Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith Page B

no point trying to come up with some kind of unified, start to finish, A-Z plan before you begin. It isn't possible because you don't have the information, because you don't have the time, and in my case, because I simply can't be bothered.
    I pulled out the map of the Neighbourhood I'd bought earlier, and opened it over the table. This was all I was going to know until I found Alkland, and seeing the interlocking grid of streets and neighbourhoods laid out in front of me helped to concentrate my mind a little. I had no contacts, no angle, and my vidiphone was turned off because I couldn't risk its transmissions being detected: there was only me and these streets, streets which I didn't know. And somewhere in there, Alkland.
    There were two main lines of thought I could follow. A gang of outsiders were not going to be able to just melt into the background. They wouldn't have the history, the jobs, the houses. Therefore they were going to have to be holed up somewhere: in a run-down area where people came and went, or in a hotel, somewhere where itinerants were to be expected. The alternative was to assume that the gang were actually from Stable itself, which a) struck me as extremely unlikely, and b) would take me back to square one, because they could be hiding out anywhere. The first task in front of me was therefore actually relatively simple, and one I'd done countless times before, albeit in easier circumstances. It was working out where you'd hide in a Neighbourhood.
    Within a couple of minutes I'd narrowed it down to only two areas, which cheered me up a bit. I wasn't going to have to slog my way through every street in the Neighbourhood. Given that Stable was closed to the outside world, they didn't have quite the call for hotels that parts of other Neighbourhoods did: what hotels there were seemed to be concentrated in one area on the North side, called Play. I got the impression from the blurb on the map that, in the absence of there being anywhere else to go, they'd turned a quarter of a square mile into a sort of low-key resort, the place to stay when you had a holiday. It didn't look very spectacular from the photos: a stretch of artificial beach by a river, mainly, but I guess that if there was no alternative, then it was the best there was. The other area that looked promising was a small enclave in the centre of the Neighbourhood, a few blocks either side of the railway line. Something about its position, the way it backed onto warehouses and railway depots, told me that if there was anywhere in Stable where derelicts went to do their thing, this was where it would be.
    Quickly finishing up my coffee, I set off in the afternoon sun. It was artificial, of course, but still rather nice. It took me about half an hour to walk to the run-down area of the Neighbourhood, and as soon as I realised that I'd found it, I began to strongly suspect that this wasn't where they'd be.
    It was too anaemic, somehow, too thin. I'm a bit of a connoisseur of disaster areas in Neighbourhoods, and I can tell what they're like immediately. This was not a place where you'd stash guns or run a drug-peddling concern. It was too clean, too flat. I can't describe exactly what was missing, a sense of fear, or possibility, or something. There were a few derelicts around, sure, and it wouldn't be my first choice of a place to hang out, but it was a nothing. It had no atmosphere, no sense of inwardness or community. Somewhere had to be not quite as nice as everywhere else, and this happened to be it. That was all.
    Of course to a really clever gang, that might be just what they were looking for, a nowhere land that no one really cared about. Not nice enough to want to live in, but not bad enough to keep bugging the council about. I dutifully trudged through a couple of hours' worth of abandoned buildings, and asked questions of a few tramps, but each one just confirmed my suspicions.
    There were no gangs here. According to the derelicts, there