William Gibson. Virtual light


     Spellcheck: Egor Podgornov


1. The luminous flesh of giants.

     The  courier  presses  his  forehead against  layers of  glass,  argon,
high-impact  plastic.  He  watches  a  gunship  traverse the  city's  middle
distance like a hunting wasp,  death slung beneath its  thorax  in a  smooth
black pod.
     Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb; seventy-three
dead, the kill as yet unclaimed. But here the mirrored ziggurats down Lozaro
Cordenas  flow with the luminous flesh of  giants, shunting  out the night's
barrage  of dreams to the waiting  avenidas-business as usual, world without
end.
     The air  beyond the  window touches each source of  light with  a faint
hepatic corona, a  tint  of  jaundice  edging  imperceptibly  into  brownish
translucence. Fine dry flakes of  fecal snow,  billowing  in from the sewage
flats, have lodged in the lens of night.
     Closing  his  eyes,  he  centers  himself in  the  background  hiss  of
climate-control. He imagines himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of
the old Imperial. He sees himself in the streets  of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the
sighing trains. Red paper lanterns line a narrow lane.
     He opens his eyes.
     Mexico City is still there.
     The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned with
the edge of the coffee  table: a  Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name
more irritating than its lingering aftertaste.
     On the screen above the console, the ptichka await him, all in a creamy
frieze. When  he takes up  the remote, their high sharp cheekbones twist  in
the space behind his eyes. Their young men, invariably entering from behind,
wear black leather gloves.
     Slavic faces, calling up unwanted fragments of a childhood: the reek of
a black  canal, steel racketing steel beneath a swaying train, the high  old
ceilings of an apartment overlooking a frozen park.
     Twenty-eight  peripheral images frame  the  Russians  in their  earnest
coupling; he glimpses  figures carried from the smoke-blackened car-deck  of
an Asian ferry.
     He opens another of the little bottles.
     Now the ptichka, their heads bobbing  like well-oiled machines, swallow
their arrogant, self-absorbed boyfriends. The camera angles recall the ardor
of Soviet industrial cinema.
     His  gaze strays  to NHK Weather.  A  low-pressure  front  is  crossing
Kansas.  Next to it, an eerily calm Islamic  downlink ceaselessly reiterates
the name of God in a fractal-based calligraphy.
     He drinks the vodka.
     He watches television.
     After midnight,  at  the  intersection of  Liverpool and Florencia,  he
stares out at the Zona Rosa from the back of  a white Lada, a nanopore Swiss
respirator chafing his freshly shaven chin.
     And every passing face  is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind
filters. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws
of grinning  sugar-skulls. Whatever  form they take, their manufacturers all
make the same dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids.
     He's  thought  to  escape  the  sameness, perhaps discover something of
beauty or passing interest, but  here there are only masked faces, his fear,
the lights.
     An ancient American car comes creeping through the turn, out of Avenida
Chapultepec, gouts of carbon pulsing from beneath a dangling bumper. A dusty
rind  of cola-colored resin and  shattered  mirror seals its every  surface;
only the windshield is exposed, and this  is  black and  glossy, opaque as a
blob of  ink,  reminding  him of the gunship's lethal pod. He feels the fear
begin to accrete,  seamlessly, senselessly, with absolute conviction, around
this carnival ghost, the  Cadillac, this  oil-burning relic  in its spectral
robe  of smudged  mosaic silver. Why is it  allowed to add its filth to  the
already impossible air? Who sits inside, behind the black windshield?
     Trembling, he watches the thing pass.
     'That car...' He finds himself leaning forward, compulsively addressing
the broad brown neck  of the driver, whose massive  ear lobes somehow recall
reproduction pottery offered on the hotel's shopping channel.
     'El coche,'  says the driver, who wears no mask, and turning, now seems
to notice the courier for  the  first time. The  courier  sees  the mirrored
Cadillac flare, once, and briefly, with the reflected  ruby of a nightclub's
laser, then gone.
     The driver is staring at him.
     He tells the driver to return to the hotel.
     He comes  awake  from  a  dream  of  metal  voices,  down  the  vaulted
concourses  of  some  European  airport,  distant  figures glimpsed in  mute
rituals of departure.
     Darkness. The hiss of climate-control.
     The touch of cotton sheets. His telephone beneath the pillow. Sounds of
traffic, muted by the gas-filled windows. All tension, his panic,  are gone.
He remembers the atrium bar. Music. Faces.
     He  becomes aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium. It is all he
knows of peace.
     And, yes, the  glasses are here, tucked  beside his telephone. He draws
them out, opening the  ear pieces  with a guilty pleasure  that  has somehow
endured since Prague.
     Very nearly a decade he has loved her, though he doesn't think of it in
those terms. But he has never bought another piece of software and the black
plastic frames have started to lose their  sheen. The label on  the cassette
is unreadable now,  sueded white with his touch in the night. So  many rooms
like this one.
     He has long since come to  prefer  her in silence. He no longer inserts
the yellowing  audio beads. He has learned to provide his own, whispering to
her as he fast-forwards through the  clumsy titles and up the moonlit ragged
hiliscape of a place that is neither Hollywood nor Rio, but  some soft-focus
digital approximation of both.
     She is waiting for him, always, in the white house up  the canyon road.
The candles. The wine. The jet-beaded  dress against the matte perfection of
her skin, such whiteness, the black beads drawn smooth and cool as a snake's
belly up her tensed thigh.
     Far away, beneath cotton sheets, his hands move.
     Later, drifting toward sleep of a different texture, the phone  beneath
his pillow chimes softly and only once.
     'Yes?'
     'Confirming your reservation to San Francisco,'  someone says, either a
woman or a machine.  He  touches  a  key, recording the flight number,  says
goodnight, and  closes his eyes on  the tenuous light  sifting from the dark
borders of the drapes.
     Her white arms enfold him. Her blondness eternal.
     He sleeps.


2. Cruising with Gunhead.

     IntenSecure had their  wagons detailed  every three  shifts. They  used
this big specialty car wash off Colby; twenty coats of hand-rubbed Wet Honey
Sienna and you didn't let it get too shabby.
     That one  November evening the  Republic of Desire  put  an end to  his
career in armed response, Berry Rydell had arrived there a little early.
     He liked the way it smelled inside.  They had this  pink stuff they put
through the power-washers to  get the road film off, and the  smell reminded
him  of a summer job he'd had  in Knoxville, his last year in school. They'd
been putting condos into the shell of this big  old Safeway out on Jefferson
Davis.  The architects wanted  the cinder block walls stripped just this one
certain  way, mostly  gray showing  through but some old pink  Safeway paint
left in the little dips and crannies. They were from  Memphis  and they wore
black suits and white cotton shirts. The shirts had obviously cost more than
the suits, or at least as  much, and they  never wore ties  or undid the top
button. Rydell had figured that that was a way for architects to dress;  now
he lived in L.A., he knew it was true. He'd overheard one of them explaining
to the foreman that what they  were doing was exposing the  integrity of the
material's passage through time. He thought that was  probably bullshit, but
he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on
television.
     But  what  it  really amounted to was getting  most of this shitty  old
paint off thousands  and  thousands  of square feet of equally shitty cinder
block,  and you did it with an oscillating  spray-head on  the end of a long
stainless handle. If you thought  the foreman  wasn't looking, you could aim
it at another kid, twist out a thirty-foot rooster tail of stinging rainbow,
and  wash  all  his  sunblock  off.  Rydell and  his friends  all  wore this
Australian stuff that came in serious colors, so you could see where you had
and hadn't put it. Had to get your right  distance on  it, though, 'cause up
close those heads  could take  the chrome  off a  bumper.  Rydell and  Buddy
Crigger both got fired for doing  that, finally, and then they walked across
Jeff Davis to a beer joint  and Rydell wound up spending the night with this
girl from Key West, the first time he'd ever slept beside a woman.
     Now here he was  in Los  Angeles, driving a six-wheeled Hotspur  Hussar
with  twenty  coats  of hand-rubbed lacquer. The Hussar was an  armored Land
Rover  that  could  do a hundred  and forty on a straightaway, assuming  you
could find one open and  had  the  time to accelerate. Hernandez,  his shift
super, said  you couldn't trust an Englishman to build anything  much bigger
than  a hat,  not  if  you wanted it to work when  you  needed  it;  he said
IntenSecure should've  bought Israeli or at  least Brazilian, and who needed
Ralph Lauren to design a tank anyway?
     Rydell didn't know about that, but that paint job was definitely trying
too hard. He thought they probably wanted people to think of those big brown
United Parcel  trucks, and at the same time they maybe hoped it  would  look
sort  of like something you'd see in an Episcopal  church. Not too much gilt
on the logo. Sort of restrained.
     The people who worked in the car wash were mostly Mongolian immigrants,
recent  ones who  had  trouble  getting  better jobs. They  did  this  crazy
throat-singing thing  while  they worked,  and he  liked  to  hear  that. He
couldn't  figure  out  how they did it; sounded like tree-frogs, but like it
was two sounds at once.
     Now they were buffing  the rows of  chromed nubs down  the sides. Those
had been meant to support electric crowd-control grids and were just chromed
for looks. The riot-wagons in Knoxville had been  electrified, but with this
drip-system that kept them wet, which was a lot nastier.
     'Sign here,'  said the crew boss, this  quiet black kid named Anderson.
He was a medical student, days, and he always looked  like  he was about two
nights short of sleep.
     Rydell took the pad  and the  light-pen and signed the signature-plate.
Anderson handed Rydell the keys.
     'You ought to get you some rest,' Rydell said. Anderson grinned, wanly.
Rydell walked over to Gunhead, deactivating the door alarm.
     Somebody  had written that  inside,  'GUNHEAD,' in green marker on  the
panel above the windshield. The name stuck, but mostly because Sublett liked
it. Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect. He
said  his mother  had been  getting ready  to  deed  his  ass to the church,
whatever that meant.
     Sublett  wasn't too anxious to talk about it, but Rydell had gotten the
idea that  these people  figured  video was  the Lord's  preferred  means of
communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually  burning bush.  'He's
in  the  details,' Sublett had said once. 'You  gotta watch for  Him close.'
Whatever  form this worship had taken,  it  was  evident  that  Sublett  had
absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had  ever met, mostly old movies
on channels that never ran anything but. Sublett said
     Gunhead was the  name  of a  robot  tank in a  Japanese  monster movie.
Hernandez  thought  Sublett had written  the name on there himself.  Sublett
denied  it.  Hernandez said take it  off. Sublett ignored him. It  was still
there, but Rydell knew  Sublett was too law-abiding to commit any vandalism,
and anyway the ink in the marker might've killed him.
     Sublett had had  allergies.  He went into shock from  various kinds  of
cleaners  and solvents, so you couldn't get him to come into the car wash at
all,  ever. The allergies made him  light sensitive, too, so he  had to wear
these mirrored contacts. What with the black IntenSecure uniform and his dry
blond hair, the contacts made  him look  like  some  kind of Kian-assed Nazi
robot. Which could get kind of complicated in the wrong store on Sunset, say
three in the morning and all  you really wanted was some mineral water and a
Coke.  But Rydell was  always glad  to have him  on shift, because he was as
determinedly  nonviolent  a  rentacop as  you  were likely to  find.  And he
probably wasn't even crazy. Both of which  were definite pluses  for Rydell.
As Hernandez was  fond of pointing  out,  SoCal had stricter regulations for
who could or couldn't be a hairdresser.
     Like Rydell, a lot of IntenSecure's response people were former  police
officers  of some kind, some were even ex-LAPD, and if  the company's  rules
about  not  carrying personal  weapons  on  duty were  any  indication,  his
co-workers were  expected  to turn  up packing all manner of hardware. There
were  metal detectors on the staff-room doors  and  Hernandez usually had  a
drawer  full of  push-daggers,  nunchuks, stunguns, knucks, boot-knives, and
whatever else the detectors  had picked  up. Like  Friday morning at a South
Miami high school. Hernandez gave it all back after the shift, but when they
went  calling,  they  were supposed to  make  do  with  their Glocks and the
chunkers.
     The Glocks were standard police issue, at least twenty years old,  that
IntenSecure bought by the truckload from PDs that could afford to upgrade to
caseless ammunition. If you did it by the book, you kept the Glocks in their
plastic holsters,  and kept the  holsters  Velcroed to  the  wagon's central
console.  When you answered a call,  you pulled a  holstered  pistol off the
console  and  stuck it on the  patch  provided on your uniform. That was the
only time you were supposed to  be out of the wagon with a gun on,  when you
were actually responding.
     The chunkers weren't  even guns, not  legally anyway,  but a ten-second
burst at  close  range would chew somebody's  face off.  They  were  Israeli
riot-control  devices,  air-powered,  that fired one-inch cubes  of recycled
rubber.  They looked like the result of  a forced  union  between  a bullpup
assault  rifle and an industrial staple  gun,  except  they were made out of
this bright yellow plastic. When you pulled  the trigger, those  chunks came
out  in a solid  stream.  If you got really good with one, you  could  shoot
around corners; just kind of bounce them off a convenient surface. Up close,
they'd eventually cut a sheet of plywood in  half, if  you kept on shooting,
and they left major bruises out to about  thirty yards. The theory  was, you
didn't always encounter  that many armed intruders, and a chunker was a  lot
less  likely to  injure  the client or  the  client's  property. If you  did
encounter an armed  intruder,  you had the Glock. Although the intruder  was
probably running caseless through a floating breech-not part  of the theory.
Nor was it part  of the theory that seriously tooled-up intruders  tended to
be tightened on dancer, and were thereby both inhumanly fast  and clinically
psychotic.

     There had been a lot of dancer in  Knoxville, and some of it had gotten
Rydell  suspended.  He'd crawled into an  apartment where  a machinist named
Kenneth Turvey was holding his girlfriend, two little kids, and demanding to
speak to the president.
     Turvey was  white, skinny, hadn't bathed  in a month, and had  the Last
Supper tattooed on  his chest. It was  a very  fresh  tattoo; it hadn't even
scabbed  over.  Through a film of  drying blood, Rydell could see that Jesus
didn't have any face. Neither did any of the Apostles.
     'Damn it,' Turvey said, when he saw Rydell. 'I just wanna  speak to the
president.'  He was sitting cross-legged, naked, on  his girlfriend's couch.
He had something like a piece of pipe across his lap, all wrapped with tape.
     'We're trying to  get  her  for  you,' Rydell  said.  'We're sorry it's
taking so long, but we have to go through channels.'
     'God damn it,' Turvey said wearily, 'doesn't nobody understand I'm on a
mission from God?'  He didn't sound  particularly  angry, just tired and put
out.  Rydell  could  see  the  girlfriend  through  the  open  door  of  the
apartment's single bedroom.  She was  on her back,  on the floor, and one of
her legs looked broken. He couldn't see her face. She wasn't moving at  all.
Where were the kids?
     'What is that thing you got there?' Rydell asked, indicating the object
across Turvey's lap.
     'It's  a  gun,'  Turvey  said,  'and  it's  why I  gotta  talk  to  the
president.'
     'Never seen a gun like that,' Rydell allowed. 'What's it shoot?'
     'Grapefruit cans,' Turvey said. 'Fulla concrete.'
     'No shit?'
     'Watch,'  Turvey said, and brought  the thing to his shoulder. It had a
sort of  breech,  very intricately  machined, a trigger-thing like part of a
pair of vise-grip pliers, and a couple  of  flexible tubes. These latter ran
down, Rydell saw, to a great big canister of gas, the kind you'd need a hand
truck to move, which lay on the floor beside the couch.
     There on his knees,  on the  girlfriend's dusty polyester  carpet, he'd
watched  that muzzle swing past. It was big enough to put your fist down. He
watched as  Turvey took  aim, back through  the open  bedroom door,  at  the
closet.
     'Turvey,' he heard himself say, 'where's the goddamn kids?'
     Turvey  moved  the vise-grip  handle and  punched a hole the size  of a
fruit-juice can  through  the  closet door.  The  kids were  in  there. They
must've screamed,  though Rydell  couldn't  remember  hearing  it.  Rydell's
lawyer later argued that he was not only deaf at this point, but  in a state
of  sonically induced  catalepsy. Turvey's invention was only a few decibels
short  of  what  you  got with  a SWAT  stun-grenade.  But  Rydell  couldn't
remember. He couldn't remember shooting Kenneth  Turvey in the head, either,
or anything else at all until he woke  up in the hospital. There was a woman
there from Cops in Trouble, which had  been Rydell's father's favorite show,
but she said she couldn't actually talk to him  until  she'd spoken with his
agent. Rydell said he didn't have  one. She said  she knew that, but one was
going to call him.
     Rydell  lay  there thinking about all the times  he and his father  had
watched Cops in Trouble. 'What kind of  trouble we talking here?' he finally
asked.
     The woman just smiled. 'Whatever, Berry, it'll probably be adequate.'
     He squinted  up at  her. She  was  sort  of good-looking.  'What's your
name?'
     'Karen Mendelsohn.'  She didn't look like  she was from  Knoxville,  or
even Memphis.
     'You from Cops in Trouble?'
     'Yes.'
     'What you do for 'em?'
     'I'm a lawyer,' she  said. Rydell  couldn't recall ever actually having
met one before, but after that he wound up meeting lots more.

     Gunhead's displays were featureless slabs of liquid  crystal; they woke
when  Rydell  inserted  the  key, typed the security code, and ran  a  basic
systems  check. The cameras under the  rear bumper were his favorites;  they
made parking really  easy; you could see exactly where you were  backing up.
The downlink from the Death Star wouldn't work while he was still in the car
wash, too much steel in the building, but it was Sublett's job to keep track
of all that with an ear-bead.
     There was a notice posted in the staff room at IntenSecure, telling you
it was company policy not to call it that, the Death Star, but everybody did
anyway. The LAPD called it  that themselves.  Officially it was the Southern
California Ecosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite.
     Watching  the  dashboard  screens, Rydell backed carefully  out  of the
building.  Gunhead's  twin ceramic  engines  were  new enough  to  still  be
relatively quiet; Rydell could  hear the tires squish  over the wet concrete
floor.
     Sublett  was  waiting outside, his  silver eyes  reflecting  the red of
passing  taillights. Behind  him, the  sun  was  setting,  the  sky's colors
bespeaking more than the usual  cocktail  of additives.  He  stepped back as
Rydell reversed past  him, anxious to avoid the least  droplet of spray from
the tires.  Rydell was anxious too; he didn't want to have to haul the Texan
to Cedars again if his allergies kicked up.
     Rydell  waited  as  Sublett  pulled  on  a pair of disposable  surgical
gloves.
     'Howdy,' Sublett said, climbing into  his seat. He closed his  door and
began to remove the gloves, gingerly peeling them into a Ziploc Baggie.
     'Don't get  any  on you,'  Rydell  said, watching  the care with  which
Sublett treated the gloves.
     'Go  ahead,  laugh,'  Sublett  said  mildly.  He  took  out  a  pack of
hypo-allergenic gum and popped a piece from its bubble. 'How's ol' Gunhead?'
     Rydell scanned the displays, satisfied. 'Not too shabby.'
     'Hope we don't have to  respond to any  damn' stealth  houses tonight,'
Sublett said, chewing.
     Stealth  houses,  so-called,  were  on Sublett's personal list  of  bad
calls.  He  said the air in them was toxic.  Rydell didn't think it made any
sense, but he was tired of arguing about it. Stealth houses were bigger than
most regular houses, cost  more,  and  Rydell  figured  the owners would pay
plenty to  keep the air clean. Sublett  maintained that  anybody who built a
stealth house was paranoid to begin with, would always keep the place locked
up too tight, no air circulation, and you'd get that had toxic buildup.
     If there'd been  any stealth houses in  Knoxville, Rydell  hadn't known
about them. He thought it was an L.A. thing.
     Sublett, who'd worked for IntenSecure  for almost  two years, mostly on
day patrol in  Venice, had been the first person  to  even  mention  them to
Rydell. When Rydell finally got to answer a call to one, he couldn't believe
the place; it just went down and down, dug  in beneath something that looked
almost, but not  quite, like a bombed-out  drycleaning plant. And it was all
peeled  logs inside,  white plaster, Turkish  carpets,  big paintings, slate
floors, furniture like  he'd never seen  before.  But it  was  some  kind of
tricky call; domestic violence,  Rydell figured.  Like  the husband  hit the
wife,  the wife  hit the button, now they  were making out it was all just a
glitch. But  it couldn't really be a  glitch, because someone had had to hit
the  button, and  there hadn't been any response to the password  call  that
came back to  them three-point-eight seconds later. She must've  messed with
the phones, Rydell thought, then  hit the button. He'd been been riding with
'Big George' Kechakmadze that night, and the Georgian (Tbilisi, not Atlanta)
hadn't  liked it either. 'You see  these people, they're  subscribers,  man;
nobody bleeding,  you get  your ass out, okay?' Big George had  said, after.
But Rydell kept remembering a tension  around the woman's eyes, how she held
the collar of the big white robe folded against her throat. Her husband in a
matching  robe but with thick hairy legs and expensive glasses. There'd been
something wrong there but he'd never know what. Not any more  than he'd ever
understand how  their lives really worked, lives  that  looked like what you
saw on tv but weren't.
     L.A. was full  of mysteries, when you looked at it that  way. No bottom
to it.
     He'd come  to like driving through it, though. Not  when he had  to get
anywhere in particular, but just  cruising with Gunhead was okay. Now he was
turning  onto  La Cienega and the little green cursor on the clash was doing
the same.
     'Forbidden Zone,'  Sublett  said.  'Herve  Villechaize,  Susan  Iyrell,
Marie-Pascal Elfman, Viva.'
     'Viva?' Rydell asked. 'Viva what?'
     'Viva. Actress.'
     'When'd they make that?'
     '1980.'
     'I wasn't born yet.'
     'Time on tv's all the same time, Rydell.'
     'Man, I thought you were trying to  get over your upbringing  and all.'
Rydell de-mirrored the door-window to better watch a redheaded girl pass him
in a pink Daihatsu Sneaker with the top off. 'Anyway, I never saw that one.'
It was just that hour of evening when women in cars looked about as good, in
Los Angeles, as anything ever did. The surgeon general was trying  to outlaw
convertibles; said they contributed to the skin-cancer rate.
     'End  game.  Al Cliver,  Moira Chen, George  Eastman, Gordon  Mitchell.
1985.'
     'Well, I was two,' Rydell said, 'but I didn't see that one either.'
     Sublett fell silent. Rydell felt sorry for him; the Texan really didn't
know any other  way to start a conversation, and  his folks back home in the
trailer-camp would've seen all those films and more.
     'Well,'  Rydell said,  trying to pick up his end, 'I  was watching this
one old movie last night-'
     Sublett perked up. 'Which one?'
     'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'This guy's in L.A. and he's just  met this girl.
Then he picks up a pay phone, 'cause it's ringing. Late  at night. It's some
guy in a missile  silo somewhere  who  knows they've just launched theirs at
the Russians. He's  trying to phone his dad, or his  brother,  or something.
Says the world's gonna end  in  short order. Then the guy who  answered  the
phone  hears these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone,
I mean.'
     Sublett closed his  eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. 'Yeah? How's
it end?'
     'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'I went to sleep.'
     Sublett opened his eyes. 'Who was in it?'
     'Got me.'
     Sublett's  blank silver eyes  widened in disbelief. 'Jesus,  Berry, you
shouldn't oughta watch tv, not unless you're gonna pay it attention.'

     He  wasn't in  the hospital very long, after  he  shot Kenneth  Turvey;
barely two days. His lawyer, Aaron Pursley  himself, made the case that they
should've  kept him in there longer, the better to assess the  extent of his
post-traumatic shock. But Rydell hated  hospitals  and anyway he didn't feel
too bad; he just couldn't recall exactly what had happened. And he had Karen
Mendelsohn to help him out with things, and his new agent, Wellington Ma, to
deal with the other people from Cops in Trouble, not  one of them as nice as
Karen,  who had long brown hair. Wellington Ma  was  Chinese,  lived  in Los
Angeles, and  Karen said his father had been  in the  Big Circle gang-though
she advised Rydell not to bring it up.
     Wellington Ma's business card was a rectangular slice of pink synthetic
quartz, laser-engraved with his name, 'The Ma-Mariano Agency,' an address on
Beverly Boulevard, and all kinds of numbers and e-mail addresses. It arrived
by GlobEx  in its own  little gray suede envelope while Rydell was still  in
the hospital.
     'Looks like you could cut yourself on it,' Rydell said.
     'You could, many no doubt have,' said Karen Mendelsohn, 'and if you put
it in your wallet and sit down, it shatters.'
     'Then what's the point of it?'
     'You're supposed to take very good care of it. You won't get another.'
     Rydell never actually did meet Wellington Ma, at least not 'til quite a
while later,  but Karen  would bring in a little  briefcase  with a pair  of
eyephones on a wire and  Rydell could talk with him in  his office in LA. It
was  the sharpest telepresence rig Rydell had ever used,  and it  really did
look just like he  was right  there.  He could see  out  the window to where
there  was  this  lopsided  pyramid the color  of a Noxzema  jar.  He  asked
Wellington Ma what  that was and Ma  said it was the  old Design Center, but
currently  it was a discount mall, and Rydell could go there when he came to
L.A., which was going to be soon.
     Turvey's  girlfriend,  Jenni-Rae  Cline,  was  bringing  an intricately
interlocking  set of separate actions against  Rydell, the  Department,  the
City of  Knoxville,  and the  company in Singapore  that owned her apartment
building. About twenty million in total.
     Rydell, having become a cop in trouble,  was glad to  find that Cops in
Trouble  was right there for him. They'd hired Aaron Pursley,  for starters,
and of course Rydell  knew  who he was from the show. He had that gray hair,
those blue  eyes, that nose you could split kindling  with,  and wore jeans,
Tony Lama  boots, and plain white oxford-cloth pima  cotton cowboy  business
shirts with Navajo-silver bob-ties. He was famous  and he defended cops like
Rydell from people like Turvey's girlfriend and her lawyer.
     Jenni-Rae Cline's lawyer maintained that  Rydell shouldn't have been in
her apartment at all, that he'd endangered her life and her children's by so
doing, and that he'd  killed Kenneth Turvey in the process, Mr. Turvey being
described  as a  skilled  craftsman, a steady worker, a loving father-figure
for little Rambo and Kelly, a  born-again  Christian, a recovering addict to
4-Thiobuscaline, and the family's sole means of support.
     'Recovering?' Rydell asked Karen Mendelsohn  in his room in the airport
Executive Suites. She'd just shown him the fax from Jenni-Rae's lawyer.
     'Apparently he'd been to a meeting that very day,' Karen said.
     'What  did he do there?' Rydell asked,  remembering the Last  Supper in
drying blood.
     'According  to our witnesses,  he  openly  horned  a  tablespoon of his
substance of choice, took the podium by force, and delivered a thirty-minute
rant on President Milibank's pantyhose and the assumed current  state of her
genitalia. He then exposed himself, masturbated  but  did not ejaculate, and
left the basement of the First Baptist Church.'
     'Jesus,' Rydell said. 'And this was at one of those drug meetings, like
A.A.?'
     'It   was,'   Karen  Mendelsohn  said,   'though  apparently   Turvey's
performance has triggered an unfortunate sequence of relapses. We'll send in
a  team  of  counselors,  of  course, to  work  with  those  who were at the
meeting.'
     'That's nice,' Rydell said.
     'Look  good in court,'  she said, 'in  the unlikely event  we  ever get
there.'
     'He  wasn't "recovering",' Rydell said. 'Hadn't even recovered from the
last bunch he jammed up his nose.'
     'Apparently  true,' she  said.  'But  he was  also a  member  of  Adult
Survivors  of  Satanism, and they  are starting to  take an interest in this
case.  Therefore,  both Mr. Pursley and Mr.  Ma feel it best we coast it but
soon, Berry. You and me.'
     'But what about the court stuff?'
     'You're  on  suspension from the Department, you  haven't  been charged
with anything  yet, and your  lawyer's name  is Aaron-with-two-a's  Pursley.
You're out of here, Berry.'
     'To L.A.?'
     'None other.'
     Rydell looked at her. He thought about Los Angeles on television. 'Will
I like it?'
     'At first,' she said. 'At first, it'll probably like you. I know I do.'
     Which  was how he wound up going to bed with  a lawyer- one who smelled
like  a  million  dollars, talked dirty, slid all around, and wore underwear
from Milan, which was in Italy.
     'The Kill-Fix. Cyrinda Burdette,  Gudrun Weaver, Dean Mitchell, Shinobu
Sakamaki. 1997.'
     'Never saw it,' Rydell said, sucking  the last of his grande decaf cold
capp-with-an-extra-shot  from the milky ice  at the bottom  of  his  plastic
thermos cup.
     'Mama saw  Cyrinda  Burdette.  In  this  mall  over by  Waco.  Got  her
autograph,  too. Kept  it  up  on  the set  with the prayer-hankies  and her
hologram of the Reverend Wayne Falbon. She had a prayer-hanky for every damn
thing. One for the rent, one to keep the AIDS off, the TB...'
     'Yeah? How'd she use 'em?'
     'Kept  'em on top of the set,' Sublett explained, and finished the inch
of quadruple-distilled  water left  in the skinny translucent bottle.  There
was only one place  along this  part  of Sunset  sold the stuff,  but Rydell
didn't  mind; it was next to  a  take-out coffee-bar, and they could park in
the lot on the corner. Fellow who ran the lot always seemed kind  of glad to
see them.
     'Prayer-hanky  won't keep any  AIDS  off,' Rydell  said. 'Get  yourself
vaccinated, like  anybody else. Get your momma vaccinated, too.' Through the
de-mirrored  window, Rydell could see a street-shrine  to  J. D. Shapely, up
against the  concrete  wall that was all that was left of the building  that
had stood there once. You saw  a lot of them in West Hollywood. Somebody had
sprayed SHAPELY WAS A COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT  in bright pink paint, the letters
three feet high, and then a  big  pink heart. Below that, stuck to the wall,
were postcards of Shapely and photographs  of people  who must've  died. God
only knew  how  many millions had. On the  pavement  at the base of the wall
were  dead  flowers, stubs  of candles,  other stuff.  Something  about  the
postcards gave
     Rydell  the  creeps; they  made the guy look like a cross between Elvis
and some kind of Catholic saint, skinny and with his eyes too big.
     He turned to Sublett. 'Man, you still  haven't got your  ass vaccinated
yet, you got nothin' but stone white-trash ignorance to thank for it.'
     Sublett cringed. 'That's worse than a live vaccine, man; that's a whole
'nother disease right there!'
     'Sure is,' Rydell said, 'but it doesn't do anything to you. And there's
still plenty of  the old  kind  walking  around  here. They  oughta  make it
compulsory, you ask me.'
     Sublett shuddered. 'Reverend Fallon always said-'
     'Screw  Reverend Fallon,' Rydell said, hitting the ignition.  'Son of a
bitch just makes money selling prayer-hankies to people like your momma. You
knew that was  all bullshit anyway, didn't you, otherwise why'd you come out
here?' He put Gunhead into gear and eased over into the Sunset traffic.  One
thing about driving a Hotspur Hussar, people almost always let you cut in.
     Sublett's head seemed  to draw down between his high  shoulders, giving
him the look of a  worried,  steel-eyed buzzard. 'Ain't all that simple,' he
said. 'It's everything  I been brought up to  be. Can't all be bullshit, can
it?'
     Rydell, glancing over  at him, took pity.  'Naw,' he said, 'I  guess it
wouldn't have to be, necessarily, all of it, but it's just-'
     'What they bring you all up to be, Berry?'
     Rydell had to think about it. 'Republican,' he said, finally.

     Karen  Mendelsohn had seemed like the best of  a whole string of things
Rydell felt he could get used  to  just  fine. Like flying business-class or
having a SoCal MexAmeriBank card from Cops in Trouble.
     That  first  time with her, in the Executive Suites in  Knoxville,  not
having  anything with  him, he'd  tried to  show  her  his  certificates  of
vaccination  (required  by  the  Department,  else  they  couldn't  get  you
insured). She'd just laughed and said German nanotech would take care of all
of that. Then she  showed Rydell this thing through the transparent top of a
gadget like a little battery-powered pressure-cooker. Rydell had heard about
them, but he hadn't ever seen  one; he'd  also heard they cost about as much
as a small car.  He'd read somewhere how they always had  to be kept at body
temperature.
     It looked  like it might be moving a  little  in there. Pale,  sort  of
jellyfish thing. He asked her  if it was true they were alive. She told  him
it wasn't,  exactly,  but it was almost,  and the rest of it was Bucky balls
and subcellular automata. And he wouldn't even know it was there, but no way
was she going to put it in in front of him.
     She'd gone into the bathroom to do that. When she came back out in that
underwear,  he got  to  learn  where Milan  was. And  while it  was  true he
wouldn't  have known the  thing was  there,  he did know  it was  there, but
pretty soon he forgot about it, almost.
     They  chartered a tilt-rotor to Memphis the next morning and got on Air
Magellan  to LAX. Business-class mostly meant better gizmos in  the seatback
in  front of you, and Rydell's immediate favorite was a telepresence set you
could tune to servo-mounted mollies on the outside of the plane. Karen hated
to use the little VirtuFax she carried around in her  purse, so she'd gotten
on to her office in L.A.  and had them download her  morning's mail into her
seatback  display. She got down to that fast, talking on the  phone, sending
faxes, and leaving Rydell to ooh and ah at the views from the mollies.
     The seats were bigger than when  he used to fly down to Florida to  see
his father, the  food was better, and the drinks were free. Rydell had three
or  four  of  those, fell  asleep, and didn't wake  up until somewhere  over
Arizona.
     The air was funny, at LAX,  and the light was different. California was
a lot more crowded than  he'd expected,  and louder. There was  a  man there
from  Cops  in Trouble, holding up a piece of  wrinkled white cardboard that
said MENDELSOHN in  red  marker,  only the  S was  backward.  Rydell smiled,
introduced himself, and shook  hands with him. He seemed to like  that; said
his name  was Sergei.  When Karen asked  him where  the fucking car was,  he
turned bright red and said it would just take him a minute to  get it. Karen
said no thanks, they'd walk to the lot with him as soon as their bags turned
up, no way was she waiting around in a zoo like this. Sergei nodded. He kept
trying to fold up the sign and put it into his jacket pocket, but it was too
big. Rydell wondered why she'd suddenly gotten bitchy  like that. Tired from
the trip, maybe. He  winked at Sergei, but that just seemed to  make the guy
more nervous.
     After their bags came, Karen's two black  leather ones and the softside
blue  Samsonite Rydell had  bought with  his new  debit-card, he and  Sergei
carried them out and across a kind of trafficloop. The air outside was about
the same, but hotter. This recording kept saying that the white  spaces were
for  loading  and  unloading only. There were all  kinds  of  cars jockeying
around, babies crying, people  leaning on piles  of luggage, but Sergei knew
where they were going-over to this garage across the way.
     Sergei's car was long, black, German, and looked like somebody had just
cleaned it  all over with warm  spit  and QTips. When Rydell offered to ride
shotgun, Sergei got rattled  again and hustled him into the back  seat  with
Karen. Which made her laugh, so Rydell felt better.
     As they were pulling out of the garage, Rydell spotted two cops over by
these big stainless-steel letters that said METRO. They wore air-conditioned
helmets with clear plastic visors. They were poking at an old man with their
sticks,  though it didn't look  like  they had them turned on. The old man's
jeans  were out  at  the knees and  he  had  big  patches  of  tape on  both
cheekbones, which almost always means cancer. He was SO burned,  it was hard
to  tell  if he was  white or  what. A crowd of people was streaming  up the
stairs  behind the old man  and the cops, under the METRO sign, and stepping
around them.
     'Welcome  to  Los  Angeles,' she said. 'Be glad  you aren't  taking the
subway.'
     They had dinner that night in what Karen said was Hollywood, with Aaron
Pursley himself, in a Tex-Mex  restaurant on North Flores Street. It was the
best Tex-Mex food Rydell had ever had. About a month later, he tried to take
Sublett there for  his  birthday, maybe cheer him up  with a down-home meal,
but the man out front just wouldn't let them in.
     'Full up,' he said.
     Rydell could  see plenty  of  empty  tables through the window. It  was
early and there was hardly anybody in there. 'How 'bout those,' Rydell said,
pointing at all the empty tables.
     'Reserved,' the man said.
     Sublett  said  spicy  foods  weren't really such  a  good idea for  him
anyway.

     What he'd come to like best, cruising with Gunhead, was getting back up
in the hills and canyons, particularly on a night with a good moon.
     Sometimes you saw things up there and couldn't quite be sure you'd seen
them or not. One full-moon night Rydell had slung Gunhead around a curve and
frozen  a naked woman in the headlights, the  way a deer'll stop, trembling,
on  a country road.  Just a second she was there, long enough for Rydell  to
think he'd seen that she either wore silver horns  or some kind of  hat with
an upturned  crescent, and that she might've been Japanese, which struck him
right then as the weirdest thing about any of it.
     Then she saw him-he saw her see him-and smiled. Then she was gone.
     Sublett had seen her,  too,  but it  only kicked him into  some kind of
motormouthed ecstasy of  religious dread,  every horrormovie he'd  ever seen
tumbling over into Reverend Fallon's rants about witches, devil-worshippers,
and the living power of Satan.
     He'd gone through his week's  supply  of  gum,  talking nonstop,  until
Rydell had finally told him to shut the fuck up.
     Because  now  she was  gone,  he wanted  to think  about her. How she'd
looked, what she might have been doing there, and how it was she'd vanished.
With Sublett sulking in the shotgun seat, Rydell had  tried to remember just
exactly how it was she'd managed to so perfectly and suddenly  not be there.
And the funny  thing was, he sort  of  remembered it  two  ways,  which  was
nothing at all like the way he still didn't really remember shooting Kenneth
Turvey, even though he'd  heard production assistants and network lawyers go
over  it so many  times he felt  like he'd seen it, or at least the Cops  in
Trouble version (which never aired). One  way  he remembered it, she'd  just
sort of gone down the slope beside the road, though  whether she was running
or  floating,  he  couldn't  say.  The  other   way   he  remembered,  she'd
jumped-though that was such a poor word for  it-up the slope above the other
side  of  the   road,  somehow  clearing  all   that  dust-silvered  moonlit
vegetation, and just flat-out impossible gone, forty feet if it was five.
     And did Japanese  women ever  have  that kind  of long curly hair?  And
hadn't it looked like the shadowed darkness of her bush had been shaved into
something like an exclamation point?
     He'd  wound up  buying  Sublett four packs of  the  special gum  at  an
all-night Russian pharmacy on Wilshire, amazed at what the stuff cost him.
     He'd  seen other  things, too, up the  canyons,  particularly when he'd
drawn  a  shift on  deep graveyard. Mostly  fires, small  ones,  where fires
couldn't be.  And lights in the sky, sometimes,  but Sublett was so  full of
trailer-camp contactee shit that if Rydell saw a light now, driving, he knew
better than to mention it.
     But  sometimes, when he was up there, he'd think  about her. He knew he
didn't know what she was, and in some funny way he didn't even care if she'd
been human or not. But he hadn't ever felt like she was bad, just different.
     So now he just drove, shooting the shit with Sublett, on the night that
would  turn  out  to be his very last  night on  patrol with IntenSecure. No
moon,  but a rare  clear sky with a few stars showing. Five minutes to their
first house check, then they'd be swinging back toward Beverly Hills.
     They were talking about this chain of Japanese gyms called Body Hammer.
Body Hammer didn't offer much in the way of traditional gym culture; in fact
they went  as far as possible  in the opposite direction, catering mostly to
kids who liked  the idea  of being injected with Brazilian fetal tissue  and
having their  skeletons  reinforced  with what  the ads  called 'performance
materials.'
     Sublett said it was the Devil's work.
     Rydell said it was a Tokyo franchise operation.
     Gunhead  said:  'Multiple  homicide, hostage-taking  in  progress,  may
involve  subscriber's minor children. Benedict Canyon. You have  IntenSecure
authorization to employ deadly, repeat, deadly force.'
     And the dash lit up like an old-time video arcade.


     The way it had worked  out, Rydell hadn't actually had time to get used
to Karen Mendelsohn, business-class seats, or any of that stuff.
     Karen lived, umpteen floors up, in Century City II, aka the Blob, which
looked sort of like  a streamlined, semi-transparent  green tit and was  the
third-tallest  structure in the L.A.  Basin. When the light  was right,  you
could see almost clear through it, and make out the three giant struts  that
held it up, each one so big around you could stuff an ordinary skyscraper up
it with room to spare.  There were elevators up through these tripod-things,
and they ran at an angle; Rydell hadn't had time to get used to that either.
     The tit  had  a carefully  corroded  copper nipple, like  one  of those
Chinese hats, that could've covered  a couple  of football fields. That  was
where Karen's  apartment  was, under  there, along with  an  equally  pricey
hundred others, a tennis club, bars and restaurants, and  a mall you had  to
pay to join before you could shop there. She was right out on the edge, with
big curved windows set into the green wall.
     Everything  in  there was different shades  of white,  except  for  her
clothes, which were always black, her  suitcases, which were black, too, and
the big terry robes she liked to wear, which were the color of dry oatmeal.
     Karen said  it  was Aggressive  Retro  Seventies and she was  getting a
little tired of it. Rydell saw how she could be, but figured it might not be
polite to say so.
     The network had gotten him a room in a West Hollywood hotel that looked
more like a regular condo-building, but he never did spend  much time there.
Until the Pooky Bear thing broke in Ohio, he'd mostly been up at Karen's.
     The discovery  of the first thirty-five Pooky Bear victims  pretty much
put paid to Rydell's career as a cop in  trouble. It hadn't helped  that the
officers who'd first  reached the  scene, Sgt. China Valdez  and Cpl.  Norma
Pierce, were easily the two best-looking women on the whole Cincinnati force
('balls-out telegenic,' one of  the  production assistants had  said, though
Rydell  thought it sounded weird  under  the circumstances). Then the  count
began  to  rise,  ultimately  going  right  off  any  known  or  established
serial-killing  scale.  Then  it was  revealed  that all  the  victims  were
children. Then  Sgt.  Valdez went post-traumatic in stone  bugfuck  fashion,
walking  into  a  downtown  tavern  and clipping  both  kneecaps off a known
pedophile-  this amazingly repulsive character, nickname  of Jellybeans, who
had absolutely no connection with the Pooky Bear murders.
     Aaron Pursley was already Learing it back to Cincinnati in a plane that
had  no metal in it whatsoever, Karen had locked the goggles across her eyes
and was talking nonstop  to  at  least six  people  at once,  and Rydell was
sitting on the  edge of her  big  white bed, starting  to get  the idea that
something had changed.

     When she finally took the goggles off, she just sat there, staring at a
white painting on a white wall.
     'They got suspects?' Rydell asked.
     Karen looked over at him like she'd never seen him before.
     'Suspects? They've got confessions already...' It struck Rydell how old
she looked right then, and he wondered how old she actually was. She  got up
and walked out of the room.
     She  came back  five minutes later  in a fresh black outfit.  'Pack.  I
can't have  you here now.' Then she was gone, no kiss, no goodbye, and  that
was that.
     He got  up, put a television on, and saw the Pooky Bear killers for the
first time.  All  three of them. They looked,  he thought, pretty much  like
everybody else, which is how people who do that kind of shit usually do look
on television.
     He  was  sitting  there  in one of  her  oatmeal robes  when  a pair of
rentacops let themselves in without  knocking. Their uniforms were black and
they  were wearing the same kind of black high-top SWAT-trainers that Rydell
had  worn on patrol in Knoxville, the ones with  the Keviar insoles in  case
somebody snuck up and tried to shoot you in the bottom of the foot.
     One of them was eating an apple. The other one had a stun-stick  in his
hand.
     'Hey, pal,' the  first one said, around a mouthful  of apple, 'we gotta
show you out.'
     'I  had a pair of shoes like  that,'  Rydell said. 'Made  in  Portland,
Oregon. Two hundred ninety-nine dollars out at CostCo.'
     The one with the stick grinned. 'You gonna get packing now?'
     So Rydell did, picking up anything that wasn't black, white, or oatmeal
and tossing it into his blue Samsonite.
     The rentacop with the stick watched  him, while  the other one wandered
around, finishing his apple.
     'Who you guys with?' Rydell asked.
     'IntenSecure,' said the one with the stick.
     'Good outfit?' Rydell was zipping up his bag.
     The man shrugged.
     'Outa Singapore,' the other one said, wrapping the core of his apple in
a crumpled  Kleenex  he'd  taken from his pants pocket. 'We  got all the big
buildings, gated communities, like that.' He carefully tucked the apple-core
into the breast-pocket of his crisp black  uniform shirt, behind the  bronze
badge.
     'You got money for the Metro?' Mr. Stick asked Rydell.
     'Sure,' Rydell said, thinking of his debit-card.
     'Then you're better off than the  majority of assholes we get to escort
out of here,' the man said.
     A day later, the network pulled the plug on his MexAmeriBank card.
     Hernandez  might be  wrong  about  English  SWAT-wagons,  Rydell  found
himself thinking, punching the Hotspur Hussar  into six-wheel overdrive  and
feeling Gunhead suck down  on pavement like a twin-engined, three-ton leech.
He'd never really stomped on that thing before.
     Sublett  yelped as the crash-harnesses tightened automatically, yanking
him up out of his usual slouch.
     Rydell slung  Gunhead up onto a verge covered in dusty ice-plant, doing
seventy past a museum-grade Bentley, and on the wrong side at that. Eyeblink
of  a  woman passenger's horrified face, then  Sublett  must have managed to
slap the red plastic plate that activated the strobes and the siren.
     Straight stretch now. No cars at all.  Rydell straddled  the centerline
and floored it. Sublett was making a weird keening sound that synched eerily
with  the  rising ceramic whine of the twin Kyoceras, and it came  to Rydell
that the Texan had  snapped  completely under the pressure of the thing, and
was  Singing in  Some  trailer-camp  tongue  known  only  to  the  benighted
followers of the Rev. Fallon.
     But,  no,  when  he  glanced that way, he  saw  Sublett,  lips  moving,
frantically scanning the client-data as  it seethed on the dash-screens, his
eyes bugging like  the silver  contacts  might  pop  right out. But while he
read, Rydell saw, he  was actually  loading his worn-out, secondhand  Glock,
his long  white fingers moving in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable, as
though he were making a sandwich or folding a newspaper.
     And that was scary.
     'Death Star!'  Rydell yelled. It was Sublett's job to  keep the bead in
his  ear  at  all  times,  listening for  the  satellite-relayed,  instantly
overriding Word of the Real Cops.
     Sublett turned, snapping the magazine into his Glock,  his face so pale
that it  seemed to reflect the colors of the dash-display as  readily as did
the blank steel rounds of his eyes.
     'The  help's all dead,' he said,  'an' they  got the three kids  in the
nursery.' He sounded like he was  talking about something mildly baffling he
was seeing on television, say a badly altered  version of some old, favorite
film,  drastically recast for some obscure ethnic market-niche. 'Say they're
gonna kill 'em, Berry.'
     'What do the fucking  cops say about  it?' Rydell shouted,  pounding on
the  padded  figure-eight steering wheel  in the purest rage of  frustration
he'd ever felt.
     Sublett touched a finger to his right ear. He  looked like he was about
to scream. 'Down,' he said.
     Gunhead's  right  front   fender  clipped   off  somebody's  circa-1943
fully-galvanized Sears rural-route mailbox, no doubt acquired at  great cost
on Melrose Avenue.
     'They can't be fucking down,' Rydell said, 'they're the police.'
     Sublett  tugged  the  bead  from  his  ear and offered  it  to  Rydell.
'Static's all...'
     Rydell  looked down at his dash-display. Gunhead's  cursor  was a green
spear of destiny, whipping along  a paler-green canyon road toward  a chaste
white circle the size  of  a seddingring.  In the window immediately  to the
right, he  could read the vital-signs data on the  subscriber's  three kids.
Their pulse rates  were up. In the window below,  there  was  a midicubousty
peaceful-looking infrared  frame of the  subscriber's front gate. It  looked
solid. The read-out said it was locked and armed.
     Right then, probably, was when he decided just to go for it.
     A week or  so later, when it had all  been  sorted  out, Hernandez  was
basically sympathetic about the whole thing. Not happy, mind you, because it
had happened over  his shift,  but he did say he  couldn't much blame Rydell
under the circumstances.
     IntenSecure  had  brought in a whole planeload of people from  the head
office in  Singapore,  Rydell had heard, to keep it all out of the media and
work out some kind of settlement  with  the subscribers, the Schonbrunns. He
had no idea what that settlement  might have finally amounted to, but he was
just as  happy  not to  know;  there was  no such  program  as  RentaCops in
Trouble, and the Schonbrunns'  front gate alone  had probably  been worth  a
couple of dozen of his paychecks.
     IntenSecure  could replace that gate, sure, because they'd installed it
in  the first place. It  had been quite a gate, too,  some  kind of Japanese
fiber-reinforced sheeting, thermoset to concrete,  and  it sure as hell  had
managed to get most of that Wet Honey Sienna off Gunhead's front end.
     Then  there  was  the  damage  to  the  house  itself,  mostly  to  the
living-room windows  (which he'd driven  through) and  the furniture  (which
he'd driven over).
     But  there  had to be  something for  the Schonbrunns  on top of  that,
Hernandez explained. Something for emotional pain, he said, pumping Rydell a
cup of  old nasty coffee from  the  big  stainless thermos behind  his desk.
There was a fridge-magnet on the thermos that  said I'M NOT OKAY, YOU'RE NOT
OKAY-BUT, HEY, THAT'S OKAY.

     It was two weeks since the night  in question, tell in the morning, and
Rydell was wearing a five-day beard, a fine-weave panama Stetson,  a pair of
baggy, faded orange  trunks, a KNOXVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT t-shirt that  was
starting to disintegrate at the shoulder-seams, the black SWAT-trainers from
his
     IntenSecure uniform, and an inflated transparent cast on his left  arm.
'Emotional pain,' Rydell said.
     Hernandez, who was  very nearly as  wide as his desk, passed Rydell the
coffee. 'You way lucky, all I can say.'
     'I'm out a job, arm in a cast, I'm "way lucky"?'
     'Seriously, man,'  Hernandez  said,  'you coulda killed yourself. LAPD,
they coulda greased your ass down  dead. Mr. and Mrs.  Schonbrunn, they been
very  nice about  this,  considering  Mrs.  Schonbrunn's  embarrassment  and
everything. Your arm  got  hassled, hey,  I'm sorry...' Hernandez  shrugged,
enormously. 'Anyway, you  not fired,  man. We just  can't let you drive now.
You want us put you on gated residential, no problem.'
     'No thanks.'
     'Retail properties? You wanna work evenings, Encino Fashion Mall?'
     'No.'
     Hernandez narrowed his eyes. 'You seen the pussy over there?'
     'Nope.'
     Hernandez sighed. 'Man, what happen with all that  shit coming  down on
you in Nashville?'
     'Knoxville.  Department  came down  for permanent  suspension. Going in
without authorization or proper back-up.'
     'And that bitch, one's suing your ass?'
     'She and her son got caught sticking up a muffler shop in Johnson City,
last  I heard...' Now  it  was Rydell's  turn  to shrug, except  it made his
shoulder hurt.
     'See,' Hernandez said, beaming, 'you lucky.'
     In   the   instant  of   putting  Gunhead   through   the   Schonbrunns
locked-and-armed Benedict  Canyon gate,  Rydell  had experienced  a fleeting
awareness of something very high, very puree and quite clinically empty; the
doing  of the thing, the not-thinking; that weird adrenal exultation and the
losing of every more troublesome aspect of self.
     And  that-he later  recalled  remembering,  as he'd fought  the  wheel,
slashing through  a Japanese garden, across  a patio, and through a membrane
of armored glass that gave way like something in a dream-had been a lot like
what  he'd felt as  he'd drawn his  gun  and  pulled  the trigger,  emptying
Kenneth Turvey's brain-pan, and most  copiously, across a seemingly infinite
expanse of white-primered wallboard that nobody had ever bothered to paint.

     Rydell went over to Cedars to see Sublett.
     IntenSecure  had sprung  for  a  private cubicle,  the better  to  keep
Sublett away from  any cruising minions of the  media. The Texan was sitting
up  in bed, chewing  gum, and watching  a little liquid-crystal  disk-player
propped on his chest.
     'Warlords of the 21st  Century,' he said,  when Rydell edged in, 'James
Wainwright, Annie McEnroe, Michael Beck.'
     Rydell grinned. 'When'd they make it?'
     '1982..' Sublett muted the audio and  looked up. 'But  I've seen  it  a
couple times already.'
     'I been over at the  shop  seem' Hernandez, man. He says you don't have
to worry any about your job.'
     Sublett looked at Rydell with his blank silver eyes. 'How 'bout  yours,
Berry?'
     Rydell's  arm started  to itch, inside the  inflated cast. He bent over
and fished a plastic drinking-straw from the little white wastebasket beside
the bed. He  poked the straw down inside the cast and  wiggled it around. It
helped some. 'I'm history, over there. They won't let me drive anymore.'
     Sublett  was looking at the  straw. 'You shouldn't  ought to touch used
stuff, not in a hospital.'
     'You don't have nothin' contagious, Sublett. You're one of the cleanest
motherfuckers ever lived.'
     'But what you gonna do, Berry? You gotta make a living, man.'
     Rydell dropped the straw back into the basket. 'Well, I don't know. But
I  know I don't wanna do gated  residential and I know I don't  wanna do any
malls.'
     'What about those hackers, Berry?  You figure they'll get the  ones set
us up?'
     'Nope. Too many of 'em. Republic of Desire's been around a  while.  The
Feds have a list of maybe  three hundred "affiliates," but there's no way to
haul 'em all in and figure out who actually  did it.  Not unless  one of 'em
rats on somebody, which they do tend to do on a pretty regular basis.'
     'But how come they'd want to do that to us anyway?'
     'Hell, Sublett, how should I know?'
     'Just mean,' Sublett said.
     'Well, that,  for  sure,  and Hernandez  says  the LAPD told  him  they
figured somebody wanted Mrs. Schonbrunn caught more or less  with her  pants
down.' Neither Sublett nor Rydell had actually seen Mrs. Schonbrunn, because
she was, as it turned out, in the nursery. Although her kids weren't, having
gone  up to Washington State with  their daddy to fly over the three  newest
volcanoes.
     Nothing that Gunhead had logged that night, since leaving the car wash,
had  been real. Someone  had  gotten  into  the  Hotspur  Hussar's  on-board
computer and plugged a  bunch  of  intricately crafted  and utterly spurious
data into  the communications  bundle,  cutting Rydell  and Sublett off from
IntenSecure and the Death Star (which hadn't, of course,  been down). Rydell
figured a few of those good ol'  Mongol boys over at the car wash might know
a little bit about that.
     And maybe, in  that instant  of weird clarity,  with Gunhead's crumpled
front  end  still trying  to  climb the shredded  remains  of  a pair of big
leather  sofas, and with the memory of  Kenneth Turvey's  death finally real
before him,  Rydell  had come to  the conclusion that that high crazy thing,
that  rush  of Going For  It, was  maybe something  that wasn't always quite
entirely to be trusted.
     'But, man,' Sublett had said, as if to himself, 'they gonna kill  those
little babies.' And, with that, he'd snapped his harness open and was out of
there, Glock in hand, before Rydell could do anything at all. Rydell had had
him shut the siren and the strobes off a block  away, but surely anybody  in
the house was now aware that IntenSecure had arrived.
     'Responding,' Rydell heard himself say, slapping a holstered Glock onto
his uniform and grabbing his chunker, which aside from its rate of  fire was
probably the best thing for a shoot-out in a nursery full of kids. He kicked
the  door open  and jumped  out,  his trainers  going  straight  through the
inch-thick  glass top of  a coffee-table. (Needed  twelve stitches,  but  it
wasn't deep.) He couldn't see  Sublett.  He stumbled forward,  cradling  the
yellow  bulk  of the chunker, vaguely aware that there was  something  wrong
with his arm.
     'Freeze, cocksucker!' said the biggest voice in the world,  'LAPD! Drop
that shit or  we blow your  ass away!' Rydell found  himself the focus of an
abrupt and extraordinarily painful radiance, a  light so bright that it fell
into  his  uncomprehending eyes like hot  metal.  'You hear me, cocksucker?'
Wincing, fingers across his eyes,  Rydell turned and saw the bulbous armored
nacelles of the descending gunship. The downdraft was  flattening everything
in the Japanese garden that Gunhead hadn't already taken care of.
     Rydell dropped the chunker.
     'The pistol, too, asshole!'
     Rydell grasped the Clock's handle between thumb and forefinger, It came
away, in its plastic holster,  with a tiny but  distinct skritch  of Velcro,
somehow  audible through  the  drumming of  the  helicopter's combat-muffled
engine.
     He dropped the Glock and raised his arms. Or tried to. The left one was
broken.
     They  found Sublett fifteen feet  from Gunhead. His face and hands were
swelling  like bright pink toy  balloons and  he  seemed to be  suffocating,
Schonbrunn's Bosnian  housekeeper  having employed a product  that contained
xylene  and  chlorinated  hydrocarbons  to clean  some  crayon-marks  off  a
bleached-oak end table.
     'What the fuck's wrong with him?' asked one of the cops.
     'He's got allergies,' Rydell  said through gritted teeth; they'd cuffed
his hands behind  his back  and it hurt  like  hell.  'You gotta get  him to
Emergency.'
     Sublett opened his eyes, or tried to.
     'Berry...'
     Rydell  remembered  the name  of  the  movie he'd  seen on  television.
'Miracle Mile,' he said.
     Sublett squinted up at him. 'Never seen it,' Sublett said, and fainted.
     Mrs. Schonbrunn  had  been  entertaining her Polish  landscape gardener
that  evening. The cops found her in the nursery. Angered beyond speech, she
was cinched quite interestingly  up in a couple of thousand dollars worth of
English latex, North Beach leather, and  a pair  of  vintage  Smith & Wesson
handcuffs that someone had paid to have  lovingly buffed and redone in black
chrome-the  gardener  evidently  having headed for the  hills when  he heard
Rydell parking Gunhead in the living room.


3. Not a nice party.

     Chevette  never  stole things,  or anyway  not from other  people,  and
definitely not  when she was pulling tags.  Except this one bad Monday  when
she took this total  asshole's sunglasses, but  that  was because  she  just
didn't like him.
     How it was, she was standing up  there by this ninth-floor window, just
looking out at the bridge, past the gray shells of the big stores, when he'd
come up behind her. She'd almost managed  to make out Skinner's room, there,
high up  in the old  cables, when the tip of a  finger  found her bare back.
Under Skinner's jacket, under her t-shirt, touching her.
     She wore that jacket everywhere, like some kind of armor. She knew that
nanopore  was the only thing to wear, riding this time of year, but she wore
Skinner's  old  horsehide  anyway, with her  bar-coded Allied  badges on the
lapels.  The little ball-chains on the zippers swinging as she spun to knock
that finger aside.
     Bloodshot eyes. A face that looked as though it were about to  melt. He
had a short little greenish cigar in his mouth but it wasn't lit. He took it
out, swirled its  wet end in a small glass of clear liquor, then took a long
suck on it. Grinning at her around it. Like  he knew she didn't belong here,
not at a party like this and not in any old but seriously expensive hotel up
Over Geary.
     But it had  been the last tag of the day,  a package for a lawyer, with
Tenderloin's trash-fires burning so close by, and around them,  huddled, all
those SO terminally  luckless, utterly  and  chemically lost. Faces aglow in
the  fairy  illumination of  the  tiny  glass pipes.  Eyes  canceled in that
terrible and fleeting satisfaction. Shivers, that gave her, always.
     Locking and  arming  her  bike in  the hollow sound of  the  Morrisey's
underground lot,  she'd  taken a service elevator to  the lobby,  where  the
security grunts tried to  brace her  for the package, but there was  no way.
She wouldn't  deliver to  anyone  at  all except this  one very specific Mr.
Garreau in  808, as stated right here on  the tag. They ran a scanner across
the bar-code on  her Allied badge, x-rayed the  package,  put her through  a
metal-detector,  and waved her  into an elevator lined with pink mirrors and
trimmed in bank-vault bronze.
     So up  she'd gone, to eight, to a corridor  quiet as the floor of  some
forest in a dream. She found Mr. Garreau  there, his shirt-sleeves white and
his  tie the color of freshly poured  lead. He signed the tab without making
eye-contact;  package in hand, he'd closed the door's three brass  digits in
her face.  She'd  checked her hair in the  mirror-polished  italic zero. Her
tail was sticking up okay, in back, but she wasn't sure they'd got the front
right. The spikes were still too long. Wispy, sort of.
     She  headed  back down  the hail,  the  hardware jingling on  Skinner's
jacket,  her new SWAT-trainers sinking into freshly vacuumed  pile the color
of rain-wet terracotta.
     But  when the elevator  doors opened, this Japanese girl  fell  out. Or
near enough,  Chevette grabbing  her  beneath both  arms  and  propping  her
against the edge of the door.
     'Where party?'
     'What folks gonna ask you,' Chevette said.
     'Floor nine! Big party!'
     The girl's eyes were all pupil, her bangs glossy as plastic.
     So Chevette, with a real glass wine-glass  full of real French wine  in
one hand,  and the smallest sandwich  she'd ever  seen in the other, came to
find  herself wondering how long  she still had  before the hotel's computer
noticed she hadn't yet left the premises.  Not that they were likely to come
looking for her here, because someone had  obviously put down good money  to
have this kind of party.
     Some  really  private kind, because she could  see  these people  in  a
darkened bathroom,  smoking ice through  a blown-glass dolphin,  its  smooth
curves illuminated by the fluttering bluish tongue of an industrial-strength
lighter.
     Not just one room, either, but lots of them, all connected up. And lots
of people, too, the men mostly gotten up in those suits with the four-button
jackets,  stiff  shirts with those  choker collars,  and no tie but a little
jeweled  stud. The women  wore clothes Chevette  had only seen in magazines.
Rich people, had  to be,  and  foreign,  too.  Though maybe rich was foreign
enough.
     She'd  managed  to  get  the Japanese girl horizontal  on a long  green
couch, where she  was  snoring now, and  safe enough unless somebody  sat on
her.
     Looking around, Chevette had seen that she wasn't the only underdressed
local to have somehow scammed entry. The guy in the bathroom working the big
yellow  Bic, for starters,  but he  was an extreme case. Then there  were  a
couple of pretty obvious  Tenderloin working-girls,  too, but maybe that was
no  more than  the  accepted amount of  local color for  whatever  this  was
supposed to be.
     But  then this  asshole's  right  in her face,  grinning  his  mean-ass
drunken  grin, and she's got her hand  on a little  folding-knife, something
else she's borrowed from Skinner.  It has a  hole in the blade that you  can
press the tip of your thumb  into and snap it open, one-handed. That blade's
under three inches, broad  as  a soupspoon, wickedly serrated, and  ceramic.
Skinner says it's a fractal knife, its actual edge more than  twice as  long
as the blade itself.
     'You're  not enjoying yourself, I  think,' he says. European, but she's
not  sure which flavor. Not French or German. His jacket's leather, too, but
nothing like  Skinner's. Some  thin-skinned  animal whose  hide drapes  like
heavy  silk,  the  color  of  tobacco.  She  thinks  of  the  smell  of  the
yellow-spined  magazines up in Skinner's  room, some so old the pictures are
only shades of gray, the way the city looks, sometimes, from the bridge.
     'Doing fine 'til you  showed up,' Chevette says, thinking it's probably
time to go, this guy's bad news.
     'Tell me,'  he says, looking appraisingly at the jacket and the t-shirt
and the bike-pants, 'what services you offer.'
     'The fuck's that supposed to mean?'
     'Clearly,' he  says, pointing at the Tenderloin girls across  the room,
'you offer something more interesting,' and he rolls his tongue wetly around
the word, 'than these two.'
     'Fuck that,' Chevette says, 'I'm a messenger.'
     And a funny pause crosses his face,  like something's gotten  past  his
drunk,  nudged him. Then he  throws  back his head and laughs like it's  the
biggest  joke  in the world. She gets a  look  at a lot of  very white, very
expensive-looking teeth. Rich people  never have any  metal in their  teeth,
Skinner's told her.
     'I say something funny?'
     The asshole wipes his eyes.
     'But we have something in common, you and I.'
     'I doubt it.'
     'I  am  a  messenger,'  he says,  though he looks  to  Chevette like  a
moderate hill would put him in line for a pig-valve.
     'A courier,' he says, like he's reminding himself.
     'So proj on,' she says, and steps around him, but just  then the lights
go out, the music starts,  and  it's the intro  to Chrome Koran's 'She God's
Girlfriend.'  Chevette, who has kind of  a major thing for Chrome Koran, and
cranks  them on her bike whenever she needs  a  boost to proj on, just moves
with it now, everybody dancing, even the icers from the bathroom.
     With the asshole gone, or anyway forgotten she  notices how much better
these people look dancing. She finds herself opposite this girl in a leather
skirt,  little black boots with jingling silver spurs. Chevette  grins;  the
girl grins back.
     'You're  from the  city?' the girl asks, as 'She God's Girlfriend' el~,
and for a second Chevette thinks she's  being  asked if  she's  a  municipal
messenger. The girl-woman-is older than she'd thought; late twenties  maybe,
but definitely older  than  Chevette. Good-looking without looking  like  it
came out of a kit; dark eyes, dark hair cut short. 'San Francisco?'
     Chevette nods.
     The next tune's older than she is; that black guy who turned white, and
then  his  face  fell in, she guesses. She looks down for her drink but they
all   look  alike.  Her  Japanese  doll  dances  past,  bangs  swinging,  no
recognition in her eyes as she sees Chevette.
     'Cody can usually find all he needs, in San Francisco,' the woman says,
a tiredness  behind her  voice but at the  same time you can tell she thinks
it's all pretty funny. German, Chevette thinks by her accent.
     'Who?' The woman raises  her eyebrows. 'Our host.' But she's  still got
her wide easy grin.
     'Just sort of walked in...'
     'Could I only say the same!' The woman laughs.
     'Why?'
     'Then I could walk out again.'
     'You  don't  like  it?'  Up  close,  she  smells expensive.  Chevette's
suddenly worried about how she must smell herself,  after a  day on the bike
and no shower. But the woman takes her elbow and leads her aside.
     'You don't know Cody?'
     'No.' Chevette sees the  drunk, the  asshole, through  the doorway into
the next room, where the lights are still  on.  He's  looking right at  her.
'And I think maybe I should leave now, okay?'
     'I't, I ,i...' you don't nave to. Please. I only envy you the option.
     'You German?'
     'Padanjan'
     Chevette knows that's part of what used to be Italy. The northern part,
she thinks. 'Who's this Cody?'
     'Cody likes a party. Cody likes this party. This party's been going  on
for several years now. When it isn't here, it's in London, Prague, Macau...'
A boy is moving through the  crowd with a tray of drinks. He doesn't look to
Chevette like he works for  the hotel. His  stiff white shirt's not so stiff
anymore;  it's open all  the way, wrinkled tails hanging loose, and she sees
he  has one of those things like  a little steel barbell through one nipple.
His stiff collar's popped  off  at  the front and sticks up behind  his neck
like a slipped halo. The woman takes a glass  of  white wine when he  offers
the tray. Chevette shakes her head. There's a white saucer on the tray, with
pills and what look like twists of dancer.
     The boy winks at Chevette and moves on.
     'You find  this strange?'  The woman drinks her wine off and tosses the
empty glass over her shoulder. Chevette hears it break.
     'Huh?'
     'Cody's party.'
     'Yeah. I guess. I mean, I just walked in...'
     'Where do you live?'
     'The bridge.' Watching for the reaction.
     The  grin widens.  'Really? It looks so... mysterious.  I'd  like to go
there, but there are no tours, and they say it's dangerous...'
     'It's  not,'  Chevette says,  then hesitates.  'Just don't  dress up so
much, right? But it's not  dangerous, not even as much  as  the neighborhood
around here.' Thinking of the ones around  the trash-fires. 'Just  don't  go
out on Treasure Island. Don't try to go all the way to Oakland. Stay over on
the suspension side.'
     'You like it, living there?'
     'Shit, yes. 1 wouldn't live anywhere else.'
     The woman smiles. 'You're very lucky then, I think.'
     'Well,' Chevette says, feeling clumsy, 'I gotta go.'
     'My name is Maria...'
     'Chevette,'  offering  her  hand.  Almost  like  her  own  other  name.
Chevette-Marie.
     They shake.
     'Goodbye, Chevette.'
     'You have a nice party, okay?'
     'This is not a nice party.'
     Settling  the wide shoulders of Skinner's  jacket, Chevette nods to the
woman Maria and begins to work her way through the crowd. Which  is  tighter
now by several degrees,  like maybe this Cody's friends are still  arriving.
More Japanese here now, she notices, all of them serious suits; their  wives
or  secretaries  or  whatever are  all  wearing pearls.  But  evidently this
doesn't  prevent them getting  into the  spirit  of the thing.  It's  gotten
noisier, too, as people have gotten more whacked. There's that loud constant
burr of party-noise you get when the drinks kick in, and now she wants to be
out of there all that much faster.
     She finds herself stuck near the door to the  bathroom where she'd seen
the icers, but it's closed now. A bunch of French people are  talking French
and laughing  and  waving their hands around, but Chevette can hear somebody
vomiting in there. 'Coming through,' she says to  a man with a bowtie and  a
gray crewcut, and just  pushes past him, spilling part of his drink. He says
something after her in French.
     She feels really claustro now,  like she  does up  in offices sometimes
when  a receptionist makes her wait  to pick  something up, and she sees the
office  people  walking back  and  forth, and  wonders whether it all  means
anything  or if  they're just walking  back  and  forth. Or maybe the wine's
gotten to her, a little, because drinking isn't something she does much, and
now she doesn't like the taste of it in the back of her throat.
     And suddenly there's her drunk,  her Euro with his unlit  cigar, sweaty
brow  too  close  to  the  dull-eyed,  vaguely  worried face of one  of  the
Tenderloin  girls. He's got her backed into a corner. And  everyone's jammed
so tight, this close to the door and the corridor and freedom, that Chevette
finds  herself  pressed  up against his  back for a  second,  not that  that
interrupts whatever infinitely  dreary shit  he's laying down for  the girl,
no,  though he does jam  his elbow,  hard, back into  Chevette's ribs to get
himself more space.
     And Chevette, glancing down, sees something sticking out of a pocket in
the tobacco-colored leather.
     Then it's in her hand,  down the front of her bike-pants, she's out the
door, and the asshole hasn't even noticed.
     In the sudden quiet of the corridor, party sounds receding as she heads
for the elevator, she wants to run. She wants to laugh,  too, but  now she's
starting to feel scared.
     Walk.
     Past the party's build-up of trays, dirty glasses, plates.
     Remembering the security grunts in the lobby.
     The thing stuck down her pants.
     Down a  corridor  that opens  off this  one,  she  sees the  doors of a
service elevator spread wide now  and welcoming. A Central Asian kid  with a
paint-splattered  steel  cart  stacked up  with  flat  rectangles  that  are
television screens. He gives her a careful look as she edges  in beside him.
His face is all cheekbones, bright hooded eyes,  his hair  shaved up high in
one of those near-vertical dos all these guys favor. He has a security badge
clipped to the front of his clean gray workshirt and a VirtuFax slung around
his neck on a red nylon cord.
     'Basement,' Chevette says.
     His  fax  buzzes.  He  raises  it,  pushes  the button, peers  into the
eyepiece. The thing in her bike-pants starts to feel huge. Then he drops the
fax back to his chest, blinks  at her, and  pushes a button marked  B-6. The
doors rumble shut and Chevette closes her eyes.
     She leans  hack against  the  big  quilted pads hung on  the walls  and
wishes she were up  in Skinner's room,  listening to  the  cables creak. The
floor there's a layer of two-by-fours laid on edge; the very top of the hump
of the  cable, riding its steel  saddle,  sticks up  through the middle, and
Skinner says  there  are 17,464 strands of wire in  that cable. Each  one is
about as thick as a pencil. You can press your  ear  against it and hear the
whole bridge sing, when the wind's just right.
     The elevator stops at four for no reason at all. Nobody  there when the
door opens. Chevette wants to press B-6 again but she makes herself wait for
the kid with the fax to do it. He does.
     And B-6 is not the garage she so thoroughly wants now, but this maze of
hundred-year-old concrete tunnels, floored in cracked asphalt tile, with big
old pipes slung in iron brackets along the ceiling. She slips out while he's
fiddling with one of the wheels on his cart.
     A century's-worth  of padlocked walk-in freezers, fifty vacuum cleaners
charging  themselves  at a row  of  numbered  stations, rolls  of  broadloom
stacked like logs.  More people in work clothes, some in kitchen whites, but
she's  trying for  tag-pulling  attitude  and looks, she  hopes, like  she's
making a delivery.
     She  finds a narrow stairway  and  climbs.  ,The air is  hot and  dead.
Motion-sensors click the  lights for her at the  start  of  each flight. She
feels the whole weight of this old building pressing down on her.
     But her bike is there, on B-i, behind a column of nicked concrete.
     'Back off,' it says  when she's five feet away. Not loud,  like a  car,
but it sounds like it means it.
     Under its  coat of spray-on imitation rust  and an  artful bandaging of
silver duct-tape, the geometry of the paper-cored, carbonwrapped frame makes
Chevette's   thighs   tremble.   She  slips  her  left   hand   through  the
recognition-loop  behind  the  seat.  There's  a  little double zik  as  the
particle-brakes let go, then she's up and on it.
     It's never felt better, as she pumps up the oil-stained ramp and out of
there.


4. Career opportunities.

     Rydell's roommate, Kevin  Tarkovsky,  wore a bone  through his nose and
worked in a wind-surfing boutique called Just Blow Me.
     Monday  morning,  when  Rydell   told  him  he'd   quit  his  job  with
IntenSecure, Kevin offered  to  try to  find him something in  sales, in the
beach-culture line.
     'You  got an okay build,  basically,' Kevin said, looking  at  Rydell's
bare chest and  shoulders.  Rydell was  still wearing the orange trunks he'd
worn  when he'd gone to see Hernandez. He'd borrowed  them  from Kevin. He'd
just taken his cast off, deflating it and  crumpling it into the five-gallon
plastic  paint bucket that  served as  a  wastebasket. The bucket  had a big
self-adhesive  daisy  on  the  side.  'You  could  work out  a  little  more
regularly. Arid maybe get some tats. Tribal black-work.'
     'Kevin, I don't  know how to surf, wind-surf,  anything. Hardly been in
the ocean in my life. Couple of times down  Tampa Bay.'  It was about ten in
the morning. Kevin had the day off work.
     'Sales is  about  providing  an  experience, Berry. The  customer needs
information, you provide it. But you give  'em an  experience,  too,'  Kevin
tapped  his  two-inch  spindle   of  smooth   white  beef-bone  by  way   of
illustration. 'Then you sell them a new outfit.'
     'But I don't have a tan.'
     Kevin  was the  approximate  color  and  sheen of  a  pair of mid-brown
Cole-Haan  loafers that  Rydell's  aunt  had  given him  for  his  fifteenth
birthday.  This had  nothing  to  do  with either  genetics or  exposure  to
unfiltered  sunlight,  but  was  the  result  of  regular injections  and  a
complicated regimen of pills and lotions.
     'Well,' Kevin admitted, 'you would need a tan.'
     Rydell knew that Kevin didn't wind-surf, and never had, but that he did
bring home disks from the shop and play them on a goggle-set, going over the
various moves involved,  and  Rydell had no  doubt that  Kevin could provide
every  bit  of  information  a  prospective  buyer  might desire.  And  that
all-important  experience;  with  his cordovan tan, gym-tuned physique,  and
that  bone through  his nose, he got a lot of  attention. Mainly from women,
though it didn't actually seem to do that much for him.
     What   Kevin  sold,  primarily,   was  clothing.  Expensive  kind  that
supposedly kept the UV and the pollutants in the water  off you. He  had two
whole cartons full of the stuff, stacked in their room's one closet. Rydell,
who currently didn't have  much in the way of a wardrobe, was welcome to paw
through there and borrow whatever took  his fancy. Which wasn't a lot, as it
turned  out, because wind-surfing gear tended to be Day-Gb,  black nanopore,
or  mirrorflex.  A  few  of the  jazzier items had UV-sensitive JUST BLOW ME
logos that appeared on days when the ozone was in particularly shabby shape,
as Rydell had discovered the last time he'd gone to the farmers market.
     He and Kevin were sharing one of two bedrooms in a sixties house in Mar
Vista, which  meant Sea  View but there wasn't any.  Someone had rigged up a
couple of  sheets of drywall down the middle of the room. On Rydell's  side,
the drywall was covered  with  those  same  big  self-adhesive daisies and a
collection of  souvenir bumper-stickers  from  places  like  Magic Mountain,
Nissan County, Disneyland, and  Skywalker Park. 1'here were two other people
sharing the house, three if you counted the Chinese  girl out  in the garage
(but she had her own bathroom in there).
     Rydell had bought  a futon  with  most  of his  first month's pay  from
IntenSecure. He'd bought  it at  this stall in the market; they were cheaper
there, and the stall was called Futon Mouth, which Rydell thought was pretty
funny. The Futon Mouth girl had explained how  you could slip  the Metro guy
on the  platform  a twenty,  then he'd let you  get on  the  train  with the
rolled-up futon, which came in a big green plastic sack that reminded Rydell
of a bodybag.
     Lately, waiting to take the  cast off, he'd spent a lot of time on that
futon, staring up at those bumper-stickers.  He wondered  if whoever had put
them  there had  actually bothered to go to all those  places. Hernandez had
once  offered  him  work  at  Nissan County. IntenSecure  had  the  rentacop
franchise there. His parents had honeymooned at  Disneyland. Skywalker  Park
was up in San Francisco;  it had been called  Golden Gate,  before,  and  he
remembered  a  couple  of fairly  low-key riots on  television  when  they'd
privatized it.
     'You on line to any of the job-search nets, Berry?'
     Rydell shook his head.
     'This  one's  on me,' Kevin said, passing Rydell  the helmet. It wasn't
anything  like Karen's slick little goggles; just a  white  plastic rig like
kids used for games. 'Put it on. I'll dial for you.'
     'Well,' Rydell said, 'this is nice, Kevin, but you don't have to go  to
all this trouble.'
     Kevin touched the bone in his nose. 'Well, there's the rent.'
     There was that. Rydell put the helmet on.

     'Now,' Sonya said,  just as perky as could be,  'we're showing that you
did graduate from this post-secondary training program-'
     'Academy,' Rydell corrected. 'Police.'
     'Yes, Berry, but we're showing that you were then employed for a  total
of  eighteen days, before  being placed on suspension.' Sonya looked like  a
cartoon of a pretty girl. No pores. No texture anywhere. Her teeth were very
white and  looked like a single  unit,  something that could  be snapped out
intact  for closer inspection.  But not  for cleaning,  because there was no
need; cartoons didn't eat. She had wonderful tits, though;  she had the tits
Rydell would have drawn for her if he'd been a talented cartoonist.
     'Well,' Rydell said, thinking of Turvey, 'I got into some trouble after
they assigned me to Patrol.'
     Sonya  nodded brightly.  'I  see, Berry.' Rydell wondered what  she did
see. Or what the expert system that used her  as a hand-puppet could see. Or
how it saw. What did someone like Rydell look bike to an employment agency's
computer system? Not like much, he decided.
     'Then  you moved  to Los  Angeles, Berry,  and  we  show  ten  weeks of
employment with  the  IntenSecure  Corporation's residential  armed-response
branch. Driver with experience of weapons.'
     Rydell  thought  of the  rocket-pods  slung  under  the  LAPD  chopper.
Probably they'd had one of those CHAIN guns in there, too. 'Yep,' he agreed.
     'And you've resigned your position with IntenSecure.'
     'Guess so.'
     Sonya  beamed  at  Rydell  as  though he'd just admitted, shyly,  to  a
congressional  appointment  or  a  post-doctoral degree.  'Well, Berry,' she
said,  'let  me  put my thinking cap on for just a second!' She winked, then
closed her big cartoon eyes.
     Jesus, Rydell thought. He tried to  glance sideways, but Kevin's helmet
didn't  have any peripherals,  so  there was nothing there. Just Sonya,  the
empty rectangle of  her desk, sketchy details suggesting an  office, and the
employment agency's logo behind her on the wall. The logo made her look bike
the anchorwoman on a channel that only reported very good news.
     Sonya  opened her eyes. Her smile became incandescent. 'You're from the
South,' she said.
     'Uh-huh.'
     'Plantations,  Berry. Magnolias.  Tradition.  But a certain darkness as
well. A Gothic quality. Faulkner.' Fawk? 'Huh?'
     'Nightmare Folk Art, Berry. Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks.'
     Kevin watched as Rydell  removed the helmet and  wrote an  address  and
telephone number on the back of last week's People. The magazine belonged to
Monica, the Chinese girl in the garage; she  always got hers  printed out so
there was  never any  mention of  scandal or  disaster, but  with  a  triple
helping of celebrity romance, particularly anything to  do with the  British
royal family.
     'Something for you, Berry?' Kevin looked hopeful.
     'Maybe,' Rydell said. 'This place  in Sherman  Oaks. I'll  call 'em up,
check it out.'
     Kevin fiddled with his nose-bone. 'I can give you a lift,' he said.
     There was a big painting of the Rapture in the window of Nightmare Folk
Art. Rydell knew paintings like that from the sides of Christian vans parked
beside shopping centers. Lots of bloody  car-wrecks and  disasters, with all
the Saved souls flying up to meet Jesus, whose eyes were a little too bright
for comfort.  This one was a  lot more detailed than the ones he remembered.
Each  one of those Saved souls had its own individual face, like it actually
represented somebody,  and a  few of them reminded him of famous people. But
it still looked like  it had been painted by either a fifteen-year-old or an
old lady.
     Kevin had let him off at the  corner of Sepulveda and he'd  walked back
two  blocks,  looking for the  place, past a crew  in wide-brim hardhats who
were pouring the foundations for a palm tree. Rydell wondered if Ventura had
had real ones before the virus; the replacements were so popular now, people
wanted them put in everywhere.
     Ventura was one of those Los Angeles streets that just went on forever.
He knew he must've driven Gunhead past Nightmare Folk Art more times than he
could count, but these streets looked  completely different  when you walked
them. For one  thing, you were pretty much alone; for another, you could see
how cracked and dusty a lot of the buildings were. Empty spaces behind dirty
glass, with a yellowing  pile  of junk-mail  on the floor inside and maybe a
puddle of  what couldn't be rainwater, so you  sort of wondered what it was.
You'd pass a couple of those, then  a place selling sunglasses for six times
the rent Rydell paid for his half of the room in Mar  Vista. The  sunglasses
place would have some kind of rentacop inside, to buzz you in.
     Nightmare   Folk  Art   was  like   that,  sandwiched  between  a  dead
hair-extension  franchise and  some kind of  failing  real estate place that
sold insurance on the  side. NIGHTMARE FOLK ART-SOUTHERN GOTHIC, the letters
hand-painted all  lumpy and hairy, like mosquito legs in a cartoon, white on
black.  But with a couple of expensive  cars parked out front: a silver-gray
Range Rover, looking like Gunhead  dressed up for the prom, and one of those
little antique Porsche two-seaters that always looked to
     Rydell like the wind-up key had fallen off. He gave  the Porsche a wide
berth; cars like that  tended to have hypersensitive anti-theft systems, not
to mention hyper-aggressive.
     There was a  rentacop  looking at him through the  armored glass of the
door; not  IntenSecure, but  some off  brand.  Rydell had borrowed a pair of
pressed chinos  from Kevin.  They were a little tight in the waist, but they
beat  hell  out  of  the  orange  trunks. He  had  on  a  black  IntenSecure
uniform-shirt with the patches ripped off, his Stetson, and  his SWAT shoes.
He wasn't  sure black really made it with khaki. He pushed the  button.  The
rentacop buzzed him in.
     'Got  an  appointment  with   Justine  Cooper,'  he  said,  taking  his
sunglasses off.
     'With a client,' the rentacop said. He looked about thirty, and like he
should've been out on  a farm in Kansas or somewhere. Rydell looked over and
saw a skinny woman with  black hair. She was talking to a fat man who had no
hair at all. Trying to sell him something, it looked like.
     'I'll wait,' Rydell said.
     The farmer didn't answer. State law said he couldn't have a  gun,  just
the industrial-strength stunner he wore in a beat-up plastic holster, but he
probably did  anyway. One  of those  little Russian hold-outs that chambered
some godawful overheated caliber originally intended for killing  the engine
blocks of tanks. The Russians, never too safety-minded, had  the  market  in
Saturday-night specials.
     Rydell looked around. That  ol' Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk  Art,
he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were
just  pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone,  no Rapture  to
speak of, and  here they were, still beating that same drum. Sublett and his
folks down in their trailer-camp in Texas, watching  old movies for Reverend
Fallon-at least that had some kind of spin on it.
     He tried  to sneak  a look, see what the lady was trying to sell to the
fat  man, but she caught his eye and that wasn't good. So he worked his  way
deeper into the shop, pretending to check out the merchandise.  There  was a
whole section of these nasty-looking spidery wreath-things,  behind glass in
faded  gilt  frames.  The wreaths  looked to Rydell  like they  were made of
frizzy  old hair. There were tiny little baby coffins, all corroded, and one
of them had been planted with ivy. There were coffee tables made out of what
Rydell supposed were tombstones, old ones,  the lettering worn down so faint
you  couldn't read it. He  paused beside a  bedstead  welded together from a
bunch of those pickaninny jockey-boys it had been against the law to have on
your lawn  in Knoxville. The jockey-boys  had all  been freshly-painted with
big,  red-lipped,  watermelon-eating  grins.  The  bed  was  spread  with  a
hand-stitched quilt patterned like a Confederate flag. When he  looked for a
price tag, all he found was a yellow SOLD sticker.
     'Mr. Rydell? May I call you Berry?' Justine Cooper's  jaw was so narrow
that  it looked like  she  wouldn't have room for the ordinary complement of
teeth in there.  Her hair was cut short, a polished brown helmet. She wore a
couple of dark, flowing things  that Rydell  supposed were  meant to conceal
the fact that she was built  more or  less like a stick-insect.  She  didn't
sound like  she was from anywhere south of anywhere,  much, and there was  a
visible tension strung through her, like wires.
     Rydell saw the fat  man walk out, pausing on the sidewalk to deactivate
the Range Rover's defenses.
     'Sure.'
     'You're from  Knoxville?' He  noticed she  was breathing  deliberately,
like she was trying not to hyperventilate.
     'That's right.'
     'You don't have much of an accent.'
     'Well, I wish everybody felt that way.' He smiled, but she didn't smile
back.
     'Is your family from Knoxville, Mr. Rydell?'
     Shit,  he thought, go ahead, call me Berry. 'My father was, I guess. My
mother's people are from up around Bristol, mostly.'
     Justine Cooper's dark eyes, not showing much  white, were looking right
at him, but they didn't seem to be registering anything. He  guessed she was
somewhere in her forties.
     'Ms. Cooper?'
     She gave a violent start, as though he'd goosed her.
     'Ms.  Cooper, what are  those wreath-sort-of-things in those old frames
there?' Pointing at them.
     'Memorial  wreaths.  Southwestern  Virginia,  late  nineteenth,   early
twentieth century.'
     Good, Rydell thought, get  her talking about  the stock. He walked over
to the framed wreaths for a closer look. 'Looks like hair,' he said.
     'It is,' she said. 'What else would it be?'
     'Human hair?'
     'Of course.'
     'You mean like dead people's hair?' He saw now the minute braiding, the
hair  twisted  up  into  tiny  flowerlike  knots.  It was lusterless and  no
particular color.
     'Mr. Rydell, I'm  afraid  that I  may have wasted your time.' She moved
tentatively in  his  direction. 'When  I  spoke with you on the phone, I was
under the impression that you might be, well, much more of the South...'
     'How do you mean, Ms. Cooper?'
     'What we  offer people here is a certain  vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain
darkness as well. A Gothic quality.'
     Damn. That talking head in  the  agency display  had been playing  this
shit back word for word.
     'I don't suppose you've read Faulkner?' She raised one hand to brush at
something invisible, something hanging in front of her face.
     There it was again. 'Nope.'
     'No, I didn't  think  so. I'm hoping to  find  someone who can help  to
convey that very darkness, Mr. Rydell. The  mind of the South. A fever dream
of sensuality.'
     Rydell blinked.
     'But  you don't convey that  to me.  I'm  sorry.'  It looked  like  the
invisible cobweb had come hack.
     Rydell looked  at the rentacop, but he didn't  seem to he listening  to
any of this. Hell, he seemed to he asleep.
     'Lady,' Rydell said carefully, 'I think you're crazier than a sack full
of assholes.'
     Her eyebrows shot up. 'There,' she said.
     'There what?'
     'Color, Mr. Rydell. Fire. The brooding verbal polychromes of  an almost
unthinkably advanced decay.'
     Rydell  had to  think  about  that.  He  found  himself looking  at the
jockey-boy  bed. 'Don't you  ever get any black people in here,  complaining
about stuff like this?'
     'On  the contrary,' she  said, a  new edge in her tone, 'we  do quite a
good business  with the  more affluent residents of South Central. They,  at
least, have a sense of irony. I suppose they have to.'
     Now he'd have to walk  to  whatever the nearest  station  was, take the
subway home, and tell Kevin Tarkovsky he hadn't been Southern enough.
     The rentacop was letting him out.
     'Where exactly you from, Ms. Cooper?' he asked her.
     'New Hampshire,' she said.
     He was on the sidewalk, the door closing behind him.
     'Fucking Yankees,'  he said to the  Porsche roadster. It  was what  his
father would have  said,  but he  had a  hard  time  now  connecting  it  to
anything.
     One of those big articulated German  cargo-rigs went by,  the kind that
burned canola oil. Rydell hated those things. The exhaust smelled like fried
chicken.


5. Hay problemas.

     The courier's dreams are made  of hot metal,  shadows that  scream  and
run,  mountains the  color of concrete.  They are  burying the  orphans on a
hillside. Plastic coffins, pale blue. Clouds  in the sky. The priest's  tall
hat. They do not see the first shell coming in from  the concrete mountains.
It  punches a hole in everything: the hillside, the sky, a blue coffin,  the
woman's face.
     A sound too vast  to be any sound at all, but through it, somehow, they
hear,  arriving only now,  the distant festive pop-popping  of  the mortars,
tidy little clouds of smoke rising on the gray mountainside.
     He comes upright,  alone  in the wide bed,  trying  to  scream, and the
words are in a language he no longer allows himself to speak.
     His head  throbs. He drinks flat water from the stainless carafe on the
nightstand. The  room sways, blurs, comes back into focus. He forces himself
from  the bed, pads  naked to  the tall,  old-fashioned windows. Fumbles the
heavy  drapes  aside.  San  Francisco.  Dawn like  tarnished silver.  It  is
Tuesday. Not Mexico.
     In  the  white  bathroom, wincing  in the sudden  light, scrubbing cold
water into his  numb  face. The dream  recedes,  but  leaves a  residue.  He
shivers, cold tile  unpleasant  beneath  his  bare  feet. The whores at  the
party.  I his Harwood. Decadent. The courier  disapproves of decadence.  His
work brings  him  into  contact  with real  wealth,  genuine power. He meets
people of substance. Harwood  is wealth  without substance. He  puts out the
bathroom light and  gingerly  returns  to his bed, favoring the ache in  his
head.
     With the striped duvet drawn up to his chin, he begins to sort  through
the  previous  evening. There  are  gaps. Overindulgence.  He disapproves of
overindulgence. Harwood's party. The voice on the  phone, instructing him to
attend. He'd already had several drinks. He sees a young girl's face. Anger,
contempt. Her short dark hair twisted up in spikes.
     His eyes feel as if they are too large for  their sockets. When he rubs
them, bright  sick flashes of  light  surround him.  The cold weight of  the
water moves in his stomach.
     He remembers sitting  at the broad mahogany  desk, drinking. Before the
call, before the party. He remembers the  two  cases open,  in front of him,
identical. He keeps her in one. The other is for that with which he has been
entrusted.  Expensive, but  then  he has no doubt  that  the information  it
contains is very valuable. He folds the thing's graphite earpieces and snaps
the case shut. Then  he  touches the  case that  holds  all her mystery, the
white house on the hillside, the release she offers. He  puts  the cases  in
the pockets of his jacket-But now he tenses, beneath  the duvet, his stomach
twisted with a surge of anxiety.
     He wore the jacket to that party, much of which he cannot remember.
     Ignoring the pounding of his head, he claws  his way out of the bed and
finds the jacket crumpled on the floor beside a chair.
     His heart is pounding.
     Here. That which he must deliver. Zipped into the inner pocket. But the
outer pockets are empty.
     She is  gone. He  roots through his other  clothing.  On  his hands and
knees, a pulsing agony behind his eyes, he peers under the chair. Gone.
     But  she,  at least, can be  replaced, he reminds himself, still on his
knees,  the  jacket  in his  hands. He will find a  dealer in that  sort  of
software.  Recently, he now admits, he had started  to  suspect that she was
losing resolution.
     Thinking this, he is watching his hands unzip the inner pocket, drawing
out the case that contains  his charge,  their property, that  which must be
delivered. He opens it.
     The  scuffed black  plastic frames, the label on the cassette  worn and
unreadable, the yellowed translucence of the audio-beads.
     He hears a thin  high sound emerge  from  the back of his throat.  Very
much as he must have done, years ago, when the first shell arrived.


6. The bridge.

     Careful to  correctly  calculate the thirty-percent tip, Yamazaki  paid
the fare and struggled out of the cab's spavined rear  seat. The driver, who
knew  that  all  Japanese were wealthy, sullenly counted  the  torn,  filthy
bills, then tossed the three five-dollar  coins into a cracked Nissan County
thermos-mug taped  to the  faded  dashboard. Yamazaki, who was not  wealthy,
shouldered  his  bag, turned,  and walked  toward the  bridge.  As  ever, it
stirred  his  heart to see  it there,  morning light aslant through all  the
intricacy of its secondary construction.
     The integrity  of its  span was rigorous as the modern  program itself,
yet around this had  grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This
had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique
and  material. The result was something  amorphous,  startlingly organic. At
night,  illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by  recycled neon, by torchlight, it
possessed a queer medieval energy. By day, seen from a distance, it reminded
him  of the  ruin of  England's Brighton Pier, as though viewed through some
cracked kaleidoscope of vernacular style.
     Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of
dreams:  tattoo parlors,  gaming  arcades,  dimly  lit  stalls  stacked with
decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops,  sushi
bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of commerce,
their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried
vehicular traffic; while above  them, rising to the very  peaks of the cable
towers,  lifted  the  intricately  suspended  barrio,  with  its  unnumbered
population and its zones of more private fantasy.
     He'd  first  seen  it  by night, three weeks before. He'd stood in fog,
amid sellers of fruit and vegetables,  their goods spread out  on  blankets.
He'd  stared back into the cavern-mouth, heart pounding.  Steam  was  rising
from the  pots  of  soup-vendors,  beneath a  jagged arc of  cavenged  neon.
Everything ran together, blurring, melting in the fog. Telepresence had only
hinted  at  the magic and  singularity of the thing, and he'd walked  slowly
forward, into  the  neon maw  and all  that patchwork  carnival of scavenged
surfaces,  in  perfect awe. Fairyland. Rain-silvered  plywood, broken marble
from  the  walls  of  forgotten banks, corrugated  plastic,  polished brass,
sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull  and peeling  in the salt
air. So many things, too much for his  reeling eye, and  he'd known that his
journey had not been in vain.
     In all the world, surely, there was no more magnificent a Thomasson.
     He entered it now,  Tuesday morning, amid a now-familiar stir-the carts
of ice and fish, the clatter of a machine that  made tortillas-and found his
way  to a coffee  shop whose interior had  the  texture of an ancient ferry,
dark  dented  varnish  over plain  heavy  wood,  as if someone had sawn  it,
entire,  from some tired public  vessel.  Which  was  entirely  possible, he
thought, seating  himself  at  the  long counter; toward Oakland,  past  the
haunted island, the wingless  carcass  of a 747 housed the  kitchens of nine
Thai restaurants.
     The  young woman behind the counter wore tattooed bracelets in the form
of stylized  indigo lizards. He asked for coffee.  It arrived in thick heavy
porcelain. No two cups  here were alike. He  took his notebook from his bag,
flicked it on, and jotted down a brief description of the cup, of the minute
pattern  of  cracks  in  its glazed  surface, like  a  white tile  mosaic in
miniature. Sipping his coffee, he scrolled back to the previous day's notes.
The  man  Skinner's  mind  was  remarkably  like   the  bridge.  Things  had
accumulated  there, around some armature of original purpose, until  a point
of crisis had been attained and a new program had emerged. But what was that
program?
     He had  asked Skinner to explain the mode of accretion resulting in the
current state of the secondary  structure. What were  the motivations  of  a
given builder, an  individual builder? His notebook had  recorded the  man's
rambling, oblique response, transcribing and translating it.
     There was this  man, fishing. Snagged his  tackle. Hauled up a bicycle.
All covered in barnacles. Everybody  laughed. Took that bike and  he built a
place to eat.  Clam broth, cold cooked mussels, Mexican beer. Hung that bike
over the counter. Just three stools  in there and he slung his box out about
eight feet,  used Super  Glue and shackles. Covered the  walls  inside  with
postcards.  Like shingles.  Nights,  he'd  curl up behind  the counter. Just
gone, one morning. Broken shackle, some splinters still stuck to the wall of
a barber shop. You could look down, see the water between your toes. See, he
slung it out too far.
     Yamazaki  watched  steam rise  from  his coffee,  imagining  a  bicycle
covered  in barnacles,  itself a Thomasson of  considerable potency. Skinner
had seemed curious about the  term, and the notebook had recorded Yamazaki's
attempt to explain its origin and the meaning of its current usage.
     Thomasson  was   an  American  baseball  player,  very  handsome,  very
powerful. He went to the Yomiyuri Giants in 1981, for a  large sum of money.
Then  it  was discovered  that he  could not  hit  the ball.  The writer and
artisan Gempei  Akasegawa  appropriated his name to describe certain useless
and inexplicable monuments, pointless yet curiously art-like features of the
urban landscape. But  the term  has  subsequently  taken  on other shades of
meaning. If you  wish, I can access and translate today's definitions in our
Gendai Yogo Kisochishiki, that is, The Basic Knowledge of Modern Terms.
     But  Skinner-gray,  unshaven,  the  whites  of his blue eyes  yellowed,
blotched with broken veins, had merely shrugged. Three of the residents  who
had previously agreed to be interviewed  had  cited Skinner  as an original,
one of the first on the bridge.
     The location of his  room indicated  a certain status  as  well, though
Yamazaki wondered how many would have welcomed a chance to build atop one of
the  cable towers. Before  the electric lift had  been installed,  the climb
would have  been daunting for anyone. Today,  with his bad hip, the  old man
was  in  effect  an  invalid, relying on his  neighbors and  the girl.  They
brought him food, water, kept  his  chemical toilet in operation.  The girl,
Yamazaki assumed, received shelter in return, though the relationship struck
him as deeper somehow, more complex.
     But  if Skinner was difficult  to read because of age,  personality, or
both, the  girl who shared his room was opaque in  that ordinary, sullen way
Yamazaki  associated  with young  Americans. Though  perhaps that  was  only
because he, Yamazaki, was a  stranger,  Japanese, and one who asked too many
questions.
     He looked down the counter, taking in the early-morning profiles of the
other customers. Americans. The  fact  that he  was actually here,  drinking
coffee   beside   these   people,  still  struck  a  chord  of  wonder.  How
extraordinary. He wrote in his notebook, the pen ticking against the screen.
     The apartment  is in  a tall Victorian  house,  built of wood  and very
elaborately  painted,  in  a  district where  the  names  of  streets  honor
nineteenth-century  American politicians: Clay, Scott, Pierce, Jackson. This
morning, Tuesday,  leaving  the apartment,  I noticed, on the  side  of  the
topmost newel,  indications of a vanished  hinge.  I suspect that this  must
once have supported an infant-gate. Going  along Scott in search of a cab, I
came upon a sodden postcard, face up on the sidewalk. The narrow features of
the martyr Shapely, the AIDS saint, blistered with rain. Very melancholy.
     'They shouldn't oughta said that. About Godzilla, I mean.'
     Yamazaki found himself blinking  up  at the earnest  face of  the  girl
behind the counter.
     'I'm sorry?'
     'They shouldn't oughta said that. About Godzilla. They shouldn't oughta
laughed. We had our earthquakes here, you didn't laugh at us.'


7. See you do okay.

     Hernandez followed Rydell into the kitchen  of  the house in Mar Vista.
He wore  a sleeveless powder-blue jumpsuit and a pair of those creepy German
shower-sandals, the kind  with about a  thousand little nubs to massage  the
soles of your feet. Rydell had never seen him out of  uniform  before and it
was kind of a shock.  He had these big  old tattoos on his upper arms; roman
numerals; gang stuff. His feet were brown and compact and sort of bearlike.
     It was Tuesday morning.  There was nobody else  in the house. Kevin was
at Just Blow Me, and the others  were  out doing whatever  it was they  did.
Monica might've been  in her place in the garage, but you never saw too much
of her anyway.
     Rydell  got  his  bag of  cornflakes  out of the cupboard and carefully
unrolled it.  About enough for a bowl. He opened  the fridge and took out  a
plastic, snap-top, liter  container with a strip of  masking-tape across the
side. He'd written MILK EXPERIMENT on the masking-tape with a heavy marker.
     'What's that?' Hernandez asked.
     'Milk.'
     'Why's it say "experiment"?'
     'So nobody'll drink  it. I figured it out in the dorm at the  Academy.'
He dumped the  cornflakes in  a bowl, covered them with milk, found a spoon,
and carried  his breakfast to the kitchen table. The table  had a trick leg,
so you had to eat without putting your elbows down.
     'How's the arm?'
     'Fine.'  Rydell  forgot  about  not putting  his  elbow down. Milk  and
cornflakes slopped across the scarred white plastic of the tabletop.
     'Here.' Hernandez went to the counter and  tore off  a fat wad of beige
paper towels.
     'Those are whatsisname's,'  Rydell said, 'and he seriously doesn't like
us to use them.'
     'Towel experiment,' Hernandez said, tossing Rydell the wad.
     Rydell blotted up the milk and  most of the flakes. He couldn't imagine
what  Hernandez  was  doing here, but  then  he'd  never have imagined  that
Hernandez  drove  a white  Daihatsu Sneaker with  an animated  hologram of a
waterfall on the hood.
     'That's a nice car out there,' Rydell said, nodding in the direction of
the carport and spooning cornflakes into his mouth.
     'My daughter. Rosa's car. Been in the shop, man.'
     Rydell chewed, swallowed. 'Brakes or something?'
     'The fucking waterfall. Supposed to be these little animals, they  come
out  of  the  bushes and  sort  of  look at  it, the waterfall,  you  know?'
Hernandez leaned back  against  the counter, flexing his toes into the nubby
sandals. 'Some kind of, like, Costa Rican  animals, you know? Ecology theme.
She's real green. Made us take out what was left  of the  lawn, put  in  all
these ground-cover things look like  gray  spiders. But  the shop can't  get
those fucking animals to  show, man. We got a  warranty  and everything, but
it's, you know, been a pain in the ass.' He shook his head.
     Rydell finished his cornflakes.
     'You ever been to Costa Rica, Rydell?'
     'No.'
     'It's fucking beautiful, man. Like Switzerland.'
     'Never been there.'
     'No, I mean what they do with data.  Like the Swiss, what they did with
money.'
     'You mean the kvens?'
     'You got  it. Those  people smart.  No  army,  navy,  air  force,  just
neutral. And they take care of everybody's data.'
     'Regardless what it is.'
     'Hey, fucking "A" Smart people. And spend that money on ecology, man.'
     Rydell carried the bowl,  the spoon, the  damp wad of  towels,  to  the
sini. He rinsed the bowl and spoon,  wiped  them with the towels, then stuck
the towels as far down as possible behind the rest of the garbage in the bag
under the sink. Straightening  up, he looked  at Hernandez. 'Something I can
do for you, super?'
     'Other way around.' Hernandez smiled. Somehow  it wasn't reassuring. 'I
been thinking about  you. Your situation. Not good. Not good, man. You never
get  to be  a  cop now. Now you resign,  I  can't  even  hire  you  back  on
IntenSecure  to work  gated residential. Maybe  you  get  on with a  regular
square-badge outfit, sit it that little pillbox in a liquor store. You wanna
do that?'
     'No.'
     'That's good, 'cause you get your ass killed, doing that. Somebody come
inthere, take your little pillbox out, man.'
     'Right now I'm looking at something in retail sales.'
     'No shit? Sales? 'What you sell?'
     'Bedsteads made out  of  cast-iron jockey-boys. These pictures made out
of hundred-year-old human hair.'
     Hernandez narrowed his  eyes and shoved off the counter, headed for the
hung room. Rydell thought he might be leaving,  but he was only starting  to
pace.  Rydell  had seen  him  do this  a couple  of  times in his  office at
IntenSecure. Now he turned, just as he was about  to enter the living  room,
and paced hack to Rydell.
     'You got this had-assed attitude sometimes, man, I dunno.
     You  oughta stop  and  think  maybe I'm trying  to  help you a  little,
right?' Back toward the living room again.
     'Just tell me what you want, okay?'
     Hernandez stopped, turned, sighed.  'Never been up to NoCal, right? San
Francisco? Anybody know you up there?'
     'No.'
     'IntenSecure's  licensed  in  NoCal,  too,   right?   Different  state,
different laws,  whole different attitude, they might as well be a different
fucking country, but we've got our shit up there. More office buildings, lot
of hotels. Gated residential's not so big up there, not 'til you  get out to
the edge-cities. Concord, Hacienda Business Center, like that. We got a good
piece of that, too.'
     'But it's the same company. They won't hire me here, they won't hire me
there.'
     'Fucking "A."  Nobody talking about hiring you.  What  this is, there's
maybe something there for  you with  a  guy.  Works freelance.  Company  has
certain kinds of problems, sometime they  bring  in  somebody. But  the guy,
he's  not IntenSecure. Freelance.  Office  up  there, they got  that kind of
situation now.'
     'Wait a second. What are  we  talking about  here? We're  talking about
freelance armed-response?'
     'Guy's a skip-tracer. You know what that is?'
     'Finds  people when they try to get out from under debt, blow  off  the
rent, like that?'
     'Or take off  with your kid in a custody case, whatever. But, you know,
those  kinds  of skips,  they can mostly  be handled  through the net, these
days.  Just  keep plugging their stats into DatAmerica, eventually you gonna
find 'em. Or even,' he shrugged, you can go to the cops.'
     'So what a skip-tracer mostly does-'  Rydell suggested, remembering one
particular episode of Cops in Trouble he'd seen with his father.
     'Is keep you from having to go to the cops.'
     'Or to a licensed private detective agency.'
     'You got it.' Hernandez was watching him.
     Rydell  walked past  him,  into  the living  room,  hearing the  German
shower-sandals come squishing  after  him  across  the  kitchen's dull  tile
floor. Someone had been smoking tobacco in there the night before. He  could
smell  it. It was in  violation of the lease. The  landlord  would give them
hell   about  it.  The  landlord   was  a  Serb   immigrant   who   drove  a
fifteen-year-old BMW,  wore these weird furry Tyrolean hats, and insisted on
being called  Wally. Because Wally knew that Rydell  worked for IntenSecure,
he'd wanted to show him the flashlight he kept clipped under the dash in his
BMW. It was about a foot long and had a button that triggered a big shot  of
capsicum gas. He'd asked Rydell if Rydell thought it was 'enough.'
     Rydell had lied. Had told  him  that  people who  did, for  instance, a
whole lot of dancer, they actually liked  a  blast or two of  good capsicum.
Like it cleared their sinuses. Got their juices flowing. They got off on it.
     Now Rydell looked down and saw for the  first time that the living room
carpet  in  the house  in Mar Vista  was exactly the same stuff he'd crawled
across  in  Turvey's  girlfriend's apartment  in Knoxville.  Maybe  a little
cleaner, but the same stuff. He'd never noticed that before.
     'Listen, Rydell, you don't want to take this, fine. My day off, I drive
over  here, you appreciate  that? You get tweaked by some hackers, you  fall
for it, you push the  response too  hard, I can understand. But it happened,
man, it's on your file, and this is the best I can do. But listen up. You do
right by the company, maybe that gets back to Singapore.'
     'Hernandez...'
     'My day off...'
     'Man, I don't know anything about finding people-'
     'You can drive.  All they want. Just  drive. You drive the tracer, see?
He's got his leg hassled, he  can't drive. And this is, like, delicate, this
thing.  Requires some smarts. I told them I  thought you could do it, man. I
did that. I told them.'
     Monica's copy of  People was on the couch, open to a story about Gudrun
Weaver, this actress in her  forties who'd just found the Lord,  courtesy of
the Reverend Wayne Fallon, in time to get her picture in People. There was a
full-page picture of her on a couch in her living room, gazing  raptly  at a
bank of monitors, each one showing the same old movie.
     Rydell saw himself on  the  futon from Futon Mouth, staring up at those
big stick-on flowers and bumper-stickers. 'Is it legal?'
     Hernandez slapped his powder-blue thigh. It sounded like a pistol shot.
'Legal?  We are talking  IntenSecure Corporation here.  We are talking major
shit. I  am  trying to  help  you, man.  You think  I  would ask  you to  do
something fucking illegal?'
     'But what's the deal, Hernandez? I just go up there and drive?'
     'Fucking "A"! Drive! Mr. Warbaby say drive, you drive.'
     'Who?'
     'Warbaby. This Lucius Warbaby.'
     Rydell picked up Monica's copy of People and found a  picture of Gudrun
Weaver  and the  Reverend Wayne Fallon. Gudrun Weaver looked like an actress
in  her  forties.  Fallon  looked  like  a possum  with hair-implants  and a
ten-thousand-dollar tuxedo.
     'This Warbaby,  Berry, he's  right on top of this shit. He's  a fucking
star,  man. Otherwise why  they hire him? You  do this, you learn  shit. You
still young, man. You can learn shit.'
     Rydell tossed the  People back onto  the  couch. 'Who  they  trying  to
find?'
     'Hotel theft.  Somebody  took something.  We  got  the security  there.
Singapore, man, they're in some kind of serious twist about it. All I know.'

     Rydell  stood in  the warm  shade of the  carport, gazing down into the
shimmering  depths of the  animated  waterfall  on  the  hood of Hernandez's
daughter's  Sneaker, mist rising through  green  boughs of rain forest. He'd
once seen a Harley done up so that everything that wasn't triple-chromed was
crawling,  fast forward, with life-sized  bugs. Scorpions,  centipedes,  you
name it.
     'See,' Hernandez  said, 'see there, where it blurs? That's  supposed to
be some kind of fucking sloth, man. Some lemur, you know? Factory warranty.'
     'When do they want me to go?'
     'I  give  you  this number.' Hernandez handed Rydell  a  torn scrap  of
yellow paper. 'Call them.'
     'Thanks.'
     'Hey,' Hernandez said, 'I like to see you do  okay. I do. I like that.'
He  touched  the  Sneaker's  hood.  'Look  at  this  shit.  Factory  fucking
warranty.'


8. Morning after.

     Chevette dreamed she was riding Folsom, a stiff sidewind threatening to
push her into oncoming. Took a left on Sixth, caught that wind at her  back,
ran a red  at Howard and Mission, a stale green at Market, bopped the brakes
and bunnied both sets of tracks.
     Coming down in a hard lean, she headed up Nob on Taylor.
     'Make it this time,' she said.
     Legs  pumping, the wind  a strong  hand in  the small of  her back, sky
clear  and beckoning at the  top of  the hill, she thumbed her chain up onto
some huge-ass custom  ring, too  big for her derailleur, too big  to fit any
frame at all, and  felt the shining teeth catch, her hammering  slowing to a
steady spin-but then she was losing it.
     She stood  up  and  started pounding,  screaming,  lactic acid slamming
through her veins. She was at the crest, lifting  off- Colored light slanted
into Skinner's room through the tinted  pie-wedge panes of the round window.
Tuesday morning.
     Two of the smaller  sections  of glass had  fallen  out;  the gaps were
stuffed with pieces of  rag, throwing shadows on the tattered yellow wall of
National Geographics. Skinner was sitting  up in  bed, wearing an  old plaid
shirt, blankets and sleeping-bag  pulled high up his  chest.  His bed was an
eightpanel oak door up on four rusty Volkswagen hubs, with a slab of foam on
top of that.  Chevette slept on the floor,  on a narrower  piece of foam she
rolled up every morning and stuck behind a long wooden crate full  of greasy
hand  tools.  The  smell  of tool grease  worked its  way  into  her  sleep,
sometimes, but she didn't mind it.
     She  snaked her arm out into  the November chill and snagged  a sweater
off the  seat of a paint-caked wooden stool. She pulled the sweater into her
bag and twisted into  it, tugging it down over  her  knees. It hung  to  her
knees when she stood  up, the neckband  so stretched  that she had  to  keep
pushing it back up on her shoulder.  Skinner didn't  say anything; he hardly
ever did, first thing.
     She rubbed her eyes, went to the ladder bolted to  the wall and climbed
the five rungs, undoing  the catch on  the  roof-hatch without  bothering to
look at it.  She came up  here  most mornings  now, started her day with the
water and then  the city. Unless  it was raining,  or too foggy, and then it
was  her turn to pump the ancient  Coleman, its red-painted  tank like a toy
submarine. Skinner did  that,  on good days, but he stayed in bed a lot when
it rained. Said it got to his hip.
     She climbed out of  the square hole and sat  on  its edge, dangling her
bare legs down  into the room. Sun struggling to  burn off the silvery gray.
On hot days  it heated the tar  on the  roof's flat rectangle and  you could
smell it.
     Skinner had showed  her  pictures  of  the  La  Brea  pits in  National
Geographic,  big sad animals going down  forever, down  in L.A. a  long time
ago. That  was  what tar was, asphalt, not  just  something they made  in  a
factory somewhere. He liked to know where things came from.
     His jacket, the one she always wore, that had come from D. Lewis, Great
Portland  Street.  That  was in  London.  Skinner  liked maps.  Some  of the
National Geographics had maps  folded into them, and all the countries  were
big, single blobs of color from one side to the other. And there hadn't been
nearly  as many  of them. There'd  been countries  big as  anything: Canada,
USSR, Brazil. Now  there  were  lots of  little  ones where those  had heen.
Skinner  said  America had  gone  that  route  without  admitting  it.  Even
California had all been one big state, once.
     Skinner's roof was eighteen  feet by twelve. Somehow it looked  smaller
than the room below, even  though the walls of the room  were  packed  solid
with Skinner's stuff. Nothing on the roof  but a rusty metal wagon,  a kid's
toy, with a couple of rolls of faded tarpaper stacked in it.
     She looked  past  three cable-towers to  Treasure  Island. Smoke  rose,
there,  from a fire on the shore, where the low cantilever, cottoned down in
fog, shot  off  to  Oakland. There was  a  dome-thing, up  on  the  farthest
suspension tower, honeycombed  into  sections like new  copper, but  Skinner
said it  was just Mylar, stretched  over  two-by-twos. They  had an plink in
that, something that talked to satellites. She  thought she'd go and  see it
one day.
     A gray gull slid by, level with her eyes.
     The city looked  the  same as ever,  the hills  like  sleeping  animals
behind the office towers she knew by their numbers. She ought  to be able to
see that hotel.
     The night before grabbed her by the back of the neck.
     She  couldn't believe she'd done that, been that stupid. The case she'd
pulled out  of that dickhead's pocket was hanging up in Skinner's jacket, on
the iron hook  shaped like an elephant's head. Nothing  in it  but a pair of
sunglasses, expensive-looking but so dark  she hadn't even been able  to see
through them  last night.  The security grunts in the lobby had  scanned her
badges when she'd gone in;  as far as they knew, she'd never come back down.
Their computer would've started looking for her, eventually. If they queried
Allied,  she'd  say  she forgot, blew  the checkout off,  took  the  service
elevator down  after she'd pulled her tag at 808. No way had she been at any
party, and  who'd seen her there anyway? The asshole. And  maybe he'd figure
she'd  done him  for his glasses.  Maybe he'd felt it. Mayhe  he'd remember,
when he sobered up.
     Skinner yelled there was coffee, but they were out of eggs.
     Chevette shoved off the edge of  the  hole, swung down and in, catching
the top rung.
     'Want any, you're gonna  get  'em,' Skinner said,  looking  up from the
Coleman.
     'Save me coffee.' She pulled on a pair of black cotton leggings and got
into her trainers  without bothering to  lace them. She opened  the hatch in
the floor  and  climbed  through,  still  worrying  about the  asshole,  his
glasses,  her job. Down ten  steel rungs off the side of  an old  crane. The
cherry-picker basket waiting where she'd left it when she'd gotten back. Her
bike  cabled to an upright with  a couple of Radio Shack screamers for  good
measure.  She climbed into  the waist-high yellow plastic basket and hit the
switch.
     The motor whined and the big-toothed cog on the bottom let her down the
slope.  Skinner called the cherry-picker  his funicular. He hadn't built it,
though;  a black  guy named Fontaine had built it for him, when  Skinner had
started to have trouble with the climb. Fontaine  lived  on the Oakland end,
with a couple of women and a lot of children. He took  care of a lot  of the
bridge's electrical  stuff. He'd show up once  in  a  while in a  long tweed
overcoat, a  toolbag in each hand, and he'd grease the thing and  check  it.
And Chevette had  a number to call  him at if it ever broke down completely,
but that hadn't happened yet.
     It  shook  when it  hit the  bottom.  She climbed  out onto the  wooden
walkway and went along  the wall  of taut  milky plastic, halogen-shadows of
plants behind it  and  the gurgle of hydroponics. Turned the corner and down
the  stairs to the  noise and  morning hustle of  the  bridge.  Nigel coming
toward her with one of his carts, a new one. Making a delivery.
     'Vette,' with his big goofy grin. He called her that.
     'Seen the egg lady?'
     'City side,' he said,  meaning S.F.  always, Oakland  being always only
'Land. 'Good one,  huh?' with  a  gesture of huilder's pride for  his  cart.
Chevette saw the hraised aluminum frame, the Taiwan-ese hubs and rims beefed
up with fat  new  spokes.  Nigel did work  for  some  of the other riders at
Allied, ones who still rode metal. He hadn't liked it when Chevette had gone
for a  paper frame. Now  she bent to run her thumb along a specially  smooth
braise. 'Good one,' she agreed.
     'That Jap shit delaminate on you yet?' 'No way.'
     'S gonna. Bunny down too hard, it's glass.'
     'Come see you when it does.'
     Nigel shook his hair at her. The  faded wooden  fishing-plug  that hung
from his left ear  rattled  and spun. 'Too  late then.' He shoved  his  cart
toward Oakland.
     Chevette  found  the egg lady and  bought three, twisted up that way in
two big dry blades of grass. Magic. You hated to take it apart,  it  was  so
perfect, and you  could never get it back together or figure out how she did
it. The  egg  lady took  the five-piece  and dropped it into the little  bag
around her scrawny lizard neck.  She had no teeth at all, her face a nest of
wrinkles that centered into that wet slit of a mouth.
     Skinner was  sitting at the table when she got back.  More like a shelf
than a table. He  was drinking coffee out of a dented steel  thermos-mug. If
you just came in and saw him like that, it didn't strike you right  away how
old he  was; just big, his hands, shoulders,  all his  bones, big. Gray hair
slicked back from his forehead's lifetime collection of scars, little dents,
a couple of black dots like tattoos, where some kind of grit had gotten into
a cut.
     She undid the eggs,  the egg  lady's  magic, and put  them in a plastic
bowl. Skinner heaved himself up from his creaking  chair, wincing as he took
the  weight  with his  hip. She handed him the bowl and he swung over to the
Coleman. The way he scrambled  eggs, he didn't use any butter, just a little
water. Said he'd learned it from a cook on a ship. It made good eggs but the
pan was hard to clean, and that was Chevette's job. While he broke the eggs,
she went to the jacket on its hook, and took that case out.
     You couldn't  tell what it  was  made  of,  and that  meant  expensive.
Something dark gray, like  the lead in a pencil, thin as the shell of one of
those eggs, but you could probably drive  a  truck  over it. Like her  bike.
She'd figured out how  you  opened it  the night before; finger  here, thumb
there, it opened. No  catch or anything, no spring. No trademark, either; no
patent numbers. Inside was like  black suede,  but it gave  like foam  under
your finger.
     Those glasses,  nested there.  Big and black.  Like that Orbison in the
poster stuck to Skinner's wall, black and white. Skinner said the way to put
a poster up forever was use condensed milk for the glue. Kind that came in a
can. Nothing much came  in cans, anymore, but Chevette  knew  what he meant,
and the weird  big-faced  guy with the black glasses  was laminated solid to
the white-painted ply of Skinner's wall.
     She  pulled  them  from the black suede, the stuff  springing instantly
back to a smooth flat surface.
     They  bothered her. Not just  that she'd stolen  them, but they weighed
too much. Way too heavy for what they were, even with the big earpieces. The
frames  looked  as though they'd been carved from slabs  of graphite.  Maybe
they  had,  she  thought; there was graphite  around  the paper cores in her
bike's frame, and it was Asahi Engineering.
     Rattle of the spatula as Skinner  swirled the  eggs.  She  put them on.
Black. Solid black.
     'Katharine Hepburn,' Skinner said.
     She pulled them off. 'Huh?'
     'Big glasses like that.'
     She picked up the lighter he kept beside the  Coleman, clicked it, held
the flame behind one lens. Nothing.
     'What're  they  for,  welding?'  He  put  her share of  the  eggs in an
aluminum mess-tray stamped 1951. Set it  down beside  a fork and her  mug of
black coffee.
     She put the glasses on the table. 'Can't see through 'em.  Just black.'
She pulled up the backless maple chair and sat, picking up the fork. She ate
her eggs. Skinner sat,  eating his, looking at her. 'Soviet,' he said, after
a swallow from his thermos-mug.
     'Huh?'
     'How they  made sunglasses in the  ol'  Soviet.  Had  two factories for
sunglasses, one of 'em always  made 'em like that. Kept right on puttin' 'em
out  in the stores, nobody'd buy 'em, buy  the ones  from the other factory.
How the place packed it in.'
     'The factory made the black glasses?'
     'Soviet Union.'
     'They stupid, or what?'
     'Not that simple... Where'd you get 'em?'
     She looked at her coffee. 'Found 'em.' She picked it up and drank.
     'You  working, today?' He pulled himself  up,  stuffed the front of his
shirt down into his jeans,  the rusted buckle on his  old leather  belt held
with twisted paper clips.
     'Noon to five.' She picked up  the glasses, turning them.  They weighed
too much for how big they were.
     'Gotta get somebody up here, check the fuel cell...'
     'Fontaine?'
     He  didn't  answer. She bedded the glasses in  black suede, closed  the
case, got up,  took the dishes to the wash-basin. Looked back at the case on
the table.
     She'd better toss them, she thought.

9. When diplomacy fails.

     Rydell  took a  CalAir tilt-rotor  out  of Burbank into Tuesday's early
evening. The  guy in San Francisco had paid  for it from the other end; said
call him Freddie. No  seatback fun on CalAir,  and the passengers definitely
down-scale. Babies crying.  Had  a  window seat.  Down there  the spread  of
lights  through the  faint glaze  of some previous passenger's hair-oil: the
Valley. Turquoise  voids of  a  few  surviving pools, lit subsurface. A dull
ache in his arm.
     He closed his eyes.  Saw  his father at the  kitchen sink of his mobile
home in  Florida, washing out a glass. At  that precise moment the  death no
doubt already growing in him, established  fact, some line crossed.  Talking
about his brother, Rydell's uncle, three years younger and five years  dead,
who'd once sent Rydell a t-shirt from Africa. Army stamps  on the bubblepack
envelope. One of those old-timey bombers, B-5z, and WHEN DIPLOMACY FAILS.
     'Is that the Coast Highway, do you think?'
     Opened his eyes to the lady leaning across him to peer through the film
of hair-oil.  Like  Mrs. Armbruster  in fifth  grade;  older than his father
would be now.
     'I don't know,'  Rydell said. 'Might be. All just looks like streets to
me. I mean,' he added, 'I'm not from here.'
     She  smiled  at  him,  settling back into  the grip of the narrow seat.
Completely  like  Mrs.  Armbruster.  Same   weird  combination   of   tweed,
oxford-cloth,  Santa  Fe  blanket coat. These old  ladies with  their bouncy
thick-soled shoes.

     'None of us are.' Reaching out to pat his khaki knee. 'Not these days.'
Kevin had said it was okay to keep the pants.
     'Uh-huh,' Rydell said,  his hand feeling desperately for  the  recliner
button, the little dimpled steel circle waiting  to tilt  him back into  the
semblance of sleep. He closed his eyes.
     'I'm on my way to San Francisco to assist in my late husband's transfer
to a smaller cryogenic unit,' she said. 'One that offers  individual storage
modules. The trade magazines call them "boutique  operations," grotesque  as
that may seem.'
     Rydell  found the button  and discovered  that CalAir's seats allowed a
maximum recline of ten centimeters.
     'He's  been in cryo, oh, nine years now, but  I've never liked to think
of his brain tumbling around in there like that. Wrapped in foil. Don't they
always make you think of baked potatoes?'
     Rydell's eyes opened. He tried to think of something to say.
     'Or like tennis shoes  in a  dryer,'  she said. 'I  know they're frozen
solid, but there's  nothing about it  that seems like  any kind of  rest, is
there?'
     Rydell concentrated on the seatback in front  of  him. A plastic blank.
Gray. Not even a phone.
     'These smaller  places  can't  promise anything new  in the way  of  an
eventual  awakening,  of  course. But it seems to  me  that there's an added
degree of dignity. I think of it as dignity, in any case.'
     Rydell glanced  sideways.  Found his gaze caught  in hers: hazel  eyes,
mazed there in the finest web of wrinkles.
     'And I certainly won't be there if he's ever thawed, or, well, whatever
they might  eventually  intend  to  do with  them. I don't believe in it. We
argued about it constantly. I thought of all those billions dead, the annual
toll in all the poor places.
     'David,'  I  said, 'how can  you  contemplate  this when  the  bulk  of
humanity lives without air-conditioning?"
     Rydell opened his mouth. Closed it.
     'Myself, I'm a card-carrying member of Cease Upon the Midnight.'
     Rydell  wasn't sure  what  'card-carrying' meant,  but  Cease Upon  the
Midnight was  mutual self-help euthanasia, and  illegal in Tennessee. Though
they did  it there anyway,  and someone on the force had told  him that they
left milk and cookies out for the ambulance crews. Did it eight or nine at a
time, mostly.  CUTM. 'Cut 'em,' the paramedics called it.  Offed  themselves
with  cocktails  of  legally  prescribed drugs.  No muss, no  fuss.  Tidiest
suicides around.
     'Excuse me, ma'am,' Rydell said, 'but I've got to try to catch a little
sleep here.'
     'You go right ahead, young man. You do look rather tired.'
     Rydell closed his eyes, put his head back, and stayed that way until he
felt the rotors tilting over into descent-mode.
     'Tommy Lee Jones,'  the  black  man said. His hair  was shaped  like an
upside-down flowerpot with a spiral path sculpted into the side of it.  Sort
of like a Shriner's fez, but without the tassel. He was about five feet tall
and  his triple-oversized shirt made him look nearly as wide.  The shirt was
lemon-yellow  and  printed  with  life-size  handguns,  in  full  color, all
different  kinds. He wore a huge pair of navy  blue shorts that came to  way
below his knees, Raiders  socks, sneakers with little red lights embedded in
the edges of the soles, and a pair of round mirrored glasses with lenses the
size of five-dollar coins.
     'You got the wrong guy,' Rydell said.
     'No, man, you look like him.'
     'Like who?'
     'Tommy Lee Jones.'
     'Who?'
     'Was an  actor, man.' For a second Rydell thought  this guy  had to  be
with Reverend Fallon. Even had those shades,  like Sublett's contacts.  'You
Rydell. Ran you on Separated at Birth.'
     'You Freddie?'  Separated  at  Birth  was a police program you used  in
missing persons  cases. You  scanned a photo  of the person you  wanted, got
back the  names of  half a dozen  celebrities who  looked  vaguely  like the
subject,  then  went around asking  people if they'd seen anybody lately who
reminded them of A, B, C... The  weird thing was, it worked better than just
showing  them  a  picture  of the subject. The instructor at the Academy  in
Knoxville had told Rydell's class that  that  was because it tapped into the
part  of the brain that kept track of celebrities. Rydell had  imagined that
as some kind of movie-star lobe. Did people really have those? Maybe Sublett
had a  great  big one. But when  they'd  run the program  on  Rydell  in the
Academy, he'd come up a dead ringer for  Howie Clacton, the Atlanta pitcher;
he'd  didn't remember any  Tommy  Lee Jones. But  then he hadn't  thought he
looked all that much like Howie Clacton, either.
     This Freddie extended a  very soft hand  and Rydell shook it.  'You got
luggage?' Freddie asked.
     'Just this.' Hefting his Samsonite.
     'That's Mr.  Warbaby  right over there,'  Freddie  said, nodding in the
direction of an exit-gate, where  a uniformed chilanga was checking people's
seat-stubs before  letting  them  out.  Another black man loomed behind her,
huge, broad as this Freddie, looking twice his height.
     'Big guy.'
     'Uh-huh,'  Freddie said, 'and  best  we not  keep  him  waiting.  Leg's
hurting him today and he  just  insisted on walking  in here from the lot to
meet you.'
     Rydell took the  man in as he approached the  gate, handing his stub to
the guard. He was enormous, over six feet, but  the thing that struck Rydell
most was a stillness about him, that and some kind of sorrow in his face. It
was a look he'd seen on the face of a black minister his father had taken to
watching, toward the end there.  You looked at that  minister's face and you
felt like he'd seen  every sad-ass thing there was, so maybe you  could even
believe what he was saying. Or anyway Rydell's father had, maybe, at least a
little bit.
     'Lucius Warbaby,' taking the biggest  hands Rydell  had ever  seen from
the deep  pockets of  a  long  olive overcoat  stitched from diamond-quilted
silk,  his voice pitched so far  into the bass that  it suggested subsonics.
Rydell  looked  at  the  proffered  hand  and  saw  he  wore  one  of  those
old-fashioned gold knuckle-duster  rings,  WARBABY across it in diamond-chip
sans-serif capitals.
     Rydell shook  it, fingers curled over diamond and bullion. 'Pleased  to
meet you, Mr. Warbaby.'
     Warbaby  wore  a  black Stetson set  dead  level on his head, the  brim
turned up all the way  around, and  glasses  with  heavy black frames. Clear
lenses,  windowpane  plain. The eyes  behind those  lenses were  Chinese  or
something; catlike,  slanted, a weird goldy  brown. He was leaning on one of
those  adjustable  canes you get  at  the hospital. There was a carbon brace
clamped around his left  leg, big midnight-blue  nylon cushions  padding it.
Skinny black jeans, brand new and never washed, were tucked into spit-shined
Texas dogger boots in three shades of black.
     'Juanito says you're a decent driver,' Warbaby said,  as though  it was
about the saddest thing  he'd ever  heard.  Rydell hadn't ever heard anybody
call Hernandez that. 'Says you don't know the area up here...'
     'That's right.'
     'Up-side of that,'  Warbaby said, 'is nobody here knows  you. Carry the
man's bag, Freddie.'
     Freddie  took Rydell's soft-side with obvious  reluctance, as though it
wasn't something he'd ordinarily care to be seen with.
     The hand with the knuckle-duster  came  down on Rydell's shoulder. Like
the ring weighed twenty pounds.  'Juanito  tell you anything  with regard to
what we're doing up here?'
     'Said a  hotel theft. Said IntenSecure was bringing you in on a kind of
contract basis-'
     'Theft,  yes.' Warbaby looked  like  he  had the  moral gravity of  the
universe  pressing  down  on  him and  was determined  to  bear  the  brunt.
'Something missing. And all more complicated, now.'
     'How's that?'
     Warbaby sighed. 'Man who's missing it, he's dead now.'
     Something else in those eyes. 'Dead hozi'?' Rydell asked, as the weight
at last was  taken from his  shoulder.  'Hom-icide,'  Warbaby said,  low and
doleful but very clear.
     'You're wondering about my name,' Warbaby said from the backseat of his
black Ford Patriot.
     'I'm wondering where to put the key, Mr.  Warbaby,' Rydell said, behind
the wheel, surveying the option-laden dash. American cars were the only cars
in the world that  still bothered to physically display the instrumentation.
Maybe that  was why there weren't very many of them. Like those Harleys with
chain-drives.
     'My grandmother,' Warbaby rumbled, like a tectonic plate giving  up and
diving  for  China,  'was  Vietnamese. Grandaddy, a Detroit  boy.  Army man.
Brought her home from Saigon, but then he didn't stick around. My daddy, his
son, he changed his name to Warbaby, see? A gesture. Sentiment.'
     'Uh-huh,' Rydell  said, starting  the big  Ford  and  checking out  the
transmission. Saigon was where rich people went on vacation.
     Four-wheel drive.  Ceramic armor. Goodyear Streetsweepers  you'd need a
serious gun to puncture.  There was a cardboard air-freshener, shaped like a
pine-tree, hanging in front of the heater-vent.
     'Now the Lucius part, well, I couldn't tell you.'
     'Mr. Warbaby,' Rydell said, looking back over his shoulder,  'where you
want me to drive you to?'
     A modem-bleep from the dash.
     Freddie, in the plush  bucket beside Rydell, whistled. 'Motherfuck,' he
said, 'that's nasty.'
     Rydell swung back to  watch  as the fax emerged:  a  fat  man, naked on
sheets  solid  with  blood.  Pools  of  it,  where  the  brilliance  of  the
photographer's strobes lay frozen like faint mirages of the sun.
     'What's that under his chin?' Rydell asked.
     'Cuban necktie,' Freddie said.
     'No, man,' Rydell's voice up an octave, 'what is that?'
     'Man's tongue,'  Freddie  said,  tearing the  image from  the  slit and
passing it back to Warbaby.
     Rydell heard the fax rattle in his hand.
     'These people,' Warbaby said. 'Terrible.'


10. The modern dance.

     Yamazaki sat on a low wooden stool, watching Skinner shave. Skinner sat
on the  edge of his bed,  scraping his  face  pink with a disposable  razor,
rinsing the  blade in a dented aluminum basin that  he  cradled  between his
thighs.
     'The razor is old,' Yamazaki said. 'You do not throw it away?'
     Skinner looked at him, over the plastic razor. 'Thing is, Scooter, they
just don't get any  duller, after a while.' He lathered and shaved his upper
lip, then paused. Yamazaki had been 'Kawasaki' for the first several visits.
Now he was 'Scooter.' The pale old eyes regarded him neutrally, hooded under
reddish lids. Yamazaki sensed Skinner's inward laughter.
     'I make you laugh?'
     'Not today,' Skinner said, dropping the razor into the basin  of water,
suds and gray whiskers recoiling  in a display of surface tension. 'Not like
the other day, watching you chase those turds around.'
     Yamazaki  had  spent  one  entire  morning  attempting  to  diagram the
sewage-collection arrangements for the  group of dwellings he  thought of as
comprising Skinner's 'neighborhood.' Widespread use of transparent five-inch
hose had made  this quite exciting, like some game  devised for children, as
he'd  tried  to follow  the  course of a  given bolliis  of  waste from  one
dwelling  down  past  the  next.  The   hoses  swooped  down   through   the
superstructure in  graceful random arcs, bundled like ganglia, to meet below
the lower  deck  in a thousand-gallon holding tank.  When  this was full  to
capacity, Skinner had explained, a  mercury-switch in a float-ball triggered
a jet-pump,  forcing  the accumulated  sewage  into a  three-foot pipe  that
carried it into the municipal system.
     He'd made a note to consider this junction as an interface between  the
bridge's program and the program of the city, but extracting Skinner's story
of  the bridge was obviously more important. Convinced that Skinner  somehow
held the key to the bridge's existential meaning, Yamazaki had abandoned his
physical survey of secondary construction in order  to spend as much time as
possible in the old man's company. Each night, in his borrowed apartment, he
would  send  the  day's  accumulation  of  material  to  Osaka  University's
Department of Sociology.
     Today, climbing to the lift  that would carry him to Skinner's room, he
had met the  girl  on her way to work,  descending, her shoulder through the
frame of her bicycle. She was a courier in the city.
     Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned
her living at the  archaic  intersection of information  and geography?  The
offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous-in  effect, a
single  desktop,  the  map  of  distances  obliterated by  the seamless  and
instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had
rendered  physical mail  an expensive novelty,  might as easily be viewed as
porosity,  and as such created the  need for the service  the girl provided.
Physically  transporting  bits of information about a grid that consisted of
little  else, she  provided  a  degree of absolute  security  in  the  fluid
universe of data. With your memo in the girl's bag, you knew precisely where
it  was;  otherwise, your memo  was  nowhere,  perhaps everywhere,  in  that
instant of transit.
     He found  her attractive, Skinner's  girl, in an odd, foreign way, with
her hard white legs and her militant, upthrust tail of dark hair.
     'Dreamin',  Scooter?' Skinner set the basin aside, his hands  trembling
slightly,  and  settled  his  shoulders  against  musty-looking pillows. The
white-painted plywood wall creaked faintly.
     'No, Skinner-san.  But you promised you  would tell  me about the first
night,  when you decided to take the bridge...' His tone was mild, his words
deliberately chosen to irritate, to spur his subject to speech. He activated
the notebook's recording function.
     'We didn't decide anything. I told you that...'
     'But somehow it happened.'
     'Shit  happens.   Happened  that  night.  No  signals,  no  leader,  no
architects. You think it  was politics.  That  particular dance, boy, that's
over.'
     'But you have said that the people were "ready."'
     'But not for anything. That's what you can't seem to get, can you? Like
the bridge was here, but I'm not saying it was waiting. See the difference?'
     'I think'
     'You think  shit.' The  notebook sometimes had  trouble  with Skinner's
idioms.  In  addition, he tended  to  slur.  An  expert system in Osaka  had
suggested he might have sustained a degree of  neural damage, perhaps as the
result of using street  drugs, or of one or more minor strokes. But Yamazaki
believed Skinner had  simply been  too long in proximity to whatever strange
attractor  had permitted the  bridge to become what it had become. 'Nobody,'
Skinner said, speaking slowly and deliberately at first, as if for emphasis,
'was using this bridge for anything.  After the Little Grande  came through,
understand?'
     Yamazaki nodded, watching the characters of Skinner's translated speech
scroll down the notebook.
     'Earthquake fucked it good, Scooter. The tunnel  on Treasure  caved in.
Always been unstable  there...  First  they were  gonna  rebuild, they said,
bottom up, but they flat-out didn't have the money. So they put  chain link,
razor-wire,  concrete up at both ends. Then  the Germans  came in, maybe two
years  later, sold 'em on nanomech, how to build the  new  tunnel. Be cheap,
carry  cars and a mag-lev.  And nobody believed how fast  they could do  it,
once they  got  it  legislated  past  the  Greens. Sure, those Green biotech
lobbies,  they made 'em actually  grow  the sections  out  in  Nevada.  Like
pumpkins, Scooter. Then they hauled 'em out here under bulk-lifters and sank
'em in the  Bay. Hooked  'em up. Little  tiny machines  crawling  around  in
there, hard  as diamonds; tied it all together tight, and  bam, there's your
tunnel. Bridge just sat there.'
     Yamazaki held his breath, expecting Skinner to  lose the thread,  as he
so often had before-often, Yamazaki suspected, deliberately.
     'This  one  woman, she kept  saying  plant  the whole  thing  with ivy,
Virginia creeper...  Somebody else, they said tear  it  down  before another
quake did it for  'em. But  there it  was. In the cities,  lot of people, no
place to go. Cardboard towns in the  park,  if you were  lucky,  and  they'd
brought those drip-pipes down from Portland, put  'em  around the buildings.
Leaks enough water on the ground, you don't want to lay there. That's a mean
town,  Portland.  Invented  that there...'  He coughed. 'But that one night,
people just came. All kinds of stories, after, how it happened. Pissing down
rain, too. No body's idea of riot weather.'
     Yamazaki imagined the two spans of the deserted bridge in the downpour,
the crowds accumulating. He watched  as  they climbed  the  wire fences, the
barricades,  in such numbers that the  chain link twisted,  fell.  They  had
climbed the towers, then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when
the dawn  came, survivors clung there, news helicopters circling them in the
gray light like patient dragonflies. He  had seen  this many times, watching
the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there.
     'Maybe a thousand people, this end. Another thousand in Oakland. And we
just started  running. Cops  falling  back,  and what were they  protecting,
anyway? Mainly the crowd-orders they had, keep people from  getting together
in the street. They had their choppers up in the rain, shining lights on us.
Just  made  it  easier. I  had  this pair of pointy boots on. Ran up to that
'link, it  was maybe  fifteen feet  tall. Just kicked my toes  in there  and
started climbing. Climb a fence like that easy, boots got a point. Up,  man,
I was up that thing like I was flying. Coils of razor at the top, but people
behind   me  were   pushing  up  anything;  hunks  of   two-by-four,  coats,
sleeping-bags. To lay across the wire. And I felt like... weightless...'
     Yamazaki felt that he was  somehow close, very  close, to the heart  of
the thing.
     'I jumped.  Don't know who jumped first, but I  just  jumped.  Out. Hit
pavement. People yelling. They'd crashed the  barriers  on the Oakland side,
by then. Those were  lower. We could see their lights as they ran out on the
cantilever.  The police 'copters  and  these red  highway flares some of the
people had. They ran toward Treasure. Nobody out there since the Navy people
left...  We ran too.  Met up  somewhere in the  middle and this  cheer  went
up...'  Skinner's  eyes  were  unfocused, distant.  'After  that, they  were
singing,  hymns and  shit. Just  milling around, singing. Crazy. Me and some
others, we  were stoked. And we could see the cops, too,  coming  from  both
ends. Fuck that.'
     Yamazaki swallowed. 'And then?'
     'We  started climbing. The towers. Rungs they  welded on those suckers,
see, so  painters could get up there. We were climbing. Television had their
own 'copters out by  then, Scooter.  We were making it to world news and  we
didn't know it.  Guess you  don't.  Wouldn't've give  a  shit  anyway.  Just
climbing. But that was going out live.  Was gonna make it hard for the cops,
later. And,  man,  people were  falling off.  In front  of me had black tape
wrapped 'round his shoes, kept the soles on. Tape all wet, coming loose, his
feet kept slipping. Right in front of my face. His foot kept coming back off
the rung and I'd get his heel in my eye, I didn't watch it
     Near to the top and both of 'em come off at once.' Skinner fell silent,
as if listening to some distant sound. Yamazaki held his breath.
     'How you learn to  climb, up here,' Skinner said, 'the first  thing is,
you don't look down.  Second thing is, you keep one hand and one foot on the
bridge all the time. This guy, he didn't know that.  And those shoes of his.
He just went off, backward.
     Never made a sound. Sort of... graceful.'
     Yamazaki shivered.
     'But I kept climbing. Rain had quit, light was coming. Stayed.'
     'How did you feel?' Yamazaki asked. Skinner blinked. 'Feel?'
     'What did you do then?'
     'I saw the city.'
     Yamazaki  rode Skinner's  lift  down to where  stairs began, its yellow
upright cup like a piece of picnicware discarded by a giant. All around him,
now, the rattle of an evening's commerce, and from a  darkened  doorway came
the slap of cards, a woman's laughter, voices raised in Spanish. Sunset pink
as wine,  through  sheets  of  plastic that  snapped like sails  in a breeze
scented with frying foods,  woodsmoke, a sweet oily drift of  cannabis. Boys
in ragged leather crouched above a game whose counters were painted pebbles.
     Yamazaki  stopped.  He  stood very still, one  hand on a wooden railing
daubed with  hyphens of  aerosol silver.  Skinner's story  seemed to radiate
out,  through the thousand  things, the unwashed  smiles and  the  smoke  of
cooking, like concentric  rings of sound from some  secret bell, pitched too
low for the foreign, wishful ear.
     We  are come  not only  past  the  century's closing,  he thought,  the
millennium's  turning,  but to  the  end of something  else.  Era? Paradigm?
Everywhere, the signs of closure.
     Modernity was ending.
     Here, on the bridge, it long since had.
     He would walk toward Oakland now,  feeling  for the new thing's strange
heart.


11. Pulling tags.

     Tuesday, she just wasn't on. Couldn't proj.  No focus. Bunny Malatesta,
the dispatcher, could feel it, his voice a buzz in her ear.
     'Chev, don't take this the wrong way, but you got like the monthlies or
something?'
     'Fuck off, Bunny.'
     'Hey,  I  just  mean you're  not your  usual ball of  fire today. All I
mean.'
     'Gimme a tag.'
     '655 Mo, fifteenth, reception.'
     Picked up, made it to 555  Cali, fifty-first floor. Pulled her  tag and
back down. The day gone gray after morning's promise.
     '456 Montgomery, thirty-third, reception, go freight.'
     Pausing, her hand in the bike's recognition-loop. 'How come?'
     'Says  messengers  carvin'  graffiti  in  the  passenger  elevators. Go
freight or  they'll  toss  you,  be  denied  access, at  which point  Allied
terminates your employment.'
     She remembered seeing Ringer's emblem carved  into the inspection plate
in  one of  456's passenger elevators.  Fucking  Ringer.  He'd  defaced more
elevators than anyone in  history. Carried around a regular toolkit to do it
with.
     456  sent her  to i EC  with a  carton  wider than she was supposed  to
accept,  but that  was  what racks and bungles were for,  and  why  give the
cage-drivers the trade? lunny  buzzed her  on  her way  out and gave her  to
Beale, the  cafeteria  on  the second floor.  She  guessed  that  would be a
woman's purse, done up in a plastic bag from the kitchen, and she was right.
Brown, sort  of  lizardskin, with a couple of  green sprouts  stuck  in  the
corners of the bag. Women left  their purses, remembered, called up, got the
manager to send for a messenger. Good for a tip, usually. Ringer and some of
the  others  would  open  them  up,  go through  the  contents,  find  drugs
sometimes. She wouldn't do that. She thought about the sunglasses.
     She couldn't get a run today. There was no routing in effect at Allied,
but sometimes  you'd  get a run by  accident; pick up here,  drop off there,
then  something here.  But  it was rare. When you worked for Allied you rode
harder. Her record  was  sixteen  tags  in  a  day; like  doing  forty  at a
different company.
     She took the purse to Fulton at Masonic, got two flyers after the owner
checked to see everything was there.
     'Restaurant's supposed  to  take it to  the cops,'  Chevette  said. 'We
don't like to be responsible.'  Blank look from the purse-lady, some kind of
secretary. Chevette pocketed the fives.
     '2.98 Alabama,' Bunny said,  as  if offering her  some  pearl  of great
price. 'Tone those thighs...'
     Bust her ass  out there to get there, then she'd pick up and do it. But
she couldn't get on top of it, today.
     The asshole's sunglasses...
     'For tactical reasons,' the  blonde said, 'we do not currently advocate
the use of violence or sorcery against private individuals.'
     Chevette had just pumped back from Alabama Street, day's  last tag. The
woman  on  the  little CNN  flatscreen  over the  door to  Bunny's  pit wore
something black and stretchy pulled over her  face, three  triangular  holes
cut  in  it.  Blue   letters  at  the  bottom  of  the  screen   read  FIONA
X-SPOKESPERSON- SOUTH ISLAND LIBERATION FRONT.
     The overlit fluorescent  corridor into Allied Messengers smelled of hot
styrene,  laser printers,  abandoned running-shoes, and stale  bag  lunches,
this  last  tugging  Chevette  toward  memories of  some  unheated  day-care
basement in Oregon, winter's colorless light  slanting  in through high  dim
windows. But now  the street door banged open behind  her,  a pair  of muddy
size-eleven neon sneakers came pounding down the stairs, and Samuel  Saladin
DuPree,  his cheeks  speckled with crusty gray  commas  of  road-dirt, stood
grinning at her, hugely.
     'Happy about something, Sammy Sal?'
     Allied's best-looking  thing on two wheels, no contest whatever, DuPree
was six-two of ebon  electricity  poured  over  a frame of such elegance and
strength that Chevette imagined his bones as polished metal, triple-chromed,
a quicksilver armature. Like those old movies with that big guy, the one who
went  into politics, after  he'd got the meat ripped off him. Thinking about
Sammy Sal's bones made most girls want him to jump theirs, but not Chevette.
He was gay, they  were friends, and Chevette  wasn't too sure  how she  felt
about all that anyway, lately.
     'Fact is,' Sammy Sal  said, smearing dirt from  his cheek with the back
of  one long hand, 'I've decided  to  kill Ringer. And the truth, y'know, it
makes you free...'
     'Ho,' Chevette said, 'you musta pulled a tag over 456 today.'
     'I  did,  dear,  do  that  thing.  All the way  up, in a dirty  freight
elevator. A slow dirty freight elevator. And why?'
     'Cause Ringer's  'graved  his  tag  in  their  brass,  Sal,  and  their
rosewood, too?"
     'Eggs-ackly, Chevette, honey.'  Sammy  Sal  undid the  blue  and  white
bandanna  around his  neck and wiped his  face with  it. 'Therefore, his ass
dies screaming.'  and  must  begin,  now,  to  systematically  sabotage  the
workplace,' Fiona X said, 'or be branded an enemy of the human race.'
     The  door  to  the  dispatch-pit,  so  thickly  stapled   with  scheds,
sub-charts,  tattered Muni regs,  and faxed  complaints that Chevette had no
idea  what  the  surface  underneath might  look  like,  popped open.  Bunny
extruded his  scarred and unevenly shaven head, turtle-like, blinking in the
light of the corridor, and  glanced up  automatically, his gaze attracted by
the tone of Fiona X's sound-bite. His expression blanked at the sight of her
mask, the  mental channel-zap executed in less time than it had taken him to
look her way. 'You,' he said, eyes back on Chevette, 'Chevy. In here.'
     'Wait for me, Sammy Sal,' she said.
     Bunny Malatesta  had been a  San  Francisco bike  messenger for  thirty
years. Would be still, if his knees and back hadn't given out on him. He was
simultaneously the best and  the worst  thing about messing for Allied.  The
best because he had a bike-map of the city hung behind his eyes, better than
anything a computer could generate. He knew every building, every door, what
the  security was like. He  had  the mess game down, Bunny did, and,  better
still, he knew the lore, all the history, the stories that made you know you
were part of something, however crazy it got, that was worth doing. He was a
legend himself, Bunny, having  Krypto'd the windshields of some seven police
cars in the course of his riding career, a record that  still stood.  But he
was  the worst for those same reasons and  more,  because  there wasn't  any
bullshitting him  at all. Any  other  dispatcher,  you could cut yourself  a
little extra slack. But not Bunny. He just knew.
     Chevette followed him in. He closed the door behind her. The goggles he
used for  dispatching dangled around his neck,  one  padded eyepiece patched
with cellophane  tape. There were no windows in the  room and Bunny kept the
lights off when he was working. Half a dozen color monitors were arranged in
a semicircle in front  of a black swivel armchair with Bunny's  pink  rubber
Sacro-saver backrest strapped to it like some kind of giant bulging larva.
     Bunny  rubbed  his  lower back with the heels  of  his  hands.  'Disk's
killing me,' he said, not particularly to Chevette.
     'Oughta let Sammy  Sal crack it for  you,' she  suggested.  'He's  real
good.'
     'It's cracked already, sweetheart. What's wrong  with it  in the  first
place. Now tell me what were you doin' over the Morrisey last night.  And it
better be good.'
     'Pulling a tag,' Chevette said, going  on automatic, the way she had to
if she were going to lie and get away with it. She'd been halfway  expecting
something like this, but not so soon.
     She  watched as Bunny took the goggles  off, disconnected them, and put
them on top of one of the monitors. 'So how come you never checked back out?
They call us on it, say you  went in to  make  a delivery, they scanned your
badges,  you never  come back out. Look, I  tell 'em, I know she's not there
now, guys,  'cause I got her out  Alabama Street  on a  call, okay?'  He was
watching her.
     'Hey, Bunny,' Chevette said, 'it was  my last  tag, my ride was down in
the  basement, I  saw a  freight el on  its way down, jumped in. I know  I'm
supposed to clock out at security, but I thought they'd have somebody on the
parking exit, you know? I  get up the ramp and there's nobody, a car's going
out, so I deak  under the barrier and I'm in the street. I shoulda gone back
around and done the lobby thing?'
     'You know it. It's regs.'
     'It was late, you know?'
     Bunny  sat down, wincing, in  the chair with the Sacro-saver. He cupped
each  knee  in a  big-knuckled hand and stared at her.  Very  un-Bunny. Like
something was really bothering him. Not just security grunts pissing because
a mess blew the check-out off.
     'How late?'
     'Huh?'
     'They wanna know when you left.'
     'Maybe ten minutes after I went in. Fifteen tops. Basement in there's a
rat-maze.'
     'You went in 6:32:18,' he  said. 'They got that when they scanned  you.
The tag, this  lawyer, they talked to him, so they know  you  delivered.' He
still had that look.
     'Bunny, what's the deal? Tell 'em I screwed up, is all.'
     'You didn't go anywhere else? In the hotel?'
     'Uh-uh,' she said, and  felt  this funny ripple move through  her, like
she'd  crossed some line and couldn't go back. 'I gave the guy  his package,
Bunny.'
     'I don't think they're worrying about the guy's package,' Bunny said.
     'So?'
     'Lookit, Chev,' he said, 'security guy calls, that's one  thing. Sorry,
boss, won't  let it  happen  again. But this was somebody up in the company,
IntenSecure it's called, and  he called up Wilson direct.'  Allied's  owner.
'So I  gotta make nice with  Wilson and  Mr. Security, I gotta  have  Grasso
cover for me on the board and naturally he screws everything up...'
     'Bunny,' she said, 'I'm sorry.'
     'Hey.  You're sorry, I'm  sorry,  but  there's some  big  shit rentacop
sitting  behind a desk and  he's  putting fucking Wilson  through about what
precisely did you do after you gave that lawyer his package. About what kind
of  employee  are you exactly, how long  you  mess  for Allied, any criminal
record, any drug use, where you live.'
     Chevette saw  the asshole's black glasses, right where she'd left them.
In their  case, behind Skinner's Geographics. She tried to lift them out  of
there with mind-power. Right  up  to the tar-smelling roof and off the edge.
Put those bastards in the Bay like she should've done this  morning. But no,
they were there.
     'That ain't normal,' Bunny said. 'Know what I mean?'
     'You tell 'em where I live, Bunny?'
     'Out on the bridge,' he said, then cracked her a little sliver of grin.
'Not like you got much of an address, is it?' Now he  spun himself around in
the chair and began to shut the monitors down.
     'Bunny,' she said, 'what'll they do now?'
     'Come  and  find you.' His back to  her. 'Here.  'Cause they won't know
where else  to go. You didn't do anything, did you, Chevy?' The back of  his
skull showing gray stubble. Automatic. 'No. No... Thanks, Bunny.'
     He grunted in reply, neutral, ending it, and Chevette was  back  in the
corridor, her heart pounding under Skinner's jacket. Up  the stairs, out the
door, plotting the quickest way home,  running red lights in her head, gotta
get rid of the glasses, gotta- Sammy Sal had Ringer braced up against a blue
recyc bin.
     Worry  was  starting  to penetrate Ringer's rudimentary view of things.
'Didn't do nuthin to you, man.'
     'Been carvin' your name in elevators again, Ringer.'
     'But I din't do nuthin to you!'
     'Cause and effect, mofo. We know it's a tough concept for you, but try:
you do shit, other shit follows. You go scratching your tag  in the clients'
fancy  elevators, we hassle  you,  man.'  Sammy  Sal  spread the long  brown
fingers  of his left hand  across  Ringer's beat-to-shit  helmet, palming it
like  a basketball,  and  twisted, lifting, the helmet's strap  digging into
Ringer's chin. 'Din't do nuthin!' Ringer gurgled.
     Chevette ducked past them, heading for the bike-rack beneath  the mural
portrait of Shapely. Someone had shot him in his soulful martyr's eye with a
condomful of powder blue paint, blue running all down his hallowed cheek.
     'Hey,' Sammy Sal said, 'come here and help me torment this shit-heel.'
     She stuck her hand through the recognition-loop  and tried to pull  her
handlebars  out of  the  rack's  tangle of molybdenum steel,  graphite,  and
aramid overwrap. The other bikes' alarms all went  off  at once,  a  frantic
chorus  of ear-splitting bleats, basso digital sirennioans, and OUC extended
high-volume  burst  of  snake-hiss Spanish profanity,  cunningly mixed  with
yelps of animal torment. She swung her bike around, got her toe in the clip,
and  kicked for the street, almost going over as  she mounted. She saw Sammy
Sal, out the corner of her eye, drop Ringer.
     She  saw  Sammy Sal straddle  his  own  bike,  a  pink  and black-fleck
fat-tube with Fluoro-Rimz that ran off a hubgenerator.
     Sammy Sal was coming after her. She'd never wanted company less.
     She took off.
     Proj. Just proj.
     Like her morning dream, but scarier.

12. Eye movement.

     Rydell looked at these  two San Francisco cops,  Svobodov and Orlovsky,
and decided  that working for  Warbaby  had a  chance  of being interesting.
These guys were the real, the  super-heavy thing. Homicide was colossus, any
department anywhere.
     And  here he'd been in  Northern  California all of forty-eight minutes
and he  was sitting  at a counter drinking coffee with Homicide. Except they
were drinking tea. Hot tea.  In  glasses. Heavy on  the sugar. Rydell was at
the  far end, on  the  other  side of Freddie,  who was drinking milk.  Then
Warbaby, with his hat still on, then Svobodov, then Orlovsky.
     Svobodov was  nearly as tall as Warbaby, but it all seemed  to be sinew
and big knobs of bone. He had long, pale hair, combed straight back from his
rocky forehead, eyebrows to match, and skin that was tight  and  shiny, like
he'd stood too long in front of a fire. Orlovsky was  thin and  dark, with a
widow's peak, lots of hair on  the  backs of his  fingers, and those glasses
that looked like they'd been sawn in half.
     They both had that eye thing,  the one that pinned you and held you and
sank right in, heavy and inert as lead.
     Rydell  had  had a course in that at the Police  Academy, but it hadn't
really taken. It was called Eye Movement Desensitization & Response, and was
taught  by  this  retired  forensic  psychologist  named  Bagley,  from Duke
University. Bagley's lectures tended to wander off into stories about serial
killers he'd processed  at Duke, auto-erotic strangulation fatalities, stuff
like  that. It sure  passed  the time between  High Profile Felony Stops and
Firearms Training System  Scenarios. But  Rydell was usually kind of rattled
after Felony Stops, because the instructors kept asking him to take the part
of the felon.  And  he  couldn't  figure  out  why.  So  he'd  have  trouble
concentrating, in Eye  Movement.  And if he  did manage to pick  up anything
useful from Bagley, a session  of FATSS would usually  make him  forget  it.
FATSS was like doing Dream Walls, but with guns, real ones.
     When  FATSS tallied  up your  score,  it would drag  you right down the
entrance wounds, your own or the  other guy's, and make the call  on whether
the loser  had bled  to  death or  copped  to  hydrostatic shock. There were
people who went into full-blown post-traumatic  heeb-jeebs after a couple of
sessions on FATSS, but  Rydell always came out  of  it with this shit-eating
grin. It wasn't that  he was violent, or didn't mind the  sight of blood; it
was  just that it was  such a rush.  And  it wasn't  real. So  he never  had
learned to throw that official hoodoo on people  with his eyes. But this Lt.
Svobodov, he had the talent beaucoup, and his partner, Lt. Orlovsky, had his
own version going, nearly as effective  and he did it over the sawn-off tops
of those glasses. Guy looked sort of like a werewolf anyway, which helped.
     Rydell continued to check out the  San Francisco  Homicide  look. Which
seemed to be old  tan raincoats  over black flak vests over white shirts and
ties.  The shirts  were button-down  oxfords and  the  ties were the stripey
kind,  like you  were supposed to belong to a club  or something.  Cuffs  on
their  trousers and great  big pebble-grain  wingtips  with  cleated  Vibram
soles. About  the only people who  wore shirts and ties and  shoes like that
were immigrants, people who wanted it as American as it got. But layering it
up with a bullet-proof and  a worn-out London Fog, he figured that was  some
kind  of  statement. The streamlined plastic butt of an N&K  didn't  exactly
hurt, either, and Rydell could see one pecking out of
     Svobodov's  open flak vest. Couldn't remember the  model number, but it
looked like the one with the magazine down the top of the barrel.  Shot that
caseless  ammo  looked  like wax crayons,  plastic  propellant molded around
alloy flechettes like big nails.
     'If we knew what you already know, Warbaby, maybe that makes everything
more  simple.'  Svobodov looked  around the  little  diner, took  a pack  of
Marlboros out of his raincoat.
     'Illegal in this  state,  buddy,'  the  waitress said,  pleased  at any
opportunity  to  threaten somebody with  the law.  She had that big kind  of
hair.  This  was one of those places you ate at if  you worked  graveyard at
some truly shit-ass industrial job. If your luck held, Rydell figured, you'd
get this particular waitress into the bargain.
     Svobodov fixed her with a couple of thousand negative volts of Cop Eye,
tugged a black plastic badge-holder out of his flak vest, flipped it open in
her direction, and let  it fall back on its nylon thong, against his  chest.
Rydell  noticed the click when it hit; some kind  of back-up armor under the
white shirt.
     'Those two Mormon boys from Highway  Patrol come in here, you show that
to them,' she said.
     Svobodov put the cigarette between his lips.
     Warbaby's fist  came up, clutching a lump  of  gold the size  of a hand
grenade.
     He lit the Russian's cigarette with it.
     'Why  you have this, Warbaby?' Svobodov said,  eyeing the lighter. 'You
smoking something?'
     'Anything  but  those Chinese  Marlboros,  Arkady.' Mournful  as  ever.
'They're fulla fiberglass.'
     'American brand,' Svobodov insisted, 'licensed by maker.'
     'Hasn't  been a legal cigarette manufactured  in this  country  in  six
years,' Warbaby said, sounding as sad about that as anything else.
     'Marl-bor-ro,' Svobodov said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and
pointing  to the lettering  in  front  of  the filter. 'When we  were  kids,
Warbaby, Marlboro, she was money.'
     'Arkady,' Warbaby said, as though with enormous patience, 'when we were
kids, man, money was money.'
     Orlovsky laughed. Svobodov shrugged. 'What you know, Warbaby?' Svobodov
said, back to business.
     'Mr. Blix has been found dead, at the Morrisey. Murdered.'
     'Pro  job,' Orlovsky said, making it  one  word, projob. 'They  want we
assume some bullshit ethnic angle, see?'
     Svobodov squinted at Warbaby. 'We don't know that,' he said.
     'The  tongue,'  Orlovsky said,  determined. 'That's color. To throw  us
off. They think we think Latin Kings.'
     Svobodov  sucked on  his cigarette, blew smoke in the general direction
of the waitress. 'What you know, Warbaby?'
     'Hans Rutger Blix, forty-three, naturalized Costa Rican.' Warbaby might
have been making the opening remarks at a funeral.
     'My hairy ass,' Svobodov said, around the Marlboro.
     'Warbaby,' Orlovsky said, 'we know you were working on this before this
asshole got his throat cut.'
     'Asshole,'  Warbaby  said,  like  maybe the  dead guy had been  a close
personal  friend, a lodge-brother or  something. 'Man's dead,  is  all. That
make him an asshole?'
     Svobodov  sat there,  puffing on his Marlboro. Stubbed  it  out on  the
plate  in front of him, beside his untouched  tuna  melt. 'Asshole.  Believe
it.'
     Warbaby sighed. 'Man had a jacket, Arkady?'
     'You want  his  jacket,'  Svobodov said,  'you  tell  us what you  were
supposed to be doing for him. We know he talked to you.'
     'We never spoke.'
     'Okay,' Svobodov said. 'IntenSecure he talked to. You freelance.'
     'Strictly,' Warbaby said.  'Why did  he talk to IntenSecure?' 'Man lost
something.' 'What?'
     'Something of a personal nature.' Svobodov sighed. 'Lucius. Please.' 'A
pair of sunglasses.'
     Svobodov and  Orlovsky looked  at  each other,  then  back to  Warbaby.
'IntenSecure  brings   in  Lucius  Warbaby  because  this  guy   loses   his
sunglasses?'
     'Maybe  they were expensive,' Freddie  offered, softly. He was studying
his reflection in the mirror behind the counter.
     Orlovsky put his hairy fingers together and cracked his knuckles.
     'He  thought  he  might  have  lost them at a  party,' Warbaby offered,
'someone might even have taken them.'
     'What party?' Svobodov shifted on his stool and Rydell heard the hidden
armor creak.
     'Party at the Morrisey.'
     'Whose party?' Orlovsky, over those glasses.
     'Mr. Cody Harwood's party,' Warbaby said.
     'Harwood,' Svobodov said, 'Harwood...'
     'Name "Pavlov" ring a bell?' Freddie said, to no one in particular.
     Svobodov grunted. 'Money.'
     'None of it in Marlboros, either,' Warbaby said. 'Mr. Blix went down to
Mr. Harwood's party, had a few drinks-'
     'Had a BA level like they won't need to embalm,' Orlovsky said.
     'Had a few  drinks. Had this property in the pocket of his jacket. Next
morning,  it  was  gone.  Called  security  at  the  Morrisey.  They  called
IntenSecure. IntenSecure called me...'
     'His phone is gone,' Svobodov said. 'They took  it. Nothing to  tie him
to anyone. No agenda, notebook, nothing.'
     'Pro job,' Orlovsky intoned.
     'The glasses,' Svobodov said. 'What kind of glasses?'
     'Sunglasses,' Freddie said.
     'We found these.' Svobodov  took something  from the side pocket of his
London Fog. A Ziploc evidence bag. He held it up. Rydell saw shards of black
plastic. 'Cheap VR. Ground into the carpet.'
     'Do you know what he ran on them?' Warbaby asked.
     Now  it  was Orlovsky's  turn  for show-and-tell. He produced a  second
evidence bag, this one from inside  his black  vest. 'Looked  for  software,
couldn't find it. Then we x-ray him. Somebody shoved this down  his throat.'
A black rectangle. The stick-on label worn and stained. 'But before they cut
him.'
     'What is it?' Warbaby asked.
     'McDonna,' Svobodov said.
     'Huh?'  Freddie  was  leaning across  Warbaby  to  peer at  the  thing.
'Mc-what?'
     'Fuck chip.' It sounded to Rydell like fock cheap,  but then he got it.
'McDonna.'
     'Wonder if they read it all the way down? ' Freddie said, from the rear
of  the Patriot. He had his feet up on the back  of the front passenger seat
and the little red lights around the edges of his sneakers were spelling out
the lyrics to some song.
     'Read what?'  Rydell  was watching  Warbaby and the  Russians, who were
standing beside one of the least subtle unmarked cars Rydell had  ever seen:
a primer-gray whale with a cage of graphite expansion-grating protecting the
headlights  and  radiator.  Fine  rain  was  beading  up  on  the  Patriot's
windshield.
     'That porn  they found  down  the  guy's esophagus.' If  Warbaby always
sounded  sad, Freddie  always sounded  relaxed.  But Warbaby sounded like he
really was  sad, and Freddie's kind of relaxed sounded like he was just  the
opposite.
     'Lotta  code in  a program  like that. Hide  all  sorta good:es  in the
wallpaper,  y'know? Running fractal to get  the skin te:ture, say, you could
mix in a lot of text...'
     'You into computer stuff, Freddie?'
     'I'm Mr. Warbaby's technical consultant.'
     'What do you think they're talking about?'
     Freddie reached up  and touched one  of  his  sneakers. The  red  words
vanished. 'They're having the real conversation now.'
     'What's that?'
     'The deal conversation. We want what they got on Blix, the dead guy.'
     'Yeah? So what we got?'
     'We'?' Freddie whistled.  'You just  drivin'.'  He pulled his feet back
and  sat  up. 'But  it ain't exactly classified: IntenSecure and  DatAmerica
more or less the same thing.'
     'No shit.'  Svobodov seemed to be  doing  most of the talking.  'What's
that mean?'
     'Means we tight with a bigger data-base than  the police. Next time ol'
Rubadub needs him a look-see, he'll  be glad he did us a favor. But tonight,
man, tonight it just burrs his Russian ass.'
     Rydell remembered the time he'd gone over to 'Big George' Kechakmadze's
house for  a barbecue and the man  had tried to sign him up for the National
Rifle Association. 'You get a lot of Russians on the force, up here?'
     'Up here? All over.'
     'Kinda funny how many of those guys go into police work.'
     'Think  about  it, man. Had 'em a whole police state, over there. Maybe
they just got a feel for it.'
     Svobodov and  Orlovsky climbed into the gray  whale.  Warbaby walked to
the Patriot, using  his alloy  cane. The police car rose up about six inches
on hydraulics and began to moan and shiver, rain dancing on its long hood as
Orlovsky revved the engine.
     'Jesus,' Rydell said, 'they don't care who sees 'em comin', do they?'
     'They  want you  see 'em  coming,' Freddie said, obscurely,  as Warbaby
opened the  right rear passenger door and  began the process  of edging  his
stiff-legged bulk into the back seat.
     'Take  off,'  Warbaby said,  slamming  the door.  'Protocol.  We  leave
first.'
     'Not that way,' Freddie said.  'That'll get  us Candlestick Park.  That
way.'
     'Yes,' said Warbaby, 'we have business downtown.' Sad about it.
     Downtown  San Francisco was really something. With everything hemmed in
by hills, built up and down other hills, it gave Rydell a sense of, well, he
wasn't sure. Being somewhere. Somewhere in particular. Not that he was  sure
he liked being there.
     Maybe it just felt so  much the opposite of L.A. and  that feeling like
you were cut loose in a grid of light that  just  spilled out to the edge of
everything. Up here  he felt like he'd come  in  from somewhere,  these  old
buildings all around  and close together, nothing more  modern than that one
big spikey one with the truss-thing on it (and  he  knew  that  one was old,
too). Cold damp air, steam billowing from  grates in the pavement. People on
the streets, too, and not just the usual kind; people with jobs and clothes.
Kind of like Knoxville, he  tried  to  tell himself, but it wouldn't  stick.
Another strange place.
     'No, man, a left, a left' Freddie thumping on the back of his seat. And
another city-grid to learn. He checked the cursor on the Patriot's dash-map,
looking for a left that would get them to this hotel, the Morrisey.
     'Don't bang on Mr.  Rydell's  seat,' Warbaby said, a  sixfoot scroll of
fax bunched in his hands, 'he's  driving.' It had come in on their way here.
Rydell  figured it was  the jacket on Blix, the guy who'd  gotten his throat
cut.
     'Fassbinder,' Freddie said. 'You ever hear of this Rainer Fassbinder?'
     'I'm not  in a joking mood, Freddie,'  Warbaby  said. 'No joke.  I  ran
Separated at Birth  on this Blix, man, scanned this  stiff-shot the  Russian
sent you before? Says he looks like  Rainer Fassbinder. And that's when he's
dead,  with   his  throat  cut.  This  Fassbinder,   he  musta  been  pretty
rough-looking, huh?'
     Warbaby sighed. 'Freddie...'
     'Well, German, anyway. Clicked with the nationality-'
     'Mr. Blix  was not German, Freddie. Says here Mr. Blix wasn't  even Mr.
Blix. Now let me read. Rydell needs quiet, in order to adjust  to driving in
the city.'
     Freddie grunted, then Rydell heard his fingers clicking over the little
computer he carried everywhere.
     Rydell took the left he thought he was looking for. Combat zone. Ruins.
Fires in steel cans. Hunched dark figures, faces vampire white.
     'Don't brake,' Warbaby said. 'Or accelerate.'
     Something came  spinning,  end  over  end,  out of  the crow-shouldered
coven, splat against the windshield; clung, then fell away, leaving a smudge
of filthy yellow. Hadn't it been gray and bloody, like a loop of intestine?
     Red at the intersection.
     'Run the light,' Warbaby instructed. Rydell did, amid horns of protest.
The yellow stuff still there.
     'Pull  over. No. Right up on the sidewalk. Yes.' The Patriot's Goodyear
Streetsweepers  bouncing  up  and  over  the  jagged  curb.  'In  the  glove
compartment.'
     A  light came  on  as Rydell  opened it. Windex, a roll  of  gray paper
towels, and a box of throwaway surgical gloves.
     'Go on,' Warbaby said. 'Nobody bother us.'
     Rydell  pulled a  glove on,  took the  Windex  and the towels, got out.
'Don't  get any on  you,' he said,  thinking of Sublett. He  gave the yellow
smear a  good shot of  Windex,  wadded tip three of the towels in his gloved
hand, wiped  until the glass was clean. He skinned the glove down around the
wet wad, the  way they'd shown him in  the  Academy, but then he didn't know
what to do with it.
     'Just toss it,' Warbaby said from  inside. Rydell  did. Then he  walked
back from  the car, five paces, and threw up. Wiped his  mouth with a  clean
towel.  He got back in,  shut the door,  locked it, put  the Windex  and the
towels in the glove compartment.
     'You gonna gargle with that, Rydell?'
     'Shut up,  Freddie,' Warbaby said. The Patriot's suspension creaked  as
Warbaby  leaned  forward.  'Leavings from a slaughterhouse, most likely.' he
said. 'But it's good you know to take precautions.' He settled back. 'Had us
a group here once called Sword of the Pig. You ever hear of that?'
     'No,' Rydell said, 'I never did.'
     'They'd steal fire-extinguishers out of buildings. Re-charge them  with
blood. Blood  from a  slaughterhouse.  But they let  it out, you understand,
that this blood, well, it was human. Then they'd go  after the Jesus people,
when they marched, with those same extinguishers...'
     'Jesus,' Rydell said.
     'Exactly,' Warbaby said.
     'You see that door, there?' Freddie said.
     'What door?'  The lobby of the  Morrisey  made Rydell want  to whisper,
like being in church or a funeral home. The carpet was so soft, it  made him
want to lie down and go to sleep.
     'That black one,' Freddie said.
     Rydell  saw a  black-lacquered rectangle,  perfectly plain,  not even a
knob. Now that he thought about it, it didn't match anything else in  sight.
The rest  of  the  place was polished wood, frosted bronze, panels of carved
glass.  If  Freddie hadn't told  him  it was a door,  exactly, he would have
taken it for art or something, some kind of painting. 'Yeah? What about it?'
     'That's a restaurant,' Freddie said, 'and it's so  expensive, you can't
even go in there.'
     'Well,' Rydell said, 'there's lots of those.'
     'No, man,' Freddie insisted, 'I mean even if  you were rich,  had money
out your ass, you could not go in there. Like it's private. Japanese thing.'
     They were standing around by the security desk  while Warbaby talked to
somebody on  a house phone.  The  three  guys  on  duty  at  the  desk  wore
IntenSecure uniforms,  but  really  fancy ones, with bronze  logo-buttons on
their peaked caps.
     Rydell had parked the Patriot in an underground garage,  floors down in
the roots of the place. He hadn't  seen anything like  that before: teams of
people in  chef's whites putting  together a  hundred plates of some  skinny
kind of salad, little Sanyo vacuum-cleaners bleeping along in pastel  herds,
all  this back-stage stuff  you'd never  guess was there  if  you were  just
standing here in the lobby.
     The Executive  Suites,  where  he'd  stayed  in  Knoxville  with  Karen
Mendelsohn, had had these Korean robot bugs that cleaned up when you weren't
looking. They'd even had a special one that ate dust off the wallscreen, but
Karen hadn't been impressed. It just meant they  couldn't afford people, she
said.
     Rydell watched as Warbaby turned, handing the phone to one of the  guys
in the peaked  caps.  Warbaby gestured for Freddie and Rydell. Leaned on his
cane as they walked toward him.
     'They'll take us up now,' he said. The cap Warbaby had handed the phone
to  came out  from  behind  the  counter.  He  saw  Rydell  was  wearing  an
IntenSecure shirt  with the patches ripped off, but  he didn't say anything.
Rydell wondered when he was going to have a chance to buy  some clothes, and
where  he should go to do it. He looked at Freddie's shirt, thinking Freddie
probably wasn't the guy to ask.
     'This way, sir,'  the cap said to Warbaby. Freddie  and Rydell followed
Warbaby across the lobby. Rydell saw how  he jabbed his cane, hard, into the
carpeting, the brace on his leg ticking like a slow clock.


13. Tweaking.

     Sometimes, when she rode hard, when she could really proj, Chevette got
free of  everything: the city, her body, even time. That was the messenger's
high,  she  knew,  and  though  it felt  like  freedom,  it was  really  the
melding-with, the clicking-in, that  did  it. The bike between  her legs was
like some  hyperevolved alien tail she'd  somehow  extruded, as  though over
patient centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine,  grown  Lexan-armored
tires, near-frictionless  bearings, and gas-filled shocks.  She was entirely
part of the city then, one wild-ass little dot of energy and matter, and she
made her thousand choices, instant to instant,  according to how the traffic
flowed, how rain glinted on the streetcar tracks, how a secretary's mahogany
hair fell like grace itself, exhausted, to the shoulders of her loden coat.
     And she  was starting to get that now, in  spite of everything;  if she
just let  go, quit  thinking, let her  mind  sink down into the machinery of
bone and gear-ring and carbon-wound Japanese paper...
     But Sammy  Sal swerved  in beside  her,  bass  pumping from his  bike's
bone-conduction beatbox. She had to bunny  the curb to keep  from going over
on a BART grate. Her tires left black streaks as the particle-brakes caught,
Sammy Sal braking in tandem, his Fluoro-Rimz strobing, fading.
     'Something eating you, little honey?'  His hand on  her arm,  rough and
angry. 'Like maybe some wonder product makes you smarter, faster? Huh?'
     'Let me go.'
     'No way. I got you this job. You're gonna blow it, I'm gonna know why.'
He slammed his  other  palm on the  black foam around his bars,  killing the
music.
     'Please, Sammy, I gotta get up to Skinner's-'
     He let go of her arm. 'Why?'
     She started  to  cough, caught  it, took three deep breaths.  'You ever
steal anything, Sammy Sal? I mean, when you were working?'
     Sammy Sal looked at  her. 'No,' he said, finally, 'but I been  known to
fuck the clients.'
     Chevette shivered. 'Not me.'
     'No,'  Sammy Sal said, 'but  you don't  pull tags all the  places I do.
'Sides, you a girl.'
     'But I  stole something last night.  From this guy's pocket, up at this
party at the Hotel Morrisey.'
     Sammy Sal licked his lips. 'How come  you had your  hand in his pocket?
He somebody you know?'
     'He was some asshole,' Chevette said.
     'Oh. Him. Think I met him.'
     'Gave me a hard time. It was sticking out of his pocket.' 'You sure  it
was his pocket this hard time sticking out of?' 'Sammy Sal,' she said, 'this
is  serious. I'm  scared shitless.'  He was looking at her, close. 'That it?
You scared? Stole some shit, you scared?'
     'Bunny says some security guys called up Allied, even called  up Wilson
and everything. Looking for me.'
     'Shit,'  Sammy Sal said, still  studying her, 'I thought you  high,  on
dancer. Thought  Bunny found out. Come after  you, gonna  chew  your  little
bitch ear off. You just scared?'
     She looked at him. 'That's right.'
     'Well,'  he  said, digging  his fingers  into the black foam, 'what you
scared of?'
     'Scared they'll come up to Skinner's and find 'em.'
     'Find what?'
     'These glasses.'
     'Spy, baby? Shot? Looking,  like Alice 'n' all?' He drummed his fingers
on the black foam.
     'These black glasses. Like sunglasses, but you can't see through 'em.'
     Sammy Sal tilted his beautiful head to one side. 'What's that mean?'
     'They're just black.'
     'Sunglasses?'
     'Yeah. But just black.'
     'Huh,'  he said, 'you had  been fucking the  clients, but only just the
cute ones, like me, you'd know what those are. Tell you don't have that many
upscale  boyfriends,  pardon   me.  You  date  you  some   architects,  some
brain-surgeons, you'd know what  those are.' His hand  came  up,  forefinger
flicking the corroded  ball-chain that dangled from  the zip.tab at the neck
of Skinner's jacket. 'Those VL glasses. Virtual light.'
     She'd heard of it,  but she wasn't sure what  it was.  'They expensive,
Sammy Sal?'
     'Shit, yes. 'Bout as  much  as a Japanese car. Not all  that much more,
though.  Got  these little  EMP-drivers around  the lenses, work  your optic
nerves  direct. Friend of mine, he'd bring a pair home from the office where
he worked. Landscape architects.
     Put 'em on, you  go  out walking, everything  looks  normal, but  every
plant you see, every tree, there's this little label hanging there, what its
name is, Latin under that...'
     'But they're solid black.'
     'Not if you turn 'em on, they aren't. Turn 'em on, they don't even look
like  sunglasses. Just make you look, I dunno, serious.' He grinned at  her.
'You look too damn' serious anyway. That your problem.'
     She  shivered.  'Come back up  to  Skinner's with me,  Sammy. Okay?' 'I
don't like heights, much,' he  said. 'That little box blow right off the top
of that bridge, one night.'
     'Please, Sammy? This thing's got me tweaking. Be okay, riding with you,
but I stop  and I start thinking  about it, I'm  scared I'm gonna freeze up.
What'll I do? Maybe I get there and it's the cops? What'll Skinner  say, the
cops  come up  there? Maybe I  go  in to  work tomorrow  and  Bunny cans me.
What'll I do?'
     Sammy Sal gave her the look he'd given her the night she'd asked him to
get her on at Allied. Then he grinned. Mean and funny. All those sharp white
teeth. 'Keep it between your legs, then. Come on, you try to keep up.'
     He bongoed off the curb, his Fluoro-Rimz flaring neonwhite when he came
down  pumping. He must  have thumbed  Play then, because she caught the bass
throbbing as she came after him through the traffic.


14. Loveless.

     'You want another beer, honey?'
     The woman behind the  bar had  an intricate black tracery along  either
side of  her  shaven skull,  down to what Yamazaki  took  to be her  natural
hairline.   The   tattoo's  style   combined   Celtic  knots   and   cartoon
lightning-bolts. Her hair,  above it, was like  the  pelt of some  nocturnal
animal that had fed on peroxide and Vaseline. Her left ear had been randomly
pierced, perhaps  a dozen times,  by  a  single length of  fine steel  wire.
Ordinarily Yamazaki found this sort of display quite interesting, but now he
was lost in composition, his notebook open before him.
     'No,' he said, 'thank you.'
     'Don't  wanna  get fucked up, or what?' Her tone perfectly cheerful. He
looked up from the notebook. She was waiting.
     'Yes?' 'You wanna sit here, you gotta buy something.'
     'Beer, please.'
     'Same?'
     'Yes, please.'
     She opened a  bottle of Mexican beer, fragments of ice sliding down the
side as she  put it  down on  the  bar in front of him, and moved on to  the
customer to his left. Yamazaki returned to his notebook.
     Skinner  has tried repeatedly to convey that  there is no  agenda  here
whatever, no underlying structure. Only the bones, the bridge, the Thomasson
itself. When the Little Grande  came, it was  not Godzilla. Indeed, there is
no  precisely equivalent  myth  in  this  place  and culture (though this is
perhaps not equally  true  of Los Angeles).  The Bomb,  so long  awaited, is
gone.  In its place came these plagues, the slowest of cataclysms. But  when
Godzilla came  at last  to Tokyo,  we were foundering in denial and profound
despair. In all truth, we welcomed the most appalling  destruction. Sensing,
even as we mourned our  dead,  that  we were  again presented with the  most
astonishing of opportunities.
     'That's real nice,' the man to his left said, placing his left hand  on
Yamazaki's notebook. 'That's  gotta  be Japanese, it's  so  nice.'  Yamazaki
looked  up,  smiling uncertainly,  into eyes of  a most peculiar  emptiness.
Bright, focused, yet somehow flat.
     'From   Japan,  yes,'  Yamazaki   said.   The   hand  withdrew  slowly,
caressingly, from his notebook.
     'Loveless,' the man said.
     'I'm sorry?'
     'Loveless. My name.'
     'Yamazaki.'
     The eyes,  very pale  and wide-set, were the eyes of something watching
from beneath  still water. 'Yeah. Figured it  was  something like  that.' An
easy smile, pointed with archaic gold.
     'Yes? Like?'
     'Something Japanese. Something  'zaki, something 'zuki.  Some shit like
that.' The  smile growing somehow sharper.  'Drink up your Corona there, Mr.
Yamazuki.' The stranger's  hand, closing  hard around  his  wrist.  'Gettin'
warm, huh?'


15. In 1015.

     There was a product called Kil'Z that Rydell had gotten  to know at the
Academy. It  smelled, but faintly,  of some ancient  hair-tonic, flowery and
cool,  and you used it  in situations where  considerable  bodily fluids had
been  spilled.  It  was  an  anti-viral  agent,  capable  of  nuking  HIV's,
Crimean-Congo, Mokola fever, Tarzana Dengue, and the Kansas City flu.
     He smelled it now, as the IntenSecure  man used a blackanodyzed passkey
to open the door into 1015.
     'We'll be sure to lock it up  when we go,' Warbaby  said, touching  the
brim of his  hat with his index finger. The  IntenSecure man hesitated, then
said, 'Yessir. Anything else you want?'
     'No,' Warbaby  said,  and went  into the room,  Freddie  on his  heels.
Rydell  decided the thing for him to  do was follow them in. He did, closing
the  door in the IntenSecure man's face. Dark. The curtains  drawn. Smell of
Kil'Z. The lights came on.
     Freddie's hand on the switch. Warbaby staring at a lighter patch of the
brick-colored carpet, the place where the bed must've been.
     Rydell glanced around.  Old-fashioned, expensive-looking.  Clubby, sort
of.  The walls covered in some kind of shiny, white-and-green striped  stuff
like silk. Polished wooden furniture. Chairs upholstered  mossy green. A big
brass lamp with a dark green shade. A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame.
Rydell went over for a closer  look. A horse  pulling a kind of  two-wheeled
wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a  bearded man in a hat like Abe
Lincoln. 'Currier & Ives,' it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse.
Then he saw a round, brownish-purple splotch of dried blood on the glass. It
had crackled  up, the way mud  does in a  summer creek bed, but tiny. Hadn't
had any of that Kil'Z on it, either, by the look of it. He stepped back.
     Freddie, in his big shorts and  the shirt with the pictures of pistols,
had settled into  one of the green chairs and was opening his laptop. Rydell
watched him reel out a  little black cable  and pop it into the  jack beside
the telephone.  He  wondered if Freddie's legs  got cold, wearing shorts  up
here  in November.  He'd noticed  that some black  people were so  far  into
fashion, they'd wear clothes like there wasn't any such thing as weather.
     Warbaby just stared at the place where the bed had been, looking sad as
ever. 'Well?' he said.
     'I'm gettin' it, I'm gettin' it,' Freddie said, twiddling a little ball
on his laptop.
     Warbaby grunted. Watching him, it looked to Rydell as though the lenses
of his black-framed  glasses winked black for a  second. Trick of the light.
Then  Rydell got  this funny  feeling,  because  Warbaby just  looked  right
through  him, his traveling  gaze  fixed  on some moving something so keenly
that Rydell himself was turning to look-at nothing.
     He looked  back  at  Warbaby. Warbaby's  cane came up, pointing  at the
space where the bed would  have  been, then  swung back down to the  carpet.
Warbaby sighed.
     'Want the site-data from SFPD now?' Freddie asked.
     Warbaby  grunted.  His  eyes were  darting  from  side  to side. Rydell
thought of tv documentaries about voodoo, the priests' eyes rolling when the
gods got into them.
     Freddie   twirled  the  trackball  under  his  finger.  'Prints,  hair,
skin-flakes... You know what a hotel room is.'
     Rydell couldn't stand it. He stepped in front of Warbaby and looked him
in the eye. 'What the hell you doing?'
     Warbaby  saw  him. Gave  him a slow sad smile and removed  his glasses.
Took  a big, navy  blue silk handkerchief from the side  pocket  of his long
coat and polished the glasses. He handed them to Rydell. 'Put them on.'
     Rydell looked down at the glasses  and saw  that  the lenses were black
now.
     'Go on,' Warbaby said.
     Rydell noticed  the weight as he slid them on. Pitch  black. Then there
was  a stutter  of soft fuzzy  ball-lightning, like  what  you saw when  you
rubbed your eyes in  the dark,  and he  was looking at Warbaby.  Just behind
Warbaby,  hung on some invisible  wall, were  words, numbers, bright yellow.
They  came  into focus as he looked at them,  somehow losing Warbaby, and he
saw that they were forensic stats.
     'Or,' Freddie said, 'you can just be here now-'
     And  the bed was  back, sodden with blood, the man's soft, heavy corpse
splayed out like a frog. That thing beneath his chin, blue-black, bulbous.
     Rydell's  stomach  heaved,  bile rose  in his throat, and then a  naked
woman rolled up from another bed, in a different room, her hair like  silver
in  some impossible  moonlight- Rydell yanked the  glasses  off. Freddie lay
back  in the chair, shaking  with silent laughter,  his  laptop  across  his
knees. 'Man,' he managed, 'you oughta seen the  look you had! Put  parta the
guy's porno on there from Arkady's evidence report...'
     'Freddie,' Warbaby said, 'are you  all that  anxious to be  looking for
work?'
     'Nossir, Mr. Warbaby.'
     'I can be hard, Freddie. You know that.'
     'Yessir.' Freddie sounded worried now.
     'A  man  died in  this room.  Someone bent  over him on this  bed,'  he
gestured at the bed that wasn't there, 'cut him  a new smile, and pulled his
tongue out through it. That isn't  a  casual homicide. You don't learn those
kinds of tricks with anatomy from watching television, Freddie.' He held out
his  hand  to  Rydell.  Rydell gave him the glasses. Their lenses were black
again.
     Freddie swallowed. 'Yessir, Mr. Warbaby. Sorry.'
     'How'd you do that?' Rydell asked.
     Warbaby wiped the  glasses again and put them  back on. They were clear
now. 'There are drivers in  the frames  and  lenses. They affect the  nerves
directly.'
     'It's a  virtual light display,'  Freddie  said,  eager  to change  the
subject. 'Anything can be digitized, you can see it there.'
     'Telepresence,' Rydell said.
     'Naw,'  Freddie  said,  'that's  light.  That's photons coming  out and
hitting on your eye. This doesn't work like  that. Mr. Warbaby walks  around
and looks at stuff, he can see the data-feed at the same time. You put those
glasses  on  a  man doesn't have eyes, optic  nerve's  okay, he can see  the
input. That's why they built the first ones. For blind people.'
     Rydell went  to the drapes,  pulled them apart,  looked down into  some
night street in this other city. People walking there, a few.
     'Freddie,'  Warbaby  said,  'flip  me  that  Washington  girl  off  the
decrypted IntenSecure feed. The one works for Allied Messenger Service.'
     Freddie nodded, did something with his computer.
     'Yes,'  Warbaby  said,  gazing  at something  only  he could see, 'it's
possible. Entirely possible. Rydell,' and he removed the glasses,  'you have
a look.' Rydell let the drapes fall back, went to Warbaby, took the glasses,
put them  on. Somehow he felt it would be a mistake to  hesitate, even if it
meant having to look at the dead guy again.
     Black into color into full face and profile of this girl. Fingerprints.
Image  of  her  right retina  blown  up  to  the  size of  her head.  Stats.
WASHINGTON,  CHEVETTE-MARII.. Big  gray  eyes, long straight nose,  a little
grin for  the camera.  Dark hair cut short and spikey, except for this crazy
ponytail stuck up from the crown of her head.
     'Well,' Warbaby asked, 'what do you think?'
     Rydell couldn't figure what he was being asked.  Finally he  just  said
'Cute.'
     He heard Freddie snort, like that was a dumb thing to say.
     But Warbaby said 'Good. That way you remember.'


16. Sunflower.

     Sammy Sal lost her, where Bryant stuttered out in that jackstraw tumble
of  concrete tank-traps. Big  as  he was, he had  no  equal  when it came to
riding tight; he could take turns that just weren't possible; he could bongo
and pull  a three-sixty if he  had to, and Chevette had seen him do it on  a
bet. But she had a good idea where she'd find him.
     She looked up, just as she whipped between the first of  the slabs, and
the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all  torches and neon. She'd
seen  pictures of what it had looked like, before, when they drove cars back
and forth on it all day, but she'd never quite believed them. The bridge was
what  it was, and somehow always  had been.  Refuge,  weirdness,  where  she
slept, home to however many and all their dreams.
     She  skidded past a fish-wagon, losing traction in shaved ice,  in gray
guts  the gulls  would  fight over in  the  morning.  The  fish  man  yelled
something after her, but she didn't catch it.
     She rode on, between  stalls and stands  and  the  evening's  commerce,
looking for Sammy Sal.
     Found him where she  thought she  would, leaning  on his bars beside an
espresso  wagon, not even breathing hard. A Mongolian  girl with  cheekbones
like honey-coated  chisels  was  running  him  a  cup. Chevette  bopped  the
particle-brakes and slid in  beside him. 'Thought I'd have time for  a short
one,' he said, reaching for the tiny cup.
     Her legs ached with trying to keep up with him. 'You better,' she said,
with a glance toward the bridge,  then  she gestured  to the girl to run her
one. She watched the steaming puck of brown grounds  thumped out,  the fresh
scoop, the quick short tamp.  The  girl swung  the handle up and twisted the
basket back into the machine.
     'You know,' Sammy Sal  said, ausing  before a first  shallow sip,  'you
shouldn't have this kind of problem. You don't need to. There's only but two
kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they're one kind  We're
the other.  Used  to be,  like, a  middle  class, people in between. But not
anymore.  How you and I relate to those other people, we proj their messages
on. We get paid for it. We try nt to drip rain on the carpet. And we get by,
okay? But what happens on the interface? What happens when we touch?'
     Chevette burned her mouth on espresso.
     'Crime,' Sammy Sal said, 'sex. Maybe drugs.' He put his cup down on the
wagon's plywood counter. 'About covers it.
     'You fuck them,' Chevette said 'You said.'
     Sammy Sal shrugged. 'I like to. Trouble comes  down from that,  I'm  up
for it. But you just went and  did something, no reason. Reached through the
membrane. Let your fingers do the walking. Bad idea.'
     Chevette blew on her coffee. 'I know.'
     'So how you going to deal witi whatever's coming down?'
     'I'm going up to Skinner's room, get those glasses,  take 'em up on the
roof, and throw 'em over.'
     'Then what?'
     'Then I go on the way I do, 'til somebody turns up.'
     'Then what?'
     'Didn't do it. Don't know shit Never happened.'
     He  nodded, slow, but he was studying  her.  'Uh-huh. Maybe. Maybe not.
Somebody  wants  those glasses back, they can  lean on you real hard. Anther
way to go: we get 'em, ride back over to Allied, tell 'em how it happened.'
     'We?'
     'Uh-huh. I'll go with you.' 'I'll lose my job.'
     'You can get you another job.'
     She drank  the little  cup off in a gulp. Wiped her mouth with the back
of her hand. 'Job's all I got, Sammy. You know that. You got it for me.'
     'You  got  a  place  to  sleep,  up  there.  You  got  that  crazy  old
motherfucker took you in-' 'I feed him, Sammy Sal'
     'You got your ass intact,  honey.  Some rich man decide  to  screw  you
over, 'cause you took his data-glasses, maybe that ceases to be the case.'
     Chevette put her empty cup down on  the  counter, dug in the pockets of
her jacket. Gave the  girl fifteen for the two coffees and a two-dollar tip.
Squared her shoulders under Skinner's jacket, the ball-chains rattling. 'No.
Once that shit's in the Bay, nobody can prove I did anything.'
     Sammy Sal sighed. 'You're an innocent.'
     It sounded funny, like she didn't know you could use the word that way.
'You coming, Sammy Sal?'
     'What for?'
     'Talk to Skinner. Get between  him  and his  magazines.  That's where I
left them. Behind his magazines. Then he won't see me get them out.  I'll go
up on the roof and off them.'
     'Okay,' he said, 'but I say you'll just be fucking up worse.'
     'I'll take the  chance, okay?' She  dismounted and started wheeling her
bike toward the bridge.
     'I guess you will,' Sammy Sal said,  but then he was off his bike, too,
and pushing it, behind her.
     There'd  only  ever been  three really good, that  was to say seriously
magic, times in Chevette's  life. Oue  was the night Sammy Sal had  told her
he'd tried to get her on at Allied, and he had.  One was the day  she'd paid
cash money  for her bike at City Wheels, and rode right on out of there. And
there'd  been the  night she first met Lowell at Cognitive Dissidents-if you
could count that now as lucky.
     Which  was not to  say  that these were the times she'd been  luckiest,
because  those were all :imes that had been uniformly and life-threateningly
shitty, except for the part where the luck cut in.
     She'd been  lucky the night she'd gone  over the razor-wire and  out of
the Juvenile Center outside Beaverton,  but that  had been one deeply shitty
night. She had scars on both palms to prove it.
     And  she'd been very lucky the  time she'd first wandered out  onto the
bridge, the lower deck,  her knees wobbling  with a fever she'd picked up on
her way down the coast.  Everything hurt her: the lights, every color, every
sound,  her  mind pressing out  into the  world  like a swollen  ghost.  She
remembered  the loose,  flapping  sole  of  her  sneaker dragging  over  the
littered deck, how that hurt her, too, and how she had to sit down, finally,
everything  up and turning,  around her, the  Korean man  running out of his
little store  to yell at her, get up, get  up,  not here,  not here. And Not
Here had seemed like such a totally  good idea, she'd  gone straight  there,
right over backward, and hadn't even felt her skull slam the pavement.
     And that was where Skinner had  found her, though he didn't remember or
maybe  want  to  talk  about it;  she was  never sure.  She didn't  think he
could've gotten her up to his room on his own; he needed he.p to get back up
there himself,  with his hip  and everything. But there were still days when
an energy got into him and you cculd see  how strong he must've  been, once,
and then he'd  do things you didn't  think  he could  do, so  she'd never be
sure.
     The  first  thing  she'd   seen,  opening  her   eyes,  was  the  round
church-window with the  rags stuck into the gaps, and sun coming through it,
little dots and blobs of colors she'd never seen before, all swimming in her
fevered eye like bugs in water. Then the bone-crack time, the virus wringing
her like the old man had wrung the gray towels he wrapped her  head in. When
the fever broke  and rolled away, out a hundred miles it felt like, back out
to  there and over the rim  of  sickness, her  hair fell out in dry  clumps,
stuck to the damp towels like some kind of dirty stuffing.
     When it grew back,  it came in darker, nearly  black. So after that she
felt  sort  of like  a  different  person. Or  anyway  her own person, she'd
figured.
     And she'd stayed with Skinner,  doing what he said to get them food and
keep  things working up in  his room. He'd send her down to the  lower deck,
where  the junk-dealers spread their  stuff. Send her down with anything:  a
wrench that said 'BMW' on  the side, a crumbling cardboard box of those flat
black things that  had  played music  once, a  bag of plastic dinosaurs. She
never figured any of it would be worth anything, but  somehow it always was.
The wrench bought a  week's food, and two  of the round things  brought even
more. Skinner  knew where  old things came from, what they'd  been  for, and
could  guess when somebody'd want  them. At first she was worried  that  she
wouldn't get enough for the things she sold, but he didn't seem to care.  If
something didn't  sell, like the  plastic dinosaurs, it  just went back into
stock, what he called the stuff ranged around the bases of the four walls.
     As  she'd  gotten stronger,  and her  new hair grew  in, she'd  started
ranging farther from the room on top  of the tower. Not into either city, at
first, though  she'd  walked  over to  Oakland a couple of times,  over  the
cantilever, and looked out at it.
     Things felt different over  there, though  she was never sure  why. But
where she felt best was on the suspension bridge, all wrapped in it, all the
people hanging and  hustling and doing what they did, and the way the  whole
thing grew a little, changed a little, every day. There wasn't anything like
that, not that she knew of, not up in Oregon.
     At first  she didn't even know that it made her feel  good; it was just
this weird thing, maybe the  fever had left her a  little crazy, but one day
she'd decided she was just happy, a little happy, and she'd have to get used
to it.
     But it turned  out  you could be sort of happy and restless at the same
time, so she started keeping back a little of Skinner's junk-money to use to
explote the city. And that was  plenty to do, for a while. She  found Haight
Street and walked it all  the  way to  the wall  around Skywalker,  with the
Temple of Doom and everything sticking up in there, but she didn't try to go
in. There was this long skinny park that led up to it, called the Panhandle,
and that was 5till public. Way too public, she thought,  with people, mostly
old or  anyway looking  that  way,  stretched out  side by side, wrapped  in
silvery plastic to keep the rays off, this crinkly stuff that glittered like
those Elvis suits  in a video they'd showed them sometimes, up in Beaverton.
It kind of made her think of maggots, like if somebody rolled each one up in
its  own little piece  of foil. They had a way  of moving like that,  just a
little bit, and it creeped her out.
     The Haight sort  of  creeped  her  out,  too,  even though  there  were
stretches  that felt  almost like you were on the  bridge, nobody  normal in
sight and people doing things right out in  public, like the cops were never
going  to  come at all. But  she wasn't ever scared, on  the  bridge,  maybe
because there were always people around she knew, people who lived there and
knew Skinner. But  she liked looking around the Haight  because there were a
lot of little shops, a lot of  places that  sold  cheap food.  She knew this
bagel place where you could buy  them a day old, and  Skinner said they were
better that way anyway. He said fresh bagels were the next  thing to poison,
like they'd plug you up or something. He had a lot of ideas  like that. Most
of  the shops,  she could  actually  go into, if she was quiet and  smile  a
little and kept her hands in her pockets.
     One day  on Haight  she  saw this shop  called Colored People  and  she
couldn't figure out what it  sold. There was a curtain behind the window and
a few things set out  in  front of that: cactus in pots, big  rusty hunks of
metal, and a bunch of these little steel  things, polished and bright. Rings
and things.  Little rods with round balls on the ends. They were hung on the
needles of the cactus  and spread out on the rusted metal. She decided she'd
open the door and just look in, because she'd  seen a couple of people going
in and out and knew it wasn't locked. A big fat guy in white coveralls, with
his  head  all shaved,  coming  out,  whistling, and these  two tall  women,
black-haired, like handsome crows, all  dressed in black, going in. She just
wondered what it was.
     She stuck  her  head in there. There  was a  woman  with short red hair
behind  a  counter,  and  every  wall  covered  with  these  bright cartoony
pictures,  colors  that made  your  eyes  jump, all snakes and  dragons  and
everything. So many pictures  it  was hard to take it in, so it wasn't until
the woman said come on, don't just block the door, and Chevette had come in,
that  she saw this  woman wore a sleeveless flannel shirt, open  all the way
down, and her front and arms all covered, solid, with those same pictures.
     Now Chevette had seen tattoos in the Juvenile Center, and on the street
before that, but those were the kind you did yourself, with ink and needles,
thread  and an old ballpoint. She walked over and  took a good long look  at
the colors exploding between the woman's breasts-which, though she was maybe
thirty, weren't as big as Chevette's-and there was an octopus there, a rose,
bolts  of blue lightning, all  of it tangling together, no untouched skin at
all.
     'You want something,' the woman said, 'or you just looking?'
     Chevette blinked.  'No,' she  heard  herself say,  'but I  was sort  of
wondering what those little metal things are, in the window.'
     The woman  swung a big black book around on the counter,  Like a school
binder except  its covers were chrome-studded black leather. Flipped it open
and Chevette was looking at this guy's thing, a big one, just hanging there.
There were two little steel balls on either side of its wedge-shaped head.
     Chevette just sort of grunted.
     'Call that an amphalang,' the woman said. She  started flipping through
the album. 'Barbells,'  she said. 'Septum spike. Labret stud. That's a chunk
ring. This one's called a milkchurn. These are bomb weights. Surgical steel,
niobium, white gold,  fourteen-carat.'  She flipped it back to the jim  with
the  bolt, sideways through the  end of it.  Maybe it was a  trick, Chevette
thought, a trick picture.
     'That's gotta hurt,' Chevette said.
     'Not as much as you'd think,' this big deep voice, 'and then  it starts
to feel jus' good...'
     Chevette  looked up at this black guy, his big  white  grin,  all those
teeth, a micropore  filtration-mask pulled down under his chin, and that was
how she'd met Samuel Saladin DuPree.
     Two days later she saw him  again in Union Square, hanging with a bunch
of bike  messengers. She'd already put messengers down as something to watch
for in the city. They had clothes and hair like nobody  else, and bikes with
neon and light-up wheels, handlebars carved up and over like scorpion-tails.
Helmets with little radios  built  in. Either they were going somewhere fast
or they were  just  goofing, hanging, drinking coffee. He was standing there
with his legs over either side  of the cross-tube of his bike, eating half a
sandwich. Music was coming out of the black-flecked pink frame, mostly bass,
and he was sort of bopping to it. She edged up  to get a  better look at the
bike, how it was made,  the intricacy of its brakes and shifters pulling her
straight in. Beauty.
     'Dang,' he said,  around a mouthful of  sandwich, 'dang, my am-phalang.
Where did you get those shoes?'
     They  were Skinner's, old canvas  sneakers,  too  long for her so she'd
stuck some paper in the toes.
     'Here.'  He  handed  her  the  other half  of  his sandwich. 'I'm  full
already.'
     'Your bike,' she said, taking the sandwich.
     'What about it?'
     'It's... it's...'
     'Like it?'
     'Uh-huh!'
     He  grinned.  'Sugawara  frame,  Sugawara  rings  'n'   'railers,  Zuni
hydraulics. Clean.'
     'I like the wheels,' Chevette said.
     'Well,'  he said,  'that's  just flash. Lets some motherfucker see  you
'fore he runs you over, y'know?'
     Chevette touched the handlebars. Felt that music.
     'Eat that sandwich,' he said. 'Look like you need it.'
     She did, and she did, and that was how they got to talking.
     Shouldering  their  bikes up the  plywood stairs, Chevette telling  him
about  the  Japanese  girl,  how  she fell  out of that  elevator. How  she,
Chevette,  wouldn't even have been at that party if she hadn't been standing
right there,  right then. Sammy grunting, his Fluoro-Rimz gone dead opal now
they weren't turning.
     'Who was it throwing this do, Chev? You think to ask anybody that?'
     Remembering that Maria. 'Cody. Said it was Cody's party...'
     Sammy Sal stopped, his brows lifting. 'Huh. Cody Harwood?'
     She shrugged,  the  paper  bike  next to  weightless on  her  shoulder.
'Dunno.'
     'You know who that is?'
     'No.' Reaching the platform, putting the bike down to wheel it.
     'That's some serious money.  Advertising. Harwood  Levine, but that was
his father.'
     'Well, I said it was rich.' Not paying him much attention.
     'His father's company did Millbank's PR, both eleclions.'
     But she was activating the recognition-loop now, not bothering with the
screamers  from Radio Shack. Sammy's Fluoro-Rimz  pulsed as he set his  bike
down beside hers. 'I'll loop it to mine. Be okay here anyway.'
     'That's what I said,' Sammy said, 'last two I bet.' He watched her pull
the  loop  out,  twist   it  around  his  bike's   frame,  careful   of  the
pink-and-black enamel, and seal it with her thumbprint.
     She headed  for the yellow lift, glad to see it there, where she'd left
it,  and  not  at  the  top  of  the  track. 'Let's  do this  thing,  okay?'
Remembering she'd meant to  buy Skinner some soup from Thai  Johnny's wagon,
that sweet-sour lemnon one he liked.
     When she'd told Sammy she  wanted to  mess, wanted  her own bike,  he'd
gotten  her  this  little Mexican headset  taught you  every  Street  in San
Francisco. Three days and she had it down, pretty much, even though he  said
that wasn't  like  the  map  in  a messenger's  head.  You  needed  to  know
buildings,  how  to get into them, how to  act, how to keep your wheels from
getting stolen. But when he'd taken her in to meet Bunny, that was magic.
     Three weeks and she'd earned enough to buy her first serious bike. That
was magic, too.
     Somewhere around then she started hanging out after work with a  couple
of the other Allied girls, Tami Two  and Alice Maybe, and that was how she'd
wound up at Cognitive Dissidents, that night she'd met Lowell.
     'Nobody locks their door here,' Sammy said, on the ladder below her, as
she lifted the hatch.
     Chevette closed her eyes, saw a bunch of cops (whatever that would look
like) standing around Skinner's room. Opened her eyes and stuck her head up,
eyes level with the floor.
     Skinner was on his bed, his little television propped on his chest, big
old yellow toenails sticking out of holes in his lumpy gray socks. He looked
at her over the television.
     'Hey,' she said, 'I brought Sammy. From work.'  She climbed  up, making
room for Sammy Sal's head and shoulders.
     'Howdy,' Sammy Sal said.
     Skinner  just  stared  at  him, colors from the little screen  flicking
across his face.
     'How you doin'?' Sammy Sal asked, climbing up.
     'Bring anything to eat?' Skinner asked her.
     'Thai Johnny'll have  soup  ready in a while,' she  said, moving toward
the shelves, the magazines. Dumb-ass thing to  say and she knew  it, because
Johnny's soup was always ready;  he'd started it years  ago  and  just  kept
adding to the pot.
     'How you doin', Mr. Skinner?'  Sammy Sal  stood slightly  hunched, feet
apart, holding his  helmet with  both hands, like a boy saying hello to  his
girlfriend's father. He winked at Chevette.
     'What  you  winkin' at, boy?' Skinner  shut the set off and snapped its
screen shut. Chevette  had  bought it  for him  off a container-ship  in the
Trap. He said he couldn't tell the difference anymore between the 'programs'
and the 'commercials,' whatever that meant.
     'Somethin'  in  my eye, Mr.  Skinner,' Sammy  Sal  said, his  big  feet
shifting,  even more  like a nervous boyfriend. Made Chevette want to laugh.
She got behind Sammy's back  and  reached in  behind  the magazines.  It was
there. Into her pocket.
     'You ever seen the view from up top here, Sammy?' She knew she had this
big crazy grin on,  and Skinner was staring at it, trying to figure what was
happening, but she didn't care. She swung up the ladder to the roof-hatch.
     'Gosh, no, Chevette, honey. Must be just breathtaking.'
     'Hey,' Skinner said, as she opened the hatch, 'what's got into you?'
     Then she was up and out and into one of the weird pockets  of stillness
you got  up there sometimes. Usually the wind made  you want to lie down and
hang  on, but then there  were  these patches when nothing moved, dead calm.
She heard Sammy  Sal coming up the ladder behind her. She had the  case out,
was moving toward the edge.
     'Hey,' he said, 'lemme see.'
     She raised the thing, winding up to throw.
     He plucked it from her fingers.
     'Hey!'
     'Shush.' Opening it, pulling them out. 'Huh. Nice ones...'
     'Sammy!' Reaching for them. He gave her the case instead.
     'See how you do this now?' Opening them, one side-piece in either hand.
'Left is aus, right's em. Just move 'em a little.' She saw  how he was doing
it, in the  light  that spilled up through the  hatch  from  Skinner's room.
'Here. Check it out.' He put them on her.
     She was facing the city when he did it. Financial district, the Pyramid
with  its brace on from the Little Grande,  the hills behind  that.  'Fuck a
duck,'  she  said,  these  towers  blooming  there,  buildings  bigger  than
anything, a stone regular grid of them, marching in from the hills. Each one
maybe  four blocks at the base, rising straight and featureless to spreading
screens like the colander she used to steam vegetables. Then Chinese writing
filled the sky. 'Sammy...'
     She felt him grab her as she lost her balance.
     The Chinese writing twisted into English.
     SUNFLOWER CORPORATION
     'Sammy...'
     'Huh?'
     'What the fuck is this?' Anything she focused on, another label lit the
sky, dense patches of technical words she didn't understand.
     'How should I know,' he said. 'Let me see.' Reaching for the glasses.
     'Hey,' she heard Skinner say, his voice carrying up through  the hatch,
'it's Scooter. What you doin' back here?'
     Sammy  Sal pulled  the glasses off and she was  kneeling,  looking down
through  the hatch at that Japanese nerd who came around to see Skinner, the
college  boy  or social worker  or  whatever he was. But he looked even more
lost than usual. He looked scared. And there was somebody with him.
     'Hey, Scooter,' Skinner said, 'how you doing?'
     'This Mr. Loveless,' Yamazaki said. 'He ask to meet you.'
     Gold  flashed up at Chevette from the stranger's  grin.  'Hi there,' he
said, taking his hand out of the side pocket of his long black raincoat. The
gun wasn't very big, but there was something too easy in the way he held it,
like a carpenter  with a hammer. He  was wearing surgical gloves. 'Why don't
you come on down here?'


17. The trap.

     'How  this works,' Freddie said,  handing Rydell a debit-card, 'you pay
five hundred to get in, then you're credited for five hundred dollars' worth
of merchandise.'
     Rydell looked at the  card. Some Dutch bank.  If this was how they were
going  to pay him, up  here,  maybe  it  was  time he asked them  what  he'd
actually be getting. But maybe  he should wait until Freddie was in a better
mood.
     Freddie  said  this  Container City  place  was  a good  quick bet  for
clothes. Regular clothes, Rydell  hoped. They'd left Warbaby drinking herbal
tea in some kind of weird coffee  joint because he said  he needed to think.
Rydell had  gone out to the Patriot  while Warbaby and  Freddie held a quick
huddle, there.
     'What if he wants us, wants the car?'
     'He'll  beep  us,'  Freddie  said.  He  showed  Rydell  how  to put the
debit-card into a machine that gave him a five-hundred-dollar Container City
magstrip and  validated  the  parking on  the Patriot.  'This way.'  Freddie
pointed at a row of turnstiles.
     'Aren't you gonna buy one?' Rydell asked.
     'Shit, no,' Freddie said. 'I don't get my clothes off boats.' He took a
card out of his wallet and showed Rydell the IntenSecure logo.
     'I thought you guys were strictly freelance.'
     'Strictly  but  frequently,'  Freddie  said,  feeding  the  card  to  a
turnstile. It clicked him through. Rydell  fed it the magstrip and  followed
him.

     'Costs people five hundred bucks just to get in here?'
     'Why  people call it the Trap. But that's just how  they make  sure the
overhead's covered. You don't come in here unless you know you're gonna drop
that much. Gives 'em a guaranteed per-cap.'
     Container City turned out to be the biggest semi-roofed mall Rydell had
ever seen, if  you could call something a mall that had  ships parked in it,
big  ones.  And the five-hundred-dollar  guaranteed purchase didn't  seem to
have put anybody off; there were more people in here than out on the street,
it looked like. 'Hong Kong money,' Freddie said. 'Bought 'em  a hunk  of the
Embarcadero.'
     'Hey,' Rydell  said, pointing at  a  dim, irregular outline  that  rose
beyond  gantries  and  towers of floodlights, 'that's that  bridge, the  one
people live on.'
     'Yeah,' Freddie  said,  giving  him  a funny look,  'crazy-ass people.'
Steering Rydell onto an  escalator that ran up the  white-painted flank of a
container ship.
     Rydell  looked  around  at Container City  as  they rose. 'Crazier than
anything in L.A.,' he said, admiringly.
     'No way,' Freddie said, 'I'm from L.A. This just a mall, man.'
     Rydell bought a burgundy nylon bomber, two pairs of black jeans, socks,
underwear,  and  three  black t-shirts.  That  came  out to  just over  five
hundred. He used the debit-card to make up the difference.
     'Hey,'  he told Freddie, his  purchases in a big  yellow Container City
bag, 'that's a pretty good deal. Thanks.'
     Freddie shrugged. 'Where they say those jeans made?' Rydell checked the
tag. 'African Union.'
     'Slave labor,' Freddie said, 'you shouldn't buy that shit.'
     'I didn't think about it. They got any food in here?'
     'Food Fair, yeah...'
     'You ever try this Korean pickled shit? It's hot, man...'
     'I got an ulcer.' Freddie was  methodically spooning plain white frozen
yogurt into his mouth with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
     'Stress. That's stress-related, Freddie.'
     Freddie looked at Rydell over  the rim of  the pink plastic yogurt cup.
'You trying to be funny?'
     'No,'  Rydell said. 'I just know about  ulcers because they  thought my
daddy had them.'
     'Well, didn't he? Your "daddy"? Did he have 'em or not?'
     'No,' Rydell said. 'He had stomach cancer.'
     Freddie winced, put his yogurt down, rattled the  ice in his  paper cup
of Evian and drank some. 'Hernandez,' he said, 'he told us you were trainin'
to be a cop, some redneck place...'
     'Knoxville,' Rydell said. 'I was a cop. Just not for very long.'
     'I hear you, I hear you,' Freddie said, like he wanted Rydell to relax,
maybe even to like him. 'You got trained and all? Cop stuff?'
     'Well,  they try to give you a little bit of  everything,' Rydell said.
'Crime scene investigation... Like up in that room today. I could  tell they
hadn't done the Super Glue thing.'
     'No?'
     'No.  There's  this  chemical in Super Glue sticks to the  water  in  a
print,  see, and  about ninety-eight percent  of a print is water. So you've
got this little heater, for the glue? Screws into a regular light socket? So
you tape up the doors and windows with garbage  bags and stuff and you leave
that little heater turned on. Leave it twenty-four hours, then you come back
and purge the room.'
     'How you do that?'
     'Open up the  doors, windows. Then you dust. But they hadn't done that,
over  at the hotel. It leaves this film all over. And  a  smell...'  Freddie
raised his eyebrows. 'Shit. You almost kinda technical, aren't you, Rydell?'
     'Mostly it's  just  common  sense,'  he said. 'Like not  going  to  the
bathroom.'
     'Not going?'
     'At a crime scene. Don't ever use  the toilet. Don't flush it. You drop
something  in a  toilet, the way the water goes. You ever notice how it goes
up, underneath there?' Freddie nodded.
     'Well, maybe your  perp flushed it after he dropped something in there.
But it doesn't always work like it's meant to, and it might be just floating
back there... You come in and flush it again, then it's gone for sure.'
     'Damn,' Freddie said, 'I never knew that.'
     'Common sense,' Rydell said, wiping his lips with a paper napkin.
     'I think Mr. Warbaby's right about you, Rydell.'
     'How's that?'
     'He says  we're  wasting you, just letting you drive that four-by-four.
Bein' straight with  you,  man, I wasn't sure, myself.' Freddie waited, like
he figured Rydell might take offense.
     'Well?'
     'You know that brace on Mr. Warbaby's leg?'
     'Yeah.'
     'You  know  that  bridge, the one  you noticed when we were  coming  up
here?'
     'Yeah.'
     'And Warbaby, he showed  you that  picture of that tough-ass  messenger
kid?'
     'Yeah.'
     'Well,' Freddy said, 'She's the one Mr. Warbaby figures took that man's
property.  And  she lives out on that  bridge, Rydell. And that bridge, man,
that's  one  evil motherfucking place. Those people anarchists, antichrists,
cannibal motherfuckers out there, man...'
     'I heard it was just a bunch of homeless  people,' Rydell said, vaguely
recollecting some  documentary he'd seen in Knoxville, 'just sort  of making
do.'
     'No,  man,' Freddie  said, 'homeless fuckers, they're  on  the  street.
Those  bridge motherfuckers, they're like king-hell satanists and  shit. You
think you  can just move on out there yourself? No fucking way. They'll just
let their own kind, see? Like a cult. With 'nitiations and shit.'
     'Nitiations?'
     'Black  'nitiates,'  Freddie  said,  leaving  Rydell  to decide that he
probably didn't mean it racially.
     'Okay,'  Rydell  said, 'but what's  it got  to do  with  that  brace on
Warbaby's knee?'
     'That's  where  he got that  knee hassled,' Freddie  said. 'He went out
there, knowing he was takin' his life in his hands,  to try and recover this
little baby. Baby girl,' Freddie  added,  like  he  liked the ring  of that.
"Cause these bridge motherfuckers, they'll do that.'
     'Do what?' Rydell asked, flashing back to the Pooky Bear killings.
     'They steal  children,' Freddie said. 'And Mr. Warbaby and me, we can't
either of us go  out there  anymore, Rydell, because those motherfuckers are
on to us, you followin' me?'
     'So  you want me to?' Rydell asked, stuffing his folded napkin into the
oily white paper box that had held his two Kim Chee WaWa's.
     'I'll let Mr. Warbaby explain it to you,' Freddie said.


     They found  Warbaby where they'd left him, in this dark, high-ceilinged
coffee place  in what Freddie  said was  North Beach.  He  was wearing those
glasses again and Rydell wondered what he might be seeing.
     Rydell had brought his blue Samsonite in from the Patriot, his bag from
Container City. He  went into the bathroom to change his  clothes. There was
just the one, unisex, and it really was a bathroom because it had  a bathtub
in it.  Not like anybody  used it, because there  was  this  mermaid painted
full-size on the inside, with a brown cigarette  butted  out on her stomach,
just above where the scales started.
     Rydell  discovered  that  Kevin's  khakis  were  split up  the ass.  He
wondered how long he'd been walking around like  that. But he hadn't noticed
it  back at Container City, so  he hoped it had happened in the car. He took
the IntenSecure shirt off, stuffed it into the  wastebasket, put  on one  of
the black t-shirts.  Then he  unlaced his trainers and tried to figure out a
way to change pants, socks, and underwear without having to put his  feet on
the floor, which was wet.  He  thought  about doing it in  the tub, but that
looked  sort  of  scummy,  too.  Decided you could  manage  it,  sort of, by
standing with  your feet  on  the top  of your sneakers,  and then  sort  of
half-sitting on the toilet. He  put everything he took off into  the basket.
Wondering how much  the debit-card Freddie had given him was still good for,
he transferred his wallet to the right  back pocket of his new jeans. Put on
his  new jacket. Washed  his hands  and  face in a  gritty trickle of water.
Combed his hair. Packed  the rest  of his new  clothes into  the  Samsonite,
saving the Container City bag to keep dirty laundry in.
     He wanted a shower, but he didn't know when he'd get one. Clean clothes
were the next best thing.
     Warbaby looked up  when Rydell got back to his  table.  'Freddie's told
you a little about the bridge, has he, Rydell?'
     'Says it's all baby-eatin' satanists.'
     Warbaby glowered  at Freddie. 'Too colorfully put, perhaps, but all too
painfully close to the  truth, Mr. Rydell. Not at all a wholesome place. And
effectively  outside  the  reach of  the law.  You won't  find  our  friends
Svobodov or Orlovsky out there, for instance. Not in any official capacity.'
     Rydell caught Freddie start to grin at that, but saw how it was pinched
off by Warbaby's glare.
     'Freddie gave me the idea you want me to go out there,  Mr. Warbaby. Go
out there and find that girl.
     'Yes,' Warbaby said, gravely,  'we do. I wish that I could  tell you it
won't be dangerous, but that is not the case.'
     'Well... How dangerous is it, Mr. Warbaby?'
     'Very,' Warbaby said.
     'And that girl, she's dangerous, too?'
     'Extremely,' Warbaby said, 'and all the more because she doesn't always
look it. You saw what was done to that man's throat, after all...'
     'Jesus,' Rydell said, 'you think that little girl did that?'
     Warbaby nodded,  sadly.  'Terrible,'  he  said, 'these people  will  do
terrible things...'
     When they got out to the car, he saw that he'd parked it right in front
of  this mural of J. D. Shapely wearing a black  leather biker jacket and no
shirt, being carried up to heaven  by half a dozen  extremely fruity-looking
angels with long blond rocker hair. There were these  blue, glowing coils of
DNA  or something  spiraling  out  of  Shapely's stomach and attacking  what
Rydell assumed was supposed to be an AIDS virus, except it  looked more like
some kind of rusty armored space station with mean robot arms.
     It made  him think  what a weird-ass thing it must've been  to  be that
guy. About as weird as it had ever been to be anybody, ever, he figured. But
it would be even weirder to be Shapely, and dead like that, and then have to
look at that mural.
     YET HE LIVES IN US NOW, it  said under the painting, in foot-high white
letters, AND THROUGH HIM DO WE LIVE.
     Which was, strictly speaking, true, and Rydell had had a vaccination to
prove it.


18. Capacitor.

     Chevette's mother had  had this boyfriend once named Oakley, who  drank
part-time and drove logging  trucks the rest,  or anyway  he said he did. He
was a  long-legged man with his blue  eyes set a little too far apart,  in a
face  with those deep seams down each cheek. Which made him look, Chevette's
mother said, like a real cowboy. Chevette just thought it made him look kind
of  dangerous.  Which  he wasn't,  usually, unless he  got  himself around a
bottle  or two of  whiskey and forgot where he was or who  he was with; like
particularly if he mistook Chevette for her mother, which he'd done a couple
of times, but she'd always gotten away from  him and  he'd always been sorry
about it afterward, bought her Ring-Dings and  stuff  from the Seven-Eleven.
But what Oakley did  that she remembered now, looking down through the hatch
at this guy with his gun, was take her out in the woods one time and let her
shoot a pistol.
     And  this  one had a face kind  of  like Oakley's,  too, those eyes and
those grooves in his cheeks. Like you got from smiling a lot, the way he was
now. But it sure wasn't a smile that would ever make anybody feel good. Gold
at the corners of it.
     'Now come on down here,' he said, stressing each word just the same.
     'Who  the  fuck  are  you?'  Skinner,  sounding  more  interested  than
pissed-off.
     The gun went off. Not very loud, but sharp, with this blue  flash.  She
saw the Japanese guy sit down on the floor,  like his legs had gone out from
under him, and she thought the guy had shot him.
     'Shut up.' Then up at Chevette, 'I told you to get down here.'
     Then Sammy Sal  touched her  on the  back of  her neck,  his fingertips
urging her toward the hatch before they withdrew.
     The guy might not even know Sammy Sal was up here at all. Sammy Sal had
the glasses. And one thing Chevette was sure of now, this guy was no cop.
     'Sorry,' the Japanese guy said, 'sorry I...'
     'I'm going  to  shoot you in  the right  eye  with  a subsonic titanium
bullet.'  Still  smiling,  the  way  he might  say I'm  going  to buy  you a
sandwich.
     'I'm  coming,' Chevette said. And  he  didn't  shot,  not  her, not the
Japanese guy.
     She thought  she  heard  Sammy Sal step back acoss the roof,  away from
her, but she didn't  look back. She wasn't  sure whether she  should try  to
close  the  hatch behind her  or not. She decided not to because the guy had
only told her to come down. She'd have to reach past the edge of the hole to
get  hold of the hatch and it might look to him like she was going for a gun
or something. Like in a show.
     She  dropped down from the bottom rung, trying to keep  her hands where
he could see them.
     'What were you doing up there?' Still smiling. His  gun wasn't anything
like  Oakley's  big old  Braziliai  revolver; it was a little  stubby square
thing made out  of dill metal, the color of Skinner's old tools. A thin ring
of lighter metal  around  the narrow hole in the end. Like the  pupil  of an
eye.
     'Looking  at the city,' she said, not feeling scared, particularly. Not
really feeling anything, except her legs were trembling.
     He glanced up, the gun staying right when it was. She  didn't want  him
to ask her  if was  she alone  up here, because the answer might hang in the
air and tell him it was a lie. 'You know what I'm here for.'
     Skinner was  sitting up on his  bed, back against the wall, looking  as
wide  awake as  she'd ever seen him. The Japanese guy, who  didn't look like
he'd been shot after  all, was  sitting on the floor, his skinny legs spread
out in front of him in a V.
     'Well,'  Skinner said, 'I'd guess money or drugs, but it happens you're
shit out of  luck. Give you fifty-six  dollars and a stale joint of Humbolt,
you want it.'
     'Shut up.'  When the automatic  smile went away, it was  like he didn't
have any lips. 'I'm talking to her.'
     Skinner looked like he was about to say  something, or maybe laugh, but
he didn't.
     'The glasses.' Now the smile was back. He raised  the gun, so  that she
was looking right into the little hole. If  he shoots me, she thought, he'll
still have to hunt for them.
     'Hepburn,'  Skinner said,  with  a  crazy  little  grin, and  just then
Chevette noticed that the poster of  Roy Orbison had a hole in the middle of
its  gray forehead. 'Down  there,' she said, pointing  to the  hatch in  the
floor.
     'Where?'
     'My bike,' hoping Sammy Sal didn't bump into  that old  rusty  wagon in
the dark up there, make a noise.
     He looked  up at  the  roof-hatch,  like  he  could  hear  what she was
thinking.
     'Lean up against the wall there, palms flat.' He moved  in closer. 'Get
your  feet apart...' The  gun touched  her neck. His other  hand slid  under
Skinner's  jacket, feeling  for  a  weapon.  'Stay that  way.'  He'd  missed
Skinner's knife, the  one with  the fractal  blade.  She  turned her  head a
little and saw him  wrapping something  red  and rubbery around  one  of the
Japanese guy's wrists, doing it one-handed. She thought of those  gummy-worm
candies you bought out of  a big  plastic jar. He yanked the Japanese guy by
the red thing, dragging him across the floor to the  shelf-table where she'd
eaten breakfast.  He stuck  one end of the red thing behind the  angle-brace
that held  the  table up, then twisted it around  the guy's other  wrist. He
took  another  one out of his pocket arid shook  it out,  like a  toy snake.
Reached behind Skinner with it and did something with his hand. 'You stay on
that  bed, old  man,'  touching the gun to  Skinner's  temple. Skinner  just
looking at him.
     He came back to Chevette. 'You're climbing down a ladder. Need yours in
front.'
     The thing was cool and slick and fused into itself as soon as he had it
around her wrists. Flowed together. Moved by itself. Plastic ruby bracelets,
like a kid's toy. One of those tricks with molecules.
     'I'm going to watch you,' he said,  with another glance up at the  open
roof-hatch,  'so you just go  down nice arid slow. And if you  jump, or  run
when you get to the bottom, I'll kill you.'
     And she  didn't  doubt he would, if he  could, but she  was remembering
something Oakley had told her that day in the woods,  how it was hard to hit
something  if you had  to  shoot almost  straight down at  it,  even  harder
straight up. SD maybe the thing to do was just proj when she hit the bottom.
She'd  only  have to clear  about six  feet from the ladder to be  where  he
couldn't see her. But she looked at the gun's black and silver  eye  and  it
just didn't seem like a good idea.
     So she went  to  the hole in the  floor and  got down on her knees.  It
wasn't easy, with her hands  tied that way. He had to steady her, grabbing a
handful of Skinner's jacket, but she got her feet down on the third rung and
her fingers around the top one, and worked her way down that way. She had to
get her feet  on a  rung, let go of the one she was holding, snatch the next
one down before she lost her balance, do it again.
     But she got to think while she was doing it, and that helped her decide
to go ahead  and try to do what she had in mind. It was weird to be thinking
that way, how quiet  she felt, but it wasn't the first time. She'd felt that
way in Beaverton,  the night she'd  gone over the wire, and that without any
more planning. And one time these truckers  had tried  to drag her into  the
sleeper in the back; she'd made  like  she didn't mind, then threw a thermos
of hot coffee in one's face, kicked the other in the head, and gotten out of
there. They'd looked  for her for  an  hour,  with  flashlights,  while  she
squatted down in river-mud and let mosquitos eat her alive. Lights searching
for her through that brush.
     She got  to the bottom  and backed off a step, holding her bound wrists
out  where he  could see them if he wanted  to. He came down fast, no wasted
movement, not a sound. His long coat was made of something black, some cloth
that didn't throw back the light, and she  saw he  was wearing black  cowboy
boots. She knew he could run just fine in those, if he had to; people didn't
always think so, but you could.
     'Where  is it?' Gold flashing at the  corners of his smile.  His  hair,
brushed straight back,  was somewhere between brown and blond. He  moved his
hand, keeping her aware of the gun. She saw his hand was starting to  sweat,
spots of wetness darkening there, inside the white rubber glove.
     'We gotta take the-' She  stopped.  The yellow lift  was  where she and
Sammy Sal had left it, so how had he gotten up?
     Extra bits of gold. 'We took the stairs.'
     They'd  come up  the painter's  ladder, bare steel  rungs, some of them
rusted through. So  she wouldn't hear the  lift. No  wonder the Japanese guy
had looked scared. 'Well,' she said, 'you coming?'
     He followed her over to the lift. She kept her eyes on the deck, so she
wouldn't  forget and look  up to try and find Sammy,  who  had to be  there,
somewhere. He wouldn't have had time to get  down, or else they  would  have
heard him.
     He held her shoulder again while she swung her leg over and climbed in,
then got in after her, watching her the whole time.
     'This one's down,' she said, pointing at one of the levers.
     'Do it.'


     She  moved  it a notch, another,  and the  engine whined  beneath their
feet,  gearing them  down the incline.  There  was a  patch of light  at the
bottom, under a bulb caged in  corroded aluminum, and she wondered what he'd
do if somebody happened to step  into it just  then, say Fontaine or one  of
the other people who came to check the electrical stuff. Anybody. He'd shoot
them, she decided. Just pop them and roll them over into the dark. You could
see it in his face. It was right there.
     He got out first, helped her over. A wind was rising and you could feel
the harmonics coming up through your soles, the bridge starting to hum  like
a muffled harp. She could hear people laughing, somewhere.
     'Where?' he said.
     She pointed to  where her bike stood, cabled  to Sammy Sal's. 'The pink
and black one.'
     He gestured with the gun.
     'Back off,' her bike said when she was five feet from it.
     'What's that?' The gun in her back.
     'This other bike.  Clunker with  a voice-alarm. Keeps people off mine.'
She  bent to thumb the tab that  released  Sammy Sal's bike,  but she didn't
touch the recognition-loop behind the seat of her own.
     'I fucking mean it, shithead,' her bike said.
     'Shut it off,' he said.
     'Okay.'
     She  knew she had to do it  in one go, flip it sideways and  over, just
her thumb and forefinger on the nonconductive rubber of the tire.
     But it was really just an  accident that the frame hit his gun. She saw
an inch of lightning arc  between  her  bike and  the pistol, hot purple and
thick as your finger, the particle-brake  capacitors in the up-tube emptying
their stored charge into the anti-theft system worked into the fake rust and
the  carefully  frayed  silver  duct-tape. He went down on  his knees,  eyes
unfocused, a single silver  bubble of spit  forming and bursting between his
half-open lips. She thought she saw steam curl from the gun in his hand.
     Proj,  she thought, crouching to run,  but then the black thing hit him
and knocked him flat, flapping down out of  the dark above them with a sound
like broken wings. A roll of tarpaper. She made out Sammy Sal then, standing
up there  on  a dark  carbon cross-brace,  his  arm around  an upright.  She
thought she saw his white smile.
     'Forgot this,' he said, and tossed something down. The glasses in their
case. Hands tied, she caught them anyway, like  they knew where  they wanted
to go. She'd never know why he did that.
     Because the little pistol made a chewing sound then, blue  pops like  a
dozen  backfires  run  together, and Sammy Sal  went  over backward off  the
brace, just gone.
     And then she was running.


19. Superball.

     Yamazaki heard gunfire, where he knelt on the floor, his  wrists joined
by glistening plastic behind  the rough metal brace that supported Skinner's
wall-table. Or was it only the sound of some hydraulic tool?
     There was a smell  in the room, high and acrid. He  thought  it must be
the smell of his own fear.
     His eyes  were level  with a  chipped  white plate, a smear  of  pulped
avocado blackening on its edge.
     'Told  him what I had,' Skinner said,  struggling to his feet, his arms
fastened behind him. 'Didn't want  it. Want what they want, don't they?' The
little television slid off the edge of the bed and hit the floor, its screen
popping out on a rainbow ribbon of flat cable. 'Shit.' He swayed, wincing as
his  bad hip took his  weight, and Yamazaki thought  he would  fall. Skinner
took one step, another, leaning forward to maintain his balance.
     Yamazaki strained at the plastic bonds. Yelped as he felt them tighten.
Like something alive.
     'You tug, twist 'em,' Skinner said, behind  him, 'bastards'll clinch up
on you. Cops used to carry  those. Got  made unconstitutional.' There was  a
crash that shook the room and made  the  light flicker. Yamazaki looked over
his shoulder and saw Skinner sitting on the floor, his knees drawn  half up,
leaning backward. 'There's a pair of twenty-inch  bolt-cutters in here,' the
old man said, indicating a dented,  rust-scarred green toolkit with his left
foot. 'That'll do it, if I can get 'em out.' Yamazaki watched as he began to
work his toes through the holes in his ragged gray socks. 'Not sure I can do
shit  with  'em, once I do...' He stopped. Looked at Yamazaki. 'Better idea,
but you won't like it.'
     'Skinner-san?'
     'Look at that brace there.'
     Discolored blobs of puddled welding-rod held the thing together, but it
looked  sturdy enough. He counted  the mismatched heads of  nine screws. The
diagonal  brace  itself seemed  to be  made  up of  thin metal shims, lashed
together top and bottom with rusting twists of wire.
     'I made  that,' Skinner said. 'Those're three sections  of blade off  a
factory saw. Never did grind the teeth off. On top there.'
     Yamazaki's fingertips moved over hidden roughness.
     'Shot, Scooter. Wouldn't cut for shit. Why I used 'em.'
     'I saw plastic?' Poising his wrists.
     'Wait up. You start sawing on that crazy-goo,  it isn't gonna like  it.
Have  to get through it quick or it's gonna close up right down to the bone.
I said wait...'
     Yamazaki froze. He looked back.
     'You're too  close to the center. You cut through there,  you'll have a
ring around  each wrist and  the  suckers'll  still close up. You want to go
through as close to  one side as possible, get over here and get the  cutter
on the other one before it does you. I'll try to get this open...' He bumped
the case with his toes. It rattled.
     Yamazaki brought his face close to the red restraint. It had  a  faint,
medicinal smell. He took  a breath,  set his teeth, and sawed furiously with
his  wrists. The thing  began to  shrink. Bands of iron,  the  pain  hot and
impossible. He remembered
     Loveless's hand around his wrist.
     'Do it,' Skinner said.
     The plastic parted with an absurdly loud pop, like some sound-effect in
a child's cartoon. He was free and, for an ISO instant, the rec band  around
his left wrist loosened, absorbing the rest of the mass.
     'Scooter!'
     It tightened. He scrambled for the toolkit,  amazed to see  it open, as
Skinner  kicked it over  with his heel, spilling a hundred pieces of  tooled
metal.
     'Blue handles!'
     The  bolt-cu:ter was  long, clumsy, its handles wrapped  in greasy blue
tape. He saw the red band narrowing, starting to sink below the level of his
flesh. Fumbled the cutter one-handed from the tangle, sank its jaws  blindly
into his  wrist and brought  all his weight  down on the uppermost handle. A
stab of pain. The detonation.
     Skinner blew air out between his lips, a long low sound of relief. 'You
okay?'
     Yamazaki  looked  at his  wrists. There was a deep, bluish gouge in the
left one. It was starting to bleed, but no more than he woulc have expected.
The other  had been  scratched  by  the  saw.  He  glanced around the floor,
looking for the remains of the restraint.
     'Do me,' Skinner said. 'But hook it under the plastic, okay? Try not to
take a hunk out. And do the second one fast.'
     Yamazaki tested  the action  of  the cutter, knelt behind Skinner, slid
one of the blades beneath the plastic around the old man's right  wrist. The
skin  translucent  there,  blotched  and  discolored, the veins  swollen and
twisted.  The  plastic  parted  easily,  with  that same  ridiculous  noise,
instantly whipping itself around 5kinner's other wrist, writhing like a live
thing.  He  severed it  before  it could tighten, but  this  time,  with the
cartoon pop, it simply vanished.
     Yamazaki stared at the space where the restraint had been.
     'Katey bar tie door!' Skinner roared.
     'What?'
     'Lock the fucking hatch!'
     Yamazaki scrambled  across the floor  on hands  and  knees, dropped the
hatch into place, and bolted it with a flat device of dull bronze, something
that might once have been  part of a ship. 'The girl,' he said, looking back
at Skinner.
     'She  can knock,' Skinner said.  'You  want that dickhead with  the gun
back in here?'
     Yamazaki didn't. He looked up at the ceiling-hatch, the one that opened
onto the roof. Open now.
     'Go up there and look for the 'mo.'
     'Skinner-san? Pardon?'
     'Big fag buddy. The black one, right?'
     Not knowing what  or whom Skinner was talking  about, Yamazaki  climbed
the ladder. A gust of wind threw rain into his face as he thrust his head up
through  the opening.  He had the sudden intense conviction that he was high
atop some  ancient  ship,  some  black iron  schooner  drifting  derelict on
darkened  seas, its  plastic sails shredded  and its  crew mad or dead, with
Skinner its demented captain, shouting orders from his cell below.
     'There is nobody here, Skinner-san!'
     The rain came down in an  explosive  sheet, hiding  the lights  of  the
city.
     Yamazaki withdrew his head, feeling  for the hatch, and closed it above
him. He fastened the catch, wishing it were made of stronger stuff.
     He descended the ladder.
     Skinner was  on his feet now, swaying toward  his bed. 'Shit,' he said,
'somebody's broken my tv.' He toppled forward onto the mattress.
     'Skinner?'
     Yamazaki  knelt  beside the bed. Skinner's eyes were closed, his breath
shallow and rapid.  His  left hand came  up,  fingers spread,  and scratched
fitfully at the tangled thatch of white  hair  at  the  open  collar of  his
threadbare flannel shirt.
     Yamazaki  smelled  the sour  tang  of  urine  above the  acrid  edge of
whatever explosive had propelled  Loveless's bullet.  He looked at Skinner's
jeans, blue  gone gray  with wear,  wrinkles  sculpted permanently,  shining
faintly with grease, and saw that Skinner had wet himself.
     He  stood there for several minutes, uncertain  of  what he should  do.
Finally he took a seat on the paint-splattered stool beside the little table
where  he had so recently been a prisoner. He  ran  his  fingertips over the
teeth of the saw  blades. Looking down, he noticed a neat red sphere. It lay
on the floor beside his left foot.
     He picked it up. A glossy marble of scarlet plastic, cool  and slightly
yielding. One of the restraints, either his or Skinner's.
     He sat there, watching Skinner and listening to the bridge groan in the
storm, a strange  music emerging from the bundled cables. He wanted tc press
his ear against them, but some fear he couldn't name heli him from it.
     Skinner woke  once, or  seemed to,  and  struggled  to sit up, calling,
Yamazaki thought, for the girl.
     'She isn't here,' Yamazaki said, his hand on Skinner's shoulder. 'Don't
you remember?'
     'Hasn't  been,'  Skinner said.  'Twenty,  thirty  years.  Motherfucker.
Time.'
     'Skinner?'
     'Time. That's the total fucking mother fucker, isn't it?'
     Yamazaki held the red sphere before the old man's eyes. 'Look, Skinner.
See what it became?'
     'Superball,' Skinner said.
     'Skinner-san?'
     'You go and fucung bounce it, Scooter.' He  closed his eyes. 'Bounce it
high...'


20. The big empty.

     'Swear to God,' Nigel said, 'this shit just moved.'
     Chevette,  with  her eyes  closed, felt the  blunt back of the  ceramic
knife press into her  wrist; there was a sound like an inner-tube letting go
when you've patched it too many times, and then that wrist was free.
     'Shit. Jesus-' His hands rough and quick, Chevette's eyes opening  to a
second pop, a red blur  whanging back and forth  around the  stacked  scrap.
Nigel's head following it, like  the counterweighted head of  a plaster  dog
that Skinner had found once and sent her down to sell.
     Every wall in this narrow space racked with  metal,  debraised sections
of old Reynolds tubing, dusty jam jars  stuffed with rusting spokes. Nigel's
workshop, where he built his carts, did what shadetree fixes he could to any
bike came his  way. The salmon-plug that dangled from his left ear ticked in
counterpoint to his swiveling head, then jingled as he snatched the thing in
mid-bounce. A ball of red plastic.
     'Man,' he said, impressed, 'who put this on you?'
     Chevette stood  up and shivered,  this tremor running down  through her
like a live thing, the way those red bracelets had moved.
     How she felt, now, was just the way she'd felt that day she'd come back
to the trailer and found her mother all packed up and gone. No message there
but  a  can of ravioli in a pot on the Stove, with the can-opener propped up
beside it.
     She hadn't eaten that  ravioli and  she hadn't eaten any since and  she
knew she never would.
     But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside
it, so big you couldn't really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of
absence  and  the memory  of  better days.  And  she'd  moved around in  it,
whatever it was, from one point to  another, 'til she'd wound up behind that
wire in  Beaverton, in a place so bad it was like a piece of broken glass to
rub against that big empty. And  thereby growing aware of the thing that had
swallowed the world, though it was  only  just visible, and then in sidelong
glances. Not a feeling so much as a form  of gas, something she could almost
smell in the back  of  her throat, lying chill and inert in the rooms of her
subsequent passage.
     'You  okay?' Nigel's greasy hair in his eyes, the red ball in his hand,
a cocktail toothpick with a spray of amber cellophane stuck in the corner of
his mouth.
     For a long time she'd wondered if maybe the fever hadn't burned it out,
hadn't  accidentally fried  whatever circuit  in her  it fed back on. But as
she'd gotten  used  to the  bridge, to Skinner, to messing at Allied, it had
just  come  to seem like the emptiness was  filled with  ordinary  things, a
whole new  world grown up in the socket of the old, one day rolling into the
next-whether she danced  in Dissidents, or sat up all night talking with her
friends, or slept curled in her bag up in Skinner's room, where wind scoured
the plywood  walls  and  the  cables thrummed  down  into rock  that drifted
(Skinner said) like the slowest sea of all.
     Now that was broken.
     'Vette?'
     That jumper she'd seen, a girl, hauled up and over the side of a Zodiac
with a pale plastic hook, white and limp, water running from nose and mouth.
Every  hone  broken or dislocated,  Skinner said, if you hit just right. Ran
through the bar naked and took a header off some tourist's table nearest the
railing, out and  over, tangled in Haru's Day-Gb  net and imitation Japanese
fishing floats. And didn't Sammy Sal drift that way now, maybe already clear
of the dead zone that chased the fish off  the years  of toxic  lead  fallen
there  from uncounted coats of paint, out into the  current that sailed  the
bridge's dead, people said, past Mission Rock, to wash up at the feet of the
micropored wealthy jogging the concrete coast of China Basin?
     Chevette bent over and threw  up,  managing to get  most of  it into an
open, empty  paint can, its  lip thickly  scabbed with the  gray primer that
Nigel used to even out his dodgier mends.
     'Hey, hey,' Nigel dancing  around her, unwilling in his shy bearish way
to touch her, his big hands hovering, anxious that she was sick  and worried
she'd puke over  his  work,  something that  might  ultimately  require  the
in-depth, never-bef ore-attempted act  of cleaning out, rather than  up, his
narrow nest.  'Water? Want  water?' Offering her the old coffee can  he kept
there to  quench hot metal. Oily flux afloat atop it like gas beside a dock,
and she nearly heaved again, but sat down instead.
     Sammy Sal dead,  maybe Skinner,  too. Him and that grad student tied up
up there with the plastic worms.
     'Chev?'
     He'd put the coffee can down  and was offering her an open  can of beer
instead. She waved it aside, coughing.
     Nigel  shifted,  foot  to  foot,  then turned  and  peered  through the
triangular  shard of lucite that served as his one window. It was  vibrating
with the  wind.  'Stormin',' he said, like he was  glad  to note  the  world
outside  continuing on  any  recognizable  course at all,  however  drastic.
'Stormin' down rain.'
     Running  from Skinner's and the gun in the killer's hand, from his eyes
and  the gold in the  corners of  his smile,  bent low for  balance over her
bound hands and the  case that held the asshole's glasses, Chevette had seen
all the others running, too, racing, it must have been, against the breaking
calm, the first  slap of  rain almost  warm when it came.  Skinner  would've
known it was coming; hed have watched the barometer in its corny wooden case
like tw wheel of some old boat; he knew his weather, Skinner, pe:ched in his
box on the top of the bridge.  Maybe the  other; knew,  too, but it was  the
style to  wait and then race  it, biding out for a last sale, another smoke,
some  bit of business. The hour before  a  storm  was good for that,  people
naking edgy purchases against what  was ordinarily  a  bearahe  uncertainty.
Though  a few were lost, if  the storm was big  enough,  and  not always the
unestablished,  the newconers lashed  with their ragged baggage  to whatever
freehold they might have  managed on the outer  structure; sometimes a whole
patchwork section would just let go, if the wind caught it right; she hadn't
seen that but there were  stories. There was nothing  to stop the new people
from coming in to the shelter of the decks, but they seldom did.
     She wiped her mouth with the back  of her  hand and  took the beer from
Nigel. Took a  sip. It  was warm.  She handed  it back  to him.  He took the
toothpick from his  mouth,  started to raise the  can for a swallow, thought
better of it, put it down beside his welding-torch.
     'Somethin's wrong,' he said. 'I can tell.'
     She massaged her wrists. Twin rings of rash coming  up, pink and moist,
where the plastic had gripped her. Picked up the ceramic knife and closed it
automatically.
     'Yeah,' she said, 'yeah Something's wrong...'
     'What's wrong, Chevette?' He shook hair out of his eyes like  a worried
dog,  fingers  running  nervously over his tools. His  hands were like  pali
dirty animals, capable  in their mute and agile way of solvingproblems  that
would have hopelessly baffled the man himself. 'That Jap shit delaminated on
you,' he decided, 'and you're pssed...'
     'No,' she said, not realy hearing him.
     'Steel's  what you wait for a  messenger  bike. Weight.  Big basket  up
front.  Not  cadhoard with  some crazy aramid shit wrapped  around it, weghs
about as much as a sandwich.
     What  if you hit a b-bus? Bang into the back of it? You got more m-mass
than  the b-bike,  you flip over  and c-crack open  crack your...' His hands
twisting, trying more accurately to frame the physics of the accident he was
seeing. Chevette looked up and saw that he was trembling.
     'Nigel,' she said, standing up, 'somebody just put that thing on me for
a joke, understand?'
     'It moved,' he said. 'I saw it.'
     'Well, not a funny joke, okay? But I knew where to come. To you, right?
And you took it off.'
     Nigel shook his hair back into his eyes, shy and pleased. 'You had that
knife. Cuts good.' Then he frowned. 'You need a steel knife...'
     'I know,' she said.  'I  gotta go now...' Bending to  pick up the paint
can. 'I'll toss this. Sorry.'
     'It's a storm,' Nigel said. 'Don't go out in a storm.'
     'I've got to,' she said. 'I'll be  okay.' Thinking how he'd kill Nigel,
too, if he found her here. Hurt him. Scare him.
     'I cut them off.' Holding up the red ball.
     'Get rid of that,' she said.
     'Why?'
     'Look at this rash.'
     Nigel dropped the bali like it  was poison. It bounced out of sight. He
wiped his fingers down the filthy front of his t-shirt.
     'Nigel, you got a screwdriver you'll give me? A flathead?'
     'Mine are  all worn down...' The white animals  running over a shoal of
tools, happy to be hunting, while Nigel gravely watched them. 'I throw those
flathead screws away as soon as I get 'em off. Hex is how you want to go-'
     'I want one that's all worn down.'
     The  right hand pounced,  came up  with  its  prize,  blackhandled  and
slightly bent.
     'That's  the  one,' she said,  zipping up  Skinner's jacket. Both hands
offered it to her, Nigel's eyes hiding behind his hair, watching. 'I... like
you, Chevette.'
     'I know,' she said, standing there with a paint can with vomit in it in
one hand, a screwdriver in the other. 'I know you do.'
     Baffled  by the patchwork of  plastic that roofed  the  upper deck, the
rain was following  waste-lines and power-cables, emerging overhead at crazy
angles,  in random cascades, miniature Niagaras rushing  off corrugated iron
and plywood. From  the entrance to Nigel's  workshop,  Chevette  watched  an
awning collapse, gallons of silver water splashing all at once from what had
been a taut concavity, a  bulging canvas bathtub that  gave way with a sharp
crack, instantly becoming  several  yards of flapping, sodden cloth. Nothing
here was  ever planned, in any overall sense, and problems of drainage  were
dealt with as they emerged. Or not, more likely.
     Half the lights were out, she saw, but that could be because people had
shut  them down, had pulled as many plugs as possible. But  then she  caught
the edge of that weird pink flash you  got when a transformer  blew, and she
heard it boom. Out toward
     Treasure. That took care  of most  of the remaining lights and suddenly
she stood in near darkness. There was nobody in sight, nobody at all. Just a
hundred-watt bulb in an orange plastic socket, twirling around in the wind.
     She  moved out into  the  center  of the deck,  trying to watch out for
fallen wires.  She  remembered the can  in  her hand and flung  it sideways,
hearing it hit and roll.
     She thought  of  her  bike  lying  there in the  rain,  its  capacitors
drained. Somebody was going to take it, for sure, and Sammy  Sal's, too.  It
was the biggest  thing, the most valuable thing  she'd ever owned, and she'd
earned every dollar she'd put down on the counter at City Wheels. She didn't
think  about it like it was a thing, more the way she figured people thought
about horses. There  were  messengers  who named  their bikes,  but Chevette
never would have  done that, and somehow because she did think about it like
it was something alive.
     Proj, she told  herself, they'll get you if you  stay here. Her back to
San Francisco, she set out toward Treasure.
     They who?  That one with his gun. He'd come for  the  glasses. Came for
the glasses and killed Sammy. Had those people sent him, the ones who called
up Bunny and Wilson the owner? Rentacops. Security guys.
     The case  in her  pocket. Smooth.  And  that weird cartoon of the city,
those towers with their spreading tops. Sunflower.
     'Jesus,' she said, 'where? Where'm I going?'
     To  Treasure,  where the  wolf-men and  the death-cookies hung, the bad
crazies chased  off  the  bridge to haunt the  woods there? Been a Navy base
there, Skinner  said,  but a plague  put paid to that just after the  Little
Grande, something that turned  your eyes to mush, then your teeth  fell out.
Treasure  Island fever,  like maybe something crawled out of  a  can at that
Navy place,  after the earthquake.  So nobody went there now, nobody normal.
You saw their fires at night,  sometimes, and  smoke in the daytime, and you
walked straight over to the Oakland span, the cantilever, and the people who
lived there  weren't  the  same, really,  as  the people over  here  in  the
suspension.
     Or should  she  go back,  try to get her bike? An hour's riding and the
brakes would  be charged again.  She  saw herself just  riding, maybe  east,
riding  forever  into  whatever country  that  was, deserts like  you saw on
television, then flat green farms where big machines came marching along  in
rows, doing whatever it was they did. But she remembered the  road down from
Oregon, the trucks groaning past in the night like lost mad animals, and she
tried to picture herself riding down that. No, there wasn't any place out on
a road like that, nothing human-sized, and hardly ever even a light,  in all
the  fields of dark. Where you could walk and walk forever and never come to
anything, not even a place to sit down. A bike wouldn't get her anywhere out
there.
     Or she  could go hack to Skinner's. Co up there and  see- No. She  shut
that down, hard.
     The empty rose out of  the rain-rattled shadws like a gas, and she held
her breath, not to breathe it in.
     How it  was, when  you lost things, it was like  you only  knew for the
first time that you'd ever had them. Took a mother's leaving for you to know
she'd ever  been there,  because otherwise she was  that place,  everything,
like weather. And Skinner and the Coleman stove and the oil  she had to drop
into the little hole to keep its leather gasket soft so the pump would work.
You didn't  wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing.
But  little things were  what it was  all made  of. Or just somebody to see,
there, when you woke  up. Or Lowell. When she'd  had Lowel.-if she could say
she  ever had, and she guessed she hadn't, really-but while he'd been there,
anyway, he'd been a little like that- 'Chev? That you?'
     And there  he was. Lowell. Sitting  up cross-legged on top  of a  rusty
cooler said  SHRIMP across the froit, smoking a cigarette and  watching rain
run off the shrimp man's  awning.  She hadn't  seen him for three weeks now,
and the only  thing  she could  think of was  how she really must  look like
total shit.  That skinhead boy they called Codes was sitting up beside  him,
black  hood of  a  sweatshirt  pulled  up and his  hands hidden in the  long
sleeves. Codes hadn't ever liked her.
     But Lowell, he  was grinning around the glow of that cigarette. 'Well,'
he said, 'you gonna say "hi" 0: what?'
     'Hi,' Chevette said.


21. Cognitive dissidents.

     Rydell wasn't  too  sure about this  whole bridge thing, and  less sure
about what Freddie had had to say about it, in Food Fair and on the way back
from  North  Beach.  He kept  remembering  that  documentary  he'd  seen  in
Knoxville and he was  pretty sure there hadn't been  anything  on that about
cannibals or cults.  He thought that had to be Freddie wanting him  to think
that, because  he, Rydell, was the one who had to go out  there and get this
girl, Chevette Washington.
     And now he was actually  out on it, watching people  hurry to get their
stuff out of  the way of the weather, it looked even less like  what Freddie
had said it  was all about.  It looked like a carnival, sort of.  Or a state
fair midway, except it  was  roofed over, on  the  upper level,  with  crazy
little shanties, just  boxes,  and whole house-trailers winched up and glued
into  the  suspension with big  gobs of  adhesive, like  grasshoppers  in  a
spider-web. You could go up  and down, between the two original deck levels,
through holes they'd cut  in the upper deck,  all different kinds of  stairs
patched in under there, plywood and welded steel, and one had an old airline
gangway, just sitting there with its tires flat.
     Down on  the bottom  deck, once you got  in past a lot of  food-wagons,
there were mostly  bars, the smallest ones  Rydell had ever seen, some  with
only  four stools and  not even a door, just a big shutter  they could  pull
down and lock.
     But none of  it done to  any plan, not that he  could see. Not  like  a
mall,  where they plug a business  into a  slot and wait  to see  whether it
works or  not. This place had just grcwn, it  looked like, one thing patched
onto  the  next, until the  whole span was wrapped in this  formless mass of
stuff,  and  io two pieces of it  matched.  There was a  different  material
anywhere you looked, almost none of it being used for what it had originally
been intended  for.  He  passed stalls faced with  turquoise  Formica,  fake
brick,  fragments  of broken  tile  vorked  into swirls  and  sunbursts  and
flowers. One place, dready shuttered, was covered with green-and-copper skbs
of desoldered component-board.
     He found himself  grinning at it all,  and at the peopli, none of  them
paying  him the least attention, cannibaliitic or otherwise. They  looked to
be  as  mixed a bunch  a; their building materials: all ages, races, colors,
and all & them rushing ahead  of  the storm that very definitely  was coming
now, wind stiffening  as  he  threaded his  way  past  carts and old  ladies
lugging  straw suitcases. A little kid,  staggering  with his  arms  wrapped
around a big red fire-extinguisher, bumped into his legs. Rydell hadn't ever
seen a little  kid  with tattons  like that.  The boy said something in some
other language aid then he was gone.
     Rydell stopped  and  got  Warbaby's map  out of  his  jacket pocket. It
showed  where this girl lived and how to get up  there. Right up on the roof
of the  damned  thing, in a little  shanty stuck  to the top  of  one of the
towers they hing the cables from.
     Warbaby had beautiful handwriting, really graceful, and he'd drawn this
map out in the back of the patriot, and labelled it for Rydell. Stairs here,
then you weni along this walkway, took some kind of elevator.
     Finding that  first set  of  stairs was  going to  be  a bitch, though,
because, now that he  looked  around, he saw lots of narrow little stairways
snaking up between stalls and shattered micro-bars, and no  pattern to it at
all. He guessed they all led  up into the same rats-nest, but there  was  no
guarantee they'd all connect up.
     Exhaustion hit him,  then, and he just wanted to know where and when he
was supposed to sleep, and what was all this bullshit  about,  anyway?  What
had he let Hernandez get him in for?
     Then the rain hit, the wind upping its velocity a couple of notches and
the locals diving seriously for cover, leaving Rydell to hunch  in the angle
between a couple  of old-fashioned  Japanese vending-machines.  The  overall
structure, if you  could call it that,  was  porous enough to  let plenty of
rain in, but big enough and clumsy enough to tangle seriously with the wind.
The whole thing  started creaking and popping and sort of groaning. And  the
lights started going out.
     He saw a  burst of white sparks and a wire came down, out of that crazy
tangle. Somebody yelled, but the words were pulled away into the wind and he
couldn't make them out. He looked down  and saw water rising around his SWAT
shoes. Not good, he thought: puddles, wet shoes, alternating current.
     There  was a fruitstand next to  one of the  vending-machines,  knocked
together from scavenged wood like a  kid's fort.  But it had a sort of shelf
under it,  raised up six inches, and it looked dry  under  there. He hunched
himself in, on top of it, with his feet up out of the water. It smelled like
overripe tangerines, but  it  was ninety-percent dry and the vending-machine
took most of the wind.
     He zipped  his jacket  as high  as  it went, balled  his fists into the
pockets,  and thought about a hot  bath and a  dry bed. He thought about his
Futon  Mouth futon, down in Mar Vista, and actually felt homesick. Jesus, he
thought, be missing those stick-on flowers next.
     A canvas awning came down, its wooden  braces snapping like toothpicks,
spilling maybe twenty gallons of rain. And  right then was when he  saw her,
Chevette Washington, right out in plain  sight. Just like  he  was dreaming.
Not twenty feet away. Just standing there.
     Rydell  had sort  of had  this girlfriend down in  Florida,  after  his
father had moved  down there and gotten sick. Her  name was Claudia Marsalis
and  she  was from Boston  and  her mother had her  RV  in  the same park as
Rydell's father, right near Tampa Bay.
     Rydell was in his first year at  the Academy, but you got a  couple  of
breaks and his father knew ways to get a deal on plane tickets.
     So  Rydell would  go down there on breaks  and stay with his father and
sometimes at night he'd go  out and ride around with Claudia Marsalis in her
mother's Lincoln, which  Claudia said had been  cherry when they brought  it
down  but now  the salt was  starting to get to it. Evidently  up in  Boston
she'd only  ever taken it  out  on the  road in the summer, so the chemicals
wouldn't eat it out. It had these blue-and-white MASS. HERITAGE plates on it
because it was a collector's item. They were the old-fashioned kind, stamped
metal, and they didn't light up from inside.
     It was kind of rough, around that part of Tampa, with the  street signs
all chewed up for target practice or  the  late-night demonstration  of  the
choke  on somebody's  shotgun. There  were plenty of shotguns  around  to be
demonstrated, too; a few in  the window-rack of  every  pick-up and 4X4, and
usually a couple of big  old dogs. Claudia used  to give Rydell a  hard time
about that, about these Florida boys in gimme hats, riding around with their
guns and dogs. Rydell told her it didn't have  anything to do  with him,  he
was from Knoxville, and people didn't drive around Knoxville with their guns
showing. Or shoot holes in street signs either, not if the  Department could
help it. But Claudia was one  of  those people thought everything  south  of
D.C. was all just the same, or maybe she just pretended to to tease him.
     But  at night it smelled like salt and  magnolia and swamp,  and they'd
drive around in  that Lincoln with the windows down and listen to the radio.
When it  got  dark  you  could watch  the lights  on  ships,  and on the big
bulk-lifters  that went drumming past like the world's slowest UFOs.  They'd
maybe  get  in  a little  listless  boogy in the back  seat, sometimes,  but
Claudia said it  just got you too  sweaty in Florida and  Rydell  tended  to
agree. It was just they were both down there and alone and there wasn't much
else to do.
     One night they were listening to a country station  out  of Georgia and
'Me And Jesus'll Whup  Your Heathen Ass' came on, this hardshell Pentecostal
Metal  thing about  abortion and  ayatollahs and all the rest of it. Claudia
hadn't ever heard that one before and she about wet her pants, laughing. She
just couldn't believe that song. When she'd gotten hold of herself and wiped
the  tears  out of  her  eyes, she'd  asked Rydell why he  wanted  to  be  a
policeman anyway? And he'd felt kind of uncomfortable about that, because it
was like she thought his going to the  Academy was  funny, too, as  funny as
she thought  that dumb-ass song  was.  But  also because  it wasn't actually
something he'd thought about, much.
     The truth was, it probably had a  lot to do  with how he and his father
had always watched Cops in Trouble together, because that show seriously did
teach you respect. You got to see what kind of problems the police were flat
up  against. Not  just tooled-up slimeballs  high on shit, either,  but  the
slimeballs' lawyers and the  damn courts and everything. But if  he told her
it was because of a tv show,  he knew she'd just  laugh  at that, too. So he
thought about it  a  while and told her it was because he liked  the idea of
being in  a  position  to help out people when  they were really in trouble.
When he'd said that, she just looked at him.
     'Berry,' she said, 'you really mean that, don't you?'
     'Sure,' he said, 'guess I do.'
     'But  Berry, when you're a cop, people  are just going  to  lie to you.
People will think of you as the enemy. The only time they'll want to talk to
you is when they're in trouble.'
     Driving, he glanced  sideways at her. 'How come you know SO  much about
it, then?'
     'Because  that's what my father does,'  she said, end  of conversation,
and she  never did bring it up again. But he'd  thought about that,  driving
Gunhead for IntenSecure, because that was like being a top except it wasn't.
The  people you were  there to help didn't even give enough of a shit to lie
to you, mostly, because they were the ones paying the bill.
     And here  he  was,  out  on this  bridge,  crawling  out  from under  a
fruitstand  to  follow  this girl  that Warbaby  and Freddie-who Rydell  was
coming to decide  lie  didn't trust  worth a rat's ass-claimed had butchered
that German or  whatever he was up  in that hotel. And  stolen these glasses
Rydell was supposed to get back, ones like Wa:baby's.  But  if  she'd stolen
them  before,  how come she'd gone back to kill the guy later? But  the real
question was, what did that have to do with  anything, or even with watching
Cops in Trouble all those times with his father? And the answer, he guessed,
was that  he, like anybody  else in his position, was just trying  to make a
living.
     Solid  streams  of rain were coming down cut of  various  points in all
that jackstraw stuff upstairs, sphshing on the deck. There was a pink flash,
like lightning, off down the bridge. He thought he saw her fling something t
the  side, but  if  he stopped to  check it  out he might lose her.  She was
moving now, avoiding the waterfalls.
     Street-surveillance  technique wasn't  something  you got much training
in,  at the  Academy, not unless yu looked like such good detective material
that they streamlined you right into the Advanced CI courses. But Rydell bad
gone and  bought the  textbook anyway. Trouble was, because of  that he knew
you  pretty well needed at  least one partnei to do it with,  and  that  was
assuming you had a radio link anc  some citizens  going about their business
to give you a little uver. Doing it this way, how he had to do it now, about
the best you could hope for was just to sneak along behind her.
     He knew it was her because of that crazy  hair, that ponytail ;tuck  up
in  the  back like  one of those  fat  Japanese wrestlers. The  wasn't  fat,
though. Her  legs, sticking out of a big old biker jacket that might've been
hanging in  a  barn for a  couple  of years, looked like she must work out a
lot.  They  were  covered with some  tight shiny black stuff,  like  Kevin's
micropore  outfits from Just Blow Me, and they went down into  some  kind of
dark boots or high-top shoes.
     Paying that  much attention to  her, and trying to stay out of sight in
case  she  turned around,  he  managed  to  walk  right under one  of  those
waterfalls. Right down the  back of his neck.  Just then he  heard  somebody
call to  her, 'Chev, that you?' and he went down  on  one knee in  a puddle,
behind  this  stack  of  salvaged  lumber, two-by-fours  with soggy  plaster
sticking to them. ID positive.
     The waterfall behind him was making too much noise for him to hear what
was  said then, but he  could  see them: a  young  guy with  a black leather
jacket, a lot newer than hers, and somebody else in something  black, with a
hood pulled up. They were sitting  up on a cooler or something,  and the guy
with the leather was dragging on a cigarette. Had his hair combed up in sort
of a crest; good trick, in that rain. The cigarette arced out and winked off
in the wet, and the guy got down from there  and seemed to be talking to the
girl. The one with  the black  hood got down, too,  moving like a spider. It
was  a sweatshirt, Rydell saw,  with sleeves  that hung down six inches past
his  hands.  He looked like  a  floppy shadow from some old movie Rydell had
seen once, where shadows got separated from people and you had to catch them
and sew them back on. Probably Sublett could tell him what that was called.
     He worked hard on not  moving, kneeling there in that puddle, and  then
they were  moving,  the  two of them  on either side  of her and  the shadow
glancing hack to check behind them. He caught a fraction of white face and a
pair of hard, careful eyes.
     He counted: one, two, three. Then he got up and followed them.
     He couldn't say how far they'd gone before  he saw them drop, it looked
like, straight out of sight. He wiped rain from his eyes and tried to figure
it, but then he saw that they'd gone down a  flight of stairs, this one  cut
into the lower deck, which was  the first time he'd seen that. He could hear
music as he came up on it, and see this bluish glow. Which proved to be from
this  skinny little neon sign that  said, in blue capital letters: COGNITIVE
DISSIDENTS.
     He  stood  there  for  a  second, hearing water  sizzle  off the sign's
transformer, and then he just took those stairs.
     They were plywood, stapled with that sandpapery  no-slip stuff,  but he
almost  slipped anyway. By  the time he'd gotten halfway  to  the bottom, he
knew it  was a bar, because he could smell beer and a  couple  of  different
kinds of smoke.
     And it was warm, down there. It was like walking into a steam bath. And
crowded. Somebody  threw a towel at him. It was  soaking wet and  hit him in
the chest, but he grabbed it and rubbed at his hair and face with it, tossed
it  back in the direction it  had come from. Somebody else, a woman  by  the
sound, laughed. He went over to the bar and found an empty space at the end.
Fished in  his soggy pockets  for a couple of fives and clicked them down on
the counter. 'Beer,' he said,  and didn't look up when somebody put one down
in front  of  him  and swept the coins  out of sight.  It  was one of  those
brewed-in-America  Japanese brands that people  in places like  Tampa didn't
drink much. He closed his eyes and drank about half  of it at a  go.  As  he
opened his eyes and put it down, somebody beside him said 'Tumble?'
     He looked over and saw this jawless character with little  pink glasses
and  a  little pink  mouth,  thinning  sandy  hair  comhed straight back and
shining with something more than the damp in the rooni.
     'What?' Rydell said.
     'I said "tumble."'
     'I heard you,' Rydell said.
     'So? Need the service?'
     'Uh, look,' Rydell said, 'all I need right now's this beer, okay?'
     'Your  phone,' the  pink-mouthed man said. 'Or fax. Guaranteed  tumble,
one month.  Thirty days or your next thirty  free. Unlimited long, domestic.
You  need overseas,  we can talk overseas. But three hundred  for the  basic
tumble.' All of this coming out in a buzz that reminded Rydell  of  the kind
of voice-chip you got in the cheapest possible type of kid's toy.
     'Wait a sec,' Rydell said.
     The man blinked a couple of times, behind his pink glasses.
     'You talking about doing that thing to a pocket phone, right? Where you
don't have to pay the company?'
     The man just looked at him.
     'Well,  thanks,'  Rydell said, quickly.  'I appreciate  it, but  I just
don't have any phone on me. If I did, I'd be happy to take you up on it.'
     Still looking at him. 'Thought I saw you before...' Doubt.
     'Naw,' Rydell said. 'I'm from Knoxville. Just come in out of the rain.'
He decided it was time to  risk turning around  and checking the place  out,
because  the mirrors behind the bar  were steamed up solid  and running with
drops.  He swung his  shoulder around and saw that  Japanese woman,  the one
he'd seen that time up in the hills over Hollywood, when  he'd been cruising
with Sublett. She was standing up on a little  stage, naked, her long  curly
hair falling around her to her waist. Rydell heard himself grunt.
     'Hey,' the man was saying, 'hey...'
     Rydell shook himself, a weird automatic thing,  like a wet dog, but she
was still there.
     'Hey. Credit.'  The drone  again. 'Got prohlems? Maybe  just wanna  see
what they've got on you? Anybody else, you got the right numbers-'
     'Hey,' Rydell said, 'wait up. That woman up there?'
     The pink glasses tilted.
     'Who is that?' Rydell asked.
     'That's a hologram,' the man said, in a completely different voice, and
walked away.
     'Damn,'  said  the bartender, behind  him. 'You just  set a  record for
blowing off Eddie the Shit. Earned yourself a beer, my man.'
     The bartender was  a black guy with  copper  beads in his hair. He  was
grinning at Rydell. 'Call him Eddie the Shit cause he ain't worth one, don't
give another. Hook your phone  up to some box doesn't have a battery, push a
few buttons, pass a dead chicken over it, take your money. That's Eddie.' He
uncapped a beer and put it down beside the other one.
     Rydell looked  back at the Japanese  woman. She hadn't  moved.  'I just
came in out of the rain,' he said, all he could think to say.
     'Good night for it,' the bartender said.
     'Say,' Rydell said, 'that lady up there-'
     'That's Josie's dancer,' the  bartender said. 'You watch.  She'll dance
her in a minute, soon as there's a song she likes.'
     'Josie?'
     The bartender pointed. Rydell looked where he was  pointing. Saw a very
fat  woman in a  wheelchair, her hair the  color and texture of coarse steel
wool.  She  wore  brand-new  blue  denim  bib  overalls  and  an  XXL  white
sweatshirt, and  both her hands were hidden inside something that sat on her
lap   like  a  sn÷ooth  gray  plastic  muff.  Her  eyes  were  closed,  face
expressionless. He couldn't have said for sure that she wasn't asleep.
     'Hologram?'  The  Japanese  woman  hadn't  moved  at  all.  Rydell  was
remembering what he'd  seen, that night. l'he  horned crown, all silver. Her
pubic hair, shaved like an exclamation point. This one didn't have either of
those, but it was her. It was.
     'Josie's  always projectin',' the bartender said, like it was something
that couldn't really be helped.
     'From that thing on her lap?'
     'That's the interface,' the bartender said. 'Projector's, well, there.'
He pointed. 'Top of that NEC sign.'
     Rydell  saw  a little  black gizmo  clamped  to  the  top  of  this Did
illuminated sign. It looked kind of like an old camera, the optical kind. He
didn't know if NEC was a beer or what. The whole wall was covered with these
signs,  all different brands, md now he  recognized  a few of  the  names he
decided they were ads for old electronics companies.
     He  looked at the gizmo,  back  at the fat woman in the wheelchair, and
felt sad. Angry, too. Like he'd  lost  something.  'Not  like I  knew what I
thought it was,' he said to himself.
     'Fool anybody,' said the bartender.
     Rydeil thought  about somebody  sitting out there by  that valley road.
Waiting for cars. Like he and  his friends would lie  under  the bushes down
Jefferson Street and toss cans  under people's  tires. Sounded like a hubcap
had come  off. See them get out and  look, shake  their heads. So  what he'd
seen had  just been  a  version of that, somebody playing with  an expensive
toy.
     'Shit,' he said, and put his mind to looking for Chevette Washington in
all this crowd. He didn't notice the beer-smell now,  or the smoke, more the
wet hair  and  clothes and just bodies. And there she  was, her and her  two
friends, hunched over  a  little round  table in  a corner. The sweatshirt's
hood  was down now, showing Rydell a white,  stubbled head with some kind of
bat or bird tattooed  Ofl the side, up where  it would he hidden if the hair
grew in. It was  the kind of tattoo somebody  had done by hand, not the kind
you got done on a computer-driven table. Baldhead had a hard little face, in
profile,  and  he  was  wasn't  talking.  Chevette  Washington  was  telling
something to the other one and not looking happy.
     Then the music changed, these drums coming in, like there were millions
of them, ranked backed somehow beyond the walls, and  weird waves  of static
riding in on that, failing back, riding in again, and women's voices, crying
like birds, and none  of  it natural, the voices dopplering past like sirens
on a highway, and the  drums, when you listened,  made  up of little snipped
bits of sound that weren't drums at all.
     The Japanese woman-the  hologram,  Rydell  reminded  himself-raised her
arms and began to  dance, a sort of looping shuffle, timed not  to the tempo
of the drums but  to the  waves of static  washing back and forth across the
sound, and when Rydell  thought  to look he  saw  the fat woman's  eyes were
open, her hands moving inside that plastic muff.
     Nobody else in the bar was paying it any attention at all,  just Rydell
and  the woman  in the wheelchair. Rydell leaned there  on the bar, watching
the hologram dance and wondering what he should do next.
     Warbaby's shopping list went like this: best he got the glasses and the
girl, next  best was the glasses, just the girl was  definitely third, but a
must if that was all that was going.
     Josie's music slid  out  and away for  the last time and the hologram's
dance ended. There was  some drunken applause from  a couple of  the tables,
Josie nodding her head a little like she was thanking them.
     The terrible thing  about it, Rydell thought, was that there Josie was,
shoehorned into that chair, and  she just wasn't  much  good  at making that
thing dance. It reminded him of this blind man in the park in Knoxville, who
sat there all day strumming an antique National guitar. There he was, blind,
had this old guitar, and he just couldn't  chord  for shit. Never seemed  to
get any better at it, either. Didn't seem fair.
     Now some people got up from a  table near where Chevette Washington was
sitting. Rydell was  in there quick, bringing the beer he'd won  for getting
rid of Eddie the  Shit. He still wasn't close enough to  pick  out what they
were saying, but he could try. He tried to think up ways to maybe start up a
conversation, but it seemed pretty hopeless. Not that he looked particularly
out  of place, because he had the impression that most of this crowd weren't
regulars here, just a random  sampling, come in out of the rain. But he just
didn't have any idea what this place  was about. He couldn't figure out what
'Cognitive  Dissidents'  meant;  it  wouldn't help him figure  out what  the
theme,  or whatever, was. And besides, whatever Chevette Washington and  her
guy were discussing, it looked to be getting sort of heated.
     Her guy, he thought.  Something there in  her  body-language that  said
Pissed-Off  Girlfriend, and something in how hard  this boy was studying  to
show how little any of it bothered  him, like maybe she was the  Ex-All this
abruptly coming  to  nothing at all as every  conversation  died  and Rydell
looked up from his  beer  to see Lt. Orlovsky,  the vampire-looking cop from
SFPD Homicide, stepping  in from the stairwell in his London  Fog, some kind
of fedora that looked like  it was molded from flesh-colored plastic on  his
head,  and  those  scary half-frame glasses. Orlovsky  stood  there,  little
streams running off the hem of his rain-darkened coat and pooling around his
wingtips, while he unbuttoned  the  coat with one hand. Still had his  black
flak vest on underneath, and now that hand came  up  to rest on  the smooth,
injection-molded, olive-drab butt of his floating-breech H&K. Rydell  looked
for the badge-case on the nylon neck-thong, but didn't see it.
     The whole bar was looking at Orlovsky.
     Orlovsky looked around the room, over  the tops of his glasses,  taking
his  time, giving them  all  a good  dose of Cop Eye.  The music, some weird
hollow  techie stuff  that sounded like bombs  going  off in  echo-chambers,
started to make a different kind of sense.
     Rydell saw  Josie the wheelchair woman  looking at  the Russian with an
expression Rydell couldn't process.
     Spotting Chevette Washington in her corner, Orlovsky walked over to her
table,  still  taking his time,  making  the rest of the room take that same
time. His hand still on that gun.
     It seemed to  Rydell like the Russian  just might be about to haul  out
and shoot her. Sure looked like it, but what kind of cop would do that?
     Now Orlovsky stopped in front of their table,  just the right distance,
too far for them to reach him and far enough to allow  room to pull that big
gun if he was going to.
     The  Boyfriend, Rydell was somehow pleased  to see, looked fit to  shit
himself. Baldhead looked like he'd been cast  in plastic, just frozen there,
hands on the table. Between his hands, Rydell saw a pocket phone.
     Orlovsky locked the girl  with his full current of Eye-thing, his  face
lined,  gray in this light, unsmiling.  He jerked the  brim of  the  plastic
fedora, just this precise little fraction, and said 'Get up.'
     Rydell  looked at  her  and saw  her  trembling.  There  was never  any
question the Russian meant her and not her friends-Boyfriend looking like he
might faint any second and Baldhead playing statue.
     Chevette Washington stood up, shaky,  the rickety little  wooden  chair
going over behind her.
     'Out.' The hat-brim indicated the stairs. The  hairy back of Orlovsky's
hand covered the butt of the H&K.
     Rydell heard his own knees creak with tension. He was  leaning forward,
gripping the edges of the  table. He could feel old dried pads of gum  under
there.
     The lights went out.
     Much later,  trying to  explain to Sublett  what  it had been like when
Josie whipped  her hologram on Orlovsky, Rydell said  it looked sort of like
the special effect at the end  of Raiders of the  Lost Ark, that  part where
those angels or whatever they were came swirling out of that box and got all
over those Nazis.
     But it had  all  been happening  at  once, for Rydell.  When the lights
went,  they all went, all those signs  on the  wall, everything, and  Rydell
just tossed that table sideways, without even  thinking  about it,  and Went
For where  she'd  been  standing. And  this ball  of  light  had  shot down,
expanding,  from a  point on the wall that  must've marked the upper edge of
that NEC  sign.  It was the color of the hologram's skin, kind of  honey and
ivory, all  marbled through  with  the dark  of  her  hair and  eyes, like a
fast-forward  of  a  satellite  storm-system.  All around  that  Russian,  a
three-foot sphere around his head  and  shoulders, and as it spun,  her eyes
and mouth, open in some silent scream, blinked by,  all magnified. Each eye,
for a fraction of a second, the size of the ball itself, and the white teeth
big, too, each one long as a man's hand.
     Orlovsky swatted at it, and that kept  him, for some very little while,
from getting his gun out.
     But it also gave off enough light to let Rydell see he was grabbing the
girl and  not  Boyfriend. Just sort of picking her up, forgetting everything
he'd  ever been taught about comealongs and restraints, and running, best he
could, for the stairs.
     Orlovsky yelled something, but it must've been in Russian.
     His uncle, the one who'd  gone off to Africa in the  Army, used to say,
if he liked how a woman's ass moved when she walked, that it looked like two
baby bobcats in a croker sack. And that  was the expression that popped into
Rydell's mind as he ran up those stairs with Chevette Washington held out in
front of him like a  big bunch of groceries.  But it didn't have anything to
do with sexy.
     He was just lucky she didn't get an eye or break any of his ribs.


22. Rub-a-dub.

     Whoever had grabbed  her, she just kept kicking and punching,  right up
the stairs, backward. But he had her held out so far in front of him that he
almost fell on top of her.
     Then  she was out on the deck, in what light there was, and  looking at
some  kind of plastic machine  gun,  the color of a  kid's army toy,  in the
hands  of another one of these big  ugly raincoat guys, this one with no hat
and his wet hair slicked back from a face with the skin on too tight.
     'You drop her now, fuckhead,' this one with the gun said. Had an accent
out of an old monster  movie. She barely kept to her  feet  when the one who
was holding her let go.
     'Fuckhead,' the gun-guy said, like Pock  Ed,  'you  try to make move or
what?'
     'War,' the one who'd grabbed  her said,  then doubled  over,  coughing.
'Baby,' he said, straightening, then winced,  hugging  his ribs, looking  at
her. 'Jesus  fuck,  you got a kick on  you.' Sounded  American, but not West
Coast. In  a  cheap  nylon jacket  with  one sleeve  half ripped  off at the
shoulder, white fuzzy stuff hanging out.
     'You try to make a move...' And  the plastic gun was pointing  right at
the guy's face.
     'War-baby,  war-baby,' the  guy said,  or anyway it sounded like  that,
'war-baby seilt  me  to get  her.  He's  parked  back  out there  past those
tank-ttap things, waiting for me to bring her Out.'
     'Arkady...' It was  the ofle  in the  plastic hat, coming up the stairs
behind the  guy who'd grabbed her. He had a pair of night-vision glasses on,
that funny-looking center-tube poking out from beneath  the brim of his hat.
He  was holding up  something that looked  like a  miniature aerosol can. He
said  something in this language. Russian? He gestured with the  little can,
back down the stairs.
     'You  use  capsicum in an enclosed space like that,' said the one who'd
grabbed her, 'people'll get hurt. Get you some permanent sinus problems.'
     The  tight-faced man  looked at him like he was something  crawled  out
from under a rock.  'You drive, yes?' he said, gesturing for  the hat-man to
put the thing away, whatever it was.
     'We had a coffee. Well, you had tea. Svobodov, right?'
     Chevette  caught the tight-faced man's  glance at her,  like he  hadn't
liked her hearing his name. She wanted to tell him she'd heard it Rub-a-Dub,
how this other guy talked, so that couldn't really be it, could it?
     'Why you grab her?' asked the tight-faced man, Rub-a-Dub.
     'She  coulda  got  away  in  the  dark, couldn't she?  Didn't know your
partner here  had night  vision.  Besides, he  sent me to  get  her.  Didn't
mention you. In fact, they said you didn't come out here.'
     The one with the  hat was behind her now, jerking her arm up in a hold.
'Lemme go-'
     'Hey,' the one who'd grabbed her said, like it made things okay, 'these
men are police officers. SFPD Homicide, right?'
     Rub-a-Dub whistled softly. 'Fuckhead.'
     'Cops?' she asked.
     'Sure are.'
     Which produced a little snort of exasperation from Rub-aDub.
     'Arkady, now we go. These dirthags try  to  spy us  from below...'  The
hat-man pulling off his night-glasses and dancing like he had to pee.
     'Hey,'  she said, 'somebody's killed Sammy. If you're  cops, listen, he
killed Sammy Sal!'
     'Who's Sammy?' the one in the torn jacket said.
     'I work with him! At Allied. Sammy DuPree. Sammy. He got shot.'
     'Who shot him?'
     'Ry-dell.  Shut fuck up.' Shot,  Pock,  Op.  'She's  tellin'  us  she's
got-information-regarding-a-possiblehomicide, and you're  telling me to shut
up?'
     'Yes, I tell you shut fuck up. War-baby. He will explain.'
     And her arm twisted up so she'd go with them.
     Svobodov had insisted on cuffing him to  Chevette Washington. They were
Beretta cuffs, just like he'd carried on patrol in Knoxville. Svobodov  said
he and Orlovsky needed  their hands free in case any of these bridge  people
caught on they were taking the girl off.
     But if  they were  taking  her in, how  come they  hadn't read  her any
Miranda, or even told her she was under  arrest? Rydell had already  decided
that if it got to court and he was called to witness, no way was he going to
perjure himself and say he'd heard any fucking Miranda. These  Russians were
balls-out cowboys as  far as he could see, just exactly the kind of officers
the Academy had tried hard to train Rydell not to be.
     In a way, though, what they were reflected what a lot of people more or
less unconsciously expected  cops to be and do, and that, this one  lecturer
at the Academy had said, was because of mythology. Like what they called the
Father Mulcahy Syndrome, in barricaded  hostage  situations.  Where somebody
took a hostage and the cops tried to decide  what to do. And they'd all seen
this movie about Father Mulcahy  once, so'd they'd say, yeah, I got it, I'll
get a priest, I'll get the guy's parents, I'll  lay  down my gun and I'll go
in there and talk him out. And he'd go in there and get  his ass drilled out
real  good. Because he  forgot,  and let  himself think  a movie was how you
really did it. And it could work the other way, too, SO you gradually became
how you saw cops were in.


23. Gone and done it.

     movies and on television. They'd all been warned about that. But people
like  Svobodov  and Orlovsky,  people who'd come here  from other countries,
maybe that media stuff worked even stronger on them. Check how they dressed,
for one thing.
     Man,  he  was going to have  him a shower. Hot shower. He was  going to
stay in  there until he couldn't stand it anymore, or until the hot ran out.
Then he was going to get out and towel off and put on all brand-new, totally
dry clothes, in whatever hotel room Warbaby had got for him. He was going to
send down  for  a couple  of  club sandwiches and an ice-bucket  with  about
four-five of those long-neck Mexican beers like they drank in  L.A. And he'd
sit there with a remote and watch some television.
     Maybe  see Cops in Trouble. Maybe he'd even call up Sublett, shoot  the
shit,  tell him about this  wild-ass time up in Northern California. Sublett
always  worked  deep  graveyard because he was  light-sensitive,  so  if  it
happened to be his night off, he'd be up watching his movies.
     'Watch where you're walking-' Yanking his cuffed hand so hard he nearly
fell over. He'd  been about to go one side of an upright as she was about to
go the other. 'Hey. Sorry,' he said.
     She wouldn't look at him. But she just didn't look to Rydell like she'd
sit down on some  guy's chest with a razor and haul  his tongue out the hard
way.  Well, she  did have that ceramic  knife, when Svobodov shook her down,
plus  a  pocket phone and the damn glasses everybody was after. Those looked
just  like Warbaby's, and had this case. The  Russians were real happy about
that, and now they were tucked away safe in the inside pocket  of Svobodov's
flak vest.
     She  wasn't  the  right kind of scared,  either, something kept telling
him. She wasn't giving off  that vibe of perp fear  that you got to know  by
about your third day on  the job. It was like victim fear, what it was, even
though she'd already flatout  admitted  to Orlovsky that she'd  stolen those
glasses. Said she'd done that up at a party in that hotel, the night before.
     But neither of the Russians had said shit  about any  homicide beef, or
any Blix or whatever the victim's name had been. Or even larceny. And  she'd
said that  about somebody killing Sammy, whoever  Sammy was. Maybe Sammy was
the German. But the Russians had just dropped it, and  shut Etydell up,  and
now she'd clammed up except  to bitch at him if he started to fall asleep on
his feet.
     The place was  coming back to  life, sort of,  now  that the storm  had
quit,  but it was God knows when in the morning  and there weren't exactly a
lot of people swarming out yet to check the damage. Lights kept coming  back
on, here and there, and there were a few people sweeping water off decks and
things, and a  few  drunks, and this guy who  looked like  he was on dancer,
talking to  himself a mile a  minute, who kept following them until Svobodov
pulled out  his  H&K and  spun  around and said  he'd grease him to  fucking
catfood if he didn't get his dancer ass to Oakland like yesterday, fuckhead,
and the guy did, naturally, his eyes about to bug right out of his head, and
Orlovsky laughing at him.
     They came out into some more lights, about where Rydell  had first laid
his eyes on Chevette Washington. Looking  down to keep track of his footing,
Rydell saw she was wearing black SWAT trainers just like his. Lexan insoles.
     'Hey,' he said, 'major footwear.'
     And she just looked up  at  him like  he  was crazy, and  he  saw tears
running down her face.
     And Svobodov jammed the muzzle  of  that H&K,  hard, into  the joint of
Rydell's jaw, just in front of his right ear, and said: 'Fuckhead. You don't
talk to her.'
     Rydell looked at Svobodov, edgewise, down the top of the barrel. Waited
until he thought it was safe to say okay.
     After that, he didn't try to say anything to her,  or even look at her.
When he thought he could get away with  it, he looked at Svohodov. When they
took that cuff off, he just might deck that SOfl of a hitch.
     But just  after the Russian had pulled the gun out  of  his ear, Rydell
had registered something behind him. Not registered big-time, but it clicked
for him later: this big bear of a longhair, blinking out at them, where they
stood in the light, from this little doorway looked like it wasn't more than
a foot wide.
     Rydell  didn't  have  anything  special  going  about black  people  or
immigrants or anything, not like a lot of people did. In fact, that had been
one  of  the things  that had gotten him  into the Academy  when  he  hadn't
exactly had great grades from high school. They'd run all these tests on him
and decided he wasn't racist. He wasn't,  either, but not because he thought
about it particularly. He  just couldn't  see the  point. It just made for a
lot of hassle,  being that way, so why  be that way? Nobody was  going to go
back  and  live where  they lived before, were  they,  and  if they  did (he
vaguely suspected) there  wouldn't be any  Mongolian barbecue and maybe we'd
all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black.
     He  had to admit,  though,  as he and Chevette  Washington  walked  out
between those  tank-trap slabs,  their cuffed wrists swinging in that stupid
prom-night unison that you get with handcuffs, that currently he was feeling
a little put upon  by a  few  very specific blacks and immigrants. Warbaby's
tvpreacher melancholy had worn thin  on him; he  thought Freddie was, as his
father would have  put it,  a jive-ass motherfucker;  Svobodov and Orlovsky,
they  must be what  his uncle, the one who  went  in the army, had meant  by
stone pigs.
     And here he could  see Freddie with his butt propped  against the front
fender of  the  Patriot, bobbing  his  head to something  on earphones,  the
lyrics or whatever sliding around the edges of his sneakers, animated in red
LEDs.  Must've sat out the rain in  the car, because his pistol-print  shirt
and his big shorts weren't even wet.
     And Warbaby there in his long  quilted coat, his hat jammed down  level
with those  VL glasses.  Looked like a refrigerator, if a refrigerator could
lean on a cane.
     And the Russians' gray  tanker  of an unmarked, pulled  up nose to nose
with  the  Patriot,  armored  tires  and  that  graphite  mesh  rhino-chaser
screaming Cop Car at anybody who was interested. As indeed some were, Rydell
saw,  a thin  crowd  of bridge-people watching  from various perches  on the
concrete   slabs  and  battened  food-wagons.   Little  kids,  a  couple  of
Mexican-looking women with  hairnets  like they worked in  food-preparation,
some  rough-looking  boys in muddy workclothes  and  leaning on  shovels and
push-brooms there.  Just looking, their  faces  carefully  neutral, the  way
people's faces got when they saw cops working and were curious.
     And somebody in the Russians' car, hunched down knees-up in the shotgun
seat.
     The  Russians closing in  tight on either side of Rydell  and the girl,
walking them out.  Rydell could feel them  responding to the presence of the
crowd. Shouldn't've left the car out there like that.
     Svobodov, this close, sort of creaked when he walked, and that was  the
armor under his shirt that Rydell  had  noticed before, back  in that greasy
spoon.  Svobodov was  smoking  one  of his Marlboro cigarettes, hissing  out
clouds of blue smoke. Had the gun out of sight now.
     And right up to Warbaby, Freddie shining the whole scene on with a grin
that made Rydell want to kick him, but Warbaby looking sad as ever.
     'Get this fucking cuff off,' Rydell said to Warbaby, raising his wrist,
Chevette Washington's coming up with it. The crowd saw the cuffs then; there
was a ripple of reaction, voices.
     Warbaby looked at Svobodov. 'You get it?'
     'Here.' Svobodov touched the front of his London Fog.
     Warbaby nodded, looked  at Chevette Washington,  then at  Rydell. 'Good
then.' To Orlovsky: 'Take the cuffs off.'
     Orlovsky  took Rydell's  wrist, slid a mag-strip  into  the slot in the
cuff.
     'Get in the car,' Warbaby said to Rydell.
     'They haven't read her any Miranda,' Rydell said.
     'Get in the car. You're driving, remember?'
     'She under arrest, Mr. Warbaby?'
     Freddie giggled.
     Chevette Washington was holding her wrist up for Orlovsky,  but  he was
putting the mag-strip away.
     'Rydell,' Warbaby said, 'get in the car now. We've done our part here.'
     The passenger-side door of  the gray car opened.  A  man got out. Black
cowboy boots and a  long black waterproof. Sandy hair, no particular length.
He had those deep smile-creases  down  his cheeks, like  somebody had carved
them there. Light-colored eyes.
     Then he did smile, and it  was about two-thirds gum and  a third teeth,
with gold at the corners.
     'That's him,' Chevette  Washington said,  in  this  hoarse  voice,  'he
killed Sammy.'
     And that was when the big longhair, the one in the dirty shirt, the one
Rydell  had noticed back on  the bridge, plowed  this  bicycle  square  into
Svobodov's  back. Not any regular  bicycle, either,  but this big old  rusty
coaster-brake number with a heavy steel basket welded in front of the  bars.
The  bike and the basket probably weighed a hundred pounds between them, and
there must've been another hundred  pounds of  scrap metal  piled up  in the
basket when Svobodov got  nailed. Put him face-down  across the hood of  the
Patriot, Freddie jumping like a scalded cat.
     The  longhair landed  on top of Svobodov and all  that junk like a bear
with rabies, grabbed  him by  the ears, and starting slamming his  face into
the  hood.  Orlovsky  was  pulling  out  his  H&K  and  Rydell saw  Chevette
Washington bend down, tug something out of the top of one SWAT shoe.  jab it
into Orlovsky's hack. Looked  like a screwdriver.  Hit whatever armor he was
wearing, but it put him off-balance as he pulled the trigger.
     Nothing  in  the  world  ever  sounded  like  caseless  ammunition,  at
full-auto, out of  a floating breech. It  wasn't the sound of a machine gun,
but a kind of ear-shattering, extended whoop.
     The  first  burst didn't  seem  to  hit  anything,  but  with  Chevette
Washington clawing at  his gun arm, Orlovsky tried to turn it on her. Second
burst went in the general direction of the crowd. People screaming, grabbing
up kids.
     Warbaby's mouth was just open, like he couldn't believe it.
     Rydell  was  behind Orlovsky  when he tried to bring the  gun up again,
and, well, it was just one of those times.
     He  side-kicked the  Russian about  three inches below the back of  his
knee, that third burst whooping almost straight up as Orlovsky went down.
     Freddie  tried  to   grab  Chevette  Washington,   seemed  to  see  the
screwdriver for the first time, and just managed to bring his laptop up with
both  hands. That  screwdriver  went  right through it.  Freddie  yelped and
dropped it.
     Rydell grabbed the loose cuff, the one  that had been around his wrist,
and just pulled.
     Opened the passenger-side door of the Patriot and hauled  her right  in
after him. Getting into the driver's seat, he  had a grandstand  view of the
longhair  pounding Svobodov's bloody face into the hood, all these pieces of
rusty junk jumping each time he did it.
     Key. Ignition.
     Rydell saw Chevette Washington's phone and the case with the VL glasses
fall  out  of  Svobodov's  flak  vest. Powered  down the window and  reached
around. Somebody  shot the longhair off Svobodov, pop, pop, pop, and Rydell,
stomping it in  reverse,  saw the man from the cop car swinging a little gun
around,  two-handed. just like they  taught you  in  FATSS. The back  of the
Patriot slammed into something and Svohodov flew  off the hood in a cloud of
rusty chain  and odd lengths of pipe. Chevette Washington was trying to  get
out the passenger door, so he had to  hang on to the cuff and spin the wheel
one-handed, let go of her long enough to shove it into forward and  tromp on
it, then grab her again.
     The passenger door slammed shut as he took it straight for the man with
the big smile, who  maybe got  off one more before  he had to get out of the
way, fast,
     The Patriot was fishtailing in about  an inch  of  water, and he barely
missed  clipping  the back of a big  orange  waste-hauler pulled up beside a
building there.
     He  caught this  one  crazy glimpse  in  the dash-mirror, out  the back
window: the  bridge  towering  up  like  something  wrapped in seaweed,  sky
graying now behind  it, and Warbaby  taking one  stiff-legged step, another,
raising the cane straight out from his shoulder, pointing it  at the Patriot
like it was a magic wand or something.
     Then whatever  came out of  the  end  of  Warbaby's  cane took out  the
Patriot's back window,  and Rydell  hung  a right  so tight it almost tipped
them over.
     'Jesus,' said  Chevette  Washington,  like  somebody talking  in  their
sleep, 'what are you doing?'
     He didn't know, but hadn't he just gone and done it?
     When  the  lights went out, Yamazaki fumbled  in the  dark for his bag.
Finding it, he felt through it for his flashlight.
     In the white beam, Skinner slept slack-jawed beneath the blankets and a
ragged sleeping-bag.
     Yamazaki  searched the  several  shelves above the  table-ledge:  small
glass  jars of spices, identical jars  containing  steel screws,  an ancient
Bakelite telephone reminding him of the origin of  the verb 'to dial,' rolls
of many different kinds and colors of  adhesive tape, twists of heavy copper
wire, pieces of what he took to be salt-water tackle, and, finally, a bundle
of  dusty  candle-stubs  secured with  a rotting rubber band.  Selecting the
longest  of  these, he found a lighter beside  the green campstove. Standing
the candle  upright  on a white saucer,  he lit it. The flame fluttered  and
went out.
     Flashlight in hand, he moved  to  the window and tugged it more tightly
into its deep circular frame. Now  the candle  stayed lit,  though the flame
pulsed and swelled in drafts he could never hope to locate. Returning to the
window, he looked out.  The darkened  bridge was invisible. Rain was driving
almost  horizontally against  the  window,  tiny droplets  reaching his face
through cracks in the glass and corroded segments of the supporting lead. It
occurred  to him that Skinner's room might be made to function as  a  camera
ohscura. If  the church window's tiny central hull's-eye pane were  removed,
and the other panes covered, an inverted image would be cast on the opposite
wall.


24. Song of the central pier.

     Yamazaki knew that the central pier, the bridge's center anchorage, had
once  qualified as  one  of the  world's  largest  pinhole cameras.  In  the
structure's  pitch-black  interior,  light shining in through a single  tiny
hole had  projected a huge  image of  the underside  of the lower  deck, the
nearest  tower,  and  the  surrounding bay. Now  the  heart of the anchorage
housed some uncounted number of the bridge's more secretive inhabitants, and
Skinner had advised him  against attempting to go there. 'Nothin' like those
Mansons out in the bushes on Treasure, Scooter, but you don't want to bother
'em anyway. Okay people but they just aren't looking for anybody to drop in,
know what I mean?'
     Yamazaki  crossed  to  the smooth curve  of cable that  interrupted the
room's floor. Only an oval segment of it was visible, like some mathematical
formula barely breaking a topological  surface in a computer representation.
He bent  to touch  it, the visible segment polished by other hands. Each  of
the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and seventy-two wires,  had
withstood,  and withstood now, a force of some million pounds. Yamazaki felt
something, some  message  of vast, obscure  moment,  shiver up  through  the
relic-smooth  dorsal hump. The storm, surely; the bridge  itself was capable
of considerable mobility; it expanded and contracted with heat and cold; the
great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into  bedrock beneath  the Bay mud,
bedrock that had scarcely moved even in the Little Grande.
     Godzilla. Yamazaki  shivered,  recalling  television  images of Tokyo's
fall. He had been in Paris, with his parents. Now a new city rose there, its
buildings grown, literally, floor by floor.
     The candlelight showed  him Skinner's  little  television, forgotten on
the  floor. Taking it  to the  table, he sat  on the stool and  examined it.
There was no visible damage to  the screen. It had simply come away from its
frame,  on a short length of  multicolored ribbon. He folded the ribbon into
the  frame  and pressed with  his thumbs on either  side  of the screen.  It
popped back into place, but would it still  function? He bent to examine the
tiny controls. ON.
     Lime-and-purple  diagonals  chased themselves across  the  screen, then
faded,  revealing some steadycam fragment,  the  NHK  logo displayed  in the
lower  left corner. '-heir-apparent to  the Harwood Levine  public relations
and advertising  fortune,  departed  San Francisco  this afternoon  after  a
rumored  stay of  several  days,  declining  comment on the  purpose of  his
visit.'  A long face, horselike yet handsome,  above a  raincoat's  upturned
collar.  A large white smile. 'Accompanying him,' mid-distance shot down  an
airport  corridor,  the  slender, dark-haired  woman  wrapped  in  something
luxurious and black, silver gleaming at the heels of her shining boots, 'was
Maria Paz,  the Padanian media personality, daughter of film director  Carlo
Paz-.' The woman, who looked unhappy,  vanished, to  be replaced by infrared
footage  from  New  Zealand,  as  Japanese peace-keeping forces  in  armored
vehicles advanced on a rural airport. '-losses attributed  to  the  outlawed
South  Island  Liberation Front, while in Wellington-' Yamazaki attempted to
change  the channel, but  the screen only  strobed its lime-and-purple, then
framed  a portrait  of  Shapely. A  BBC  docu-drama.  Calm,  serious, mildly
hypnotic. After two more unsuccessful attempts at  locating another channel,
Yamazaki let the  British  voiceover blot  out the wind, the groaning of the
cables, the creaking of the  plywood walls. He focused his attention on  the
familiar story, its outcome fixed, comforting-if only in its certainty.
     James Delmore Shapely had come to the attention of the AIDS industry in
the  early months  of  the  new  century.  He  was  thirty-one years old,  a
prostitute,  and  had been HIVpositive for twelve years. At the time of  his
'discovery,' by Dr. Kim  Kutnik of Atlanta,  Georgia,  Shapely was serving a
two  hundred and  fifty  day  prison  term for  soliciting. (His  status  as
HIV-positive, which would automatically have warranted more serious charges,
had apparently  been 'glitched.')  Kutnik,  a researcher  with  the  Sharman
Group, an American subsidiary of Shibata Pharmaceuticals, was sifting prison
medical data in search of individuals who had been HIV-positive for a decade
or  more, were  asymptomatic,  and had entirely normal  (or, as in Shapely's
case, above the norm) T-cell counts.
     One of the Sharmar Group's  research initiatives  centered  around  the
possibility of isolating mutant strains  of  HIV.  Arguing that viruses obey
the laws of  natural selection, several Sharman biologists had proposed that
the HIV virus, in its then-current  genetic format,  was excessively lethal.
Allowed to range unchecked, argued the Sharman  team, a  virus demonstrating
ioo percent lethality must eventually bring about the extinction oF the host
organism. (Other Sharman researchers countered Fy citing the long incubation
period as contributing to the suivival  of the host population.) As  the BBC
writers  were  careful to  make  clear, the idea of  locating  nonpathogenic
strains of HIV, with a view of overpowering and neutralizing lethal strains,
had  been  put  forward  almost  a  decade  earlier,  though  the  'ethical'
implications  of experimentation  with human subjects had impeded  research.
The core observation cf the  Sharman  researchers dated  from  this  earlier
work:  The %irus  wishes to  survive,  and cannot if it  kills its host. The
Shariian  team,  of  which  Dr.  Kutnik  was  a  part,  intended  to  inject
HIV-positive patients with blood extracted from individials they believed to
be infected  with nonpathogenic strains of the  virus. It was possible, they
believed,  that the nonathogenic strain  would overpower the lethal  strain.
Kim  KutrLik  was one  of  seven researchers  given  the  task  of  locating
HIV-positive individuals  who might be harboring a nonpathogenic strain. She
elected to begin her search through a  sectorof data concerned with  current
inmates of state  prisons who were (a) in apparent good health, and  (b) had
tested HIV-positive at least  a decade  before. Her initial search turned up
sixty-six possibles-among them, J. D. Shapely.
     Yamazaki  watched  as  Kutnik,  played  by  a  young  British  actress,
recalled, from  a patio in  Rio, her first meeting with Shapely.  'I'd  been
struck by the fact that his T-cell count that day  was over i,zoo, and  that
his responses to  the questionnaire seemed to indicated that 'safe sex,'  as
we thought of  it then, was,  well,  not exactly a priority.  He  was a very
open, very outgoing, really a very innocent character, and when I asked him,
there in the prison visiting room, about oral sex, he actually blushed. Then
he laughed, and said, well, he said he 'sucked cock like it was going out of
style...'  The  actressKutnik looked  as  though  she were  about  to  blush
herself. 'Of course,' she  said, 'in those  days we didn't really understand
the  disease's  exact  vectors  of infection,  because, grotesque  as it now
seems,  there  had  been  no   real  research  into  the  precise  modes  of
transmission...'
     Yamazaki cut the set  off. Dr.  Kutnik would  arrange Shapely's release
from  prison as an AIDS research volunteer under  Federal  law. The  Sharman
Group's project would  be hindered by fundamentalist Christians objecting to
the injection of 'HIV-tainted' blood into the systems of terminally ill AIDS
patients.  As the project  foundered,  Kutnik  would  uncover  clinical data
suggesting  that  unprotected sex with Shapely  had apparently reversed  the
symptoms of  several of her patients.  There would  be Kutnik's  impassioned
resignation, the flight  to Brazil with the baffled  Shapely, lavish funding
against a backdrop of impending civil war,  and what could only be described
as an extremely pragmatic climate for research.
     But it was such a sad story.
     Better to sit here by  candlelight, elbows  on the  edge  of  Skinner's
table, listening for the song of the central pier.
     He kept saying he was from Tennessee and he  didn't need this shit. She
kept thinking she was going to die, the way he was  driving, or anyway those
cops would be after  them, or the  one who shot Sammy. She still didn't know
what had happened, and wasn't that Nigel who'd plowed into that  tight-faced
one?
     But he'd hung  this right off Bryant, so she  told  him left on Folsom,
because if the assholes were coming, she figured she wanted the Haight, best
place she knew to get lost, and that was definitely what she intended to do,
earliest  opportunity.  And this  Ford  was  just like the one  Mr. Matthews
drove, ran the holding  facility up  in  Beaverton. And  she'd tried to stab
somebody with a screwdriver. She'd never done anything like that in her life
before. And she'd wrecked  that  black  guy's computer,  the  one  with  the
haircut.  And this  bracelet on  her left  wrist, the  other  half  flipping
around, open, on three links of chain- He reached over and grabbed the loose
cuff. Did something to it without taking his eyes off the street. He let go.
Now it was locked shut.
     'Why'd you do that?'
     'So you don't snag it on something,  wind up cuffed  to the door-handle
or a street sign-'
     'Take it off.'
     'No key.'
     She rattled it at him. 'Take it off.'
     'Stick it up the sleeve of your jacket. Those are Beretta



25. Without a paddle.

     cuffs.  Real good cuffs.' He sounded like he  was sort of happy to have
something  to  talk about,  and his driving had evened out.  Brown eyes. Not
old; twenties, maybe. Cheap clothes like K-Mart stuff,  all wet. Light brown
hair cut too short but not short enough.  She watched  a  muscle  in his jaw
work, like he was chewing gum, but he wasn't.
     'Where we going?' she asked him.
     'Fuck if I know,'  he said, gunning the engine a  little. 'You  the one
said "left"...'
     'Who are you?'
     He glanced over at her. 'Rydell. Berry Rydell.'
     'Barry?'
     'Berry. Like straw. Like dingle. Hey, this a big fucking Street, lights
and everything-'
     'Right.'
     'So where should I'
     'Right!'
     'Okay,' he said, and hung it. 'Why?'
     'The Haight. Lots of people up late, cops don't like to go there...'
     'Ditch this car there?'
     'Turn your back on it two seconds, it's history.'
     'They got ATM's there?'
     'Uh-uh.'
     'Well, here's one...'  Up over  a  curb, hunks  of crazed  safety-glass
falling out  of the  frame where  the back window  had been. She hadn't even
noticed that.
     He  dug a  soggy-looking  wallet out  of  his  back pocket and  started
pulling cards out of it. Three of them. 'I have to try to get some cash,' he
said.  He looked  at  her.  'You  wanna jump  out of this  car  and run,' he
shrugged, 'then you just go for it.'
     Then  he reached in his  jacket pocket  and pulled out the glasses  and
Codes's phone that  she'd scooped when  the  lights went out  in Dissidents.
Because she knew from Lowell that people in trouble need a phone, most times
worse than anything. He dropped them  in  her lap, the asshole's glasses and
the phone. 'Yours.'
     Then he got out, walked  over to the ATM, and started feeding it cards.
She sat  there, watching it emerge  from its armor, the way they do, shy and
cautious, its cameras coming out, too,  to monitor the transaction. He stood
there, drumming his fingers on the side, his mouth like he was whistling but
he wasn't making any noise. She looked down  at the case and  the  phone and
wondered why she didn't just jump out and run, like he said.
     Finally he came back,  thumb-counting a fold of bills, stuck it down in
his front jeans pocket, and got in He  sailed the first of his cards out the
open  window at the ATM, which was pulling back into its  shell like a crab.
'Don't know how they cancelled that one so quick,  after  you put that thing
through Freddie's laptop.' Flicked another. Then the last one.  They lay  in
front of  the  ATM as  its lexan shield  came trundling down,  their  little
holograms winging up in the machine's halogen floods.
     'Somebody'll get those,' she said.
     'Hope so,' he  said, 'hope  they get 'em  and go to Mars.'  Then he did
something in reverse with all four wheels and the Ford sort of jumped up and
backward, into the street, some other car swerving  past them all brakes and
horn and the driver's mouth a black 0, and the part of her that  was still a
messenger  sort of liked it. All  the  times they'd cut her off.  'Shit,' he
said, jamming the gear-thing around  until he  got what  he needed  and they
took off.
     The handcuff was rubbing on the rash where  the red worm had been. 'You
a cop?'
     'No.'
     'Security? Like from the hotel?'
     'Uh-uh.'
     'Well,' she said, 'what are you?'
     Streetlight sliding across his face. Seemed like  he was thinking about
it. 'Up shit creek. Without a paddle.'


26. Colored people.

     The first thing Rydell saw when he got out of the Patriot, in the alley
off Haight Street, was a one-armed, one-legged man on a skateboard. This man
lay on his stomach, on the board, and propelled himself along with a curious
hitching motion that  reminded Rydell of the  limbs of a gigged frog. He had
his  right  arm  and his left leg, which  at least  allowed for some kind of
symmetry, but there was  no  foot on the leg.  His face, as if by some weird
osmosis, was the color of dirty concrete, and Rydell couldn't have said what
race he was.  His hair, if he had any, was covered by  a black knit cap, and
the  rest of  him was  sheathed in  a  black, one-piece  garment  apparently
stitched from sections of heavy-duty rubber inner-tube. He looked up, as  he
hitched past Rydell, through puddles left by the storm, headed for the mouth
of the alley, and said, or Rydell thought he said: 'You  wanna  talk to  me?
You wanna talk to me, you better shut your fuckin' mouth...'
     Rydell stood there, Samsonite dangling, and watched him go.
     Then   something   rattled  beside  him.  The  hardware   on   Chevette
Washington's leather jacket. 'Come  on,' she said,  'don't wanna hang around
back in here.' 'You see that?' Rydell asked, gesturing with his suitcase.
     'You hang around back in here, you'll see worse than that,' she said.
     Rydell  looked back at the  Patriot. He'd  locked it  and left  the key
under the driver's scat, because he hadn't wanted to

     make it look too easy, but he'd forgotten  about that back window. He'd
never been in the position before of actively wanting a car to be stolen.
     'You sure somebody'll take that?' he asked her.
     'We don't  get out  of here,  they'll  take  us  with it.' She  started
walking. Rydell followed. There was stuff painted on the brick walls as high
as anyone could reach, but it didn't  look like any language he'd ever seen,
except maybe the way they wrote cuss-words in a printed cartoon.
     They'd just rounded the corner,  onto the  sidewalk, when  Rydell heard
the Patriot's engine start to rev. It gave him goosebumps, like something in
a ghost story, because there hadn't been  anybody back in  there at all, and
now he couldn't see the skateboard man anywhere.
     'Look at the ground,'  Chevette Washington  said.  'Don't look  up when
they go by or they'll kill us...'
     Rydell concentrated  on the toes of his black SWATs. 'You hang out with
car-thieves much?'
     'Just walk. Don't talk. Don't look.'
     He heard the  Patriot  wheel out of the  alley and draw up beside them,
pacing them. His  toes  were  making little squelching noises, each time  he
took a step,  and what  if the  last thing you knew before you died was just
some pathetic  discomfort like that, like your  shoes  were  soaked and your
socks were wet, and you weren't ever going to get to change them?
     Rydell heard the Patriot take off, the driver  fighting the  unfamiliar
American shift-pattern. He started to look up.
     'Don't,' she said.
     'Those friends of yours or what?'
     'Alley pirates, Lowell calls 'em.'
     'Who's Lowell?'
     'You saw him in Dissidents.'
     'That bar?'
     'Not a bar. A chill.'
     'Serves alcohol,' Rydell said.
     'A chill. Where you  hang.' 'You' who?  This  Lowell,  he  hang there?'
Yeah.'
     'You too?'
     'No,' she said, angry.
     'He your friend, Lowell? Your boyfriend?'
     'You said you weren't a cop. You talk like one.'
     'I'm not,' he said. 'You can ask 'em.'
     'He's just somebody I used to know,' she said. 'Fine.'
     She looked at the Samsonite. 'You got a gun or something, in there?'
     'Dry socks. Underwear.'
     She looked up at him. 'I don't get you.'
     'Don't have to,' he said. 'We just walking, or you maybe know somewhere
to go? Like off this street?'
     'We want  to  look at some flash,' she said to  the  fat man. He had  a
couple of things through each nipple, looked like Yale locks. Kind of pulled
him down, there, and Rydell just couldn't look at them. Had on  some kind of
baggy white pants with the crotch down about where the knees should've been,
and this little blue velvet vest all embroidered  with  gold. He was big and
soft and fat and covered with tattoos.
     Rydell's uncle, the one who'd  gone to Africa with the  army and hadn't
come back, had had a couple of tattoos. The best one went  right across  his
back, this big  swirly dragon  with  horns  and  sort of  a goofy grin. He'd
gotten  that one in  Korea,  eight colors  and  it  had all been  done by  a
computer. He'd told  Rydell how the computer had  mapped his back and showed
him exactly what it was going to look  like when it was done. Then he had to
lie down on this table while this robot put the tattoo on.
     Rydell had imagined  a robot kind  of like a  vacuumcleaner,  but  with
twisty  chrome arms had needles on the end. But his  uncle said it  was more
like being fed through a  dotmatrix printer,  and he'd had to go  back eight
times, one  time  for each color.  It  was  a great dragon, though, and lots
brighter than the tattoos  on his uncle's arms,  which were  American eagles
and  a Harley  trademark.  When his uncle worked out  in  the backyard  with
Rydell's set of Sears weights, Rydell would watch the dragon ripple.
     This fat bald  guy with the  weights  through  his nipples  had tattoos
everywhere except his hands and his head. Looked like he was wearing a  suit
of  them. They were  all different, no American eagles  or Harley trademarks
either, and they sort of ran together. They made  Rydell feel kind of dizzy,
so he looked up  at the walls, which were covered  with  more tattoos,  like
samples for you to pick from.
     'You've been here before,' the man said.
     'Yeah,' Chevette Washington said, 'with Lowell. You remember Lowell?'
     The fat man shrugged.
     'My friend and I,' she said, 'we wanna pick something out...'
     'I  haven't seen your friend before,' the fat  man said, perfectly nice
about it but  Rydell could hear the question in his voice. He was looking at
Rydell's suitcase.
     'It's okay,' she said. 'He knows Lowell. He's a 'Land boy, too.'
     'You  bridge people,' the fat man  said,  like he liked bridge  people.
'That storm was just terrible, wasn't it? I hope it didn't do you people too
much damage... We had a client last month brought in a wide-angle Cibachrome
he wanted done as a back-piece. Your whole suspension span and everything on
it. Beautiful shot but he wanted it inked just that size, and he just wasn't
broad enough...'  He  looked  up  at Rydell. 'Would've  fit, on  your friend
here...'
     'Couldn't  he get  it?' she  asked, and Rydell  caught that instinct to
keep people talking, keep them involved.
     'We're  a  full-service shop here at Colored People,' the fat man said.
'Lloyd  put it on a  graphics  engine, rotated it thirty degrees, heightened
the perspective, and it's gorgeous
     Now, were you interested in seeing some flash for yourself, or for your
big friend here?'
     'Uh, actually,' Chevette said, 'we're looking for something for both of
us. Like, uh, matching, you know?'
     The fat man smiled. 'That's romantic...'
     Rydell looked at her.
     'Just  come this way.' The fat man sort  of jingled when he walked, and
it made Rydell wince. 'May I bring you some complimentary tea?'
     'Coffee?' Rydell asked hopefully.
     'I'm sorry,' the  fat man said, 'but  Butch left at twelve and  I don't
know how to operate the machine. But I can bring you some nice tea.'
     'Yeah,'  Chevette  said, urging Rydell  along  with  little elbow-jabs,
'tea.'
     The  fat  man  took them  down a hallway and into a little  room with a
couple of wallscreens and a leather sofa. 'I'll just get your tea,' he said,
and shuffled out, jingling.
     'Why'd you say that, about matching tattoos?' Rydell was looking around
the room. Clean. Blank walls. Soft light but no shadows.
     'Because  he'll  leave us  alone while we're trying  to  pick  one, and
'cause it'll take us so long to make up our minds.'
     Rydell put  his  Samsonite down and sat on  the  couch. 'So we can stay
here?'
     'Yeah, as long as we keep calling up flash.'
     'What's that?'
     She  picked up a little  remote and  turned one  of the wallscreens on.
Started blipping through menus. Hi-rez close-ups of tattooed skin.  The  fat
man came  back with a couple of big rough mugs of  steaming tea on a  little
tray.  'Yours  is green,' he  said to Chevette  Washington,  'and  yours  is
Mormon,' he said to Rydell, 'because you did ask for coffee...'
     'Urn, thanks,' Rydell said, taking the mug he was offered.
     'Now you two  take  plenty of time,'  the fat  man  said, 'and you want
anything, just call.' He went out, tray tucked under his arm, and closed the
door behind him.
     'Mormon?' Rydell sniffed at the tea. It didn't smell much of anything.
     'Aren't supposed to drink coffee. That  kind  of tea's got ephedrine in
it.'
     'Got drugs in it?'
     'It's made from  a plant  with something that'll  keep  you awake. Like
coffee.'
     Rydell decided it was too hot to drink now anyway. Put  it down on  the
floor beside the couch. The girl on the wallscreen had a dragon sort of like
his uncle's, but  on  her left hip. Little  tiny silver ring through the top
edge of her belly button.
     Chevette Washington flipped it to a big sweaty biker-arm with President
Milibank's face looking out from it in shades of gray.
     Rydell  struggled out of his damp jacket, noticing the ripped shoulder,
the cheap  white stuffing popping out. He dropped it behind  the couch. 'You
got any tattoos?'
     'No,' she said.
     'So how come you know about this?'
     'Lowell,'  she  said, flipping through  half a dozen more images, 'he's
got a Giger.'
     '"Gigger"?' Rydell opened his Samsonite, got out  a pair  of socks, and
started unlacing his SWAT shoes.
     'This painter.  Like nineteenth-century or something.  Real  classical.
Bio-mech.  Lowell's  got  this Giger back-piece done  off a  painting called
"N.Y.C.  XXIV."  She  said it x,  x,  i,  v. 'It's  like  this  city. Shaded
black-work. But he wants sleeves to go with it, so we'd come in here to look
for more Gigers to match it.'
     'Why don't  you sit down,' Rydell said,  'you're making my  neck hurt.'
She was pacing back and forth in front of the screens. He took his wet socks
off, put  them  in the Container City bag, and put the dry ones  on. Thought
about leaving his shoes  off for a  while, but what if he had to leave  in a
hurry? He put  them back on. He  was lacing them up when she sat down beside
him.
     She unzipped her jacket and  shrugged it  off, the  loose Beretta  cuff
rattling. The sleeves of her plain black t-shirt had been scissored  off and
her upper arms were smooth and pale. She reached over  the end of  the couch
and put the jacket down, sort of propped against the wall, the leather stiff
enough that it just stayed there, its arms slumped down, like it was asleep.
Like Rydell wished he could be. Now she had the remote in her hand.
     'Hey,'  Rydell said,  'that guy  in  the  raincoat back there,  the one
shot-' He was  about to say the big longhair on the bicycle, but she grabbed
his wrist, the handcuff rattling.
     'Sammy. He shot Sammy, up at Skinner's. He... He was after the glasses,
and Sammy had them, and-'
     'Wait. Wait a sec. The glasses. Everybody  wants the glasses.  That guy
wants 'em, Warbaby wants 'em...'
     'Who's Warbaby?'
     'The big black man shot the back window  out of his car I was stealing.
That Warbaby.'
     'You think I know what they are?'
     'You don't know why people are after them?'
     She gave him a look like you might give a dog that had just told you it
was a good day to spend all your  money on one  particular  kind of  lottery
ticket.
     'Let's  start over,' Rydell suggested.  'You tell me  where you got the
glasses.'
     'Why should I?'
     He thought about it. 'Because you'd be dead by now if I hadn't done the
kind of dirt-stupid shit I just did, back there.'
     She thought about that. 'Okay,' she said.
     Maybe there really was  something in the fat man's Mormon tea, or maybe
Rydell had just  crossed  over  into that point  of  tiredness where it  all
flipped around for a while and you started to feel like you were more awake,
some ways, than you usually ever were. But he wound up sipping that tea  and
listening to  her, and when she'd get too deep into her story to remember to
keep flipping the tattoo-pictures on the wallscreen, he'd do it for her.
     When  you  worked it around to sequential order, she was this girl from
Oregon, didn't have  any family, who'd come down here and moved out on  that
bridge with this old man, crazy by the sound of it, had a bad hip and needed
somebody around to help him.
     Then she'd gotten her  a  job riding a  bicycle  around  San Francisco,
delivering messages.  Rydell knew  about  messengers  from  his  foot-patrol
period in  downtown  Knoxville, because you  had to keep  ticketing them for
riding  on the sidewalk, traffic violation,  and they'd give you a hard time
about  it.  But they made pretty good money if they worked at it. This Sammy
she'd said was shot,  murdered,  he was another messenger, a black guy who'd
gotten her on at Allied, where she worked.
     And her story of how she'd taken the glasses out of the guy's pocket at
this big drunk party  she'd wandered  into up in the Morrisey, that made  as
much sense to  him as anything. And it wasn't the kind of story  people made
up.  Not like  the glasses  crawled into  her  hand  or anything,  she  just
flat-out stole them,  impulse, just because  the  guy  was in her  face  and
obnoxious. Nuisance crime, except they'd turned out to be valuable.
     But from her  description he knew her  asshole up in the  Morrisey  had
been the  same  one got  himself the Cuban  necktie,  your German-born Costa
Rican citizen who maybe wasn't either, star of that X-rated fax of Warbaby's
and the one Svobodov and Orlovsky had been investigating. If they had been.
     'Shit,' he said, in the middle of something she was trying to tell him.
     'What?'
     'Nothing. Keep talking...'
     The Russians were bent, and he knew that. They were Homicide, they were
bent, and  he'd  bet  dollars to donuts they weren't  even investigating the
case.  They  could  talk  Warbaby's way  onto  the  crime-scene,  tap  their
department's computer, but the rest of it had just been window-dressing, for
him,  for Rydell, the  hired help. And what was  that that Freddie had said,
about DatAmerica and IntenSecure being basically your same company?
     But Chevette Washington was on  a roll of her  own  now, like sometimes
when  people get started talking  they just let it all hang out, and she was
saying how Lowell, who was the one  with the hair  and not the skinhead, and
who  actually had,  sort of,  been her boyfriend for  a while, was a guy who
could (you know?) get things done  with computers, if you had the money, and
that sort of scared her because he was always talking about the cops and how
he didn't have to worry about them.
     Rydell nodded, automatically flipping through a couple more pictures of
tattoos-lady  there  with  these  pink   carnations  sort  of  followed  her
bikini-line--but  really he was listening to something  going  around in his
own head.  Like  Hernandez was  IntenSecure,  the Morrisey was  IntenSecure,
Warbaby  was IntenSecure, Freddie said DatAmerica  and IntenSecure were like
the same thing- '-Desire...'
     Rydell blinked. Skinny guy there with J. D. Shapely all mournful on his
chest. But you'd be mournful, too, you had chest hair growing out your eyes.
'What?'
     'Republic. Republic of Desire.'
     'What is?'
     'Why Lowell says the COPS won't ever bother him, but  I told him he was
full of shit.'
     'Hackers,' Rydell said.
     'You haven't heard a word I said.'
     'No,' Rydell said, 'no, that's  not true. Desire. Republic of. Run that
one by again, okay?'
     She  took the remote, blipped through  a  shaven head with a sun at the
very top,  planets orbiting  down to the top of  the ears,  a  hand  with  a
screaming mouth on  the palm, feet covered with blue-green  creature-scales.
'I said,' she said, 'Lowell bullshits about that, how he's connected up with
this  Republic  of  Desire, how they can  do  anything they  feel like  with
computers, so anybody messes with him is gonna get it.'
     'No shit,' Rydell said. 'You ever see these guys?'
     'You  don't see them,' she said,  'not like live.  You talk to them, on
the phone. Or like with goggles, and that's the wildest.'
     'Why?'
     'Cause they look like lobsters and shit. Or some tv star. Anything. But
I don't know why I'm telling you.'
     'Because  I'll nod out otherwise,  then how're we gonna decide if we're
getting the creature-feet or the crotch-carnations?'
     'It's  your  turn,'  she  said,  and just sat  there  until he  started
talking.
     He told her  how  he  was from  Knoxville and about  getting  into  the
Academy, about  how he'd  always watched Cops in Trouble and then  when he'd
been a cop and gotten in trouble, it had  looked like he was going  to be on
the show. How they'd brought him out to Los Angeles because they didn't want
Adult  Survivors of Satanism  stealing their  momentum, but then the  Pookey
Bear murders had  come along and they'd sort of lost interest, and  he'd had
to  get on with IntenSecure and drive Gunhead. He told her about Sublett and
living with  Kevin Tarkovsky  in the house in Mar Vista, and sort of skipped
over  the  Republic of  Desire and the night  he'd driven  Gunhead  into the
Schonbrunns' place in Benedict Canyon.
     About how Hernandez had come over, just the other morning but it seemed
like  years, to tell him  he could  come  up here  and  drive  for  this Mr.
Warbaby. Then she wanted to know  what it was that skip  tracers  did, so he
explained  what  it was they were supposed to do, and what it was he figured
they probably did do, and she said they sounded like bad news.
     When  he was  done, she just looked at him. 'That's it? That's  how you
got here and what you're doing?'
     'Yeah,' he said, 'guess it is.'
     'Jesus,'  she said. Sort of shook her head. They both  watched a couple
of full body-suits blip past,  one of them  all circuit-patterns,  like they
stenciled on old-fashiohed circuit-boards. 'You  got  eyes,' she  said,  and
yawned in the middle of it, 'like two piss-holes in a snowbank.'
     There was a knock at the door. It opened a crack, and somebody, not the
man who jingled when he walked, said: 'You having any luck picking a design?
Henry's gone home...'
     'Well it's just so  hard to decide,' Chevette Washington said, 'there's
so many of them and we want to get just the right one.'
     'That's  fine,' said the voice, bored.  'You just go right on looking.'
The door closed.
     'Let me see those glasses,' Rydell said.
     She reached over and got her jacket. Got out the case with the glasses,
the phone. Handed him the glasses. The case was made out of some dark stuff,
thin as eggshell, rigid as steel. He opened it. The  glasses  looked exactly
like  Warbaby's.  Big  black  frames, the lenses black now. They had a funny
heft to them, weighed more than you thought they would.
     Chevette Washington had flipped open the phone's keypad.
     'Hey,' Rydell said, touching her hand,  'they'll  have your number  for
sure. You dial out on that, or even take a call, they'll be in here in about
ten minutes.'
     'Won't have this number,' she said. 'It's one of Codes's phones. I took
it off the table when the lights went out.'
     'Thought you said you didn't just steal things.'
     'Well,'  she said, 'if Codes had it,  it's stolen already. Codes trades
'em off people in the city,  then Lowell gets somebody to tumble 'em, change
the numbers.' She tapped the pad, held the little phone  to her ear. 'Dead,'
she said, shrugging.
     'Here,' Rydell said, putting the glasses down on his lap and taking the
phone. 'Maybe  it  got wet, or the battery's knocked loose. What's old Codes
trade for these, anyway?' He ran his thumbnail around the back of the phone,
looking for the place where you could pry it open.
     'Well,' she said, 'stuff.'
     He popped the case. Saw  a tightly rolled mini-Ziploc wedged  in  there
beside tie  battery. It had pushed the contacts out of alignment. He took it
out and unrolled it. 'Stuff?'
     'Uh-huh.'
     'This type of stuff.'
     'Uh-huh.'
     He looked  at her.  'If  this  is  4-Thiobuscaline,  it's a  controlled
substance.'
     She looked at the bag of grayish powder, then at him. 'But you aren't a
cop anymore.'
     'You don't do this stuff, do you?'
     'No. Well, once or twice. Lowell did, sometimes.'
     'Well, just  don't  do any around me, because I've  seen what  it does.
Nice noTmal people  do a couple of hits of this,  they go snake-shit crazy.'
He tapped the bag. 'Enough in this to get half a dozen people fucked up like
you wouldn't  believe.' He handed it to her and  picked up the phone, trying
to get the battery back where it belonged.
     'I'd believe it, she said. 'I saw what it did to Lowell...'
     'Dial tone,' he said. 'Who you want to call?'
     Thought about it, then she took the  phone and flipped  it shut. 'Guess
thee isn't anybody.'
     'That old man have a phone?'
     'No,'  she sad,  and  her  shoulders hunched.  'I'm scared they  killed
him,too. 'Cause of me...'
     Rydell couldn't think of anything to say to that.  He was too tired  to
flick the remote.  Some guy's arm with a furled Confederate flag on it. Just
like  home. He looked at her. She sure didn't look anywhere near as tired as
he was. That could just be being young, he thought. He sure hoped she wasn't
on  any ice  or dancer  or anything. Maybe she  was in some  kind of  shock,
still. Said this  Sammy  had been killed, two others  she was worried about.
Evidently  she'd known the  guy plowed in  Svobodov on that bicycle, but she
didn't know yet that he'd been shot. Funny what you miss seeing  in a fight.
Well, he didn't see any reason to tell her, not right now.
     'I'll try Fontaine,' she said, opening the phone again.
     'Who?'
     'He  does  Skinner's electricity  and stuff.' She dialled a number, put
the phone to her ear.
     His eyes  closed and his  head  hit  the back  of  the couch so hard it
almost woke him up.

27. After the storm.

     'Smells like piss,' Skinner said, accusingly,  waking  Yamazaki  from a
dream in which he stood beside J. D. Shapely on a great dark plane, before a
black and endless wall inscribed with the names of the dead.
     Yamazaki raised his  head from the table. The room  in  darkness. Light
through the church window.
     'What are you doing here, Scooter?'
     Yamazaki's buttocks  and lower  back ached. 'The storm,' he said, still
half in his dream.
     'What storm? Where's the girl?'
     'Gone,' Yamazaki said. 'Don't you remember? Loveless?'
     'What  are you  talking  about?'  Skinner  struggled  up on one  elbow,
kicking  off the blankets and the sleeping-bag back, his gray-stubbled  face
twisted with disgust. 'Need a bath. Dry clothes.'
     'Loveless. He  found me in a bar. He made me bring him here. I think he
must have followed me, earlier, when I left you-'
     'Sure. Shut up, Scooter, okay?'
     Yamazaki closed his mouth.
     'Now we need a bunch  of water. Hot. First for coffee, then  some  so I
can wash off. You know how to work a Coleman stove?'
     'A what?'
     'Green thing over there, red tank on the front. You go jiggle that tank
off, I'll tell you how to pump it up.'
     Yamazaki stood up, wincing at the pain in his back, and stumbled toward
the green-painted metal  box Skinner was pointing at. 'Gone off fucking that
no-ass greaseball boyfriend of hers again. Useless, Scooter...'
     He stood  on Skinner's roof, pantlegs flapping in a breeze that gave no
hint of last night's storm, looking out at the city washed in a strange iron
light,  shreds  of his  dream still circling dimly...  Shapely had spoken to
him, his  voice the voice of the  young Elvis  Presley. He  said that he had
forgiven his killers.
     Yamazaki  stared  at Transamerica's  upright  thorn, bandaged with  the
brace they'd  applied  after the  Little  Grande,  half-hearing the  dreamed
voice. They just didn't know any better, Scooter.
     Skinner cursing, below,  as he sponged himself with water  Yamazaki had
warmed on the Coleman stove.
     Yamazaki thought of his thesis advisor in Osaka.
     'I don't care,' Yamasaki said, in English, San Francisco his witness.
     The whole city was a Thomasson. Perhaps America itself was a Thomasson.
     How could they understand this in Osaka, in Tokyo?
     'Yo! On the roof!' someone called.
     Yamazaki turned,  saw a  thin black man atop the tangle of girders that
braced the upper end of Skinner's lift. He wore a thick tweed overcoat and a
crocheted cap.
     'You okay up there? How 'bout Skinner?'
     Yamazaki  hesitated, remembering Loveless.  If Skinner or the  girl had
enemies, how could he recognize them?
     'Name's Fontaine,'  the man said.  'Chevette called me, told me  to get
over here and see if  Skinner got through the blow all right. I take care of
the wiring tip here, make sure his lift's running and all.'
     'He's  bathing  now,'  Yamazaki  said.  'In  the  storm,  he  became...
confused. He doesn't seem to remember.'
     'Have some power for you in about another half an  hour,' the man said.
'Wish I could  say the same for over  my end. Lost four transformers. Got us
five dead bodies, twenty injured that I know of. Skinner got coffee on?'
     'Yes,' Yamazaki said.
     'Do with a cup about now.'
     'Yes, please,' Yamazaki said, and bowed. The black man smiled. Yamazaki
scrambled down through the hatch. 'Skinner-san!  A man named Fontaine, he is
your friend?'
     Skinner  was  struggling  into  yellowed  thermal  underwear.  'Useless
bastard. Still don't have any power...'
     Yamazaki unlatched the hatch in the floor and hauled it open.  Fontaine
eventually appeared at the bottom  of the ladder, a battered canvas tool-bag
in either hand.  Putting one down and slinging the other over  his shoulder,
he began to climb.
     Yamazaki poured the remaining coffee into the cleanest cup.
     'Fuel-cell's buggered,' Skinner said, as Fontaine  pushed his bag ahead
of him,  through the  opening. Skinner  was  layered now  in  at least three
threadbare flannel shirts, their tails pushed unevenly into the waistband of
an ancient pair of woolen Army trousers.
     'We're working on  it,  boss,' Fontaine said, standing up and smoothing
his overcoat. 'Had us a big old storm here.'
     'What Scooter says,' Skinner said.
     'Well,  he's  not shittin' you, Skinner. Thanks.' Fontaine accepted the
steaming  cup  of  black  coffee  and  blew  on it. He  looked at  Yamazaki.
'Chevette said she might not get back  here for a while. Know anything about
that?'
     Yamazaki looked at Skinner.
     'Useless,' Skinner said. 'Gone off with that shithead again.'
     'Didn't  say anything about  that,' Fontaine said.  'Didn't say much at
all. But if she's not going to be around, you're going to need somebody take
care of things for you.'
     'Take care of myself,' Skinner said.
     'I know that,  boss,' Fontaine assured,  'but we got  a couple of fried
servos  in your lift down there. Take a few days get that going for you, the
kind  of  backlog  we're looking at.  Need you  somebody go up and down  the
rungs. Bring you food and all.'
     'Scooter can do it,' Skinner said.
     Yamazaki blinked.
     'That right?' Fontaine  raised his  eyebrows at Yamazaki. 'You stay  up
here and take care of Mr. Skinner?'
     Yamazaki thought  of his borrowed flat in the tall Victorian house, its
black marble bathroom larger than his bachelor apartment in Osaka. He looked
from  Fontaine  to  Skinner,  then back.  'I  would be honored, to stay with
Skinner-san, if he wishes.'
     'Do what you like,' Skinner said,  and began laboriously  stripping the
sheets from his mattress.
     'Chevette told me you might be up  here,' Fontaine said. 'Some kind  of
university guy...' He  put his cup  down on  the  table, bent  to swing  his
tool-bag  up beside  it.  'Said  maybe  you  people worried about  uninvited
guests.'  He undid the bag's two buckles and opened it. Tools gleamed there,
rolls of  insulated  wire. He  took out  something wrapped  in an  oily rag,
looked to see that Skinner wasn't observing him, and tucked the thing behind
the glass jars on the shelf above the table.
     'We can pretty much make sure nobody you  don't  know will get up  here
for the  next couple  days,'  he said  to Yamazaki, lowering his voice. 'But
that's a .38 Special, six rounds  of hollow-point. You  use it,  do me a big
favor  and  toss it  off  the  side, okay? It's  of, uh,'  Fontaine grinned,
"dubious provenance."
     Yamazaki thought of  Loveless. Swallowed.  'You gonna be okay up here?'
Fontaine asked. 'Yes,' Yamazaki said, 'yes, thank you.'


28. RV.

     It was ten-thirty before they finally had to  hit the  street, and then
only because Laurie, who Chevette  knew from that  first day she'd ever come
in  here, said that the manager, Benny Singh, was going to be showing up and
they couldn't stay in there anymore, particularly not with her friend asleep
like  that,  like  he  was  passed  out  or  something.  Chevette  said  she
understood, and thanked her.
     'You see Sammy Sal,' Laurie said, 'you say hi for me.'
     Chevette nodded,  sad,  and  started  shaking the  guy's  shoulder.  He
grunted and tried to brush her hand away. 'Wake up. We gotta go.'
     She couldn't believe  she'd told him all that stuff, but she'd just had
to tell somebody or she'd go crazy. Not that telling it had made it make any
more  sense than it did before, and with this Rydell's side of  it added on,
it sort of made even less.
     The news  that  somebody had gone and murdered the asshole  just didn't
seem real, but if it was, she supposed, she was in deeper shit than ever.
     'Wake up!'
     'Jesus...' He sat up, knuckling his eyes.
     'We gotta go. Manager'll be in soon. My friend let you sleep a while.'
     'Go where?'
     Chevette  had been thinking about  that. 'Cole, over  by the Panhandle,
there's places rent rooms by the hour.'
     'Hotels?'
     'Not  exactly,'  she said. 'For people just need  the bed for  a little
while.'
     He dug  behind  the  couch  for  his jacket. 'Look at  that,' he  said,
sticking his fingers into the rip in the shoulder. 'Brand new last night.'
     Neighborhoods  that mainly operated at night had a way of looking a lot
worse  in the  morning.  Even the beggars looked worse off this time of day,
like that guy  there with those sores, the  one trying to sell half a can of
spaghetti sauce.  She stepped  around him. Another block or two  and  they'd
start to hit the early crowd of day-trippers headed for Skywalker Park; more
cover in the crowd  but more cops, too. She tried to remember if Skywalker's
rentacops were IntenSecure, that company Rydell talked about.
     She wondered if Fontaine had gone to Skinner's like he'd said he would.
She hadn't wanted  to say too  much  over the phone, so at first  she'd just
said she was going away for a while, and would Fontaine  go over and see how
Skinner was doing, and  maybe this Japanese  student guy who'd  been hanging
around lately. But Fontaine could tell she sounded worried, so  he'd sort of
pushed her about it, and  she'd told him she was worried about Skinner,  how
maybe there were some people gonna go up there and hassle him.
     'You  don't  mean bridge people,' he'd  said,  and she'd said  no,  she
didn't, but that was all she could say about it.  The line went quiet  for a
few seconds  and  she could  hear  one  of  Fontaine's  kids singing  in the
background, one of those African songs with the weird throat-clicks. 'Okay,'
Fontaine finally  said, 'I'll  look  into  that for you.' And Chevette  said
thanks, fast,  and clicked off.  Fontaine  did a  lot of favors for Skinner.
He'd never talked to Chevette about it, but he seemed to have known
     Skinner all  his life, or  anyway as long as  he'd  been on the bridge.
There were a lot of people  like that, and Chevette knew  Fontaine could fix
it so people would watch the tower there, and the lift. Watch for strangers.
People did that  for each other, on the bridge, and Fontaine was always owed
a lot of favors, because he was one of the main electricity men.
     Now they were  walking past this bagel  place had  a  sort of iron cage
outside,  welded out of junk, where you could sit in there  at little tables
and have coffee and eat bagels, and  the smell of the morning's baking about
made her faint from hunger. She was thinking maybe they'd better go in there
and get a dozen in a bag, maybe some  cream cheese, take it with  them, when
Rydell put his hand on her shoulder.
     She turned  her  head and saw this big shiny  white RV had  just turned
onto Haight in  front  of them, headed  their way. Like  you'd  see rich old
people driving  back  in  Oregon,  whole convoys of them,  pulling boats  on
trailers,  little jeeps, motorcycles hanging off the  backs like  lifeboats.
They'd stop for the night in these special camps had razor-wire around them,
dogs, NO TRESSPASSING signs that really meant it.
     Rydell was staring  at  this RV like he couldn't believe it, and now it
was  pulling up right beside them, this gray-haired old  lady  powering down
the window and  leaning out the driver's side, saying 'Young man! Excuse me,
but I'm Danica Elliott  and  I believe we  met  yesterday  on the plane from
Burbank.'
     Danica  Elliott was  this retired  lady from Altadena, that was down in
SoCal, and she'd flown  up  to San Francisco, she said on the same plane  as
Rydell, to get  her husband moved to a  different cryogenic  facility. Well,
not her husband, exactly, but his brain, which he'd had frozen when he died.
     Chevette  had  heard  about  people  doing  that,  but she  hadn't ever
understood why  they did it, and evidently Danica Elliott didn't  understand
it either. But  she'd come up here to throw good money after  bad, she said,
and get her husband  David's brain  moved to this more expensive place  that
would keep it  on ice in  its Own private little tank, and not just tumbling
around in a big tank with a hunch of other people's frozen brains, which was
where it had been before. She seemed like  a really  nice lady  to Chevette,
but she sure could go on about this  stuff, so that after a while Rydell was
just driving and  nodding his head like he  was listening, and Chevette, who
was navigating,  was mostly paying attention to  the map-display on the RV's
dash, plus keeping a lookout for police cars.
     Mrs.  Elliott  had taken care of getting her  husband's brain relocated
the night before,  and she said it had made her kind of emotional, so  she'd
decided to rent this RV and  drive it  back to Altadena, just take  her time
and enjoy the trip. Trouble was, she didn't know  San Francisco,  and  she'd
picked it up that  morning at  this rental  place  on  sixth and gotten lost
looking for a freeway. Wound up driving around in the Haight, which she said
did  not look  at  all like  a safe  neighborhood  but  was  certainly  very
interesting.
     The loose handcuff  kept falling out of the sleeve of Skinner's jacket,
but Mrs.  Elliott was  too  busy  talking to  notice.  Rydell  was  driving,
Chevette was in the middle, and Mrs. Elliot  was on the  passenger side. The
RV was Japanese, and had these three power-adjustable buckets up front, with
headrests with speakers built in.
     Mrs. Elliot had  told Rydell she was  lost and did he know the city and
could he drive her  to where  she  could get on the highway  to Los Angeles?
Rydell had sort of gawked at  her for  a minute, then shook himself and said
he'd be glad to, and this was his friend Chevette, who knew the city, and he
was Berry Rydell.
     Mrs. Elliot said Chevette was a pretty name.
     So here they  were, headed  out of San  Francisco, and  Chevette  had a
pretty  good idea that  Rydell  was going  to  try to talk Mrs. Elliott into
letting them  go  along  with her. That was all she could  think  of  to do,
herself, and here  they  were off  the  street and headed  away from the guy
who'd shot Sammy and from that Warbaby and  those Russian cops, which seemed
like  a  good  idea to her,  and aside from her stomach feeling  like it was
starting to eat itself, she felt a little better.
     Rydell drove  past an In-and-Out Burger place and  she  remembered  how
this boy she knew called Franklin, up in Oregon, had taken a pellet-gun over
to an  In-and-Out and shot  out  the B and the R, so it just said IN-AND-OUT
URGE. She'd told Lowell  about that, but he hadn't thought it was funny. Now
she thought about how she'd told Rydell stuff about Lowell that Lowell would
go ballistic if he ever found out  about, and here Rydell was the next thing
to a cop. But  it bothered her how Lowell had been,  the night before. There
he  was, all  cool and heavy with his  connections and  everything,  and she
tells him she's in trouble and  somebody's just shot  Sammy Sal and  they're
gonna be after her  for sure, and him and  Codes just sit there, giving each
other these looks, like  they like this story  less by  the minute, and then
the big  motherfucker cop in the raincoat walks in and they're about to shit
themselves.
     Served her right. She hadn't had a single friend liked Lowell much, and
Skinner had hated  him on sight. Said Lowell had his head so far up his ass,
he might as  well just climb in after it  and disappear. But she just hadn't
ever really had a boyfriend before, not  like that, and he'd been so nice to
her at first. If he  just  hadn't started in doing that dancer, because that
brought the  asshole  out in him  real fast, and then Codes, who hadn't ever
liked her, could get him going about how  she was just a country girl.  Fuck
that.
     'You know,' she said, 'I don't get something  to eat soon, I think I'll
die.'
     And Mrs.  Elliott started making a fuss about how  Rydell  should  stop
immediately and get something for Chevette, and how sorry she was she hadn't
thought to ask if they'd had breakfast.
     'Well,' Rydell said, frowning into  the rear-view, 'I really would like
to miss the, uh, lunch-hour traffic here...'
     'Oh,'  Mrs. Elliott  said.  Then she brightened.  'Chevette,  dear,  if
you'll just go in the  back, you'll find a fridge there. I'm sure the rental
people have put a snack basket in there. They almost always do.'
     Sounded fine to Chevette. She undid her harness and edged back  between
her seat and Mrs. Elliott's. There was a little door there and when she went
through  it the lights came on. 'Hey,' she said, 'it's a  whole little house
back here...'
     'Enjoy!' said Mrs. Elliott.
     The light stayed on  when she  closed the  door behind her. She  hadn't
ever seen the inside of one of  these things before, and the first thing she
thought  of was that it had nearly as much  space as Skinner's room, plus it
was about ten times more comfortable.  Everything  was gray, gray carpet and
gray  plastic  and gray imitation  leather. And the fridge  turned out to be
this cute  little  thing built  into  a counter, with this  basket in there,
wrapped up in plastic with a ribbon on it. She got the plastic off and there
was some wine,  little  cheeses, an apple, a pear, crackers, and a couple of
chocolate bars. There was  Coke  in the  fridge, too, and bottled water. She
sat on  the bed and ate a cheese, a bunch of crackers, a chocolate bar  that
was made in France, and drank  a bottle of water. Then she tried out the tv,
which had twenty-three channels on downlink.
     When she was done,  she put  the empty bottle  and the torn  paper  and
stuff in a  little wastebasket built into the wall, cut the tv off, took off
her shoes, and lay back on the bed.
     It  was strange,  to stretch out on a  bed in  a little  room that  was
moving, she didn't know where, and she wondered where she'd be tomorrow.
     Just before she fell asleep, she  remembered that she still had  Codes'
hag of dancer stuck down  in  her pants. She'd better get  rid of  that. She
figured there was enough there to go to jail for.
     She  thought about  how  it made you  feel, and how weird  it  was that
people spent all that money to feel that way.
     She sure wished Lowell hadn't liked to feel that way.
     She woke up  when he lay down beside her, the RV moving but she knew it
must've stopped before. The lights were off.
     'Who's driving?' she said.
     'Mrs. Armbruster.'
     'Who?'
     'Mrs.  Elliott. Mrs.  Armbruster was this  teacher I  had, looked  like
her.'
     'Where's she driving to?'
     'Los Angeles. Told her  I'd take over when she got tired. Told  her not
to bother waking us up  when  she goes  through at the state line. Lady like
that, if she tells 'em she's not carrying any agricultural products, they'll
probably let her through without checking back here.'
     'What if they do?'
     He was close  enough to her on the  narrow bed that she could  feel  it
when he shrugged.
     'Rydell?'
     'Huh?'
     'How come there's Russian cops?'
     'How do you mean?'
     'You watch on tv, like a cop show,  about half the big cops  are always
Russian. Or those guys back there on the bridge. How come Russian?'
     'Well,' he  said,  'they kind of exaggerate  that on tv, 'cause  of the
Organizatsiya thing, how people  like to see shows about that. But the truth
is, you  get a  situation where there's Russians running  most  of your  mob
action,  you'll  want to get  you  some Russian cops...' She heard him yawn.
Felt him stretch.
     'Are they all like those two came to Dissidents?'
     'No,'  he said. 'There's  always some crooked cops, but that's just the
way it is...'
     'What'll we do, when we get to Los Angeles?'
     But he didn't answer, and after a while he started to snore.


29. Dead mall.

     Rydell opened his eyes. Vehicle not moving.
     He held his Timex up in front of his face and used the dial-light. 3:15
PM. Chevette Washington was curled up beside him in her biker  jacket.  Felt
like sleeping next to a piece of old luggage.
     He rolled over until he could find the shade over the window beside him
and raise it a little. As dark out there as it was in here.
     He'd been dreaming about Mrs. Armbruster's class, fifth grade at Oliver
North  Elementary.  They were about to be let out because  LearningNet  said
there was too much Kansas  City flu around to  keep the kids in Virginia and
Tennessee in school that week.
     They were  all wearing  these  molded white paper masks  the nurses had
left on  their seats that  morning. Mrs.  Armbruster had  just explained the
meaning of the word pandemic. Poppy Markoff, who sat next to him and already
had tits out to here,  had  told Mrs. Armbruster that her daddy  said the KC
flu  could  kill you  in  the time  it  took to walk  out  to the bus.  Mrs.
Armbruster, wearing her own  mask, the  micropore kind  from the  drugstore,
started in  about the word  panic, tying that  into pandemic because of  the
root, but that was where Rydell woke up.
     He sat up on the bed. He had a headache and the start of a cold. Kansas
City flu. Maybe Mokola fever.
     'Don't panic,' he said, under his breath.
     But he sort of had this feeling.
     He got up and felt his way to the front.  A little bit  of light there,
coming from under the door. He found the handle. Eased it open a crack.
     'Hey there.'  Gold at the  edges  of  a smile.  Square little automatic
pointing at Rydell's  eye. He'd  swung  the passenger-side bucket around and
tilted it  back.  Had his boots up  on the middle seat. Had  the  dome-light
turned down low.
     'Where's Mrs. Elliott?'
     'Mrs. Elliott is gone.'
     Rydell opened the door the rest of the way. 'She work for you?'
     'No,' the man said. 'She's IntenSecure.'
     'They put her on that plane to keep track of me?'
     The  man shrugged. Rydell noticed that the gun didn't move  at all when
he  did that.  He was wearing surgical gloves, and that  same long coat he'd
had on when he'd gotten out of the  Russians' car, like an Australian duster
made out of black micropore.
     'How'd she know to pick us up by that tattoo parlor?'
     'Warbaby had to be good for something. He had a couple of people on you
for backup.'
     'Didn't see anybody,' Rydell said.
     'Weren't supposed to.'
     'Tell me something,' Rydell said. 'You the one did that Blix guy, up in
the hotel?'
     The man  looked at him over  the barrel  of the gun. That small a bore,
ordinarily,  wouldn't mean  much  damage, so  Rydell  figured the ammunition
would be doctored some  way. 'I don't  see what it's got to do with you,' he
said.
     Rydell  thought about it. 'I saw a picture of  it. You just  don't look
that crazy.'
     'It's my job,' he said.
     Uh-huh,  Rydell thought, just like running a french-fry computer. There
was a fridge and sink on the right side of the door, so he  knew he couldn't
move that way. If he went left, he figured the guy'd just stitch through the
bulkhead, probably get the girl, too.
     'Don't even think about it.'
     'About what?'
     'The hero thing. The cop shit.' He took his feet off the center bucket.
'Just do this.  Slowly. Very. Get into the driver's seat and  put your hands
on the  wheel. Nine  o'clock and  two o'clock. Keep them there. If you don't
keep  them  there, I'll shoot you behind your right ear. But you  won't hear
it.' He had this  kind of slow, even tone, reminded Rydell  of a vet talking
to a horse.
     Rydell did  like he was  told. He couldn't see anything  outside.  Just
dark, and the reflections from the dome light. 'Where are we?' he asked.
     'You  like  malls,  Rydell?  You got malls  back  in Knoxville?' Rydell
looked at him sideways.
     'Eyes front, please.'
     'Yeah, we got malls.'
     'This one didn't do so well.'
     Rydell squeezed the foam padding on the wheel.
     'Relax.'
     Rydell heard him give the  bulkhead  a  kick with the heel of one boot.
'Miss  Washington!  Rise and shine, Miss Washington! Do us the favor of your
presence.'
     Rydell heard the double thump as she startled from sleep, tried to jump
up, hit her head, fell off the bed. Then he saw her white face reflected  in
the windshield, there in the doorway. Saw her see the man, the gun.
     Not the screaming kind. 'You shot Sammy Sal,' she said.
     'You  tried to electrocute me,' the  man said,  like he could afford to
see  the  humor in it now. 'Come out here,  turn  around, and  straddle  the
central console. Very slowly. That's right.  Now lean forward and brace your
hands on the seat.'
     She wound up next to Rydell, her legs on either side  of the instrument
console, facing backward. Like she was riding some cafe-racer.
     Gave him about a two-inch difference of arc between shooting either one
of them in the head.
     'I want you to take your jacket off,' he said  to  her, 'so you'll have
to take your hands off the seat to do that. See if you can manage to keep at
least one hand on the seat at all times. Take plenty of time.'
     When she'd gotten it to where she could shrug it off her left shoulder,
it fell over against the man's legs.
     'Are  there  any  hypodermic needles in  here,'  he said, 'any  blades,
dangerous objects of any kind?'
     'No,' she said.
     'How about electrical charges? You don't have a great record for that.'
     'Just the asshole's glasses and a phone.'
     'See,  Rydell,' he  said,  "the  asshole."  How  he'll  be  remembered.
Nameless.  Another nameless  asshole...' He was going  through the  jacket's
pockets with his free hand. Came up with the case and the phone and put them
on  the RV's deep, padded dash-panel. Rydell had his head turned now and was
watching him, even though he'd been told  not to. He watched the gloved hand
open the  case  by  feel, take out the black glasses. That was the only time
those eyes left him, to check those glasses, and that took about a second.
     'That's them,' Rydell said. 'You got 'em now.'
     The hand put them back in their case, closed it. 'Yes.'
     'Now what?'
     The  smile went away. When it did, it  looked like he  didn't  have any
lips. Then it came back, wider and steeper.
     'You think you could get me a Coke out of the fridge? All  the windows,
the door back there, are sealed.'
     'You want a Coke?' Like she didn't believe him. 'You're gonna shoot me.
When I get up.'
     'No,'  he  said, 'not necessarily. Because I want a Coke. My throat's a
little dry.'
     She turned her head to look at Rydell, eyes big with fear.
     'Get him his Coke,' Rydell said.
     She  got off  the console and edged through, into the back, there,  but
just by the door, where the fridge was.
     'Look out the front,' he  reminded Rydell.  Rydell saw the fridge-light
come on, reflected there, caught a glimpse of her squatting down.
     'D-diet or regular?' she said.
     'Diet,' he said, 'please.'
     'Classic or decaf?'
     'Classic.' He made a little sound that Rydell thought might be a laugh.
     'There's no glasses.'
     He made the sound again. 'Can.'
     'K-kinda  messy,'  she  said,  'm-my  hand's  shakin'-'  Rydell  looked
sideways, saw  him take the red can, some brown cola  dripping off the side.
'Thank you. You can take your pants off now.'
     'What?'
     'Those black ones you're wearing. Just peel them down, slow. But I like
the socks. Say we'll keep the socks.'
     Rydell caught  the expression on  her  face,  reflected  in  the  black
windshield, then saw how it  went sort of blank. She bent, working the tight
pants down.
     'Now get  back on the console. That's right. Just like you were. Let me
look at you. You want to look too, Rydell?'
     Rydell  turned,  saw  her  squatting  there, her bare  legs smooth  and
muscular, dead white  in the glow of  the  dome-light. The  man  took a long
swallow of Coke, watching  Rydell around the rim. He put the can down on the
dash-panel  and wiped  his mouth with the back of his gloved hand. 'Not bad,
huh, Rydell?' with a nod toward Chevette Washington.  'Some potential there,
I'd say.'
     Rydell looked at him.
     'Is this bothering you, Rydell?'
     Rydell didn't answer.
     The man made  the sound  that might've been a laugh.  Drank some  Coke.
'You think I enjoyed having to mess that shitbag up the way I did, Rydell?'
     'I don't know.'
     'But you think I  did. I know you think I enjoyed it. And  I did, I did
enjoy it. But you know what the difference is?'
     'The difference?'
     'I didn't have a hard on when I did it. That's the difference.'
     'Did you know him?'
     'What?'
     'I mean like was it personal, why you did that?'
     'Oh, I guess you could say I knew him. I  knew him. I knew him like you
shouldn't  have to know  anyone, Rydell. I knew everything he did. I'd go to
sleep,  nights, listening to the sound of  him breathing. It got  so I could
judge how many he'd had, just by his breathing.'
     'He'd had?'
     'He drank. Serbian. You were a policeman, weren't you?'
     'Yeah.'
     'Ever have to watch anybody, Rydell?'
     'I never got that far.'
     'It's a funny  thing, watching someone. Traveling with them. They don't
know you. They don't know  you're  there. Oh, they guess. They assume you're
there. But they  don't know who you are. Sometimes you catch them looking at
someone, in the lobby of the hotel, say, and you know  they think it's  you,
the one who's watching. But it never is. And as you watch them, Rydell, over
a period of months, you start to love them.'
     Rydell  saw a  shiver  go  through Chevette  Washington's  tensed white
thigh.
     'But then, after  a few  more months, twenty flights, two dozen hotels,
well, it starts to turn itself around...'
     'You don't love them?'
     'No. You  don't.  You  start to wait  for  them to fuck up, Rydell. You
start to wait for them  to betray  the trust. Because a courier's trust is a
terrible thing. A terrible thing.'
     'Courier?'
     'Look at her, Rydell. She knows. Even if she's just riding confidential
papers  around San Francisco, she's a  courier. She's entrusted, Rydell. The
data becomes a physical thing. She carries it. Don't you carry it, baby?'
     She was still as some sphinx, white fingers  deep in the gray fabric of
the center bucket.
     'That's  what I do,  Rydell.  I  watch  them carry  it.  I  watch them.
Sometimes people try to  take it from them.' He  finished the  Coke. 'I kill
those  people. Actually that's the best part of  the  job. Ever been  to San
Jose, Rydell?'
     'Costa Rica?'
     'That's right.'
     'Never have.'
     'People know how to live, there.'
     'You work for those data havens,' Rydell said.
     'I didn't say that. Somebody else must've said that.'
     'So did he,' Rydell said. 'He was  carrying those glasses to  somebody,
up from Costa Rica, and she took 'em.'
     'And I was glad she did. So glad. I was in the room next to  his. I let
myself in through the connecting door. I introduced myself. He met Loveless.
First time. Last time.' The  gun never wavered, but he  began to scratch his
head  with his hand in the surgical glove. Scratch it like he had  fleas  or
something.
     'Loveless?'
     'My nom. Nom  de thing.' Then a long  rattle of  what Rydell took to be
Spanish, but he only caught nombre de something. 'Think she's tight, Rydell?
I like it tight, myself.'
     'You American?'
     His head sort of whipped sideways, a little, when Rydell said that, and
his  eyes  unfocused  for  a second, but  then they came back, clear  as the
chromed rim around the muzzle  of his gun. 'You know who started the havens,
Rydell?'
     'Cartels,' Rydell said, 'the Colombians.'
     'That's  right. They brought  the  first  expert  systems  into Central
America, nineteen-eighties, to coordinate their shipping. Somebody had to go
down there and install those systems. War on drugs, Rydell. Lot of Americans
on either side, down there.'
     'Well,'  Rydell  said, 'now we  just make our own drugs up here,  don't
we?'
     'But they've got the havens, down there. They don't even need that drug
business. They've got  what Switzerland  used to  have. They've got  the one
place in the world to keep what people can't afford to keep anywhere else.'
     'You look a little young to have helped put that together.'
     'My father. You know your father, Rydell?'
     'Sure.' Sort of, anyway.
     'I never did. I had to have a lot of therapy, over that.'
     Sure glad it worked, Rydell thought. 'Warbaby, he work for the havens?'
     A sweat had broken out on the man's  forehead. Now he wiped it with the
back of the  hand that held the gun, but Rydell saw the gun  click back into
position like it was held by a magnet.
     'Turn on the headlights, Rydell. It's okay. Left hand off the wheel.'
     'Why?'
     'Cause you're dead if you don't.'
     'Well, why?'
     'Just do it, okay?' Sweat running into his eyes.
     Rydell  took   his  left  hand  off  the  wheel,  clicked  the  lights,
double-clicked them to high  beams. Two  cones of light  hit into a  wall of
dead shops, dead  signs, dust  on plastic. The one in front of the left beam
said THE GAP.
     'Why'd anybody ever call a store that?' Rydell said.
     'Trying to fuck with my head, Rydell?'
     'No,' Rydell said, 'it's just a  weird  name. Like ad those places look
like gaps, now...'
     'Warbaby's  just  hired help, Rydell.  IntenSecure brings  him  in when
things get too sloppy. And they do, they always do.'
     They were parked in  a sort of plaza, in a mall, the stores all boarded
or their windows whitewashed. Either underground or else it was roofed over.
'So she  stole  the glasses out  of a hotel had  IntenSecure security,  they
brought in  Warbaby?' Rydell looked at Chevette Washington. She  looked like
one of those  chrome  things  on the nose of an antique car,  except she was
getting goosebumps down  her thigh.  Not exactly warm  in  here, which  made
Rydell think it might be underground after all.
     'Know what, Rydell?'
     'What?'
     'You don't  know shit about shit.  As much as I  tell you, you'll never
understand  the  situation.  It's  just  too big  for someone  like  you  to
understand. You don't know how to think in  those terms. IntenSecure belongs
to the company that owns the information in those glasses.'

     'Singapore,' Rydell said. 'Singapore own DatAmerica, too?'
     'You can't prove it, Rydell. Neither could Congress.'
     'Look at those rats over there...'
     'Fucking with my head...'
     Rydell watched the last of the  three rats  vanish into  the place that
had been called The Gap. In through a loose vent or something. A gap. 'Nope.
Saw 'em.'
     'Has it  occurred to you that you  wouldn't be here right now if Lucius
fucking Warbaby hadn't taken up rollerblading last month?'
     'How's that?'
     'He wrecked his knee. Warbaby wrecks his knee, can't drive, you wind up
here. Think about it. What does that tell you about late-stage capitalism?'
     'Tell me about what?'
     'Don't they teach you anything in that police academy?'
     'Sure,' Rydell said, 'lots  of stuff.' Thinking: how to  talk  to crazy
fuckers when you're being held hostage,  except  he was having  a  hard time
remembering  what they'd  said.  Keep 'em talking and don't  argue too much,
something  like that. 'How come the stuff in  those glasses  has everybody's
tail in a twist, anyway?'
     'They're going to rebuild San Francisco. From the ground up, basically.
Like  they're  doing to Tokyo. They'll start by layering a grid of seventeen
complexes into the existing infrastructure. Eighty-story office/residential,
retail/residence in  the  base.  Completely self-sufficient.  Variable-pitch
parabolic  reflectors,  steam-generators.  New buildings,  man;  they'll eat
their own sewage.'
     'Who'll eat sewage?'
     'The buildings. They're going to grow them, Rydell.  Like they're doing
now in Tokyo. Like the maglev tunnel.'
     'Sunflower,'  Chevette Washington said, then looked  like she regretted
it.
     'Somebody's been looking...' Gold teeth flashing.
     'Uh, hey...' Go for that talking-to-the-armed-insane mode.
     'Yes?'
     'So what's the problem? They wanna do that, let 'em.'
     'The problem,' this Loveless said, starting to unbutton  his shirt, 'is
that  a city like San Francisco has about as much sense of where it wants to
go,  of where it should go, as you do. Which is  to  say, very little. There
are people, millions of them, who would object to the fact that this sort of
plan even exists. Then there's the business of real estate...'
     'Real estate?'
     'Know the three most important considerations  in  any purchase of real
estate, Rydell?' Loveless's chest, hairless  and artificially pigmented, was
gleaming with sweat.
     'Three?'
     'Location,' Loveless said, 'location, and location.'
     'I don't get it.'
     'You  never will.  But  the  people  who know where  to buy, the people
who've seen where the footprints  of  the towers  fall,  they  will, Rydell.
They'll get it all.'
     Rydell thought about it. 'You looked, huh?'
     Loveless nodded. 'In  Mexico  City. He  left them in his  room.  He was
never, ever supposed to do that.'
     'But you weren't supposed to look either?' It just slipped out.
     Loveless's skin  was running with sweat now, in spite of the  cool.  It
was like  his whole  lymbic  system or whatever had  just  let  loose.  Kept
blinking and  wiping it back  from his eyes.  'I've done my job. Did my job.
Jobs. Years. My father, too. You haven't seen how they live, down there. The
compounds. People up here have no idea what money can do, Rydell. They don't
know what real money is. They live like gods, in the compounds. Some of them
are over a hundred years old, Rydell...' There were flecks of white stuff at
the corners of Loveless' smile, and Rydell was back in Turvey's girlfriend's
apartment, looking into Turvey's eyes, and it just clicked, what she'd done.
     Dumped that whole bag of dancer into  the  Coke she'd brought him.  She
hadn't been able  to pour it all in, so she'd sloshed the Coke out onto  the
top of the can to wash it down, mix it around.
     He had his  shirt undone all  the way now, the dark  fabric darker with
sweat, and his face was turning red.
     'Loveless-'  Rydell started, no  idea what  he was  about  to  say, but
Loveless screamed then, a high thin inhuman sound like a rabbit with its leg
caught in a wire, and started pounding the butt of his pistol into the tight
crotch of his jeans like there was something terrible fastened on him there,
something he had  to kill. Each time  the  gun came down,  it fired, blowing
holes in the carpeted floorboard the size of five-dollar pieces.
     Chevette Washington came off that console like she was on rubber bands,
right over the top of the center bucket and into the cabin in back.
     Loveless froze, quivering, like every atom in  him had locked  down all
at once, spinning in some tight emergency orbit.  Then he smiled, like maybe
he'd killed the thing that was after his crotch, screamed again, and started
firing  out  through the  windshield.  All  Rydell  could  remember was some
instructor telling them that an  overdose of  dancer made too much  PCP look
like putting aspirin in a Coke. In a Coke.
     And Chevette Washington, she was going just about  that crazy  herself,
by the sound of it, trying to beat her way out the back of the RV.
     'Hundred years old, those fuckers,'  Loveless said, and sort of sobbed,
ejecting the empty magazine and snapping a fresh one  in, 'and they're still
getting it...'
     'Out there,' Rydell said. 'By The Gap-'
     'Who?'
     'Svobodov,' Rydell said, guessing that might do it.
     The bullets  came out of the little  gun like the rubber cubes out of a
chunker.  By  the  third  one,  Rydell  had reached  over,  deactivated  the
door-lock, and just sort of fallen out. Landed  on his back on some cans and
what felt like foam cups. Rolled.
     Kept rolling 'til he hit something.
     Those little bullets blowing big holes  in the whitewashed glass of the
dead stores. A whole section fell away with a crash.
     He could hear Chevette Washington pounding on the back door  of the  RV
and he wished he could get her to stop.
     'Hey! Loveless!'
     The shooting stopped.
     'Svohodov's down, man!'
     Chevette still pounding. Jesus.
     'He needs an ambulance!'
     On his  hands and knees,  up against some low tiled fountain smelled of
chlorine and dust, he saw Loveless scramble down from the driver's side, his
face and chest slick  and shining. The  man had  been trained  so deeply, it
occurred to Rydell, that it  even cut through whatever the dancer  was doing
to him. Because he still moved the way they taught you to move in FATSS, the
pistol  out  in both  hands,  the  half-crouch,  the smooth  swings  through
potential arcs of fire.
     And Chevette,  she  was still  trying to kick her way  out  through the
hexcel or  whatever  the  back of the  RV was made of. Then Loveless  put  a
couple of bullets into it and she all of a sudden stopped.


30. Carnival of souls.

     At  four  o'clock  Yamazaki  descended  the  rungs  he'd  climbed  with
Loveless, in the dark, the night before.
     Fontaine  had gone, twenty minutes before  the  power  returned, taking
with him, against Skinner's protests, an enormous bundle of washing. Skinner
had spent the day sorting and re-sorting the contents  of the green toolkit,
the one he'd overturned in his bid for the bolt-cutters.
     Yamazaki had  watched the old man's hands as  they touched each tool in
turn,  imagining he  saw some  momentary strength or purpose flow into  them
there, or perhaps only memories of  tasks  undertaken, abandoned, completed.
'You can always sell tools,'
     Skinner  had  mused,  perhaps   to   Yamazaki,   perhaps  to   himself.
'Somebody'll always buy 'em. But then you always need 'em again, exactly the
one  you sold.' Yamazaki didn't know the English words for most of the tools
there,  and  many  were  completely unfamiliar.  'T-reamer,'  Skinner  said,
holding up  his  fist,  a  rust-brown,  machined  spike of steel  protruding
menacingly between his  second and third fingers. 'Now that's about as handy
a thing as you can have, Scooter, but most people never seen one.'
     'Its purpose, Skinner-san?'
     'Makes a  round hole  bigger. Keeps it  round, too,  you use it  right.
Sheet-metal, mostly, but it'll do plastic, synthetics. Anything thin, fairly
rigid. Short of glass.'
     'You have many tools, Skinner-san.'
     'Never learned how to really use 'em, though.'
     'But you built this room?'
     'You ever watch a real carpenter work, Scooter?'
     'Once, yes,' Yamazaki said, remembering a  demonstration at a festival,
the black blades  flying,  the smell of cut cedar. He remembered the look of
the lumber, creamy and flawless. A tea-house was being erected, to stand for
the duration  of the festival.  'Wood is very  scarce in Tokyo, Skinner-san.
You would not see it thrown away, not even small scraps.'
     'Not that easy to come by here,'  Skinner said, rubbing the ball of his
thumb with the  edge of  a chisel. Did he mean in America, San Francisco, on
the bridge? 'We  used to burn our scrap, before we  got the  power  in. City
didn't like that at all. Bad  for the air, Scooter.  Don't do that as  much,
now.'
     'This is by consensus?'
     'Just common sense...' Skinner put the chisel into a greasy canvas case
and tucked it carefully away in the green box.
     A procession  was making its way toward  San Francisco, along the upper
deck, and Yamazaki instantly regretted having left his notebook in Skinner's
room. This was the first evidence he had seen here of public ritual.
     In the narrow, enclosed space, it was impossible to view the procession
as anything other than a succession of participants, in their ones and twos,
but it was a procession nonetheless, and clearly funereal, perhaps memorial,
in its purpose.  First came children, seven  by his hasty  count, one behind
the other, in ragged, ash-dusted clothing. Each child wore a mask of painted
plaster,  clearly  intended to  represent  Shapely.  But  there was  nothing
funereal in  their  progress;  several  were skipping,  delighted  with  the
attention they were receiving.
     Yamazaki,  on  his  way  to  purchase hot  soup, had  halted between  a
bookseller's wagon and a stall hung with caged birds. He felt awkward there,
very much  out  of  place, with  the  unaccustomed  shape  of  the insulated
canister under  his arm. If  this  was a funeral,  perhaps  there  was  some
required gesture, some attitude he might  be expected to assume?  He glanced
at  the bookseller, a tall  woman in a greasy sheepskin vest,  her gray hair
bound back into a knot transfixed by two pink plastic chopsticks.
     Her stock, which consisted primarily of yellowing paperbacks in various
stages of disintegration, each  in a clear plastic bag,  was  stacked before
her on her  wagon. She  had been crying her wares, when she saw the children
masked as Shapely; she'd  been calling out strange phrases that he  supposed
were  titles:  'Valley  of  the  dolls,  blood  meridian,  chainsaw savvy...
'Yamazaki, struck  by the  queer American poetry,  had been on the  verge of
asking  after Chainsaw Savvy. Then she'd fallen silent, and he too had  seen
the children.
     But there was nothing  in her manner now  that indicated the procession
required  anything  more of her  than  whatever degree of  her attention she
might choose to afford it. She was automatically counting her stock, he saw,
as she watched the children pass, her hands moving over the bagged books.
     The keeper of the bird stall, a pale man with a carefully groomed black
mustache, was scratching his stomach, his expression mild and blank.
     After the children came five dancers in the skeleton-suits of  La Noche
de  Muerte,  though  Yamazaki  saw  that  several of  the  masks  were  only
half-masks, micropore respirators molded to  resemble the grinning  jaws  of
skulls. These were teenagers, evidently, and shaking to some  inner music of
plague and chaos. There was a strong erotic undercurrent, a violence, to the
black, bone-painted  thighs,  the white  cartoon  pelvises daubed on  narrow
denimed buttocks. As the bonedancers passed, one fixed Yamazaki with a sharp
stare, blue  adolescent eyes  above the  black, molded nostrils of the white
respirator.
     Then two tall figures,  black men in an ugly beige face-paint, costumed
as surgeons, in pale green gowns and long gloves of scarlet latex. Were they
the doctors, predominantly white, who had failed to rescue so many, prior to
Shapely's  advent,  or did  they  somehow represent the Brazilian biomedical
firms   who  had  so  successfully   and   lucratively  overseen   Shapely's
transformation, the illiterate prostitute  become the splendid  source?  And
after them, the first of the  bodies, wrapped  and bound in layers of  milky
plastic, each one tiding a two-wheeled cart of the kind manufactured here to
transport baggage or bulk  foodstuffs. The carts,  temporarily equipped with
narrow pallets of  plywood, were steered along, front and  back, by  men and
women  of  no special  costume or demeanor, though Yamazaki  noted that they
looked neither to the right nor left, and seemed to make no eye-contact with
the onlookers.
     'There's  Nigel,' the  bookseller  said,  and  probably built the  cart
they're taking him off on.'
     'These are the victims of the storm?' Yamazaki ventured.
     'Not Nigel,' the woman said, narrowing her eyes as she saw that he  was
a stranger. 'Not with those holes in him...'
     Seven  in all,  each to  its  cart,  and then a man  and  a  woman,  in
identical  paper coveralls, carrying between them a  laminated lithograph of
Shapely, one of  those  saccharine portraits, large  of  eye  and hollow  of
cheek, that invariably left Yamazaki feeling slightly queasy.
     But  then a small,  red,  capering figure.  A tailless, hornless devil,
perhaps, dancing with an enormous gun, an ancient AK-47, its bolt long gone,
the  curved magazine carved  from wood, and all of it dipped, once, into red
enamel, worn now by hands, by processions.
     And Yamazaki knew,  without asking, that the red dancer represented the
way  of Shapely's  going,  like some terrible base  stupidity waiting at the
core of things.
     'Skinner-san?' The  notebook  ready. 'I saw  a procession today. Bodies
being taken from the bridge. The dead from the Storm.'
     'Can't keep 'em out here.  Can't throw 'em in the water. City sticks on
that.  We pass 'em  over for  cremation.  Some people, they  don't hold with
fire, they bury 'em over on Treasure. Kind of people live out  on  Treasure,
you kind of wonder if that makes much sense.'
     'In  the procession  there were  many  references  to  Shapely,  to his
story.'
     Skinner nodded over his little television.
     'Children  masked as  J.  D. Shapely,  two black  men painted as  white
doctors, Shapely's portrait...'
     Skinner grunted. Then, distantly: 'While since I saw one of those.'
     'And at the end, a small figure, red. Dancing. With an assault rifle.'
     'Uh-huh.' Skinner nodded.
     Yamazaki activated the notebook's transcription function.
     Me, you know, I never even got it. Off him, I mean. That  piece of  him
in  everybody now. Couldn't see the point at my age and anyway I never  held
with medicine. Happened I never got the other kind either, not that I didn't
have plenty of chances.
     You're too young to remember how it  felt, though. Oh,  I  know, I know
you all  think you live  in all the times at  once, everything  recorded for
you, it's  all there  to  play back.  Digital. That's all  that is,  though:
playback. You still don't remember what it felt like, watching them  pile up
like  that.  Not here so  much, bad as it was, but Thailand, Africa, Brazil.
Jesus,  Scooter.  That  thing  was just  romping  on  us.  But  slow,  slow,
slowmotion  thing. Those retroviruses are. One  man told me once, and he had
the old kind, and died of it, how we'd  lived in this funny little pocket of
time when  a lot  of people got to feel like a piece  of ass wasn't going to
kill anybody,  not even a woman. See, they always had to worry anyway, every
time it's a chance, get knocked up and maybe die in  childbirth, die getting
rid of it, or anyway your life's not gonna be the same. But in that  pocket,
there, there were pills for that,  whatnot, shots for the other things, even
the ones had  killed people all over hell, before. That was a time, Scooter.
So  here  this thing comes along, changes  it back.  And we're sliding up on
woo, shit's changing all  over, got  civil  wars in Europe already  and this
AIDS thing just kicking along. You know  they tried  to say it was the gays,
said it was  the CIA, said it was the  U.S.  Army in  some fort in Maryland.
Said it was  people cornholing green monkeys. I  swear to God. You know what
it was?  People. Just too goddamn many of 'em, Scooter. Flying all  the fuck
over everywhere  and  walking around back  in there. Bet your ass somebody's
gonna pick up a bug or two. Every place on the damn planet just  a couple of
hours from any other place. So here's poor fucking Shapely comes along, he's
got this mutant strain won't kill you. Won't do shit to you at all, 'cept it
eats the old kind for breakfast. And I don't buy any of that bullshit he was
Jesus, Scooter. Didn't think Jesus was, either.
     'Any coffee left?'
     'I will pump stove.'
     'Put  a little drop of  Three-in-One  in  that hole by  the piston-arm,
Scooter. Leather gasket in there. Keeps it soft.'


31. Driver side.

     She didn't  see that  first  bullet,  but  it must  have  hit a wire or
something, coming  through,  because the lights  came  on.  She did  see the
second  one,  or  anyway  the hole it  blew in  the  leather-grain  plastic.
Something inside her stopped, learning this  about  bullets: that one second
there isn't any hole, the next second there is. Nothing in  between. You see
it happen, but you can't watch it happening.
     Then she got  down on her  hands  and  her knees and  started crawling.
Because  she couldn't just  stand there and wait for the next one.  When she
got up by the door, she could see her black  pants crumpled up on the  floor
there, beside a  set of keys on a gray, leather-grain plastic tab. There was
this smell from when he'd shot the gun into the floor. Maybe from the carpet
burning,  too,  because  she  could see that the  edges  of  the  holes were
scorched and sort of melted.
     Now she could hear him  yelling, somewhere  outside, hoarse and  hollow
and chased by echoes. Held her breath. Yelling how they (who?) did the  best
PR in the world, how they'd sold Hunnis Millbank, now they'd sell Sunflower.
If she heard it right.
     'Down by the door, here. Driver side.'
     It was Rydell, the door on that side standing open.
     'He left the keys in here,' she said.
     'Think he's gone down there  where  the  Dream Walls  franchise used to
be.'
     'What if he comes back?'
     'Probably come back anyway, we stick  around here.  You  crawl up there
and toss me those?'
     She edged through the door  and between the  buckets. Saw Rydell's head
there, by the open door. Grabbed  the keys  and threw them sideways, without
looking. Snatched her pants and scooted backward, wondering could she  maybe
fit in the fridge, if she folded her legs up?
     'Why don't you lie down flat on the floor back there...' His voice from
the driver's seat.
     'Lie down?'
     'Minimum silhouette.'
     'Huh?'
     'He's  going to start shooting. When  I do this-' Ignition-sound. Glass
flying from fresh holes in the windshield and she threw herself flat. The RV
lurched backward,  turning  tight,  and she  could  hear  him  slapping  the
console, trying to find some  function he needed, as more bullets came, each
one distinct, a blow, like  someone was swinging an invisible hammer, taking
care to keep the rhythm.
     Rydell must've gotten  it lined up how  he  needed it, then, because he
did  that  thing  boys  did,  up  in  Oregon,  with  their  brakes  and  the
transmission.
     She  realized  then that she was screaming. Not words or anything, just
screaming.
     Then  they were in  a  turn that almost took them over, and she thought
how these RV's probably  weren't  meant  to move very  fast.  Now they  were
moving even faster, it felt like, uphill.
     'Well  fuck,'  she  heard Rydell say,  in this weirdly ordinary kind of
voice, and then they hit the door, or the gate, or whatever, and it was like
the time she  tried to  pull this radical  bongo  over in Lafayette Park and
they'd had to keep explaining to her how'd she'd come down  on her head, and
each time they did, she'd forget.
     She was back  in Skinner's room, reading National Geographic, about how
Canada  split  itself  into  five  countries. Drinking cold milk out of  the
carton and  eating  saltines. Skinner in bed with  the  tv,  watching one of
those shows he liked about history.
     He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had  been
getting  better and better  looking. How they'd started  out jumpy and black
and  white, with the  soldiers running around  like  they had ants in  their
pants,  and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full  of scratches.
How gradually they'd slowed down to how people really moved, and then they'd
been colorized, the grain getting finer and  finer, and even  the  scratches
went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every  other  bit of it was
an approximation, somebody's idea of how it might have looked, the result of
a particular decision, a particular button being pushed. But it was  still a
hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie Holiday  without all that
crackle and tin.
     Billie Holiday was  probably  a  guy like Elvis, Chevette thought, with
spangles on his suit, but like when he was younger and not all fat.
     Skinner had this thing he got on about history. How it was turning into
plastic. But  she  liked  to  show him  she  was listening when he told  her
something,  because otherwise  he could go for days without saying anything.
So she looked up now, from her magazine and the picture of girls waving blue
and  white  flags in the Republic of Quebec,  and it  was her mother sitting
there, on the  edge of Skinner's bed, looking beautiful and sad  and kind of
tired, the way she could look after she got off work and still  had  all her
make-up on.
     'He's right,' Chevette's mother said.
     'I 'com?'
     'About history, how they change it.'
     'Mom, you?'
     'Everybody does that anyway,  honey.  Isn't  any  new  thing.  Just the
movies have caught up with memory, is all.'
     Chevette started to cry.
     'Chevette-Marie,' her mother said, in that singsong out of so far back,
'you've gone and hurt your head.'
     'How well you say you know this guy?' she asked.


32. Fallonville.

     Rydell's  SWAT shoe  crunched on little  squares  of safety-glass every
time he used the brake. If he'd had time and a broom, he'd have swept it all
out.  As it was, he'd had to bash out what was left of the windshield with a
piece of rusty  rebar  he found beside  the road, otherwise  Highway  Patrol
would've seen the  holes and hauled them over. Anyway, he had those insoles.
'I  worked  with him in L.A.,' he said,  braking to  steer around  shreds of
truck-trailer tires  that lay on the two-lane blacktop like the moulted skin
of monsters.
     'I was just wondering if he'll turn out like Mrs. Elliott did. Said you
knew her too.'
     'Didn't know her,' Rydell said, 'I met her,  on the plane. If Sublett's
some kind of plant,  then  the whole  world's a plot.' He  shrugged. 'Then I
could start  worrying about  you,  say.'  As opposed, say, to worrying about
whether  or not  Loveless or Mrs. Elliot had bothered to plant a locator-bug
in this  motorhome, or whether the Death Star was  watching for them,  right
now,  and could  it pick them up, out here?  They said the  Death Star could
read the headlines on a newspaper, or what brand and size of shoes you wore,
from a decent footprint.
     Then this wooden  cross seemed  to  pop  up,  in the headlights,  about
twelve  feet high, with TUNE IN across  the horizontal  and TO  HIS IMMORTAL
DOWNLINK coming down the upright, and  this dusty old portable tv  nailed up
where  Jesus's head  thought  to have  been. Somebody'd taken a .22  to  the
screen, it looked like.
     'Must be getting closer,' Rydell said.
     Chevette Washington sort of grunted. Then she drank some  of the  water
they'd gotten at the Shell station, and offered the bottle to him.
     When he'd crashed out of that mall, he'd felt like they were sure to be
right  by  a major highway. From the  outside,  the mall was  just  this low
tumble of  tan brick,  windows  boarded up  with sheets of that  really ugly
hot-pressed  recyc they  ran  off from chopped  scrap, the  color of day-old
vomit. He'd gone  screeching around this big empty parking lot,  just a  few
dead clunkers and old  mattresses to get in the  way, until he'd found a way
out through the chain link.
     But  there  wasn't  any highway  there,  just some  deserted  four-lane
feeder, and  it looked  like Loveless had put a  bullet into  the navigation
hardware, because  the map was  locked on downtown  Santa Ana  and  just sat
there,  sort of  flickering.  Where  he was had  the feel of  one  of  those
fallen-in edge-cities, the kind of place that  went down when the Euro-money
imploded.
     Chevette Washington was curled up by  the  fridge with her eyes closed,
and she wouldn't answer him. He was scared Loveless had put one through her,
too, but he knew he couldn't afford to stop until he'd put at least a little
distance between them and the mall. And  he couldn't see any blood on her or
anything.
     Finally he'd come  to this Shell station. You  could tell  it  had been
Shell because  of the  shape of the  metal things up  on the poles that  had
supported  the  signs. The men's room  door was  ripped off the  hinges; the
women's chained and padlocked.
     Somebody had taken  an automatic  weapon to the pop machine,  it looked
like. He swung  the RV around  to the  back and  saw this real old Airstream
trailer there, the same kind a neighbor of his father's had lived in down in
Tampa. There was a man there kneeling beside a hibachi, doing something with
a pot, and these two black Labradors watching him.
     Rydell parked,  checked to  see Chevette Washington was  breathing, and
got down out of the cab. He walked over to the man beside the hibachi, who'd
gotten up now and was wiping the palms of his hands on the thighs of his red
coveralls. He  had on  an old khaki  fishing cap with about a nine-inch bill
sticking straight  out. The threads  on  the embroidered Shell patch  on his
coveralls had sort of frayed and fuzzed-out.
     'You just  lost,' the  man  said, 'or is  there some  kind of problem?'
Rydell figured him to be at least seventy.
     'No  sir, no problem, but  I'm  definitely  lost.' Rydell looked at the
black  Labs. They looked right back. 'Those dogs of  yours there, they don't
look too happy to see me.'
     'Don't see a lot of strangers,' the man said.
     'No sir,' Rydell said, 'I don't imagine they do.'
     'Got  a  couple of cats,  too. Right  now I'm feeding 'em  all  on  dry
kibble. The cats get a bird sometimes, maybe mice. Say you're lost?'
     'Yes sir, I am.  I  couldn't  even tell you what state we're  in, right
now.'
     The man  spat  on the ground. 'Welcome to the goddamn club, son. I  was
your age, it was all of this California, just like God meant  it to be.  Now
it's Southern, so they tell me, but you know what it really is?'
     'No sir. What?'
     'A  lot  of that same happy horseshit. Like that  woman  camping in the
goddamn White House.' He took the fishing  cap  off,  exposing  a  couple of
silver-white   cancer-scars,   wiped   his   brow  with   a   grease-stained
handkerchief, then pulled the cap hack on.
     'Say you're lost, are you?'
     'Yes sir. My map's broken.'
     'Know how to read a paper one?'
     'Yes sir, I do.'
     'What the hell'd she do to her head?' Looking past Rydell.
     Rydell turned  and saw  Chevette  Washington leaning over  the driver's
bucket, looking out at them.
     'How she cuts her hair,' Rydell said.
     'I'll be damned,'  the  man  said.  'Might  be  sort  of  good-looking,
otherwise.'
     'Yes sir,' Rydell said.
     'See  that box of Cream o' Wheat there? Think you can stir me up  a cup
of that into this water when it boils?'
     'Yes sir.'
     'Well,  I'll  go find  you a  map to look at.  Skeeter and Whitey here,
they'll just keep you company.'
     'Yes sir.'
     PARADISE, SO. CALIFORNIA
     A CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY
     THREE MILES
     NO CAMPING
     CONCRETE PADS
     FULL HOOKUPS
     ELECTRIFIED SECURITY PERIMETER
     FREE SWIMMING
     LICENSED CHRISTIAN DAYCARE (STATE OF SO. CAL.)
     327 CHANNELS ON DOWNLINK
     And  a taller  cross rising  beyond that, this  one  welded  from rusty
railroad track, a  sort of  framework stuck full  of old televisions,  their
dead screens all looking out toward the road there.
     Chevette Washington was asleep now, so she missed that.
     Rydell  thought about  how  he'd used Codes's  phone to  get through to
Sublett's number in L.A.,  and gotten this funny ring, which had nearly made
him hang up right then, but it had turned out to be call-forwarding, because
Sublett had this leave to go and stay with his mother,  who was feeling kind
of sick.
     'You mean you're in Texas?'
     'Paradise, Berry. Mom's sick 'cause she 'n' a bunch of others got moved
up here to SoCal.'
     'Paradise?'
     Sublett had explained where it  was while Rydell  looked  at the  Shell
man's map.
     'Hey,' Rydell  had said, when he had  a general idea where it was, 'how
about I drive over and see you?'
     'Thought you had you a job up in San Francisco.'
     'Well, I'll tell you about that when I get there.'
     'You know they're saying  I'm an apostate here?' Sublett hadn't sounded
happy about that.
     'A what?'
     'An apostate.  'Cause I showed my mom this Cronenberg film, Berry? This
Videodrome? And they said it was from the Devil.'
     'I thought all those movies were supposed to have God in 'em.'
     'There's movies that are clearly of the Devil,  Berry. Or anyway that's
what Reverend Fallon says. Says all of Cronenberg's are.'
     'He in Paradise, too?'
     'Lord no,' Sublett had said, 'he's in these tunnels out  on the Channel
Islands, between England and France. Can't leave there, either,  because  he
needs the shelter.'
     'From what?'
     'Taxes. You know who dug those same tunnels, Berry?'
     'Who?'
     'Hitler did, with slave labor.'
     'I didn't know  that,' Rydell had said, imagining this scary little guy
with a black mustache, standing up on a rock and cracking a big whip.
     Now here came another sign,  this one not nearly as professional as the
first one, just black spraypaint letters on a couple of boards.
     R.U. READY FOR ETERNITY?
     HE LIVES! WILL YOU?
     WATCH TELEVISION
     'Watch television?' She was awake now.
     'Well,' Rydell said,  'Fallonites believe God's  sort of just there. On
television, I mean.'
     'God's on television?'
     'Yeah. Kind of like in the background or  something.  Sublett's mother,
she's in the church herself, but Sublett's kind of lapsed.'
     'So they watch tv and pray, or what?'
     'Well, I think it's more like kind of a meditation, you know? What they
mostly watch is  all  these old movies, and they figure if they watch enough
of them, long enough, the spirit will sort of enter into them.'
     'We had Revealed  Aryan  Nazarenes,  up in  Oregon,'  she said.  'First
Church of Jesus, Survivalist. As soon shoot you as look at you.'
     'Bad news,' Rydell agreed, the RV cresting a little ridge there, 'those
kind of Christians...' Then he saw  Paradise,  down  there, all  lit up with
these lights on poles.
     The  security  perimeter they advertised was just  coils of  razor-wire
circling  maybe  an  acre  and  a half. Rydell  doubted if it  actually  was
electrified, but he could see screamers hanging on it, every ten feet or so,
so   it  would   be  pretty  effective   anyway.   There  was   a  sort   of
blockhouse-and-gate set-up where  the  road ran in, but all  it seemed to he
protecting were about a dozen  campers, trailers,  and  semi-rigs, parked on
cement beds around  what  looked like an  old-fashioned  radio tower  they'd
topped with a whole cluster of satellite dishes, those little expensive ones
that  looked  sort  of  like giant gray  plastic marshmallows.  Somebody had
dammed a creek, to make a  sort of pond for swimming, but the  creek  itself
looked like  the  kind  of  industrial runoff  you  wouldn't even find  bugs
around, let alone birds.
     Sure had the whole place lit up,  though. He could hear the drumming of
big generators as they drove down the incline.
     'Jesus,' Chevette Washington said.
     Rydell pulled up by the blockhouse and powered his window down, glad it
still worked. A man in  a blaze-orange fleece jacket and a matching cap came
out, carrying  some kind of  shotgun  with a skeletal metal stock.  'Private
property,'  he said, looking at where the  windshield  should've been. 'What
happened to your windshield there, mister?'
     'Deer,' Chevette Washington said.
     'Here to visit our friends, the Subletts?' Rydell said, hoping he could
distract  the  guard  before  he'd  notice  the  bullet  holes or  anything.
'Expecting us, if you wanna go call 'em.'
     'Can't say you much look like Christians.'
     Chevette  Washington sort of leaned  across Rydell and  gave  the guard
this  stare. 'I don't know about you, brother, but we're Aryan Nazarene, out
of Eugene. We  wouldn't  want  to  even come in there,  say you got  any mud
people, any kind of race-mixing.
     Race-traitors all over, these days.'
     The guard looked at her. 'You Nazarene, how come you ain't skins?'
     She touched the front  of her crazy  haircut, the  short  spikey  part.
'Next thing  you're  gonna tell me, Jesus was  a  Jew. Don't know  what this
means?'
     He looked more than maybe just a little worried, now.
     'Got us some  sanctified nails in the hack, here.  Maybe that gives you
some idea.'
     Rydell saw the guard hesitate, swallow.
     'Hey, good buddy,' Rydell said, 'you gonna call tip ol' Sublett for us,
or what?'
     The man went back into the blockhouse.
     'What's that about nails?' Rydell asked.
     'Something Skinner told me about once,' she said. 'Scared me.'
     Dora, Sublett's mother, drank Coke and Mexican vodka.  Rydell had  seen
people drink thai  before, but never at room  temperature. And the  Coke was
flat, because she bought  it and the vodka in these big plastic  supermarket
bottles, and they looked as though they'd already lasted her a while. Rydell
decided he didn't feel like drinking anyway.
     The living room  of  Dora's trailer had a matching couch  and reclining
lounger. Dora lay back in the lounger with her feet up, for  her circulation
she  said,  Rydell  and Chevette  Washington sat side by side  on the couch,
which was more a loveseat, and
     Sublett sat on  the  floor,  his knees drawn up almost under  his chin.
There was a lot of stuff on the walls, and on little ornamental shelves, but
it  was all  very  clean.  Rydell  figured that  was  because  of  Sublett's
allergies. There  sure was a  lot  of it, though:  plaques  and pictures and
figurines and things  Rydell figured  had to be those prayer hankies.  There
was a flat type of hologram of Rev. Fallon, looking as much like a possum as
ever,  but a possum  that  had gotten a tan  and maybe had  plastic surgery.
There  was a life-size head of J. D. Shapely that Rydell didn't like because
the eyes seemed  to follow you.  Most of :he good stuff was  sort of grouped
around the  television, which was big and shiny but the old kind from before
they started to get real big and flat. It was on now, showing this black and
white movie, but the sound was off.
     'You're sure you won't have a drink, Mr. Rydell?'
     'No ma'am, thank you,' Rydell Said.
     'Joel doesn't drink. He has allergies, YOU know.'
     'Yes ma'am.' Rydell hadn't ever known Sublett's first name before.
     Sublett was wearing brand-new white denim jeans, a white t-shirt, white
cotton socks, and disposable white paper hospital slippers.
     'He was  always  a sensitive boy, Mr.  Rydell. I  remember one time  he
sucked on the handle of this other boy's Big Wheel. Well, his  mouth like to
turned inside-out.'
     'Momma,' Sublett said, 'you know the doctor  said you ought to get more
sleep than you been getting.'
     Mrs. Sublett  sighed. 'Yes, well, Joel, I know you young  people want a
chance  to talk.' She  peered at  Chevette Washington. 'That's a shame about
your hair,  honey. You're  just as pretty  as can be,  though, and  you know
it'll  just grow in so nice. I tried  to light the broiler on this gas range
we  had, down in Galveston,  that was when  Joel was just  a baby, he was so
sensitive, and that stove about blew up. I just had had this perm, dear and,
well...'
     Chevette Washington didn't say anything.
     'Momma,' Sublett said, 'now you know you've had your nice drink...'
     Rydell watched Sublett lead the old woman off to bed.
     'Jesus Christ,' Chevette Washington said, 'what's wrong with his eyes?'
     'Just light-sensitive,' Rydell said.
     'It's spooky, is what it is.'
     'He wouldn't hurt a fly,' Rydell said.
     Sublett  came  back, looked at the  picture on the tv, then  sighed and
shut it off. 'You know I'm not supposed to leave the trailer, Berry?'
     'How's that?'
     'It's  a  condition of  my  apostasy.  They  say  I  might  corrupt the
congregation  by contact.'  He perched  on  the edge  of the recliner  so he
wouldn't have to actually recline in it.
     'I thought you'd blown Fallon off when you came out to LA.'
     Sublett  looked  embarrassed.  'Well, she's hecn sick, Berry, so when I
came here I told 'em I was here to reconsider. Meditate on the box 'n' all.'
He wrung his long pale hands. 'Then  they caught me watching Videodrome. You
ever see, uh, Deborah Harry, Rydell?' Sublett sighed and sort of quivered.
     'How'd they catch you?'
     'They've got it set up so they can monitor what you're watching.'
     'How come they're out here anyway?'
     Sublett ran his fingers back through his dry, straw-colored hair. 'Hard
to say, but I'd  figure it's  got something to do with Reverend Fallon's tax
problems. Most of what he does, lately, it's about  that. Didn't your job in
San Francisco work out, Berry?'
     'No,' Rydell said, 'it didn't.'
     'You want to tell me about it?' Rydell said he did.

     'I think he shot through  something to do with the damned heater, too,'
Rydell said. They were back in the RV, outside the perimeter.
     'I like your friend,' she said. 'I do too.'
     'No,  I mean he  really  cares about what's going to happen  to you. He
really does.'
     'You  take  the  bed,'  he  said. 'I'll sleep  up  front.'  'There's no
windshield. You'll freeze.'
     'I'll be okay.'
     'Sleep back here. We did before. It's okay.'

     He woke in the dark  and listened to the sound of her breathing, to the
creak of stiff old leather from the jacket spread over her shoulder.
     Sublett had listened to his story, nodding sometimes, asking a question
here and there, his mirrored contacts reflecting  tiny convex images of them
sitting there on that  loveseat. In the end he'd  just whistled  softly  and
said, 'Berry,  it  sounds to  me like  you're  really  in  trouble now.  Bad
trouble.'
     Really in trouble now.
     Rydell slid his hand down, brushing  one of hers by accident as he  did
it, and touched  the bulge of his wallet in his  back  pocket. What money he
had was in  there, but  Wellington Ma's card  was in there, too. Or what was
left of it. The last time he'd looked, it had broken into three pieces.
     'Big trouble,'  he said to the dark, and Chevette Washington lifted the
edge of  her jacket  and sort of snuggled  in  closer,  her breathing  never
changing, so he knew she was still asleep.
     He lay there,  thinking, and after a while he started to get this idea.
About the craziest idea he'd ever had.

     'That  boyfriend  of yours,'  he said to  her, in the  tiny kitchen  of
Sublett's mother's trailer, 'that Lowell?'
     'What about him?'
     'Got a number we could reach him at?'
     She poured  milk on  her cornflakes. It was  the kind you mixed up from
powder.  Had  that thin  chalky look.  The  only kind Sublett's  mother had.
Sublett was allergic to milk. 'Why?'
     'I think maybe I want to talk to him about something.'
     'About what?'
     'Something I think maybe he could help me with.'
     'Lowell? Lowell's  not gonna  help you. Lowell doesn't give a rat's ass
for anybody.'
     'Well,' Rydell said, 'why don't you just let me talk to him.'
     'If you tell him  where we are, or he has  it traced  back through  the
cd-net, he'll turn us in. Or he would if he knew anybody was after us.'
     'Why?'
     'He's  just  like that.'  But then she  gave  Rydell  the phone and the
number.
     'Hey, Lowell?'
     'Who the fuck is this?'
     'How you doin'?'
     'Who gave you-'
     'Don't hang up.'
     'Listen, motherf-'
     'SFPD Homicide.'
     He could hear  Lowell draw on a  cigarette. 'what did you say?'  Lowell
said.
     'Orlovsky. SFPD  Homicide, Lowell.  That big fucker with  the great big
fucking  gun?  Came in  the bar there? You remember. Just before the  lights
went out. I was over there by the bar, talking with Eddie the Shit.'
     Lowell took another drag, shallower by the sound of  it. 'Look, I don't
know what you-'
     'You don't have to. You can just hang up right now, Lowell. But if  you
do, boy,  you just better  kiss your ass goodbye.  Because you saw  Orlovsky
come in there for the girl, Lowell,  didn't you? You saw him. He didn't wart
you to. He wasn't in there on any SFPD business, Lowell. He was there on his
own stick. And that's one serious bad oficer, Lowell. Serious as cancer.'
     Silence. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'
     'Then you just listen, Lowell.  Listen up.  You don't listen, I'll tell
Orlovsky  you  saw him.  I'll  give  him  this number.  I'll give  him  your
description, and that skinhead's, too. Tell him you been  talking about him.
And you know  what he'll do, Lowell? He'll come out there and shoot your ass
dead, that's what he'll  do. And nobody to stop  him. Homicide, Lowell. Then
he  can investigate it himself,  he  wants to. Man's heavy, Lowell, I  gotta
tell ya.' Lowell coughed, a couple of times.  Cleared his throat. 'This is a
joke, right?'
     'I don't hear you laughing.'
     'Okay,' Lowell said, 'say it's for real. Then that? What're you after?'
     'I hear you  know people  can  get  things  done.  With  computers  and
things.' He could hear Lowell lighting a fresh cigarette.
     'Well,' Lowell said, 'sort of.'
     'Republic of Desire,' Rydell said. 'I need  you to get them to do me  a
favor.'
     'No names,' Lowell said, fast. 'There's scans set to pick things out of
traffic'
     'Them.' 'Them' okay? Need you to get them to do something for me.'
     'It'll cost you,' Lowell said, 'and it won't be cheap.'
     'No,' Rydell said, 'it'll cost you.'
     He pressed  the  button that broke  the connection. Give  old  Lowell a
little time to think about it; maybe look Orlovsky up on the Civil List, see
he was there  and he was Homicide. He flipped the little phone shut and went
back into the trailer.
     Sublett's  mother  kept the air-conditioning  up  about  two clicks too
high.
     Sublett was sitting  on the loveseat. His  white clothes  made him look
sort of like a painter,  a plasterer or  something, except he was too clean.
'You know, Berry, I'm thinking maybe I better get back to Los Angeles.'
     'What about your mother?'
     'Well, Mrs.  Baker's  here now, from Galveston? They been neighbors for
years. Mrs. Baker can watch out for her.'
     'That apostate crap getting to you?'
     'Sure is,' Sublett said,  turning to look at the hologram of Fallon. 'I
still  believe  in the Lord, Berry,  and  I know  I've  seen His face in the
media,  just like Reverend  Fallon  teaches.  I have. But the rest of  it, I
swear, it might as  well be just  a  flatout hustle.'  Sublett almost looked
like he  might be about to cry. The silver eyes swung  around, met Rydell's.
'And I been thinking about IntenSecure, Berry. What you told  me last night.
I  don't see  how I can go hack there and work, knowing the kinds  of things
they'll condone. I thought I was  at  least helping to protect people from a
few  of the evils in this  world, Berry, but now I know I'd just  be working
for a company with no morals at all.'
     Rydell  walked  over  and  had a closer  look at the prayer-hankies. He
wondered which one of them was supposed to keep the AIDS off. 'No,' he said,
finally, 'you go back to work. You are protecting people. That  part's real.
You got to make a living, Sublett.'
     'What about you?'
     'Well, what about me?'
     'They'll just find you and kill you, Berry. You and her.'
     'You, too,  probably,  if  they  knew  what  I'd told  you. I shouldn't
ought've done that, Sublett.  That's  one  reason Chevette and I have to get
out of here. So there won't be any hassle for you and your mom.'
     'Well,' Sublett said, 'I'm not working for them anymore, Berry. But I'm
leaving here, too. I just have to.'
     Rydell  looked at Sublett, seeing him, somehow, in his full IntenSecure
outfit, Glock and all, and suddenly that big crazy idea-thing sort of up and
shook itself, and rolled over, revealing all these new angles. But you can't
get him involved, Rydell told himself, it just wouldn't be fair.
     'Sublett,'  Rydell heard himself saying, about a minute later, 'I bet I
got a career-option here you haven't ever even considered.'
     'What's that?' Sublett said.
     'Getting in trouble,' Rydell said.


33. Notebook.

     Rice
     scouring pads broom
     detergent liquid sleeping bag
     stove fuel oil/gasket

     He sleeps now. Rice with the curry from the Thai wagon. Asks  where the
girl has gone. Tell him Fontaine  has heard from her but does not know where
she is or why. The pistol on the shelf. Reluctant to touch  it (cold, heavy,
smelling of oil, the dark blue  finish worn to silver-gray down the sides of
its muzzle, around the fluted segments of the  cylinder.  ('SMITH & WESSON.'
Thomasson.) Tonight he spoke again of Shapely.
     How  they did him like that, Scooter, that's just some sorry shit. Same
shit all over. Always  some of 'em, anyway, makes you wonder how  these damn
religions last so long or what started it in the first place. Could be he'll
be  that himself one  day, crazy fuckers  out  killing  people  for  him, or
they'll say it's  for  him. Used  to be  these Crucified Jesus  people, they
wouldn't  talk  at all except on Mondays, and that was the day they'd go and
dig one spadeful of dirt out of their grave, Scooter.
     Every little while they'd get one of them thought  he'd got the  spirit
in him and they'd just do it, do it with these special chrome nails they all
carried,  leather neck-pouch, see, it had to be unborn lambskin. Hell, you'd
have  to say they were  crazier than the ones got him, Scooter. Put  'em all
away, finally. Weren't any left at all, after about 1998.

34. Punching out of paradise.

     'Inner Tube,  honey,' Mrs. Sublett said, 'Talitha Morrow, Todd Probert,
Gary  Underwood.  1996.' She  was leaning back in the  recliner with  a damp
washcloth  folded across  her forehead.  It was the same  color  blue as her
slippers, and they were terrycloth, too.
     'I never  saw  that,'  Chevette  said,  flipping through the pages of a
magazine all about Reverend Fallon. There was this  has-been actress, Gudrun
Weaver, and  she was up there hugging  Fallon  on a stage somewhere. If he'd
turned around, Chevette thought, his  nose would've barely  come  up  to her
breastbone. Looked like he'd  had some kind of pink wax injected,  all under
his skin; had the  creepiest-looking hair  she'd ever  seen, like  a  really
short wig but it sort of looked like it might get up and walk off by itself.
     'All  about  television,'  Mrs.  Sublett said,  'so naturally  it's  of
special significance to the Church.'
     'What's it about?'
     'Talitha Morrow is this newswoman,  and Todd Probert is a bank  robber.
But he's a  good bank robber, because he only needs the  money to pay for  a
heart-transplant for his  wife. Carrie Lee. Remember  her? In a mature role,
honey.  More like a  cameo. Well, Gary Underwood  is Talitha's  ex, but he's
still got it for her, bad. In fact he's got-whatcha callit?-erotomania, like
it's all he ever thinks about  and, honey, it's turned pure evil. First he's
sending her these chopped up Barbie  dolls;  sends her a dead white  rabbit,
then all this fancy underwear with blood on it...'
     Chevette  let  the old lady talk. She could just sort of tune  her out,
the way she used to do with  her own mother, sometimes. She wondered what it
was Rydell and Sublett were so worked up about. Up to  something; whispering
in the kitchen.
     She watched a fly buzz around  the stuff on  Mrs. Sublett's shelves. It
looked slow, like maybe the air-conditioning was too much for it.
     She wondered if maybe  she wasn't starting to fall for Rydell. Maybe it
was  just that he'd  showered and shaved and  put  on clean clothes from his
stupid-looking suitcase. The clothes were exactly the  same as the ones he'd
been wearing before. Maybe he never wore anything else. But she had to admit
he had a cute  butt in those jeans. Sublett's mother  said he  looked like a
young Tommy Lee Jones. Who was Tommy Lee Jones? Or  maybe it was because she
had  the idea  somehow  he was going to  do something mean to Lowell.  She'd
thought she was still in love with Lowell, or something anyway, but  now she
didn't  think so,  not at all. If Lowell  just hadn't started  doing dancer.
She'd thought about  how that Loveless  had got when she'd  dumped all  that
dancer in  his  Coke. She'd asked Rydell  if that was enough to  have killed
him, and Rydell had said no. Said it  was enough to keep him stone crazy for
a  while, and when he got  back together, he was going to  be hurting.  Then
she'd asked  Rydell  why  Loveless had done that,  banging his gun into  his
crotch that way. Rydell  had sort  of scratched  his head and said he wasn't
sure, but he thought it had something to do with what it did to your nervous
system. Said he'd heard it induced priapism, for one thing.
     She'd asked him  what that was. Well, he'd said, it's when the man  is,
like,  overstimulated. She didn't know  about that, but it  had given Lowell
these  total  brickbat  boners that  just didn't want to go away.  And  that
would've  been just fine, or anyway okay, except he  got  all mean with  it,
too, SO she'd wind  up all sore and then he'd he badmouthing her in front of
these people he hung out with, like Codes. Anyway, she wasn't going to waste
any  time  worrying about what Rydell might have in mind for Lowell, no way.
What  she did  worry about  was Skinner, whether he was okay, whether he was
being taken care of.  She was kind  of scared to  try  phoning Fontaine now;
every time Rydell made a call out, she worried it might  get  traced back or
something.  And  it  made her  sad  to think  about her bike.  She was  sure
somebody would've gotten it by now.  She kind of hated to admit it, but that
was starting to make her nearly as sad as Sammy getting killed that way. And
Rydell had said he thought maybe Nigel had gotten shot, too.
     'And then,'  Sublett's mother was saying, 'Gary Underwood goes  through
this window. And he falls on one of those fences? Kind with spikes on top.'
     'Hey, Mom,' Sublett said, 'you're bending Chevette's ear.'
     'Just telling her  about Inner Tube,' Mrs. Sublett said, from under the
washcloth.
     '1996,' Sublett said. 'Well, Rydell and I, we need her  for something.'
Sublett gestured for her to follow him back into the kitchen.
     'I don't think it's a real good idea for her to go outside,  Berry,' he
said to Rydell. 'Not in the daytime.'
     Rydell was  sitting  at  the  little  plastic  table  where  she'd  had
breakfast. 'Well, you  can't  go,  Sublett, because  of your apostasy. And I
don't want to be in there by myself, not with my head stuck in one  of those
eyephone things. His parents could walk in. He might listen.'
     'Can't you just call them on the regular phone, Berry?' Sublett sounded
unhappy.
     'No.' Rydell said, 'I can't. They just don't like that. He says they'll
at least talk to me if I call them on an eyephone rig.'
     'What's the problem?' Chevette said.
     'Sublett's got a friend here who's got a pair of eyephones.'
     'Buddy,' Sublett said.
     'Your buddy?' she asked.
     'Name's Buddy,' Sublett said, 'but that VR,  eyephones 'n'  stuff, it's
against  Church  law.  It's been  revealed  to Reverend Fallon that  virtual
reality's  a  medium of Satan, 'cause you don't  watch  enough tv after  you
start doing it...
     'You don't believe that,' Rydell said.
     'Neither  does Buddy,'  Sublett  said, 'but  his daddy'll whip his head
around if he finds that VR stuff he's got under the bed.'
     'Just call him up,' Rydell said, 'tell him what I told you. Two hundred
dollars cash, plus the time and charges.'
     'People'll see  her,' Sublett said, his shy  silver  gaze  bouncing  in
Chevette's direction, then back to Rydell.
     'What do you mean, "see" me?'
     'Well, it's  your haircut,' Sublett said. 'It's too unusual  for 'em, I
can tell you that.'
     'Now, Buddy,' Rydell said to the boy, 'I'm going to  give you these two
hundred-dollar bills here. Now when'd you say your father's due back?'
     'Not  for  another two hours,'  Buddy said,  his  voice  cracking  with
nervousness. He took  the  money  like  it might have something on it. 'He's
helping  pour a new pad for the fuel  cells they're bringing from Phoenix on
the  Church's bulk-lifter.' Buddy kept  looking  at Chevette.  She had on  a
straw sun-hat that belonged to Sublett's mother, with a big floppy brim, and
a pair of  these really strange old-lady sunglasses with lemon-yellow frames
and lenses that sort  of  swooped up at the side. Chevette tried smiling  at
him, but it didn't seem to help.
     'You're  friends  of Joel's, right?'  Buddy had  a  haircut that wasn't
quite skin, some kind of gadget in his mouth to straighten his teeth, and an
Adam's apple about  a third the  size of his head. She watched it bob up and
down. 'From L.A.?'
     'That's right,' Rydell said.
     'I... I wanna g-go there,' Buddy said.
     'Good,' Rydell said.  'This is a step  in the right direction, you just
believe it. Now  you wait out there like I said,  and tell  Chevette here if
anybody's coming.'
     Buddy went out  of  his tiny  bedroom, closing the  door behind him. It
didn't  look to Chevette like  anybody Buddy's age lived  there at all.  Too
neat, with these posters of Jesus and Fallon. She felt sorry for him. It was
close  and hot and she  missed Sublett's mother's air-conditioning. She took
off that hat.
     'Okay,' Rydell said, picking up the plastic helmet, 'you sit on the bed
here and pull the plug if  we get interrupted.' Buddy had  already hooked up
the  jack for them. Rydell sat down on the floor  and put the  helmet on, so
she couldn't see his eyes.
     Then he  pulled on  one  of  those gloves you use to dial with and move
stuff around in there.
     She watched his index finger, in that  glove, peck out something  on  a
pad that  wasn't  there. Then she listened to  him  talking to the telephone
company's computer about getting the time and charges after he was done.
     Then his hand came up again. 'Here goes,' he said, and started punching
out this number he said Lowell had given him,  his finger coming down on the
empty air. When he was done, he made a fist, sort of wiggled it around, then
lowered the gloved hand to his lap.
     He just sat  there for a  few  seconds, the  helmet kind  of  swiveling
around like he was looking at stuff, then it stopped moving.
     'Okay,' he said, his voice kind of funny, but not to her, 'but is there
anybody here?'
     Chevette felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
     'Oh,' he said, the helmet turning, 'Jesus...'


35. The republic of desire.

     Rydell had liked doing Dream  Walls,  when he was a kid in high school.
It was this Japanese franchise operation  they set up in different kinds  of
spaces, mostly  in  older malls; some were  in  places that  had been  movie
theaters, some were  in  old department stores.  He'd gone to  one once that
they'd put  into an old bowling alley; made it real long and  narrow and the
stuff sort of distorted on you if you tried to move it too fast.
     There were a  lot  of  different ways  you could play with it, the most
popular one in Knoxville  being gunfights, where you got these guns and shot
at all  kinds  of bad guys, and they shot back and then  you got the  score.
Sort of like FATSS at  the Academy, but only about half the rez. And none of
the, well, color.
     But the one  Rydell had liked  most was where you just went in and sort
of sculpted things out of  nothing, out of  that cloud of pixels or polygons
or whatever they were, and you could see what other people were doing at the
same time, and maybe even put your stuff together with theirs, if  you  both
wanted to. He'd been kind of self-conscious about it, because it seemed like
something  that  mostly  girls did.  And the girls  were  always doing these
unicorns  and  rainbows  and  things,  and Rydell liked to do  cars, kind of
dream-cars, like he  was some designer in Japan somewhere and he could build
anything  he wanted. You could get these full-color  printouts when you were
done,  or a cassette,  if you'd  animated it. There'd always be  a couple of
girls down at the far end, doing plastic surgery  on pictures of themselves,
fiddling around with their faces and hair, and they'd get printouts of those
if they did one they really liked.
     Rydell would be up closer to the entrance, molding these grids of green
light around a frame  he'd drawn, and laying color  and texture over that to
see how different  ones looked. But what he remembered when he  clicked into
the Republic of Desire's eyephone-space was the  sense  you got, doing that,
of what the  space around Dream Walls  was like.  And it  was a weird thing,
because  if you  looked up  from  what you were doing,  there really  wasn't
anything there; nothing in particular,  anyway. But when you were doing  it,
designing your car or whatever, you could get this funny sense that you were
leaning out, over the edge of the  world, and the  space beyond that sort of
fell away, forever.
     And you  felt like  you weren't standing on  the floor  of an old movie
theater or  a  bowling alley, but on some kind of  plain, or maybe a pane of
glass, and you felt like it just stretched away behind you, miles and miles,
with no real end.
     So when he went from looking at the phone company's logo to being right
out there on that glassy plain, he just said  'Oh,' because he could see its
edges, and see that it hung there, level, and around and above it this cloud
or  fog or  sky that  was  no color and  every color at  once, just  sort of
seething.
     And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than
anything, their  chests about even  with  the edges of  the  plain,  so that
Rydell got to feel like a bug, or a little toy.
     One of them  was  a  dinosaur, this  sort of T.  Rex job with the short
front legs,  except they ended in something a lot more like hands. One was a
sort of  statue, it looked like,  or more like some freak natural formation,
all  shot  through  with  cracks and  fissures, but  it  was  shaped  like a
wide-faced man  with dreadlocks, the face relaxed and the lids  half-closed.
But  all stone and moss, the dreadlocks somehow stacked from whole mountains
of shale.
     Then he looked and saw the third one there, and just said
     'Jesus.'
     This was a figure, too, and just as big, but all made up of television,
these moving images winding  and  writhing together, and  barely, it seemed,
able to hold the form they took: something that might either have been a man
or a  woman. It hurt his eyes, to try to look too close at any  one  part of
it. It was like trying to  watch a million channels at  once, and this noise
was rushing off  it like a waterfall off  rocks, a sort of hiss that somehow
wasn't a sound at all.
     'Welcome  to the  Republic,' said the  dinosaur, its voice the voice of
some beautiful woman. It smiled, the  ivory of its teeth  carved  into whole
temples. Rydell tried to look at  the carvings; they got  really clear for a
second, and then something happened.
     'You don't  have a  third  the  bandwidth  you  need,'  the dreadlocked
mountain said, its voice about what you'd expect from a mountain. 'You're in
K-Tel space...'
     'We  could  turn  off  the  emulator,'  the thing  made  of  television
suggested, its voice modulating up out of the waterfall-hiss.
     'Don't bother,' said the dinosaur. 'I  don't  think this is going to be
much of a conversation.'
     'Your name,' said the mountain.
     Rydell hesitated.
     'Social  Security,' said  the  dinosaur, sounding  bored, and for  some
reason Rydell thought about his father,  how  he'd always gone on about what
that had used to mean, and what it meant now.
     'Name and number,' said the mountain, 'or we're gone.'
     'Rydell, Stephen Berry,' and  then  the  string of digits.  He'd barely
gotten the last one out when the dinosaur said 'Former policeman, I see.'
     'Oh dear,' said the mountain, who kept reminding Rydell of something.
     'Well,'  said the dinosaur, 'pretty permanently former,  by the look of
it. Worked for IntenSecure after that.'
     'A sting,' said the mountain, and brought a hand up to point at Rydell,
except it  was  this giant  granite lobster-claw, crusted  with  lichen.  It
seemed to fill half the sky, like the side of  a space ship. 'The narrow end
of the wedge?'
     'They don't come much narrower, if you ask me,' the storm of television
said. 'You seem to have gotten our Lowell's undivided attention, Rydell. And
he wouldn't even tell us what your name was.'
     'Doesn't know it,' Rydell said.
     'Don't  know  his  ass  from a  hole in the  ground, hee haw,' said the
mountain,  lowering the claw, its voice a sampled parody of Rydell's. Rydell
tried to  get  a good  look at its  eyes;  got  a flash of still blue pools,
waving  ferns,  some  kind  of  tan rodent  hopping away,  before  the focus
slipped. 'People like Lowell imagine we need them more than they need us.'
     'State your business, Stephen Berry,' said the dinosaur.
     'There was something happened, up Benedict Canyon-'
     'Yes, yes,' said the dinosaur, 'you were the driver. What  does it have
to do with us?'
     That was when it dawned on Rydell  that the dinosaur, or  all of  them,
could probably see all the records there were  on him, right then, anywhere.
It gave him a funny feeling. 'You're looking at all my stuff,' he said.
     'And it's not very interesting,' said the dinosaur. 'Benedict Canyon?'
     'You did that,' Rydell said.
     The  mountain raised  its  eyebrows.  Windblown  scrub shifting,  rocks
tumbling  down. But just on the  edge  of  Rydell's  vision. 'For what  it's
worth, that was not us, not exactly. We would've gone a more elegant route.'
     'But why did YOU do it?'
     'Well,' said the dinosaur, 'to the extent that anyone did it, or caused
it to be done, I imagine you might look to the lady's husband, who I see has
since filed for divorce. On very solid grounds, it seems.'
     'Like he set her up? With the gardener and everything?'
     'Lowell has some serious explaining to do, I think,' the mountain said.
     'You  haven't  told us what it is  you want, Mr. Rydell.' This from the
television-thing.
     'A job like that. Done. I need you to do one of those. For me.'
     'Lowell,' the mountain  said, and  shook its dreadlocked head. Cascades
of shale in Rydell's peripheral vision. Dust rising on a distant slope.
     'That sort of thing is dangerous,' the dinosaur said. 'Dangerous things
are very expensive. You don't have any money, Rydell.'
     'How about if Lowell pays you for it?'
     'Lowell,' from that vast blank face twisting with images, 'owes us.'
     'Okay,'  Rydell said, 'I  hear you.  And I  think I  know somebody else
might pay you.' He wasn't even sure if that was bullshit or not. 'But you're
going to have to listen to me. Hear the story.'
     'No,' the mountain  said, and Rydell  remembered  who it was he figured
the thing was supposed to look like, that guy you  saw on  the history shows
sometimes,  the one  who'd  invented eyephones or something, 'and  if Lowell
thinks he's the only pimp out there, he might have to think again.'
     And then  they were  fading, breaking  up  into  those paisley  fractal
things, and Rydell knew he was losing them.
     'Wait,' he said. 'Any of you live in San Francisco?'
     The dinosaur came flickering back. 'What if we did?'
     'Well,' Rydell said, 'do you like it?'
     'Why do you ask?'
     'Because it's all going to change.  They're going to do it like they're
doing Tokyo.'
     'Tokyo?' The television-storm, coming back now as this big  ball,  like
that hologram in Cognitive Dissidents. 'Who told you that?' Now the mountain
was back, too. 'There's not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now...'
     'Tell us,' the dinosaur said.
     So Rydell did.
     She  had the hat back on,  when  he took  the helmet  off, but she  was
holding those sunglasses in her hand. Just looking at him.
     'I don't think I made sense of much of that,' she said. She'd only been
able to hear his side of it, but it had  been  mostly  him talking, there at
the end. 'But I think you're flat fucking crazy.'
     'I probably am,' he said.
     Then he got the time and charges on the call. It came to just about all
the money he had left.
     'I don't  see  why  they had to put the damn thing through  Paris,'  he
said.
     She just put those glasses back on and slowly shook her head.


36. Notebook (2).

     The city in sunlight,  from  the roof of this  box atop the  tower. The
hatch  open.  Sound  of  Skinner  sorting and  resorting  his  belongings. A
cardboard box, slowly filling with objects I will take below, to the sellers
of things,  their goods  spread  on blankets,  on  greasy squares of ancient
canvas. Osaka far away. The wind brings  sounds of hammering, song. Skinner,
this morning, asking if I had seen the pike in the Steiner Aquarium.
     - No.
     - He doesn't move, Scooter.
     Sure that's all Fontaine said? But he'd found her bike? That's no good.
Wouldn't go  this long without that.  Cost an arm and  a fucking  leg,  that
thing. Made of paper, inside. Japanese construction-paper, what's it called?
Useless, Scooter. Shit, it's your language.  Forgetting it  faster  than  we
are... Tube of that paper,  then they wrap it with aramyd or  something. No,
she wouldn't leave that. Day  she  brought it home,  three hours down  there
spraying  this fake  rust  on  it,  believe  that?  Fake rust,  Scooter. And
wrapping it  with old rags,  innertubes, anything. So it wouldn't look  new.
Well, it makes more sense than just locking it, it really does. Know how you
break  a Kryptonite lock, Scooter? With a Volvo jack. Volvo jack  fits right
in there, like it  was made for it. Give it a shove or two, zingo.  But they
never use 'em anymore, those locks. Some people still carry 'em, though. One
of  those up 'side the head, you'll notice  it... I just found her  one day.
They wanted to cart her down to the  end, let the city have her.  Said she'd
be dead  before they got  her off anyway. Told 'em  they could fuck off into
the air. Got her up  here. I could still do  that.  Why? Hell.  Because. See
people dying, you just walk by like it was television?


37. Century city.

     Chevette didn't know what to think about Los Angeles.
     She thought those palm  trees  were  weird,  though.  On  the  way  in,
Sublett's electric  car had pulled up behind this big white trailer-rig with
A-LIFE  INSTALLATIONS, NANOTRONIC VEGETATION across  the back of it, and the
heads of these fake palm trees sticking out, all wrapped in plastic.
     She'd seen  it all on tv once, with Skinner, how  they  were putting in
these trees to  replace the ones  the  virus had killed, some Mexican virus.
They were kind of like the Bay  maglev, or like what Rydell and Sublett said
that  that Sunflower company was going to do in San Francisco; these  things
that kind  of grew, but only because they  were made up of  all these little
tiny machines. One  show  she'd seen with Skinner,  they'd talked about  how
these new trees were designed so that all kinds of birds and rats and things
could nest  in them, just like the ones that had died. Skinner told her that
he'd run a Jeep into a real palm tree, in L.A., once, and about ten rats had
fallen out, landed on the hood and  just sort of stood there, until they got
scared and ran away.
     It sure didn't feel like San Francisco. She felt kind of two ways about
it. Like  it  was just this bunch of  stuff, all spread  out  pretty much at
random, and then like it was this really big place, with mountains somewhere
back there, and all  this energy  flowing around in  it, lighting things up.
Maybe that was because they'd got there at night.
     Sublett had this  little white Eurocar called  a Montxo. She knew  that
because she'd had to look at the logo on the dash all the way from Paradise.
Sublett said it rhymed with poncho. It was  built  in Barcelona and you just
plugged it into  the house-current  and left it until  it  was  charged.  It
wouldn't  do much more  than forty  on a highway, but Sublett didn't like to
drive anything else because of his allergies. She said he was lucky they had
electric cars;  he'd  told  her  all about  how  he  was  worried about  the
electromagnetic fields and cancer and stuff.
     They'd left  his mother with this Mrs. Baker, watching  Spacehunter  on
the  tv. They were both real excited  about that  because  they said  it was
Molly Ringwald's first  film.  They'd get excited about just about anything,
like that, and Chevette never had any idea who they were talking about.
     Rydell was just  spending more  and more time on the phone, and  they'd
had to stop and buy fresh batteries twice, Sublett paying.
     It kind of bothered her that he didn't give her any more attention. And
they'd slept on  the same bed again,  in the room at  the motel, but nothing
had happened, even  though Sublett  had slept out  in the  Montxo,  with the
seats tilted back.
     All  Rydell ever  did now was  talk to those Republic  of Desire people
Lowell  knew,  but  on  the  regular phone,  and try  to  leave  messages on
somebody's voicemail. Mr. Mom or something. Ma. But he  didn't think anybody
was getting them, so he'd called  up  the Desire  people and gone on  and on
about the whole story, everything that happened to them, and they'd recorded
it and they were supposed to put it in this Mr.  Ma's voicemail. Rydell said
they were going to stuff it there, so there wasn't any other mail. Said that
ought to get his attention.
     When they'd got to L.A. and got a  room in a motel,  Chevette had  been
kind of excited, because she'd always wanted  to do that. Because her mother
had always seemed to have real good times when she went  to motels. Well, it
had turned  out to be sort of like a trailer camp without the trailers, with
these little concrete  buildings divided  up  into smaller rooms, and  there
were  foreign people cooking barbecues down in what had  been  the  swimming
pool. Sublett had gotten really upset about that, how he couldn't handle the
hydrocarbons and  everything,  but Rydell  had  said it was just for the one
night. Then Rydell had gone over to  the foreign people and talked to them a
little,  and  came back  and  said  they  were Tibetans.  They  made a  good
barbecue, too, but  Sublett just ate  this  drugstore food he'd brought with
him, bottled water and these yellow bars looked  like soap, and  went out to
sleep in his Montxo.
     Now here she was, walking into this place  called  Century City II, and
trying to look like she was there to pull a tag. It was  this kind of green,
tit-shaped  thing up  on  these three legs that ran up through it. You could
see  where they went because the walls  were some kind of glass, mostly, and
you could see through. It was about  the biggest thing around; you could see
it forever. Rydell called it the Blob.
     It was real upscale,  too,  kind of like  China Basin,  with those same
kind of people, like you mostly saw in the financial  district, or in malls,
or when you were pulling tags.
     Well, she  had her badges on, and she'd had a good shower at the motel,
but  the  place was starting  to  creep her  out anyway. All these trees  in
there, up all through this sort  of giant, hollow leg, and  everything under
this weird  filtered  light  came in  through  the sides.  And here  she was
standing on  this escalator, about  a mile  long, just going up and up,  and
around  her  all  these  people  who  must've  belonged  there.  There  were
elevators,  Rydell said, up  the other two legs,  and  they ran at an angle,
like the lift up to Skinner's. But Sublett's friend had said there were more
IntenSecure people watching those, usually.
     She knew that Sublett was behind her, somewhere, or anyway that was how
they'd worked it out before  Rydell dropped them off at  the entrance. She'd
asked him where  he was going  then, and he'd  just said he  had  to go  and
borrow  a  flashlight. She  was  starting  to really  like him. It  sort  of
bothered  her. She  wondered what he'd be like if  he  wasn't in a situation
like this. She wondered what she'd be like if she wasn't in a situation like
this.
     He and  Sublett had both worked for the company that did  security  for
this building,  IntenSecure, and Sublett had called  up a friend  of his and
asked him questions about how tight it was. The way he'd put it, it was like
he wanted  a new  job with the company. But he  and Rydell had worked it out
that she could get in, particularly if he was following her to keep track.
     What bothered her about Sublett was  that he was acting sort of like he
was  committing suicide or something.  Once he'd gotten  with  the  program,
Rydell's plan, it was like he felt cut loose from things. Kept talking about
his apostasy and these movies  he liked, and somebody called Cronenberg. Had
this weird calm like somebody who knew for sure  he was  going to  die; like
he'd sort of  made peace  with it,  except he'd  still  get  upset about his
allergies.
     Green light. Rising up through it.
     They'd made her up this package at the motel. What it had in it was the
glasses. Addressed to Karen Mendelsohn.
     She closed her eyes, told  herself  Bunny Malatesta would  bongo on her
head if she didn't make the tag, and pushed the button.
     'Yes?' It was one of those computers.
     'Allied Messenger, for Karen Mendelsohn.'
     'A delivery?'
     'She's gotta sign for it.'
     'Authorized to barcode-'
     'Her hand. Gotta see her hand. Do it. You know?'
     Silence. 'Nature of delivery?'
     'You think I open them or what?'
     'Nature of delivery?'
     'Well,'  Chevette  said,  'it  says  "Probate  Court,"  it's  from  San
Francisco, and you  don't open the  door, Mr. Wizard, it's on the next plane
back.'
     'Wait, please,' said the computer.
     Chevette looked at  the potted plants  beside the  door. They were big,
looked real, and she knew Sublett was standing behind them, but she couldn't
see him. Somebody had put a cigarette out on one, between its roots.
     The door open, a crack. 'Yes?'
     'Karen Mendelsohn?'
     'What is it?'
     'Allied  Messenger, San Francisco.  You wanna  sign for  this?'  Except
there was nothing, no tag, to sign.
     'San Francisco?'
     'What it says.'
     The  door  opened  a  little  more. Dark-haired  woman in  a long  pale
terrycloth robe. Chevette saw  her check the badges on Skinner's jacket.  'I
don't understand,' Karen Medelsohn said. 'We do everything via GlobEx.'
     'They're too slow,' Chevette said, as Sublett stepped around the plant,
wearing this  black uniform. Chevette saw herself reflected in his contacts,
sort of bent out at the middle.
     'Ms. Mendelsohn,' he  said,  'afraid we've got us a security emergency,
here.'
     Karen Mendelsohn was looking at him. 'Emergency?'
     'Nothing to worry  about,' Sublett said. He  put his hand on Chevette's
shoulder and  guided  her  in, past  Karen  Mendelsohn.  'Situation's  under
control. Appreciate your co-operation.'


38. Miracle mile.

     'Wally' Divac, Rydell's Serbian  landlord, hadn't really wanted to loan
Rydell  his flashlight, but  Rydell  had  lied  and  promised  he'd  get him
something  a  lot  better, over at IntenSecure, and bring it  along when  he
brought the flashlight back.  Maybe one of those telescoping batons with the
wireless laser-tips,  he  said;  something serious, anyway, professional and
maybe quasi-illegal.  Wally was sort of a cop-groupie.  Liked to feel he was
in with the force. Like a lot of people, he didn't  much distinguish between
the  real  PD  and  a company like IntenSecure. He had  one  of those  armed
response signs in his  front yard, too, but Rydell was glad to see it wasn't
IntenSecure. Wally couldn't quite afford that kind of service, just like his
car  was second-hand, though he would've told you  it was  previously owned,
like the first guy was just some flunky  who'd had the job of breaking it in
for him.
     But he  owned this house,  where  he lived,  with the baby-blue plastic
siding  that looked sort of  like painted wood, and one of those fake  lawns
that looked realer  than AstroTurf.  And he had the house in Mar Vista and a
couple of others.  His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he'd come
himself, to  get away from  all the  trouble over there. Never regretted it.
Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants.
     'What's that  you're  driving?'  he'd  asked, from  the  steps  of  the
renovated Craftsman two blocks ahove Mel rose.
     'A Montxo,' Rydell said. 'From Barcelona. Electric.'
     'You  live in America,' he'd  said, his gray hair plastered neatly back
from his pitted forehead. 'Why you drive that?' His BMW, immaculate, reposed
in  the driveway; he'd had  to spend  five minutes  disarming it to  get the
flashlight out for  Rydell. Rydell  had remembered  the  time  in Knoxville,
Christmas day, when the  Narcotics team's new  walkie-talkies had  triggered
every car-alarm in a ten-mile radius.
     'Well,' Rydell said, 'it's real good for the environment.'
     'It's  bad for  your  country,' Wally said.  'Image thing. An  American
should drive some car to feel proud of. Bavarian car. At least Japanese.'
     'I'll  get  this  back  to  you,  Wally.'  Holding  up  the  big  black
flashlight.
     'And something else. You said.'
     'Don't worry about it.'
     'When you pay rent on Mar Vista?'
     'Kevin'll take  care of it.' Getting into  the tiny Montxo and starting
up the flywheel.  It sat  there,  rocking slightly  on its shocks, while the
wheel got up to speed.
     Wally waved,  shrugged, then backed into his house and closed the door.
Rydell hadn't ever seen him not wear that Tyrolean hat before.
     Rydell looked at the flashlight, figuring out where  the safety was. It
wasn't  much,  but  he  felt like he had  to  have  something.  And  it  was
nonlethal. Guns weren't that hard  to buy, on  the  street,  but  he  didn't
really want to have to have  one around today.  You did  a different kind of
time, if there was a gun involved.
     Then  he'd  driven  back  toward  the  Blob,  taking  it  real  easy at
intersections and  trying  to keep to  the streets that had designated lanes
for electric vehicles.  He got Chevette's phone out  and hit redial  for the
node-number  in  Utah, the  one  Godeater had given  him, back  in Paradise.
God-eater was  the one who looked  like the mountain, or so he said.  Rydell
had asked him what kind of a  name that was. He'd  said he  was a full-blood
Blood Indian. Rydell sort of doubted it.
     None  of  their  voices were  real, even;  it  was  all  digital stuff.
God-eater could just as well be a woman, or three different people,  or  all
three of the  ones he'd seen there might've been just one person. He thought
about the woman in the wheelchair  in Cognitive Dissidents. It could be her.
It could be anybody. That was the spooky thing about these hackers. He heard
the node-number ringing,  in Utah. God-eater  always picked up on  five,  in
mid-ring.
     'Yes?'
     'Paradise,' Rydell said.
     'Richard?'
     'Nixon.'
     'We have your goods in place, Richard. One little whoops and a push.'
     'You get me  a  price  yet?' The  light changed. Somebody  was honking,
pissed-off at the Montxo's inability to do anything like accelerate.
     'Fifty,' God-eater said.
     Fifty thousand dollars. Rydell winced. 'Okay,' he said, 'fair enough.'
     'Better  be,'  God-eater  said. 'We  can  make you  pretty miserable in
prison, even. In fact,  we can make  you  really miserable  in  prison.  The
baseline starts lower, in there.'
     I'll bet you got lots of friends there, too, Rydell thought. 'How  long
you  estimate the response-time,  from when I call?'  God-eater burped, long
and deliberate. 'Quick.  Ten, fifteen max. We've got it slotted  the way  we
talked about. Your friends're  gonna shit themselves. But  really, you don't
wanna be in the way. This'll  be like  something you never saw before.  This
new unit they just got set up.'
     'I hope so,' Rydell said, and broke the connection.
     He gave  the parking-attendant Karen's apartment number. After this, it
really wasn't going to matter much. He had the flashlight stuck down  in the
back  of his jeans, under the zoo denim  jacket Buddy had loaned him. It was
probably Buddy's father's. He'd told Buddy he'd  help him find  a place when
he got  to  L.A. He sort  of  hoped Buddy  never  did  try that, because  he
imagined kids like Buddy made it about a block  from the bus  station before
some  really fast  urban  predator got them, just a blur of wheels and teeth
and no more Buddy to speak of. But then again you had to think about what it
would be like to be  him, Buddy, back there in his three-by six-foot bedroom
in  that trailer,  with those posters of Fallon and Jesus, sneaking  that VR
when his daddy  wasn't looking. If you didn't at least try  to get out, what
would  you  wind up  feeling like? And that  was  why you  had to give it to
Sublett, because he'd gotten out of that, allergies and all.
     But he  was  worried about Sublett. Pretty crazy  to  be  worried about
anybody,  in a situation like  this, but Sublett  acted like he  was already
dead  or something. Just moving  from one thing to the next, like it  didn't
matter. The only thing  that  got any  kind  of  rise  out  of him  was  his
allergies.
     And Chevette, too, Chevette  Washington,  except what worried him there
was  the  white  skin of  her  back,  just above  the waist of  those  black
bike-pants, when she was curled on the bed beside him. How he keptwanting to
touch it.  And how  her tits stuck out against her t-shirt when she'd sit up
in  the  morning, and  those little dark twists of hair under her  arms. And
right now, walking up to this terracotta coffee-module near the base  of the
escalator, the rectangular  head of Wally's pepper-spray  flashlight digging
into his spine, he knew he might never get another chance. He could be dead,
in half an hour, or on his way to prison.
     He ordered a latte with a double shot, paid for it with  just about the
last of  his money, and  looked  at  his Timex. Ten  'till three.  When he'd
called  Warbaby's personal portable from  the motel,  the night before, he'd
told him three.
     God-eater  had  gotten him that  number.  God-eater could  get you  any
number at all.
     Warbaby had sounded really sad to hear from him.
     Disappointed, like. 'We never expected this of you, Rydell.'
     'Sorry,  Mr.  Warbaby. Those fucking Russians. And that cowboy  fucker,
that Loveless. Got on my case.'
     'There's no need for obscenity. Who gave you this number?'
     'I had it from Hernandez, before.' Silence.
     'I got the glasses, Mr. Warbaby.'
     'Where are you?'
     Chevette Washington watching  him,  from  the  bed.  'In Los Angeles. I
figured I'd better get as far away from those Russians as I could.'
     A pause. Maybe Warbaby had  put his hand over the phone. Then, 'Well, I
suppose I can understand your behavior, although I can't say I approve...'
     'Can you  come down  here and get them, Mr. Warbaby?  And  just sort of
call it even?'
     A longer pause. 'Well, Rydell,' sadly, 'I  wouldn't want you  to forget
how disappointed I am in you, but, yes, I could do that.'
     'But just you and Freddie, right? Nobody else.'
     'Of course,' Warbaby  had said. Rydell imagined him looking at Freddie,
who'd  be tap-tapping away on some new laptop, getting the call traced. To a
cell-node in Oakland, and then to a tumbled number.
     'You be down here tomorrow, Mr. Warbaby. I'll  call  you at  your  same
number, tell you where to come. Three o'clock. Sharp.'
     'I think you've made the right decision, Rydell,' Warbaby had said.
     'I hope so,' Rydell had said, then clicked off.
     Now he looked at his Timex. Took a sip of coffee. Three o'clock. Sharp.
He put  the coffee  down  on the counter  and got  the  phone  out.  Started
punching in Warbaby's number.
     It took them twenty minutes  to get there.  They came in two cars, from
opposite  directions;  Warbaby and  Freddie in  a black Lincoln with a white
satellite-dish on top, Freddie driving it, then Svobodov  and Orlovsky in  a
metallic-gray Lada sedan that Rydell took for a rental.
     He watched them meet up, the four of them, then walk in, onto the plaza
under  the  Blob, past those  kinetic  sculptures,  heading  for the nearest
elevator, Warbaby looking sad  as ever and leaning on that cane. Warbaby had
his same olive coat on, his Stetson, Freddie was wearing a  big shirt with a
lot  of  pink in it, had  a laptop  under his  arm, and  the  Russians  from
Homicide had these gray suits  on, about the color  and texture of  the Lada
they were driving.
     He  gave  it a  while  to see  if Loveless was  going to turn up,  then
started keying in that number in Utah.
     'Please, Jesus,' he said, counting the rings.
     'Your latte okay?'  The Central Asian kid in the coffee-module, looking
at him.
     'It's fine,' Rydell said, as God-eater picked up.
     'Yes?'
     'Paradise.'
     'This Richard?'
     'Nixon. They're here. Four but not Smiley.'
     'Your two Russians, Warbaby, and his jockey?'
     'Got 'em.'
     'But not the other one?'
     'Don't see him...'
     'His  description's in  the package anyway. Okay, Rydell. Let's do it.'
Click.
     Rydell stuck  the  phone  in his jacket  pocket,  turned,  and  headed,
walking  fast,  for  the  escalator.  The boy in the  coffeemodule  probably
thought there was something wrong with that lane.
     God-eater  and his friends, if  they weren't  just one person, say some
demented old lady up in the Oakland hills with a couple of million  dollars'
worth of equipment and a terminally bad attitude, had struck Rydell as being
almost uniquely full of shit. There was nothing,  if you believed them, they
couldn't do. But if they were all that  powerful,  how come they had to hide
that way, and make money doing crimes?
     Rydell  had gotten  a couple of  lectures  on  computer  crime  at  the
Academy, but  it had been pretty dry. The history of it, how hackers used to
be just these smart-ass  kids  dicking  with the phone companies. Basically,
the visiting  Fed  had said, any crime that was what  once had  been  called
white-collar was going to be  computer crime anyway, now, because people  in
offices did everything with computers. But there were other crimes you could
still call computer crimes in the old  sense, because they usually  involved
professional  criminals, and these criminals still thought  of themselves as
hackers. The public, the Fed had told them, still tended to think of hackers
as  some  kind  of romantic  bullshit  thing, sort of  like kids  moving the
outhouse.
     Merry pranksters. In the old days, he said, lots of people still didn't
know there was an outhouse there to be moved, not until they wound up in the
shit. Rydell's  class  laughed dutifully. But  not today, the Fed said; your
modern hacker was about as romantic  as a hit man from some ice posse  or an
enforcer with  a dancer  combine. And a lot harder to catch, although if you
could get one and lean on  him, you could  usually  count on  landing a  few
more.  But  they were set up mostly in  these  cells, the cells building  up
larger  groups, so that the  most  you  could  ever pop,  usually, were  the
members of a single cell; they just didn't know who the members of the other
cells were, and they made a point of not finding out.
     God-eater and his  friends, however many of them there were or weren't,
must've been a cell like that, one of however many units in what they called
the Republic of Desire. And if they were really going to go ahead and do the
thing  for him, he figured there were three reasons: they hated the  idea of
San  Francisco getting rebuilt  because  they liked an infrastructure with a
lot  of  holes in  it, they  were charging  him  good money-money  he didn't
have-and they'd figured out a way  to do something that nobody had ever done
before. And it was that  last one  that had really seemed to get them going,
once they'd decided to help him out.
     And now,  climbing the escalator,  up through all these kinds of people
who lived or worked up here, forcing himself not to break into a run, Rydell
found it hard to believe that God-eater and them were doing what they'd said
they could do. And if they weren't, well, he was just fucked.
     No,  he  told himself,  they were. They  had to be. Somewhere in Utah a
dish was turning,  targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky.
And out of it,  fed  in from wherever God-eater and his  friends  were, were
coming these packages,  no,  packets, of signals. Packets,  God-eater called
them.
     And somewhere, high above the Blob,  up  over the whole L.A. Basin, was
the Death Star.
     Rydell dodged past a silver-haired man in tennis whites  and ran up the
escalator. Came out under the copper  tit.  People  going in and out of that
little mall there. A fountain with water sliding  down big ragged  sheets of
green  glass. And  there  went the Russians,  their  wide gray backs heading
toward the  white walls  of  the  complex  where Karen's  apartment  was. He
couldn't see Warbaby or Freddie.
     3:32. 'Shit,' he said,  knowing  it  hadn't worked,  that God-eater had
fucked him, that he'd doomed Chevette Washington  and Sublett and even Karen
Mendelsohn and it was  one more time he'd just  gone for it, been wrong, and
the last fucking time at that.
     And then these things came through  a long gap in the glass, just south
of where the handball-courts  were,  and he  hadn't ever  seen anything like
them. There were a bunch of them, maybe ten or a dozen, and they were black.
They  hardly  made any  sound at  all, and they were sort  of floating. Just
skimming along. The players on the courts stopped to watch them.
     They were helicopters, but too small to carry anybody. Smaller than the
smallest   micro-light.   Kind    of    dish-shaped.   French   Aerospatiale
gun-platforms, the kind you saw on the news from Mexico City, and he guessed
they  were  under the  control  of  ECCCS,  the  Emergency  Command  Control
Communications System, who ran the Death Star. One  of them  swung by, about
twenty feet over his head, and  he saw the clustered tubes  of some  kind of
gun or rocket-launcher.
     'Damn,' Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response.
     'POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.'
     A woman  started screaming, from somewhere  over by the mall, over  and
over, like something mechanical.
     'REMAIN CALM.'
     And  mostly they did, all those faces; faces  of the residents  of this
high  country,  their  jawlines firm,  their soft  clothes fluttering in the
dancing downdrafts.
     Rydell started running.
     He  ran  past Svobodov  and  Orlovsky,  who were looking  at  the three
helicopters that were much lower now, and so clearly edging  in on them. The
Russians' mouths were open  and  Orlovsky's  half-frame glasses  looked like
they were about to fall off.
     'ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.'
     But the  residents, slender and mainly  blond, stood unmoved, watching,
with  racquets  in their hands, or  dark  glossy paper bags  from  the mall.
Watching the helicopters. Watching Rydell as  he  ran past them, their  eyes
mildly curious and curiously hard.
     He  ran  past Freddie, who  was flat  down on the granite payers, doing
what the helicopters said,  his  hands above his head and his laptop between
them.
     'REMAIN CALM.'
     Then he saw Warbaby, slouched back  on a cast-iron bench like he'd been
sitting there forever, just watching life go by. Warbaby saw him, too.
     'POLICE EMERGENCY.'
     His cane was  beside him, propped  on the bench. He picked it  up, lazy
and deliberate, and Rydell was sure he was about to get blown away.
     'REMAIN CALM.'
     But Warbaby, looking sad as ever, just brought the cane  up to the brim
of his Stetson, like some kind of salute.
     'DROP THAT CANE.'
     The  amplified  voice of  a  SWAT  cop, bunkered  down in  the hardened
sublevels  of City  Hall  East,  working  his little Aerospatiale  through a
telepresence rig. Warbaby shrugged, slowly, and tossed the cane away.
     Rydell  kept running,  right through  the  open gates  and  up to Karen
Mendelsohn's door. Which  was half-open,  Karen and Chevette Washington both
there, their eyes about to pop out of their heads.
     'Inside!' he yelled.
     They just gaped at him.
     'Get inside!'
     There  were a bunch of big plants beside the door, in a terracotta  pot
about  as high as his  waist. He saw Loveless  step around it,  raising  his
little gun; Loveless had on a silvery  sportscoat and his left  arm was in a
sling; his face was studded with  micropore dressings that weren't quite the
right shade, so he looked like  he had leprosy or something. He was  smiling
that smile.
     'No!' Chevette Washington screamed, 'you murdering little fuck!'
     Loveless brought the gun around, about a foot from her head, and Rydell
saw the  smile vanish. Without it, he noticed,  Loveless sort of looked like
he didn't have any lips.
     'REMAIN CALM,' the helicopters reminded them all, as Rydell brought tip
Wally's flashlight.
     Loveless never even managed to pull the trigger, which you had to admit
was kind of impressive. What  that  capsicum did,  it was  kind of like when
Sublett got an allergic reaction, but a lot worse, and a lot quicker.
     'You crazy, crazy motherfucker,' Karen Mendelsohn kept saying, her eyes
swollen  up like she'd  walked through a  swarm of hornets. She and Chevette
had both caught the  edges of that  pepper-spray, and Sublett was so worried
about  the residue  that  he'd gone into  a  closet in Karen's  bedroom  and
wouldn't come out.  'You  crazy, outrageous motherfucker.  Do you  know what
you've done?'
     Rydell just sat there, in one of  her white Retro Aggressive armchairs,
listening to those helicopters yelling  outside. Later on,  when it all came
out, they'd find out that the Republic of Desire had set Warbaby and them up
as these bomb-building mercenaries working for the Sonoran Separatist Front,
with  enough high explosives stored in Karen's place to blow that nipple off
the tit and clear  to  Malibu. And they'd also worked in this hostage-taking
scenario, to guarantee the SWAT  guys made a soft entry, if they had to. But
when  the real live  Counterterrorism Squad got in there,  it would've  been
pretty hairy, at least if Karen  hadn't been a lawyer for  Cops in  Trouble.
Those  were  some  angry  cops,  and getting  angrier,  at  first, but  then
Pursley's people seemed to have their ways to calm them down.
     But the funny thing was, they, the LAPD, never would, ever, admit to it
that anybody had hacked the Death  Star. They kept saying it had been phoned
in. And  they stuck to that, too;  it  was  so important to them, evidently,
that they were willing, finally, to let a lot of the rest of it just go.
     But when he  was  sitting there,  listening  to  Karen,  and  gradually
getting the idea that, yeah,  he  was  the  kind  of  crazy motherfucker she
liked, he kept thinking about Nightmare Folk  Art, and whatever that woman's
name was, over there, and hoping she was coping okay,  because God-eater had
needed an L.A. number to stick into his fake data-packet, a number where the
tip-off was  supposed to have  come from. And  Rydell hadn't  wanted to give
them Kevin's number, and then he'd found the Nightmare number in his wallet,
on part of a People cover, so he'd given God-eater that.
     And  then  Chevette came over,  with  her  face  all  swollen from  the
capsicum,  and asked him if it was working or were they  totally fucked? And
he said  it was, and  they weren't, and then the cops came in  and it wasn't
okay, but then Aaron Pursley  turned up with about as many other lawyers  as
there were cops, and then Wellington Ma, in a navy blazer with gold buttons.
     So Rydell finally got to meet him.
     'Always  a pleasure to meet a client in  person,' Wellington  Ma  said,
shaking his hand.
     'Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ma,' Rydell said.
     'I won't ask you what you  did to my voice-mail,' Wellington  Ma  said,
'but I hope you won't do it again. Your story, though, is fascinating.'
     Rydell remembered God-eater and  that fifty thousand, and hoped  Ma and
Karen and them weren't going  to be  pissed about that. But he didn't  think
so, because Aaron Pursley had already said,  twice, how it  was  going to be
bigger  than the  Pookey  Bear thing,  and Karen kept  saying how  telegenic
Chevette was, and about the youth angle, and how Chrome Koran would fall all
over themselves to do the music.
     And  Wellington Ma had signed  up Chevette, and Sublett, too, but  he'd
had to pass the papers  back into that closet because Sublett still wouldn't
come out.
     Rydell  could  tell  from  what  Karen said that Chevette had told  her
pretty much  the whole story while she and  Sublett  had kept her there, and
kept her from  hitting  any IntenSecure panic-buttons. And Karen, evidently,
knew all about those VL glasses and  how to get them to play things back, SO
she'd spent  most  of  the  time  doing  that, and now  she knew  all  about
Sunflower or whatever it was called. And she kept telling Pursley that there
was a dynamite angle here because they could implicate Cody fucking Harwood,
if they played their cards right, and was he ever due for it, the bastard.
     Rydell hadn't ever even had a chance to see that stuff, on the glasses.
     'Mr. Pursley?' Rydell kind of edged over to him.
     'Yes, Berry?'
     'What happens now?'
     'Well,' Pursley  said,  tugging at the skin beneath his  nose, 'you and
your two friends here are about to be arrested and taken into custody.'
     'We are?'
     Pursley looked at  his big gold watch. It  was set with diamonds around
the dial, and had a  big lump of  turquoise on  either side.  'In about five
minutes. We're arranging to have the first press-conference around six. That
suit you, or would you rather eat first? We can have the  caterers bring you
something in.'
     'But we're being arrested.'
     'Bail,  Berry.  You've  heard  of  bail?  You'll  all  be  out tomorrow
morning.' Pursley beamed at him.
     'Are we going to be okay, Mr. Pursley?'
     'Berry,'  Pursley  said, 'you're in trouble, son.  A cop. And an honest
one.  In trouble. In  deep, spectacular,  and, please, I  have to  say this,
clearly heroic shit.' He clapped Rydell on the shoulder. 'Cops in Trouble is
here for you, boy, and, let me assure  you,  we are all of us going to  make
out just fine on this.'
     Chevette said jail sounded just fine to her, but please  could she call
somebody in San Francisco named Fontaine?
     'You  can  call  anybody  you  want,  honey,'  Karen  said, dabbing  at
Chevette's eyes with a tissue. 'They'll record it all, but we'll get a copy,
too. What was the name of your friend, the black man, the one who was shot?'
     'Sammy Sal,' Chevette said.
     Karen  looked  at  Pursley. 'We'd better  get Jackson Gale,' she  said.
Rydell wondered what for,  because Jackson Gale was this new young black guy
who acted in made-for-tv movies.
     Then Chevette came over and hugged him, all of  her pressing up against
him, and just sort of looking  up  at him from under that crazy-ass haircut.
And he liked that, even if her eyes were all red and her nose was running.


39. Celebration on a gray day.

     On  Saturday, the fifteenth of  November, the morning after his  fourth
night with  Skinner, Yamazaki,  wearing an enormous, cape-like plaid jacket,
much mended and smelling of  candle-grease, descended in  the yellow lift to
do business with the dealers  in artifacts. He brought with  him a cardboard
carton containing several large fragments of petrified wood, the left antler
of a buck deer, fifteen  compact  discs,  a Victorian promotional novelty in
the  shape  of  a fluted china mug, embossed with  the letters  'OXO,' and a
damp-swollen copy of The Columbia Literary History of the United States.
     The  sellers were  laying  out  their goods, the  morning iron-gray and
clammy, and he was grateful for the borrowed jacket, its pockets silted with
ancient sawdust and  tiny, nameless bits of  hardware. He  had  been curious
about the correct  manner  in  which  to  approach  them, but  they took the
initiative, clustering around him, Skinner's name on their lips.
     The petrified wood  brought the best price, then the mug, then eight of
the compact  discs. It all  went, finally, except for the  literary history,
which was badly mildewed.  He  placed this, its  blue  boards warping in the
salt air, atop a mound of trash.
     With the money  folded in  his hand, he went looking for  the old woman
who sold eggs. Also, they needed coffee.
     He was in sight of the place that roasted and ground coffee when he saw
Fontaine  coming through  the morning bustle,  the collar of his long  tweed
coat turned up against the fog.
     'How's the old man doing, Scooter?'
     'He asks  more  frequently after  the girl...' 'She's in  jail  down in
L.A.,' Fontaine said. 'Jail?'
     'Out on bail this morning, or that's what she said last night. I was on
my way over to bring you this.'  He took  a phone from his pocket and handed
it  to  Yamazaki.  'She has that number. Just don't go making too many calls
home, you hear?'
     'Home?'
     'Japan.'
     Yamazaki blinked. 'No. I understand...'
     'I don't know  what she's  been up to since that  damned storm hit, but
I've  been too busy to  bother thinking about it. We  got the power back but
I've still got an injury case nobody's bothered to claim yet. Fished him out
of what was left of somebody's greenhouse, Wednesday  morning. Sort  of down
under  your place, there, actually.  Don't know if he hit his  head or what,
but he just keeps coming around a little, then fading off. Vital signs okay,
no broken bones. Got a burn along his side could be from a bullet, some kind
of hot-shoe load...'
     'You would not take him to a hospital?'
     'No,' Fontaine said, 'we don't do that unless they ask us to, or unless
they're gonna die otherwise.  Lot of us have good reason not to go to places
like that, get checked out on computers and all.'
     'Ah,' Yamazaki said, with what he hoped was tact.
     'Ah  so,' Fontaine  said. 'Some kids probably found him first, took his
wallet  if  he  had one. But  he's a  big  healthy  brother  and somebody'll
recognize him eventually. Hard not to, with that bolt through his johnson.'
     'Yes,'  Yamazaki  said, failing to understand this last,  'and  I still
have your pistol.' Fontaine looked around. 'Well, if you feel like you don't
need it, just chuck it for me.  But I'll need that phone back, sometime. How
long you gonna be staying out here, anyway?'
     'I... I do not know.' And it was true.
     'You be down here this afternoon, see the parade?'
     'Parade?'
     'November fifteenth. It's Shapely's birthday. Something to see. Sort of
Mardi Gras feel to it. Lot of the younger people take their clothes off, but
I don't know about this weather. Well, see you around. Say hi to Skinner.'
     'Hi, yes,'  Yamazaki said, smiling,  as Fontaine went  on his  way, the
rainbow of his crocheted cap bobbing above the heads of the crowd.
     Yamazaki  walked  toward  the  coffee-vendor,  remembering the  funeral
procession,  the  dancing  scarlet  figure  with its red-painted rifle.  The
symbol of Shapely's going.
     Shapely's murder,  some  said sacrifice, had taken  place in  Salt Lake
City. His seven killers,  heavily armed fundamentalists, members of  a white
racist sect driven  underground  in the months following the assault  on the
airport, were still imprisoned in Utah, though two of  them had subsequently
died of AIDS, possibly contracted  in prison, steadfastly refusing the viral
strain patented in Shapely's name.
     They had remained silent during  the trial, their  leader stating  only
that the disease was God's vengeance on  sinners and the  unclean.  Lean men
with shaven heads and blank, implacable  eyes,  they were  God's gunmen, and
would stare, as such, from all the tapes of history, forever.
     But Shapely  had been  very wealthy when he had died, Yamazaki thought,
joining the line for coffee. Perhaps he had even been happy. He had seen the
product  of  his blood  reverse  the  course of  darkness. There were  other
plagues  abroad  now, but the live  vaccine bred from Shapely's variant  had
saved uncounted millions.
     Yamazaki  promised  himself  that  he  would observe Shapely's birthday
parade. He would remember to bring his notebook.
     He stood in the smell of fresh-ground coffee, awaiting his turn.


     Acknowledgments

     This book owes  a very special debt to Paolo Polledri, founding Curator
of  Architecture and Design,  the  San  Francisco  Museum of Modern Art. Mr.
Polledri  commissioned,  for the 1990 exhibition  Visionary San Francisco, a
work  of fiction which  became the short story  'Skinner's Room,'  and  also
arranged for me  to collaborate with the  architects  Ming  Fung  and  Craig
Hodgetts, whose  redrawn  map of  the city (though I redrew it  once  again)
provided me with Skywalker Park, the Trap, and the Sunflower towers.
     (From  another   work   commissioned  for   this   exhibition,  Richard
Rodriguez's powerful  'Sodom: Reflections on  a Stereotype,'  I appropriated
Yamazaki's borrowed Victorian and the sense of its melancholy.)
     The term Virtual Light was coined by scientist Stephen Beck to describe
a form of  instrumentation that produces 'optical sensations directly in the
eye without the use of photons' (Mondo 2000).
     Rydell's Los Angeles owes much to  my  reading of Mike  Davis's City of
Quartz,  perhaps   most  particularly  in  his  observations  regarding  the
privatization of public space.
     I am indebted to Markus, aka Fur, one of the editors of Mercury Rising,
published by  and  for the San  Francisco  Bike  Messenger Association,  who
kindly provided a complete file of hack issues and then  didn't hear from me
for a year or SO (sorry).
     Mercury  Rising  exists  'to  inform,  amuse,  piss off, and  otherwise
reinforce'  the   messenger   community.   It  provided   me  with  Chevette
Washington's workplace and a good deal of her character. Proj on!
     Thanks, too, to the following, all of whom provided crucial assistance,
the  right fragment at the right time, or artistic support: Laurie Anderson,
Cotty  Chubb,  Samuel  Delany, Richard Dorsett, Brian  Eno,  Deborah  Harry,
Richard Kadrey,  Mark Laidlaw, Tom  Maddox,  Pat Murphy,  Richard Piellisch,
John Shirley,  Chris  Stein, Bruce Sterling,  Roger Trilling,  Bruce Wagner,
Jack Womack.
     Special thanks to Martha Millard, my literary agent, ever understanding
of the long haul.
     And to Deb, Graeme, and Claire, with love, for putting up with the time
I spent in the basement.

     Vancouver, B.C. January 1993

     Thanks
     Sogho Ishii,  the Japanese director, introduced  me  to  Kowloon Walled
City  via the photographs of Ryuji Miyamoto.  It was Ishiisan's idea that we
should make a science fiction movie there. We never did, but the Walled City
continued to haunt me, though I knew no  more  about it than I could  gather
from  Miyamoto's  stunning  images, which  eventually provided most  of  the
texture for the Bridge in my novel Virtual Light.
     Architect Ken Vineberg drew my attention to an article about the Walled
City  in  Architectural Reviews, where I first  learned of City of Darkness,
the splendid  record  assembled by Greg  Girard and Ian Lambrot  (Watermark,
London, 1993).  From  London,  John Jarrold very kindly  arranged for  me to
receive a copy.
     Anything I  know of the  toecutting  business,  I owe  to  the criminal
memoirs of Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read (Chopper from the  inside,  Sly  Ink,
Australia, 1991). Mr. Read is  a  great deal scarier than Blackwell, and has
even fewer ears.
     Karl  Taro Greenfeld's  Speed  Tribes  (HarperCollins,  New York, 1994)
richly fed my dreams of Laney's jet lag.
     Stephen P. ("Plausibility")  Brown rode shotgun on the work in progress
for many months,  commenting daily,  sometimes more often, and always with a
fine  forbearance,  as  I faxed  him  a  bewildering  flurry of disconnected
fragments he was somehow expected  to interpret as "progress."  His constant
encouragement and seemingly  endless patience  were absolutely  essential to
this book's completion.
     My publishers, on both sides  of the  Atlantic, also demonstrated great
patience, and I thank them.