The Bridge Trilogy Part 136

The switchblade sounded so loud, opening it, that he was sure they'd have heard it, so he just moved, sweeping the ceramic blade down, then sideways, to cut himself a backward "L." Through which he ducked and stepped, as if in a dream, the paint on the canvas crackling as he did so.

Into warmth and a different light and these completely unexpected people seated around a table, cards in their hands, mother-of-pearl chips piled on the table in front of them. And one of them, a woman, the nipples of her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s transfixed with surgical steel, the stub of a small cigar wedged into the corner of her mouth, met Rydell's eye and said: "I'll see you one and raise you one."

"Never mind me," Rydell heard himself say, as he saw a man with a tattooed scalp, still holding his hand of cards, raise his other hand, with a gun in it, from beneath the table. And simultaneously he realjzed that he still had the black knife, open, in his hand. He felt a weird wash of cold down his spine as his feet just kept moving, past the table and the man and the deep and somehow limitlessly large black hole in the winking ring of stainless steel that was the pistol's muzzle.

Through a thick brown velour curtain that smelled of ancient movie houses and he was still moving, apparently intact. Feeling his hand thumb the b.u.t.ton, closing and c.o.c.king the blade against his hip as he went, something he wouldn't have thought of doing otherwise. Pocketing the knife. In front of him a ladder rough-sawn from two-by-fours. Straight to it and just climbing, as fast as he could.

Took him up through a square hole in a splintered timber deck, narrow walkway between walls cut from peeling billboards, a woman's huge stained paper eye faded there as if staring into infinite distance.

Stop. Breathe. Heart pounding. Listen.

Laughter. The card players?

187.

He started along the walkway, feeling a rising sense of triumph: he'd done it. Lost 'em. Wherever he was, up here, he'd be able to find his way back out, and down, and then he'd see how it went.

But he had the projector and he'd lost them and he hadn't gotten his a.s.s shot for interrupting somebody's poker game. "Lateral thinking," he said, congratulating himself, as he reached the end of the walkway and rounded a corner.

He felt the rib crack as the weight lifter hit him and knew that the black glove, like the ones he'd trained with in Nashville, was weighted with lead.

It sent him back against the opposite wall, his head slamming against that, and his whole left side refused to move when he tried.

The weight lifter pulled the black glove back for a roundhouse into Rydell's face. And smiled.

Rydell tried to shake his head.

Faintest look of surprise, maybe confusion, in the other's eyes, his face. Then nothing. The smile gone slack.

The weight lifter went suddenly and very heavily to his knees, swayed, and crashed sideways to the gray timber deck. Revealing behind him this slender, gray-haired man in a long smooth coat the color of old moss, who was replacing something there, the lapel held open with his other hand.

Eyes regarding Rydell through gold-rimmed gla.s.ses. A deep crease up each cheek, like he smiled a lot. The man adjusted his beautiful coat and lowered his hands.

"Are you injured?"

Rydell drew a ragged breath, wincing as the rib seemed to grate. "Rib," he managed.

"Are you armed?"

Rydell looked into the clear, bright, unmoving eyes. "Knife in my right pocket," he said.

"Please keep it there," the man said. "Are you able to walk?"

"Sure," Rydell said, taking a step and almost falling on the weight lifter.

"Come with me, please," the man said and turned, and Rydell followed.

188.

CREEDMORE was into the climax of his number before Chevette spotted G.o.d's Little Toy cruising past overhead. The bar, like a lot of the s.p.a.ces here on the original deck, didn't have a ceiling of its own, just the bottoms of whatever floor areas had been erected above it, with the result that what pa.s.sed for a ceiling was uneven and irregular. The management had at some point sprayed all that black, and Chevette might not have noticed the floating camera platform if its Mylar balloon hadn't caught and reflected the stage lights. It was definitely under human control and looked like it might be jockeying to get a close-up of Creedmore. Then Chevette spotted two more of the silver balloons, these parked up in a sort of hollow created by a discontinuity in the floors above.

That meant, she thought, that Tessa had gotten someone to drive her back to the foot of Folsom.

Then either she'd driven back or gotten a lift. (She was pretty sure Tessa wouldn't have walked it, not with the balloons anyway.) Chevette hoped the latter, because she didn't .want to have to try to find a s.p.a.ce to park the van a second time. Whatever Tessa was up to here, they were going to need a place to sleep later.

Creedmore's song ended with a sort of yodeling cry of brainless defiance, which was echoed back, amplified into a terrifying roar, by the meshback crowd. Chevette was amazed by the enthusiasm, not so much that it was for Creedmore as it was for this kind of music. Music was strange that way though; there were people into any d.a.m.ned thing, it seemed like, and if you got enough of them together in one bar, she guessed, you could have a pretty good time.

She was still working her way through the crowd, warding off the odd grope, looking for Tessa, and keeping an eye out for Carson, when Creedmore's friend Maryahce found her. Maryalice had undone a couple of extra increments of bustier, it looked like, and was presenting as very ample indeed.

She looked really happy, or anyway as happy as you

189.

46. PINE BOX.

can look when you're really drunk, which she definitely and obviously was.

"Honey!" she cried, grabbing Chevette by the shoulders. "Where have you been? We got all kinds of free drinks for our industry guests!"

Maiyalice clearly didn't remember Chevette having told her that she and Tessa weren't A&R people, but Chevette guessed that there was quite a lot, usually, that Maryalice didn't remember.

"That's great," Chevette said. "Have you seen Tessa? My friend I was here with? She's Australian-"

"Up in the light booth with Saint Vitus, honey. She's getting Buell's whole performance on those little balloon things!" Maryalice beamed. Gave Chevette a big, lipstick-greasy kiss on the cheek and instantly forgot her, face going blank as she turned in what Chevette supposed would be the direction of the bar.

But the light booth, now, she could see that: a sort of oversized matte-black crate tacked up against the angle of the wall, opposite the stage, with a warped plastic window running its length, through which she could see, quite plainly, the faces of Tessa and some bald-headed boy with mean-looking slitty black gla.s.ses. Just their two heads in there, like puppet heads. Reached, she saw, by an aluminum stepladder fastened to the wall with lengths of rusting pipe strap.

Tessa had her own special gla.s.ses on, and Chevette knew she'd be seeing the output from G.o.d's Little Toy, adjusting angle and focus with her black glove. Creedmore had launched into another song, its tempo faster, and people were tapping their feet and bobbing up and down in time.

Couple of men in those meshback caps, drinking beer out of cans, by that ladder, but she ducked under their arms and climbed up, ignoring the one who laughed and swatted her b.u.t.t with the flat

of his hand.

Up through the square hole, her nose level with dusty, beer-soaked brown carpet. "Tessa. Hey."

"Chevette?" Tessa didn't turn, lost in the view in her gla.s.ses. "Where'd you go?"

"I saw Carson," Chevette said, climbing up through the hole. "I took off."

190.

"This is amazing footage," Tessa said. "The faces on these people.

Like Robert Frank. I'm going to treat it as mono and grain it down-"

"Tessa," Chevette said, "I think we should get out of here."

"Who the f.u.c.k are you?" said the baldie, turning. He was wearing a sleeveless tube shirt and his upper arms were no thicker than Chevette's wrists, his bare shoulders looking fragile as the bones of a bird.

"This is Saint Vitus," Tessa said, as if absently bidding to forestall hostilities, attention elsewhere. "He does the lights in here, but he's the sound man at two other clubs on the bridge, Cognitive Dissidents and something else Tessa's hand dancing with itself in the black control glove.

Chevette knew Cog Diss from before. "That's a dancer bar, Tessa," she said.

"We're going over there after this," Tessa said. "He says it'll just be getting going, and it'll be a lot more interesting than this."

"Anything would," Saint Vitus said with infinite weariness.

"Blue Ahmed cut a single there," Tessa said, "called 'My War Is My

-War.'"

"It sucked," Chevette said.

"You're thinking of the Chrome Koran cover," said Saint Vitus, his voice dripping with contempt.

"You've never heard Ahmed's version."

"How the f.u.c.k would you know?" Chevette demanded.

"Because it was never released," Saint Vitus declared smugly.

"Well, maybe it f.u.c.king escaped," Chevette said, feeling like she wanted to deck this diz-monkey,