I Only Killed Him Once Read online

  What it certainly was was expensive. I looked over the gear and checked the time. It was four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon and there was only a certain portion of the population who could spend a workday afternoon trying to poke a metal stick into their fellow enthusiasts.

  Soon enough one bout finished and the fencers shook hands and took off their masks before heading to the bleachers to towel off. One of them saw me, and after first disconnecting the cable that ran from the cuff of his jacket into the socket of his épée, and then the cable from the back of his jacket to the spool on the floor, he rubbed his face again with his towel and swung the towel over his neck and padded over in his gym shoes. He was an older fellow with a handlebar moustache and enough gray at his temples to look impressive in the boardroom. There was a broadness to his forehead. I imagined the brain behind it was full of numbers and stock prices and share grants and other things I imagined rich executives knew a lot about.

  As he approached he looked me up and down like he was appreciating a fine painting. I didn’t know whether I should have been flattered or not. He was clearly old enough to remember a time when there had been robots, some of them like me and some of them not. A man like him, somewhere high up the food chain, he probably saw robots and people the same way. Just tools for the job, whether it was polishing his shoes or mowing his lawn or driving him to his high-rise office in downtown LA.

  I touched the brim of my hat with a finger and did my best to look casual, which was not a lot considering I couldn’t change the expression on my face. As soon as the moustache and the fencer it was attached to came within an acceptable distance for conversation, he grabbed the two ends of the towel around his neck like he was about to jump out of an airplane.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Fencing’s a nice game,” I said, leaning back into the door and folding my arms. “Always thought so.” And that was true, given that I hadn’t thought of fencing before a quarter hour ago and I’d liked it as soon as I had.

  “Fencing, my friend, is a martial art,” said the man with lips that moved and a moustache that stayed put. “An ancient and historic sport that had its home in the royal courts of Europe for centuries.”

  It seemed I was right about fencers. I pursed my lips, or I would have.

  “But what can I help you with?” asked the moustache that was less a soup catcher and more a safety net for an all-you-can-eat buffet. “Something tells me you are not here to enquire about club membership.”

  Behind him the other bout had finished up and the two fencers and the referee had joined the other two at the bleachers. They were all looking at us although they were too far away for them to hear what we were saying. Not that it was much of a conversation. “You might be right there,” I said, “although you never know, maybe I’d be good at it. I wouldn’t need the mask, after all.”

  The mouth under the moustache chuckled in a way that indicated the owner of both did not find what I had said amusing.

  “Actually, I’m looking for someone,” I said.

  “Is that so?” His eyes narrowed and I got the feeling that maybe he knew something and I didn’t.

  It was a feeling I was getting more of all the time and I didn’t like it much. It made my voltage comparators skip a megacycle or two.

  “Friend of mine,” I said. “Thought I’d meet him for lunch. His secretary told me he’d be here.”

  The tip of the man’s tongue appeared for a moment through the gray hedgerow hanging from his upper lip and then he half-turned back toward the bleachers. Most of the gang were in quiet conversation, no longer interested in what was going on between me and the moustache at the door.

  All except the guy at the back. His mask was still in place and he wasn’t talking to his friends.

  He’d made a mistake. Because the bout had finished and the gym was hot and his buddies were cooling off. The only reason he was still wearing the mask was because he knew who I was and, more important, who I was looking for.

  Which was him. He was my guy. He had to be.

  The man with the moustache turned back around. “Something of a late lunch.”

  I shrugged. “This is Los Angeles. Every lunch is a late lunch.”

  His eyebrows came together and did a passable impression of the fuzz under his nose. “Somebody sent you, right?”

  Before I could answer he sighed and his moustache trembled like a thin curtain in an evening breeze. Then he lowered his head and took a step forward.

  “Listen, chum, this is a private club, okay?” he said to my shoes. He lifted his head up a little. “And we don’t appreciate the invasion, okay?” He said that to my middle button. “So you can just get out and stay out and tell your editor that he’s going to get some very important phone calls that he’s not going to enjoy very much, okay?”

  “My editor?”

  Now the head came up and the moustache came with it. The ends of it stood out an inch from the sides of his face and I watched a drop of sweat coalesce on the very tip on the left side.

  “The Los Angeles Times. The Hollywood Daily News. The Bay City Real Estate Monthly. Whatever rag it is you work for, I won’t have my club members harassed in this manner.”

  I didn’t point out that the only person in the club being harassed at that moment was me and I wasn’t even a member.

  “You think I’m a reporter?”

  “There would be some inclined to disagree with you,” he said, “but if you want to call yourself that, chum, then be my guest.”

  I let a couple of processor cycles run by. I looked at the guy again. He was old enough to remember robots, which meant he was old enough to know what had happened to them.

  “You think they have robot reporters now? In 1965?”

  The man snarled as a sudden spark of anger somewhere inside him caught light. “I wouldn’t put anything past the Hollywood Daily News. That paper isn’t fit to line my cat’s litter tray with. Listen, chum, your editor is a schmuck and until today I thought he’d tried it all. You just go back to him and tell him I know what’s what.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t even told you who I’m looking for.”

  The smile returned and it was a smile that told me to get the hell back to my editor and explain how I’d annoyed someone important on the LA business roundtable. If only I’d had an editor. I thought Ada would do in a pinch, but I before I reported back to her about the incredible facial hair I had met and the angry man who owned it I needed to get some kind of information worth reporting.

  The fencer was getting hotter under that white tunic of his. “Well?”

  I told him the name that was printed on the ticker tape. The man’s smile widened and he showed some teeth. It was the smile of a man ready to throw a punch. His teeth were very white but they were a little crooked at the front.

  “Get the hell out,” he said, and he said it very quietly and then he lowered his head and he repeated the instruction, this time to my shoes. If I’d known they were going to be spoken to twice in one day I would have got them polished on the way in.

  “The charm of your establishment overwhelms me,” I said.

  The man folded his arms, and half-turned to his friends again. The one in the mask was gone. There was a door at the back of the gym, leading, I assumed, to the locker room. I hadn’t seen or heard him leave but I’d been a little preoccupied.

  “Get the hell out,” said the man again, “or so help me I’ll call the police.”

  “I get the picture,” I said, “although I’m not sure you have.”

  I turned and left the guy steaming under his moustache. Once the double doors were safely closed behind me I paused and considered the events of the day. Clearly they’d had trouble with reporters turning up in the past. Although quite why reporters would come to the Bay City Fencing Club was beyond me.

  But I’d found my guy. The name on Ada’s ticker tape wasn’t on the noticeboard
downstairs, but the club manager had known it. That was because the target was a member—the man who hadn’t taken his mask off—he just used a different name for the club roster. That seemed like a strange thing to do, but then this was Los Angeles so I knew better to question it.

  Now there was some detective work.

  The only problem was that my target knew not only that I was looking for him but also who I was and what I did for pocket money, otherwise there would have been no reason for him to keep his face disguised and sneak out the back without so much as a farewell to his friends. My bet was that my target was already down in the parking lot.

  I wasted no further time and headed down the stairs two at a time. On the ground level the lobby was still empty. I crossed the space and went out into the parking lot.

  And then I stopped, because a voice called out. I turned to my left, and there he was, standing behind one of the pillars that supported the gym floor above. He was still in his white gear but had lost the mask. He leaned his upper body out from behind the pillar and he jerked his head like he wanted me to come over, so I did. I didn’t know what was going on, and other than his name I didn’t know who he was or what he had done to get on someone’s hit list. That wasn’t my problem. But I did know that I had a job to do and that fraternizing with the target wasn’t a commonplace technique for an assassination. Ada was going to be four kinds of angry about what I was about to do.

  Which was to walk over to the man behind the pillar and stop and ask him a question.

  “Fresco Peterman, I presume?”

  The man frowned like he’d never heard the name before. He was handsome in a way that got you onto the cover of a magazine. His hair was swept back in a fetching wave and he had a chin you could cut glass with. His eyes were small and they were blue and they squinted at me from out of the shadows of the pillar.

  “Listen, Sparks, you can’t come waltzing in there like that. People will talk, Ray. This town is built on chatter.”

  I stopped where I was, which was between two pillars. Out on the street beyond the parking lot cars came and went.

  Fresco Peterman grinned. “Ah, don’t worry about it, Sparks. You were just using your initiative. Don’t tell me, a little note to yourself hidden in the glove box?”

  I cast a glance at the street. I felt a little exposed where I was, a big robot in a big coat talking to what would look like nothing more than an ugly concrete pillar from the street.

  “Actually, it was on the passenger seat,” I said.

  Peterman jerked his head back like he’d touched his nose to the terminal of a battery and he barked out a laugh.

  For a second there I saw myself holding my hand out in a dark loud room and watching as a blue spark crackled on one fingertip and a small flame flared and a man leaned back with a cigarette smoldering between his lips. And then the image was gone and I was back in the parking lot with a guy I was supposed to kill and I could have sworn he was the man with the cigarette in that dark loud room.

  “Hey, good for you, Sparks,” said Peterman when he had recovered. “Good for you.”

  I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing. Peterman licked his lips and then leaned back, ducking out from the pillar to look at the street.

  “Listen, okay, we gotta talk, yes? But not here. Okay? I know a place. I’ll go. You follow. You keep it discreet, okay? We got eyes watching all over the show.” Peterman narrowed his eyes at me again. “You got that, Ray?”

  I could already hear the telephone ringing in my parked car. I turned and listened to it for a while. Peterman heard it too, because he looked, and then he nodded, perhaps to himself. Then he stepped out of shadow of the pillar and got close enough to give my arm a slap. He did it too hard and hissed as his hand made contact and then he shook it in the air like that would make it better.

  Then he said “come on,” and he walked into the parking lot and got into the big German sedan and turned it on and he left the lot. Out on the street he indicated the wrong way and then pulled over. He wound down a window and waved his arm at me and then the arm went back inside and the car roared and rocked on its suspension as he blasted off down the street.

  I didn’t know who he was but I sure as hell wanted to find out so I got into my car and I ignored the ringing phone and I followed Fresco Peterman back into the city.

  10

  I kept myself at an inconspicuous distance from Fresco Peterman’s big German number like any private detective worth his salt. Peterman had said that there were eyes on him, which I assumed also meant eyes on me. So I took it easy and I think I did a pretty good job.

  Peterman did a good job too. I didn’t know who he was but he knew what he was doing. After leaving the gym he wove around Bay City and then he headed east and for a while there I thought he was heading toward my neck of the woods. But then he turned again and cut a zigzag path all over the western reaches of Los Angeles and soon enough we were winding up into the hills with the sky some more of that azure blue above and the city slowly baking in a shimmering haze below. After a while there was a little traffic and then there was none so I decided to ditch any pretense that I wasn’t on someone’s tail and I got in close. If anyone was following us now it had to be in an invisible car, and if anyone saw us I thought they probably deserved to.

  We drove more and soon the hills surrounded us and it felt like we were on another planet, not merely in the dusty edge of the desert right on the angels’ doorstep. I wound my window down and smelled live oak and wild sage and that peculiar tang of hot places that made my circuits zip. If Ada could only have bottled that smell and sold it downtown we might have been in another line of work altogether.

  I liked it up here, out of the city. I didn’t know if I’d been up here before, but if I had I knew I would have liked it just as much then as I did now. It was hot and dry and scrubby but there was life up here. Birds and other animals and trees that were surprisingly green and vital.

  Then I realized I’d backed off a little as I took in the surrounds and I couldn’t see Peterman’s car, just the comet tail of dust his tires were doing a good job of kicking up. I pushed the accelerator and kicked up my own plume and after another crest or two the one I was chasing began to die. When it cleared I saw Peterman parked under some of those live oaks. I pulled up behind him and turned the engine off and sat and listened to birdsong and the ticking of two hot cars. We were in a sort of basin filled with old trees. It was cooler here and there was a nice breeze coming in.

  I could see Peterman’s silhouette as he sat in his car. He hadn’t moved from the driver’s seat but he was looking around, one arm over the back of the seat, his eyes behind a pair of large sunglasses of the type favored by pilots. He was checking the road, making sure we really were alone. He seemed to be doing a good job so I left him to it.

  As I watched him I considered that he was my target, and that I had a job to do, and that Mr. Fresco Peterman had very kindly led me to the particular kind of locale that was rather suitable for the kind of work I engaged in. We were alone and the road was empty and the trunk of Peterman’s sedan looked plenty big enough to fold him into. On the way up we’d passed a good handful of ravines and some of them looked pretty handy, the kind that were almost triangular, the sides steep and stony and awkward, the base scrubby and prone to night patrols of coyotes. Hell, even the Hollywood sign wasn’t too far away, and I’d always thought those letters were big enough for someone to take a fall that would make the police shake their heads and take off their caps and lament the toll the City of Angels took on some of its more vulnerable inhabitants.

  But I also knew something else.

  I wasn’t going to do the job.

  At least . . . not yet. Because Fresco Peterman wasn’t just a name handed to me by Ada. He knew who I was and he knew I was coming to find him. He knew about the note, which meant he knew about the limitations of my memory.

  I had a feeling I knew him just as well as he knew me, only I d
idn’t remember.

  It was time to renew that acquaintance.

  Apparently satisfied that the coast was clear, Peterman swung the door of his car open. It was heavy and bounced on its hinges and his arm came out to stop it closing again. From where I sat I could see he was fussing with something. Then he got out and I could see it was a cigarette lighter that wouldn’t light the cigarette that was now sticking straight out of his mouth. With the door still open he leaned back against the car and worked on the lighter. Somewhere on the journey over he’d managed to get out of the fencing jacket and he stood there in a white T-shirt and short white pants with long white socks and white gym shoes.

  I got out of my car. I closed the door. I stopped and stood and listened to the birds and I smelled the smell of the desert and then I walked over to where Peterman was ignoring me.

  “Damn thing,” he said, finally giving up on the lighter but not before giving it a good shake. He sighed around his cigarette and tossed the lighter into the car. Then he looked around at the trees and the scrub, his cigarette lifting in the air as the lips around it moved into a frown like he was surprised there wasn’t a whole bunch of lighters growing on the tree by the car.

  “Here,” I said. I reached forward with one hand. Peterman got the drift because although he was still frowning he moved his head down and he poked it out so the cigarette was pointing at me. I shorted a solenoid and a blue spark jumped from my fingertip to the end of his cigarette. Peterman puffed and then leaned back and blew smoke into the warm air with the sense of a man truly appreciating the world around him.

  “Sparks, you’re a life saver.”