One of Us. Michael Marshall Smith
to live without it.
I was halfway across the lobby downstairs when I heard an exclamation behind me. I turned unsteadily – unconscious bodies are difficult to manage – to see the flunky staring at me open-mouthed, hand already reaching for the phone.
‘Private joke,’ I said.
The flunky eyed the blood-soaked towels. ‘Excuse me?’
‘She's a heavy sleeper. Sometimes I just come along and take her somewhere weird so when she wakes up she wonders where the hell she is.’
‘Sir, I don't believe you.’
‘Does this help?’ I asked, pulling my gun out and pointing it straight at his head.
‘Very amusing,’ he said, and his hand crept back to his side.
‘Keep laughing for a while,’ I suggested. ‘Or I'll come back and explain it again.’
I lurched around the corner to where I'd parked the car, and laid Laura Reynolds across the back seats. Then I got in and drove away, knowing that if I didn't get her to a doctor within a very short time my life had just got even worse.
As I two-wheeled onto Santa Monica Boulevard I nearly totalled us both, swerving to avoid a small group of chest freezers making their way across the road. I could have just driven straight at them, but I make a policy of not tangling with white goods. They're really heavy.
When we were safely heading in the right direction I called Deck. It took him a while to understand what I was saying, but he agreed to do as I asked. Then I flipped the phone to the Net and tried Quat again. It rang and rang, but there was still no answer. I frowned, cut the connection, redialled. Okay it was late, but Quat was always up, and whenever he was awake he was in the Net. Still no answer.
I left it on callback with a redirect to the apartment, and concentrated on the road as we crossed Wilshire and into Beverly Hills. You should know that I'm not a big fan of driving. Never have been. I realize this undermines me in the view of any red-blooded American, but so be it. Lot of people still bemoan the fact that kids spend all their time in computer games: I say it's the only thing that's going to prepare them for real life. Driving equals long stretches of boredom, during which lunatics will randomly pop up and try to kill you – interspersed with pockets of hell where absolutely everything is out to get you. They call these pockets ‘cities’, and they're best avoided unless you happen to live there. Give me a fist fight in a bar, and I'll hold my own. Send me round the beltway at rush hour – fuck off. I'll take a cab. Or walk.
I glanced back at Laura Reynolds continually as I drove, and after the turn onto Western pulled over to get a proper look at her. She was still breathing, but the rise and fall of her chest was shallow. The blood round the cut on her right arm was congealing nicely, but the other still looked wide open. I loosened the tourniquet for a moment, then re-tightened it before setting off again. I really hoped Deck got hold of Woodley, or I was fucked. The only alternative was taking her to a hospital, in which case I'd lose her. I couldn't stand guard the whole time, and she'd already proved she was determined to escape one way or another.
When I turned off Los Feliz I was happy to see there wasn't much of a queue for entry into Griffith. There's only twenty entrances around the entire district, and at certain times of day it can be a complete pain in the ass. As we approached the wall I saw a knot of armed guards peering in the direction of the car, and was pleased to note that even at this advanced hour they were working for the inhabitants' protection.
In 2007 someone decided that Griffith Park wasn't operating to its full potential. They felt the whole ‘park’ thing, in fact, was a little bit twentieth century. It was all very well having a huge open space with a couple of golf courses and areas for boy scouts to tramp around, but there were other uses the land could be put to. Up-scale residential, for example. The nice areas of LA were pretty full by then, and the well-heeled craved new Lebensraum – especially after plate analysis revealed that, come the next quake, Brentwood was going to end up in Belgium. There was a pitched battle with the local history fanatics and the poorer people who liked having a place to barbecue, but the problem with those guys is they don't have much money. The developers did. They won, more or less. A solution was reached.
An area was marked off, bordered by the Ventura and Golden State freeways in the North and East, and Los Feliz in the South. A hundred-metre wall was built along this entire stretch, and along the boundary with Mount Sinai Memorial Park in the West, creating an entirely closed area. The exterior of this wall was painted with high-resolution LED, and the whole surface was wired into a central computer. Certain interior features, like Mount Hollywood and small areas of the old wild lands, were left untouched. Even the developers realized the Hollywood sign was inviolate. This, along with stored images of how the park used to be before the development, was seamlessly displayed on the videowall – creating the illusion that nothing was there. From wherever you stood in LA, you could still see the sign, and the Hills and park to the North East. Unless you walked right up to the wall and punched it – which the guards were there to prevent you from doing – the illusion was perfect. It was like nothing had changed.
Inside the district the same idea was deployed in reverse, with views of Burbank, Glendale and Hollywood constantly updated right up to the sky. LA got a whole new district, but kept the same view, and access tunnels leading from the outside to the three preserved areas even meant that there was technically still a public park. The environmentalists were a bit pissed about the whole thing, claiming this wasn't the point, but they never have any money at all and weren't even invited to the meetings.
As we approached the gate – a ten-by-six-foot hole in the otherwise flawless panorama – I laid my finger over the sensor in the dashboard. This relayed my name, genome and credit rating to the matrix built into the car's shell, for reading by the entrance computer. The matrix was treble-encrypted with a top-of-the-line government DES algorithm, and thus had probably taken someone a good twenty minutes to crack. I simply don't believe that all the people you see driving round Griffith have the money to live there. Particularly those who hang around my block.
I passed, and was allowed through the barrier. The outer doors shut behind me, leaving me in the access tunnel through the wall. The car hummed as it was conveyed towards the inner door. At the end the doors opened gracefully, and I drove out into the world again.
I locked the car to Griffith's auto system and told it to get me home as quickly as possible.
On the inside Griffith looks like it was designed by someone who took acid in Disneyland. The hills provide perching space for split-level houses of high cost and loveliness, but the rest is wall-to-wall fun. The valley areas are split up into regular grids of stores and restaurants, and you're never more than five minutes' drive from a Starbucks or Borders or Baby Gap, the building blocks of Generica. Extensive areas are pedestrianized, and each storefront has been built up into an hysterical shout of commerciality. Restaurants in the shape of food and stores in the style of their products: the shoe stores look like shoes, the video stores are thin and rectangular, and Herbie Crouton's – where the owner, Herbie, sells over two hundred different flavours of small cubes of toasted bread – looks like an enormous crouton. You don't even have to be literate to know where to shop: the perfect, post-verbal landscape. There's a spanking new subway, complete with designer graffiti, a cluster of big hotels in the middle, and little enclaves of speciality shops nestling in the canyons. Nothing is older than ten years, and even the smog is artificial and guaranteed free of pollution.
It's trashy, superficial, and vacuous. I call it home.
When the car turned into my square I took it off auto and drove it myself. I can get all brave when the parking lot is in sight. My building used to be one of the flashest hotels in the area, but then one day someone decided that two hundred yards down the way was far cooler. Everyone checked out of the Falkland virtually overnight, some even carrying their suitcases by themselves. Within a week it was abandoned. By the time I opted for having a stable place to hang my hat, it had applied for and been granted ‘characterful’ status – then turned into private apartments. A SWAT team of interior decorators was called in to make the place look run-down. They did quite a good job, but if you rub hard