Michael Smith - One of Us

‘How the fuck do you expect me to know, dickweed?’ snarled the voice, and the connection was severed.

I tried the number again, immediately. It rang, but there was no answer. Then I called the operator. She told me there was no fault on the line but wouldn't give me the address.

I called Quat. He said he'd call me back. I stumbled around the room for ten minutes, gobbling aspirin like candy.

Quat called, hack done. The number was from a booth in the first class departure lounge of O'Hare airport.

I called the other number I had for the woman. The line was dead. Then I blacked out.

When I came to, I was pretty scared. Two reasons. The first is that it had never happened to me before, except the tiny blips you got immediately after receiving a memory. The second was that my client had clearly fucked me over.

I checked out of the hotel and drove fast back to LA along Highway 1, bolting myself into the apartment. I panicked when I found a note had been stuffed under the door, but it was only from my old neighbours, the Dickenses. They were a nice young couple with three kids, originally from Portland. Year ago someone came up with an idea to sell everyone on how well the country was doing. They invented an imaginary family: parents of a certain age, such-and-such background, current and past employment, recreational habits, kids' sexes, ages, SAT scores and eye colour – they were very specific. Then they hung an entire campaign around it, staking their reputation on claiming that such a family was so many dollars better off every week – thinking nobody could disprove it. Problem was, they screwed up. There was such a family – the Dickenses. Some suit in the Statistics Bureau panicked and took a contract out on them, and they'd been on the run ever since. The note just said they'd seen someone sniffing around, and they were gone. They left me their keys, and said I could have the milk in their fridge.

I hid the memory receiver in the bedroom and spent the rest of the day in the bathtub, slowly drinking. By the time I got out, I could piece together most of the first two days of the memory. The woman had been down in Ensenada, but she'd been by herself: mainly she'd spent the time drinking Margaritas in Housson's and a variety of other bars. The first night was pretty quiet, and by midnight she was back where she was staying, a small and run-down beach resort called Quitas Papagayo, about half a mile up the coast. I'd stayed there myself, a long time ago, and even then its halcyon days had been thirty years behind it. On the second night, drunk, she nearly ended up going home with an American sailor. On the whole I was glad she changed her mind, and bawled him out in the street instead. She kept screaming at him as he hurried away up the street, then went back in the bar and drank until it closed. God knows how she got home: she couldn't remember. Hardly the vacation of a lifetime, though I've had worse, I've got to admit.

And it hadn't been ten years ago, either. She'd taken an organizer with her, and checked her email obsessively – the dates on screen made it clear her ‘holiday’ had taken place only a couple of days before she contacted me. Finally she got the email she was waiting for. It was short. Just an address. She walked straight out of the bar and got in her car, and was back in LA early evening.

The next part of the memory, the murder at the crossroads, took a long time in coming. I'd never experienced anything like it before. Though it was very recent, it was already distorted, and shot through with darkness. It was as if a process of blanking had already started, before she decided to get rid of it. I don't know why she wanted to lose the time in Ensenada as well: when you take other people's memories, you don't always get all the thoughts that happened during them. It's like some people's sense data and internal workings take part in different parts of their head, like they've trained a part of their mind to remain distant at all times. All I got during the time in the Baja was a draining feeling of misery, of a desire to be either drunk or dead – mixed with dark elation. Not a good way to feel, sure, but I got the sense that this was how she felt about half the time. Ditching two days of it wasn't going to make much difference. Perhaps she'd spent those two days working herself up to what happened – reliving certain things in part of her mind, girding herself. I don't know.

But in the end I was able to form a coherent idea of the last night, and what had happened, and learn her name when the guy used it just before she killed him. I told Deck everything I could remember, from the way the crossroads had looked, to the way the man called Ray winked, to the number of shots she pumped into his body. The feeling of emptiness as she stared down at the corpse, reloading the gun for the sake of it.

The numb despair, as she ran away, at realizing that it had made no difference.

Laura Reynolds was breathing easy, apparently now asleep. Retelling the memory made me feel something new towards her, though I wasn't sure what. Guilty, perhaps. I'd taken something that had previously only been in our heads, and brought it out into the world. I'd never done that before, and regarded the confidentiality of my profession with a kind of half-assed pride. I hedged the feeling down, told it to go away. She'd deliberately dumped something on me which could get me sent to prison for ever.

Deck was standing at the window when I got back, looking down at the street. The sky was beginning to lighten round the edges, and somewhere the smog machines were stirring into life. Looked like we were heading for a hot day, unless the chemicals in the sky decided they fancied a blizzard instead. Being a weather man in LA isn't the joke job it used to be.

When Deck spoke it was as if he was working up to something, clearing the side issues out of the way first. ‘Who do you think the guys at the end were?’

‘I have no idea. They're weren't cops, I'm pretty sure of that.’

‘Why?’

‘Don't know. Something about them. Plus they looked familiar.’

‘Plenty cops look familiar to me.’

‘Not like that. An old memory.’

‘Yours?’

‘I think so. I don't think they sparked anything in her at all.’

‘Could it be them who've been in here?’

I shook my head. ‘They didn't see me, remember? – I wasn't actually there. I didn't do anything. It just feels as if I did.’

He looked at me. ‘You know what will happen if you're caught with that in your head?’ He's warned me about this since I started memory work.

‘Murder One. Or Half, at least.’

He shook his head. ‘You don't know the half of it.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Deck walked past the door, and rootled through the pile of yesterday's news. I guess I should cancel the hardcopy paper, save a few trees somewhere: but reading it off a screen isn't ever going to be the same. He found the edition he was looking for, and handed it to me.

I scanned the front page:

There might be an earthquake at some stage.

A property entrepreneur called Nicholas Schumann had killed himself in a spectacular way: financial problems cited. I remembered the name, vaguely: he might even have been one of the wheels who redeveloped Griffith. Must have taken some piece of phenomenal stupidity for him to have lost all that money.

The weather was still fucked, and they didn't think they could fix it.

‘So what?’ I said.

‘Page three,’ Deck said

I turned to it, and found an article about a murder which had happened six days earlier. It recapped how an unarmed man had died from multiple gunshot wounds in the street in Culver City. It implied that the cops had a number of leads, which meant for the time being they had jack shit, but they were working it hard. It gave the age of the deceased, his profession, and also his name.