Something Coming Through

28. The Worst Thing

Mangala | 30 July

Vic was woken by the scratchy rhythm of his phone’s ringtone and groped for it half asleep, the terrible shadow of a hangover looming at the edge of his consciousness. He couldn’t find the bedside table or the damn phone, wincingly opened his eyes. An unfamiliar bedroom, pink pillowcases and pink sheets and some kind of patchwork quilt, the naked curve of a woman’s back close to him.

It had been his day off yesterday. A Saturday. He’d gone into Junktown and found Dodger, who’d told him that he hadn’t been able to find out much about Danny Drury.

‘From what I heard, he doesn’t represent on the streets. But I did hear that he recently hired some tasty geezers. Former soldiers. Serious muscle. Word is he’s looking to rumble with someone.’

‘With Cal McBride?’

Vic was thinking of Skip’s idea that Drury and McBride were headed for that Elder Culture site in Idunn’s Valley.

‘That was one of the names mentioned.’

Vic gave Dodger another forty and told him to find out who Drury had a beef with, and headed over to his ex’s place to pick up the last of his stuff. Halfway there, he became stuck in an epic traffic jam on the ring road. A juvenile plainswalker had wandered onto the carriageway and there’d been a pile-up when a truck skidding around it had ploughed into half a dozen other vehicles. Vic glimpsed the biochine in the distance, sails semaphoring sunlight as it scampered away, pursued by the round-up crew. Way back, when Petra had been nothing more than huts and tents strung along half a dozen streets bulldozed out of the playa, biochines had wandered all over the place, innocently curious about the new arrivals. These days, they were rarely spotted inside the city limits: they had learned what humans could do, and kept well away.

It took more than an hour to round up the biochine and reopen the ring road. And when Vic arrived at what used to be his home, late and exasperated, his ex, Janet, straight away told him that she had a new boyfriend, and they were getting serious.

‘He’s moving in, actually. So I appreciate you finding the time to come over and take away your things.’

‘Because he was poking about in the back of the garage, taking an inventory of your old paint cans, and got upset, finding my shit?’

‘He’s a lovely man. A surgeon at the hospital, came up just a year ago. You might even like him.’

‘I’m not ready for double dating, but hey, I’m pleased for you. Really. Have he and Poppy hit it off?’

Poppy was Janet’s daughter from her previous marriage. Nine years old, bright, energetic, and possessed of an infallible bullshit detector when it came to grown-ups. And presently — Vic was certain it wasn’t a coincidence — at a friend’s house on a playdate. He still missed her, missed their walks along the rim trails in the hills above the lake. Poppy was a fiend for natural history, loved to take photos of biochines and to collect bugs. Hoppers, mirror flies, army beetles, blinkies, web worms, Goliath grubs, and all the other weird insects that weren’t really insects.

Janet said, ‘She and Aldo get along just fine. How are you doing, Vic?’

‘You know. Making out.’

They were talking in the big kitchen, with its work island surfaced in polished pink marble, the sweep of glass that looked out over the rock garden and the view of the blue expanse of Lake Europa, the reservoir that stored the city’s water. It was a minimalist house, Janet’s previous husband having been an architect. Cantilevered levels of concrete and glass, clean white spaces, carefully selected pieces of imported furniture. Vic had never felt comfortable there. He’d felt exposed in all that light. There’d been no corner he could claim as his own.

Janet was a tall energetic redhead, the owner of a 3D printing company, on the board of the city’s hospital and a founding member of the city’s eighteen-hole golf club. They’d met at a police charity ball, lust at first sight, love a little later. But Janet had always wanted his full attention, had always resented his work, the unpredictability and the long hours, the fact that he was never really off duty. The usual grief. After two years she’d told Vic it wasn’t working, and that was that. She knew what she wanted, knew when to give up on something. He didn’t much like her ruthlessness — as far as he was concerned, it was selfishness masked by pragmatism — but he had to respect her honesty.

She offered him lunch, but he noticed that she kept glancing at her watch and knew from her pinched look that she wanted to be elsewhere, with her new boyfriend or out on the links. So he stuck the plastic crates of his stuff into his car — an old pair of hiking boots, a Kindle loaded with history books, clothes that Janet had bought him, the aftershave and lotions she’d given him as birthday and Christmas presents — and to celebrate this last tick mark in the dissolution of his marriage he tied one on in the Irish pub, drinking until last orders.

He couldn’t recall the woman’s name; he must have picked her up in the pub. Or no, he remembered now, he’d tried to walk back to the municipal apartment building, one in the morning, the sun burning on the glass fronts of office buildings. One of the downsides of thirty-one days of sunlight was coming out of some dim cosy pub or bar long past midnight and being blasted by atomic radiance. As if you were some vampire about to explode into dust. He’d stopped at the diner on the corner of Hope and Esperance, ordered a mac and cheese to settle his stomach, the waitress had just been coming off shift, and here he was.

The phone still doing its thing.

It was in his jacket, strewn with the rest of his clothes on the floor. The caller was Mikkel Madsen, saying, ‘I need you to come in, Vic.’ Refusing to explain what it was about, saying again, ‘Come in. As soon as you can.’

Vic felt a tremor of foreboding pass through the heavy gravity of his hangover, and although there was nothing he wanted more than to collapse back into bed and sleep until noon, he started to gather up his scattered clothing. The woman on the bed — Joni, he remembered, Hi I’m Joni written in ornate red lettering on her name badge, a perky thirtysomething who’d been impressed to meet an actual murder police she’d seen on the local news — rolled over and looked at him through the spill of her hair and said so that was how it was with the resignation of someone this had happened to before.

Vic’s head thumped full of blood when he sat down on the edge of the bed to pull on his trousers; he swallowed a mouthful of saliva. ‘Something’s come up,’ he said. And without knowing why he added, ‘I’m really sorry.’

Joni turned out to live in one of the blocks of system-built flats that could be erected inside a week using stacks of components shipped from Earth, everything from framework steels to doorknobs and taps. Vic called a cab but baled out halfway to the UN Building and in a Starbucks threw up in the toilet and drank half a litre of chocolate milk that he immediately regretted. It wasn’t just the usual feeling that he’d been badly beaten and cast onto the deck of a wildly pitching ship: there was also a terrible sense of existential doom, as if he’d become a wretched ghost haunting his own life.

‘I hope you feel as bad as you look,’ Mikkel said, when Vic at last arrived in the squad room. Only a couple of investigators were working on this Sunday morning, both of them looking at Vic and then looking away, deepening his feeling that something truly dreadful was rushing towards him.

He said, ‘The kid fucked up, didn’t he? How bad?’

‘The skipper wants to talk to you,’ Mikkel said, and there she was at the doorway of her office, Captain Lucille Colombier, giving Vic a look of pity and tender concern, and he knew at once it was the worst thing.