One of Us. Michael Marshall Smith

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       Four

      We got her laid out on the sofa, and I was halfway through making coffee when there was a buzz at the door. I had my gun out before I knew what I was doing, and Deck held his hands up.

      ‘Be cool,’ he said, squinting through the peep hole, and kicking aside the small pile of newspapers which had arrived while I was away. ‘Just the old guy.’

      Woodley lurched in. ‘I take it you understand this is going to be double rate?’ he rasped, setting his two bags down on the floor. ‘It's nearly four in the morning.’

      ‘Just shut up and get on with it,’ I said. ‘You'll get four times the rate if you understand that mentioning this to anyone could be fatal. For you, not her.’

      Woodley harumphed for a moment, trying to hide a satisfied leer. If there's anything the old berk likes more than money, I can't imagine what it would be. He peered at Laura Reynolds: when he saw the blood-soaked towels he blanched, and waved a hand vaguely at Deck. ‘Let them out, would you, young fellow?’

      Though I'd managed to remain relatively calm during the journey home, seeing Woodley dithering around brought it home just how ill Laura Reynolds was. The only time I'd give the old twonk house room was when things were close to the edge. I grabbed one of his bags and shoved him in front of me towards the main bedroom. Meanwhile Deck opened the other bag and let the remotes out – small crab-like machines, the size of tarantulas. Attracted by the smell of blood, they clambered straight up onto the sofa, and started nosing around.

      Deck and I had used Woodley on and off for five years, back in the bad old days. He had once, he claimed, been a telesurgeon for covert army operations – conducting surgery remotely through satellite links. There was no way I'd found of establishing whether this was true, but it was certainly the case that he couldn't stand blood. We'd shown him some once, just to check. He didn't mind the sight of it, so long as it was mediated through the remotes' cameras – just didn't like the reality of the actual stuff. After he was court-martialled (unfairly, so he claimed, though he declined to specify what the unfair charges had been) he couldn't get a proper licence, so he hacked out a living catering to people like me. People who every now and then needed something biological sorted out, and who couldn't go to a hospital. Old fool he might be, and I strongly suspected he collected string and slept on the beach somewhere, but boy could that guy stitch. Nicely healed scars in my shoulder, chest and leg – all of which had once been bullet wounds – were testament to that.

      I stood where I could see both Laura and Woodley, and watched as he got down to work. The old man's hands were trembling big time, but that wasn't a cause for concern: the controls had anti-shake mechanisms built into them. He put the glasses and gloves on, and within moments the remotes were speeding up and down the woman's arms. After a while one of them hopped off the sofa and delved in the bag, reappearing with a fridgipacked bag of plasma. Woodley clucked and frowned with concentration.

      Deck appeared next to me, handed me a cigarette. I fitted a prism filter on the end and lit it gratefully. The filters are a pain in the ass, stealing half the flavour, but it's the only way of smoking indoors without the wall sensors ratting on you. The cigarettes dissolve after use, which is convenient, because possession of them is a misdemeanour. Smoking in LA these days takes more planning than conducting a minor war.

      ‘So?’ Deck asked.

      ‘Later,’ I said.

      Deck smiled, settled back to watch the remotes. He's a patient man – far more so than me. You could dump Deck in the middle of the Gobi desert, and he'd just look around and say, ‘Is there any beer?’

      ‘No,’ you'd reply, obviously.

      ‘Water?’ You shake your head, and he'd think for a minute:

      ‘Anywhere to sit?’ And he'd walk over to the nearest fairly comfortable rock, and sit there for as long as it took for either beer, water or a parallel universe to appear.

      After a while I got fidgety, and checked the answering machine. This works pretty well, considering, hardly ever telling me that 67•0*3∼ has called about the ;,,, t[{+®3, and so I was surprised to see I had no messages. I'd been away for two days. I'm not an especially popular guy, but people tend to ring me up at fairly regular intervals to bug me about something trivial. I experimentally banged the side of the machine.

      ‘Piss off,’ it said. The machine's been sulking since I threw my coffee machine out. I think they had something going together.

      ‘Nobody's called?’

      ‘Since midnight, no. Most people tend to sleep sometimes.’

      I stared down at it. ‘What are you talking about?’

      ‘Which was the difficult word?’

      ‘When did you last give messages?’ I asked, very slowly.

      ‘11.58 p.m. yesterday.’

      ‘Tonight?’

      ‘I remember it clearly. You pressed the button lightly for once.’

      ‘Problem?’ Deck asked.

      I didn't bother to ask the machine if it was sure about the time. If there was any useful cross-breeding that could have taken place in my apartment, it would have been between the answering machine and my alarm clock.

      ‘Someone's been in the apartment tonight,’ I said.