Shooting Star

26

‘Mark sounds nice,’ said Orlovsky. ‘In fact, I feel the whole family really growing on me.’

We were drinking coffee down the road from Martie Harmon’s office. ‘Mark’s a concern,’ I said. ‘But my heart says this thing isn’t masterminded by Russian pornographers. The stunt at the football, why waste the money?’

‘And why bother with the girl in the first place?’ said Orlovsky. ‘Presumably they’ve got Mark. They could ransom him.’

‘That might backfire. Barry for one wouldn’t be chipping in unless it was to have them keep him.’ I drank black coffee. ‘The vehicle, the Tarago. How long have they got to register it in a new name?’

‘Fourteen days.’

‘Too long.’ All the rivers ran dry. You knew more about the Carsons than you wanted to but that didn’t help you find the girl. Was that something to feel bad about? You could have all the resources of the force on this and still not find her. Anyway, I had no hope of finding her. I needed to keep telling myself that. I was just asking the basic questions, clearing the underbrush for the real investigators to come. If she was dead, that would be Vella and his gang of cropped-haired Homicide plodders.

I should not have stopped the Carsons calling in the cops. My chance to get out from under this mess thrown away, the perfect opportunity missed. I urged them to tell the cops, then, through sheer force of argument, I convinced them not to.

‘What makes you think she’s alive?’ said Orlovsky. He was watching a young woman in grey inserting wine bottles into an overhead rack. Every time she reached up, she exposed milky skin and vertebrae as prominent as the knuckles of a clenched fist.

‘Nothing.’ I had the last inky drop. ‘I just think they’re not finished. If I’m wrong and it’s not crazy people having fun or simple payback, something else, she may well be dead.’

‘What would something else be?’

‘I might have another one. You?’

Orlovsky nodded. I stared at the espresso machine jockey for a while, caught his eye, made the snail sign. His face said he didn’t like signals, he might or he might not respond.

‘Coffee’s like horse,’ Orlovsky said. ‘Millions of coffee junkies, that’s perfectly okay. They can’t get through the day without it, they’d rather drink it than eat. About something else? Like what?’

‘Who the fuck knows. What worries me is the silence. There’s nothing been done that could spook them. This is a very confident silence.’

‘The voice,’ Orlovsky said. His gaze was now on the street. ‘I should have thought of this earlier. That’s something to think about. It’s got intonation.’

‘What?’

‘Stresses words. As in saying “I don’t screw for money” and “I don’t screw for money”. The intonation makes all the difference.’

‘So?’

‘Well, what the guy is doing is speaking into a device. I said it before, it’s not a cheap voice-disguiser. If it was, we could get his real voice in seconds. It’s a voice-recognition program that’s producing an electronic version of what he’s saying and it’s mimicking his intonation. It’s not just volume, it’s the actual way he’s saying words. Like when he says bleed. He says it with about five es in it. BLEEEEED. Capturing that, that’s a very complicated thing to do.’

The coffees came, brought by the wine stacker.

‘Thank you,’ said Orlovsky. ‘And may I say that you have beautiful lower vertebrae.’

She smiled. ‘Thank you for saying that. You don’t know the work I’ve put into those bits of cartilage.’

We watched her go.

I cleared my throat, got his attention. ‘What does it mean if it’s complicated?’

‘He didn’t buy it. He developed it or he got it from the developer. I can’t see the developer lending it, though.’

‘Let’s say he developed it.’

‘There’s probably only a couple of dozen people in the country working on stuff like that.’

‘How many here?’

‘Not many.’

‘Could you find out?’

‘I could ask the obvious places, sure. If it’s a bloke in a garage, that’s a problem.’

‘Would a bloke in a garage develop something like this without ever talking to other people in the field? How would he know it hadn’t already been done? What would he be planning to do with it? Presumably he didn’t do all this work just to disguise his voice for a kidnap.’

‘There’s no knowing what blokes in garages will do. But those are certainly interesting questions.’

‘Interesting questions?’ I said. ‘You know, I liked your personality more when you didn’t have this air of running a special tutorial for the dimwitted, when you were just a scared prick trying to prove he was as hard as the next man. And failing. Remember that?’

Orlovsky gave me a smile that conveyed enjoyment, drank some coffee. ‘Can’t bear it, can you?’ he said. ‘Other people move on, develop, grow. You were snap-frozen at fifteen, thereabouts. Know what they do with these huge tuna they catch to sell to the Japanese? First, they hook them, then they shoot them, in the water, in the head, get them close to the boat and shoot them in the head with a.22. But that doesn’t kill them, that isn’t what you want to do. You want to get them on board, very gently, they’re upset, they’ve been hooked and shot, then you core their brains while they’re alive, like you’d core an apple, with that thing you force in, push down, twist, pull out the core. Then they stick a wire down the spine. Now the fish is brain-dead, automatic nervous system gone, no more alarm signals being sent out to the flesh, and in top-class condition for slicing and eating. Raw.’

I finished my coffee, wished I hadn’t had a second one. ‘You’re saying I’m like that?’ I said. ‘Like a tuna?’

‘No, you’re the guy with the.22 and the piece of wire.’

‘That’s better. So you’re the tuna?’

‘I could have been,’ said Orlovsky. ‘I could have been. But I resisted.’

‘Swam away with a bullet in your brain. See if you can find out who’s working on this voice stuff,’ I said. ‘Start now. About tomorrow, you’re going on the road.’

‘Before dawn,’ he said.

‘How much do you make?’

Orlovsky eyed me suspiciously. ‘It’s a commitment,’ he said. ‘It’s an obligation.’

‘Far be it from me to come between you and your commitments. Can you get a stand-in?’

He rubbed his jaw, an imperfectly shaved jaw, a shave in progress. ‘The boss might do it himself. Can’t just bring in a temp for work like this, you know. There’s trust involved, I’m dealing with people…’

‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘I’m not a cop anymore and I still don’t want to know. Tell the boss your temporary employer has urgent need of your services and he’ll pay, what, five hundred? For inconveniencing the man, the person. How much do you make?’

‘For the three days, six-fifty a day.’

‘Okay, two grand to you for lost earnings, five hundred to the boss. He saves the two grand you get, he’s up two-and-a-half on the deal.’

‘If he wanted to save two grand, he’d always do it himself. He doesn’t like going out there. That’s why he pays me.’

‘A thousand.’

‘This is Carson money you’re spending. You’re acting as if it’s yours.’

I shook my head at him. ‘The concept of honest stewardship of other people’s money means nothing to you, does it?’

Orlovsky smiled, stroked a patch of stubble. ‘Nothing that I can think of, no.’

We drove back to the Carson compound. No one was waiting in the underground carpark, no messages.

Walking though the garden, I listened to the voice in my head saying: It’s not too late, it’s not too late. Call Noyce now. Tell him you think you were wrong. They must call in the cops now. But I knew I couldn’t, wouldn’t.