‘It's already started,’ I said, kicking the door straight back at him and crunching it into his nose. He clattered back into the hallway and fell somewhat awkwardly on his head. I strode a couple of paces into the apartment, which smelt bad, looking for more fun. Rat-face's friend appeared in another doorway, recognized me, darted back the way he'd come. I followed, and found myself in a room with a gun pointing at my head.
Sitting at a table in the corner was a large black man, head shaven, the whites of his eyes luminous in the gloom. A line of blue LCDs was tattooed into his scalp from front to back, blinking softly in the twilight. His features were broad and brutal, and his skin was greasy. He stared impassively at me. Narcotics were spread out in front of him, arranged into piles of various sizes. I'd interrupted a buy – no wonder people were kind of edgy. I stood still. It seemed the thing to do.
After a moment the big man lowered the gun. He looked at me a little longer, moving his head slightly as if trying to catch a glimpse of me in a different light. Something about him struck me as strange, though I couldn't put my finger on what it might be.
Rat-face reappeared raggedly from the hallway and started squawking, hungry for blood. ‘Say adios to your brain, motherfuck,’ he snarled, and my head was suddenly knocked forward as he jammed the barrel of his gun into my neck.
‘Ain't no call for that,’ the big man said mildly. ‘Leastways not until we find out what he wants.’
‘I want to know if anyone saw someone go upstairs since last night,’ I said, trying to avoid looking at the man's flashing head. I thought I could hear it blinking on and off like a car indicator.
‘Well?’ the man said, raising his eyebrows at the other two men. In variously bad tempers but with apparent sincerity, the men denied having seen anyone. The big man looked back at me. ‘This be anything to do with the dead dude in the hallway?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And who the fuck are you?’
‘No one in particular,’ he said. ‘Just passing through, doing a little deal with my new friends here. I ain't seen anyone either, and I didn't recognize the bag of bones lying downstairs. You want him, you can find the body in the bins behind the back of Mandy's Diner out on the edge.’
‘You moved it there?’
‘Surely did. It was lowering the tone.’
‘Okay,’ I said, starting to back out of the room.
‘Now I'm going to blow his face off,’ said Rat-face, getting excitable again. The big man tutted.
‘No you ain't: can't you get that into your head?’
Rat-face stuffed his gun into the front of his pants and squared up to me instead. ‘Okay, well Marty and me'll just beat the shit out of him, then. Okay?’ He glanced at the black man for confirmation, and I wondered what the power structure was here.
Marty looked less than enthusiastic at the prospect, and quietly relieved when the big man shook his head. ‘You welcome to try,’ he said, ‘but the dude has the Bright Eyes and in my experience they tend to be some crazy motherfucks.’
He winked at me, and went back to sorting his piles of drugs. Rat-face glared. Marty had taken a step backwards at the mention of Bright Eyes, and took another as I turned to him. I walked unmolested through the gap and out of the apartment.
Back in Mal's I stood for a while, wondering what to do next. Then I noticed something, and walked slowly to where Mal's display hung on the wall down by the window. When the sheet of cloth was pulled away it confirmed what I'd suspected.
The display had gone. The board was still there, covered in tiny holes where pins had been, but all of the photos and notes had been removed. I let the cloth fall again.
Who'd done this? Not Mal. He wouldn't have had time before being killed. And why would he take it down? He was a cop. It was his work. He was entitled to have what the fuck he liked on his walls. So who?
Whoever cleaned the place up.
Or, I thought, maybe it had happened earlier than that. When I'd come back to find Mal dead, checking whether his board was still intact had been the last thing on my mind. Perhaps the fumbling Suej had heard was a scrabbling as they ripped everything off of the board.
Either way, it begged questions: why remove evidence of what Mal had been working on? What did that have to do with me?
Answer, nothing.
So maybe it wasn't me they'd been after. Maybe Mal had been the target all along.
I lit a cigarette and stared out of the window until I'd finished it. I was thinking, I guess, though it was like swatting flies off a piece of meat. Then I locked the door so I wouldn't be disturbed, and tossed Mal's apartment. Not all of it, you understand; the cupboards alone would have taken months. Just the places a cop would hide things.
I found nothing, not even a computer, which I knew Mal had. My eyes turned upwards, and I saw the loose panel in Mal's ceiling, a panel which was presumably the entrance to the place where he'd tried to hide the spares before opening the door to his killer. The hiding place which the people who'd whacked him hadn't found.
I grabbed a chair and, standing precariously on its back, opened the panel. I boosted myself up into the darkness, and rested for a moment on the edge with my legs dangling down. I couldn't see anything, but it felt right. Mal was a secretive bastard — when he played poker he kept his cards inside his chest. I stood and wandered around like a zombie, arms outstretched, feeling for a switch. Eventually found one, a pull cord which lit a hanging bulb and threw the area into harsh shadow.
It was surprisingly neat — untypical Mal. A pile of boxes lined one wall — autopsy reports and other documents, hardcopied from police e-Files. Illegal — Mal out on a limb about something. Down the other end was a desk, and on it a computer. Nothing in the drawers. Everything looked bright and shiny, as if this was some new venture, a recent hidey-hole. The computer was his old one, a cellular Matrix connection plugged in the back. A digipic lay next to it.
On the wall above the desk, photographs. Three women dead; close-ups showing that their eyes were missing.
Unspecified facial damage.
I sat down heavily on his chair, and I found I was swallowing involuntarily. I forced myself to concentrate on the images, on these three women and not on any others.
Three murders, plus one in the early hours of today which he'd been too dead to know about. And maybe … I checked the fact sheets tacked under the pictures. He didn't have yesterday's either — too busy dealing with me and the spares. Five murders in ten days, each with the same MO.
He'd said he wanted to tell me about something.
I yanked the hard drive from the computer, slipping Mal's digipic into my pocket alongside it as an afterthought. Then I climbed back down into the apartment, resealed the roof and left for Mandy's Diner.
Howie's place was nearly empty.
I have a talent for arriving between shifts, for finding gaps and walking into them. As I went in the back way I heard a voice call out from Howie's office.
‘Is it nice?’ he asked.
‘Is what nice?’ I said, turning to look at Howie through the door. He was standing by his desk, holding a sheaf of invoices.
‘The truck you've bought. The truck you went out to buy. Is it a nice colour? Is it comfortable? Did you check it thoroughly for rust spots and thunking noises?’
‘I haven't bought it yet.’
Howie sighed. ‘I know you haven't, Jack.’
I walked