Читать книгу Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence - Michael Marshall Smith - Страница 17

Meanwhile, back in Miami, Nash and his remaining (non-exploded) associates – Eduardo, Jesse and Chex – were breaking into a second-hand store close to the warehouse where they’d encountered the freaky old man in the suit.

Most criminals avoid committing crimes on home turf, on the grounds that stealing from people with whom you might later come into contact tends to be a bad policy. People don’t like being stolen from. It makes them angry and upset. In places like Opa Locka, where the stolen-from have a tendency to briskly take matters into their own hands, this can lead to violent confrontations, broken bones and general sadness.

Nash didn’t care about this, despite the fact the store they were robbing belonged to a man called Mr Files, who even the dumbest locals knew was a dude on whose wrong side you most certainly didn’t want to be. Mr Files knew everyone thought of him this way, however, and would therefore be able to guess that the only person likely to go ahead and rob him anyway would be Nash, whom Mr Files accepted was even scarier than he was. The situation was further complicated by the fact that half the goods in the store were in fact stolen, and Mr Files had acquired most of these from Nash himself. The items were, therefore, now being stolen a second time, and it was far from inconceivable that (after a suitable delay) Nash might resell them back to Mr Files; that some of these pieces of tech might spend the rest of their existence circulating back and forth between them like pieces of flotsam bobbing on a dead sea.

This is why you have to be quite smart to be a successful criminal. Keeping track of the interlocking illegalities and hierarchies can be hard, and if you get it wrong you don’t just get a bad appraisal and the chance to buck up your ideas, but instead wind up floating in the bay, often in more than one piece. Men (and women) who were neither smart nor scary enough to work this system with confidence – men like Eduardo, Jesse and Chex – tended to find a leader and do what they were told.

Though robbing Mr Files’s store made them nervous, they were glad to be doing something. In the couple of days since the encounter with the man in the black suit, morale among the group had not been high. The following night the three men had turned up to Nash’s house to find their boss sitting on the tilting porch, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, staring into the middle distance. He had not, as per his usual custom, got decisively to his feet, bounced down the steps, and led them into an evening of lucratively criminal behaviour.

He’d just sat there, alone, reaching after a while for another beer and another cigarette, saying nothing. After nearly an hour of watching this, the three men left.

A common trait amongst persons of a criminal nature is a lack of foresight. This is why so many of them end up in jail. It also means that rather than putting money aside for a rainy day, they live within narrow margins. Eduardo, Jesse and Chex were therefore soon in a position where they had no money.

And so they turned up at Nash’s house again the next night, because though they could have scraped together a little cash through muggings or small-scale robberies of their own, working for Nash produced a much higher return – plus there was the fact he was well known for exacting hideous revenge on anybody who messed with his people, and this made them feel a lot safer.

So though it was in none of their natures, they elected to be patient for once, and wait.

Tonight, Nash had come down off the porch. There hadn’t been quite the usual spring in his step, but his guys supposed they could understand why. For six months he’d been trying to raise their game. Lift them from being mere thieves, drug dealers and criminals. Trying to make their actions pay off towards a larger goal – that of being truly evil. For a while on that evening in the abandoned warehouse it looked as though it had worked. But then the old guy in the suit had blown Pete to pieces, and left. Leaving Nash looking wrong-footed, rejected, and … a little dumb.

They knew this was intolerable, the very worst thing – especially in front of people who looked up to you. Leaders who’ve been made to feel dumb often feel the need to re- establish dominance through acts of flamboyant violence, and sometimes it’s the people nearest them who wind up taking the brunt. Tonight, thankfully, Nash didn’t seem like he was feeling dumb.

‘So what’s the plan, boss?’ Jesse asked.

‘Business as usual,’ Nash said. And that was that.

Once they were inside Mr Files’s store they fanned out. All had been in the building before, either to steal things or to buy. They knew what they were looking for. Not televisions, though twenty hung along the side wall. Nobody steals televisions any more, they’ve become too big and heavy. Game consoles were better. Smaller, lighter, easier to sell – even pro junkies need a game to nod out in front of. Laptops worked too.

And – especially and most of all – phones.

Eduardo went to the back and started putting the slimmest and newest-looking laptops into his bag. Jesse did the same with the consoles, picking through the available brands with a practised eye. Chex and Nash went to the other side, where the phones were. The interior of the store was dimly lit through the sturdy metal grille in front of the window, by the flickering neon sign outside and an occasional slow swish of passing car headlamps. Nobody was worried about people glimpsing shapes within the store and alerting the cops. The police knew better than to get involved in the complex criminal ecosystem, unless unusually high rates of fatality were involved.

Chex stood in front of the display with the Samsungs and LGs. He ignored the cheap, contractless handsets that people called ‘burners’, only ever of interest to drug dealers and those of no fixed abode, and started taking down smartphones and stowing them in his shoulder bag.

Nash walked further to the primo items, the iPhones. There were a lot, certainly more than when they’d last robbed the place. This could mean Mr Files had found an additional source of stolen goods, and that was something Nash needed to look into. A man in his position could not tolerate new thieves in his area, not least because if Mr Files stopped relying upon Nash then the balance of power could change. Nash knew he’d be able to resolve the situation, and the fact that spirited violence would be involved only made the prospect more appealing. Since the embarrassing evening in the warehouse he’d found himself increasingly drawn to the idea of hurting people, especially people who’d done him wrong. This, in fact, was what he’d been thinking about while sitting on the porch for hour after hour. Hurting. Causing harm. Breaking things and people so very badly that there would never be any chance of putting them together again. And then breaking them some more.

‘What’s that?’ Chex had stopped plucking phones from the shelves and was standing with his head cocked.

‘What’s what?’

‘I heard something.’

‘No you didn’t. Keep working.’

Chex didn’t, however. Nash was self-aware enough to know these people worked for him mainly because they were afraid of him, and therefore when one of them didn’t do what he said, there was generally a good reason for it.

So he became still too, iPhone in hand, and listened. At first nothing. But then, yes – a faint crackling sound. Not even quite a crackling. Quieter. More like a hiss. And then louder than that, more keening.

The other guys were talking quietly to each other as they gathered up stuff and didn’t seem to have heard anything. No sign of anyone at the door in the back, through which they’d entered. Nash peered at the televisions hanging on the wall. There was something different about them. The screens were dark, but not the flat dark of an LCD or plasma when no power’s going through. A faint swirling motion was visible within the muddy grey. On old-fashioned TVs a dead channel was bright and noisy and sparkling. Now it looked like electricity had been applied to all the televisions, but no signal.

Finally the guys at the back noticed. ‘What’s up?’

Nash held up his hand for silence. He’d already realized a possible explanation was all the TVs were on the same circuit, and had been turned on. Maybe from the back room.

Which meant someone was in here.

He was reaching for the gun lodged in the back of his jeans when he noticed something else, however. The screen of the iPhone he was holding was doing the same thing. Instead of a black, shiny surface, it too was a swirling dark grey. And there was no way someone in back could have turned that on.

He glanced at Chex, saw he was staring down at the phone in his hand too. ‘Hell’s going on?’

Nash looked back at the phone. The variation in tones became more marked. He felt like he couldn’t look away. The darker greys got darker, the lighter a little more light. It was as if there was something there, some pattern just outside reach – like one of those black-and-white pictures you stare at until they resolve into a Dalmatian or something. But moving.

Was it a face?

Was there someone in there, inside the phone?

Someone or something or maybe even a bunch of someones or somethings. If so, Nash believed they were there to talk to him – that this phenomenon was meant for him alone. He was wrong about this: something similar was happening in many places across the country, in front of similar men and women. The only difference was that Nash was able to perceive it clearly. It was not meant specifically for him, but it spoke to him far more strongly than anybody else. His soul was tuned to receive.

And so he was the only one who saw a digital compass slowly swimming up out of the swirling dots on the screen, its needle spinning so fast that it was a blur.

He was dimly aware of Chex staring down at the phone in his own hand, and the others gazing up at the televisions on the wall. But this wasn’t for them.

Then he heard it, or felt it. The message. What sounded like a distant howl, something wild and feral heard from the other side of a mountain in the night, resolved into a number of voices, speaking as one. Two words. A verb and a direction. He blinked, and felt the message settle deep inside.

The compass stopped spinning.

It pointed in one clear direction.

Then suddenly the screen was blank again, and the crackling sound was gone.

When they were back outside Jesse noticed that whatever had just happened, it had put purpose back in Nash’s step. Their leader lit a cigarette and stood smoking in silence for a while. Then he nodded at the bags full of stolen goods each had hanging from their shoulders.

‘Drop it all,’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘We don’t need it where we’re going.’

‘Going? Where are we going?’

‘West.’ Nash dropped his cigarette to the ground and strode off towards the truck. ‘We’re going west.’