Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [8]
I swung myself out of the shaft and crouched down in the horizontal corridor, using a pocket penlight to peer into the gloom. The way was still clear, so I walked quickly north for about eight hundred yards until I found the wall panel I was looking for. I loosened the bolts and put my dark glasses on. This wasn’t a matter of vanity. I didn’t want anyone to make me while I was in New Richmond. It was a small chance that someone would recognize me, but I don’t like to take chances of any size unless they seem like fun. The other reason is that the hatch opens into a cubicle in the women’s rest room in a restaurant on 8.
I pulled the panel back about a millimeter, saw the cubicle was empty, and clambered through the hole as quickly and quietly as I could. It wasn’t easy. I stand over six feet tall and am kind of broad in the shoulders. Ventilation hatches aren’t built for people like me. I could hear the thump of music beyond the door to the John, but it didn’t sound as if anyone was there.
I replaced the panel, pulled the door of the cubicle open, and stepped through. A woman was standing there. Nice one, jack, I thought At least you haven’t lost your touch or anything.
She was hunched over by the sinks at the far end. She was very slim, had thick brown hair, and was wearing a short dress in iridescent blue. Good legs in sheer stockings led to shoes with very sharp and pointy heels.
Uh-huh, I thought, making a guess at her profession. As I glanced at her she shifted slightly, and I saw the mirror over which she was bent, and the rolled-up hundred-dollar bill in her hand. I took a quiet step toward the door, assuming she was sufficiently occupied to miss me.
Wrong. She looked up vaguely but immediately.
“Wow,” she said. “A big man. Intense.” Her face was caught somewhere between pretty and beautiful—her nose a shade too big for everyone’s pretty, but the bone structure too perfect for beautiful. Her eyes were clear and green, and looked natural.
“You’ve got good hearing,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s a feature.” She sniffed, and bent to do her other nostril. Then a thought occurred to her, and she peered at me again. “What are you doing in here?”
“Pest control,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “Well, I got a license. I’m allowed to be a pest in here. You, I’m not so sure about.”
“Is there any way,” I asked, “that I could just walk out of here, right now, and you’d think nothing more about it, ever?”
She looked at me for a long moment, considering. Then she shrugged. “Yeah,” she said, bending back over her mirror, and I turned and walked quickly out of the door.
A short corridor led out into the restaurant proper, and I skirted round the edge of the room toward the exit. With the time now coming up for nine o’clock, the place was in a transition period. The 8th floor runs on a kind of shift system. It romps twenty-four hours a day, but in practical terms this breaks down into three evenings of eight hours each. I once went round the clock twice. I can’t recommend it, except as an expensive suicide attempt The restaurant was about half-full of people from floors in the 60s and 70s, most of them either on the edge of unconsciousness or so wired you could hear their teeth vibrating. The others looked spruce and enthusiastic, rubbing their hands together in anticipation.
No one saw me walk out of the ladies’, and no one paid any attention as I walked through the restaurant. Feeling light-headed at seeing so many normal people at once, I escaped into the avenue outside.
Floor 8 is an anomaly in the lower levels of New Richmond. It’s fairly civilized. Floors 1 to 7 and 9 to 49 are bad. Each varies, depending on who’s got control of it at any given time, but basically they’re places you don’t want to go, especially the 20s and 30s. They’re dead code, cut out of the loop of normal life and left to fester by themselves.
You probably wouldn’t actually want to go to the 8th floor either, but at least it has pretensions. Originally, it had been the lowest food court in the MegaMall,