Geoff Nicholson - The City Under the Skin

“I hear you’ve been buying real estate,” he said.

“It’s not a secret. Looks like easy money to me. I see you buying and selling property. I think, How hard can it be?”

McKinley didn’t take the bait. He said, “Maybe you should sell that compound of yours. Turn it into quirky luxury apartments.”

“No.”

“Too many memories, eh?” Ray said, smirking. “Look, are you all right? What is it? Money troubles? Women troubles? Whatever it is, you can talk to me about it.”

“No, I can’t. And I don’t want to.”

“Okay then, just enjoy the view,” Ray McKinley said. “I like it here. You can see half the city from here. Don’t you like it?”

“I’d like it better without the nets and the lights and the dicks playing golf.”

“You have to see past all that stuff,” said McKinley. “That’s what I do. I look beyond. I see possibilities.”

“Yeah, Ray, you’re king of all you survey.”

“No need to be a jerk about it.”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Wrobleski, continuing to be a jerk. “You can see the tower of the Telstar Hotel from here, can’t you? You still own a piece of that?”

“You know I do. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“I hear the mayor’s plans are going pretty well.”

“Plans are made to be changed.”

They looked out across the city, to the dimmed stillness of the empty Telstar. There were one or two lights dotted randomly amid the grid of its windows: squatters. Ray lofted another ball, harder, straighter, even higher.

“Don’t tell me,” said Wrobleski, “you just want to talk.”

“Is that so terrible?”

“It’s a conversation we’ve already had,” said Wrobleski. “You’re going to ask me to do a job I’ve already told you I’m not going to do.”

“I think you should be allowed to change your mind.”

“There are jobs and there are jobs. This one is just suicide.”

“What? You’re scared? The old Wrobleski wouldn’t have scared so easily.”

“What’s wrong with being scared?” said Wrobleski. “Only an idiot’s never scared. And you can’t just rub out the mayor because she’s in the way of one of your development deals.”

“Oh, I think you can,” said McKinley. “The mayor goes. Her little restoration plan collapses. The Telstar gets demolished. I make a killing.”

“And I’m the one who does the killing.”

“Sure. It’s what you do, isn’t it?”

Wrobleski didn’t respond, but he didn’t deny it.

“Look,” said McKinley, “I’m not asking you to enjoy it. But I can’t see any other way. I’ve tried reasoning with her. I’ve tried bribing her. You got rid of the other old dude for me. That ought to have got her attention, made her rethink her position. But it didn’t. So what am I supposed to do?”

A news helicopter, black and white, insectlike, hacked through the air not so far above their heads. There was a man in the passenger seat, leaning out, pointing a video camera down at them. McKinley raised thumb and index finger and mimed shooting down the chopper.

“The mayor has people,” said Wrobleski. “She’s never alone. She has armed security. She has cameras on her twenty-four hours a day.”

“What is it?” Ray asked. “Are you trying to go straight, Wrobleski?”

“No.”

“Or maybe you’re squeamish about women.”

Wrobleski didn’t answer.

“Really? Is that it? Well, aren’t you the gentleman assassin?”

At last Wrobleski picked up one of the golf clubs McKinley had rented for him. He held it like an ax. McKinley addressed the new ball that had appeared before him. He swung, the ball flew away, fast, straight, and low this time.

“Why don’t you pay one of your other goons to get rid of the mayor for you?”

“You’re the only goon I can trust,” said Ray. “I want to keep it neat. I want to keep it in-house.”

“You could always do it yourself.”

“What do you think I am?”

“I know what you are,” said Wrobleski.

“You sure?”

Wrobleski at last stepped up to a place at the tee. A ball was there waiting. He wound himself up, took an almighty swing, as though he was trying to burst the netting, send the ball far across the city, to the outskirts, to the empty brown land beyond. The ball sliced fiercely, viciously off to the right, smacked the young Asian man standing three tees away, hit him clean and hard in the right shin. He fell down as though he’d been shot. Wrobleski strolled across, stood over him, and offered a thoroughly insincere apology.

“You have to keep your head down and your elbows in,” said McKinley, unhelpfully.

Marilyn Driscoll wafted into Utopiates, a certain elasticity, maybe even bounce, in her step. Zak wondered if this was a good sign; at the very least it suggested that the place no longer gave her the creeps.

“Your black eye’s not looking so bad,” Zak said by way of greeting.

“You think?” said Marilyn. “Under the makeup it’s looking more purple edged with yellow than black. I guess that’s a step in the right direction.”

“And how was your tattooist?”

“My tattooist was a cranky old lady who has a lot more information than she’s prepared to give me. Especially about compass roses.”

“I can tell you more about the compass rose if you like.”

“Sorry, Zak, not that kind of information.”

Again Zak felt a pang of not quite explicable hurt.

“You ever worry, Zak, that the printed map might be a dying form?”

“I know the printed map is a dying form, but I don’t worry about it.”

“So what do you think of this?”

Marilyn flipped open her laptop, and on the screen was a computer-generated map of the city, with a tiny, stationary red spark flashing at its center.

“What’s that?” Zak asked.

“It’s Billy Moore’s car,” Marilyn said.

“Billy Moore?”

“Our friend with the Cadillac.”

“You know his name?”

“Yeah, and I know where he parks his car, on some new lot that’s opened at the corner of Hope Street and Tenth.”

“Is that worth knowing?” said Zak.

“Yes. And now I know he lives there too, in a trailer, with his daughter. I’ve seen them. And I know some of where he goes. Not very far, not yet anyway, but I haven’t been tracking him very long.”

“What kind of tracking?”

“With a portable tracker. That’s the thing flashing on the map on-screen. You stick it underneath a car, like if you have a fleet of delivery trucks or traveling salesmen, so you can see they’re not goofing off or speeding or going somewhere they shouldn’t. You could use it to keep track of an errant wife if you had one.”

“It all sounds very high tech.”

“It cost seventy-five dollars on Amazon. No bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Thirty days’ battery life. Ideal for rugged outdoor use is what it says on the package.”

Even if Zak had no illusions about the printed map being a dying form, he hadn’t realized how out of touch he was with new developments.

“So far,” said Marilyn, “our man’s been from the parking lot to a school and back every day, his daughter’s school presumably. And the other day he went to a tailor’s.”

“You’ve been following him?”

“Only on-screen. And the fact is, Zak, there are real limits to how much you can learn that way.”

“You want a printed map?”

“No, I want us to follow him in the real world.”

“Us?”

“Yes. I don’t want to come across as a girl, Zak, but I’d like you to come with me. There’s safety in numbers.”