The Night Mayor by Kim Newman Page A

hadn’t had a photograph for me to flash, but had described him as looking ‘a lot like you, Mr Quick, a
lot
like you’. She had made a pass at me, of course, but I had left her and her dead eyes in her big, empty house. I make a policy of never fooling around with my clients. It’s kept me alive so far.
    From the dry-out farm, Tunney had moved down to the border, mooched around in cantinas for a while, then left the country two steps ahead of the sheriff of some Rio Grande jerkwater. I followed by car and
burro
, tracking him from town to town. The bottles marked his way through the desert, like cat’s-eyes down a street. I made some deposit money back on as many as I could carry. The rest I left out there with the bones of prehistoric animals, as a sign for future generations that there had been civilisation in the Americas.
    Tunney had made a lot of friends along the way, until his travelling money ran out. After that, he made a lot of enemies. I interviewed some of them. Three beer-befuddled construction workers played softball with my head in a backstreet on the mistaken assumption that I
was
Tom Tunney. With the bruises and a three-day beard, I was told I looked even more like him than I had done. Lissa’s money gave out, and she told me over an international phone hook-up that she wasn’t interested any more. She was remarrying – to a war hero, of course, just like all the girls that year – and didn’t want to know either way about her former husband. ‘He was just a no-account,’ she told me, ‘a Dreamer.’ But I was too far along to drop it that easily. I’m a detective, so I feel obliged to detect.
    I was finding out more and more about my quarry’s life. From the witnesses, I picked up details about his work, his friends, his childhood, his Dreams. And, with each scrap of information I unearthed about Tom Tunney, I seemed to forget something about myself. I found myself using his name on hotel registers, in barroom conversations. I realised, with a shock, that I was drinking almost constantly. One evening, I sat in a cantina with a row of bottles on the bar, and tried to remember absurdly small things about my own life. I couldn’t remember the make of car I drove, how my girlfriend looked naked, what I had done before I got my PI licence, what shape my bathroom was, my parents’ names. I knew more about Tom Tunney than about Richie Quick. The man I had not found yet was real to me, but I was a phantom, as flat and one-sided as Dick Tracy or Steve Canyon.
    I was staring at a wall-sized mirror when he walked into the bar. Over my own shoulder, I saw his face come out of the shadows. For the briefest of instants, I was standing up looking in the mirror at the face of a man at the bar…
    Then the curtains parted, and I was back in the City. Back in the night. Back in the pain.
    ‘Heavens be praised, my boy,’ said Carradine. ‘I thought you were dead for sure!’
    I opened my eyes, was assaulted by the light, and shut them again.
    ‘Easy now,’ said the deep, resonant voice. ‘Step by step.’
    I opened my eyes again, less painfully. I was still on the floor of Kelly’s, surrounded by smashed tables and bulletholes. I was sitting in a congealed pool of stickiness. I felt myself for wounds, and couldn’t find any. The mess was just spilled ketchup. Maybe my luck was changing.
    ‘Not a mark on him,’ said Thelma, ‘saints be praised!’ She had a rosary out, and was knotting it around one hand like a beaded bandage.
    Carradine helped me up. I was unsteady on my feet, and my head felt like a leftover battlefield, but everything seemed to be in more or less working order. There was ketchup on my trench coat, but it would wash off in time.
    ‘Looks like you’re right about there being a new man at the top,’ said Carradine, ‘and he’s just paid you his friendly compliments.’
    Kelly grunted, seemingly no more upset by the destruction of his diner than he would have been by a broken