The Coincidence Engine Page 24

  The man with the gun was gone, and where he had been was an oblong block on the ground at the centre of a great asterisk of red. There was black stone and polished wood of some sort dashed to matches, and a spreading stain of bright blood. Down both long sides of the oblong, great fat pillars of wood stuck up skywards. Two, at the end that took the impact, had snapped off and shivered. One of them bounced and rolled away over the uneven ground. Meanwhile, fugitive pieces of what used to be Sherman were crumbed in the dust of the yard like meat scraps in the sawdust of a butcher’s floor.

  Alex’s mouth opened and closed. His hands remained in the air.

  Bree looked at the scene. The impact had sent fine brown dust in every direction, and Bree’s next breath caused her to cough. A torn skein of green felt, poking out from under the edge of the table, was soaking black with the blood.

  Bree was the first person to talk, and she said: ‘The fuck?’

  Jones, standing slightly further away, said: ‘Snooker table.’

  Jones was right. What had landed on Sherman was a brand-new, full-sized slate-bed snooker table. It had cost twenty thousand dollars and weighed something approaching a ton and a half. It had been destined for pride of place in a newly built ‘Sherlock Holmes’ suite at the MGM hotel and casino, whither the helicopter that was carrying it had been bound before its cargo had parted company with its bindings.

  All this took approximately three-quarters of a second, and that fragment of time was crowned by an instant of tranquil bewilderment. The dust hung in the air, and there was silence.

  Alex’s hands remained in the air. Bree gaped. Then Bree looked down and saw a bit of Sherman on her boot, and as she was bending over to be sick the stillness was broken by a sound like the crack of a pistol. Something powered into the centre of the oblong like a little howitzer and shattered into dust. Then another crack, equally loud. Then another – something, this time, kicking off the oblong and skittering across the uneven surface of the yard, something round and red.

  Then another – CRACK! – and another – CRACK! – then the same sound but softened, without the hint of ricochet. Bree could see something blurring out of the sky and punching into the dirt in the floor of the yard. It looked like an apple. She had a fleeting image of the way hailstorms used to begin when she was a kid.

  Bree flinched as if she were under fire. Then she felt a sharp agony in her hand and her gun flew out of it and onto the ground. Her arm felt as if she’d been hit on the funny bone with a sledgehammer. A round red apple bounced over the yard. She hunched, thrusting her sore arm into her armpit and bringing the other up to protect her head. Then she felt another whistle down behind her, and another, and two more red apples snapped into existence half buried in the dirt of the yard. Snap, snap.

  Then a yellow one. Then a green one. Then a brown one.

  Jones was still standing, looking puzzled, when a blue snooker ball struck him on the top-right corner of his forehead, a quarter of an inch below his hairline. The orbit of his right eye collapsed, and blood exploded from his face.

  Behind Jones a pink ball punched into the dirt.

  Jones flopped forward and landed on his knees. His hands were by his sides. His mouth was open. His cigarette fell out.

  A couple of feet further on a black ball hit the concrete in which the fence was set and exploded into dust.

  Then Jones’s whole long body pitched face first, waist still unbending, into the dirt. He came to rest like that, his head looking down the length of his shoulder across the ground to where Bree was half crouched, expecting at any moment to be struck dead by some kind of English sporting goods travelling at terminal velocity.

  The hailstorm stopped. Again, there was silence – though it was the anticipatory and untrusted silence of a pause in shelling.

  Jones’s legs, still bent at the knee, subsided in a succession of ragged jerks to the horizontal. His mouth opened. Blood was pooling, under the influence of gravity, in the corner of his shattered eye. It flowed over the bridge of his nose and trickled thickly into the corner of his undamaged eye. It looked almost black in the artificial light. His mouth closed.

  Bree, picking herself up, her hand still buzzing agonisingly from the impact – one of those balls must have hit the barrel of the gun she was holding – ran-stumbled towards where Jones was lying.

  Alex was standing where he had been standing, not more than a body’s length or two from the wreckage of the snooker table. His hands were still in the air.

  Bree shouted ‘Stay there!’ at him but he didn’t show any signs of having heard her. He wasn’t going anywhere. He had been chased, and newly shot at, and heartbroken, and rescued from death by a falling snooker table. Now he was out. Not computing. Just staring into space.

  Bree reached Jones and knelt beside him. The uneven dirt of the lot was hard through the knees of her slacks. She put her hand on his shoulder. His mouth opened. His unbroken eye shifted focus to look at her face. He looked confused. And he looked, for the first time, afraid.

  ‘Easy, Jones,’ Bree cooed to him. ‘It’s all right. We’re going to get you an ambulance. Ambulance is going to come, and pick you up, and we’re going to get that eye -’

  Jones blinked, and a smear of blood tinted the white of his eye pink. His mouth closed.

  ‘- get that eye looked at, get it fixed up, an’ – we’re – don’t try to speak – just getting an ambulance right now -’

  She felt panic getting a hold on her. She fought it. She realised she needed to call, needed to call a fucking ambulance – her hands were shaking. She pulled out the cheap cellphone she had and stabbed at the keys, mistyped twice, hit 911, composed herself as she spoke to the dispatcher.

  ‘Yes, corner of – that’s right – it says -’ she read the street sign she could see – ‘down an alley at the yard in back. We’ve got – yes, badly injured, something fell on him. Hit him on the head. Come quick.’

  She returned her attention to Jones. Absently, maternally, she realised that she had been stroking his hair. Her hand was sticky with blood. He flapped his mouth again, then half coughed a syllable.

  ‘Not,’ Jones said.

  ‘Don’t try to speak, baby,’ Bree said. She could see the blood, the shattered skull. Jones was dying, right here, right in front of her. ‘Don’t try to speak. Everything’s going to be all right. The ambulance is coming. The table got fucko. We won. The good guys won.’

  ‘Not alone,’ Jones said, and she realised that what was in his eye was not fear but imploring.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jones. Not alone, no. I’m right here with you. Not alone.’

  The blood from the wound in Jones’s head passed in a runnel down the corner of his jaw. It dripped from the bridge of his nose. Bree was down low, looking into his good eye, nearly on the ground, trying not to think about the mashed part of his face where the ball had hit. ‘Not alone,’ she said. ‘I’ll be with you all the way. In the ambulance. Ambulance is coming. Coming now. Not alone, baby. Not alone.’

  Jones’s eye spooked a little. He looked afraid again, held her gaze as if she was what was holding him to the world. And then the pupil of his eye ballooned until the grey iris was the width of a fingernail paring, and he was looking at nobody.

  Bree was still there on her knees beside him, stroking his sticky hair and bawling, when the ambulance showed up twenty minutes later and with nobody to save.

  Chapter 22

  Alex went with Bree and Jones’s body to the emergency room.

  Retrieving the main section of Sherman – as the two paramedics discovered when they tried to lift the snooker table – was going to be a separate project. They called for backup while the lights of the ambulance revolved noiselessly on the main street, red spilling through the gap in the fencing and over the bare pocked earth.

  While Jones had been dying Alex had passed out. The last thing he heard was a clattering sound somewhere nearby – the landfall, like giant pick-up-sticks, of a baker’s dozen
snooker cues and rests of different lengths. His system was lousy with whiskey and adrenalin. Alex’s mind had had enough.

  ‘Alive,’ Bree had said to the paramedics, still with Jones, waving at where Alex was lying. ‘That one’s alive. Bring him.’

  And they had – hauling the boy’s unresisting frame into the back of the ambulance between two of them, letting him lie on the floor at Bree’s feet, beside the gurney on which Jones, having given up smoking for good, made his journey to the hospital.

  While they were loading the bodies, Bree called Red Queen. She just said: ‘We’ve found him. The other side was there. Jones is gone.’

  ‘Jones is gone?’ Red Queen said. ‘Where gone?’

  ‘Gone. Dead. We’re in an ambulance on the way to the medical centre.’

  ‘Wait there,’ said Red Queen. Bree was exhausted. She wondered whether Red Queen would be thinking that Jones dead solved a problem. She didn’t know Red Queen well enough to make the call, and didn’t have the energy for anger. Alex came round in the ambulance, tried to sit up, lay back down again. Bree took charge of him.

  When they got to the emergency room they took Jones away and made Bree sign a form. Jones had no identification on him. She realised she didn’t know his first name, so she wrote on the form just ‘Jones’ and circled ‘Mr’. You could also be ‘Mrs’, ‘Miss’ and ‘Ms’. If you were dead in this hospital, it seemed, they were still interested in whether or not you might be single.

  She said that she was his next of kin, and didn’t have the presence of mind to give any but her real name. Under ‘relationship to the deceased’, she wrote: ‘Friend’. Her hands were still shaking.

  Afterwards Bree was asked to wait. She was hustled through the emergency room, and into a public waiting area. The walls were sea green and grainy in the strip light. Alex was already there, and Bree went and sat beside him on a metal seat with fixed armrests. The seats were bolted to the walls. It had the feel of a budget airport departure lounge, except that the room’s hard acoustics rang with the wails of the suffering and the mad.

  Doctors appeared through double doors, looked anxious, and vanished again. A drunk with some sort of wound in his leg lay across two seats on the facing wall. His dark grey jogging bottoms were streaked down one leg with a wet black stain, and there were smears of blood and dirt on his hands and face. He was muttering something that sounded like ‘ong, ong, ong’ and every few minutes he would shriek out ‘They’re here! They’re here! They’re here!’ and bang his open hand on the metal chair, some ring or bangle he wore making a piercing clangour as he struck.

  An old man with matted hair and several days of stubble sat, in the far corner, topless and dirty, with a twist of webbing slung around his bare chest. His head jerked, sporadically, towards his shoulder but his gaze was fixed on Bree. She broke eye contact and looked at Alex.

  Alex sat, still wrapped in the foil blanket they had given him in the ambulance, hunched and looking away. His face was a waxen yellow, his deep-set eyes dark with sleeplessness and shock. He focused on nothing.

  ‘The thing, then,’ said Bree, quietly. ‘Tell me about it. Where did you hide it?’

  Alex took a long time before answering.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said, still not looking at her.

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘Really.’ His voice was dead flat. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. You tell me?’

  ‘No,’ said Bree. ‘Not really.’ Alex paused, and zoned out again. Bree’s question went ignored. Then, as if remembering something from a dream, he said: ‘You were at the supermarket, weren’t you?’

  ‘The supermarket?’ Bree tried to think. She picked at a hangnail. Adrenalin, washing back out of her system, had numbed her. Everything felt unreal.

  ‘The supermarket. Where the man chased me. The dead man.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bree. She didn’t know what to say after that. The dead man. The other dead man. The other other dead man.

  ‘Why did he chase me?’

  ‘He thinks you have the machine.’

  ‘I told him,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about.’

  ‘No?’ Bree looked at him appraisingly. If he was lying he was a good liar. She continued. ‘Something has gone missing. Something that we think – the agency I work for, that is – and the man who had the gun on you thought – the people he worked for, anyway… you have. We’ve been trying to find you. You and your connection in the city.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing,’ Alex insisted. ‘I came here to see my girlfriend.’

  Bree thought about it for a moment. The calls they’d picked up once they’d got hold of his phone records: the calls to a cell on a San Francisco network; then the phone showing up in Las Vegas. The contact: how could it be otherwise?

  ‘Your girlfriend?’ Bree wondered whether she was going to regret the initiative she had taken while Alex had been unconscious in the ambulance. If Jones had died – if Jones had died for this, she had wanted to make sure it had been for something. She wasn’t going to let it away.

  ‘Ex-girlfriend, probably. We had – something went wrong that can’t be put right.’

  Bree exhaled. She knew all about things that went wrong that couldn’t be put right. She felt a hundred years old.

  ‘This is bigger than that,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Alex. Not sounding convinced.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Bree. ‘People are trying to kill you. That man was trying to kill you. It has to have been the machine that saved you. The coincidence engine.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It affects probability. It might be a weapon. Everybody thinks you have it.’

  ‘I haven’t got anything. I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘Well, if you haven’t got it, who has?’

  ‘If I’ve never heard of it it’s not very likely I’m going to know that, is it?’

  Bree fell silent again. She looked down at her hands. Her right palm was slightly tacky with Jones’s blood.

  ‘You need to stay here with us,’ she said. ‘My boss needs to speak to you.’

  ‘Oh no. No, no,’ Alex croaked. ‘I’ve got rights. I’m not saying anything. I don’t know who you are.’

  ‘I work for the government.’

  ‘A government that puts people in black planes and tortures them? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Bree. ‘But the other guys will come back. You know that, don’t you? You were lucky this time. Lucky. If you can’t decide who to trust, you’re going to end up dead, my friend. People are already dying because of this thing. My colleague there.’

  ‘A snooker table fell out of the sky,’ said Alex. ‘How is that something to do with me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bree. ‘I’ve barely heard of snooker. But it fell on a man who was trying to kill you. And it killed a man who was trying to protect you. He’s right in there somewhere -’ she pointed down through the double doors into the lit corridor beyond -’being zipped into a bag. That was my colleague. We were coming to try to help you.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘We didn’t want you dead. The other guy did. We were on your side. I am on your side.’

  ‘Nobody’s on my side,’ said Alex. ‘Not even my girlfriend.’

  Girlfriend? Jeezus. Talk about self-absorbed. She let the pause ride, and picked a bit at her thumbnail.

  ‘Want to tell me what happened?’ she said afterwards. Bree didn’t care about the kid’s romantic problems – she had just seen two men die violently at very close quarters, and she wasn’t wanting to think very much about the likelihood that whatever killed them would kill her too. People who got close to this thing were dying.

  ‘No,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Once again, Bree’s mind did what it always did when traumatised: it sought refuge in the practical. Bree was thinking. She knew the police would have been called – the immediate assumption bei
ng that what had happened to Jones was a gunshot wound – and they were likely to have enough trouble with them as it was, explaining what these four people, some with guns, had been doing there in the first place.

  The guard at the entrance to the emergency room was already casting the sort of glances their way that suggested he’d been briefed to prevent them walking out if they wanted to. Or was that paranoia? Red Queen would be able to calm this down. Perhaps.

  ‘It’s my girlfriend, see, Carey. She works here. She was a student where I go to university, in Cambridge. I’m studying for a PhD. You know about Cambridge?’

  Bree let him ramble. She thought about the way Jones’s eye had looked when he was lying there in that vacant lot. Not the damaged eye – the other one. Stone grey in the iris. And that sudden sharp opening of the pupil as he came to grief.

  ‘Anyway, she went home. She’s American, from the West Coast. I came out to visit her and I had this idea that I… It sounds so stupid now, I know. But I thought she was it. She was… it’s hard for me to talk about this to a stranger, but…’

  Came to grief. Why was it people said that?

  ‘I asked her to marry me. She didn’t want to, I don’t think. She sort of hesitated. No. Got to admit it. She turned me down flat. Just like that. I had a ring and everything. I came all the way here to see her.’

  As if grief was there already, waiting for you. You don’t go away to it. You arrive. The boy burbled on.

  ‘Pretty funny. I was pretty upset at the time, but now – you know, you chalk it up to experience. It was about four hours ago, actually. I mean, I’m still pretty upset about it if truth be told. I wasn’t completely – you know, I did what you do. Went out and just left her. You can’t – you can’t recover from that, you know. But you live and learn, move on. Into every life a little rain must fall. It’s not the end of the world. It just feels -’ his voice quavered – ‘like the end of the world…’