Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [72]
The phone clicked off. I looked at Vinaldi.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Yes, it fucking will.” Vinaldi looked spruce and calm, as though he spent most nights awake in a chair. “Anything that relates to Yhandim relates to me.”
“I’d rather you stayed here.”
“I don’t give a shit what you’d rather, Randall. I’m coming.”
I looked at him for a moment. Last night had made a difference, but in daylight I wasn’t sure how much. Eventually I nodded. I scribbled a note for Nearly and we left, closing the door quietly behind us. The lock told us to take care—advice which I valued highly. The corridor to the elevator was filthy, overflowing with the detritus of the previous evening. Empty bottles, cracked vials, a used rubber. In the distance I heard the sound of a sweepteam vacuuming it up. Hazy light slanted in from the external window down at the end of the corridor, and for once it looked like it wasn’t raining outside.
We stood in silence in the elevator as it descended, and I thought momentarily about how weird it was to be standing next to New Richmond’s premier villain. Maybe he was mulling over his proximity to one of its key losers. If so, he didn’t say. Perhaps, like me, he was mainly wondering whose head we were going to find this time. Howie had called me, not Vinaldi. I was thinking that was probably a clue.
It was nighttime on 8. I took us the quickest route, which happens also to be the noisiest, going down Bon Bon Street past bars full of revelers encouraging young (and not so young) ladies to remove their clothes. I can only watch that kind of stuff for a short while before being suffused with a feeling of utter futility—a kind of pornui, I guess—but the patrons down on 8 certainly seemed to be going for it. Vinaldi merely swept his gaze over it with a grimly professional eye, probably calculating if any of it was worth taking over. Bon Bon led us into a net of side streets where people were eating and drinking, overspilling out of diners onto the crowded streets. Here Vinaldi looked around more casually as we walked, and I figured it must all seem kind of small beer to him.
“I haven’t been down here in years,” he said suddenly, contradicting me. “Looks kind of fun.”
“What, more fun than Club Bastard?” I said, making the turn into Howie’s side street.
“Having someone drill a hole in your head and pour ants in is more fun than Club Bastard,” he said. “The young people these days, what do they know from fun?”
I felt that my own notions of what was enjoyable were open to question, and also that if age meant maturity, I should probably still be sucking my thumb. I was about to say so when I noticed Vinaldi had disappeared. One minute he was beside me, the next he was gone. Assuming he’d hung back in the preceding street to observe fun in progress, I entered Howie’s bar. I was actually kind of relieved to be able to handle this on my own. All the way down I’d been hoping that if I was going to see anyone’s head it would be the half-spare’s, and realizing that fate would be unlikely to help me out. Yhandim’s MO seemed to favor women rather exclusively, with the exception of the warning sent to Vinaldi. David and Mr. Two might very well be dead by now, but Yhandim’s present to me would have overtones of sexuality. It always does when that level of mangling is involved, and the manglers tend not to be switch-hitters.
“Jack, hi,” said Howie.
The room was entirely empty. “Business is quiet,” I said.
“I closed down for the morning. Putting new windows in.”
I nodded, noticing the piles of broken glass swept up against the bottom of the bar. Howie seemed subdued, not at all his normal self, and I said so. “Yeah,” he replied, smiling tightly. “Difficult times.”
“What did you have to show me?”
“This way,” he said.
On the table in his office was a box, like the two I’d already seen. I approached it with quiet dread, bracing myself.
“When did it come?”
“An hour ago,” Howie said. “Hand delivery.”
I was going to have to open it sooner or later, so I did it immediately.