Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [17]
Me, in other words.
It had to be SafetyNet. Somehow they’d tracked us. I didn’t know how and it didn’t make much difference. The result was the same: Mal got wasted, when it should have been me.
The men who’d done this had to be found, had to be killed, and it was going to be my job. Finally, I had a task I could understand.
When I got back to Howie’s bar my plan was simple. Dump Suej, borrow all the bullets Howie had, and go fuck somebody up. Though a little rough round the edges, the plan had worked for me. It hadn’t for Howie, and he—with Paulie slightly shamefacedly helping—had physically prevented me from going. There would still be, he opined, plenty of people who’d like to whack me for free, and never mind the five thou gig. He didn’t know about the spares, and I didn’t try to explain any of the history or mention SafetyNet, so he probably just thought I’d gone nonlinear.
But he wouldn’t let me go, and he was probably right, and that’s why I was sitting in his office and smoking furiously. Howie had people out asking questions for me, against his better judgment. He thought I should just take Suej and get the fuck out of town. I’d refused, and we were waiting for word to come back. In the meantime he sat in his chair opposite me, watching through the one-way mirror as the bar filled up for the small hours session.
Eventually he turned, and looked at me shrewdly for a moment. “I’ve had a better idea,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any money in Date Canceling.”
“You could be right.” I lit another cigarette and waited, as I had so many times before.
“So try this. You know how women eat cake?” I didn’t answer, so he filled in for me. “Instead of having a normal-sized piece—you know, like a proper slice—they have a tiny sliver. A tiddly-widdly bit. Generally, my research shows, it’s about a twenty-degree angle of pie. You know why they do this?”
“No,” I said. I knew what he was doing, and was content to play along. He was relaxing me, in his roundabout way. I thought that was okay. I felt I could do with some relaxing.
“They do it because they think that if they have a piece that small, then in some way it doesn’t count. It’s too tiny. It slips through the calorie net, like candy you eat in a car. Then they can have another piece a bit later on—less than twenty degrees, of course—and that piece won’t count either.”
“Howie, what are you talking about?”
“You watch, next time you break bread with a babe. You’ll see I’m right. So this is the plan—I come up with a new diet. All you have to do is buy circular food. Whatever you want, you can have it—so long as you make sure that you never have more than twenty degrees at one time. What do you think?”
“Complete and utter nonsense,” I said.
“Possibly, possibly—but who knows? Women understand some weird shit. Maybe they’re on to something.” He winked, leant over to a small fridge and pulled out a couple of beers from the multitude inside. “As you can see, there’s a lot of beer. More than enough.”
“For what?”
“For however long it’s going to take you to explain. I still say you should blow town, but I’m not letting you out of here before you calm down. Against my better judgment, you’re going to be crashing in my storeroom tonight, Jack. These are aggressive people you’re dealing with. Tell me what the hell’s going on.”
I knew I was going to have to tell someone sooner or later. I’d assumed it would be Mal. As I took my first sip of beer in a long time, I looked at Howie’s face and realized that it was going to be him.
I met the spares five years ago. I was thirty-four. I was put in a car and driven out of New Richmond in the middle