LUCKY DRAGON swirling in bland script up a sort of fin or pylon whose base seems comprised of dozens of crawling video screens.
19 5. MARIACHI STATIC ‘so she left you for this TV producer,” the country singer said, slipping what was left of thirteen ounces of vodka back into the waistband of his indigo jeans, so new and taut that they creaked when he walked. The flat bottle’s concavity rode there behind an antique buckle that resembled an engraved commemorative plaque, something someone had once won, Rydell supposed, for calf-roping or some similar competitive activity. Rydell powered the side window down, a crack, to let the fumes out.
“Production coordinator,” Rydell said, wishing the vodka would put his passenger, whose name was Buell Creedmore, to sleep again. The man had spent the better part of their drive up the coast asleep, snoring lightly, and Rydell hadn’t minded that. Creedmore was a friend, or maybe more of an acquaintance, of Durius Walker’s. Durius had been a drug dealer before, in South Central, and had gotten addicted to the stuff. Now that he’d gotten his recovery, he spent a lot of time with other people who had drug problems, trying to help them. Rydell assumed Buell Creedmore was one of those, though as far he could see the man was just basically a drunk.
“Bet that one burned your ass,” Creedmore said, his eyes slit with spirits. He was a small man, lightly built, but roped with the sort of whipcord muscle that had never seen the inside of a gym. Ditchdigger muscle. What Rydell took to be several layers of artificial tan were wearing off over an inherent pallor. Bleached hair with dark roots was slicked straight back with some product that kept it looking like he’d just stepped out of a shower. He hadn’t, though, and he was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning.
“Well,” Rydell said, “I figured it’s her call.”
“What kind of bleeding-ass liberal bullshit is that?” Creedmore asked. He pulled the bottle from his waistband and eyed the remaining liquor narrowly, as though he were a carpenter checking a level. It seemed to fail to meet his standards just then, so he returned it to its 20 place behind the commemorative plaque. “What kind of man are you, anyway?”
Rydell briefly entertained the idea of pulling over on the margin,
beating Creedmore senseless, then leaving him there at the side of the five, to get up to San Francisco as best he could. But he didn’t and, in fact, said nothing.
“Pussy-assed attitude like that, that’s what’s wrong with America today.”
Rydell thought about illegal choke holds, brief judicious constriction of the carotid artery. Maybe Creedmore wouldn’t even remember if Rydell put one on him. But it wouldn’t keep him under, not that long anyway, and they’d taught Rydell in Knoxville that you couldn’t count on how a drunk would react to anything.
“Hey, Buell,” Rydell asked, “whose car is this anyway?”
Creedmore fell silent. Grew, Rydell felt, restive.
Rydell had wondered from the start if the car might not be stolen. He hadn’t wanted to think about it really, because he needed the ride up to NoCal. A plane ticket would’ve had to come out of his severance from the Lucky Dragon store, and he had to be extra careful with that until he determined whether or not there was anything to this story of ‘~mazaki’s, that there was money for him to earn, up in San Francisco.
Yamazaki was deep, Rydell told himself. He’d never actually figured out what it was that Yamazaki did. Sort of a freelance Japanese anthropologist who studied Americans, as near as Rydell could tell. Maybe the Japanese equivalent of the Americans Lucky Dragon hired to tell them they needed a curb check. Good man, Yamazaki, but not easy to say where he was coming from. The last time he’d heard from Yamazaki, he’d wanted Rydell to find him a netrunner, and Rydell had sent him this guy named Laney, a quantitative researcher who’d just quit Slitscan, and had been moping around the Chateau, running up a big bill. Laney had taken the job, had gone over to Tokyo, and Rydell had subsequently gotten fired for, they called it, fraternizing with the guests. That was basically how Rydell had wound up working night security in a nience store, because he’d tried to help Yamazaki. 21 Now he was driving this Hawker-Aichi roadster up the Five, very definitely the designated driver, no idea what was waiting for him up there, and halfway wondering if he weren’t about to transport a stolen vehicle across a state line. And all because Yamazaki said that that same Laney, over in Tokyo, wanted to hire him to do some fieldwork. That was what Yamazaki called it, “fieldwork.”