The Bridge Trilogy Part 13

Downtown San Francisco was really something. With everything hemmed in by hills, built up and down other hills, it gave Rydell a sense of, well, he wasn't sure. Being somewhere. Somewhere in particular. Not that he was sure he liked being there. Maybe it just felt so much the opposite of

L.A. and that feeling like you were cut loose in a grid of light that just spilled out to the edge of everything. Up here he felt like he'd come in from somewhere, these old buildings all around and close together, nothing more modern than that one big spikey one with the truss-thing on it (and he knew that one was old, too). Co~ damp air, steam billowing from grates in the pavement.

Peopfe on the streets, too, and not just the usual kind; people with jobs and clothes. Kind of like Knoxville, he tried to tell himself, but it wouldn't stick. Another strange place.

'No, man, a left, a left' Freddie thumping on the back of his seat. And another city-grid to learn. He checked the cursor on the Patriot's dash-map, looking for a left that would get them to this hotel, the Morrisey.

'Don't bang on Mr. Rydell's seat,' Warbaby said, a sixfoot scroll of fax bunched in his hands, 'he's driving.' It had come in on their way here. Rydell figured it was the jacket on Blix, the guy who'd gotten his throat cut.

106.

'Fa.s.sbinder,' Freddie said. 'You ever hear of this Rainer Fa.s.sbinder?'

'I'm not in a joking mood, Freddie,' Warbaby said. 'No joke. I ran Separated at Birth on this Blix, man, scanned this stiff-shot the Russian sent you before? Says he looks like Rainer Fa.s.sbinder. And that's when he's dead, with his throat cut. This Fa.s.sbinder, he musta been pretty rough-looking,

huh?'

Warbaby sighed. 'Freddie...'

'Well, German, anyway. Clicked with the nationality-'

'Mr. Blix was not German, Freddie. Says here Mr. Blix wasn't even Mr. Blix. Now let me read.

Rydell needs quiet, in order to adjust to driving in the city.'

Freddie grunted, then Rydell heard his fingers clicking over the little computer he carried everywhere.

Rydell took the left he thought he was looking for. Combat zone. Ruins. Fires in steel cans.

Hunched dark figures, faces vampire white.

'Don't brake,' Warbaby said. 'Or accelerate.'

Something came spinning, end over end, out of the crow-shouldered coven, splat against the windshield; clung, then fell away, leaving a smudge of filthy yellow. Hadn't it been gray and b.l.o.o.d.y, like a loop of intestine?

Red at the intersection.

'Run the light,' Warbaby instructed. Rydell did, amid horns of protest. The yellow stuff still there.

'Pull over. No. Right up on the sidewalk. Yes.' The Patriot's Goodyear Streetsweepers bouncing up and over the jagged curb. 'In the glove compartment.'

A light came on as Rydell opened it. Windex, a roll of gray paper towels, and a box of throwaway surgical gloves.

'Go on,' Warbaby said. 'n.o.body bother us.'

Rydell pulled a glove on, took the Windex and the towels, got out. 'I)on't get any on you,' he said, thinking of Sublett. He gave the yellow smear a good shot of Windex, wadded tip 107.

three of the towels in his gloved hand, wiped until the gla.s.s was clean. He skinned the glove down around the wet wad, the way they'd shown him in the Academy, but then he didn't know what to do with it.

'Just toss it,' Warbaby said from inside. Rydell did. Then he walked back from the car, five paces, and threw up. Wiped his mouth with a clean towel. He got back in, shut the door, locked it, put the Windex and the towels in the glove compartment.

'You gonna gargle with that, Rydell?'

'Shut up, Freddie,' Warbaby said. The Patriot's suspension creaked as Warbaby leaned forward.

'Leavings from a slaughterhouse, most likely.' he said. 'But it's good you know to take precautions.' He settled back. 'Had us a group here once called Sword of the Pig. You ever hear of that?'

'No,' Rydell said, 'I never did.'

'They'd steal fire-extinguishers out of buildings. Re-charge them with blood. Blood from a slaughterhouse. But they let it out, you understand, that this blood, well, it was human. Then they'd go after the Jesus people, when they marched, with those same extinguishers. .

'Jesus,' Rydell said.

'Exactly,' Warbaby said.

'You see that door, there?' Freddie said.

'What door?' The lobby of the Morrisey made Rydell want to whisper, like being in church or a funeral home. The carpet was so soft, it made him want to lie down and go to sleep.

'That black one,' Freddie said.

Rydell saw a black-lacquered rectangle, perfectly plain, not even a k.n.o.b. Now that he thought about it, it didn't match anything else in sight. The rest of the place was polished wood, frosted bronze, panels of carved gla.s.s. If Freddie hadn't told him it was a door, exactly, he would have taken it for art or something, some kind of painting. 'Yeah? What about it?'

io8) 'That's a restaurant,' Freddie said, 'and it's so expensive, you can't even go in there.'

'Well,' Rydell said, 'there's lots of those.'

'No, man,' Freddie insisted, 'I mean even if you were rich, had money out your a.s.s, you could not go in there. Like it's private. j.a.panese thing.'

They were standing around by the security desk while Warbaby talked to somebody on a house phone.

The three guys on duty at the desk wore IntenSecure uniforms, but really fancy ones, with bronze logo-b.u.t.tons on their peaked caps.

Rydell had parked the Patriot in an underground garage, floors down in the roots of the place. He hadn't seen anything like that before: teams of people in chef's whites putting together a hundred plates of some skinny kind of salad, little Sanyo vacuum-cleaners bleeping along in pastel herds,

all this back-stage stuff you'd never guess was there if you were just standing here in the lobby.

The Executive Suites, where he'd stayed in Knoxville with Karen Mendelsohn, had had these Korean robot bugs that cleaned up when you weren't looking. They'd even had a special one that ate dust off the wallscreen, but Karen hadn't been impressed. It just meant the)' couldn't afford people, she said.

Rydell watched as Warbaby turned, handing the phone to one of the guys in the peaked caps. Warbaby gestured for Freddie and Rydell. Leaned on his cane as they walked toward him.

'They'll take us up now,' he said. The cap Warbaby had handed the phone to came out from behind the counter. He saw Rydell was wearing an IntenSecure shirt with the patches ripped off, but he didn't say anything. Rydell wondered when he was going to have a chance to buy some clothes, and where he should go to do it. He looked at Freddie's shirt, thinking Freddie probably wasn't the guy to ask.

T09.

'This way, sir,' the cap said to Warbaby. Freddie and Rydell followed Warbaby across the lobby.

Rydell saw how he jabbed his cane, hard, into the carpeting, the brace on his leg ticking like a slow clock.

Sometimes, when she rode hard, when she could really proj, Chevette got free of everything: the city, her body, even time. That was the messenger's high, she knew, and though it felt like freedom, it was really the melding-with, the clicking-in, that did it. The bike between her legs was like some hyperevolved alien tail she'd somehow extruded, as though over patient centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine, grown Lexan-armored tires, near-frictionless bearings, and gas- filled shocks. She was entirely part of the city then, one wild-a.s.s little dot of energy and matter, and she made her thousand choices, instant to instant, according to how the traffic flowed, how rain glinted on the streetcar tracks, how a secretary's mahogany hair fell like grace itself, exhausted, to the shoulders of her loden coat.

And she was starting to get that now, in spite of everything; if she just let go, quit thinking, let her mind sink down into the machinery of bone and gear-ring and carbon-wound j.a.panese paper...

But Sammy Sal swerved in beside her, ba.s.s pumping from his bike's bone-conduction beatbox. She had to bunny the curb to keep from going over on a BART grate. Her tires left black streaks as the particle-brakes caught, Sammy Sal braking in tandem, his Fluoro-Rimz strohing, fading.

'Something eating you, little honey?' His hand on her arm, rough and angry. 'Like maybe some wonder product makes you smarter, faster? Huh?'

III.

13 Tweaking 'Let me go.'

'No way. I got you this job. You're gonna blow it, I'm gonna know why.' He slammed his other palm on the black foam around his bars, killing the music.

'Please, Sammy, I gotta get up to Skinner's-'

He let go of her arm. 'Why?'

She started to cough, caught it, took three deep breaths. 'You ever steal anything, Sammy Sal? I mean, when you were working?'

Sammy Sal looked at her. 'No,' he said, finally, 'but I been known to f.u.c.k the clients.'

Chevette shivered. 'Not me.'

'No,' Sammy Sal said, 'but you don't pull tags all the places I do. 'Sides, you a girl.'

'But I stole something last night. From this guy's pocket, up at this party at the Hotel Morrisey.'

Sammy Sal licked his lips. 'How come you had your hand in his pocket? He somebody you know?'

'He was some a.s.shole,' Chevette said.

'Oh. Him. Think I met him.'

'Gave me a hard time. It was sticking out of his pocket.' 'You sure it was his pocket this hard time sticking out of?' 'Sammy Sal,' she said, 'this is serious. I'm scared s.h.i.tless.' He was looking at her, close. 'That it? You scared? Stole some s.h.i.t, you scared?'

'Bunny says some security guys called up Allied, even called up Wilson and everything. Looking for me.'

's.h.i.t,' Sammy Sal said, still studying her, 'I thought you high, on dancer. Thought Bunny found out. Come after you, gonna chew your little b.i.t.c.h ear off. You just scared?'

She looked at him. 'That's right.'

'Well,' he said, digging his fingers into the black foam, 'what you scared of?'

'Scared they'll come up to Skinner's and find 'em.'

'Find what?'

I 12.

'These gla.s.ses.'

'Spy, baby? Shot? Looking, like Alice 'n' all?' He drummed his fingers on the black foam.

'These black gla.s.ses. Like sungla.s.ses, but you can't see through 'em.'

Sammy Sal tilted his beautiful head to one side. 'What's that mean?'

'They're just black.'

'Sungla.s.ses?'

'Yeah. But just black.'

'Huh,' he said, 'you had been f.u.c.king the clients, but only just the cute ones, like me, you'd know what those are. Tell you don't have that many upscale boyfriends, pardon me. You date you some architects, some brain-surgeons, you'd know what those are.' His hand came up, forefinger flicking the corroded ball-chain that dangled from the zip.tab at the neck of Skinner's jacket.

'Those VL gla.s.ses. Virtual light.'

She'd heard of it, but she wasn't sure what it was. 'They expensive, Sammy Sal?'

's.h.i.t, yes. 'Bout as much as a j.a.panese car. Not all that much more, though. Got these little EMP- drivers around the lenses, work your optic nerves direct. Friend of mine, he'd bring a pair home from the office where he worked. Landscape architects. Put 'em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there's this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that. . .'

'But they're solid black.'

'Not if you turn 'em on, they aren't. Turn 'em on, they don't even look like sungla.s.ses. Just make you look, I dunno, serious.' He grinned at her. 'You look too d.a.m.n' serious anyway. That your problem.'

She shivered. 'Come back up to Skinner's with me, Sammy. Okay?'

'I)on't like heights, much,' he said. 'That little box blow right off the top of that hridge, one night.'

113.

'Please, Sammy? This thing's got me tweaking. Be okay, riding with you, but I stop and I start thinking about it, I'm scared I'm gonna freeze up. What'll I do? Maybe I get there and it's the cops? What'll Skinner say, the cops come up there? Maybe I go in to work tomorrow and Bunny cans me. What'll Ido?'

Sammy Sal gave her the look he'd given her the night she'd asked him to get her on at Allied. Then he grinned. Mean and funny. All those sharp white teeth. 'Keep it between your legs, then. Come on, you try to keep up.'

He bongoed off the curb, his Fluoro-Rimz flaring neonwhite when he came down pumping. He must have thumbed Play then, because she caught the ba.s.s throbbing as she came after him through the traffic.

14 Loveless 'You want another beer, honey?'