Technomancer (5 page)

I snorted, but thought
what the hell
and put them on. I jiggled the knob one more time. The door popped open at long last.

I took off the glasses and frowned at them. There was no way they could have helped me open the door. All they did, as far as I could see, was make the gloomy bar two shades darker. I looked at her.

“Are you trying to tell me that these sunglasses…?”

Holly shook her head. “I’m not trying to tell you anything, Mr. Draith.”

She pushed past me into the office before I could ask her how she knew my name. She had never asked me what it was. I noticed her attitude had changed. She seemed much more confident in my presence now. Perhaps she’d measured me and marked me down as harmless.

I followed her into the office. The interior was acrid with stale cigar smoke. A full ashtray sat on the desktop, brimming with ashes and thick cigar stubs. The ashtray was smooth, thick glass shaped like a clamshell. The glass had a faintly green color to it, and I figured it was a refugee from the last century, when ashtrays decorated everyone’s coffee table.

We both took a look around. I found papers, receipts, bills. No checks or cash. Nothing of any real interest.

“The safe is down here,” Holly said, kicking away a dirty scrap of carpet with a rubber backing.

A round metal door with a recessed combination dial was planted in the floor. The floor felt very flat even if you stepped on the dial.

Holly sucked in her lips, and looked at me. She made a brief, hurry-up gesture in my direction.

“What?” I asked. “I don’t know the combination.”

She rolled her eyes and put out her hand.

“What?” I asked again, feeling as if everyone at the party was in on some secrets—but no one had bothered to tell me anything.

“The sunglasses,” she said, still holding out her hand.

I stared at her, then at the safe. I knelt beside the safe, and she knelt beside me. I reached down and gave the handle a twist. It didn’t budge. I let my hand fall away. I took the sunglasses out of my pocket, but I didn’t put them on.

“Are you telling me that if I put these things on, I’ll know the combination?” I asked.

Holly shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. All I know is—it will open.”

I rubbed my chin for a moment. I took out the sunglasses and eyed them with alarm. What was I playing with? Could these plastic shades do something…strange? I recalled the way Meng’s hood ornament had tossed me out the back door of her sanatorium.

For a moment, as I stared at them, I found the sunglasses threatening. A cold ripple ran through my nervous system. I knew it was silly. The lock on the office door had been a fluke. This woman was as crazy as the rest of them. But back at the sanatorium that pistol
had
vanished from my hand—and I
had
been transported and dropped onto a set of cement stairs.

Sometimes, when a man’s world shifts under his feet, it causes paranoia. I had experienced these odd events stoically, if suspiciously. I’d played along up until now, assuming some logical explanation would eventually present itself. Perhaps I’d been experiencing side effects from days on heavy drugs. But now it was different, because I was being asked to actively participate in this particular impossibility.

“This can’t be real,” I said.

“You know it is.”

I looked at her. “How do you know me?”

Holly appeared incredulous. “Your picture is on your blog,” she said.

“Blog?”

“Draith’s Weird Stuff,” she said. “You post photos of creepy things every week. You’re an underground hit, you must know that.”

I smiled weakly. “I didn’t realize.”

“You should be the one explaining this crazy crap to me. I never believed in any of it until I began seeing it with my own eyes. I thought you must be trying to sell health supplements and dating sites on your blog, so you made it all up. Now, I know you were telling the truth. Don’t you believe your own stories?”

“Um,” I said, having no recollection of having written articles about the supernatural. “I suppose it’s different when you are staring them in the face.”

Holly nodded. “OK. I guess I can understand that. But you should at least try, don’t you think?”

I nodded, then lifted the sunglasses to my face. I paused.

“Open it!” she urged.

I stared at her. “No,” I said.

“What?”

“You want this safe open more than I do. But I’m not going to do it. Not until you tell me your story.”

Holly made a sound as if she were strangling. “What can I tell you that you don’t already know?”

“Start with how you know me. Besides reading about me online.”

“That night,” she said, looking down at her hands. “The night Tony died. You were in the accident.”

“You remember any details?”

“He almost ran me over with his Cadillac.”

I took out Tony’s wallet and eyed the photograph on the driver’s license. I’d never taken the time to look at it before. Light brown hair, swept to the side. A single earring
gleamed beside a crooked smile. So that was Tony. There was some familiarity to the tiny square headshot. I recalled liking him.

“I don’t remember the accident,” I said. “There were head injuries.”

“I’m not surprised about that,” she said. “I’m surprised you made it at all. I can hardly believe you are walking and talking. When I first saw you, you scared me. You were really messed up after the wreck. You were ejected and broken up. That was less than two weeks ago.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Look,” she said. “I’ll tell you all about it. I swear. But you have to open this frigging safe before we get caught in here.”

I realized she had a point. “You promise?”

“I said so.”

I nodded and turned back to the round, flat door of the safe in the floor. We were both down on our knees. I had no idea what the combination was. None at all. I gave the dial an experimental spin and tugged at the handle. Then I spun it in the opposite direction and tried the handle again. It didn’t even click or rattle. It was like tugging on a lamppost. The handle didn’t even move fractionally. Nothing.

“What the hell are you doing?” Holly hissed.

“If this works, I want it to be a clear test. I don’t want to be telling myself afterward that it opened only because the combination had already been dialed and all I had to do was twist the handle.”

Holly made a sound of exasperation.

I took a deep breath and put on the sunglasses. I didn’t
feel
any different with them on. But the room did look darker, just as it should have. I reached down and tugged the handle.

I hadn’t really expected that it would open right away. I had expected that I would have to give the dial a spin or two first. Maybe the dial would click itself into precisely the right spot when I spun it at random. But that wasn’t how it happened. It was easier than that. The handle twisted and I heard a clinking sound.

“I think it’s open,” I whispered.

“No shit,” Holly said. “Lift the door up, man.”

“What if there’s something bad in there?”

She looked at me as if I was crazy. “Like what?”

“I don’t know.” I felt a chill. A creepy feeling, as if I had just invoked an unknown power. I didn’t like the sensation. It was exciting, but also frightening.

Sighing loudly, Holly placed her hands over mine and tried to force my hand to lift the door open. I resisted, and the door stayed closed. She wasn’t very strong. She made a sound of vexation and sat back on her haunches.

“What’s wrong now?” she asked.

“I wasn’t ready yet.”

She crossed her arms, waiting. After another few seconds, I faced my demons and yanked the door open.

Holly whooped. She shoved her hand deeply into the safe and pulled out three wads of money. They were thick packets of twenties, hundreds of them in each wad, folded over once and wrapped neatly with thick blue rubber bands.

I reached out and took one of the wads from her. She frowned, but then shrugged. I hefted the wad in my palm. Three thousand, I figured. Maybe four.

“For expenses, Tony,” I said aloud to no one. “We’ll call this full payment for investigating your death.”

“I’ll call it severance pay,” Holly added. She reached back into the safe with a grin on her face. I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back.

She gave an irritated squeak and slapped my hand away. I looked into the safe. There was more money in there. A lot of it. I slammed the safe closed and spun the dial.

“What the hell?” Holly exclaimed. She stood up and grabbed at my sleeve. “Are you crazy, Draith?”

“It’s not ours. Not all of it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There are other girls who need to get paid. Maybe Tony had heirs too.”

Holly shook her head. “I never figured you for a do-gooder.”

“I didn’t figure you for a thief either,” I lied.

She slapped at me, but I caught her wrist. I stood up, still holding her wrist so she couldn’t slap me again.

“Two wads of cash are all you’re getting. I’m sure that is more than you were owed.”

Holly seemed to get hold of herself then. She heaved a sigh. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I just got a little carried away.”

“Sure. I understand.”

She shoved the cash into her purse and headed out. I followed. She pushed open the back door a fraction, then paused to look back at me.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll find a hotel. I need some sleep.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I can see that. You could use some fresh clothes too. Say, you want to come to my place? I’ll let you get some sleep and borrow some of my ex-boyfriend’s clothes. He was about your size.”

I thought about it. Was this real consideration or something else? “I don’t know,” I said. “But thanks a lot for the offer.”

Her lips cinched tight. I wasn’t sure if it was because I wasn’t cooperating with a sneaky plan of hers, or if I had insulted her somehow.

“I’m not going to try to take them, you know,” she said hotly.

“What? The money?”

“The sunglasses.”

I eyed her for a second. Right then, it occurred to me that sunglasses that let you open vaults were quite valuable. Priceless, maybe.

“People are going to be looking for you,” Holly said. “Do you understand that? You can’t use Tony’s plastic. You shouldn’t even be in his clothes, or showing off those sunglasses.”

I nodded. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Let’s go to your place.”

Holly twisted her lips and made a face at me. I pretended not to notice.

“You can tell me the story you promised while we walk,” I said.

Neither of us had a car, and it was a long walk. Holly began to talk. Somehow it turned into more than the story of the accident. She told me everything. At least, I thought she did.

When she was done, everything was a lot clearer.

Holly Jensen had started off her career in the city as a dealer. Her job mostly consisted of flipping out cards when smoking, vodka-drinking men said “hit me” at the blackjack table. She learned to charm them with her pretty smile and thus garner tips. The job had gone well for a year or so, until she’d been fired for palming a few extra chips that had not been intended as tips. Those cameras and mirrors and the assholes that sat behind them didn’t miss a trick, as she put it.

Fortunately, there were others on the casino strip who wanted her. She’d moved on down to the Lucky Seven, a big horseshoe-shaped building that flowed with twinkling green lights each night. The twin towers of the horseshoe were filled with hotel patrons while the base of the U-shaped building was a giant casino. Behind the casino was what they called a “show palace.” The palace had once hosted comedy acts and singers from both coasts and had been filled
with high rollers who kept gold on their wrists and in their mouths. After the turn of the century, the show palace had decomposed into something that resembled a giant titty bar.

The bosses at the show palace wore too-tight suits and experienced leers. They gave her a job on the chorus line. She had a face they constantly referred to as “sweet” and legs that made them stare. She’d blushed hard when she had gone topless for the first time, feeling ridiculous in an outfit constructed of rhinestones, sequins, and feathers, all built upon a soft bedrock of black nylon. But she’d done it, and she’d kicked and strutted her way onto the stage.

Holly didn’t mind the dancing, after the initial shock of baring her breasts in public. She’d always kept in shape and found the job easier than dealing cards for hours on end. At least it went by faster.

But trouble quickly came again. This time, it was a murder that interrupted her life. There had been a growing number of strange killings in town. When they weren’t talking about boyfriends, bragging about big tips or snaking each other with gossip, the showgirls talked about little else. One rumor that made her a little sicker than the others was the story of a tourist from Boston. According to the coroner, he’d fallen from twenty stories up and pulverized every bone in his body—but somehow he’d landed in his own hotel room. They’d found him splattered on the bathroom floor. She’d discounted the story as too incredible to believe.