Free Arabesk by Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page A

life was a Xerox, a copy. And the original wasn’t his. Never had been. He was a mirror, in which people saw what they wanted to see; and in him they soon saw a J-Cat, ready for the Ding Wing, walking the very edge of psychosis.
    He took up tai chi—minus the sword, obviously. Volunteered to act as kick bag to a hard-ass elderly rasta with a thing for Capoeira. He learned ginga, rabo de arraia and queixada as well as esquiva and a few other basic defensive moves, but mostly he learned blade technique, though to the badges and white-shirts it just looked like dance. But then that was the whole point of a martial art which had survived by disguising itself as something else.
    “Do your own time,” warned the rasta and ZeeZee did. He kept himself to himself, didn’t pry, didn’t boast, lost the fights he couldn’t win or absolutely couldn’t avoid, until one week he won, then won again, earning himself space. And when the rasta nicknamed him after some hick redneck band, ZeeZee took it as a compliment and waxed his own matted hair into embryo dreadlocks.
    But as age nineteen slid into twenty and a date still wasn’t set for his trial, ZeeZee kept on fretting, right up to the morning a suited lawyer turned up in his holding cell at Remand3 and put the basis of a cast-iron insanity plea in front of him.
    It was elegant, it was sweet and all ZeeZee had to do was agree: but it was only when the lawyer mentioned ’ville that ZeeZee nodded and reached for a pen.
    “I didn’t kill anyone,” he told Clem suddenly.
    “Yeah,” Clem hawked out his window, just missing the windscreen of a passing saloon. “That’s something else I’d kick out of you cons at Shitville, All that ‘Poor me, I’m innocent’ shit. If you weren’t guilty you wouldn’t be there. How fucking simple do you want it?”
    ZeeZee silently shook his head. In his case guilty didn’t come into it. He was either innocent or mad, not that Dr Millbank used such words. Hysterically amnesiac was what had made it onto ZeeZee’s files. He knew: the doctor had powered up a screen just to show him.
    The insanity plea on offer was simple. ZeeZee couldn’t be convicted of murdering Micky O’Brian because he didn’t know he’d done it. His fingerprints might be on the Wilson Combat thrown down by Micky’s body, they might also be on a couple of .22LR in its magazine and all over the conversion unit that had replaced the Wilson’s usual .45 barrel, but ZeeZee genuinely didn’t know he’d fired the shot.
    Even though the police had found him in O’Brian’s house overlooking Puget Sound, standing in the hallway with Micky dead in the gallery at the top of the stairs.
    Every lie-detector test ZeeZee took came up clean, and he’d taken five, three of them in sterile-lab conditions. He’d had CT and MRI and, according to the expert witness lined up for his trial, the scans revealed fear and anxiety but absolutely no guilt. At the demand of the police, he’d undergone full hypnotic memory-recall. He recalled nothing.
    The defence was simple.
    ZeeZee believed he was not guilty, except all the evidence said he was. Ergo, to use his lawyer’s phrase, he was innocent through insanity. Except that ZeeZee knew the lawyer realized that wasn’t how it went. ZeeZee might not be guilty but he wasn’t insane. Insanity would involve naming Hu San.
    “Hey!” ZeeZee nodded at a black pick-up only inches from the front of Clem’s Lincoln. “What gives?”
    “Asshole won’t pull over.”
    “Look,” said ZeeZee, drawing his knees up into the brace position. “We’re in the slow lane, Chief. Where’s he going to move?”
    “That’s not my problem,” Clem announced, but he edged back slightly. And just as ZeeZee was about to sigh with relief, Clem hit the gas again, lurching the Lincoln straight into the back of the pick-up. Metal shrieked and locked, and then the Lincoln twisted sideways, did half a revolution and came to a halt on the hard shoulder fifty