The Bridge Trilogy Part 121

"Why?"

"We'll be out of here dawn tomorrow," Chevette said. "We're just two women. You okay with that?"

The girl raised the tarp a fraction, and Chevette caught a glimpse of her eyes. "Just two of you?"

"Let us stay," Chevette said, "then you won't have to worry who else might come along."

"Well," the girl said. And was gone, ducking back down. Chevette heard the hatch dragged shut. -

"b.u.g.g.e.r leaks," Tessa said, examining the roof of the van with a small black flashlight.

"I don't think it'll keep up long," Chevette said.

"But we can park here?"

"Unless Buddy comes back," Chevette said.

Tessa turned the light back into the rear of the van. Where rain was already pooling.

"I'll get the foam and the bags up here," Chevette said. "Keep 'em dry till later, anyway."

She climbed back between the seats.

119.

29. VICIOUS CYCLE.

RYDELL found a ma? of the bridge in his sungla.s.ses, a shopping and restaurant guide for tourists.

It was in Portuguese, but you could toggle to an English version.

It took him a while; a wrong move on the rocker-pad and he'd wind up back in those Metro Rio maps, but finally he'd managed to pull it up. Not a GPS map, just drawings of both levels, set side by side, and he had no way of knowing how up-to-date it was.

His bed-and-breakfast wasn't on it, but Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl was (three and a half stars) and Bad Sector was too.

The lozenge that popped up when he clicked on Bad Sector described it as a source for "retro hard and soft, with an idiosyncratic twentieth-century bent." He wasn't sure about that last part, but he could at least see where the place was: lower level, not far from that bar he'd gone in with Creedmore and the guitar player.

There was a cabinet to put stuff in, behind the triple-faux paneling, so he did: his duffel and the GlobEx box with the thermos thing. He put the switchblade, after some thought, under the foam slab. He considered tossing it into the bay, but he wasn't sure exactly where you could find a clear shot to do that out here. He didn't want to carry it, and anyway he could always toss it later.

It was raining when he came out beside Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl, and he'd seen it rain on the bridge before, when he'd first been here. What happened was that rain fell on the weird jumble of shanty boxes people had built up there and shortly came sluicing down through all of that in big random gouts, like someone was emptying bathtubs. There was no real drainage here, things having been built in the most random way possible, so that the upper level, while sheltered, was no way dry.

This seemed to have thinned the line for the Ghetto Chef, so that he briefly considered eating, but then he thought of how Laney had him on retainer and wanted him to get right over to this Bad Sector and get that cable. So instead he headed down to the lower level.

120.

The rain had concentrated the action down here, because it was relatively dry. It felt like easing your way through a very long, very homemade rush-hour subway car, except over half the other people were doing that too, in either direction, and the others were standing still, blocking the way and trying hard to sell you things. Rydell eased his wallet out of his right rear pocket and into his right front.

Crowds made Rydell nervous. Well, not crowds so much as crowding. Too close, people up against you. (Someone brushed his back pocket, feeling for the wallet that wasn't there.) Someone shoving those long skinny Mexican fried-dough things at him, repeating a price in Spanish. He felt his shoulders start to bunch.

The smell down here was starting to get to him: sweat and perfume, wet clothing, fried food. He wished he was back in Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl, finding out what those three and a half stars were for.

He couldn't take much more of this, he decided, and looked over the heads of the crowd for another stairway to the upper level. He'd rather get soaked.

But suddenly it opened out into a wider section, the crowd eddying away to either side, where

there were food stalls, cafes, and stores, and there was Bad Sector, right there, done up in what looked to him like old-fashioned aluminum furnace paint.

He tried to shrug the crowd-induced knots out of his shoulders. He was sweating; his heart was pounding. He made himself take a few deep breaths to calm down. Whatever it was he was supposed to be doing here, for Laney, he wanted to do it right. Get all jangled, this way, you never knew what could happen. Calm down. n.o.body was losing it here.

He lost it almost immediately.

There was a very large Chinese kid behind the counter, shaved almost bald, with one of those little lip beards that always got on Rydell's nerves. Very large kid, with that weirdly smooth- looking ma.s.s that indicated a lot of muscle supporting the weight. Hawaiian shirt with big mauvy- pink orchids on it. Antique gold-framed Ray-Ban aviators and a s.h.i.t-eating grin. Really it was that grin that did it.

"I need a cable," Rydell said, and his voice sounded breathless, and

121.

somehow it was not liking to hear himself sound that way that took him the rest of the way over.

"I know what you need," the kid said, making sure Rydell heard the boredom in his voice.

"Then you know what kind of cable I need, right?" Rydell was closer to the counter now. Ragged old posters tacked up behind it, for things with names like Heavy Gear II and T'ai Fu.

"You need two." The grin was gone now, kid trying his best to look hard. 'One's power: jack to any DC source or wall juice with the inbuilt transformer. Think you can manage that?"

"Maybe," Rydell said, getting right up against the front of the counter and bracing his feet, "but tell me about this other one. Like it cables what to what exactly?"

'Tm not paid to tell you that, am I?"

There was a skinny black tool lying on the counter. Some kind of specialist driver. "No," Rydell said, picking up the driver and examining its tip, "but you're going to." He grabbed the kid's left ear with his other hand, pinched off an inch of the driver's shaft between thumb and forefinger, and inserted that into the kid's right nostril. It was easy hanging on to the ear, because the kid had some kind of fat plastic spike through it.

"Uh," the kid said.

"You got a sinus problem?"

"No."

"You could have." He let go of the ear. The kid stood very still. "You aren't going to move, are you?"

"No..

Rydell removed the Ray-Bans, tossing them over his right shoulder. "I'm getting sick of people grinning at me because they know s.h.i.t I don't. Understand?"

"Okay."

"'Okay' what?"

"Just . . . okay?"

"Okay is: where are the cables?"

"Under the counter."

122.

'Okay is: where did they come from?"

"Power's standard hut lab grade: transformer, current-scrubber. The other, I can't tell you-"