(71 horned crown, all silver. Her pubic hair, shaved like an exclamation point. This one didn’t have either of those, but it was her. It was. ‘Josie’s always projectin’,’ the bartender said, like it was something that couldn’t really be helped. ‘From that thing on her lap?’ ‘That’s the interface,’ the bartender said. ‘Projector’s, well, there.’ He pointed. ‘Top of that NEC sign.’ Rydell saw a little black gizmo clamped to the top of this Did illuminated sign. It looked kind of like an old camera, the )ptical kind. He didn’t know if NEC was a beer or what. The whole wall was covered with these signs, all different brands, md now he recognized a few of the names he decided they were ads for old electronics companies. He looked at the gizmo, back at the fat woman in the wheelchair, and felt sad. Angry, too. Like he’d lost something. ‘Not like I knew what I thought it was,’ he said to himself. ‘Fool anybody,’ said the bartender. Rydeil thought about somebody sitting out there by that valley road. Waiting for cars. Like he and his friends would lie under the bushes down Jefferson Street and toss cans under people’s tires. Sounded like a hubcap had come off. See them get out and look, shake their heads. So what he’d seen had just been a version of that, somebody playing with an expensive toy. ‘Shit,’ he said, and put his mind to looking for Chevette Washington in all this crowd. He didn’t notice the beer-smell now, or the smoke, more the wet hair and clothes and just bodies. And there she was, her and her two friends, hunched over a little round table in a corner. The sweatshirt’s hood was down now, showing Rydell a white, stubbled head with some kind of bat or bird tattooed Ofl the side, up where it would he hidden if the hair grew in. It was the kind of tattoo somebody had done by hand, not the kind you got done on a computer-driven table. Baldhead had a hard little face, in
172 ) profile, and he was wasn’t talking. Chevette Washington was telling something to the other one and not looking happy. Then the music changed, these drums coming in, like there were millions of them, ranked backed somehow beyond the walls, and weird waves of static riding in on that, failing back, riding in again, and women’s voices, crying like birds, and none of it natural, the voices dopplering past like sirens on a highway, and the drums, when you listened, made up of little snipped bits of sound that weren’t drums at all. The Japanese woman-the hologram, Rydell reminded himself-raised her arms and began to dance, a sort of looping shuffle, timed not to the tempo of the drums but to the waves of static washing back and forth across the sound, and when Rydell thought to look he saw the fat woman’s eyes were open, her hands moving inside that plastic muff. Nobody else in the bar was paying it any attention at all, just Rydell and the woman in the wheelchair. Rydell leaned there on the bar, watching the hologram dance and wondering what he should do next. Warbaby’s shopping list went like this: best he got the glasses and the girl, next best was the glasses, just the girl was definitely third, but a must if that was all that was going. J osie’s music slid out and away for the last time and the hologram’s dance ended. There was some drunken applause from a couple of the tables, Josie nodding her head a little like she was thanking them. The terrible thing about it, Rydell thought, was that there Josie was, shoehorned into that chair, and she just wasn’t much good at making that thing dance. It reminded him of this blind man in the park in Knoxville, who sat there all day strumming an antique National guitar. There he was, blind, had this old guitar, and he just couldn’t chord for shit. Never seemed to get any better at it, either. I)idn’t seem fair. Now some people got up from a table near where Chevette Washington was sitting. Rydell was in there quick, bringing ’73 the beer he’d won for getting rid of Eddie the Shit. He still wasn’t close enough to pick out what they were saying, but he could try. He tried to think up ways to maybe start up a conversation, but it seemed pretty hopeless. Not that he looked particularly out of place, because he had the impression that most of this crowd weren’t regulars here, just a random sampling, come in out of the rain. But he just didn’t have any idea what this place was about. He couldn’t figure out what ‘Cognitive Dissidents’ meant; it wouldn’t help him figure out what the theme, or whatever, was. And besides, whatever Chevette Washington and her guy were discussing, it looked to be getting sort of heated. Her guy, he thought. Something there in her body-language that said Pissed-Off Girlfriend, and something in how hard this boy was studying to show how little any of it bothered him, like maybe she was the Ex- All this abruptly coming to nothing at all as every conversation died and Rydell looked up from his beer to see Lt. Orlovsky, the vampire-looking cop from SFPD Homicide, stepping in from the stairwell in his London Fog, some kind of fedora that looked like it was molded from flesh-colored plastic on his head, and those scary half-frame glasses. Orlovsky stood there, little streams running off the hem of his rain-darkened coat and pooling around his wingtips, while he unbuttoned the coat with one hand. Still had his black flak vest on underneath, and now that hand came up to rest on the smooth, injection-molded, olive-drab butt of his floating-breech H&K. Rydell looked for the badge-case on the nylon neck-thong, but didn’t see it. The whole bar was looking at Orlovsky. Orlovsky looked around the room, over the tops of his glasses, taking his time, giving them all a good dose of Cop Eye. The music, some weird hollow techie stuff that sounded like bombs going off in echo-chambers, started to make a different kind of sense. ’74 Rydell saw Josie the wheelchair woman looking at the Russian with an expression Rydell couldn’t process. Spotting Chevette Washington in her corner, Orlovsky walked over to her table, still taking his time, making the rest of the room take that same time. His hand still on that gun. It seemed to Rydell like the Russian just might be about to haul out and shoot her. Sure looked like it, but what kind of cop would do that? Now Orlovsky stopped in front of their table, just the right distance, too far for them to reach him and far enough to allow room to pull that big gun if he was going to. The Boyfriend, Rydell was somehow pleased to see, looked fit to shit himself. Baldhead looked like he’d been cast in plastic, just frozen there, hands on the table. Between his hands, Rydell saw a pocket phone. Orlovsky locked the girl with his full current of Eye-thing, his face lined, gray in this light, unsmiling. He jerked the brim of the plastic fedora, just this precise little fraction, and said ‘Get up.’ Rydell looked at her and saw her trembling. There was never any question the Russian meant her and not her friends-Boyfriend looking like he might faint any second and Baldhead playing statue. Chevette Washington stood up, shaky, the rickety little wooden chair going over behind her. ‘Out.’ The hat-brim indicated the stairs. The hairy back of Orlovsky’s hand covered the butt of the H&K. Rydell heard his own knees creak with tension. He was leaning forward, gripping the edges of the table. He could feel old dried pads of gum under there. The lights went out.