Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [84]
“Come on, Jack,” he said. “Time’s wasting.”
I jerked my head to look up at him. Maybe it was the use of my first name, which appeared unconscious and unplanned, but what I saw in front of me was not Johnny Vinaldi, the gang lord and vicious thug who had half of New Richmond’s underworld in the palm of his hand. Instead, I saw just a man who was having to gear himself up to something he didn’t want to do. Something he was afraid of, possibly more so even than me. Someone who, for reasons of his own, was giving me an opportunity to be less of a waste of everybody’s time and patience.
I shut my eyes, turned away for a moment, and it came: a shiver of finality like the one when you decide, in your own mind, that you’re going to have to tell someone who loves you that you don’t want to be with them anymore. Terror, and relief; relief and terror, so intermingled that they feel like the same thought.
I leaned down unsteadily, picked up my drugs, and straightened again.
“Just understand one thing,” I told Vinaldi. “if you’re thinking of atoning to Yhandim, you’re taking the wrong guy along with you. When I find the man who’s got Nearly and Suej I’m going to tear his fucking head off.”
“That’s more like it,” Vinaldi said, slapping me on the back. “The old reasonableness we know and love.”
“Piss off,” I muttered. “Where’s this fucking truck?”
Four o’clock found us driving as fast as we dared through Covington Forge, through snow falling in flakes the size of small dogs. It was dark, the heating in Vinaldi’s truck didn’t work, and both of us were frozen. A bottle of Jack’s bought at a gas station in Waynesboro was trying its hardest to alleviate the season’s weather, but it was only a veneer at best. Vinaldi was pissed at me because he’d wanted an almond cappuccino. The gas station attendant and I had a good laugh about that. I guess it had been a while since Johnny’d had to deal with the real world.
The Matrix junction box at the town limits had burned out long ago and subsequently been used for target practice. Covington Forge was off the net, abandoned to the past and left to cannibalize itself. As Vinaldi steered through the deserted streets, I saw America itself as one big matrix: bright, dangerous cities crammed with sharp and needy people, interconnected by a spider’s web of highways and toll roads and bordered at the edges by the slow coasts peppered with perambulating old people. And in between, in the gaps, a sagging mass of flat line towns that hadn’t made it into the twenty-second century—alive and technically equal to everyone else, but actually breaking up, losing their cohesion like skin on the face of someone who’s been very ill for a long time. The nose might still look sharp, the eyes bright, the cheekbones in place; but the flesh in between falls loosely between the peaks.
It wasn’t an especially profound observation, but then I was very cold. The buildings around us looked as if they agreed with me, and as if they were only too aware of their position in history. They looked pissed off, to be honest. The pavements were scarred, the walls bulged, the roofs a millimeter away from collapsing onto the fetid life within. It felt like we were driving over a corpse that was fermenting inside, but whose chest still rose and fell, and probably always would. It was great.
We’d thought maybe Ghuaji was meeting someone here, but as we followed his car from a distance it became clear that we were going straight through and out the other side. I was beginning to come down by then, though it still felt as if someone was slowly stirring my brains with a warm finger. Sounds were now distinguishable as such, and I believed that the majority of what I saw was real. For most of the afternoon what I’d seen had mainly consisted of a dark bulk of trees against mountainous hills, as we headed higher into the Appalachians. In the last of the afternoon light we’d piled up Interstate 64, through the glittering sprawl of Charlottesville and then higher into the beginnings of the Blue Ridge. After Waynesboro, Ghuaji had taken 81