Kitabı oku: «Spares», sayfa 2

I was glad that Mal was still enough my friend to simply say the name out loud. ‘What kind of problems?’

Mal shrugged. ‘Rumours. He's pretty much the man these days. Probably someone's just trying to climb over him. The usual shit. Just thought I'd let you know.’ He shook his head. ‘You really only staying a couple hours?’

I nodded tightly. ‘This shit's too deep to swim in. We've got to disappear and stay that way.’

‘Again.’ He smiled. ‘Something I want to tell you about later, though, before you go.’ Then he clapped me on the back with his massive hand and turned towards the spares. ‘You guys about ready for some noodles?’

They stared at him with wide eyes. ‘They've never had noodles,’ I said.

‘Then they haven't lived,’ he replied, and of course he was right.

I walked a long way through the bowels of New Richmond, my stomach growling, wishing I'd stayed to have some noodles with the spares. There hadn't been time. We had serious people after us, and were only safe for as long as it took them to realize that I'd given them a false name and previous address when I was taken on at the Farm. As soon as that was blown, all hell was going to break loose.

It was about two miles from my entry point to the stage where I started to climb, two miles of textured darkness and muffled sounds. When I saw the familiar shaft in front of me I stopped walking. I rolled my head on my shoulders, wishing briefly and pointlessly that I didn't smoke, then climbed up the metal ladder attached to the wall.

Ten minutes later my arms and legs were aching and I'd reached the horizontal ventilation chute on 8. The MegaMall's original ventilation system is now completely disused, and most of it is filled with refuse, sludge and unnameable crap from a million different sources. It's like a lost river – paved over and diverted and hidden, but still there in the gaps and interstices. All but a couple of the original inspection hatches were welded shut a long time ago. I was hoping that no more had been sealed while I'd been away, or I'd be in trouble.

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 toilets in a restaurant on 8.

I pulled the panel back about a millimetre, 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 towards 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 licence. 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, and it was still predominantly a place where you came to eat, drink or have a good time. Whatever the focus of your sexual inclination, you can go to the 8th floor and watch it dancing on a very small stage. You can also score recreational quantities of pretty much whatever you want, without danger of being caught in a fire storm. Most of it is only one storey high, and they keep the ceiling lights off, relying on orange street lamps which run along either side of the thoroughfares. If you don't check the corners too closely the floor has a kind of lop-sided charm, like a run-down but cheery portion of some European capital, or the Old Quarter of New Orleans. The ceiling is covered in creepers and foliage, making the roads feel like paths in a forest. Forests usually give me The Fear, but I like 8, and always have. It's full of neon, autumn jazz, the smell of good food and, for some reason, the feeling that it has just stopped raining. It never has, of course, but it always feels that way to me.

I walked quickly down the centre of the street, noticing what was new and what remained. The streets were quiet but music slunk out of most of the open doors, buoying up the desultory strippers who swayed on table tops. A few down-and-outs sat on street corners, stuck in main() with their handleMouseDown() mitts held out, but from the look of them I didn't think anyone's cursor was ever going to find them. It's an image problem, I think. Maybe they should all club together and hire a PR consultant, put out a few TV ads, find some way of making begging seem cool. I'm sure there's money to be made in it somewhere.

I had to be out of here quickly, but I wanted to make my last visit right. I stopped at one corner to catch a few minutes from a news post, just like I always used to. New Richmond has a twenty-four-hour local events feed on every corner. Flatscreen monitors hang like banners wherever your go, twisting and turning to foist information on the unwary public as they approach. It helps the upper floors think they know what's going on. They don't, of course, but they spend so much time talking about the twenty per cent it covers that no one even guesses at all the rest.

Arlond Maxen had opened a new school on 190, I learned. Big fucking deal. The people who lived that high had so much money they had to be sedated every morning to stop them going berserk with glee. The only floors richer than 190 to 200 were the ones built on top of the MegaMall – all owned by Maxen himself, the de facto king of the heap. In the news footage, Maxen looked the same as he always had: distant, a man who was always the other side of an LCD panel or cathode tube. It was some times hard to believe that he was anything more than a pattern of lights, moving across the face of New Richmond, always at one remove.

The next item said that Chief of Police McAuley was lobbying to relocate people out of 100 and fill it with concrete, to finally stop the plebs from accessing the higher floors. Cunning, I thought, and never mind that the real lowlife have fuck-off great houses on 185. The C of P in New Richmond is one of the world's premier dickheads, and also one of the best kickback receivers in the country. Never known to fumble a play.

The new hobby for the young and stupid was wall-diving: jumping out of upper-storey windows without a rope or parachute. And some woman had got psychoed and spread over twenty square yards of 92: the murderer had wrought ‘unspecified damage to her face’, and the cops were hopeful of an early arrest. Yeah, right.

Nothing much had changed.

Passing all the food stands wasn't easy. The one thing Ratchet hadn't been able to cook properly was burgers, and after five years I'd almost turned the idea of them into a religion. I took a turn off Main and walked some sidestreets until I reached the place I was going. The sign outside had been made bigger and more ostentatious, but apart from that the bar looked exactly the same. I stood outside for a moment, looking past the wooden window frames, stained deep brown with polish, at the dim pools of light within. I came here a lot, at one time, when things were different. Seeing it again made me feel old, and tired, and breathlessly sad.

Just as I was reaching for the door, something odd happened. I thought I felt a hand try to wheedle itself into my palm, down where it hung by my side. It was plump and warm, like the hand of an eight-year-old girl. I felt it try to pull me away.

As soon as I noticed it properly the feeling was gone, and though I turned and looked both ways up the sidestreet, there was no one there. I stood still for a moment, breathing shallowly, aware of a small tic under my left eye. So far, I'd managed to blank the things I should be feeling, but I knew I couldn't keep it up for ever. For the first time in years I wanted something which came in small rolls of foil, wanted it suddenly and completely with a need that defied all reason.

I forced myself to push open the door and walk into the bar. It was mainly empty, a few hopheads nodding over their drinks. I went straight through into the back area, which is smaller, cosier, and also where the owner tends to hang out.

‘Jack Randall,’ said a voice, and I turned.

Howie was sitting at one of the tables, piles of receipts and general administrative junk strewn all around him. That kind of stuff makes me want to go back to barter economy, but he lives for it. An unopened bottle of Jack Daniels was at his right elbow, next to a large bucket of ice and two empty glasses. He was slightly rounder, had lost a little hair and gained an alarming scar on his forehead, but apart from that he looked pretty much the same. He grinned at me affably, a picture of relaxation.

‘Guess you're not surprised to see me,’ I said.

‘To see you, no. To see you alive, always, and especially today. Dath? Paulie?’ Howie gave an upwards nod towards the couple of steroid abusers lurking round a table near the back. They rose and split up, one going to cover the front entrance, the other the back. I'm a cautious man, but Howie sleeps with a bazooka under his pillow. Dath nodded at me as he passed. ‘The guys at the back door gave me a call,’ Howie said, dropping a couple of cubes of ice into the glasses, and then filling both with whiskey. ‘Sounded like it had to be you.’

‘That's a big drink,’ I said, accepting a glass.

‘By whose standards? Come on Jack, I've seen you unconscious earlier than this. Time was you thought by nine o'clock the evening was getting old. You want any Rapt while you're here?’

I shook my head, silently cursing Howie for being able to read my mind. ‘I've cleaned up a little,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘You just think you have,’ he said, and lifted one of the glasses. ‘A man who lays it on like you did only ever goes on holiday.’

I chinked my glass against his and drank. Howie drained his in one, leaned back, and patted his stomach comfortably with both hands.

‘How's tricks?’ I asked, looking around the bar.

‘Tricky,’ he said. ‘But what about this? Couples, okay, they're always ringing each other up, inviting each other round for dinner. Sounds like a great idea at the time – some wine, fine conversation, a chance to peek down the other woman's blouse. But then the day starts to approach, and everyone's thinking Jesus H – why did we agree to this? The hosts are dreading all the admin – restocking the drinks cabinet, cooking fiddly food, making sure all the tubes of Gonorrhoea-Be-Gone in the bathroom are hidden. The guests are thinking about getting expensive cabs and babysitters and not being able to smoke. Complete downer all round. You with me so far?’

‘Yes,’ I said, though I wasn't sure I was.

‘Okay. So the idea is this. A Date Cancelling Service. The day before the evening's supposed to happen, the guests ring up and cancel. They call it off, politely, just before anyone has to actually do anything. Everyone gets a nice warm glow about agreeing to see each other, but no one has to tidy up afterwards or schlep baby photos halfway across town. Everyone can just sit in their own apartments and have a perfectly good evening by themselves, and they'll enjoy it all the more because they thought they were going to have to go out.’

‘Where do you come in?’

‘I come up with an excuse for cancelling – won't even have to be a good one, because no one wants to go through with it anyway. You can say, “My head has exploded and Janet has turned into an egg” and it'll be, “Oh, sorry to hear that, some other time then, yeah great, goodbye”.’

‘Where does the money come in?’

‘I take the cut of what it would have cost to buy the food and drink and cabs. In the early days it's nickel and dime, I admit, but wait till it gets into the upper floors. I'll make a pile. What do you think?’

‘I think it's a crock of shit,’ I said, laughing. ‘Even worse than the mugging service.’

‘You could be right,’ he admitted, grinning. ‘But you didn't come here for this – you can wait for the autobiography. What can I do for you, boss man?’

‘Has the word gone round?’ I asked, knowing the answer.

‘The word has gone round and around and met itself coming back. “Jack's in town. Everyone beware.” ’

‘Not any more,’ I said. Howie looked at me soberly.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘And I have to admit, that's not what people are saying. You were spotted out in the Portal, that's all.’ Howie lit a cigarette and looked at me closely. ‘How are you doing, Jack?’

I knew what he was asking. I wasn't ready to go into it yet, not even with him. Possibly not ever, with anyone.

‘I'm okay,’ I said. ‘But I'm in very deep shit.’

‘That I will believe. What can I do for you?’

I reached into my pocket and brought the chip out. It was a small oblong of clear perspex, about four centimetres by two, and five millimetres deep. Along one of the short edges was a row of tiny gold contacts designed to interface the unit to the motherboard of a computer. The number ‘128’ was printed matter-of-factly on the front. I'd found it in my bag after we'd left the Farm. I hadn't put it there, which meant Ratchet must have done. Howie took it from me, peered closely at it, and sniffed.

‘What's this?’

‘I think it's one-twenty-eight gigs of RAM,’ I said.

‘Don't recognize the make. Where's it from?’

‘A friend gave it to me.’

‘You're in luck,’ he said. ‘The market's volatile, and this week it's up. I can probably give you about eight for this without fucking myself up too badly.’

‘I'm in kind of a hurry.’

He reached under the chair and brought up a large metal cashbox. He placed it on the table and opened it, revealing bundles of dirty notes. All of the money in New Richmond is dirty, figuratively at least. There can't be a dollar bill which hasn't been involved in something illegal somewhere down the line, hasn't been handed over in a suitcase at some stage in its life. Howie counted off eight hundred dollars in fifties and held it out to me between two fingers of one hand. ‘You want a loan on top?’

I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but no. Don't know when I'll be this way again. Maybe never.’

‘So pretend I'm your friend and call it a gift.’

I smiled and stood up, slipping the notes into my inside pocket. ‘You are and I'll be okay.’

Howie pursed his lips and looked up at me. ‘You know there's a whack out on you?’

I stared at him. ‘Already? What, an old one?’

Howie shook his head. ‘Don't know, but I think it's new. Heard twenty minutes ago.’

‘How much is it for?’

‘Five thou.’

‘That's insulting. Let me know if it goes above ten,’ I said. ‘Then I'll start seriously watching my back.’

At the door, Dath stepped to one side to let me out. I paused, and looked up at his face. Dath looks like your basic worst nightmare, except he wears expensive clothes and gets a nice close shave. There'd always been a rumour that before working for Howie he'd been a made guy in Miami: starting at the bottom, in the mail room, before deciding to specialize as a hitman. The word was he'd worked his way up the ladder in the old-fashioned way, beginning by being cutting to people: for a hundred dollars he'd march into someone's place, look them up and down and go ‘Yeah, great suit,’ in a really ironic way, and then leave. His speciality was the ‘overheard conversation’ hit. Wherever the target went – in a restaurant, in a bar, in the john – Dath would be somewhere just out of sight, talking loudly about postmodernism. It eventually drove them crazy.

He always denied it. I was never sure.

‘You heard about the contract on me?’ I asked. He nodded. ‘You a player?’

‘Nah,’ he said slowly. ‘Think I'll wait till it goes up to ten.’

Then he winked, and I smiled as I walked past him back out into the streets.

Goodbye to all that, I thought.

Two

The guy behind the counter was looking at me strangely, but I went quickly about my business, walking the mart's dusty aisles and picking out what we needed. I got a couple packs of soya bars, powdered milk, cheap food in heataTins – and the biggest jar of Frapan pickles I could see. Every couple of minutes I glanced down the end and saw the guy was still looking at me. Not all the time, but enough. It was beginning to piss me off.

At the exit of the service shaft, I'd given the guys the 170 dollars I owed them. They were pleasantly surprised, said it had been a pleasure doing business with me, and gave me their card for future reference. The main man also said that Mr Amos had sent a message saying that I had a free pass in future. I told them I wouldn't be coming back.

‘Yeah, he said you'd say that,’ the man said.

Which left me with a little under 700 dollars, just about enough for a beaten-up truck and the gas to get us out of the state. After that, who knows what was going to happen? Certainly not me. I was in kind of a bad mood by then; wishing I'd had another drink with Howie, wishing I'd had several more, in fact, and just forgotten about the spares. I've never been good with responsibility. That much at least seemed not to have changed.

All I could sense for the future was the sound of road beneath tyres and the chill of winter evenings in places I didn't know. After so long away from New Richmond I could hardly believe this was it: a quick score, and then scurrying away back into the wilderness. The feeling got so strong that I actually stopped walking, turned and looked back up at the city. Other pedestrians had to pass either side of me, muttering and glaring, and what they saw was a man just standing, staring up at a building, probably with an expression somewhere between love and hate in his eyes.

Halfway back to Mal's I'd stopped at the Minimart, knowing there were things we needed. I expected a fast and joyless shopping experience. I didn't expect to be stared at. I knew my clothes looked ragged, and I've got a couple of scars on my face – but who hasn't, these days? This is a time for scars. It's a feature. The counter man didn't look especially charming himself. He had the slab knuckles of someone who'd grown up fighting, and the flat eyes of a man who could watch bad things and not feel too much about them. He was big in the shoulders but going to seed out front, and his face looked like someone had spent a happy afternoon flattening it out with a spade. The few other customers I'd seen were fumbling for the cheapest brands of alcohol and shambling up to the counter to pay with heaps of small change. Derelicts, in other words, in a store run by an ex-hood where the lino on the floor was yellowed and worn with age and curled up at every join to show the stained concrete underneath.

Maybe I looked too refined.

There was a convex plastic mirror hanging at the end of the aisle, bent in the middle from some past impact and so dirty as to be nearly opaque. It was there to stop people lifting stuff from the dead zone, but I doubt the proprietor could see much more in it than ghosts. As I walked slowly towards the cold goods I caught sight of my battered reflection. I guess I might have looked a little wired, and in certain lights my eyes can look a little weird. I have the Bright Eyes, for a start, though it generally requires a certain kind of slanting light to show, rather than the sickly haze which oozed out the Mart's tired strip lighting.

I knew he could still see me, even though he was wrapping up a bottle for some huge black guy down the end, so I got out my wallet and made a big thing about counting through my cash. ‘I've got money,’ was what I was saying. ‘Don't worry. You'll get paid.’ His big, impassive face showed no sign of having got my message. There was insufficient depth in his eyes to show if he was even looking, or just had his head pointed my way.

Maybe I was just being paranoid. I turned my attention to the stuff in the chest fridge instead.

‘I wouldn't if I were you,’ said a low voice. I didn't straighten, but just swivelled my eyes from side to side. I couldn't see anyone, and it didn't feel as if anyone was behind me. ‘Seriously, I can't advise it,’ the voice added, and I had my hand halfway in my jacket before I realized it was the fridge talking.

‘What?’ I said quietly.

‘Don't buy the cold goods.’

‘Why?’

‘They aren't cold. I've been broken for six months, and he won't get me fixed. Says it's cold enough outside.’

‘You don't agree.’

‘See that cream cheese? Been there a month. Another couple of days and it's going to explode. And he won't clear it up. That stain on the side there is from a yoghurt that went critical a month ago.’

I glanced round to see if the guy was looking, and saw that I was pretty well masked from him by the racks. I leaned on the front of the cooling unit and spoke quietly.

‘What can you tell me about him?’

‘He's a slob,’ the fridge said. ‘That's all she wrote.’

‘Anything else? Like what his problem is?’

‘Look, I'm just a fucking fridge. Don't buy the cold goods is all I'm saying.’

I reached in and grabbed a pot of soft cheese, and then turned away.

‘You'll regret it.’

‘Probably,’ I agreed.

The other side of the aisle had household goods, and I picked up a box of large band-aids and a couple of bars of soap. Then after some thought I picked up some disinfectant and the floor cloth that looked least like it was second-hand, before heading down to pay.

At the counter another random loser was stocking up on the necessities of his life. A pack of cigarettes, a bag of dope and a half bottle of Wild Thyme. Looked like he had a perfect evening ahead of him, but maybe not so good a life. I saw a flicker down by the side of the cash register and glanced to see an ancient eight-inch television. It was hotwired to the insides of a CD ROM player that had lost its casing somewhere down the years. An old porn film flickered and hazed on the screen. The customer kept his eyes on the action while the counter man gave him his change, and then left grinning vaguely at a scene still playing in his head.

Nice one, I thought. Skim a buck off every bonehead who's too busy watching the skin, and each day you've got a little something extra for yourself.

I dumped my goods on the counter, running my eyes over what else he had behind there. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing self-evidently dangerous.

‘Have you got a bag for that?’ I asked as he started to ring in the goods.

‘One dollar.’

‘You're kidding me.’

He shrugged, put his hand on the next item and waited, eyebrows raised but not even looking at me. I got out my wallet and put a one on the counter. I had a way to walk.

‘Your fridge is broken,’ I said, looking away from him, wondering what I was doing, why I was rattling this man's cage.

‘It's cold enough outside.’

‘Thought you'd say that.’ I opened the pot of soft cheese. The grunge inside was covered in half an inch of lurid blue mould. The counter man smiled meaninglessly, eyes dead. Even his lips weren't up to the job. The left side of his mouth barely moved, as if there was some deep damage there.

‘So don't eat it.’

‘Where can I buy some real milk?’

‘It's in the fridge.’

‘I'll pass,’ I said, and he got on with making up the bill. Quiet, tinny grunts came from his TV set, and I added: ‘I'll be checking my change.’

‘Sure you will,’ he said, reaching under the counter to bring up a battered brown paper bag. I put my purchases into it, trying to make sure the heavy stuff went at the bottom, like Henna had taught me to. Sometimes things like that swam up through the years. Then on an afterthought I reached behind me and took down a bottle of Jack Daniels. Actually, it wasn't an afterthought. It had been a first thought and an in-between thought. I'd been trying to make it an ex-thought, but something inside me gave up.

The bill came to nearly sixty dollars. I had no obvious way of getting hold of any more cash, and I couldn't use my ownCard without setting off a large flashing sign saying, ‘Anyone interested in bringing unhappiness into Jack Randall's life will find him right here’. But most of the food was concentrate, and we were going to have to eat wherever we went. Running out of money would simply bring the inevitable on a little sooner. I paid the man, picked up my bag, and made for the door.

‘Lieutenant.’

I froze. It was very dark outside, and I could see flecks of cold rain hitting the cracked glass, cutting lines across it.

‘Don't remember me, do you.’

I turned slowly. The man was still standing behind the counter, arms folded. Something almost like life had crept into his eyes when I wasn't looking.

‘Should I?’

‘You put me away.’

Oh shit, I thought. I briefly considered facing him down, but the look in his eyes killed the idea almost before it was born. He'd made me. I looked away and then back, and in that moment realized that the last five years were apt to blow away to nothing, and that in some sense I'd never been away.

‘I probably had a reason.’

‘Three years. That's a long time.’

‘I'm surprised I don't recall the circumstances.’

‘You never met me. I was just a mule.’

I stared calmly back at him, trying to work out how I was supposed to play this. It was the last thing I needed. The very last thing. We looked at each other for a while and I could hear the blood pumping through the arteries in my head. It stepped up a notch when I realized that I was holding the grocery bag in front of me with both arms. He could have had me in pieces before I got my hand anywhere near my jacket pocket.

‘You've bounced back nicely,’ I said eventually.

‘I took someone's fall, and they looked after me. They still do.’ ‘I'm not The Man any more,’ I said, abruptly. His face changed then, as a broad vicious smile spread slowly across it.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Guess we all heard about that.’

‘You want to say something funny?’ I asked, and his grin dropped. The light went out of his eyes and they went back to looking like two very old coins pressed into dirty white Plasticine. Like so many of his kind his face looked far away and unformed, as if imperfectly glimpsed through a layer of water.

I smiled faintly, nodded, then left. The wind had picked up outside and the rain was turning to sleet. As I stepped out of the store I heard his voice again.

‘Lieutenant,’ he said. I didn't turn round but kept on walking, and the rest of his words were blurred by the sound of the wind and a siren in the distance. ‘Be seeing you.’

When I was round the corner I picked up the pace, swearing dully and repetitively. A quick glance behind showed that no one was following, but that was no consolation. A phone call would be all it took, a phone call from a man so far down the food chain that plankton probably made fun of him behind his back.