promised to take her to the Memorial as my guest. That’s why she came with me last night. She kept her side of the bargain—she ain’t going to leave now for no man.”
Sandy was sitting up in bed as I entered, looking fetchingly disheveled. I twitched the sheet off, then pulled out my gun and racked it
“Sandy, go home,” I said. “There’s a danger this man may only be after your body.”
I walked into Golson’s kitchen and started nuking some coffee. It was cinnamon apple, but I reckoned if I smoked heavily enough I could mask the taste. Gotson stayed in the bedroom and watched with bewilderment as Sandy gathered up her clothes and left in a way which underlined her chagrin, slamming the door hard enough to shake the city to its foundations. I smiled. Everybody I knew seemed cursed to do the same thing again and again: The if-then loops go on and on until you find some way of breaking out.
I was sipping my first cup when Golson stomped in. “Hey listen, dude,” he began petulantly. “That was beyond. I mean it. Okay, so I got laid already, but the service starts at nine and how am I going to mobilize someone foxy enough to be my guest by then?”
“You already got a replacement guest,” I said.
“Oh yeah?” he said, hopefully. “Who?”
“Me,” I said. “Get dressed.”
The great and the good, the talented and the important, the cream of New Richmond’s gene pool.
No, actually. Just the richest. I guess some people of merit probably made it in through the side doors, invited to make the memorial service even more appealing to the media circus. But the autocameras and talking heads were kept firmly away from the event itself, and buzzed excitably around the lobby on the 200th floor. I’d like to think they were kept out through respect for the dead, but I suspect it was just to pique their curiosity. The cameras, droid-operated fliers, seemed to be remaining calm, but their human front people were almost exploding with excitement.
Everybody else was led up an enormous spiral staircase all the way to 203, where we stood buzzing in a room the size of a small European country. This, we were given to understand, was the chapel’s anteroom. It was two stories high, and the ceiling had been entirely painted in the style of the Sistine Chapel. Storyboarded by the West Coast’s finest, the ceiling celebrated the exploits of that most durable of action heroes—God. Religion never really went out of fashion for the rich, maybe because it’s the easiest pretense at humility they could find. All the people around me, themselves the most well-heeled in New Richmond, stood trying not to be obvious about the fact they were wondering how much it cost to have a mile-square Renaissance cartoon daubed over a ceiling—proving that pretense was all that it ever was. The room could dwarf five thousand guests, and so the four or five hundred who stood huddled in its middle were left in absolutely no doubt as to their relative status to the person who owned it.
I stood with Golson to one side of the group. It wasn’t that I particularly valued his company; there just wasn’t anywhere else for me to go. I didn’t have a plan of any kind. I was waiting to see what I would do.
The area around us was alive with a low murmur of anticipation. Golson was utterly entranced. His eyes flitted over the assembled