The Intruders. Michael Marshall

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      I’ll just bet you are, I thought, as I shook it. And I don’t like you.

      He was smooth, though. I guess half his job was making strangers feel at home. There was a framed photograph on one corner of his desk, a studio portrait showing Crane with his arm around a glossy woman, flanked by three daughters of widely spaced ages. Curiously, it was angled not towards his chair, but out into the room; as if it were another credential, like the certificates on the walls. There was a retro radio on the floor in the corner of the room too, 1970s era, presumably another character statement.

      ‘So, Jack,’ he said, leaning back. ‘Great to finally put a face to the name after all this time. I’m amazed it never happened before.’

      ‘Didn’t get out of LA often,’ I said. ‘Until we moved.’

      ‘So what brings you to the city today? You’re in books now, right?’

      ‘I have a meeting. Plus Amy managed to leave her cell phone in a cab yesterday. So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, get the phone to her right away. She must be in withdrawal by now.’

      Todd laughed. Ha, ha, ha. The beats were separate, as if the sequence had been composed, practised and perfected in private many, many years before.

      Then he paused, as if waiting for me to say something else. I thought that was weird. I had been expecting him to be the one to start volunteering information.

      ‘So,’ I said, eventually. ‘What’s the best way of me doing that?’

      ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Crane said. He looked confused.

      ‘I assumed someone here would have her diary.’

      ‘Well, not really,’ he said, folding his arms and pursing his lips. ‘Amy’s our roving trouble-shooter now. As you know, of course. Finger in a lot of pies. A global view. Strategic. But fundamentally she still reports to the LA office. They’d be the people who’d—’

      He stopped, as if he’d just put things together in his head. Looked at me carefully.

      ‘Uh, Amy’s not in Seattle this week, Jack,’ he said. ‘At least, not with us.’

      I was as fast as I could be, but my mouth must still have been hanging open for a second. Maybe two.

      ‘I know that,’ I said, smiling broadly. ‘She’s visiting friends. I just wondered whether she was expected to touch base at any point. As she’s here anyway.’

      Todd shook his head slowly. ‘Not that I know of. But maybe, you know? Have you tried her hotel? We always book people in the Malo. Or is she staying with her … friends?’

      ‘I left a message for her there already. Just wanted to get this phone back to her as quick as I can.’

      ‘Understand that,’ Todd nodded, all smiles again. ‘Lost without them these days, right? Wish I could help you more, Jack. She stops by, I’ll tell her you’re on the hunt. You want to give me your number?’

      ‘I left it already,’ I said.

      ‘That’s right, sorry. Hell of a morning. Clients. Can’t live with them, not recommended business practice to shoot them in the head. Or so they say.’

      He clapped me on the shoulder and walked me out back along the corridor, filling the journey with praise of Amy and a sustained meditation on how her new position was going to shake things up for the company, and in a good way. It was not difficult to imagine him greeting his wife and kids in a similar manner every morning, a goals and achievements spiel capped with assurances of his best attention at all times, cc-ed to his personal assistant.

      He left me at the door and I walked out across reception alone. I turned my head just before stepping back out into the world. It seemed to me that there might be someone standing behind the frosted glass door, watching me leave, but I couldn’t be sure.

      I walked down the alley slowly. I hadn’t brought Amy’s organizer but I remembered the contents. Three days full of meetings. Sure, I hadn’t read the details and they could theoretically have been in LA, San Francisco or Portland – the last only a three-hour drive away – but I didn’t believe for a moment that I’d confused the city. Plus I had her phone in my pocket, found here in this city last night. Amy had come here, and until the night before last had been in contact as usual. Now she was nowhere to be found. The hotel was a blank. The people at her job didn’t know where she was, or said they didn’t.

      And neither did I.

      Post Alley deposited me in a stubby dead-end, over which the beginnings of an elevated street set off towards the bay, before banking sharply left to join the Alaskan Viaduct above. The concrete supports had been covered in graffiti, over what looked like many years. ‘Rev9’, and ‘Later’ and ‘Back Again’ it said, amongst other things. While my eyes were wandering over this I felt a sudden itch in my shoulder blades.

      I turned, slowly, as if that was simply what I was doing next. A few people were walking back and forth at the end of the road, going about their business in the shadow of the elevated highway, getting in or out of cars, moving stuff here and there. Beyond that there was a wide road and a couple of piers, and then the flicker of light hitting water out on Elliott Bay.

      No one was looking in my direction. Everyone was in motion, walking or driving. Traffic rumbled over the elevated highway above, sending deep vibrations through the buildings and sidewalks around me, until the whole city almost seemed to be singing one long, low note.

Chapter 9

      I found a bar downtown. I scored a table by the window and ordered a pot of coffee – employing the last of my charm to get the waitress to let me use a socket behind the bar to plug in a power adapter for Amy’s phone, which I’d bought on the way. While I waited for the coffee I watched people at the other tables. Bars used to be a place where you came to get away from the outside world. That was the point. Now everyone seemed to be sucking free wi-fi or talking on cell phones.

      Nobody did anything interesting enough to distract me from the interlocking dialogues in my head. The fact Amy wasn’t in town on Kerry, Crane & Hardy business could be explained. I knew that. I was calm. It was still possible there was nothing strange going on here except inside my own head, and it reminded me of a time a year or so before, when Amy went through a period of talking in her sleep. At first it was just a mumbling and you couldn’t make out anything within it. After a while it got stronger, words and sections of sentences. It would wake me up, night after night. It began to screw with both our sleep patterns. She tried adjusting her diet and caffeine intake and spending even longer in the gym on the way to work, but nothing helped. Then it just stopped, though it was a couple of weeks before I started sleeping soundly again. In the meantime I had plenty of time to lie in the dark and wonder what made the brain do such a thing, how it must be organized so that when all of the conscious functions had apparently checked out, some part was still verbalizing about something. How was it doing that, and why? Who was it talking to?

      That’s what it felt like my brain was doing right now. The part under my conscious control was sticking fingers in dykes and providing rational explanations. It was doing good work, suggesting Amy might indeed be here on the quiet in the hope of bringing clients to KC&H as a lock, stock and barrel triumph that СКАЧАТЬ