Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [75]
Only when he was completely immobilized and rolled onto his back did I stand up and take a hurried swig from the bottle of Jack’s Howie was inhaling. My hands were shaking. Proximity to death does that to me. If you’ll take my advice, avoid it.
“What’s his name?” I asked Vinaldi, handing him the bottle. He looked at it, realized it was before eight in the morning, then took a mouthful anyway. “He get left behind, too?”
Vinaldi nodded reluctantly. “His name’s Ghuaji,” he said, then handed me the bottle. “Pour some of this down his throat.”
I did so, and Ghuaji coughed, spluttered, and swam back up toward the light. His eyes flicked against the blood pooling down from his flattened nose. I thought about wiping his eyes for him, then realized I couldn’t be fucked. I leaned in very close, and spoke very clearly indeed. Déjà vu again: last night, not to mention the man outside Mal’s apartment.
But this time I had to get it right.
“You’ve got five minutes,” I said. “That’s about how much I can spare. After that Howie here is going to drop you down an xPress elevator shaft to see if you bounce. Understand?”
His voice was thick, and too weak to make out. But he’d heard me. I could tell by the way he spat a bloody tooth into my face.
“Super,” I said. “I have four questions. Answer all of them and we could have a basis for negotiation. Any less and it’s bargain bucket of pain approach. Okay. One: Where has Yhandim taken Suej and the other woman? Two: Where are the other spares? Three: Who is behind all this shit and four: What is his fucking problem? Answer in any order you like but don’t take your time because I don’t have any and yours is running out real fast.”
Ghuaji smiled up at me, and I cocked my gun. This didn’t do anything except broaden his smile. I felt panic rising behind the calm I was trying to project.
“The birds are here,” he said. “Surely you seen them.”
A chill, but I hid it. “What about them? How come they’re coming through?”
“Yhandim’s got a plan, ain’t not even nobody knows about it. The leaves will be with him, man. He been up all night, talking to the boys. It’s going down.”
“I tend to find,” Vinaldi said sagely from behind me, “that blowing pieces off a man’s body one by one will reduce the obscurity of his answers.”
“Johnny, thanks for the fortune cookie, but…”
“Seriously, I can recommend it, and Jaz, God willing he comes out of the MediCenter as a functioning human being, will back me up on that to the hilt.”
“You think that’s going to scare a man who’s been in The Gap all this time?” I said, turning to him but speaking for Ghuaji’s benefit. “A guy who’s been in-country half his life? I like the way you’re thinking, but I think maybe this isn’t the guy for it.”
It seemed to work. When I turned back to him, Ghuaji’s eyes focused more clearly on me, and when he next spoke it was with a hint of wistfulness.
“It’s home. I miss it every second, man. Top-ups just ain’t enough.”
It was then I knew that not only was the man off his head, but that he wouldn’t tell us anything he didn’t want to even if we whittled his body down to the bone. Anyone who could miss The Gap wasn’t even human anymore.
I reached down and tilted Ghuaji’s head slightly, looking at the bullet’s entrance wound. It went through the skin and skull, but not much deeper than that. It must have started healing immediately, and can’t have held him up long enough to allow the police to get to the bar before he escaped.
“You see that?” I asked Vinaldi. He nodded, and I saw a little fear in his eyes, and Howie’s, which I suspected was probably mirrored