A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0029

Chapter 29

He had been awake for an hour, and for an hour he had been trying to lay the pieces of the night before back into the order they belonged, and they kept refusing him.

Some of it came easily, because the easy parts were the parts a man wanted to keep. The deal had been good. The deal had been better than good. He remembered the price the way a starving man remembers a meal, every figure of it, the way the number had sat on the table between him and the seller and refused to climb no matter how long Johnson waited for the catch. He remembered the satisfaction of walking away having robbed a fool, and the second satisfaction stacked on top of the first, the private one, the part he had told no one above him about, that the price had come in so far under what he had been given to spend that there was a fat clean wedge of money left over with nobody’s name on it. That money was not going back up the chain. He had decided that before the ink was dry. He had decided it the way he decided everything that mattered, quietly and completely, and his men had agreed to keep their mouths shut about it because his men understood that a leader who fed them was a leader worth lying for. Loyalty was a thing you bought with bread, not with speeches. He had bought it.

After that the order broke.

There had been the warehouse, and the crates going up into the van, and the smile he could not get off his face. And then the boy. He reached for the boy the way you reach in the dark for a step that is not there, and his mind came back with nothing he could use. A shape in a doorway. A sense of someone too thin to matter standing where no one should have been able to stand. He could not find the face. He turned the memory over and the face simply was not in it, scrubbed out, the way a name you have known your whole life will sometimes refuse to come, and the absence frightened him in a way he did not have the room, just then, to examine. He knew the boy had done something. That was all his body would confirm. Something had been done to him, and his skull still held the bill for it.

The pain lived behind his eyes and to the left, a slow pulse that swelled when he moved his head and ebbed when he held it still, and his sight had not come all the way back. The edges of the room stayed soft. When he looked at the window the light pulled itself out into a smear before it settled. The nurse had used a word for it, and the word had been concussion, and she had told him in the flat practiced way of someone reading off a chart that the fall had been a serious one and that he would be here some days before they let him walk out, and that he should be glad of how he had landed, because men landed worse. He had not felt glad. He had felt the slow black tide of wanting to put his hands around the throat of whoever had put him on the ground, and the wanting had nowhere to go, because his hands were not free.

They had cuffed him to the rail. Both wrists, the steel cold against the bone, a short chain on each side that let him lift his arms a few inches off the mattress and no further, so that even the small dignity of covering his own eyes against the light was denied him. He lay there pinned to a hospital bed like an insect to a board and let the indignity of it work on him, and through the long window that gave onto the corridor he could see the reason for the chains. A policeman sat on a bench out there in the ordinary blue of his uniform, one ankle crossed over a knee, a folded newspaper held up in front of his face, turning the pages with the bottomless patience of a man being paid by the hour to do nothing. He had not looked in once that Johnson had seen. He did not need to. The chains were doing his watching for him.

The thought that came back to Johnson most often, circling in like a fly that would not be waved off, was the bill. Not the guns. Not even the boy. The bill. He was going to have to pay for this. For the bed, for the nurse, for the chart with its flat word on it, for every hour he lay here being kept alive by people who had cuffed him to the furniture, the city was going to hand him a number, and the number would come out of the same dwindling pile that every other piece of this disaster was coming out of, and the smallness of the insult, stacked on top of everything larger, was somehow the part that made the heat climb hardest into his face.

Because the larger things were waiting, and he could not stop them waiting. He made himself look at them anyway, because a man who would not look at the size of his own trouble was a man already beaten by it. The guns were gone. All of them. The thing he had been sent to get, the first task that had ever felt like a test instead of an errand, and he had gotten it, he had gotten it cleaner than anyone above him had any right to expect, and then he had lost it whole in a single night to a shape in a doorway he could not even describe. The money was gone, the clean money and the dirty, the part he owed and the part he had quietly meant to steal. The van was gone. He was going to have to stand in front of the man he answered to, with his head still ringing, and say all of that out loud. I had it and I lost it. I had everything and I have nothing. And he was going to have to say it now, of all the weeks in the year, with the streets winding themselves tighter every day, with the thing everyone could feel coming and no one would name, the war he had wanted his whole life arriving at last and finding him empty-handed and chained to a bed.

He went back, because there was nowhere else to go, to the question of who. Someone had sent the boy. The boy had not wandered into that warehouse by accident; nobody wandered into that, not that night, not to that slip, and a thing that thin did not put a man like Johnson on his back without knowing exactly whose back it was. So. Who. He turned it the only way he knew how, by following the money, and the money pointed at the seller, because the seller was the one strange fact in the whole clean afternoon, the price that had been too low, the man who had wanted the crates gone the way you want a body gone. It fit. It almost fit. He could nearly hold it.

And then it came apart in his hands, because the seller was a bridge, and the bridge had held weight before. Years of weight. The man had moved real things for real people and never once dropped a load, and in the work Johnson did there was exactly one currency that mattered more than money and that currency was the knowledge of who you could turn your back on, and the seller had earned a place on the short list of men Johnson would turn his back on, and you did not throw a man off that list on the strength of a good price and a bad night. Trust was the whole architecture. Pull one beam and the building came down, and you spent the rest of your life unable to stand under any roof. No. Not the seller. Probably not the seller. He let it go, and it left a worse thing behind it, which was that if it was not the seller then it was someone he could not see at all, someone outside the whole map he carried in his head, and that meant the map was wrong, and a man whose map was wrong was a man already lost and still walking.

The rage did not help and he did not care. It was the only thing in the bed with him that was his. He fed it. He needed his men, that was the shape the rage kept taking, he needed to get to them and put the night back together out of what they had seen, who had stood where, what the boy had touched, which way he had gone, and out of that he needed to build the one thing that would make any of the rest of it bearable, which was the road back to that doorway with a gun in his hand and time on his side. He set that down at the center of himself like a stone on a table and built the rest of his thinking around it, and his head pulsed, and the light in the window smeared and settled, and he lay in the wreck of the best night of his life and waited for it to become a thing he could survive.

He was deep in it, deeper than he meant to be, when he heard the footsteps.

More than one set. Two, his ear told him before his eyes could turn, two men walking unhurried down the corridor toward his room, and he came up out of his own head and looked toward the long window expecting the flat white of a coat, a nurse, an orderly, the doctor finally come to read him his sentence. It was not a coat. It was two suits. One man tall and one man short, and even with his sight gone soft at the edges Johnson could see the cut of the cloth on them, the way good cloth hangs, expensive in a way that had no business in this corridor, and the wrongness of that landed in him a half second before anything else did.

The policeman saw them too. He folded the paper and rose off the bench with the unbothered authority of a man whose whole job was to stand in doorways and turn people away, and he stepped to put himself between the suits and the room. The short man walked into him. Not a collision; Johnson could not have called it a collision. The short one simply came forward a step ahead of the tall one and lifted a hand and laid it against the side of the policeman’s head, the way you might steady a man who had stumbled, and the policeman’s eyes rolled up white under the brim of his cap and his knees let go and he went down into the bench he had just left, boneless, the newspaper sliding off his lap and fanning across the floor. It had taken no more than the touch. There had been no struggle in it at all.

Johnson understood, in the cold clean way that fear sometimes lets a man understand things, that these two were the boy’s. That they came from wherever the boy came from, the place outside his map, the place that did things to a man’s body with a touch and scrubbed faces out of his memory and put him on the floor without effort. And understanding it, he did the only thing the bed left him to do. He pulled a breath down to the bottom of himself to scream, to bring every nurse and orderly on the floor down on this room at a run, because noise was the one weapon a chained man had left.

The breath never became a sound.

The tall man was beside the bed. Johnson had watched him standing in the corridor a heartbeat earlier, the length of the room and the doorway between them, and now he was here, at the rail, leaning over him, and there had been no crossing. No blur of motion, no rush of cloth, nothing for the eye to hold. The distance had simply stopped existing, and a hand the size of a dinner plate was already coming down over the lower half of Johnson’s face, sealing his mouth and his nose at once, and the scream broke against the inside of it and died there in the dark behind the man’s palm.

He fought. Of course he fought. He was two hundred and forty pounds of a man who had spent his life being the largest thing in every room he entered, and he bucked his whole body up off the mattress and twisted and pulled against the steel at his wrists until it cut, and none of it moved the hand. The hand was not a hand. It was a weight that had been set down on him by something that did not strain, and it held his skull pinned to the pillow as though his head had been bolted there, and behind it his lungs began to climb toward panic, the first hot scrabble of a body that is being kept from air, and the more he heaved the more nothing happened, and the nothing was its own particular horror, worse than pain. Pain at least meant you had been touched by something that could be touched back.

Through the wet swimming edges of his sight he saw the short man come around the foot of the bed. Unhurried still. There was no hurry anywhere in either of them, and the absence of hurry told him more about how this was going to end than anything they could have said. The short man reached the side of the bed and looked down at him with no expression Johnson could name, not cruelty and not pity, the flat considering look of a man checking a number against a list, and he raised his hand and laid it flat across Johnson’s forehead, cool and dry, the fingers spread.

The voice came from inside his own skull.

It did not come through his ears. There was nothing in the room to hear. It arrived already in him, in the middle of his head where his own thoughts lived, a voice that was not his speaking a single word into the private dark behind his eyes, and the word was sleep, and it was not a suggestion. It was a hand closing over a lamp. A pressure rose up out of nowhere to fill the whole inside of his head at once, vast and gray and absolute, pouring into every corner of him faster than he could flinch from it, pressing the panic flat, pressing the rage flat, pressing the light in the window down to a point and then to nothing, and the last thing Johnson knew, the very last image his mind let through before the gray took all of it, was the short man’s hand lifting away from his forehead, the fingers rising, the touch ending, as though the work were already done.

…

“At last,” the tall man said. “The last one.” He straightened up off the rail and rolled the great slab of his shoulder, working out some stiffness the long week had put into it, though his hand stayed where it was, clamped soft and total over the unconscious man’s mouth. “And that’s the job. Two weeks chasing rats around this city, and tonight we get to go home.” He said the word home the way a tired man says it, with weight on it. “New York. God. I’d forgotten there were cities where the air doesn’t taste like a harbor.”

“Don’t,” the short one said. He had taken his hand from the man’s forehead and was already turning away toward the inside of his own coat. “Don’t say going home to me. I get back and there’s another one waiting on my desk before I’ve unpacked. Yours ends. Mine just changes addresses.” He let a long breath out through his nose, the sound of a man too far into the work to be cheered by the end of any single piece of it. “Let’s just finish.”

From inside the coat he drew a small case, black, rectangular, no longer than his hand, and he thumbed it open against his palm. Two things sat in the molded dark of it, a syringe, empty, and beside it a slim glass ampoule with something in it that did not catch the light the way clean liquid should. He took the ampoule out between two fingers and snapped its neck with a small dry sound, and fitted the needle, and drew the contents up into the barrel slow and even until the glass was empty and the syringe was full, and he tipped the case shut against his thigh and slid it back into his coat without looking at it.

He took the man’s bound arm above the wrist and turned it, finding the soft inner crook of the elbow where the vein ran close, and set the needle to it, and pushed the plunger all the way down in one unhurried motion, emptying every drop of the dark thing into the blood.

It moved faster than blood should. Under the skin of the man’s forearm a fine black tracery bloomed and ran, branching up from the puncture along the lines of the veins, climbing, spreading, the dark spidering out beneath the surface and racing the heart that was pumping it, and where it passed the skin around it went tight and gray. Then the body began to convulse. It came up off the mattress in a long arching seizure, every muscle locked and hauling against the steel at the wrists, the heels drumming, a sound trying to tear its way up out of the chest, and the tall man simply leaned a fraction more weight onto the hand over the mouth and held the head down and let the body do what it had to do against the floor of his palm, patient, incurious, a man waiting out weather. The seizure went on. It went on far longer than a body should be able to sustain it, the dark working through him, the silent ruin of it, and the short man stood with his hands in his pockets and watched the chest, only the chest, counting.

Seven minutes, near enough, and then it broke. The arching let go all at once and the body dropped back into the mattress and lay still, the limbs slack against the rails, the black gone out of the surface of the skin and back down into wherever it had gone to do its work, and for a long moment there was nothing in the man at all, no motion, no sign. Then the chest rose. It rose and fell, shallow and slow and even, and went on rising and falling, and the tall man watched it do that twice more before he lifted his hand away from the slack mouth at last and flexed the fingers.

“Well, hell,” he said. He looked down at the breathing thing on the bed with something close to grudging respect. “Another one. This one lived.” He shook his head slowly. “This city. I’ve never seen anything like it for luck. That’s ten now. Ten out of the whole run. I’ve worked towns where we didn’t get half that.”

“Ten,” the short man agreed, “out of seventy.” He had not stopped looking at the chest. “We put it into seventy people in this city, and ten of them are still breathing. You can call that luck if it helps you sleep. I call it a number that should worry the people who send us, and won’t.” He finally looked up. “Sixty dead in fourteen days, and they’ll read the ten and call the trip a success.”

The tall man made a low dismissive sound in his chest. “Not my arithmetic to do. Who any of them are, what they were before, none of it touches me. I went through my own door a long time back and came out the other side, same as everyone who carries this case.” He nodded down at the man on the bed without warmth. “Whether a rat like this one can do anything with what’s in him now is somebody else’s problem to sit and watch. They left him here, they want him here. We did the part they pay us for.”

“We did.” The short man turned his cuff up to check the time, then let it fall. “And we should be gone before the man outside comes back to himself. He’ll wake up thinking he nodded off, and the longer there’s nobody for him to have a problem with, the longer it stays that way.” He moved first, toward the door, the tired economy of a man who had done this in a great many rooms. “Come on.”

The tall man cast a last unbothered glance over the bed, over the steady rise and fall of the chest and the slack ruined face above it, and followed.

They went out into the corridor and turned down it together and walked, and there was no haste in either of them and no care either, no quick checking of the high corners where a camera might sit, no second look at the policeman folded asleep on his bench with the newspaper spread around his feet. That had all been seen to before they ever came up the stairs; the eyes of the building had been closed an hour ago by people whose only job that was. They passed the dark mouths of other rooms and the long empty run of waxed floor and came at last to the wide lit space of the reception, where the night’s broken and bleeding and frightened sat in rows under the hard fluorescent light waiting to be called, none of whom looked up, none of whom would ever have a reason to remember two men in good suits crossing the room toward the doors, and they crossed it, and the doors slid open ahead of them onto the dark, and they were gone.