People Die Read Free

didn’t look like a hit; that was the only thing that mattered. He’d call London, sort out a new handler, and then he’d be back to business as usual. It was a shame though, Viner had been okay.
    As okay as people got, anyway. His material could be as off-target as anyone else’s, and when it came down to the wire he’d have sold people. But it had never come down to the wire and for the most part he’d been sound, sick in the sexual department but one of the few when it came to business.
    A scooter tore up the street below; early evening, the city quiet, a time for teenagers to tear up streets on scooters, the whole night ahead, possibilities. It was a great time of day out there in the city, disjointed sounds playing out the bottom of the lull. He found himself distracted by it, drawn way into some indistinct memory, then pulled back again by the smell lapping toward him at the faltering of the breeze.
    It made some people sick, the different ways death smelled, but it was a skill worth having, to be able to smell a corpse and know it. And the smell here wasn’t the worst; Viner had soiled himself but he was still fresh, had probably been there only a few hours, an early-afternoon rendezvous turned sour.
    JJ tapped out the numbers on the phone and waited, then let the alarm tone sink in and the automated telecom voice repeating itself. Please try again. He tapped them out again and listened, put the handset down and stared at it, puzzled. Numbers like that didn’t change, didn’t stop being available; it didn’t make sense. He tapped it out a third time, carefully, more deliberately, got the same result, and put the phone down.
    Another number reeled itself off in his head, but he held off using it. Something was badly wrong; for the contact number not to be working, there had to be a mess somewhere. He still couldn’t quite believe the scene in front of him was wrapped up with it, but suddenly he was uncomfortable, no longer certain it was a good idea to get in touch.
    It hardly seemed necessary, but he tapped out a random number to cover his tracks, putting the phone down as soon as it rang. It was reassuring somehow to imagine some early-evening apartment, thrown into a moment’s suspended animation by that single ring of the phone, its occupants yanked by the leash and then released again to speculate on who might have called.
    And the thought of another apartment made him look once more at Viner’s. It was too tidy, a couple of things knocked around near the body but the rest of the place untouched, or else turned over by someone who knew what he was doing. If a rent boy had done it he’d have ransacked the place. The way it looked just didn’t square with the way the man had been killed.
    JJ glanced back at the phone and then stared at the door, listening; quiet footsteps outside. He moved his hand inside his jacket but let it fall away again as whoever it was knocked tentatively. It was instinct, a sense that the person on the other side of that knock wouldn’t know where to begin being a threat to him.
    Things were getting interesting though. And it was like it was nothing to do with him, like he was just a spectator, cut off from the whole little drama by the stench rising off Viner’s body. He was on the edge of it, more a part of evening in the city than a part of what was happening in front of him. Because of the telephone. The telephone had cut him loose, and as long as he spoke to no one he’d stay that way.
    There was another knock, and a few seconds later the door opened, hesitantly, almost apologetically. Battered red Converse, that’s what Viner would have seen from down there under his chair, and maybe that would have been enough to recognize him. He certainly had the look of one of Viner’s boys—jeans, T-shirt, scruffy black hair, young face, lean.
    The only thing that didn’t fit was his nationality. He looked like a French kid, but as he bridled against the smell in the room he