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 throughout 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-MARIE … 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.”
   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.

16. Sunflower

   You know” Sammy Sal said, pausing 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 not 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 with 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 try 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 times 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 help to get back up there himself, with his hip and everything. But there were still days when an energy got into him and you could 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 he 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 explore 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 still 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 smiled 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 elections.”
   But she was activating the recognition-loop now, not bothering with the screamers from Radio Shack. Sammy’s FluoroRimz 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 lost.” 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 lemon 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 of 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?”
   “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.

17. The trap

   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 foor, 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 he 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 Brazilian revolver; it was a little stubby square thing made out of dull 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 and 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 and 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. So 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.
   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 forward. “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.”

19. Superball

   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 instant, the red 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-cutter 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 would 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 skinner’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 the 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 to press his ear against them, but some fear he couldn’t name held 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 fucking 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 bone 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-Glo 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-before-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; he’d have watched the barometer in its corny wooden case like the wheel of some old boat; he knew his weather, Skinner, perched 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 bearable uncertainty. Though a few were lost, if the storm was big enough, and not always the unestablished, the newcomers 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 pale dirty animals, capable in their mute and agile way of solving problems that would have hopelessly baffled the man himself. “That Jap shit delaminated on you” he decided, “and you’re pissed ….
   “No” she said, not really hearing him.
   “Steel’s what you want for a messenger bike. Weight. Big basket up front. Not cardboard with some crazy aramid shit wrapped around it, weighs 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 ball 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. Go up there and see– No. She shut that down, hard.
   The empty rose out of the rain-rattled shadows 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 Lowell—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 front, 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’ or 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 grown, it looked like, one thing patched onto the next, until the whole span was wrapped in this formless mass of stuff, and no 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 worked into swirls and sunbursts and flowers. One place, already shuttered, was covered with green-and-copper slabs of desoldered component-board.
   He found himself grinning at it all, and at the people, none of them paying him the least attention, cannibalistic or otherwise. They looked to be as mixed a bunch as their building materials: all ages, races, colors, and all of 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 tattoos like that. The boy said something in some other language and 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 hung 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 went 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 4 X 4, 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 cop 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 he 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 Warbaby’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, splashing on the deck. There was a pink flash, like lightning, off down the bridge. He thought he saw her fling something to 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 had gone and bought the textbook anyway. Trouble was, because of that he knew you pretty well needed at least one partner to do it with, and that was assuming you had a radio link and some citizens going about their business to give you a little cover. 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 stuck up in the back like one of those fat Japanese wrestlers. She 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 combed straight back and shining with something more than the damp in the room.
   “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 problems? 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 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. The 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 old 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, and 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 off the side, up where it would be 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 sent me to get her. He’s parked back out there past those tank-trap 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 possible homicide, 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 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.

23. Gone and done it

   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 Rydell 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 Svobodov. When they took that cuff off, he just might deck that son of a bitch.
   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 back. 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 Svobodov 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 obscura. 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.