Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [134]
“Louella Richardson wasn’t killed by accident,” I said, trying to make it as simple as possible. The microphone picked up my voice and sent it ringing out around the room. “Louella was killed for fun. Louella was killed by a man hired by Mr. Maxen.”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it didn’t happen. The room was utterly silent. The eyes kept staring up at me, but I could see no change in their expression. Maxen stood stiffly by my side, the shaved underside of his chin smooth against my wrist.
I started again. “This same man killed four other women, and some friends of mine. But the only one who lived above the hundred line was Louella, and so that’s why you’re here today. Not because Arlond Maxen gives a shit, but because he’s guilty. It’s his fault that these women all died and he thinks that if he does this it will cover the smell in his head.”
Still nothing. I stared down, at the faces, wondering if I’d started speaking by mistake in some foreign language. Nobody moved, there was no scandalized buzz, no buzz of any kind. This didn’t seem to mean anything to anyone.
Bewildered, I let go of Maxen and leaned on the lectern. I opened my mouth to speak once more, but nothing came except this, with a dawning white light in my head.
“And five years ago, he had my wife and daughter killed.”
Only then had I realized, and I found that after the realization came, I didn’t have anything else to say.
“Nobody gives a shit, Jack,” said a voice, and I turned to see where it had come from. There, sitting on the end of the sixth row, was Johnny Vinaldi. “Henna, your spares, anyone below the hundreds—to these guys, they’re all just disposables.”
This time there was a reaction from the congregation, although I don’t think any of them could have been as surprised as me. Vinaldi stood up and shook his head at me. “Sure, Maxen here cared a little bit about Suej. After all, she was his daughter’s spare. That’s why he was so keen to get her back, and the real Suej died this morning, Jack, so looks like you got tit for tat. Apart from that, no one here gives a flying fuck. They didn’t come here to mourn. They came here to worship this guy.”
I suddenly understood why Maxen had never visited my Farm in the night: because his own daughter’s spare was there, and that would have seemed wrong to him; and in that moment I realized how many rooms there must be in his head, how tiny and how tightly locked.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Vinaldi quietly, light-headed with a sense of unreality. I knew only the sound of gunshots could make it seem real.
Vinaldi grinned humorlessly. “What you should have been doing,” he replied, and then he raised his hand and shot Arlond Maxen in the face.
He spun round on his axis, still upright, and before the body was on the ground, Vinaldi had emptied his clip into it. Maxen’s glasses skittered across the floor in the silence, and his eyes stared nakedly up into nothing.
The room exploded all around me into flares and tear gas. Out of the shadows ran six of Vinaldi’s men, spraying machine-gun fire all around them, leaving behind the bodies of the guards they’d already killed, the guards who should have been parking bullets in Vinaldi and me. They were aiming now for the remaining Maxen security men, and got most of them, but Maxen’s men weren’t the only people who fell. Maybe it wasn’t deliberate, but people still died, falling to the ground like trees in a forest which had never seen violence, surrounded by the ghostly faces of those who would be left behind. I knew that at least some of them would remember the day when the jungle rose up and came to find them where they lived, but I also knew how little difference it would make.
Vinaldi was surrounded by his men and swept away by their human shield, his mission accomplished. The room flickered with orange light, thick with smoke. I reeled into the chaos, staggering through screams and blood and fire.
Dazed by the fact I was still alive, I wandered toward the thickest