Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,13

go when they die, this is the place. I've never seen a customer enter or leave the place, though there's so much grime on the windows they could be running live sex shows in there and no one would be any the wiser. And Gizmo reckons he's moved up in the world.

I was going against the traffic flow on the busy arterial road, so it didn't take me long to drive the short distance to Levenshulme and find a parking space on a side street of red-brick terraces. I pressed the bell and waited, con¬templating a front door so coated with inner-city pollu¬tion that it was no longer possible to tell what color it had originally been. The only clean part of the door was the glass on the spyhole. After about thirty seconds, I pressed the bell again. This time, there was a thunder of clatter¬ing feet, a brief pause, and then the door opened a cau¬tious couple of inches. "Kate," Gizmo said, showing no inclination to invite me in. His skin looked gray in the harsh morning light, his eyes red-rimmed like a labora¬tory white rat. "All right, Giz?"

"No, since you ask." He rubbed a hand along his stub-bled jaw and scratched behind one ear with the knuckle of his index finger.

"What's the problem? Trouble with the Dibble?" His lips twisted in the kind of smile dogs give before they remove your liver without benefit of anesthetic. "No way, I'm always well ahead of the boys in blue. No, this is serious. I've got the bullet." "From Telecom?" "Who else?"

I was taken aback. The only thing I could think of was that someone had got wise to Gizmo's extracurricular activities. "They catch you with your hand in somebody's digital traffic?"

"Get real," he said indignantly. "Staff cuts. The section head doesn't like the fact that I know more than anybody else in the section, including him. So it's good night, Vienna, Gizmo."

"You'll get another job," I said. I would have found it easier to convince myself if I hadn't been looking at him as I spoke. As well as the red-rimmed eyes and the stub¬ble, a prospective employer had to contend with a hair¬cut that looked like Edward Scissorhands on a bad hair day, and a dress sense that would embarrass a jumble sale.

"I'm too old."

"How old?"

"Thirty-two," he mumbled with a suspicious scowl, as if he thought I was going to laugh. I didn't have enough years on him for that.

"You're winding me up," I said.

"The guys who do the hiring are in their forties and scared shitless that they're going to get the tin handshake any day now, and they know nothing about computer sys¬tems except that someone told them it's a young man's game. If you're over twenty-five, twenty-seven if you've got a Ph.D., they won't even look at your CV. Believe me, Kate, I'm too old."

"What a bummer," I said, meaning it.

"Yeah, well. Shit happens. But it's nicer when it hap¬pens to somebody else. So what did you come around for? Last orders before I have to put my rates up?"

I handed him the piece of paper where I'd noted Will Alien's license plate. "The name and address that go with the car."

He didn't even look at it. He just said, "Sometime this afternoon," then started to close the door.

"Hey, Giz?" He paused. "I'm really sorry," I said. He nodded and shut the door.

I walked back toward the street where I'd parked the zippy Rover 216 that Mortensen and Brannigan had bought for me a couple of months before. Until then, I'd been driving a top of the range sports coupe that we'd taken in part payment for a long and complicated car finance fraud case, but I'd known in my heart of hearts it was far too conspicuous a set of wheels for the kind of work I do. Given how much I enjoy driving, it had been a wrench to part with it, but I'd learned to love the Rover. Especially after my mate Handbrake had done something double wicked to the engine which made it nippier than any of its German siblings from BMW.

As I rounded the corner, I couldn't believe what I saw. There was a spray of glittering glass chunks like hundreds of tiny mosaic tiles all over the pavement by the driver's door of the Rover. The car was twenty yards from the main road, it was half past eight in the morning, and I'd been gone less than ten