Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [69]
“Suej,” I said. “What were you staring at in the bar, on the way out?”
“The door frame,” she said. “The wood was acting funny.”
Everest, wall-diving, the mad, happy birds. It was all leading to one place. The forest.
I wasn’t going back there again.
A rasping sprint along deserted corridors to the corner of Tyson and Stones; a huddle outside Nearly’s door. She was scrabbling for her keys and I was staring wildly around when the door lock spoke to us.
“There’s someone inside,” it said. “Just thought you might like to know.”
“Who?” Nearly yelped, as I pulled out my gun. Sometimes I don’t know why I don’t just have it surgically implanted in my hand.
“He didn’t say,” the lock replied mildly, as if its mind was on other things. “He had keys, so there wasn’t much I could do.”
“Howie?” I asked Nearly, trying not to panic.
She shook her head, backing away from the door. “He’s my manager, not my boyfriend.”
I took Nearly’s keys and stood in front of the door. Fresh clip into the gun. Not many left, but the way things were going I wouldn’t be around to need them for much longer.
Nearly tugged at my sleeve. “This is going to be bad news,” she opined. “Let’s find somewhere else to be. Seriously, I hear Florida’s nice…”
“It is, but I have to get Mal’s disk back,” I said. “It’s all that’s left of him.”
Nearly, very nervous now: “Like, I respect that and everything, but I really think we should…”
I put the keys in the door and turned. “Best of luck,” said the lock, and I took a step into the corridor beyond. A quiet sound from the living room, like feet moving on carpet.
“Who’s there?” I inquired. No reply. I walked a couple more steps down the hall. “I have a gun and I’m in a strange kind of mood,” I added. “So whoever you are, don’t fuck me around.”’
Still nothing, except that scuffling sound. It wasn’t going to go away, and neither was I, so what else could I do but just take a deep breath and burst into the room.
Johnny Vinaldi looked up impatiently, pacing around the floor.
“Where the hell have you been?” he said, and I just stared at him openmouthed.
Nearly dithered between coffee and a line of coke, and in the end opted for both. Suej went into the kitchen to help with the former, and I stayed in the living room with Vinaldi.
“He got away,” he said. “How, don’t ask me to tell you. He’s surrounded by a boatload of the guys I think of as my least disappointing men, not to mention hundreds of teenage dancing people, and he blows out of the club like a lungful of smoke and just disappears.”
“But he didn’t get you,” I said, lighting a cigarette. I didn’t know whether “I wanted to be having this conversation. Events had pushed Vinaldi and me together in ways I didn’t understand, but I still wanted him dead. Each sentence I spoke to him felt like unfaithfulness. I wasn’t going to waste many words.
“True, and I’m enormously psyched about that, as you can imagine, but Jaz—whom I know you have little respect for, and I can understand that but he is loyal to me beyond reason and good at hurting people, so what can I do?—is in the MediCenter with bullets in disturbing places. His brother Tony is dead, and three others are not as healthy as they used to be.”
“I just killed a guy who I think was an associate of the man with the lights,” I said. “In a bar on sixty-seven.”
Vinaldi looked up at me then, finally stopping his pacing. “I’m impressed,” he said, with apparent sincerity. “It’s been a long, long time for us. These guys, I think they’re still there.”
“Johnny, why are you here and what are you talking about?” I still had my gun in my hand and I wasn’t completely sure that I wasn’t going to use it on him.
“I know who the man who came to my club was,” he said, lighting a cigarette of his own. The clattering in the kitchen seemed a hundred miles away. “And that’s why I know now it wasn’t you who sent me that box or was violent to me in the shadows of my business.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Jeq Yhandim,” Johnny said, suddenly looking older.