motherfucks.”
He winked at me, and went back to sorting his piles of drugs. Rat-face glared. Marty had taken a step backward at the mention of Bright Eyes, and took another as I turned to him. I walked unmolested through the gap and out of the apartment.
Back in Mal’s I stood for a while, wondering what to do next. Then I noticed something, and walked slowly towhere Mal’s display hung on the wall down by the window. When the sheet of cloth was pulled away it confirmed what I’d suspected.
The display had gone. The board was still there, covered in tiny holes where pins had been, but all of the photos and notes had been removed. I let the cloth fall again.
Who’d done this? Not Mal. He wouldn’t have had time before being killed. And why would he take it down? He was a cop. It was his work. He was entitled to have what the fuck he liked on his walls. So who?
Whoever cleaned the place up.
Or, I thought, maybe it had happened earlier than that. When I’d come back to find Mal dead, checking whether his board was still intact had been the last thing on my mind. Perhaps the fumbling that Suej had heard was a scrabbling as they ripped everything off of the board.
Either way, it posed questions: Why remove evidence of what Mal had been working on? What did that have to do with me?
Answer, nothing.
So maybe it wasn’t me they’d been after. Maybe Mal had been the target all along.
I lit a cigarette and stared out of the window until I’d finished it. I was thinking, I guess, though it was like swatting flies off a piece of meat. Then I locked the door so I wouldn’t be disturbed, and tossed Mat’s apartment. Not all of it, you understand; the cupboards alone would have taken months. Just the places a cop would hide things.
I found nothing, not even a computer, which I knew Mal had. My eyes turned upward, and I saw the loose panel in Mal’s ceiling, a panel which was presumably the entrance to the place where he’d tried to hide the spares before opening the door to his killer. The hiding place that the people who’d whacked him hadn’t found.
I grabbed a chair and, standing precariously on its back, opened the panel. I boosted myself up into thedarkness, and rested for a moment on the edge with my legs dangling down. I couldn’t see anything, but it felt right. Mal was a secretive bastard—when, he played poker he kept his cards inside his chest. I stood and wandered around like a; zombie, arms outstretched, groping for a switch. Eventually found one, a pull cord which lit a hanging bulb and threw the area into harsh shadow.
It was surprisingly neat—untypical Mal. A pile of boxes lined one wall—autopsy reports and other documents, hardcopied from police E-files. Illegal—Mal out on a limb about something. Down the other end was a desk, and on it a computer. Nothing in the desk drawers. Everything looked bright and shiny, as if this was some new venture, a recent hidey-hole. The computer was his old one, a cellular Matrix connection plugged in the back. A digipic lay next to it.
On the wall above the desk, photographs. Three women dead; close-ups showing that their eyes were missing.
Unspecified facial damage.
I sat down heavily on his chair, and I found I was swallowing involuntarily. I forced myself to concentrate on the images, on these three women and not on any others.
Three murders, plus one in the early hours of today which he’d been too dead to know about. And maybe… I checked the fact sheets tacked under the pictures. Mal didn’t have yesterday’s either—too busy dealing with me and the spares. Five murders in ten days, each with the same MO.
He’d said he wanted to tell me about something.
I yanked the hard drive from the computer, slipping Mal’s digipic into my pocket alongside it as an afterthought. Then I climbed back down into the apartment, resealed the roof, and left for Mandy’s Diner.
Howie’s bar was nearly empty.
I have a talent for arriving between
He winked at me, and went back to sorting his piles of drugs. Rat-face glared. Marty had taken a step backward at the mention of Bright Eyes, and took another as I turned to him. I walked unmolested through the gap and out of the apartment.
Back in Mal’s I stood for a while, wondering what to do next. Then I noticed something, and walked slowly towhere Mal’s display hung on the wall down by the window. When the sheet of cloth was pulled away it confirmed what I’d suspected.
The display had gone. The board was still there, covered in tiny holes where pins had been, but all of the photos and notes had been removed. I let the cloth fall again.
Who’d done this? Not Mal. He wouldn’t have had time before being killed. And why would he take it down? He was a cop. It was his work. He was entitled to have what the fuck he liked on his walls. So who?
Whoever cleaned the place up.
Or, I thought, maybe it had happened earlier than that. When I’d come back to find Mal dead, checking whether his board was still intact had been the last thing on my mind. Perhaps the fumbling that Suej had heard was a scrabbling as they ripped everything off of the board.
Either way, it posed questions: Why remove evidence of what Mal had been working on? What did that have to do with me?
Answer, nothing.
So maybe it wasn’t me they’d been after. Maybe Mal had been the target all along.
I lit a cigarette and stared out of the window until I’d finished it. I was thinking, I guess, though it was like swatting flies off a piece of meat. Then I locked the door so I wouldn’t be disturbed, and tossed Mat’s apartment. Not all of it, you understand; the cupboards alone would have taken months. Just the places a cop would hide things.
I found nothing, not even a computer, which I knew Mal had. My eyes turned upward, and I saw the loose panel in Mal’s ceiling, a panel which was presumably the entrance to the place where he’d tried to hide the spares before opening the door to his killer. The hiding place that the people who’d whacked him hadn’t found.
I grabbed a chair and, standing precariously on its back, opened the panel. I boosted myself up into thedarkness, and rested for a moment on the edge with my legs dangling down. I couldn’t see anything, but it felt right. Mal was a secretive bastard—when, he played poker he kept his cards inside his chest. I stood and wandered around like a; zombie, arms outstretched, groping for a switch. Eventually found one, a pull cord which lit a hanging bulb and threw the area into harsh shadow.
It was surprisingly neat—untypical Mal. A pile of boxes lined one wall—autopsy reports and other documents, hardcopied from police E-files. Illegal—Mal out on a limb about something. Down the other end was a desk, and on it a computer. Nothing in the desk drawers. Everything looked bright and shiny, as if this was some new venture, a recent hidey-hole. The computer was his old one, a cellular Matrix connection plugged in the back. A digipic lay next to it.
On the wall above the desk, photographs. Three women dead; close-ups showing that their eyes were missing.
Unspecified facial damage.
I sat down heavily on his chair, and I found I was swallowing involuntarily. I forced myself to concentrate on the images, on these three women and not on any others.
Three murders, plus one in the early hours of today which he’d been too dead to know about. And maybe… I checked the fact sheets tacked under the pictures. Mal didn’t have yesterday’s either—too busy dealing with me and the spares. Five murders in ten days, each with the same MO.
He’d said he wanted to tell me about something.
I yanked the hard drive from the computer, slipping Mal’s digipic into my pocket alongside it as an afterthought. Then I climbed back down into the apartment, resealed the roof, and left for Mandy’s Diner.
Howie’s bar was nearly empty.
I have a talent for arriving between
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