The Bridge Trilogy Part 107

"To work," RydeIl said.

"Work," he heard Creedmore say and "s.h.i.t," but the door swung shut behind him, and he was on the

street.

64.

15. BACK UP HERE.

CHEVETTE stood beside the van, watching Tessa release G.o.d's Little Toy. The camera platform, like a Mylar m.u.f.fin or an inflated coin, caught the day's watery light as it rose, wobbling, then leveled out, swaying, at fifteen feet or so.

Chevette felt very strange, being here, seeing this: the concrete tank traps, beyond them the impossible shape of the bridge itself. Where she

had lived, though it now seemed a dream, or someone else's life, atop the nearest cable tower. Way up in a cube of plywood there, sleeping

while the wind's great hands shoved and twisted and clawed, and she'd heard the tendons of the

bridge groan all in secret, a sound carried up the twisted strands for only her to hear, Chevette with her ear pressed

against the graceful dolphin back of cable that rose through the oval hole sliced for it through Skinner's plywood floor.

Now Skinner was dead, she knew. He'd gone while she was in Los Angeles, trying to become whoever it was she'd thought she wanted to be. She hadn't come up. The bridge people weren't big on funerals, and possession, here, was most points of the law. She wasn't Skinner's daughter, and even if she had been, and had wanted to hold his place atop the cable tower, it would've been a matter of staying there for as long as she intended it to be hers. She hadn't wanted that.

But she'd had no way to grieve him in Los Angeles, and now it all came up, came back, the time she'd lived with him. How he had found her, too sick to walk, and taken her home, feeding her soups he bought from the Korean vendors until she was well. Then he'd left her alone,

asking nothing, accepting her there the way you'd accept a bird on a windowsill, until she'd learned to ride a bicycle in the city and become a

messenger. And soon the roles had reversed: the old man failing, needing help, and she the one to go for soup, bring water, see that coffee was made. And that was how it had been, until she'd gotten herself into the trouble that had resulted in her first having met Rydell.

"Wind'll catch that," she cautioned Tessa, who had put on the gla.s.ses that let her watch the feed from the floating camera.

"I've got three more in the car," Tessa said, pulling a sleazy-looking black control glove over her right hand. She experimented with the touch pads, revving the platform's miniature props and swinging it through a twenty-foot circle.

"We've got to hire someone to watch the van," Chevette said, "if you want to see it again."

"Hire someone? Who?"

Chevette pointed at a thin black child with dusty dreadlocks to his waist. "You. What's your name?"

"What's it to you?"

"Pay you watch this van. We come back, chip you fifty. Fair?" The boy regarded her evenly. "Name Boomzilla," he said.

"Boomzilla," Chevette said, "you take care of this van?"

"Deal," he said.

"Deal," Chevette said to Tessa. -

"Lady," Boomzilla said, pointing up at G.o.d's Little Toy, "I want that."

"Stick around," Tessa said. "We'll need a grip."

Tessa touching fingers to black-padded palm. The camera platform executing a second turn and gliding out of sight, above the tank traps. Tessa smiling, seeing what it saw. "Come on," she said to Chevette and stepped between the nearest traps.

"Not that way," Chevette said. "Over here." There was a path you followed if you were just walking through. To take another route indicated either ignorance or the desire to do business.

She showed Tessa the way. It stank of urine between the concrete slabs. Chevette walked more quickly, Tessa behind her.

And emerged again into that wet light, but here it ran not across the stalls and vendors of memory, but across the red-and-white front of a modular convenience store, chunked down front and

center across the entrance to the bridge's two levels, LUCKY DRAGON and the shudder of video up the trademark tower of screens.

"f.u.c.king h.e.l.l," said Tessa, "how interst.i.tial is that?"

Chevette stopped, stunned. "How could they do that?"

66.

* "It's what they do," Tessa said. "Prime location."

"But it's like . . . like Nissan County or something."

"'Gated attraction.' The community's a tourist draw, right?"

"Lots of people won't go where there's no police."

"Autonomous zones are their own draw," Tessa said. "This one's been here long enough to become the

city's number-one postcard."

"G.o.d-awful," Chevette said. "It . . . ruins it."

"Who do you think Lucky Dragon Corp is paying rent to?" Tessa asked, swinging the platform around

for a pan across the store.

"No idea," Chevette said. "It's right in the middle of what used to be the street."

"Never mind," Tessa said, moving on, into the pedestrian traffic flowing to and from the bridge.

"We're just in time. We're going to doc.u.ment the life before it's theme-parked."

Chevette followed, not knowing what it was exactly that she felt.

THEY ate lunch in a Mexican place called Dirty Is G.o.d.

Chevette didn't remember it from before, but places changed V names on the bridge. They changed size and shape too. You'd get these

strange mergers, a hair place and an oyster bar deciding to become a bigger place that cut hair and sold oysters. Sometimes it worked: one of the longest-running places on the San Francisco end was an old-style,

manual tattoo parlor that served breakfast. You could sit there over a

plate of eggs and bacon and watch somebody get needled with some

kind of hand-drawn flash.