24. Song of the central pier

   Yamazaki knew that the central pier, the bridge’s center anchorage, had once qualified as one of the world’s largest pinhole cameras. In the structure’s pitch-black interior, light shining in through a single tiny hole had projected a huge image of the underside of the lower deck, the nearest tower, and the surrounding bay. Now the heart of the anchorage housed some uncounted number of the bridge’s more secretive inhabitants, and Skinner had advised him against attempting to go there. “Nothin’ like those Mansons out in the bushes on Treasure, Scooter, but you don’t want to bother ’em anyway. Okay people but they just aren’t looking for anybody to drop in, know what I mean?”
   Yamazaki crossed to the smooth curve of cable that interrupted the room’s floor. Only an oval segment of it was visible, like some mathematical formula barely breaking a topological surface in a computer representation. He bent to touch it, the visible segment polished by other hands. Each of the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and seventy-two wires, had withstood, and withstood now, a force of some million pounds. Yamazaki felt something, some message of vast, obscure moment, shiver up through the relic-smooth dorsal hump. The storm, surely; the bridge itself was capable of considerable mobility; it expanded and contracted with heat and cold; the great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into bedrock beneath the Bay mud, bedrock that had scarcely moved even in the Little Grande.
   Godzilla. Yamazaki shivered, recalling television images of Tokyo’s fall. He had been in Paris, with his parents. Now a new city rose there, its buildings grown, literally, floor by floor.
   The candlelight showed him Skinner’s little television, forgotten on the floor. Taking it to the table, he sat on the stool and examined it. There was no visible damage to the screen. It had simply come away from its frame, on a short length of multicolored ribbon. He folded the ribbon into the frame and pressed with his thumbs on either side of the screen. It popped back into place, but would it still function? He bent to examine the tiny controls. ON.
   Lime-and-purple diagonals chased themselves across the screen, then faded, revealing some steadycam fragment, the NHK logo displayed in the lower left corner. “—heir-apparent to the Harwood Levine public relations and advertising fortune, departed San Francisco this afternoon after a rumored stay of several days, declining comment on the purpose of his visit.” A long face, horselike yet handsome, above a raincoat’s upturned collar. A large white smile. “Accompanying him” mid-distance shot down an airport corridor, the slender, dark-haired woman wrapped in something luxurious and black, silver gleaming at the heels of her shining boots, “was Maria Paz, the Padanian media personality, daughter of film director Carlo Paz—.” The woman, who looked unhappy, vanished, to be replaced by infrared footage from New Zealand, as Japanese peace-keeping forces in armored vehicles advanced on a rural airport. “—losses attributed to the outlawed South Island Liberation Front, while in Wellington—” Yamazaki attempted to change the channel, but the screen only strobed its lime-and-purple, then framed a portrait of Shapely. A BBC docu-drama. Calm, serious, mildly hypnotic. After two more unsuccessful attempts at locating another channel, Yamazaki let the British voiceover blot out the wind, the groaning of the cables, the creaking of the plywood walls. He focused his attention on the familiar story, its outcome fixed, comforting—if only in its certainty.
   James Delmore Shapely had come to the attention of the AIDS industry in the early months of the new century. He was thirty-one years old, a prostitute, and had been HIV-positive for twelve years. At the time of his ‘discovery,’ by Dr. Kim Kutnik of Atlanta, Georgia, Shapely was serving a two hundred and fifty day prison term for soliciting. (His status as HIV-positive, which would automatically have warranted more serious charges, had apparently been ‘glitched.’) Kutnik, a researcher with the Sharman Group, an American subsidiary of Shibata Pharmaceuticals, was sifting prison medical data in search of individuals who had been HIV-positive for a decade or more, were asymptomatic, and had entirely normal (or, as in Shapely’s case, above the norm) T-cell counts.
   One of the Sharmar Group’s research initiatives centered around the possibility of isolating mutant strains of HIV. Arguing that viruses obey the laws of natural selection, several Sharman biologists had proposed that the HIV virus, in its then-current genetic format, was excessively lethal. Allowed to range unchecked, argued the Sharman team, a virus demonstrating 100 percent lethality must eventually bring about the extinction of the host organism. (Other Sharman researchers countered by citing the long incubation period as contributing to the suivival of the host population.) As the BBC writers were careful to make clear, the idea of locating nonpathogenic strains of HIV, with a view of overpowering and neutralizing lethal strains, had been put forward almost a decade earlier, though the ‘ethical’ implications of experimentation with human subjects had impeded research. The core observation cf the Sharman researchers dated from this earlier work: The virus wishes to survive, and cannot if it kills its host. The Sharman team, of which Dr. Kutnik was a part, intended to inject HIV-positive patients with blood extracted from individuals they believed to be infected with nonpathogenic strains of the virus. It was possible, they believed, that the non strain would overpower the lethal strain. Kim Kutnik was one of seven researchers given the task of locating HIV-positive individuals who might be harboring a nonpathogenic strain. She elected to begin her search through a sector of data concerned with current inmates of state prisons who were (a) in apparent good health, and (b) had tested HIV-positive at least a decade before. Her initial search turned up sixty-six possibles—among them, J.D. Shapely.
   Yamazaki watched as Kutnik, played by a young British actress, recalled, from a patio in Rio, her first meeting with Shapely. “I’d been struck by the fact that his T-cell count that day was over 1,200, and that his responses to the questionnaire seemed to indicated that ‘safe sex,’ as we thought of it then, was, well, not exactly a priority. He was a very open, very outgoing, really a very innocent character, and when I asked him, there in the prison visiting room, about oral sex, he actually blushed. Then he laughed, and said, well, he said he ‘sucked cock like it was going out of style’…” The actress-Kutnik looked as though she were about to blush herself. “Of course” she said, “in those days we didn’t really understand the disease’s exact vectors of infection, because, grotesque as it now seems, there had been no real research into the precise modes of transmission…”
   Yamazaki cut the set off. Dr. Kutnik would arrange Shapely’s release from prison as an AIDS research volunteer under Federal law. The Sharman Group’s project would be hindered by fundamentalist Christians objecting to the injection of ‘HIV-tainted’ blood into the systems of terminally ill AIDS patients. As the project foundered, Kutnik would uncover clinical data suggesting that unprotected sex with Shapely had apparently reversed the symptoms of several of her patients. There would be Kutnik’s impassioned resignation, the flight to Brazil with the baffled Shapely, lavish funding against a backdrop of impending civil war, and what could only be described as an extremely pragmatic climate for research.
   But it was such a sad story.
   Better to sit here by candlelight, elbows on the edge of Skinner’s table, listening for the song of the central pier.
   He kept saying he was from Tennessee and he didn’t need this shit. She kept thinking she was going to die, the way he was driving, or anyway those cops would be after them, or the one who shot Sammy. She still didn’t know what had happened, and wasn’t that Nigel who’d plowed into that tight-faced one?
   But he’d hung this right off Bryant, so she told him left on Folsom, because if the assholes were coming, she figured she wanted the Haight, best place she knew to get lost, and that was definitely what she intended to do, earliest opportunity. And this Ford was just like the one Mr. Matthews drove, ran the holding facility up in Beaverton. And she’d tried to stab somebody with a screwdriver. She’d never done anything like that in her life before. And she’d wrecked that black guy’s computer, the one with the haircut. And this bracelet on her left wrist, the other half flipping around, open, on three links of chain– He reached over and grabbed the loose cuff. Did something to it without taking his eyes off the street. He let go. Now it was locked shut.
   “Why’d you do that?”
   “So you don’t snag it on something, wind up cuffed to the door-handle or a street sign—”
   “Take it off.”
   “No key.”
   She rattled it at him. “Take it off.”
   “Stick it up the sleeve of your jacket. Those are Beretta cuffs. Real good cuffs.” He sounded like he was sort of happy to have something to talk about, and his driving had evened out. Brown eyes. Not old; twenties, maybe. Cheap clothes like K-Mart stuff, all wet. Light brown hair cut too short but not short enough. She watched a muscle in his jaw work, like he was chewing gum, but he wasn’t.

25. Without a paddle

   Where we going?” she asked him.
   “Fuck if I know” he said, gunning the engine a little. “You the one said ‘left’…”
   “Who are you?”
   He glanced over at her. “Rydell. Berry Rydell.”
   “Barry?”
   “Berry. Like straw. Like dingle. Hey, this a big fucking Street, lights and everything—”
   “Right.”
   “So where should I—”
   “Right!”
   “Okay” he said, and hung it. “Why?”
   “The Haight. Lots of people up late, cops don’t like to go there…”
   “Ditch this car there?”
   “Turn your back on it two seconds, it’s history.”
   “They got ATM’s there?”
   “Uh-uh.”
   “Well, here’s one…” Up over a curb, hunks of crazed safety-glass falling out of the frame where the back window had been. She hadn’t even noticed that.
   He dug a soggy-looking wallet out of his back pocket and started pulling cards out of it. Three of them. “I have to try to get some cash” he said. He looked at her. “You wanna jump out of this car and run” he shrugged, “then you just go for it.” Then he reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out the glasses and Codes’s phone that she’d scooped when the lights went out in Dissidents. Because she knew from Lowell that people in trouble need a phone, most times worse than anything. He dropped them in her lap, the asshole’s glasses and the phone. “Yours.”
   Then he got out, walked over to the ATM, and started feeding it cards. She sat there, watching it emerge from its armor, the way they do, shy and cautious, its cameras coming out, too, to monitor the transaction. He stood there, drumming his fingers on the side, his mouth like he was whistling but he wasn’t making any noise. She looked down at the case and the phone and wondered why she didn’t just jump out and run, like he said.
   Finally he came back, thumb-counting a fold of bills, stuck it down in his front jeans pocket, and got in He sailed the first of his cards out the open window at the ATM, which was pulling back into its shell like a crab. “Don’t know how they cancelled that one so quick, after you put that thing through Freddie’s laptop.” Flicked another. Then the last one. They lay in front of the ATM as its lexan shield came trundling down, their little holograms winding up in the machine’s halogen floods.
   “Somebody’ll get those” she said.
   “Hope so” he said, “hope they get ’em and go to Mars.” Then he did something in reverse with all four wheels and the Ford sort of jumped up and backward, into the street, some other car swerving past them all brakes and horn and the driver’s mouth a black O, and the part of her that was still a messenger sort of liked it. All the times they’d cut her off. “Shit” he said, jamming the gear-thing around until he got what he needed and they took off.
   The handcuff was rubbing on the rash where the red worm had been. “You a cop?”
   “No.”
   “Security? Like from the hotel?”
   “Uh-uh.”
   “Well” she said, “what are you?”
   Streetlight sliding across his face. Seemed like he was thinking about it. “Up shit creek. Without a paddle.”
   The first thing Rydell saw when he got out of the Patriot, in the alley off Haight Street, was a one-armed, one-legged man on a skateboard. This man lay on his stomach, on the board, and propelled himself along with a curious hitching motion that reminded Rydell of the limbs of a gigged frog. He had his right arm and his left leg, which at least allowed for some kind of symmetry, but there was no foot on the leg. His face, as if by some weird osmosis, was the color of dirty concrete, and Rydell couldn’t have said what race he was. His hair, if he had any, was covered by a black knit cap, and the rest of him was sheathed in a black, one-piece garment apparently stitched from sections of heavy-duty rubber inner-tube. He looked up, as he hitched past Rydell, through puddles left by the storm, headed for the mouth of the alley, and said, or Rydell thought he said: “You wanna talk to me? You wanna talk to me, you better shut your fuckin’ mouth…”
   Rydell stood there, Samsonite dangling, and watched him go.
   Then something rattled beside him. The hardware on Chevette Washington’s leather jacket. “Come on” she said, “don’t wanna hang around back in here.”
   “You see that?” Rydell asked, gesturing with his suitcase.
   “You hang around back in here, you’ll see worse than that” she said.
   Rydell looked back at the Patriot. He’d locked it and left the key under the driver’s seat, because he hadn’t wanted to make it look too easy, but he’d forgotten about that back window. He’d never been in the position before of actively wanting a car to be stolen.

26. Colored people

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

27. After the storm

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

28. RV

   It was ten-thirty before they finally had to hit the street, and then only because Laurie, who Chevette knew from that first day she’d ever come in here, said that the manager, Benny Singh, was going to be showing up and they couldn’t stay in there anymore, particularly not with her friend asleep like that, like he was passed out or something. Chevette said she understood, and thanked her.
   “You see Sammy Sal” Laurie said, “you say hi for me.”
   Chevette nodded, sad, and started shaking the guy’s shoulder. He grunted and tried to brush her hand away. “Wake up. We gotta go.”
   She couldn’t believe she’d told him all that stuff, but she’d just had to tell somebody or she’d go crazy. Not that telling it had made it make any more sense than it did before, and with this Rydell’s side of it added on, it sort of made even less. The news that somebody had gone and murdered the asshole just didn’t seem real, but if it was, she supposed, she was in deeper shit than ever.
   “Wake up!”
   “Jesus…” He sat up, knuckling his eyes.
   “We gotta go. Manager’ll be in soon. My friend let you sleep a while.”
   “Go where?”
   Chevette had been thinking about that. “Cole, over by the Panhandle, there’s places rent rooms by the hour.”
   “Hotels?”
   “Not exactly” she said. “For people just need the bed for a little while.”
   He dug behind the couch for his jacket. “Look at that” he said, sticking his fingers into the rip in the shoulder. “Brand new last night.”
   Neighborhoods that mainly operated at night had a way of looking a lot worse in the morning. Even the beggars looked worse off this time of day, like that guy there with those sores, the one trying to sell half a can of spaghetti sauce. She stepped around him. Another block or two and they’d start to hit the early crowd of day-trippers headed for Skywalker Park; more cover in the crowd but more cops, too. She tried to remember if Skywalker’s rentacops were IntenSecure, that company Rydell talked about.
   She wondered if Fontaine had gone to Skinner’s like he’d said he would. She hadn’t wanted to say too much over the phone, so at first she’d just said she was going away for a while, and would Fontaine go over and see how Skinner was doing, and maybe this Japanese student guy who’d been hanging around lately. But Fontaine could tell she sounded worried, so he’d sort of pushed her about it, and she’d told him she was worried about Skinner, how maybe there were some people gonna go up there and hassle him.
   “You don’t mean bridge people” he’d said, and she’d said no, she didn’t, but that was all she could say about it. The line went quiet for a few seconds and she could hear one of Fontaine’s kids singing in the background, one of those African songs with the weird throat-clicks. “Okay” Fontaine finally said, “I’ll look into that for you.” And Chevette said thanks, fast, and clicked off. Fontaine did a lot of favors for Skinner. He’d never talked to Chevette about it, but he seemed to have known Skinner all his life, or anyway as long as he’d been on the bridge. There were a lot of people like that, and Chevette knew Fontaine could fix it so people would watch the tower there, and the lift. Watch for strangers. People did that for each other, on the bridge, and Fontaine was always owed a lot of favors, because he was one of the main electricity men.
   Now they were walking past this bagel place had a sort of iron cage outside, welded out of junk, where you could sit in there at little tables and have coffee and eat bagels, and the smell of the morning’s baking about made her faint from hunger. She was thinking maybe they’d better go in there and get a dozen in a bag, maybe some cream cheese, take it with them, when Rydell put his hand on her shoulder.
   She turned her head and saw this big shiny white RV had just turned onto Haight in front of them, headed their way. Like you’d see rich old people driving back in Oregon, whole convoys of them, pulling boats on trailers, little jeeps, motorcycles hanging off the backs like lifeboats. They’d stop for the night in these special camps had razor-wire around them, dogs, NO TRESSPASSING signs that really meant it.
   Rydell was staring at this RV like he couldn’t believe it, and now it was pulling up right beside them, this gray-haired old lady powering down the window and leaning out the driver’s side, saying “Young man! Excuse me, but I’m Danica Elliott and I believe we met yesterday on the plane from Burbank.”
   Danica Elliott was this retired lady from Altadena, that was down in SoCal, and she’d flown up to San Francisco, she said on the same plane as Rydell, to get her husband moved to a different cryogenic facility. Well, not her husband, exactly, but his brain, which he’d had frozen when he died.
   Chevette had heard about people doing that, but she hadn’t ever understood why they did it, and evidently Danica Elliott didn’t understand it either. But she’d come up here to throw good money after bad, she said, and get her husband David’s brain moved to this more expensive place that would keep it on ice in its own private little tank, and not just tumbling around in a big tank with a bunch of other people’s frozen brains, which was where it had been before. She seemed like a really nice lady to Chevette, but she sure could go on about this stuff, so that after a while Rydell was just driving and nodding his head like he was listening, and Chevette, who was navigating, was mostly paying attention to the map-display on the RV’s dash, plus keeping a lookout for police cars.
   Mrs. Elliott had taken care of getting her husband’s brain relocated the night before, and she said it had made her kind of emotional, so she’d decided to rent this RV and drive it back to Altadena, just take her time and enjoy the trip. Trouble was, she didn’t know San Francisco, and she’d picked it up that morning at this rental place on sixth and gotten lost looking for a freeway. Wound up driving around in the Haight, which she said did not look at all like a safe neighborhood but was certainly very interesting.
   The loose handcuff kept falling out of the sleeve of Skinner’s jacket, but Mrs. Elliott was too busy talking to notice. Rydell was driving, Chevette was in the middle, and Mrs. Elliot was on the passenger side. The RV was Japanese, and had these three power-adjustable buckets up front, with headrests with speakers built in.
   Mrs. Elliot had told Rydell she was lost and did he know the city and could he drive her to where she could get on the highway to Los Angeles? Rydell had sort of gawked at her for a minute, then shook himself and said he’d be glad to, and this was his friend Chevette, who knew the city, and he was Berry Rydell.
   Mrs. Elliot said Chevette was a pretty name.
   So here they were, headed out of San Francisco, and Chevette had a pretty good idea that Rydell was going to try to talk Mrs. Elliott into letting them go along with her. That was all she could think of to do, herself, and here they were off the street and headed away from the guy who’d shot Sammy and from that Warbaby and those Russian cops, which seemed like a good idea to her, and aside from her stomach feeling like it was starting to eat itself, she felt a little better.
   Rydell drove past an In-and-Out Burger place and she remembered how this boy she knew called Franklin, up in Oregon, had taken a pellet-gun over to an In-and-Out and shot out the B and the R, so it just said IN-AND-OUT URGE. She’d told Lowell about that, but he hadn’t thought it was funny. Now she thought about how she’d told Rydell stuff about Lowell that Lowell would go ballistic if he ever found out about, and here Rydell was the next thing to a cop. But it bothered her how Lowell had been, the night before. There he was, all cool and heavy with his connections and everything, and she tells him she’s in trouble and somebody’s just shot Sammy Sal and they’re gonna be after her for sure, and him and Codes just sit there, giving each other these looks, like they like this story less by the minute, and then the big motherfucker cop in the raincoat walks in and they’re about to shit themselves.
   Served her right. She hadn’t had a single friend liked Lowell much, and Skinner had hated him on sight. Said Lowell had his head so far up his ass, he might as well just climb in after it and disappear. But she just hadn’t ever really had a boyfriend before, not like that, and he’d been so nice to her at first. If he just hadn’t started in doing that dancer, because that brought the asshole out in him real fast, and then Codes, who hadn’t ever liked her, could get him going about how she was just a country girl. Fuck that.
   “You know” she said, “I don’t get something to eat soon, I think I’ll die.”
   And Mrs. Elliott started making a fuss about how Rydell should stop immediately and get something for Chevette, and how sorry she was she hadn’t thought to ask if they’d had breakfast.
   “Well” Rydell said, frowning mto the rear-view, “I really would like to miss the, uh, lunch-hour traffic here…”
   “Oh” Mrs. Elliott said. Then she brightened. “Chevette, dear, if you’ll just go in the back, you’ll find a fridge there. I’m sure the rental people have put a snack basket in there. They almost always do.”
   Sounded fine to Chevette. She undid her harness and edged back between her seat and Mrs. Elliott’s. There was a little door there and when she went through it the lights came on. “Hey” she said, “it’s a whole little house back here…”
   “Enjoy!” said Mrs. Elliott.
   The light stayed on when she closed the door behind her. She hadn’t ever seen the inside of one of these things before, and the first thing she thought of was that it had nearly as much space as Skinner’s room, plus it was about ten times more comfortable. Everything was gray, gray carpet and gray plastic and gray imitation leather. And the fridge turned out to be this cute little thing built into a counter, with this basket in there, wrapped up in plastic with a ribbon on it. She got the plastic off and there was some wine, little cheeses, an apple, a pear, crackers, and a couple of chocolate bars. There was Coke in the fridge, too, and bottled water. She sat on the bed and ate a cheese, a bunch of crackers, a chocolate bar that was made in France, and drank a bottle of water. Then she tried out the tv, which had twenty-three channels on downlink.
   When she was done, she put the empty bottle and the torn paper and stuff in a little wastebasket built into the wall, cut the tv off, took off her shoes, and lay back on the bed.
   It was strange, to stretch out on a bed in a little room that was moving, she didn’t know where, and she wondered where she’d be tomorrow.
   Just before she fell asleep, she remembered that she still had Codes’ bag of dancer stuck down in her pants. She’d better get rid of that. She figured there was enough there to go to jail for.
   She thought about how it made you feel, and how weird it was that people spent all that money to feel that way.
   She sure wished Lowell hadn’t liked to feel that way.
   She woke up when he lay down beside her, the RV moving but she knew it must’ve stopped before. The lights were off.
   “Who’s driving?” she said.
   “Mrs. Armbruster.”
   “Who?”
   “Mrs. Elliott. Mrs. Armbruster was this teacher I had, looked like her.”
   “Where’s she driving to?”
   “Los Angeles. Told her I’d take over when she got tired. Told her not to bother waking us up when she goes through at the state line. Lady like that, if she tells ’em she’s not carrying any agricultural products, they’ll probably let her through without checking back here.”
   “What if they do?”
   He was close enough to her on the narrow bed that she could feel it when he shrugged.
   “Rydell?”
   “Huh?”
   “How come there’s Russian cops?”
   “How do you mean?”
   “You watch on tv, like a cop show, about half the big cops are always Russian. Or those guys back there on the bridge. How come Russian?”
   “Well” he said, “they kind of exaggerate that on tv, ’cause of the Organizatsiya thing, how people like to see shows about that. But the truth is, you get a situation where there’s Russians running most of your mob action, you’ll want to get you some Russian cops…” She heard him yawn. Felt him stretch.
   “Are they all like those two came to Dissidents?”
   “No” he said. “There’s always some crooked cops, but that’s just the way it is…”
   “What’ll we do, when we get to Los Angeles?”
   But he didn’t answer, and after a while he started to snore.
   Rydell opened his eyes. Vehicle not moving.
   He held his Timex up in front of his face and used the dial-light. 3:15 PM. Chevette Washington was curled up beside him in her biker jacket. Felt like sleeping next to a piece of old luggage.
   He rolled over until he could find the shade over the window beside him and raise it a little. As dark out there as it was in here.
   He’d been dreaming about Mrs. Armbruster’s class, fifth grade at Oliver North Elementary. They were about to be let out because LearningNet said there was too much Kansas City flu around to keep the kids in Virginia and Tennessee in school that week. They were all wearing these molded white paper masks the nurses had left on their seats that morning. Mrs. Armbruster had just explained the meaning of the word pandemic. Poppy Markoff, who sat next to him and already bad tits out to here, had told Mrs. Armbruster that her daddy said the KC flu could kill you in the time it took to walk out to the bus. Mrs. Armbruster, wearing her own mask, the micropore kind from the drugstore, started in about the word panic, tying that into pandemic because of the root, but that was where Rydell woke up.
   He sat up on the bed. He had a headache and the start of a cold. Kansas City flu. Maybe Mokola fever.
   “Don’t panic” he said, under his breath.

29. Dead mall

   But he sort of had this feeling.
   He got up and felt his way to the front. A little bit of light there, coming from under the door. He found the handle. Eased it open a crack.
   “Hey there.” Gold at the edges of a smile. Square little automatic pointing at Rydell’s eye. He’d swung the passenger-side bucket around and tilted it back. Had his boots up on the middle seat. Had the dome-light turned down low.
   “Where’s Mrs. Elliott?”
   “Mrs. Elliott is gone.”
   Rydell opened the door the rest of the way. “She work for you?”
   “No” the man said. “She’s IntenSecure.”
   “They put her on that plane to keep track of me?”
   The man shrugged. Rydell noticed that the gun didn’t move at all when he did that. He was wearing surgical gloves, and that same long coat he’d had on when he’d gotten out of the Russians’ car, like an Australian duster made out of black micropore.
   “How’d she know to pick us up by that tattoo parlor?”
   “Warbaby had to be good for something. He had a couple of people on you for backup.”
   “Didn’t see anybody” Rydell said.
   “Weren’t supposed to.”
   “Tell me something” Rydell said. “You the one did that Blix guy, up in the hotel?”
   The man looked at him over the barrel of the gun. That small a bore, ordinarily, wouldn’t mean much damage, so Rydell figured the ammunition would be doctored some way. “I don’t see what it’s got to do with you” he said.
   Rydell thought about it. “I saw a picture of it. You just don’t look that crazy.”
   “It’s my job” he said.
   Uh-huh, Rydell thought, just like running a french-fry computer. There was a fridge and sink on the right side of the door, so he knew he couldn’t move that way. If he went left, he figured the guy’d just stitch through the bulkhead, probably get the girl, too.
   “Don’t even think about it.”
   “About what?”
   “The hero thing. The cop shit.” He took his feet off the center bucket. “Just do this. Slowly. Very. Get into the driver’s seat and put your hands on the wheel. Nine o’clock and two o’clock. Keep them there. If you don’t keep them there, I’ll shoot you behind your right ear. But you won’t hear it.” He had this kind of slow, even tone, reminded Rydell of a vet talking to a horse.
   Rydell did like he was told. He couldn’t see anything outside. Just dark, and the reflections from the dome light. “Where are we?” he asked.
   “You like malls, Rydell? You got malls back in Knoxville?” Rydell looked at him sideways.
   “Eyes front, please.”
   “Yeah, we got malls.”
   “This one didn’t do so well.”
   Rydell squeezed the foam padding on the wheel.
   “Relax.”
   Rydell heard him give the bulkhead a kick with the heel of one boot. “Miss Washington! Rise and shine, Miss Washington! Do us the favor of your presence.”
   Rydell heard the double thump as she startled from sleep, tried to jump up, hit her head, fell off the bed. Then he saw her white face reflected in the windshield, there in the doorway. Saw her see the man, the gun.
   Not the screaming kind. “You shot Sammy Sal” she said.
   “You tried to electrocute me” the man said, like he could afford to see the humor in it now. “Come out here, turn around, and straddle the central console. Very slowly. That’s right. Now lean forward and brace your hands on the seat.”
   She wound up next to Rydell, her legs on either side of the instrument console, facing backward. Like she was riding some cafe-racer.
   Gave him about a two-inch difference of arc between shooting either one of them in the head.
   “I want you to take your jacket off” he said to her, “so you’ll have to take your hands off the seat to do that. See if you can manage to keep at least one hand on the seat at all times. Take plenty of time.”
   When she’d gotten it to where she could shrug it off her left shoulder, it fell over against the man’s legs.
   “Are there any hypodermic needles in here” he said, “any blades, dangerous objects of any kind?”
   “No” she said.
   “How about electrical charges? You don’t have a great record for that.”
   “Just the asshole’s glasses and a phone.”
   “See, Rydell” he said, “the asshole. How he’ll be remembered. Nameless. Another nameless asshole…” He was going through the jacket’s pockets with his free hand. Came up with the case and the phone and put them on the RV’s deep, padded dash-panel. Rydell had his head turned now and was watching him, even though he’d been told not to. He watched the gloved hand open the case by feel, take out the black glasses. That was the only time those eyes left him, to check those glasses, and that took about a second.
   “That’s them” Rydell said. “You got ’em now.”
   The hand put them back in their case, closed it. “Yes.”
   “Now what?”
   The smile went away. When it did, it looked like he didn’t have any lips. Then it came back, wider and steeper.
   “You think you could get me a Coke out of the fridge? All the windows, the door back there, are sealed.”
   “You want a Coke?” Like she didn’t believe him. “You’re gonna shoot me. When I get up.”
   “No” he said, “not necessarily. Because I want a Coke. My throat’s a little dry.”
   She turned her head to look at Rydell, eyes big with fear.
   “Get him his Coke” Rydell said.
   She got off the console and edged through, into the back, there, but just by the door, where the fridge was.
   “Look out the front” he reminded Rydell. Rydell saw the fridge-light come on, reflected there, caught a glimpse of her squatting down.
   “D-diet or regular?” she said.
   “Diet” he said, “please.”
   “Classic or decaf?”
   “Classic.” He made a little sound that Rydell thought might be a laugh.
   “There’s no glasses.”
   He made the sound again. “Can.”
   “K-kinda messy” she said, “m-my hand’s shakin’—” Rydell looked sideways, saw him take the red can, some brown cola dripping off the side. “Thank you. You can take your pants off now.”
   “What?”
   “Those black ones you’re wearing. Just peel them down, slow. But I like the socks. Say we’ll keep the socks.”
   Rydell caught the expression on her face, reflected in the black windshield, then saw how it went sort of blank. She bent, working the tight pants down.
   “Now get back on the console. That’s right. Just like you were. Let me look at you. You want to look too, Rydell?”
   Rydell turned, saw her squatting there, her bare legs smooth and muscular, dead white in the glow of the dome-light. The man took a long swallow of Coke, watching Rydell around the rim. He put the can down on the dash-panel and wiped his mouth with the back of his gloved hand. “Not bad, huh, Rydell?” with a nod toward Chevette Washington. “Some potential there, I’d say.”
   Rydell looked at him.
   “Is this bothering you, Rydell?”
   Rydell didn’t answer.
   The man made the sound that might’ve been a laugh. Drank some Coke. “You think I enjoyed having to mess that shitbag up the way I did, Rydell?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “But you think I did. I know you think I enjoyed it. And I did, I did enjoy it. But you know what the difference is?”
   “The difference?”
   “I didn’t have a hard on when I did it. That’s the difference.”
   “Did you know him?”
   “What?”
   “I mean like was it personal, why you did that?”
   “Oh, I guess you could say I knew him. I knew him. I knew him like you shouldn’t have to know anyone, Rydell. I knew everything he did. I’d go to sleep, nights, listening to the sound of him breathing. It got so I could judge how many he’d had, just by his breathing.”
   “He’d had?”
   “He drank. Serbian. You were a policeman, weren’t you?”
   “Yeah.”
   “Ever have to watch anybody, Rydell?”
   “I never got that far.”
   “It’s a funny thing, watching someone. Traveling with them. They don’t know you. They don’t know you’re there. Oh, they guess. They assume you’re there. But they don’t know who you are. Sometimes you catch them looking at someone, in the lobby of the hotel, say, and you know they think it’s you, the one who’s watching. But it never is. And as you watch them, Rydell, over a period of months, you start to love them.”
   Rydell saw a shiver go through Chevette Washington’s tensed white thigh.
   “But then, after a few more months, twenty flights, two dozen hotels, well, it starts to turn itself around..
   “You don’t love them?”
   “No. You don’t. You start to wait for them to fuck up, Rydell. You start to wait for them to betray the trust. Because a courier’s trust is a terrible thing. A terrible thing.”
   “Courier?”
   “Look at her, Rydell. She knows. Even if she’s just riding confidential papers around San Francisco, she’s a courier. She’s entrusted, Rydell. The data becomes a physical thing. She carries it. Don’t you carry it, baby?”
   She was still as some sphinx, white fingers deep in the gray fabric of the center bucket.
   “That’s what I do, Rydell. I watch them carry it. I watch them. Sometimes people try to take it from them.” He finished the Coke. “I kill those people. Actually that’s the best part of the job. Ever been to San Jose, Rydell?”
   “Costa Rica?”
   “That’s right.”
   “Never have.”
   “People know how to live, there.”
   “You work for those data havens” Rydell said.
   “I didn’t say that. Somebody else must’ve said that.”
   “So did he” Rydell said. “He was carrying those glasses to somebody, up from Costa Rica, and she took ’em.”
   “And I was glad she did. So glad. I was in the room next to his. I let myself in through the connecting door. I introduced myself. He met Loveless. First time. Last time.” The gun never wavered, but he began to scratch his head with his hand in the surgical glove. Scratch it like he had fleas or something.
   “Loveless?”
   “My nom. Nom de thing.” Then a long rattle of what Rydell took to be Spanish, but he only caught nombre de something. “Think she’s tight, Rydell? I like it tight, myself.”
   “You American?”
   His head sort of whipped sideways, a little, when Rydell said that, and his eyes unfocused for a second, but then they came back, clear as the chromed rim around the muzzle of his gun. “You know who started the havens, Rydell?”
   “Cartels” Rydell said, “the Colombians.”
   “That’s right. They brought the first expert systems into Central America, nineteen-eighties, to coordinate their shipping. Somebody had to go down there and install those systems. War on drugs, Rydell. Lot of Americans on either side, down there.”
   “Well” Rydell said, “now we just make our own drugs up here, don’t we?”
   “But they’ve got the havens, down there. They don’t even need that drug business. They’ve got what Switzerland used to have. They’ve got the one place in the world to keep what people can’t afford to keep anywhere else.”
   “You look a little young to have helped put that together.”
   “My father. You know your father, Rydell?”
   “Sure.” Sort of, anyway.
   “I never did. I had to have a lot of therapy, over that.”
   Sure glad it worked, Rydell thought. “Warbaby, he work for the havens?”
   A sweat had broken out on the man’s forehead. Now he wiped it with the back of the hand that held the gun, but Rydell saw the gun click back into position like it was held by a magnet.
   “Turn on the headlights, Rydell. It’s okay. Left hand off the wheel.”
   “Why?”
   “Cause you’re dead if you don’t.”
   “Well, why?”
   “Just do it, okay?” Sweat running into his eyes.
   Rydell took his left hand off the wheel, clicked the lights, double-clicked them to high beams. Two cones of light hit into a wall of dead shops, dead signs, dust on plastic. The one in front of the left beam said THE GAP.
   “Why’d anybody ever call a store that?” Rydell said.
   “Trying to fuck with my head, Rydell?”
   “No” Rydell said, “it’s just a weird name. Like all those places look like gaps, now…”
   “Warbaby’s just hired help, Rydell. IntenSecure brings him in when things get too sloppy. And they do, they always do.”
   They were parked in a sort of plaza, in a mall, the stores all boarded or their windows whitewashed. Either underground or else it was roofed over. “So she stole the glasses out of a hotel had IntenSecure security, they brought in Warbaby?” Rydell looked at Chevette Washington. She looked like one of those chrome things on the nose of an antique car, except she was getting goosebumps down her thigh. Not exactly warm in here, which made Rydell think it might be underground after all.
   “Know what, Rydell?”
   “What?”
   “You don’t know shit about shit. As much as I tell you, you’ll never understand the situation. It’s just too big for someone like you to understand. You don’t know how to think in those terms. IntenSecure belongs to the company that owns the information in those glasses.”
   “Singapore” Rydell said. “Singapore own DatAmerica, too?”
   “You can’t prove it, Rydell. Neither could Congress.”
   “Look at those rats over there…”
   “Fucking with my head…”
   Rydell watched the last of the three rats vanish into the place that had been called The Gap. In through a loose vent or something. A gap. “Nope. Saw ’em.”
   “Has it occurred to you that you wouldn’t be here right now if Lucius fucking Warbaby hadn’t taken up rollerblading last month?”
   “How’s that?”
   “He wrecked his knee. Warbaby wrecks his knee, can’t drive, you wind up here. Think about it. What does that tell you about late-stage capitalism?”
   “Tell me about what?”
   “Don’t they teach you anything in that police academy?”
   “Sure” Rydell said, “lots of stuff.” Thinking: how to talk to crazy fuckers when you’re being held hostage, except he was having a hard time remembering what they’d said. Keep ’em talking and don’t argue too much, something like that. “How come the stuff in those glasses has everybody’s tail in a twist, anyway?”
   “They’re going to rebuild San Francisco. From the ground up, basically. Like they’re doing to Tokyo. They’ll start by layering a grid of seventeen complexes into the existing infrastructure. Eighty-story office/residential, retail/residence in the base. Completely self-sufficient. Variable-pitch parabolic reflectors, steam-generators. New buildings, man; they’ll eat their own sewage.”
   “Who’ll eat sewage?”
   “The buildings. They’re going to grow them, Rydell. Like they’re doing now in Tokyo. Like the maglev tunnel.”
   “Sunflower” Chevette Washington said, then looked like she regretted it.
   “Somebody’s been look-ing…” Gold teeth flashing.
   “Uh, hey…” Go for that talking-to-the-armed-insane mode.
   “Yes?”
   “So what’s the problem? They wanna do that, let ’em.”
   “The problem” this Loveless said, starting to unbutton his shirt, “is that a city like San Francisco has about as much sense of where it wants to go, of where it should go, as you do. Which is to say, very little. There are people, millions of them, who would object to the fact that this sort of plan even exists. Then there’s the business of real estate…”
   “Real estate?”
   “Know the three most important considerations in any purchase of real estate, Rydell?” Loveless’s chest, hairless and artificially pigmented, was gleaming with sweat.
   “Three?”
   “Location” Loveless said, “location, and location.”
   “I don’t get it.”
   “You never will. But the people who know where to buy, the people who’ve seen where the footprints of the towers fall, they will, Rydell. They’ll get it all.”
   Rydell thought about it. “You looked, huh?”
   Loveless nodded. “In Mexico City. He left them in his room. He was never, ever supposed to do that.”
   “But you weren’t supposed to look either?” It just slipped out.
   Loveless’s skin was running with sweat now, in spite of the cool. It was like his whole lymbic system or whatever had just let loose. Kept blinking and wiping it back from his eyes. “I’ve done my job. Did my job. Jobs. Years. My father, too. You haven’t seen how they live, down there. The compounds. People up here have no idea what money can do, Rydell. They don’t know what real money is. They live like gods, in the compounds. Some of them are over a hundred years old, Rydell…” There were flecks of white stuff at the corners of Loveless’ smile, and Rydell was back in Turvey’s girlfriend’s apartment, looking into Turvey’s eyes, and it just clicked, what she’d done.
   Dumped that whole bag of dancer into the Coke she’d brought him. She hadn’t been able to pour it all in, so she’d sloshed the Coke out onto the top of the can to wash it down, mix it around.
   He had his shirt undone all the way now, the dark fabric darker with sweat, and his face was turning red.
   “Loveless—” Rydell started, no idea what he was about to say, but Loveless screamed then, a high thin inhuman sound like a rabbit with its leg caught in a wire, and started pounding the butt of his pistol into the tight crotch of his jeans like there was something terrible fastened on him there, something he had to kill. Each time the gun came down, it fired, blowing holes in the carpeted floorboard the size of five-dollar pieces.
   Chevette Washington came off that console like she was on rubber bands, right over the top of the center bucket and into the cabin in back.
   Loveless froze, quivering, like every atom in him had locked down all at once, spinning in some tight emergency orbit. Then he smiled, like maybe he’d killed the thing that was after his crotch, screamed again, and started firing out through the windshield. All Rydell could remember was some instructor telling them that an overdose of dancer made too much PCP look like putting aspirin in a Coke. In a Coke.
   And Chevette Washington, she was going just about that crazy herself, by the sound of it, trying to beat her way out the back of the RV.
   “Hundred years old, those fuckers” Loveless said, and sort of sobbed, ejecting the empty magazine and snapping a fresh one in, “and they’re still getting it…”
   “Out there” Rydell said. “By The Gap—”
   “Who?”
   “Svobodov” Rydell said, guessing that might do it.
   The bullets came out of the little gun like the rubber cubes out of a chunker. By the third one, Rydell had reached over, deactivated the door-lock, and just sort of fallen out. Landed on his back on some cans and what felt like foam cups. Rolled. Kept rolling ’til he hit something.
   Those little bullets blowing big holes in the whitewashed glass of the dead stores. A whole section fell away with a crash.
   He could hear Chevette Washington pounding on the back door of the RV and he wished he could get her to stop.
   “Hey! Loveless!”
   The shooting stopped.
   “Svobodov’s down, man!”
   Chevette still pounding. Jesus.
   “He needs an ambulance!”
   On his hands and knees, up against some low tiled fountain smelled of chlorine and dust, he saw Loveless scramble down from the driver’s side, his face and chest slick and shining. The man had been trained so deeply, it occurred to Rydell, that it even cut through whatever the dancer was doing to him. Because he still moved the way they taught you to move in FATSS, the pistol out in both hands, the half-crouch, the smooth swings through potential arcs of fire.
   And Chevette, she was still trying to kick her way out through the hexcel or whatever the back of the RV was made of. Then Loveless put a couple of bullets into it and she all of a sudden stopped.
   At four o’clock Yamazaki descended the rungs he’d climbed with Loveless, in the dark, the night before.
   Fontaine had gone, twenty minutes before the power returned, taking with him, against Skinner’s protests, an enormous bundle of washing. Skinner had spent the day sorting and re-sorting the contents of the green toolkit, the one he’d overturned in his bid for the bolt-cutters.
   Yamazaki had watched the old man’s hands as they touched each tool in turn, imagining he saw some momentary strength or purpose flow into them there, or perhaps only memories of tasks undertaken, abandoned, completed. “You can always sell tools” Skinner had mused, perhaps to Yamazaki, perhaps to himself. “Somebody’ll always buy ’em. But then you always need ’em again, exactly the one you sold.” Yamazaki didn’t know the English words for most of the tools there, and many were completely unfamiliar. “T-reamer” Skinner said, holding up his fist, a rust-brown, machined spike of steel protruding menacingly between his second and third fingers. “Now that’s about as handy a thing as you can have, Scooter, but most people never seen one.”
   “Its purpose, Skinner-san?”
   “Makes a round hole bigger. Keeps it round, too, you use it right. Sheet-metal, mostly, but it’ll do plastic, synthetics. Anything thin, fairly rigid. Short of glass.”
   “You have many tools, Skinner-san.”
   “Never learned how to really use ’em, though.”

30. Carnival of souls

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

31. Driver side

   Probably come back anyway, we stick around here. You crawl up there and toss me those?”
   She edged through the door and between the buckets. Saw Rydell’s head there, by the open door. Grabbed the keys and threw them sideways, without looking. Snatched her pants and scooted backward, wondering could she maybe fit in the fridge, if she folded her legs up?
   “Why don’t you lie down flat on the floor back there…” His voice from the driver’s seat.
   “Lie down?”
   “Minimum silhouette.”
   “Huh?”
   “He’s going to start shooting. When I do this—” Ignition-sound. Glass flying from fresh holes in the windshield and she threw herself flat. The RV lurched backward, turning tight, and she could hear him slapping the console, trying to find some function he needed, as more bullets came, each one distinct, a blow, like someone was swinging an invisible hammer, taking care to keep the rhythm.
   Rydell must’ve gotten it lined up how he needed it, then, because he did that thing boys did, up in Oregon, with their brakes and the transmission.
   She realized then that she was screaming. Not words or anything, just screaming.
   Then they were in a turn that almost took them over, and she thought how these RV’s probably weren’t meant to move very fast. Now they were moving even faster, it felt like, uphill.
   “Well fuck” she heard Rydell say, in this weirdly ordinary kind of voice, and then they hit the door, or the gate, or whatever, and it was like the time she tried to pull this radical bongo over in Lafayette Park and they’d had to keep explaining to her how’d she’d come down on her head, and each time they did, she’d forget.
   She was back in Skinner’s room, reading National Geographic, about how Canada split itself into five countries. Drinking cold milk out of the carton and eating saltines. Skinner in bed with the tv, watching one of those shows he liked about history. He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had been getting better and better looking. How they’d started out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they’d slowed down to how people really moved, and then they’d been colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody’s idea of how it might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a particular button being pushed. But it was still a hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie Holiday without all that crackle and tin.
   Billie Holiday was probably a guy like Elvis, Chevette thought, with spangles on his suit, but like when he was younger and not all fat.
   Skinner had this thing he got on about history. How it was turning into plastic. But she liked to show him she was listening when he told her something, because otherwise he could go for days without saying anything. So she looked up now, from her magazine and the picture of girls waving blue and white flags in the Republic of Quebec, and it was her mother sitting there, on the edge of Skinner’s bed, looking beautiful and sad and kind of tired, the way she could look after she got off work and still had all her make-up on.
   “He’s right” Chevette’s mother said.
   “I-I am?”
   “About history, how they change it.”
   “Mom, you—”
   “Everybody does that anyway, honey. Isn’t any new thing. Just the movies have caught up with memory, is all.”
   Chevette started to cry.
   “Chevette-Marie” her mother said, in that singsong out of so far back, “you’ve gone and hurt your head.”
   “How well you say you know this guy?” she asked.
   Rydell’s SWAT shoe crunched on little squares of safety-glass every time he used the brake. If he’d had time and a broom, he’d have swept it all out. As it was, he’d had to bash out what was left of the windshield with a piece of rusty rebar he found beside the road, otherwise Highway Patrol would’ve seen the holes and hauled them over. Anyway, he had those insoles. “I worked with him in L.A.” he said, braking to steer around shreds of truck-trailer tires that lay on the two-lane blacktop like the moulted skin of monsters.
   “I was just wondering if he’ll turn out like Mrs. Elliott did. Said you knew her too.”
   “Didn’t know her” Rydell said, “I met her, on the plane. If Sublett’s some kind of plant, then the whole world’s a plot.” He shrugged. “Then I could start worrying about you, say.” As opposed, say, to worrying about whether or not Loveless or Mrs. Elliot had bothered to plant a locator-bug in this motorhome, or whether the Death Star was watching for them, right now, and could it pick them up, out here? They said the Death Star could read the headlines on a newspaper, or what brand and size of shoes you wore, from a decent footprint.
   Then this wooden cross seemed to pop up, in the headlights, about twelve feet high, with TUNE IN across the horizontal and TO HIS IMMORTAL DOWNLINK coming down the upright, and this dusty old portable tv nailed up where Jesus’s head ought to have been. Somebody’d taken a.zz to the screen, it looked like.

32. Fallonville

   Must be getting closer” Rydell said.
   Chevette Washington sort of grunted. Then she drank some of the water they’d gotten at the Shell station, and offered the bottle to him.
   When he’d crashed out of that mall, he’d felt like they were sure to be right by a major highway. From the outside, the mall was just this low tumble of tan brick, windows boarded up with sheets of that really ugly hot-pressed recyc they ran off from chopped scrap, the color of day-old vomit. He’d gone screeching around this big empty parking lot, just a few dead clunkers and old mattresses to get in the way, until he’d found a way out through the chain link.
   But there wasn’t any highway there, just some deserted four-lane feeder, and it looked like Loveless had put a bullet into the navigation hardware, because the map was locked on downtown Santa Ana and just sat there, sort of flickering. Where he was had the feel of one of those fallen-in edge-cities, the kind of place that went down when the Euro-money imploded.
   Chevette Washington was curled up by the fridge with her eyes closed, and she wouldn’t answer him. He was scared Loveless had put one through her, too, but he knew he couldn’t afford to stop until he’d put at least a little distance between them and the mall. And he couldn’t see any blood on her or anything.
   Finally he’d come to this Shell station. You could tell it had been Shell because of the shape of the metal things up on the poles that had supported the signs. The men’s room door was ripped off the hinges; the women’s chained and padlocked. Somehody had taken an automatic weapon to the pop machine, it looked like. He swung the RV around to the back and saw this real old Airstream trailer there, the same kind a neighbor of his father’s had lived in down in Tampa. There was a man there kneeling beside a hibachi, doing something with a pot, and these two black Labradors watching him.
   Rydell parked, checked to see Chevette Washington was breathing, and got down out of the cab. He walked over to the man beside the hibachi, who’d gotten up now and was wiping the palms of his hands on the thighs of his red coveralls. He had on an old khaki fishing cap with about a nine-inch bill sticking straight out. The threads on the embroidered Shell patch on his coveralls had sort of frayed and fuzzed-out.
   “You just lost” the man said, “or is there some kind of problem?” Rydell figured him to be at least seventy.
   “No sir, no problem, but I’m definitely lost.” Rydell looked at the black Labs. They looked right back. “Those dogs of yours there, they don’t look too happy to see me.”
   “Don’t see a lot of strangers” the man said.
   “No sir” Rydell said, “I don’t imagine they do.”
   “Got a couple of cats, too. Right now I’m feeding ’em all on dry kibble. The cats get a bird sometimes, maybe mice. Say you’re lost?”
   “Yes sir, I am. I couldn’t even tell you what state we’re in, right now.”
   The man spat on the ground. “Welcome to the goddamn club, son. I was your age, it was all of this California, just like God meant it to be. Now it’s Southern, so they tell me, but you know what it really is?”
   “No sir. What?”
   “A lot of that same happy horseshit. Like that woman camping in the goddamn White House.” He took the fishing cap off, exposing a couple of silver-white cancer-scars, wiped his brow with a grease-stained handkerchief, then pulled the cap hack on. “Say you’re lost, are you?”
   “Yes sir. My map’s broken.”
   “Know how to read a paper one?”
   “Yes sir, I do.”
   “What the hell’d she do to her head?” Looking past Rydell.
   Rydell turned and saw Chevette Washington leaning over the driver’s bucket, looking out at them.
   “How she cuts her hair” Rydell said.
   “I’ll be damned” the man said. “Might be sort of good-looking, otherwise.”
   “Yes sir” Rydell said.
   “See that box of Cream o’ Wheat there? Think you can stir me up a cup of that into this water when it boils?”
   “Yes sir.”
   “Well, I’ll go find you a map to look at. Skeeter and Whitey here, they’ll just keep you company.”
   “Yes sir…”
   PARADISE, so. CALIFORNIA
   A CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY
   THREE MILES
   NO CAMPING
   CONCRETE PADS
   FULL HOOKUPS
   ELECTRIFIED SECURITY PERIMETER
   FREE SWIMMING
   LICENSED CHRISTIAN DAYCARE (STATE OF so. CAL.)
   327 CHANNELS ON DOWNLINK
   And a taller cross rising beyond that, this one welded from rusty railroad track, a sort of framework stuck full of old televisions, their dead screens all looking out toward the road there.
   Chevette Washington was asleep now, so she missed that.
   Rydell thought about how he’d used Codes’s phone to get through to Sublett’s number in L.A., and gotten this funny ring, which had nearly made him hang up right then, but it had turned out to be call-forwarding, because Sublett had this leave to go and stay with his mother, who was feeling kind of sick.
   “You mean you’re in Texas?”
   “Paradise, Berry. Mom’s sick ’cause she ’n’ a bunch of others got moved up here to SoCal.”
   “Paradise?”
   Sublett had explained where it was while Rydell looked at the Shell man’s map.
   “Hey” Rydell had said, when he had a general idea where it was, “how about I drive over and see you?”
   “Thought you had you a job up in San Francisco.”
   “Well, I’ll tell you about that when I get there.”
   “You know they’re saying I’m an apostate here?” Sublett hadn’t sounded happy about that.
   “A what?”
   “An apostate. ’Cause I showed my mom this Cronenberg film, Berry? This Videodrome? And they said it was from the Devil.”
   “I thought all those movies were supposed to have God in ’em.”
   “There’s movies that are clearly of the Devil, Berry. Or anyway that’s what Reverend Fallon says. Says all of Cronenberg’s are.”
   “He in Paradise, too?”
   “Lord no” Sublett had said, “he’s in these tunnels out on the Channel Islands, between England and France. Can’t leave there, either, because he needs the shelter.”
   “From what?”
   “Taxes. You know who dug those same tunnels, Berry?”
   “Who?”
   “Hitler did, with slave labor.”
   “I didn’t know that” Rydell had said, imagining this scary little guy with a black mustache, standing up on a rock and cracking a big whip.
   Now here came another sign, this one not nearly as professional as the first one, just black spraypaint letters on a couple of boards.
   R.U. READY FOR ETERNITY?
   HE LIVES! WILL YOU?
   WATCH TELEVISION
   “Watch television?” She was awake now.
   “Well” Rydell said, “Fallonites believe God’s sort of just there. On television, I mean.”
   “God’s on television?”
   “Yeah. Kind of like in the background or something. Sublett’s mother, she’s in the church herself, but Sublett’s kind of lapsed.”
   “So they watch tv and pray, or what?”
   “Well, I think it’s more like kind of a meditation, you know? What they mostly watch is all these old movies, and they figure if they watch enough of them, long enough, the spirit will sort of enter into them.”
   “We had Revealed Aryan Nazarenes, up in Oregon” she said. “First Church of Jesus, Survivalist. As soon shoot you as look at you.”
   “Bad news” Rydell agreed, the RV cresting a little ridge there, “those kind of Christians…” Then he saw Paradise, down there, all lit up with these lights on poles.
   The security perimeter they advertised was just coils of razor-wire circling maybe an acre and a half. Rydell doubted if it actually was electrified, but he could see screamers hanging on it, every ten feet or so, so it would be pretty effective anyway. There was a sort of blockhouse-and-gate set-up where the road ran in, but all it seemed to be protecting were about a dozen campers, trailers, and semi-rigs, parked on cement beds around what looked like an old-fashioned radio tower they’d topped with a whole cluster of satellite dishes, those little expensive ones that looked sort of like giant gray plastic marshmallows. Somebody had dammed a creek, to make a sort of pond for swimming, but the creek itself looked like the kind of industrial runoff you wouldn’t even find bugs around, let alone birds.
   Sure had the whole place lit up, though. He could hear the drumming of big generators as they drove down the incline.
   “Jesus” Chevette Washington said.
   Rydell pulled up by the blockhouse and powered his window down, glad it still worked. A man in a blaze-orange fleece jacket and a matching cap came out, carrying some kind of shotgun with a skeletal metal stock. “Private property” he said, looking at where the windshield should’ve been. “What happened to your windshield there, mister?”
   “Deer” Chevette Washington said.
   “Here to visit our friends, the Subletts?” Rydell said, hoping he could distract the guard before he’d notice the bullet holes or anything. “Expecting us, if you wanna go call ’em.”
   “Can’t say you much look like Christians.”
   Chevette Washington sort of leaned across Rydell and gave the guard this stare. “I don’t know about you, brother, but we’re Aryan Nazarene, out of Eugene. We wouldn’t want to even come in there, say you got any mud people, any kind of race-mixing. Race-traitors all over, these days.”
   The guard looked at her. “You Nazarene, how come you ain’t skins?”
   She touched the front of her crazy haircut, the short spikey part. “Next thing you’re gonna tell me, Jesus was a Jew. Don’t know what this means?”
   He looked more than maybe just a little worried, now.
   “Got us some sanctified nails in the back, here. Maybe that gives you some idea.”
   Rydell saw the guard hesitate, swallow.
   “Hey, good buddy” Rydell said, “you gonna call tip ol’ Sublett for us, or what?”
   The man went back into the blockhouse.
   “What’s that about nails?” RydeE asked.
   “Something Skinner told me about once” she said. “Scared me.”
   Dora, Sublett’s mother, drank Coke and Mexican vodka. Rydell had seen people drink that before, but never at room temperature. And the Coke was flat, because she bought it and the vodka in these big plastic supermarket bottles, and they looked as though they’d already lasted her a while. Rydell decided he didn’t feel like drinking anyway.
   The living room of Dora’s trailer had a matching couch and reclining lounger. Dora lay back in the lounger with her feet up, for her circulation she said, Rydell and Chevette Washington sat side by side on the couch, which was more a loveseat, and Sublett sat on the floor, his knees drawn up almost under his chin. There was a lot of stuff on the walls, and on little ornamental shelves, but it was all very clean. Rydell figured that was because of Sublett’s allergies. There sure was a lot of it, though: plaques and pictures and figurines and things Rydell figured had to be those prayer hankies. There was a flat type of hologram of Rev. Fallon, looking as much like a possum as ever, but a possum that had gotten a tan and maybe had plastic surgery. There was a life-size head of J.D. Shapely that Rydell didn’t like because the eyes seemed to follow you. Most of the good stuff was sort of grouped around the television, which was big and shiny but the old kind from before they started to get real big and flat. It was on now, showing this black and white movie, but the sound was off.
   “You’re sure you won’t have a drink, Mr. Rydell?”
   “No ma’am, thank you” Rydell said.
   “Joel doesn’t drink. He has allergies, YOU know.”
   “Yes ma’am.” Rydell hadn’t ever known Sublett’s first name before.
   Sublett was wearing brand-new white denim jeans, a white t-shirt, white cotton socks, and disposable white paper hospital slippers.
   “He was always a sensitive boy, Mr. Rydell. I remember one time he sucked on the handle of this other boy’s Big Wheel. Well, his mouth like to turned inside-out.”
   “Momma” Sublett said, “you know the doctor said you ought to get more sleep than you been getting.”
   Mrs. Sublett sighed. “Yes, well, Joel, I know you young people want a chance to talk.” She peered at Chevette Washington. “That’s a shame about your hair, honey. You’re just as pretty as can be, though, and you know it’ll just grow in so nice. I tried to light the broiler on this gas range we had, down in Galveston, that was when Joel was just a baby, he was so sensitive, and that stove about blew up. I just had had this perm, dear and, well…”
   Chevette Washington didn’t say anything.
   “Momma” Sublett said, “now you know you’ve had your nice drink…”
   Rydell watched Sublett lead the old woman off to bed.
   “Jesus Christ” Chevette Washington said, “what’s wrong with his eyes?”
   “Just light-sensitive” Rydell said.
   “It’s spooky, is what it is.”
   “He wouldn’t hurt a fly” Rydell said.
   Sublett came back, looked at the picture on the tv, then sighed and shut it off. “You know I’m not supposed to leave the trailer, Berry?”
   “How’s that?”
   “It’s a condition of my apostasy. They say I might corrupt the congregation by contact.” He perched on the edge of the recliner so he wouldn’t have to actually recline in it.
   “I thought you’d blown Fallon off when you came out to LA.”
   Sublett looked embarrassed. “Well, she’s been sick, Berry, so when I came here I told ’em I was here to reconsider. Meditate on the box ’n’ all.” He wrung his long pale hands. “Then they caught me watching Videodrome. You ever see, uh, Deborah Harry, Rydell?” Sublett sighed and sort of quivered.
   “How’d they catch you?”
   “They’ve got it set up so they can monitor what you’re watching.”
   “How come they’re out here anyway?”
   Sublett ran his fingers back through his dry, straw-colored hair. “Hard to say, but I’d figure it’s got something to do with Reverend Fallon’s tax problems. Most of what he does, lately, it’s about that. Didn’t your job in San Francisco work out, Berry?”
   “No” Rydell said, “it didn’t.”
   “You want to tell me about it?” Rydell said he did.
   “I think he shot through something to do with the damned heater, too” Rydell said. They were back in the RV, outside the perimeter.
   “I like your friend” she said. “I do too.”
   “No, I mean he really cares about what’s going to happen to you. He really does.”
   “You take the bed” he said. “I’ll sleep up front.”
   “There’s no windshield. You’ll freeze.”
   “I’ll be okay.”
   “Sleep back here. We did before. It’s okay.”
   He woke in the dark and listened to the sound of her breathing, to the creak of stiff old leather from the jacket spread over her shoulder.
   Sublett had listened to his story, nodding sometimes, asking a question here and there, his mirrored contacts reflecting tiny convex images of them sitting there on that loveseat. In the end he’d just whistled softly and said, “Berry, it sounds to me like you’re really in trouble now. Bad trouble.”
   Really in trouble now.
   Rydell slid his hand down, brushing one of hers by accident as he did it, and touched the bulge of his wallet in his back pocket. What money he had was in there, but Wellington Ma’s card was in there, too. Or what was left of it. The last time he’d looked, it had broken into three pieces.
   “Big trouble” he said to the dark, and Chevette Washington lifted the edge of her jacket and sort of snuggled in closer, her breathing never changing, so he knew she was still asleep.
   He lay there, thinking, and after a while he started to get this idea. About the craziest idea he’d ever had.
   “That boyfriend of yours” he said to her, in the tiny kitchen of Sublett’s mother’s trailer, “that Lowell?”
   “What about him?”
   “Got a number we could reach him at?”
   She poured milk on her cornflakes. It was the kind you mixed up from powder. Had that thin chalky look. The only kind Sublett’s mother had. Sublett was allergic to milk. “Why?”
   “I think maybe I want to talk to him about something.”
   “About what?”
   “Something I think maybe he could help me with.”
   “Lowell? Lowell’s not gonna help you. Lowell doesn’t give a rat’s ass for anybody.”
   “Well” Rydell said, “why don’t you just let me talk to him.”
   “If you tell him where we are, or he has it traced back through the cd-net, he’ll turn us in. Or he would if he knew anybody was after us.”
   “Why?”
   “He’s just like that.” But then she gave Rydell the phone and the numher.
   “Hey, Lowell?”
   “Who the fuck is this?”
   “How you doin’?”
   “Who gave you—”
   “Don’t hang up.”
   “Listen, motherf—”
   “SFPD Homicide.”
   He could hear Lowell draw on a cigarette. “what did you say?” Lowell said.
   “Orlovsky. SFPD Homicide, Lowell. That big fucker with the great big fucking gun? Came in the bar there? You remember. Just before the lights went out. I was over there by the bar, talking with Eddie the Shit.”
   Lowell took another drag, shallower by the sound of it. “Look, I don’t know what you—”
   “You don’t have to. You can just hang up right now, Lowell. But if you do, boy, you just better kiss your ass goodbye. Because you saw Orlovsky come in there for the girl, Lowell, didn’t you? You saw him. He didn’t want you to. He wasn’t in there on any SFPD business, Lowell. He was there on his own stick. And that’s one serious bad oficer, Lowell. Serious as cancer.”
   Silence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
   “Then you just listen, Lowell. Listen up. You don’t listen, I’ll tell Orlovsky you saw him. I’ll give him this number. I’ll give him your description, and that skinhead’s, too. Tell him you been talking about him. And you know what he’ll do, Lowell? He’ll come out there and shoot your ass dead, that’s what he’ll do. And nobody to stop him. Homicide, Lowell. Then he can investigate it himself, he wants to. Man’s heavy, Lowell, I gotta tell ya.”
   Lowell coughed, a couple of times. Cleared his throat. “This is a joke, right?”
   “I don’t hear you laughing.”
   “Okay” Lowell said, “say it’s for real. Then what? What’re you after?”
   “I hear you know people can get things done. With computers and things.” He could hear Lowell lighting a fresh cigarette.
   “Well” Lowell said, “sort of.”
   “Republic of Desire” Rydell said. “I need you to get them to do me a favor.”
   “No names” Lowell said, fast. “There’s scans set to pick things out of traffic—”
   “Them.”
   “ ‘Them’ okay? Need you to get them to do something for me.”
   “It’ll cost you” Lowell said, “and it won’t be cheap.”
   “No” Rydell said, “it’ll cost you.”
   He pressed the button that broke the connection. Give old Lowell a little time to think about it; maybe look Orlovsky up on the Civil List, see he was there and he was Homicide. He flipped the little phone shut and went back into the trailer. Sublett’s mother kept the air-conditioning up about two clicks too high.
   Sublett was sitting on the loveseat. His white clothes made him look sort of like a painter, a plasterer or something, except he was too clean. “You know, Berry, I’m thinking maybe I better get back to Los Angeles.”
   “What about your mother?”
   “Well, Mrs. Baker’s here now, from Galveston? They been neighbors for years. Mrs. Baker can watch out for her.”
   “That apostate crap getting to you?”
   “Sure is” Sublett said, turning to look at the hologram of Fallon. “I still believe in the Lord, Berry, and I know I’ve seen His face in the media, just like Reverend Fallon teaches. I have. But the rest of it, I swear, it might as well be just a flatout hustle.” Sublett almost looked like he might be about to cry. The silver eyes swung around, met Rydell’s. “And I been thinking about IntenSecure, Berry. What you told me last night. I don’t see how I can go back there and work, knowing the kinds of things they’ll condone. I thought I was at least helping to protect people from a few of the evils in this world, Berry, but now I know I’d just be working for a company with no morals at all.”
   Rydell walked over and had a closer look at the prayer-hankies. He wondered which one of them was supposed to keep the AIDS off. “No” he said, finally, “you go back to work. You are protecting people. That part’s real. You got to make a living, Sublett.”
   “What about you?”
   “Well, what about me?”
   “They’ll just find you and kill you, Berry. You and her.”
   “You, too, probably, if they knew what I’d told you. I shouldn’t ought’ve done that, Sublett. That’s one reason Chevette and I have to get out of here. So there won’t be any hassle for you and your mom.”
   “Well” Sublett said, “I’m not working for them anymore, Berry. But I’m leaving here, too. I just have to.”
   Rydell looked at Sublett, seeing him, somehow, in his full IntenSecure outfit, Glock and all, and suddenly that big crazy idea-thing sort of up and shook itself, and rolled over, revealing all these new angles. But you can’t get him involved, Rydell told himself, it just wouldn’t be fair.
   “Sublett” Rydell heard himself saying, about a minute later, “I bet I got a career-option here you haven’t ever even considered.”
   “What’s that?” Sublett said.
   “Getting in trouble” Rydell said.

33. Notebook

   rice
   scouring pads broom
   detergent liquid sleeping bag
   stove fuel oil/gasket
   He sleeps now. Rice with the curry from the Thai wagon. Asks where the girl has gone. Tell him Fontaine has heard from her but does not know where she is or why. The pistol on the shelf. Reluctant to touch it (cold, heavy, smelling of oil, the dark blue finish worn to silver-gray down the sides of its muzzle, around the fluted segments of the cylinder. (‘SMITH & WESSON.’ Thomasson.) Tonight he spoke again of Shapely.
   How they did him like that, Scooter, that’s just some sorry shit. Same shit all over. Always some of ’em, anyway, makes you wonder how these damn religions last so long or what started it in the first place. Could be he’ll be that himself one day, crazy fuckers out killing people for him, or they’ll say it’s for him. Used to be these Crucified Jesus people, they wouldn’t talk at all except on Mondays, and that was the day they’d go and dig a spadeful of dirt out of their grave, Scooter. Every little while they’d get one of them thought he’d got the spirit in him and they’d just do it, do it with these special chrome nails they all carried, leather neck-pouch, see, it had to be unborn lambskin. Hell, you’d have to say they were crazier than the ones got him, Scooter. Put ’em all away, finally. Weren’t any left at all, after about 1998.
   “Inner Tube, honey” Mrs. Sublett said, “Talitha Morrow, Todd Probert, Gary Underwood. 1996.” She was leaning back in the recliner with a damp washcloth folded across her forehead. It was the same color blue as her slippers, and they were terrycloth, too.
   “I never saw that” Chevette said, flipping through the pages of a magazine all about Reverend Fallon. There was this has-been actress, Gudrun Weaver, and she was up there hugging Fallon on a stage somewhere. If he’d turned around, Chevette thought, his nose would’ve barely come up to her breastbone. Looked like he’d had some kind of pink wax injected, all under his skin; had the creepiest-looking hair she’d ever seen, like a really short wig but it sort of looked like it might get up and walk off by itself.
   “All about television” Mrs. Sublett said, “so naturally it’s of special significance to the Church.”
   “What’s it about?”
   “Talitha Morrow is this newswoman, and Todd Probert is a bank robber. But he’s a good bank robber, because he only needs the money to pay for a heart-transplant for his wife. Carrie Lee. Remember her? In a mature role, honey. More like a cameo. Well, Gary Underwood is Talitha’s ex, but he’s still got it for her, bad. In fact he’s got—whatcha callit?—erotomania, like it’s all he ever thinks about and, honey, it’s turned pure evil. First he’s sending her these chopped up Barbie dolls; sends her a dead white rabbit, then all this fancy underwear with blood on it…”