The Coincidence Engine Page 23

  It was from Rob. The message said: ‘How Green Was My Valet?’ He looked at it blankly. It was like a message from another universe, a time capsule from an age when he had thought stupid jokes were funny. He turned off his phone, settled back at the bar, had another whiskey, went back to feeling sorry for himself. If he drank enough, he reasoned, not only would the truth of his feelings become apparent to him, but the course of action he needed to take would also decide itself for him.

  He found himself attending to the background noise of the jukebox. He was reaching just that mood when whatever song comes on will acquire a generalised sense of tragic grandeur. Had ‘Barbie Girl’ or the ‘Birdie Song’ come on, they would have seemed to speak directly to him of the futility of life. As it was, he had mawked his way already through ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, ‘Born to Follow’ and – bizarrely – ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’.

  Then, in a ragged tangle of chords, underpinned by a sluggish drumbeat, another song he recognised began, and he rested his elbows on the bar, pushed his cheeks up with the heels of his hands and closed his eyes.

  Once I thought I saw you… in a crowded hazy bar…

  His lips moved quietly to the words. She was. She was like a hurricane. She was spontaneous and – were hurricanes spontaneous? Never mind – free and… she danced like a hurricane, like hurricanes dance, from one star to another, on the light…

  Chugging, chiming, sad-defiant. The song made no sense at all, but it seemed in that instant to mean everything to Alex. There were calms in her eyes. And, like a hurricane, Carey had blown the modest bungalow of his happiness flat.

  If he hadn’t thought the barman would see him, laugh at him and stop serving him, he would have allowed himself a blub.

  Alex still had his eyes closed when Sherman emerged from the door of the washroom and started walking down the bar. The toilet, for reasons Sherman didn’t want to think about, was entirely painted in textured black gloss paint, and the bulb in there had gone. Sherman had been in this dive long enough – fifteen bottles of Molson long, ever since he’d lost most of his stack at blackjack up on Fremont Street – and the toilet had made his decision for him. Here, in the fanciest town he’d ever been in, he’d found a khazi that would have disgraced a rough pub in Plymouth.

  He’d been standing tiptoe on sodden wads of bum roll, the closest he could get to the pan, leaning over forward with one hand steadying himself on the cistern pipe. Occasional glints of light from outside showed a seatless bowl, sprinkled with drops, in the general direction of which he had pissed with ferocious need. He had shaken off, nearly losing his footing as he did so on the slippery floor, and walked out with the full intention of finding somewhere very, very cheap to kip.

  And it was then that he clocked the skinny kid at the bar, nodding his head to the music like a nonce. And it occurred to him that something about the kid was familiar.

  No, he exhaled quietly. You are shitting me. That’s the prick that killed Davidoff.

  Sherman’s first thought – which was his first thought in pretty much all circumstances in any case – was that something fishy was going on. What were the chances of the little bastard fetching up here? And why? He hadn’t seemed keen to speak the last time they’d met.

  Could it be Ellis tying up loose ends? One of the reasons Sherman had chosen Vegas was that it was an easy city to get lost in, an easy city to make money safe in. If there was going to be a clean-up operation, Sherman had been determined to make sure he was out of the way of the mop.

  He’d been careful – booked a flight to LAX, booked a ticket on a Greyhound bus east with his credit card, not taken it, and paid for another ticket on a bus to Las Vegas with cash. That one, he had got aboard. He’d been here less than twenty-four hours. If they had figured out he was here, they really wanted to find him. And that was very bad news for him.

  It was the kid, though.

  OK, smooth. The smart thing to do was slip out and get lost. But. But. The blackjack – dealer paying 21 twice in a row, Sherman doubled down both times and stuck on 20 – the beer, the fact he was going to be staying in some horrible hotel again, the crappy toilet and the general fuck-up Sherman’s life had become… all of these seemed in some way to be this lad’s responsibility. Sherman didn’t yet know whether the kid was going to get him killed, but it didn’t seem unlikely at this rate. And then there was Davidoff, also not to be forgotten. Sherman was buggered if he wasn’t going to take a run at him one way or another.

  But what he wanted to do, which was pick nodding boy up by his scrawny little neck and push his face through the glass shelves behind the bar (it was possible; oh, it was possible, given a bit of a run-up), he was not going to do.

  Smooth and easy. The kid hadn’t seen him, or if he had he was giving a very good impression of not having done so. Or not caring – which would mean… Sherman, pulling back against the wall, scanned the room. There was nobody else in the place. Barman? Unlikely.

  The kid really might be there alone. The Gents had been empty. Sherman walked back to where he had been sitting and angled the table so his back was to the room, but he could see the kid in the glass behind the bar. He pretended to keep drinking his final bottle of Molson.

  The kid wasn’t looking anywhere – he looked drunk, was what he looked. Sherman watched him order another Maker’s Mark, pay in cash. Head lolling a bit. Mouthing along to the jukie.

  ‘You, my son,’ Sherman promised him, ‘are going to get a very nasty bump on the head indeed before this evening is out. You see if you don’t.’

  The song ended with a squeal, and then a jerk. Then there was a click as the mechanism changed and a tangled chord rolled out, fuzzy with static. A drumbeat thumped and limped behind it. ‘Like a Hurricane’ was starting again. Sherman, remembering the song for some reason, frowned.

  Chapter 21

  Alex left the bar, his eyeballs floating. The horizontal hold had gone on the room, and he could feel the fajitas moving in his stomach. He wanted fresh air. The jammed jukebox, playing that one song over and over again, had proved resistant to the barman thumping it, and after letting it play the same song for fifteen minutes the guy had finally gone and pulled the plug, with some violence, out of the wall.

  Neil Young had stopped, and the circular riff of Alex’s own thoughts had continued: hate and fear, anger and grief, grief and hate, anger and fear, salt, pepper, vinegar, mustard…

  Alex left the bar and turned away from the Strip and walked. Behind him, a shadow calved off from the shadow of the doorway and crept down the dark lee of the building, skipping occasionally through pools of light and back into darkness.

  Alex wasn’t hard to follow. Sherman had had an hour to sober up. Alex had had an hour to get drunker. He was staggering like a cow that had been hit with a hammer, away from the bright light, into the darkened residential streets, dragging his tail behind him.

  Alex stopped at the edge of a bare lot. They were building something there.

  A rough fence of corrugated iron had been raised around it, the gaps covered over with panels of metal netting, through which you could see an uneven expanse of bare dirt, pocked and pitted. Blue-white lights on tall poles scored it with sharp shadows. Orange construction vehicles slept like dinosaurs in the cold lunar daylight.

  Sherman stopped behind him. Alex put his hands on his knees, bent forward, rocked back and forth over the ground with his mouth open. It looked like he was going to be sick, but then whatever it was passed. Alex spat, instead, a long spool of saliva descending to the blue ground.

  Then he resumed his progress, not once looking back, slipping through a wide gap in the fence and ignoring the signs that enjoined him to wear a hard hat. Sherman followed, stopping at the edge of the site in a pool of darkness cast by one of the tall panels. It was bright as day in that site, but dark outside. If the boy was bait, this would be a perfect killing zone. He didn’t want to move in until he was sure he was alone.

  He watched Alex move
with the aimless deliberateness of the seriously drunk. He seemed to be talking to himself. Then Sherman saw him double back towards him. He ducked his head behind the corrugated-iron sheet and stepped further into the dark. If the boy came out through the gap, Sherman would have the drop on him. He waited.

  Then he heard a zip go, and the loud drum roll of someone pissing like a horse against the other side of the fence. A pool of hot urine leaked from under the fence and spread around Sherman’s shoes. The smell was pungent. If the boy was setting him up he was no sort of professional.

  Step in and shoot? Let the kid die with his dick in his hand?

  On second thoughts, if there was an accomplice, now might be exactly when he would anticipate Sherman making his move. Maybe professional was exactly what he was. So far the boy had done absolutely everything he could, seemingly, to invite Sherman to murder him. He had got drunk. He had shown no sign of even looking around to see if there was anyone following him. He had walked off to a deserted construction site, brightly illuminated, with clear sightlines in. And now he was taking a pee.

  The gap in the fence spilled light. There was no way this sort of thing happened by accident. Hold back.

  Sherman listened patiently. It ended, and Sherman could hear Alex walking away, further into the site. Sherman waited a long time, and then, finally, followed him.

  Alex sat down on a short stack of wooden pallets. He had at last lost his self-consciousness. He snivelled, miserably.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ he asked the empty lot. ‘What am I going to do?’ He didn’t mind much if he died right there. His mouth was foul with whiskey. He felt sick, but it wouldn’t come up. He wanted to go home and sleep forever. He wanted Carey. He wanted to die. He wanted his mum. He didn’t know what he wanted.

  He took his phone out, and looked at it, and put it away again. He wondered if he might be going mad.

  Sherman moved out of the shadow of the fence and into the light. He moved quietly, on the balls of his feet. His gun was in his hand. Alex was half turned away from him, staring into the far corner of the lot, where one of the lights was out and the adjacent two-storey building left that side in darkness.

  There was a sort of generalised sobbing and wailing going on. Sherman knew at that moment that this was more elaborate than he’d have needed for a set-up. There was no accomplice. This had been nothing to do with MIC at all.

  Alex sobbed again. The lad was upset – anyone could see that. And Sherman felt sorry for him, whatever his problem was. But Sherman still intended to shoot him in the face.

  He waited until he was close enough to be sure of making a chest shot in a hurry.

  ‘You,’ Sherman called. ‘Boy.’ Alex was still looking away. He made no acknowledgement.

  ‘Alex!’ he called. Slightly louder. The boy’s head turned in surprise.

  Who? Alex saw a man with a gun. He stood up suddenly, feeling very sober. It looked like the man who had chased him at the supermarket. The gun was pointed at him.

  ‘Yeah, pal. You.’ Alex gave a sudden jolt of fright. Seconds ago, when in no prospect of doing so, he had thought he perhaps wanted to die. Now, presented with a golden opportunity, his body chemistry was telling him the opposite. He discovered that he did not want to die at all. The whiskey vanished from his system. He was sober, and terrified.

  ‘Alex Smart,’ said Sherman. ‘You’ve caused me a lot of trouble, lad. A lot.’

  Alex struggled to say something. He had never had a gun pointed at him before. He said: ‘Whu-whu-whu-whu-’

  Sherman stepped forward and Alex yelped. ‘Easy,’ said Sherman. ‘Hands where I can see them.’

  Hands where I can see them? Sherman thought. Does anybody actually say that?

  Hands where I can see them? Alex thought. They say that. They actually do say that.

  Alex realised he had had no idea where his hands were. He discovered that they were straight out in front of him, as if his unconscious had decided it was possible to fend off bullets by the act of protesting politely against them, like someone refusing a canapé at a party. Please don’t. I couldn’t possibly take a bullet in the gut. I’m watching my weight.

  Alex’s hands shot up level with his head.

  ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Whatever it is, I’m sorry. I don’t know what you think I’ve done, but I – I think you’ve got the wrong person, sincerely, sir.’ The whiskey hadn’t entirely worn off. Alex struggled to pronounce ‘sincerely, sir’.

  ‘You’re Alex Smart?’

  ‘Yes. I mean no. Sorry. Yes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to lie. I mean. I got confused.’ Alex was breathing fast and shallow. Terror made everything very clear to him. He could see Sherman’s sandy hair and hard little face – or, at least, he was aware of them. All he literally saw was the little black hole in the end of the gun.

  He talked to Sherman and looked at the gun.

  ‘I’m Alex Smart, but you must mean a different Alex Smart, I mean. There’s been some sort of mix-up. I’m a student.’

  ‘Are you?’ said Sherman. ‘That’s nice for you.’

  ‘I’m at Cambridge. I do maths. I don’t do…’ He trailed off helplessly. He didn’t know what it was he didn’t do, or – rather – how to articulate the mass of things that people presumably did do that led to people pointing guns at them, but that were so far outside the sphere of all the things Alex did as to occupy a separate category of existence.

  ‘Cambridge, eh? Mummy and Daddy must be very proud of you,’ said Sherman, in a not altogether friendly way. ‘But I’m afraid I couldn’t give two shits what you do or don’t do. Not two shits. You’ve got this machine. It’s not your property. And I want it back.’

  Alex was even more baffled. What machine?

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Please. I don’t know what you’re talking about -’

  I don’t know what you’re talking about, Alex thought. I actually said that. That’s what people always say in films, and they are always lying, and something very horrible always happens to them.

  ‘- I mean, sorry, I know how that sounds, I really don’t know, I promise I don’t. I don’t have any machines. Please. You can search me and everything. Just please don’t -’ and he couldn’t bring himself to utter the words ‘shoot’ and ‘me’ out of the fear that it might put an idea into the man’s head which would not otherwise have occurred to him.

  Overhead Sherman could hear the sound of a helicopter. It flickered through his head that he should run – that that might be MIC come to disavow him, or the FBI come to take him in – and then he put the thought out of his head and concentrated on killing the young man who he believed had killed his friend.

  Sherman hadn’t liked Davidoff, not that much. But a point of principle was, as he saw it, at stake. Davidoff had been in his regiment. He had been beside Davidoff when they were digging into a position in the Iraqi desert under fire, and discovering they were on top of a mass grave had given each of the sandbags they filled a name: Abdul, Mustapha, Mohammed. They had spent a night dug into that position. This soggy little prick knew nothing of that. And the only thing that would get Sherman out of the hole he was in with his employers and with the law was in this lad’s possession.

  ‘Please,’ said Alex.

  ‘No,’ said Sherman. He took a step closer to Alex, who had raised his hands, palms out, like a hostage in a black-and-white film. ‘Mate, the way I see it is this. You killed my friend. You have this coincidence machine. And this is nothing personal but I’m fed the fuck up asking nicely.’

  Sherman had at no point asked nicely, it occurred to him fleetingly. But he kept the gun level. This was not personal. No. It was personal. He gestured with it for Alex to move – down the fence towards the unlit corner of the site, further into the shadow, further away from the human noise of the street.

  ‘I – I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Alex. ‘I’ve got money. Please. I can help you. Please.’

  It was as Alex went, stum
bling sideways down the fence line, that Sherman realised the boy had suffered a failure of imagination. He didn’t realise that Sherman meant to kill him – or if he did realise it he was not allowing himself to believe it. He thought he belonged to a different story. His was a world in which people didn’t kill each other, except in foreign countries and on television. At some level, this little twat thought that one day he was going to be telling people about this.

  It made Sherman hate him – but also envy him. This wet, spoilt, selfish, privileged little wanker. Sherman was not only going to kill Alex, he realised then, but he wanted to.

  If he’d kept his eyes on Alex, Sherman would have seen that realisation communicate itself to the young man he was about to kill. He’d have seen a face, streaked with drying tears, turn to fear and bewilderment. Alex in that instant knew, for the first time, what it was to be properly hated; to be hated to death.

  Sherman would also have seen Alex’s eyes, an instant later, attempt to focus over his shoulder on a pudgy woman in early middle age emerging from the far corner of the yard, followed by a tall man with grey hair. The woman had a gun in her hand.

  But Sherman saw none of these things because he was disconcerted by a sudden movement in the corner of his field of vision. Distracted for an instant, he looked down. There was a faint, blurred rectangular shadow on the pavement around him, about the size of a Volvo estate. The shadow was getting crisper and smaller, Sherman thought. And that was the last thing Sherman thought.

  Sherman was standing there and then Sherman was gone – vaporised, obliterated.

  At first nobody in the yard could process the sound. Offensively abrupt and shatteringly loud, it had a quality of being at once percussive and muffled, like a fat person’s thigh bone snapping clean without breaking the skin.

  Bree had been aware of something flickering in the upper corner of her field of vision and then, with a tremendous WHUMPH! and a tangible dislocation of the air, what she had been looking at had become without preamble what she now was looking at, and it made no sense.