Chapter Three

Chapter Three

 

            ‘You still drive this heap?’ Zarrath asked as I led him to my car.

            ‘As long as the wheels keep turning,’ I said, hopping in. The address Zarrath had pulled was down dockside, off Muir and Stratton. It was a place where crooks went to sleep at night when they weren’t at the bars. A part of me kind of liked the place.

            We drove silent under the gaze of the buildings on either side of us, I had taken a route through the heart of the city and at this hour, 3:15 AM or so, the heart does not beat. The skyscrapers watched our passing like skulls in the desert watching sand. We dipped in and out of the yellow light of street lamps, went through East-West Tunnel and were through the graveyard hour.

            I pulled a right, took the car through its gears and hummed south.

            We found the street Max lived on. It was dark. No street lamps were on, and I wondered if residences had resorted to stealing their bulbs. Then I wondered if maybe they just liked the dark. The few lights on in the buildings shone like golden teeth in an ugly smile. The kind of smile I was hoping to have a chat with pretty soon. We parked a few doors down from Max’s place, a seven story piece of work. The windows on its first floor were all covered with cardboard, their glass smashed in a long time ago.

            ‘This whole place tells the same story,’ Zarrath said. ‘People are moving on.’

            ‘Yeah, but where to?’ I sighed, checked my piece and unbuttoned the holster. Just in case. ‘I’ll go up, you keep watch and follow me if anything suspicious happens. What number?’

            ’32 B,’ Zarrath said.

            There was a lock screen to get into the building, and a buzzer beside it. Above the device was a white scrawl telling me to eat s**t. I punched in 32 B and let it ring out once, then punched the numbers again. A little blue light flicked on and the voice of a man who’s smoked one too many packs for twenty years said, ‘Who is it?’

            I lent to the little microphone. ‘Hi Max, I was hoping to have a talk about a guy with chest pains, he had them real bad.’ I said.

            The little blue light flickered to black, then blue again. The voice said, ‘Sounds like you need a doctor.’

            ‘Naw,’ I said, smiling at the camera. ‘I don’t think he notices them anymore. You catch? I’m sure you do. Why don’t you just let me up?’ I stamped my feet. ‘It’s damn cold out here.’

            ‘Come up,’ said the voice. The door buzzed and I went through. The lift didn’t seem to want to work for me, so I took the stairs, hopping up between syringes and bags of rubbish that lay against the walls like bloated corpses.

            The door to 32 B was at the end of a long hall pointed away from the street. When I knocked I heard a voice from inside call out to me but didn’t make out what it said. The door’s lock beeped and it opened just enough to let a face through. Lynn was right. It was an ugly, mean face that had known a lot of trouble. Anyone could guess that. Max’s nose was flattened and spider webbed with thin red veins from being punched in too often; his skin was waxy and the whites of his eyes seemed to have gone off. His hair was thin and oily. He wasn’t tall.

            ‘You going to invite me in?’ I asked. ‘You and I have no reason not to be friends.’

            The mean little face frowned. ‘You’re a dick,’ he said. ‘That’s reason enough for me.’

            I shrugged. ‘What makes you think that? You expecting a dick to show up sometime soon? Look,’ I pulled a credit-chip from a coat pocket. ‘We can be friends.’ I let him see the chip, the shiny gunmetal grey and gold lion of the IGB.

            The door closed with a breath of sour air then opened and Max stood in front of me. He wasn’t tall. About 5’10’’ or so, with still some muscle left over from his younger days, but a clear paunch beginning to hang over his belt. He wore black pants and a grey shirt with one long sleeve. The right sleeve was bare, showing the fancy cyber work of his prosthesis. His metal arm was thinner than its flesh and blood counterpart, to conserve weight. It was dark grey and green. Not as pretty as they come, but neither was Max, so it didn’t stand out.

            What did stand out was the cannon in his left hand. It was an industrial weapon, military grade I assumed. It could have shot the head off a bull. Max was holding it steady as a paintbrush. The muzzle was pointed right at my chest.

            ‘Come in and sit down,’ he said calmly.

His apartment was small and cramped and I navigated my way through piles of tech and cables to seat myself on a couch. I was careful to keep my hands in view the whole time, Max was careful but he had a crazy look in his eye.

‘You from Argo, then?’ he said, walking across the room to sit in a chair opposite me.

‘As in the security agency?’ I asked.

‘Yes the security agency,’ Max said with a wave of his gun. He stood up again. He looked tired.

‘Were you expecting someone from Argo, Maxwell? Maybe they wanted to talk to you about a gambler called Lawrence Seer who’d ran in with a bad lot?’ I was trying to read his eyes, probably too busy reading them because all they were telling me was crazy. They might have been telling me to shut my mouth, too, but I’ve never been good at doing that.

            ‘I’m not talking about Lawrence,’ Max said quietly.

            ‘But I am, Max,’ I said as if it was the greatest day of my life. ‘From what I hear, and I’m hard of hearing so correct me if I’m wrong, is that Lawrence got his hand on some documents. Paper ones. Documents he wasn’t meant to have, and because of it he got shot through the chest.’

            ‘Yeah, well that ain’t gonna happen to me, friend.’ Max said.

            That surprised me.

            ‘You mean to say you didn’t kill Lawrence, Max?’

            That’s when we were both confused. But I was confused and sitting on a couch with my hands on a coffee table; Max was confused and fatigued with a gun in his hand. ‘This is what’s going to go down,’ Max said. ‘You’re going to stand up and go and put your hands up over your head against the wall, you’re going to put your forehead on the wall and spread your legs. You’re going to count to ten.’

            Max came round the coffee table, shook the gun, and I did as I was told. I was bigger, and I was younger, but he was hot full of crazy where I’d only had toast that morning for breakfast. It was as simple as that.

This wasn’t worth a diamond, I remember thinking to myself.

I had my hands up on the wall and was counting in my head. I’d reached four when I thought I heard the door click. Max was talking to no one in particular. ‘This is crap,’ he was saying. ‘Seer, and you, and Caribez, and�"’

But he didn’t get to finish his sentence.

Max made a choking sound and his gun clunked as it flew across the room and hit the wall. It spat flames with a bang and sent a slug up through the roof. I spun and pulled my piece.

Zarrath-Zenobion had jumped Max and was holding him by the throat with two clawed feelers. In a third, Zarrath held a shiny, blunt nosed .32 calibre to Max’s forehead. His last feeler was preoccupied with a good handful of Max’s wobbly bits. Good old Zarrath, I’d thought.

‘Don’t know what made me come up,’ he said to me. ‘Instinct, I guess.’ He opened and closed the mandibles that led to his more or less human mouth.

‘Well, Zarrath, I’m yours, friend. You name it and I’ll do it, don’t even hesitate to ask.’ I smiled at my friend and lowered my weapon.

It was just then that I noticed a hissing sound. I spent a moment thinking about what it was before Max’s prosthetic arm jack-knifed and caught Zarrath under the chin in an uppercut. There was a sharp whistling sound and  Zarrath-Zenobion’s head exploded.

I hadn’t expected that.