I Only Killed Him Once Page 6

  I glanced back at my car, half-expecting the telephone to start ringing, but there was no sound except the birds in the trees and the wind sweeping up the sandy dirt and depositing it on my loafers.

  “Good job last night, Ray,” said Peterman, working on his cigarette as he spoke. “Thought that storm was going to make things difficult, but it was a big help, right?”

  I turned back to him. Not for the first time I wished I had more than a twenty-four-hour memory tape. All I could do was reset a logic gate or two and hope he was going to fill me in.

  Peterman froze, two fingers around his cigarette, eyes open and staring, cheeks in the processing of sucking in another lungful. He stood like that for a few seconds. The wind tugged on his T-shirt but somehow not his hair, which shone with something a little stronger than tonic. Wood varnish, I would have guessed.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, mostly to himself. “Right. No problem. We did a good job. Trust me. Nice and tidy.” Then he coughed and he took the cigarette out of his mouth and then he put it back in and took another draw even as he was still coughing on the first one. “Mind you, we’ve had some practice at it now. We make a good team, you and me, Sparks. A good team.”

  If I could have frowned I would have, but I got the feeling Peterman got the idea. He took another look at me and he shook his head and he tossed his just-lit cigarette into the dirt. I watched it continue to smoke.

  “I’ll have to take your word on that,” I said. “Call it a design flaw. All I can hold is—”

  “Twenty-four hours of memory,” said Peterman. “I know, I got it.” He pointed two fingers at my chest like he was still holding his cigarette. “High-density magnetic tape, one-eighth inch, micro-monolith recording heads with a five-minute redundancy. One of Thornton’s most overlooked achievements, and that’s saying something, considering everything else the prof did.”

  There was a little flap behind my mouth grille. It didn’t have much of a function except, perhaps, to keep dust out of my vocalizer, which was useful up here on the hills. But other than that it wasn’t really necessary. It opened when I spoke and it closed when I didn’t and it did so silently. Except for right now, when I clicked it a few times. I wasn’t aware I was doing it until I saw Peterman’s eyes move down from my optics to my mouth and then back.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, “we had a solution for it once, but that didn’t work out.”

  “A solution for Thornton’s insoluable problem?”

  Peterman’s face cracked into a grin as wide as the summer sky. “Thornton’s problem? Hey, I like it, Sparks, I like it. But yeah, there was a way around it. It was a few years ago now—oh, I know, you don’t remember, I got it—but listen, you and I helped each other out on a little problem.”

  “Thornton’s or someone else’s?”

  “Little problem with the Ruskies, Sparks. And that guy in the wheelchair. Now he was something else.” He waved his hands in the air like he could sculpt a guy in a wheelchair out of nothing but the summer breeze. “Anyway, we got that tidied away and actually it did you a favor. Turns out the Soviets had been working on something that wasn’t entirely different to Thornton’s insoluble problem and they’d got something together that worked, and pretty well too.”

  Peterman’s eyes dropped to my chest. He nodded and sniffed and then he stepped forward and lifted one lapel of my trench coat. I didn’t stop him, but I did take a half step back.

  Peterman pulled his hands away like a man caught trying to lift a handbag from someone’s grandmother.

  “Hey, come on, we’re friends, Sparks, remember? Oh no, sorry, you don’t.” He clicked his fingers in annoyance.

  “Keep talking and maybe you can get back on my Christmas card list,” I said.

  Peterman grinned. “Now we’re in business, Sparks! So listen, the Soviets had developed a memory cube, some kind of three-dimensional digital matrix I think, read by a fixed laser array. Anyway, I don’t know the details. That was Ada’s department.”

  “Ada?”

  “You going to let me tell you about how we saved your life or not?”

  “We?”

  “Yeah, Sparks. We! Me and Ada and Eva.” “Eva?”

  “Are you going to listen or not?”

  I kept my mouth grille shut.

  “Okay, so, we get this crystal and we install it in your chest. You know, to replace your memory tape. We had to make a new plate, of course. By the way your shirt keeps unbuttoning I guess you still have it.”

  I found the fingers of my right hand had moved up and were feeling the buttons of my shirt just underneath my tie. Sure enough, the third one down had come undone. I did it back up but it felt a little tight.

  “So yeah,” said Peterman, “we put the crystal in and everything’s fine and now you don’t have to forget anything.”

  “Except I don’t have a digital crystal as a memory store,” I said.

  Peterman clicked his fingers again. “Right, Sparks, right! It was swapped out and the tape array was put back in. Ada called us back to help out. Seems the crystal wasn’t working out, for some reason. A crying shame. For a while there I didn’t need to tell you who won the Oscar for best actor in a leading role for three years straight every day.”

  I didn’t say anything. Peterman frowned at me, then said, “The answer to that question is me, Sparks. Fresco Peterman!”

  “You’re telling me you’re a movie star?” I said. I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth but then there was no reason for him to lie. Especially as we were old friends.

  Apparently.

  Peterman didn’t look too happy. I thought maybe he had been waiting for me to congratulate him on his success rather than question his bona fides so I kept talking.

  “Which explains,” I said, “the scene at the BCFC. You use a different name on the membership list because you’re a celebrity. But the club has had trouble with reporters finding out and trying to ambush its most famous member, which is why your club captain has a tendency to jump to conclusions when people or robots show up unannounced.”

  Peterman narrowed his eyes as he listened and he nodded his head like it was the first time he’d heard this theory expounded. Then he clicked his fingers and his smile turned back on all at the same time.

  “Hey, who’s the detective now, huh?”

  “So you need to talk to me?” I asked.

  “Right again, Sparks.” Peterman made yet another flying visit to the interior of his sedan. This time he reached over the driver’s side to the glove box. He pulled something out and pulled himself out of the car and he passed that something to me. I looked at it in his outstretched hand. He shook it at me. It was a book of some kind.

  “What is it?” I asked, not lifting a finger to take it.

  “Sparks, listen, you’re killing me here, killing me! This is yours, you big hunk of scrap metal. You gave it to me to look after last night—remember, you took it out from under the spare wheel . . . oh, yeah, of course you don’t remember. Well, look, you said it was important and that you’d want it back the next day, which was technically the same day, but let’s not get into all that. It makes my head hurt.”

  “You should be so lucky,” I said. My own headache was coming back. As I took the book from Peterman I adjusted the resistance in the motherboard system bus on my left side but it didn’t make me feel any better.

  I didn’t know anything about what had gone down last night, but the fact that the book had been under the spare wheel rang a hell of an alarm right in the middle of my positronic brain. The book was clearly what Touch Daley had wanted me to find. Only he hadn’t known I’d passed it on for safekeeping.

  The book was a paperback novel. The cover was creased and it featured a guy in spacesuit cradling a woman in a chainmail bikini. They looked like they were on the moon except the rocks were pink and there was a green monster coming over the rim of a crater. The guy in the spacesuit had a ray gun in his free hand but it didn’t look like it would do
much against the impending danger.

  I held the book in my hands and glanced up at Peterman. He had turned his face up to sun and seemed to be enjoying the great outdoors.

  “You know a guy called Touch Daley?” I asked.

  Peterman blinked and I wasn’t sure it was because of the light in his eyes. He turned his head to face me.

  “You remember Touch Daley?”

  “Sure,” I said, “because he paid me a visit this morning. He told me I was in danger and that I needed to check under the spare wheel.”

  Peterman whistled between his teeth. When he did that the breeze picked up like he had called it, but it was just a coincidence. I glanced up behind him and saw a few clouds gathering over the crest of the next hill ahead.

  “Boy, they’re moving fast now. Seventeen already. Phew. And he came to visit in person? Phew. Things are moving, Sparks, things are moving.”

  “Seventeen what?”

  “Seventeen Touch Daleys. Last night—I mean, this morning—it was only sixteen and I thought we were ahead.”

  I didn’t know what that meant. Seventeen Touch Daleys? As far as I knew—and this was from firsthand experience—Touch Daley was a human being and most often they only came in ones.

  On the other hand, the Touch Daley who had visited me this morning was wearing a tight black trilby and I just happened to have another one just like it getting warm in the sun on the passenger seat of my car.

  I didn’t like where that particular train was headed.

  I looked at Peterman. I saw he’d gone back to quiet contemplation as he leaned against the car, his lips moving as he looked at the dirt. I didn’t want to interrupt so I returned my attention to the book—and what was inside it. Because while the book was old and well read, it wasn’t what was printed on the pages that was interesting. Between a good deal of them were small sheets of folded yellow notepaper, tucked in so they didn’t poke out the sides but enough to make the book swell so it didn’t close properly.

  I took out one of the sheets. It was written on in a thin gray pencil in a handwriting that was mine. It was just like the note that had brought me to Fresco Peterman at the BCFC.

  The first page had some sparse notes about a club on the Sunset Strip and mentioned a woman called Honey. I pulled out another, and this one had a description of the replacement chest panel that Peterman knew about and a suggestion that I ask Ada about it.

  I leafed through some more. There were names and places. Zeus Falzarano. Alfie Micklewhite. Emerson Ellis Building and Construction. The address for an Italian restaurant. I kept looking and I found Peterman’s name, along with someone called Eva McLuckie—the Eva he had mentioned—and someone else called Charles David.

  I flipped to the back and I found what I presumed was the most recent note. It had just one word on it—Esmerelda—and I could see the impression of the note before still embossed on the surface. I tilted the paper to catch the light and read the ghost of my own instruction, GO HERE INSTEAD, along with the address I now knew to be of the gym in Bay City.

  I looked at Peterman. He was watching me now. I saw him watching and I closed the book and put it into the pocket of my coat.

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “Anytime, Sparks, anytime. So, look, if seventeen made contact with you already, then things are moving, and moving fast.”

  “So you said,” I said.

  Peterman frowned again. “If they’re moving that quickly then we don’t have much time. I need to get back to town and get ready. You need to get back to your office and pretend nothing has happened, okay?”

  “Ada isn’t going to buy that,” I said. “She sent me out on a job and I’m going to have some explaining to do if I haven’t done it.”

  Peterman cocked his head. “What was the job?”

  I fished inside my jacket for the ticker tape. I handed it over. Peterman peered at it.

  “Just a name and an address,” I said. “Specifically, your name. The address I don’t know. Do you recognize it?”

  Peterman nodded and then he laughed and that laugh kept on going as he handed the tape back to me.

  “That Ada, she’s a doll. Always one step ahead. She’s good, Ray, very good. I’m sure Professor Thornton would be proud to see what she’s become.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure about that but I kept that particular thought to myself. As I stuffed the tape back into my pocket, Peterman nodded in my general direction.

  “That address is my beach house—well, one of them. Ada wasn’t sending you to kill me; she was sending you to meet me. Only we—you and me—decided on another rendezvous last night. There’s more than a fair chance that house is being watched, and we don’t know that Ada knows that.”

  If I could have raised an eyebrow I would have. Peterman seemed to sense it because he raised his hands again. “Hey, Sparks, it was your idea! And a good one too. You’ve got a nose for trouble, I’ll give you that.”

  “So Ada knows about you—and us?”

  “Everything, Ray. Everything.”

  Then the famous movie star cleared his throat and checked over his shoulder, but we were still alone and not a single car had come along the hill road since we’d stopped.

  “Okay, Ray, okay, time to roll. I’ll get into position. You go back to the office. Maybe, I don’t know, make some more notes. You’re going to have to wait, but I’m pretty sure things will get off the ground today. I’ll be in touch.”

  With that he swung back into his car and he swung the car back onto the road and he was gone in a spit of gravel and a cloud of dust.

  I stood and waited long enough for the dust to settle and then I stood and listened to the birds and the breeze in the trees. I could feel the paperback book in my pocket and it felt like it was made of four-inch armor plating.

  Then I got back into my car and turned back onto the road and I followed it down the hill and all the while I wondered what I had gotten myself into this time.

  No, not me.

  Ada.

  Because right now it felt like trouble was my business, and business was good.

  11

  I didn’t go straight back to the office but it wasn’t until I was back in town and cruising Sunset Boulevard that I decided to turn tail and go somewhere quieter to think. Maybe I decided the moment I passed a club on a corner where I had, according to my notes, met a girl called Honey. Maybe I had made the decision long before then.

  I drove back into the hills. I didn’t know where I was going but I got there anyway, winding up the hills and then down a narrow road that was mostly dirt until I slid the Buick through an old chicken-wire gate and into a small dusty lot behind the Hollywood sign. There had been a sign on the gate telling me to think twice about what I was doing, but the gate was open and the parking lot was empty and it seemed like a good spot for a little contemplation. There was a hut by the lot, a long rectangular thing with a green roof and a sign on the side that said it belonged to the City of Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation.

  When the car was off I rolled down the window and I reached into my pocket and I took out the book and I started reading the yellow sheets of notepad concealed within.

  What they said was interesting but not illuminating. I read them through three times even though I remembered exactly what was on them after the first time. Part of me wanted to be sure, and rereading what I already knew gave me something to do while my para-neuristic calculators did an awful lot of complex math.

  When I was done I sat and I looked out at the view from the hill until the sun went down and the moon came up and the lights on the Hollywood sign went on. I hadn’t known the sign was illuminated. I thought it was just a sign. It ran in sequence, first the HOLLY flashing white and then the WOOD flashing white and then the whole HOLLYWOOD blazing three more times. It must have been hell on house prices for those unlucky enough to live on the twisting streets just below.

  While I sat there I kept expecting the telephone by my
elbow to ring but it never did and that was fine. Ada knew I was out on a job and I could look after myself. In fact, according to my new—or old—friend Fresco Peterman, Ada knew exactly what I was doing today.

  After a few more hours of smelling the cooling desert air and listening to coyotes awaken as the light died I went back into the book, to the last note. It had been written after my past self had given my future self the instruction to meet Peterman, but I had no idea what it meant and Peterman hadn’t said anything. I should have asked him, but I’d had other things on my circuits.

  Esmerelda.

  I wondered who that was. She wasn’t mentioned elsewhere in the notes. She must have been important to get a page all to herself.

  I put the note back into the book and checked my watch. It was late. I’d wasted a whole lot of time, which was something Peterman said we were short on. But he also said Ada was in on this grand plan so I figured she would have called if things were moving.

  But it was still time to go. I put the book in my pocket and I started the car. Then I turned the car off and I got out and I went around to the trunk and I opened it and I got the floor out and I put the book back under the spare wheel.

  Then I got back in behind the wheel and I headed back to the office.

  * * *

  It was later still by the time I got back to town but that didn’t mean it was any quieter. According to my permanent store, New York was the city that never sleeps, but I was pretty sure the sentiment could be applied to that other town on the opposite coast.

  People were about and some were in cars and some were on foot. Lights blazed and flashed and I drove on.

  And as I got closer to the office I saw other lights that blazed and flashed. Blue and red, moving and strobing and sweeping the intersection of Cahuenga and Hollywood, on the corner of which sat the building that housed the Electromatic Detective Agency. The lights did a good job of illuminating the building too, almost to the floor where Ada sat.

  I counted a half dozen police cars arranged around the intersection, another three lined up nose to tail at the curb outside the building’s main door, and another parked at an angle on the ramp that led to the parking garage, blocking access.