Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [140]
My hand was shaking, my finger slick against the trigger. Vinaldi’s chest looked like the biggest target in the world.
“You go back there, don’t you,” I said. “To the seventy-second floor.”
He looked at me. “How do you know that?”
“Some kid I met. He’s seen you standing down by the window.”
Vinaldi’s head dropped. “I can’t remember what happened in there,” he said quietly. “Not most of the time, anyway. Sometimes I dream about it, and when I wake up I go down and stand outside your apartment. You’re right about some things, Jack, and one of them is this: Sometimes you do things which won’t fit in any head. Things which are too big to forget. I gave you a hard time in front of Nearly about you thinking everything’s tainted, but you were right. I tainted my own life, and I don’t even remember doing it All I know is that the shit is there, and that it ain’t ever going away.”
I looked up at his face then, at the muscle twitching in his cheek. All the hate I’d nursed for him came crashing back into my brain, burning the image of his face into utter clarity. I saw his face so clearly that I realized it was my own, and as I started to pull the trigger it was with a feeling of utter relief.
The shot rang out in the darkness.
I let my gun drop, listening to the shallow breaths of a man who’d seen me move my hand at the last minute and fire my bullet into the floor. I stood there a while, until the echoes had died away and left us alone again.
“Why’d you kill Maxen?” I asked. “Because he’d decided he didn’t need you anymore and pulled Yhandim through to take you down? because the guys from The Gap were whacking your associates and girls? Or because of something else?”
“Jack…” he whispered.
“Get out of here,” I told him.
He stood, like an old man, and walked to the door.
“Good luck,” he said.
“If I ever see you again I’m going to kill you. Understood?”
He nodded once, opened the door and left.
I went into the women’s restroom, removed the panel, and climbed through into the pipe. Then I resealed the exit behind me, in the hope of putting off the inevitable for a little longer. I ran down the ventilation corridor as quickly as I could, ignoring a few bumps and cracks on the head. By then I didn’t seem to have any processing cycles to spare for worrying about a little pain. I was listening to the sound of pieces falling into place, seeing how they changed things and wondering how much difference it made.
But then I heard a faint clang behind me as they located the panel, and the shout from Ghuaji which indicated he’d heard my footsteps as I fled down the chute barely half a mile ahead of them. I hadn’t expected to elude them for long, but their speed was still a shock.
They were good soldiers. I’d lost them but then they’d found me, and now they were going to do their job.
My father only said one thing I admire. “The race isn’t over until everyone’s gone home and you’re left in the stadium by yourself.” He used to say it every time he lost a job. We would generally already be packing to leave for another town, and I never really understood what he meant. Not then, anyhow. But as I ran breathlessly through the dank guts of New Richmond I understood all too well. I played out the game to the last, darting through cross corridors, taking a deliberately bewildering route until I reached the main shaft, then putting my hands and feet on the outside of the ladder so I could slide down the floors as quickly as possible.
But I could still hear their boots thudding toward me, and as I swung off the ladder at ground level I knew the odds were against me. It seemed unfair, somehow, to have come so far, and for it to all come down to this. All I ever wanted was to escape from the noise, to find a little peace. I saw it then, that final moment, as if it had always been ordained. I saw the features of men who didn’t even really know enough to hate me properly, who were simply living out their programming; saw the random expressions