“Don’t you fucking shoot him,” I shouted, pulling my own gun, grateful to have it in my hand again.
Vinaldi looked up at me. “What the fuck are you yelling about? Of course I’m going to shoot him.”
“If you do I’ll shoot you,” I said, holding my gun steady as I walked toward him. “And as for being out of practice, if you’d stayed the fuck back at Nearly’s then they’d be all right now.” Vinaldi frowned, but flicked his safety back on. I turned to Howie, who was still pressed against the wall, probably wondering whom he was now in most danger from. “Howie, go get some tape.”
“Jack, I’m…”
“Yeah, I know. It’s not a problem.” He wasn’t convinced. “Seriously. In your position I’d have done the same. Now please go get us some tape.”
As Howie ran out, I knelt beside the man and listened to his breathing. It was ragged, but steady.
“Randall, what are you doing?” Vinaldi said, with more than a trace of impatience, “Here is a man who had nothing but your death, and mine too, I might add, on his mind, and you decide this is the time to go round supporting the right to life? You should be running after your women, not worrying about this scum.”
“Yhandim has already got Nearly and Suej,” I said. “He was probably in there two minutes after we left. This guy may know where they’ve been taken. He may know where the other spares are. He may even know what the fuck is going on. You spread his face over the walls and we’re never going to know—added to which I’ve already parked metal in this man’s head and he’s still up and around. Doing it again may only make him pissed.”
Howie came back in with the tape and I rolled the body onto its chest. Using large quantities of very secure masking tape, I quickly bound the man’s hands and legs. His fatigues seemed even dirtier than they had the night before, and fragments of leaves were stuck in the soles of his boots. While I was working, I glanced at the back of his head and noticed a messy exit wound there, blood and tissue melted into his hair. It wasn’t as big as it should have been, and it didn’t seem to have inconvenienced him much. Maybe a lucky deflection off the inside of his skull. Yeah, right. And maybe the strange, tacky texture of his skin was because he used too much moisturizer.
Only when he was completely immobilized and rolled onto his back did I stand up and take a hurried swig from the bottle of Jack’s Howie was inhaling. My hands were shaking. Proximity to death does that to me. If you’ll take my advice, avoid it.
“What’s his name?” I asked Vinaldi, handing him the bottle. He looked at it, realized it was before eight in the morning, then took a mouthful anyway. “He get left behind, too?”
Vinaldi nodded reluctantly. “His name’s Ghuaji,” he said, then handed me the bottle. “Pour some of this down his throat.”
I did so, and Ghuaji coughed, spluttered, and swam back up toward the light. His eyes flicked against the blood pooling down from his flattened nose. I thought about wiping his eyes for him, then realized I couldn’t be fucked. I leaned in very close, and spoke very clearly indeed. Déjà vu again: last night, not to mention the man outside Mal’s apartment.
But this time I had to get it right.
“You’ve got five minutes,” I said. “That’s about how much I can spare. After that Howie here is going to drop you down an xPress elevator shaft to see if you bounce. Understand?”
His voice was thick, and too weak to make out. But he’d heard me. I could tell by the way he spat a bloody tooth into my face.
“Super,” I said. “I have four questions. Answer all of them and we could have a basis for negotiation. Any less and it’s bargain bucket of pain approach. Okay. One: Where has Yhandim taken Suej and the other woman? Two: Where are the other spares? Three: Who is behind all this shit and four: What is his fucking problem? Answer in any order you like but don’t take your time because I don’t have any and yours is running out real fast.”
Ghuaji smiled up at me, and I cocked my gun. This didn’t do anything except broaden his smile. I felt panic rising behind the calm I was trying to project.
“The birds are here,” he said. “Surely you seen them.”
A chill, but I hid it. “What about them? How come they’re coming through?”
“Yhandim’s got a plan, ain’t not even nobody knows about it. The leaves will be with him, man. He been up all night, talking to the boys. It’s going down.”
“I tend to find,” Vinaldi said sagely from behind me, “that blowing pieces off a man’s body one by one will reduce the obscurity of his answers.”
“Johnny, thanks for the fortune cookie, but…”
“Seriously, I can recommend it, and Jaz, God willing he comes out of the MediCenter as a functioning human being, will back me up on that to the hilt.”
“You think that’s going to scare a man who’s been in The Gap all this time?” I said, turning to him but speaking for Ghuaji’s benefit. “A guy who’s been in-country half his life? I like the way you’re thinking, but I think maybe this isn’t the guy for it.”
It seemed to work. When I turned back to him, Ghuaji’s eyes focused more clearly on me, and when he next spoke it was with a hint of wistfulness.
“It’s home. I miss it every second, man. Top-ups just ain’t enough.”
It was then I knew that not only was the man off his head, but that he wouldn’t tell us anything he didn’t want to even if we whittled his body down to the bone. Anyone who could miss The Gap wasn’t even human anymore.
I reached down and tilted Ghuaji’s head slightly, looking at the bullet’s entrance wound. It went through the skin and skull, but not much deeper than that. It must have started healing immediately, and can’t have held him up long enough to allow the police to get to the bar before he escaped.
“You see that?” I asked Vinaldi. He nodded, and I saw a little fear in his eyes, and Howie’s, which I suspected was probably mirrored in my own. On the other hand, I thought the wound looked a little worse than when I’d first seen a droplet ooze out. The healing was reversing.
I had one more try. “You’re not going to answer the questions, are you?”
“You a clever guy,” he croaked.
“Okay, well here’s the deal. I’ve changed my mind. We’re not going to throw you down the shaft just yet, because later we may be able to get you to reconsider. Howie’s going to put you in the back, and someone’s going to watch over you. You show any sign of being antisocial, this employee of Howie’s is going to chainsaw off your legs. You’re healing in a very weird way, my friend, but I think that could keep even you out of action for a while.” I watched him carefully, and added: “Especially without a top-up.”
A tiny flicker. Enough.
I stood and nodded to Howie. “Have Paulie sling him in the back—away from the food—and sit over him. I’m not joking about the chain saw. Don’t take any crap from this guy.”
“Paulie’s dead,” Howie told me. “He was here when this guy arrived.”
“Shit, I’m sorry,” I said.
Howie nodded distantly. “That’s okay. Dath can do it. He’ll enjoy fucking this fucker up. What do you want to do with that shit?”
He pointed over at the mess on the table. While our attention had been diverted, the bird’s other leg had come off, and most of its back section had collapsed in on itself. Vinaldi stared at it, face drawn, and just when I’d decided it was dead the bird’s head made a small vicious movement, pulling its front half away from the rest. Using the stumps of its wings like paddles it tried to crawl along the desk, trailing the remains of its insides behind it and shedding skin and fur like snow from shaken trees.
“Take it somewhere and burn it,” I told Howie. “Burn it until it’s gone. And ignore anything it says. It isn’t even a real bird. It’s just a fragment of something else.”