Jon Grimwood - Pashazade

'I didn't do that for you,' said Zara firmly, as the car screeched to a halt at the entrance to Rue Cif. And then she was crunching her way through the gears again, leaving him alone on a street corner, fifty paces from where Hani waited on the other side of a wall.

All matter moved. At a basic, base level atoms resonated, electrons could simultaneously occupy contradictory positions in space. What the eye regarded as solid was anything but... Of course, at a human level, movement was also what you got when people were too empty to stay still. That was the fox's opinion, anyway.

Wild Boy rode a red 650cc with a custom-built exhaust pot no larger than the silencer on a Ruger rifle. The bike was Japanese like Wild Boy himself, which had no significance (the same bike was ridden by ZeeZee, standard issue for all lieutenants in Hu San's street militia). And Wild Boy was on his way to see ZeeZee, which did .. ,

The Japanese kid dressed smart but flashy in silk suits that flattered his rough-cut hair and emphasized his slim shoulders and narrow hips. At the front, Wild Boy's hair was razored to frame wide green eyes and high cheekbones. That was the way Hu San liked it.

He wore a brushed-steel Tag Heuer, lace-up Louis Vuitton boots, cotton shirt from Abercrombie & Fitch, a white Moschino coat over his dark suit and wide Alain Mikli spectacles fitted with tinted glass. Even his cigarettes were Gitanes, carried in a black enamel case with a Gucci clasp. Everything about Wild Boy had a label except the position he occupied in the Five Winds.

It took ZeeZee two months to work out what Wild Boy did. At first he figured Wild Boy and Hu San were somehow family, then that Wild Boy was her bodyguard. Though why Hu San would need a bodyguard when she could wield a blade that way wasn't clear. Unless it was a matter of face. As it was, ZeeZee didn't really work it out for himself at all. Hu San's Croat enforcer Artan told him. 'They're lovers, fuckwit, he's her pretty boy ...' Wild Boy didn't protect Hu San. She protected him.

Wild Boy hated ZeeZee from the start.

Maybe it was simply the fact that Hu San took ZeeZee on at all. Given he was the only Caucasian in Five Winds, except for Artan and Artan didn't count. Hu San got through enforcers like Wild Boy got through Chinese take-out, which was often how her enforcers ended up looking after she'd sent them to a disputed area of town. Though those areas got fewer by the day.

The only branded thing ZeeZee carried was a small .357 Taurus, with a rib grip and two-inch ported barrel, in matte Spectrum blue. And even then he carried that in a cheap $10 neoprene holster from Gunmart. He didn't want the revolver and only carried it because Hu San insisted. Unlike Wild Boy's gun, ZeeZee's weapon was legal, clean, licensed and never-before-fired, and ZeeZee aimed to keep it that way.

The job Hu San had chosen for him was pig-simple. A hundred years back, in a harbour-side bar, an English ex-policeman called Charles Jardine met a Seattle attorney named Angus Bannerman. Several whiskies later they came up with Jardine&Bannerman, an agency that would handle both the legal and investigative sides of life's personal problems, plus deliver subpoenas and do a little underwriting of bail bonds on the side.

By the time ZeeZee became a junior partner, the legal and investigative side was a memory held only in mouldering ledgers in the basement, bail bonds were a minor side-line and thrusting subpoenas into dirty hands made up the bulk of the business, especially subpoenas that were hard to deliver. On paper, which really meant on microfiche at a warehouse out on the city edge and on a thumb-smeared DVD in City Hall, the company was recorded as stand-alone and independent; majority-owned by its partners. In practice, Hu San owned and ran it, and always referred to the company as Jade&Bamboo, smiling at the words. As with most of her jokes, ZeeZee didn't get the punchline.

All ZeeZee had to do was dress neatly, present himself at the reception desk of some gilt-edged outfit in Houston, Los Angeles or Seattle (though mostly it was Seattle) and talk his way up to whatever floor was necessary. Either that or stroll casually through the doors of some exclusive club as if he belonged. His English accent and manners usually did the rest.

Once inside, he apologized for disturbing his quarry, handed them the court order and, whipping out a tiny Nikon, immediately apologized again for snapping a shot of them holding the papers. There would be a click, a faint ping and the evidence would be uploaded to J&B's secure databox before the person holding the subpoena had even worked out what was happening.

And all the time, ZeeZee thought people were polite because he was polite, not realizing until he was in Huntsville that the bulge of a revolver slung under his left armpit said more about him than a floppy haircut, elegant clothes or any credit card ever could.

For a year or so, what Hu San got out of owning J&B eluded ZeeZee. Until he began to realize that for every fifteen or twenty supposedly difficult subpoenas he managed to deliver, there was always one job where the target had vanished like early-morning mist before the sun. Sometimes the target left his or her old life behind in uneaten toast or unwashed clothes. And sometimes their possessions were gone as well, gutted out of an apartment or house that echoed with absence.

There seemed no logic, at first, to which person on the list would suddenly vanish but slowly ZeeZee began to develop a sixth sense. So one autumn morning he reversed the order of two jobs and turned up early at an art brut concrete lodge outside Seattle.

ZeeZee left his red Suzuki and black crash helmet at the top of a rough earth track that fed off the crumbling backtop and walked down towards the house and Puget Sound's pale waters beyond.

The man on the jetty wasn't expecting to see him. That much was obvious from the way he froze, heavy suitcase still clutched in one hand.

'Sorry to disturb you ...'ZeeZee held out his hand and when Micky O'Brian put down his suitcase, ZeeZee slipped the court order into the hand that reached out, watching the fingers close from instinct. ZeeZee relied on that reaction a lot in his line of work.

'Smile.'

By lunchtime the sudden breakdown of Micky O'Brian was leading the local news and had third slot on Sky. A feeding frenzy was about to begin. Ravaged by drugs, or maybe by pleurisy brought on by Aids, by alcohol and painkiller addiction, by paradise syndrome ... Journalistic diagnoses were made from positions of absolute ignorance; conflicting, contradictory, as many irrefutable facts offered as there were commentators.

Shots of a private ambulance with blackened windows appeared first on Celebrity Update. As did footage of a grey-haired woman in a white coat who spoke sincerely and at great length to the camera without actually giving out any information at all. Confidentiality got a name check, so did courage, hope and recovery. The name of the clinic got mentioned three times, but that information was redundant. Everyone watching the CU channel already knew where celebs got their lives, health and shit back on track.

The fact was, Micky O'B would be in there forty-eight hours max, seventy-two hours at a push. The clinic operated a high-profile arrivals policy, while arranging the world's quickest and most discreet departures.

The only thing on which every single commentator agreed was that Micky O'Brian's agent had signed him into a clinic that morning and the head of the clinic was now refusing to let cameras past the gate. That Micky had recently been served with a summons regarding a major drugs bust went unmentioned.