Chen didn’t say anything for a while. The wire-haired guy got through to someone and talked in low, urgent tones. Finally, Chen asked, “Did you leave anything behind that might incriminate you?”
I thought about the kill list. The history I’d written down that included Arno, and Carla and me. Yeah, that would have been incriminating. “No,” I said. “There won’t be anything left at all.” Gelpacks burned hot and long and left no residue. The fire department would think Arno had accidently set off some of the extra buzzcar fuel bars he stored in his garage.
I sat staring at the back of the wire-haired guy’s head while we drove back to town. “Who was Judge Kimbanski? Why did Arno have me kill him?” I didn’t really want to know, but I felt like I should learn. It would deepen my guilt and I had the need to do that. I wanted to wallow in guilt. The more blame I gathered to myself, the more deep my ache. Wallowing made me feel like a martyr.
“Judge Kimbanski was investigating the blackmailing scheme that Kumar, and maybe your brother, ran. The judge got too close, and Arno apparently hired you to kill him. Maybe Arno, acting as your agent, was paid by Kumar, maybe he was a part of it. I doubt we’ll ever know.
“I knew you’d killed before, but I thought you’d forgotten it all. That’s why I didn’t turn you in, but somehow you remembered.” Chen was silent while we waited for a light to change.
“How are you in this, Chen? Why did you pick me up? Why do you care?”
Chen thought about that. You could see him trying to decide how much to tell me, or what story to feed me. Then he shook his head. “I work for Up Your News. I was following the Kimbanski case. The judge was a friend.” Chen dropped his head. He cleaned a nonexistent spot on his shoe, then looked up at me and said quietly. “You killed a good man, Benny.”
Chen watched my reaction. He needed to know if I was a danger to society or not.
“Yes. I killed him.”
I said it like a confession; as though it were for the record; as though I were making sure I wouldn’t ever change my story. “I’d like to think it wasn’t really me. That it was a past me, but I know that really isn’t going to help your feelings about the murder or about me. Arno and Kumar were the last, Chen. Even so, I’ll understand if you turn me in. You’ve no way of knowing who I am now.”
Chen was thoughtful. He flicked his thumbnail against his teeth. “Do you want me to hide you for a while?” He didn’t sound enthusiastic.
“No, I’ll take whatever comes my way. I’m not sure whether Denise will tell them I was there or not. There are probably some police who know I was there, but I doubt they will want to tell how or why they knew. I’ll just let things happen.”
The driver pulled the car up to my building. I reached for the handle, but Chen grabbed my arm. “Arno and Kumar used you to kill. You were a willing partner, but you don’t remember that. If you were arrested for Kimbanski’s murder, they would release you because you already accepted the punishment. Killing Arno and Kumar, that was planned. That, they would wipe your memories for, even if it was self-defense. Maybe you could put all this behind you by confessing, or by getting another forget. But I don’t want you to forget. I want you to remember, Benny. I want every last detail to stay fresh and hot in your mind. You killed your brother, Benny. You feel guilt now, and that is what’s going to keep you straight. If you do go in for another forget, I’ll spill everything I have to the police, and I have more than you know. They will wipe you clean as a new born babe.”
We locked eyes. “Be good, Benny,” he said. He released my arm.
I nodded, climbed out of the car and closed the door behind me. They drove off.
I trudged up to the front of my apartment building. The doorwoman was there, asleep, or faking it. Inside, the lights were out, so I knew the elevators would be too. Climbing the stairs, I thought about Chen being so sympathetic yet stern, but at the same time making it clear with his eyes that he didn’t want to see me again. He already considered me a stranger.
When I opened the door to my room, I saw that the place had been stripped. The only things remaining intact were the table and the bedstead. The mattress had been ripped up and a blanket lay in a pile below the window. All my clothing, all my food, my PAL and even my one chair had been taken. I guessed they took everything that might have hidden evidence or secrets. Kumar probably sent them to clean my place as soon as he knew I was at the police station.
We spend our lifetimes collecting physical representations of memories, but the stuff is so ephemeral. The thievery here didn’t bother me that much. My real past was gone in a few minutes of fire at my brother’s house, and I didn’t even know I’d had a past until a few days ago.
Everything here could be replaced, but people were going in and out of my apartment like it was a thrift store and not leaving any money for what they took.
I stood up on my bed and watched the swirling clouds through the window. The note in the dust was still there on the sill as were the carrot doodles. I pushed the doodles onto the floor and wiped off the note about my stuff being at Arno’s. I’d been there and didn’t like it.
The old life was completely gone now except for my memories of Kumar’s face burning and Arno lying on the floor as I left the garage. Carla was alive, but changed in ways I didn’t understand. My stomach hurt. I wanted to forget. I climbed down from the bed, sat on the floor, and cried. A tough guy killer sitting in the middle of an empty apartment, weeping and rocking and holding his stomach. I wanted to forget.
Lying back onto the floor and looking at the ceiling, I thought back on what Chen had said in the car. “I’ll spill everything I have to the police, and I have more than you know,” he’d said. What else did he know that he would tell to the police? And how had he known I was going to Arno’s house with Kumar? I hadn’t told him about my appointment. But what made me stand up and start pacing was the realization that Chen had allowed me to kill two people. Whether guilty or not, he should have stopped me. His wire-haired proxy should have stopped me.
Chen had told me not to take my information to Kumar in the first place. Why? Was Kimbanski really investigating Arno and Kumar, or was he investigating Chen? He’d said that Kumar would try to pump me for more information about him. But what could I have told Kumar that he didn’t already know?
Thinking back on it, when I first went to Chen to talk about the bills from Forget What, he’d suggested using Carla to get my transcript. He’d known I knew Carla, and he apparently knew we worked together too and thought it a great joke to get us back together when neither of us remembered that we were killers.
What’s more, he’d said Carla could get my last transcript for me. It was a minor distraction at the time. I thought it a slip of the tongue, but obviously he’d known I’d had other forgets. He also said later that he knew I’d killed before. Could Chen be a danger to Carla? If I determined he was, would I kill him?
Paranoia is insidious. It starts with a little thing, something you hardly notice, but you still question it. Then, when you start looking for more evidence to prove that they are out to get you, you start to see it everywhere. Repeatedly pacing the five steps from the door to the bed wasn’t helpful either. It just fueled my obsession.
My chair had been removed, so I flipped over what was left of the mattress, pulled the bed away from the wall, and wrapped the blanket around the mattress like a bandage to contain most of the stuffing. It looked like a fresh-made army cot. I laid down on top and forced myself to smile and think about Carla’s face.
I laid there for quite a while, feeling better, until I fell asleep. A fwoop sound startled me awake and I immediately rolled away from the sound and off the bed. I landed on my elbow and stifled a groan. Light expanded into the room as the door swung open, and I could see under the bed as two sets of boots and dark pant legs strode into my apartment. The palm lock lay smoking on the floor. I could hear my breath easing in and out. I sounded like a tire pump.
“He’s not h
ere,” a man said.
A woman replied. “Look in the bathroom, quickly.” She sounded like she was in charge. Her voice was familiar.
“If he’s in there, he’s going to shoot me.”
“I’ll be right behind you, just go. I don’t think he’s here at all.”
One of the sets of boots took small shuffling steps toward the bathroom. If he turned to his right and looked between the bed and the wall, he would see me. I rolled further under the bed, using the noise from his shuffling to mask my movement.
He stopped for a moment, probably listening, though why he couldn’t hear my heart pound, I didn’t know. My lungs ached from consciously focused breathing. I hoped his vision was poor coming from the lit hallway into the dark room.
The bathroom light went on. The shower curtain screeched suddenly across the bar breaking the silence. “He’s not here.”
The man strode back to the door. “Looks like his bed hasn’t been slept in either. They’re going to be mad. We’ve tipped him off, and he’ll be more careful now. I told you we should have kicked the door in. He won’t believe this break-in was just burglars. He’s going to know.”
The woman moved into the kitchen area. Cupboard doors thumped closed as she searched. “It looks like he’s moved out,” she said, “but let’s get out of here anyway in case he comes back. You never know what a guy like him is carrying.”
They kicked the palm lock out of the way and pulled the door closed behind them. A pool of light from the hallway still shone through the hole where the lock used to be. I waited, elbow throbbing, still trying to breathe slowly.
These two assassins didn’t know that Kumar had had the place stripped, which meant only that they weren’t associated with Kumar. They could still be police, though the police had shown previously that they have easier and quieter ways to enter my apartment.
I counted to a hundred before I lifted my head and peered over the edge of the bed. No one was there, but I waited ten minutes, listening and rubbing my elbow, before I stood up shakily and padded over to the door.
Someone knew I was a killer, and they wanted me dead. Chen was the only one I could think of who knew and was still alive.
Chapter 22
My PAL had been taken with everything else, but I figured it to be about two-thirty or three in the morning when the assassins left my apartment. Since someone wanted to kill me and they knew where I lived, I said good-bye to my desk and what was left of my bed. I walked out the door knowing I couldn’t return for a while. Everything I owned was in my pockets, cash and swipe cards and the slash thatcher I’d used to start the fire that burned Kumar and Arno.
The laundry room in the basement was a dank hole, but under the sink I found a pair of huge greasy pants that would fit over my own. Stuffed behind a broken washing machine I discovered an oversize coat with a burned left sleeve. Judging by the dust and layers of cobwebs it must have been there for years. A piece of torn green undershirt, which I tied over my head, completed the look. I put a little of the money in the outside pants and put the rest in two mismatched socks in the pockets of my own inside pants.
If they were watching the entrances, there wasn’t much I could do about it, but I didn’t think they would recognize me with the alterations. I certainly didn’t smell the same.
I walked out the front door. No one moved on the street. The one street lamp lit a few cars parked on the far side of Obyeo. A light drizzle made everything shiny. I sat down beside the doorwoman
She kicked me. “What do you think you’re doing? And in them clothes.”
So much for my disguise, at least at close range. “I’m hiding,” I said. I pulled out a five and gave it to her. “You mind if I sit here for an hour or so?”
She looked at the bill. “Yeah, OK. But don’t make it a habit. I’m not a landlord.”
“I thought this was your real estate.”
“And don’t be thinking of any long term leases.” I wasn’t sure, but I thought she might have snuck a smile in at that point.
“Did you see a man and a woman dressed in black, maybe carrying weapons, go into the building about twenty minutes ago?”
She grunted. “How could I miss them? They came by like they were invading the place, jack boots and all. Were they after you? Is that who you’re hiding from?”
“They blew off the lock in my room, but I hid under the bed.”
“You hid under the bed?” She laughed showing white teeth. “That’s a good one. And they didn’t look? That’s even better. They weren’t pros, that’s for sure. They approached the door like they’d read a book about how to approach a door, but they kept talking to each other in a whisper so loud I’m surprised they didn’t wake you up from down here.”
“What did they say?”
“The woman was pointing and saying, ‘Go over there,’ or ‘Don’t make so much noise.’ You’d think they were in training. She called him Soybrain a couple times. He called her Rela.”
“Was the power back on by then?”
“Yes, the lights woke me up a little while before that.”
“What did they look like?”
“She had medium hair, blonde and wavy and in a ponytail, silver nails—bad color for her light complexion. She was much shorter than he was. He had dark stiff hair about as long as hers, some stubble—pretty much nondescript other than that.”
I stared at her. “That’s a remarkably good description.” I pulled another ten out of my pocket and gave it to her. She’d just described perfectly the driver and the wire-haired guy in the front of Chen’s car. I couldn’t be positive that this Rela was the same one I’d had dinner with at Arno’s, but the matching name and hair would be an extraordinary coincidence. Paranoia is instinctual for a reason. Sometimes it saves your life.
“I used to be a couturier—you know, a fashion designer. The way people looked was my business.” She stuffed the money into her shirt. “You could use a fashion consultation yourself.”
A buzzcar flew past overhead, but other than that there was still no movement on the street. “What happened? Why did you quit?”
She looked at me curiously. “You’re just passing time here. I got to stay. Don’t get me thinking about old times. I don’t need the heartache.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean.”
“I don’t think you do. You aren’t down low enough. Live awhile in those clothes. See how it feels. It changes your life. Just the way people look at you changes your life.”
I thought about that for a while. I couldn’t figure out why people like her lived on the street. Even if you had no money, you could get an apartment as long as you took the rent receipts down to the gov every month, and, although the dole wasn’t really enough money to buy all the food you needed, with some odd jobs and some scratching, you could get along. Yet there were a lot of people who chose not to accept public assistance. They would rather sit outside, unprotected and hungry and let their life get sucked into the concrete. It seemed like a self-enforced misery, a kind of righteous martyrdom. What was the point?
I sat for another twenty minutes. My ass was falling asleep and getting cold. “My name is Benny—Benjamin. If you need anything, let me know. I’ll help if I can. I won’t be back for a while, but after I’ve straightened a few things out, I’ll move back in.”
Big sighs can mean a lot of things. This one I think was her way of saying she didn’t think I would be back. “I’m Myra, but everyone calls me Hattie.” She reached up and patted the top hat on her stack, which this night was a purple beret. She gazed intently at me for a moment then kicked me in the calf. “I think I still owed you that one. Maybe we’re even now.”
That last kick irritated me at first, I was getting tired of being kicked, but then I decided that it was her way of keeping me at a distance. She didn’t want friends. She certainly didn’t want any that would be dead in a day or two. She’d lost enough already.
If someone was still watching the a
partments, they had more patience than I had. I stood up to go, and rubbed my butt to get the circulation going again. I didn’t know which way to turn. Under The River was the only place I could think of, so I waddled over to LaSally, getting my circulation going, then headed south.
On the way, I thought about Chen. The more I thought about him, the more I thought he was a self-absorbed, nasty, ass-thatching bastard. I just hadn’t really taken notice of that fact before because he was a friend. You can put up with a lot of crap from a friend. You just ignore the bad behaviors. Especially when he is the only friend you have.
I didn’t have any close friends, and I started wondering why not. I guessed I’d forgotten them all, or pissed them off before they turned from acquaintances to friends. Or maybe I just kicked people too often. I suspected that before I had my last couple forgets I had acted a lot like Chen acted. Maybe I was a self-absorbed, nasty, ass-thatching bastard too. Perhaps removing all those experiences and memories had allowed a conscience to bubble up to the surface.
Since he didn’t succeed in killing me, Chen would think I would be out to kill him now. He must have determined that if I tracked down Kumar and my own brother, found them guilty, and killed them, that I might start thinking more about it, and I might track him down too. His people had already made the first move. They wanted to kill me first.
At least it wasn’t Carla who came for me. I would have died twice.
I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do when I found Chen. I probably wouldn’t kill him, but I was having a tough time coming up with a good reason not to. Guilt was one, but guilt would pass. The only guilt that remained over killing my brother and Kumar was really over my not feeling especially guilty about it anymore.
Fear would be my best weapon against Chen and his pair of hired guns. I was a killer from their point of view. They were scared of me, and I had nothing to lose.
Chapter 23
There were people walking Chicago’s streets at four in the morning, but they stayed away from each other. If they had to pass by someone, they would look straight ahead and walk fast. I imagined them chiding themselves for fearing every stranger they saw and believing he was a killer. Yet sometimes they would be right.
Walking Shadow: A Sci Fi Noir Novel Page 14
