Proxy, page 3
“Okay,” he said, climbing back out of the car and pushing the door closed, “that’s the GPS reprogrammed.”
Harry, who had been leaning against the bumper of a half-gutted Audi, watching while he worked, nodded with apparent satisfaction. “Finally,” he said, standing up and stretching his spine, the heel of one hand pressed to his lower back. “I remember when you used to be able to take care of a job like that in half an hour, but that took you most of half a day. Losing your touch?”
Ray stepped around to the Volkswagen’s engine compartment, its five-cylinder petrol engine long since replaced by a single large battery unit, and closed the hatch. Even the batteries had been hacked to remove embedded software that could track the vehicle’s movements.
“The firmware’s a lot harder to get around these days,” Ray explained. “You have to take extra precautions to be sure they won’t be identified as stolen.” He glanced towards Harry. “I could do it faster if you like, but if I did, I couldn’t guarantee whoever ended up buying it wouldn’t get nicked. And that risks leading the police back here.”
“Fair enough,” said Harry. He nodded up at the ceiling. “I think such blatant disregard for the law of the land deserves a beer, don’t you?”
“Seconded.” Ray unplugged the laptop and powered it down, hearing laughter from upstairs. His palms were still dirty from rooting around inside the Volkswagen’s engine compartment to try and find a port he could plug the laptop into. “Just let me wash my hands first.”
“That’s the problem with a job like this,” said Harry. “Can’t help but get your hands dirty.” He grinned broadly, as if they were sharing a private joke. “Know what I mean?”
“Sure.” Ray smiled back uncertainly. Something in the way Harry had said it gave him a moment’s pause.
“By the way,” said Harry, his tone casual, “Al dropped in for a visit. Figured you might want to say hello, seeing you used to be cellmates and all.”
“Al Stokes?” Ray didn’t need to pretend he was pleased, if for entirely different reasons than Harry might have suspected. “Long time no see. Did he say anything about…?”
Harry clapped him on the shoulder. “He did. I put in a good word for you, but you know Al. Wouldn’t trust his own mother. I think he just wants to talk to you first.”
At last, thought Ray. I’m finally getting somewhere.
Ray headed through to the back of the body shop, passing by cars raised high on hydraulic jacks, and washed his hands in the tiny washroom. The garage made most of its money converting ancient petrol-guzzlers to electric to keep them straight with the law, but hacking the onboard computer systems that otherwise allowed stolen vehicles to be traced brought Harry a brisk under-the-counter trade.
Once he had finished washing his hands, Ray studied the face that looked back at him from the mirror above the sink: Marky Stevenson, car thief and hacker extraordinaire. Marky’s face was freckled and round, with blond-ginger hair and a nose that had been broken more than once. To say he and Ray bore little resemblance to one another was something of an understatement.
Ray dried Marky’s hands and checked his watch. He’d been proxying with the carjacker for just over three hours now. That left him another three to four hours at the very most before the proxy beads in both his and Marky’s necks dissolved and they each found themselves back in their own bodies.
He thought about the way Harry had looked at him and felt a stab of worry. Pretending to be the person you were proxying with required a certain degree of acting skill. You had as much as possible to mimic their habits, body language and speech patterns, but Ray knew from bitter experience that there were a thousand ways to slip up or otherwise reveal oneself.
It was possible Harry had figured out someone was proxying with Marky, but there was no way to be sure.
And even if things went wrong, well, one way or another he’d be back in his own body before long.
And it wasn’t like you could just stop proxying any time you wanted. Short of digging a bead out of your neck, you had to ride a proxy session out to the bitter end.
“You don’t have to do this,” Ray said in a low voice to the face in the mirror.
But if you weren’t doing this, said a small voice in the back of his mind, what else would you be doing? Working night shifts as a security guard for some supermarket chain?
At least now he’d hit bottom, there was nowhere else to fall.
Returning from the washroom, Ray headed upstairs to a storeroom that also functioned as a break room. There, he found Harry Cutts sitting on a stool before a scarred coffee table. Across the table from him, and squeezed together on a crumbling couch, were Jayden Cutts, Al Stokes, and Harry’s nephew Dylan Wicks, with whom Harry owned the garage.
Stokes had long, dark hair that spilled across his shoulders in greasy waves. Ferret-like eyes gleamed from beneath a side-parting, while a cigarette poked out from between scarred knuckles.
The murmur of conversation abated when Ray entered.
“We were just talking about you,” said Jayden, pulling the top off a beer bottle and passing it to Ray as he approached.
Ray took a slug of beer and felt it wash the dust from his throat. “Good things, I hope.”
He studied the men around the table to try to get some sense of what was on their minds. Something definitely felt off. None of them quite met his eyes, and their smiles looked less than genuine.
Regardless, Ray extended a hand to Stokes, and they shook. “Good to see you again, Al,” said Ray.
“I was telling them about when we shared a cell,” said Al, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “There are too many stories to count, yet these arseholes seem to want to hear every one of them.”
Everything Ray knew about Al Stokes came from a police interrogation of Mark Stevenson that had taken place two weeks before. He’d been nicked driving a stolen vehicle, and his connection with Stokes had attracted the attention of the CID.
A raid subsequently carried out on Stevenson’s home had produced enough evidence to put him away for a long, long time—unless, as the police had explained to him, he was willing to aid them in their ongoing pursuit of Stokes.
The way Ray heard it, the carjacker had been almost embarrassingly eager to tell his interrogating officer all about his two years as Al Stokes’ cellmate.
But reading a police report and being face-to-face with Stokes himself were two very different things.
Ray produced what he hoped was a convincing smile. “Like the one about that bloke they caught fucking a teddy-bear?”
Jayden’s eyes grew wide, and he half-choked on his beer. Harry, by contrast, laughed uproariously.
“All true,” Stokes said to Jayden. “He even had it smuggled into prison because he couldn’t bear to be without it.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “No,” he said, looking back over at Ray, “I was thinking about the time they searched us for drugs, forced you to strip and discovered you were wearing nappies.”
“Fuck off,” said Jayden, staring at Ray in horrified amazement.
Ray’s hand tightened around his beer bottle. Marky had mentioned nothing about that.
“He’s having you on,” said Ray, sweat beading his borrowed skin.
“Maybe you’re right,” said Stokes. “Was it someone else?” He tapped the fingers of one hand on the side of his head. “Wait. Was it whatsisname? Do you remember his name, Marky?”
“Fucked if I remember,” said Ray, his fingers tight around the bottle.
He’d have preferred almost anywhere else for this meeting. There was one window, but it was covered over by an advertising hoarding, and that meant the only way out was down the stairs.
“But you remember when it was, don’t you?” Stokes asked, something feral in his gaze. “Last time I saw you, in fact.”
Ray made a helpless gesture. “I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning let alone what happened years ago,” he said. “I guess maybe it was.”
Stokes made a noise in the back of his throat and nodded to himself as if coming to a conclusion. Then he stood and walked over to where several chairs were pushed into a corner. He picked one up, placed it by his own chair, and gestured to Ray to sit next to him.
Ray sat by Stokes’ side and they clinked beers. “You’ve been asking about me, right?” Stokes asked, his expression suddenly sombre. “And not just because we used to be cell-mates.”
Ray drank more beer. The alcohol would affect Marky’s brain, but not his, and so he could remain fully alert. But he couldn’t drink too much, either, because the alcohol would slow down his skin’s ability to react if things went south.
The act of drinking, however, at least gave him time to think.
“Well,” Ray replied, “I’d heard you were in a certain line of business and it sounded, you know, interesting.”
“And what line of business would that be, exactly?” asked Stokes.
“I heard you were running a proxy factory down in Shoreham. And I just thought, well…maybe I could help.”
“Because you’ve heard there’s a lot of money to be made manufacturing proxy, right?”
“It’s getting harder to crack cars by the day,” Ray explained. “And I’ve got Marjorie and two kids to look after.”
“All good points,” said Al, putting his beer down and stubbing out his cigarette before lighting another. “But here’s the thing.”
Stokes put his left arm around Ray’s shoulders in what at first appeared to be a friendly embrace. Then, before Ray quite knew what was happening, Stokes took hold of Marky’s head in a vice-like grip and jammed the glowing tip of his cigarette into one of the carjacker’s eyes.
Ray smelled burning flesh. The shock of the heat and pain felt like an icepick driven into his skull. It hurt just as much as if it had been Ray’s own eye, rather than Marky’s.
Ray tore himself loose of the other man’s grip and let out a bellow of pain and anguish. He pushed himself upright, his chair tumbling to one side.
“Jesus!” Ray screamed, pressing his hands against Marky’s injured eye. “What the fuck did you do that for?”
Too late, Ray became aware that the rest of them had stood as well. He looked towards the stairs and freedom, but before he could take a single step in that direction, Jayden and Harry had grabbed him by the shoulders, twisting his arms behind his back. Stokes, meanwhile, lurched upright and began raining punches into Marky’s belly.
Ray felt every blow. His legs gave way beneath him and, if not for the two men holding him upright, he would have slumped to the floor.
The blows kept coming, and coming. Ray tried to twist out of the way of Stokes’ fists, but it was useless; he tasted the copper scent of blood, mixed with the sordid stench of his own fear.
If he just stuck to his role—if he could still somehow convince them he really was who he said he was—maybe there was still a chance he could get out of this without having to live through whatever they had planned for Marky.
At last the blows ceased. “Al,” Ray rasped, his bruised lungs snatching at the air, “why are you doing this?”
“Don’t you fucking ‘Al’ me,” Stokes screamed. Then came more punches and, finally, Ray was allowed to crumple to the floor.
“It wasn’t Marky who wore the nappy,” Stokes snarled, his chest heaving from his exertions, “that much you got right. It was Sharpton. Marky and him hated each other’s guts. Marky couldn’t shut up when they caught Sharpton wearing nappies and you—I mean, he—said he’d remember that day for the rest of his life. I should know. I was stuck in that fucking cell listening to him rabbit on and on about it for fucking years.”
Stokes lit another cigarette, his hands trembling with adrenaline or perhaps from fury. “This lot have been onto you for days, mate,” he said, pointing the lit cigarette at Ray, “whoever you really fucking are. They noticed the way you kept slipping away at odd hours, I’m guessing so you could put a new bead in Marky’s neck and keep the link going. Jayden,” he said, snapping a look at the other man. “Go get us a bucket of water and some of those rags from downstairs. Make sure it’s full right to the top.”
Jayden nodded with clear excitement and dashed downstairs.
“How about dropping the bullshit, lad?” Stokes asked Ray, who still crouched on the floor surrounded by his tormentors. “Who have we really been talking to? And how long have you been proxying with Marky?”
Ray considered keeping up the pretence, then discarded it. Instead, he responded to Stokes’ question with a tight shake of the head.
Stokes half-kneeled before Ray and opened a pocket knife, its serrated edge gleaming dully beneath a bare overhead light-bulb. “Proxy’s a wonderful thing, innit?” said Stokes. “Just like magic, you stick a little bead under your skin and all of a sudden you can walk around in someone else’s body. You can feel everything they can, and vice versa. Even pain.” He held the blade close to Ray’s—Marky’s—cheek. “If I cut you right now, you’ll feel it just as much as if it was your own skin.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” said Ray, his voice tight with pain.
“Why not?”
“You’d be hurting Marky, not me. I’ll be fine when the proxy link breaks.”
“On the contrary,” said Stokes, his eyes gleaming, “it’ll hurt you in the short term, and Marky very much in the long term. Because there’s no way you’d be here, proxying through the miserable little turd, unless he’d already told you something he shouldn’t have. So tell me—what was it you were sent you to find out? It was summat to do with me, right?”
Jayden returned just then, a bucket of water in one hand and a pile of dirty rags in the other. Water slopped over the sides of the bucket as he placed it next to the coffee table.
Stokes grabbed Ray by the chin, digging the tip of his knife into the skin behind the carjacker’s ear.
Ray howled from the pain.
“Now tell me,” Stokes growled, “why the fuck you’re here?”
“Fuck you,” Ray grunted between panicked gasps.
“Think,” said Stokes. “What kind of a miserable life is this, stealing people’s skins and spying on their friends and family?” Stokes sneered. “I’ve met blokes like you. The police won’t use proxy themselves because they think it’s beneath them, so they hire idiots like you to do it on their behalf.” Stokes shook his head. “I’m betting this isn’t the first time you’ve been caught out, is it?”
Ray saw no point in denying it. “No, it isn’t.”
“Fine then,” said Stokes. “Now, I figure you’ve been at this game long enough that your pain threshold must be pretty high by now.” His expression became almost sympathetic. “You know, you could save yourself an awful lot of bother if you just told me what I want to know. You know that, don’t you?”
Ray knew, but he still didn’t tell Stokes anything. At least, not at first.
When he didn’t immediately receive an answer, Stokes’s expression became contemptuous. He stepped over to the coffee table, sweeping the empty beer bottles and ashtrays onto the floor. Then he had Jayden and the others lift Ray up and onto the table, laying him out like a corpse on a slab.
Harry punched Ray in the belly a couple more times when he tried to struggle upright. By then, he was too weak to resist when Stokes pressed the oily rags down over his mouth, nose and eyes.
Then came a rush of water as one of Stokes’ cronies upended the bucket over Ray’s face. The water tasted as cold and pure as death, his lungs struggling to suck in air that suddenly wasn’t there. He coughed and spluttered and gagged as the water filled his nostrils.
They waterboarded him twice more, just to be sure. Ray struggled and kicked and screamed the whole time, Jayden running back downstairs whenever they needed a fresh bucket filled.
After the third waterboarding, Ray told the assembled faces anything they wanted to hear. He told them he worked as a licensed body jacker for a private investigator and that Marky had been promised leniency if Stokes, a wanted man, was finally cornered.
In the middle of his confession, a sensation of falling away into darkness came over Ray. Within moments the stink of the rags was gone, along with Stokes, Cutts and the whole garage crew.
Ray’s lungs seized at the air. His hands—his hands, not Marky’s—gripped the armchair in which he found himself sitting. Around him was a sparsely furnished office with stained blinds part-drawn over unwashed windows dark with grime.
Ray twisted to one side and vomited noisily onto green linoleum.
When he looked back up, Ray saw a man had entered the office with a large mug gripped in one hand. A tiny kitchenette was visible through a door behind him. The man had a wool balaclava pulled down over his face so that all Ray could see were his eyes and mouth.
“Christ on a pogo stick,” said the man in the balaclava, staring at the puddle of vomit. “Am I going to have to clean that up?”
“Tip,” Ray gasped. “It’s me.”
The other man’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What’s the code phrase, then?”
Ray coughed and cleared his throat, his tongue still sour with the taste of vomit. “’I have CCTV evidence that you once fucked a badger’,” he rasped.
Tip’s eyes grew wide, and he yanked the balaclava off, revealing a man in his early sixties with a shock of untidy steel-grey hair and a chin scarred by childhood acne. “Shit, Ray. Throwing up after a proxy session is a bit amateur, innit?”
“I talked to Stokes,” said Ray, wiping his mouth with a sleeve. His hands were shaking. “But he was onto me. They all were. Call it in, but I’ll be surprised if Stokes is within thirty miles of the garage by the time the Met gets there.”
Tip looked pained on receiving this news. Ray knew what he was thinking: Stokes’ capture meant a fat reward, and both of them needed the cash.
“I’ll call it in anyway,” said Tip. He let out a sigh of disappointment and raised his data bracelet to his mouth. “Maybe there’s still a chance.”
