Michael Smith - One of Us

I passed, and was allowed through the barrier. The outer doors shut behind me, leaving me in the access tunnel through the wall. The car hummed as it was conveyed towards the inner door. At the end the doors opened gracefully, and I drove out into the world again.

I locked the car to Griffith's auto system and told it to get me home as quickly as possible.

On the inside Griffith looks like it was designed by someone who took acid in Disneyland. The hills provide perching space for split-level houses of high cost and loveliness, but the rest is wall-to-wall fun. The valley areas are split up into regular grids of stores and restaurants, and you're never more than five minutes' drive from a Starbucks or Borders or Baby Gap, the building blocks of Generica. Extensive areas are pedestrianized, and each storefront has been built up into an hysterical shout of commerciality. Restaurants in the shape of food and stores in the style of their products: the shoe stores look like shoes, the video stores are thin and rectangular, and Herbie Crouton's – where the owner, Herbie, sells over two hundred different flavours of small cubes of toasted bread – looks like an enormous crouton. You don't even have to be literate to know where to shop: the perfect, post-verbal landscape. There's a spanking new subway, complete with designer graffiti, a cluster of big hotels in the middle, and little enclaves of speciality shops nestling in the canyons. Nothing is older than ten years, and even the smog is artificial and guaranteed free of pollution.

It's trashy, superficial, and vacuous. I call it home.

When the car turned into my square I took it off auto and drove it myself. I can get all brave when the parking lot is in sight. My building used to be one of the flashest hotels in the area, but then one day someone decided that two hundred yards down the way was far cooler. Everyone checked out of the Falkland virtually overnight, some even carrying their suitcases by themselves. Within a week it was abandoned. By the time I opted for having a stable place to hang my hat, it had applied for and been granted ‘characterful’ status – then turned into private apartments. A SWAT team of interior decorators was called in to make the place look run-down. They did quite a good job, but if you rub hard on the walls in the apartments you can tell the grime's just colour-wash, an environmental laughter track.

I let one of the building's regulars valet-park my vehicle, as always mentally waving it goodbye. I could afford a collapsing car now if I wanted, but I don't really trust them. I've heard too many stories about people who've slipped one into their pocket, popped into a restaurant for some lunch, and then found the car re-expanding at the table. The last thing you want when you're halfway through your tagliatelle is two tons of vehicle on your lap.

Laura Reynolds was still unconscious but also still alive, and I hauled her over my shoulder and hurried into the building. The whole of the first floor has become a kind of freak show bazaar, a throng of fun-seekers and working girls – with a constant backdrop of noise coming from a hundred different stalls. At first glance it looks kind of cool, in an ‘If you are over forty this is your worst nightmare’ kind of way, but take my advice: the drugs are generally cut to shit and you don't want to tangle with the girls. Most of them are method prostitutes: the nurses carry catheters, the meter maids give you tickets enforceable by law, and the schoolgirls like terrible bands and always come straight from an argument with their mothers. The only highlight is the homeopathic bars, where you can get wasted on just one sip of beer: there's a healthcare firm has ambulances out the back with engines running twenty-four hours a day.

Deck was standing right inside the entrance, looking tense. The anti-smoking laws are even tougher inside Griffith, and it drives him berserk. He was also alone.

‘Where the fuck is he?’ I said, heading straight for the elevators on the other side of the foyer.

‘On his way.’ Deck held his arm out to keep the doors open as I manoeuvred into the elevator. Luckily by then I'd remembered my apartment number. ‘He wasn't exactly awake when I called.’ Two guys tried to get in the elevator with us, but Deck dissuaded them. He's a good couple of inches shorter than me, and on the wiry side – but it would be a mistake to read anything into that. His face is a little wonky, but his ease with his scars communicates an entirely valid confidence in his ability to handle himself. He's kept in practice at the whole violence thing, working occasional muscle for local businessmen while holding part-time square john jobs. We made a policy of never working together, back in the old days, but I know that if I ever needed someone covering my back, Deck would be that man.

As we stood outside my door he took Laura from me and held her upright as I fumbled with my keys.

‘You going to explain this to me at some stage?’ he asked mildly.

‘At some stage, yeah.’ I pushed the door open, listened for a moment, then helped Deck drag her in.

We got her laid out on the sofa, and I was halfway through making coffee when there was a buzz at the door. I had my gun out before I knew what I was doing, and Deck held his hands up.

‘Be cool,’ he said, squinting through the peep hole, and kicking aside the small pile of newspapers which had arrived while I was away. ‘Just the old guy.’

Woodley lurched in. ‘I take it you understand this is going to be double rate?’ he rasped, setting his two bags down on the floor. ‘It's nearly four in the morning.’

‘Just shut up and get on with it,’ I said. ‘You'll get four times the rate if you understand that mentioning this to anyone could be fatal. For you, not her.’

Woodley harumphed for a moment, trying to hide a satisfied leer. If there's anything the old berk likes more than money, I can't imagine what it would be. He peered at Laura Reynolds: when he saw the blood-soaked towels he blanched, and waved a hand vaguely at Deck. ‘Let them out, would you, young fellow?’

Though I'd managed to remain relatively calm during the journey home, seeing Woodley dithering around brought it home just how ill Laura Reynolds was. The only time I'd give the old twonk house room was when things were close to the edge. I grabbed one of his bags and shoved him in front of me towards the main bedroom. Meanwhile Deck opened the other bag and let the remotes out – small crab-like machines, the size of tarantulas. Attracted by the smell of blood, they clambered straight up onto the sofa, and started nosing around.

Deck and I had used Woodley on and off for five years, back in the bad old days. He had once, he claimed, been a telesurgeon for covert army operations – conducting surgery remotely through satellite links. There was no way I'd found of establishing whether this was true, but it was certainly the case that he couldn't stand blood. We'd shown him some once, just to check. He didn't mind the sight of it, so long as it was mediated through the remotes' cameras – just didn't like the reality of the actual stuff. After he was court-martialled (unfairly, so he claimed, though he declined to specify what the unfair charges had been) he couldn't get a proper licence, so he hacked out a living catering to people like me. People who every now and then needed something biological sorted out, and who couldn't go to a hospital. Old fool he might be, and I strongly suspected he collected string and slept on the beach somewhere, but boy could that guy stitch. Nicely healed scars in my shoulder, chest and leg – all of which had once been bullet wounds – were testament to that.

I stood where I could see both Laura and Woodley, and watched as he got down to work. The old man's hands were trembling big time, but that wasn't a cause for concern: the controls had anti-shake mechanisms built into them. He put the glasses and gloves on, and within moments the remotes were speeding up and down the woman's arms. After a while one of them hopped off the sofa and delved in the bag, reappearing with a fridgipacked bag of plasma. Woodley clucked and frowned with concentration.