The Bridge Trilogy Part 3

IntenSecure had brought in a whole planeload of people from the head office in Singapore, Rydell

had heard, to keep it all out of the media and work out some kind of settlement with the subscribers, the Schonbrunns. He had no idea what that settlement might have finally amounted to, but he was just as happy not to know; there was no such program as KentaCops in Trouble, and the Schonbrunns' front gate alone had probably been worth a couple of dozen of his paychecks.

IntenSecure could replace that gate, sure, because they'd installed it in the first place. It had been quite a gate, too, some kind of j.a.panese fiber-reinforced sheeting, thermoset to concrete, and it sure as h.e.l.l had managed to get most of that Wet Honey Sienna off Gunhead's front end.

Then there was the damage to the house itself, mostly to the living-room windows (which he'd driven through) and the furniture (which he'd driven over).

But there had to be something for the Schonbrunns on top of that, Hernandez explained. Something for emotional pain, he said, pumping Rydell a cup of old nasty coffee from the big stainless thermos behind his desk. There was a fridge-magnet on the thermos that said I'M NOT OKAY, YOU'RE NOT.

OKAY-BUT, hEY, THAT'S OKAY.

It was two weeks since the night in question, tell in the

2.9.

morning, and Rydell was wearing a five-day beard, a fine-weave panama Stetson, a pair of baggy, faded orange trunks, a KNOXVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT t-shirt that was starting to disintegrate at the shoulder-seams, the black SWAT-trainers from his IntenSecure uniform, and an inflated transparent cast on his left arm. 'Emotional pain,' Rydell said.

Hernandez, who was very nearly as wide as his desk, pa.s.sed Rydell the coffee. 'You way lucky, all I can say.'

'I'm out a job, arm in a cast, I'm "way lucky"?'

'Seriously, man,' Hernandez said, 'you coulda killed yourself. LAPD, they coulda greased your a.s.s down dead. Mr. and Mrs. Schonbrunn, they been very nice about this, considering Mrs. Schonbrunn's embarra.s.sment and everything. Your arm got ha.s.sled, hey, I'm sorry . . .' Hernandez shrugged, enormously. 'Anyway, you not fired, man. We just can't let you drive now. You want us put you on gated residential, no problem.'

'No thanks.'

'Retail properties? You wanna work evenings, Encino Fashion Mall?'

'No.'

Hernandez narrowed his eyes. 'You seen the p.u.s.s.y over there?'

'Nope.'

Hernandez sighed. 'Man, what happen with all that s.h.i.t coming down on you in Nashville?'

'Knoxville. Department came down for permanent suspension. Going in without authorization or proper back-up.'

'And that b.i.t.c.h, one's suing your a.s.s?'

'She and her son got caught sticking up a m.u.f.fler shop in Johnson City, last I heard . . .' Now it was Rydell's turn to shrug, except it made his shoulder hurt.

'See,' Hernandez said, beaming, 'you lucky.'

In the instant of putting Gunhead through the Schonbrunns

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locked-and-armed Benedict Canyon gate, Rydell had experienced a fleeting awareness of something very high, very puree and quite clinically empty; the doing of the thing, the not-thinking; that weird adrenal exultation and the losing of every more troublesome aspect of self.

And that-he later recalled remembering, as he'd fought the wheel, slashing through a j.a.panese garden, across a patio, and through a membrane of armored gla.s.s that gave way like something in a dream-had been a lot like what he'd felt as he'd drawn his gun and pulled the trigger, emptying Kenneth Turvey's brain-pan, and most copiously, across a seemingly infinite expanse of white- primered wallboard that n.o.body had ever bothered to paint.

Rydell went over to Cedars to see Sublett.

IntenSecure had sprung for a private cubicle, the better to keep Sublett away from any cruising minions of the media. The Texan was sitting up in bed, chewing gum, and watching a little liquid- crystal disk-player propped on his chest.

'Warlords of the 21st Century,' he said, when Rydell edged in, 'James Wainwright, Annie McEnroe, Michael Beck.'

Rydell grinned. 'When'd they make it?'

'1982..' Sublett muted the audio and looked up. 'But I've seen it a couple times already.'

'I been over at the shop seem' Hernandez, man. He says you don't have to worry any about your job.'

Sublett looked at Rydell with his blank silver eyes. 'How 'bout yours, Berry?'

Rydell's arm started to itch, inside the inflated cast. He bent over and fished a plastic drinking- straw from the little white wastebasket beside the bed. He poked the straw down inside the cast and wiggled it around. It helped some. 'I'm history, over there. They won't let me drive anymore.'

Sublett was looking at the straw. 'You shouldn't ought to touch used stuff, not in a hospital.'

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'You don't have nothin' contagious, Sublett. You're one of the cleanest motherf.u.c.kers ever lived.'

'But what you gonna do, Berry? You gotta make a living, man.'

Rydell dropped the straw back into the basket. 'Well, I don't know. But I know I don't wanna do gated residential and I know I don't wanna do any malls.'

'What about those hackers, Berry? You figure they'll get the ones set us up?'

'Nope. Too many of 'em. Republic of Desire's been around a while. The Feds have a list of maybe three hundred "affiliates," but there's no way to haul 'em all in and figure out who actually did it. Not unless one of 'em rats on somebody, which they do tend to do on a pretty regular basis.'

'But how come they'd want to do that to us anyway?'

'h.e.l.l, Sublett, how should I know?'

'Just mean,' Sublett said.

'Well, that, for sure, and Hernandez says the LAPD told him they figured somebody wanted Mrs.

Schonbrunn caught more or less with her pants down.' Neither Sublett nor Rydell had actually seen Mrs. Schonbrunn, because she was, as it turned out, in the nursery. Although her kids weren't, having gone up to Washington State with their daddy to fly over the three newest volcanoes.

Nothing that Gunhead had logged that night, since leaving the car wash, had been real. Someone had gotten into the Hotspur Hussar's on-board computer and plugged a bunch of intricately crafted and utterly spurious data into the communications bundle, cutting Rydell and Sublett off from IntenSecure and the Death Star (which hadn't, of course, been down). Rydell figured a few of those good ol' Mongol boys over at the car wash might know a little bit about that.

And maybe, in that instant of weird clarity, with Gunhead's crumpled front end still trying to climb the shredded remains

of a pair of big leather sofas, and with the memory of Kenneth Turvey's death finally real before him, Rydell had come to the conclusion that that high crazy thing, that rush of Going For It, was maybe something that wasn't always quite entirely to be trusted.

'But, man,' Sublett had said, as if to himself, 'they gonna kill those little babies.' And, with that, he'd snapped his harness open and was out of there, Glock in hand, before Rydell could do anything at all. Rydell had had him shut the siren and the strobes off a block away, but surely anybody in the house was now aware that IntenSecure had arrived.

'Responding,' Rydell heard himself say, slapping a holstered Glock onto his uniform and grabbing his chunker, which aside from its rate of fire was probably the best thing for a shoot-out in a nursery full of kids. He kicked the door open and jumped out, his trainers going straight through the inch-thick gla.s.s top of a coffee-table. (Needed twelve st.i.tches, but it wasn't deep.) He couldn't see Sublett. He stumbled forward, cradling the yellow bulk of the chunker, vaguely aware that there was something wrong with his arm.

'Freeze, c.o.c.ksucker!' said the biggest voice in the world, 'LAPD! Drop that s.h.i.t or we blow your a.s.s away!' Rydell found himself the focus of an abrupt and extraordinarily painful radiance, a light so bright that it fell into his uncomprehending eyes like hot metal. 'You hear me, c.o.c.ksucker?' Wincing, fingers across his eyes, Rydell turned and saw the bulbous armored nacelles of the descending gunship. The downdraft was flattening everything in the j.a.panese garden that Gunhead hadn't already taken care of.

Rydell dropped the chunker.

'The pistol, too, a.s.shole!'

Rydeji grasped the Clock's handle between thumb and forefinger, It came away, in its plastic holster, with a tiny hut distinct skritch of Velcro, somehow audible through the drumming of the helicopter's combat-m.u.f.fled engine.

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He dropped the Glock and raised his arms. Or tried to. The left one was broken.

They found Sublett fifteen feet from Gunhead. His face and hands were swelling like bright pink toy balloons and he seemed to be suffocating, Schonbrunn's Bosnian housekeeper having employed a product that contained xylene and chlorinated hydrocarbons to clean some crayon-marks off a bleached-oak end table.

'What the f.u.c.k's wrong with him?' asked one of the cops.

'He's got allergies,' Rydell said through gritted teeth; they'd cuffed his hands behind his back and it hurt like h.e.l.l. 'You gotta get him to Emergency.'

Sublett opened his eyes, or tried to.

'Berry. . .'

Rydell remembered the name of the movie he'd seen on television. 'Miracle Mile,' he said.

Sublett squinted up at him. 'Never seen it,' Sublett said, and fainted.

Mrs. Schonbrunn had been entertaining her Polish landscape gardener that evening. The cops found her in the nursery. Angered beyond speech, she was cinched quite interestingly up in a couple of thousand dollars worth of English latex, North Beach leather, and a pair of vintage Smith & Wesson handcuffs that someone had paid to have lovingly buffed and redone in black chrome-the gardener evidently having headed for the hills when he heard Rydell parking Gunhead in the living room.

3 Not a nice party

Chevette never stole things, or anyway not from other people, and definitely not when she was pulling tags. Except this one bad Monday when she took this total a.s.shole's sungla.s.ses, but that was because she just didn't like him.

How it was, she was standing up there by this ninth-floor window, just looking out at the bridge, past the gray sh.e.l.ls of the big stores, when he'd come up behind her. She'd almost managed to make out Skinner's room, there, high up in the old cables, when the tip of a finger found her bare back. Under Skinner's jacket, under her t-shirt, touching her.

She wore that jacket everywhere, like some kind of armor. She knew that nanopore was the only thing to wear, riding this time of year, but she wore Skinner's old horsehide anyway, with her bar- coded Allied badges on the lapels. The little ball-chains on the zippers swinging as she spun to knock that finger aside.

Bloodshot eyes. A face that looked as though it were about to melt. He had a short little greenish cigar in his mouth but it wasn't lit. He took it out, swirled its wet end in a small gla.s.s of clear liquor, then took a long suck on it. Grinning at her around it. Like he knew she didn't belong here, not at a party like this and not in any old hut seriously expensive hotel up Over Geary.

But it had been the last tag of the day, a package for a lawyer, with ~Ienderloin's trash-fires burning so close by, and around them, huddled, all those SO terminally luckless, utterly

35.

and chemically lost. Faces aglow in the fairy illumination of the tiny gla.s.s pipes. Eyes canceled in that terrible and fleeting satisfaction. Shivers, that gave her, always.

Locking and arming her bike in the hollow sound of the Morrisey's underground lot, she'd taken a service elevator to the lobby, where the security grunts tried to brace her for the package, but there was no way. She wouldn't deliver to anyone at all except this one very specific Mr. Garreau in 8o8, as stated right here on the tag. They ran a scanner across the bar-code on her Allied badge, x-rayed the package, put her through a metal-detector, and waved her into an elevator lined with pink mirrors and trimmed in bank-vault bronze.

So up she'd gone, to eight, to a corridor quiet as the floor of some forest in a dream. She found Mr. Garreau there, his shirt-sleeves white and his tie the color of freshly poured lead. He signed the tab without making eye-contact; package in hand, he'd closed the door's three bra.s.s digits in her face. She'd checked her hair in the mirror-polished italic zero. Her tail was sticking up okay, in back, but she wasn't sure they'd got the front right. The spikes were still too long.