Hernandez might be wrong about English SWAT-wagons, Rydell found himself thinking, punching the Hotspur Hussar into six-wheel overdrive and feeling Gunhead suck down on pavement like a twin-engined, three-ton leech. He’d never really stomped on that thing before. Sublett yelped as the crash-harnesses tightened automatically, yanking him up out of his usual slouch. Rydell slung Gunhead up onto a verge covered in dusty ice-plant, doing seventy past a museum-grade Bentley, and on the wrong side at that. Eyeblink of a woman passenger’s horrified face, then Sublett must have managed to slap the red plastic plate that activated the strobes and the siren. Straight stretch now. No cars at all. Rydell straddled the centerline and floored it. Sublett was making a weird keening sound that synched eerily with the rising ceramic whine of the twin Kyoceras, and it came to Rydell that the Texan had snapped completely under the pressure of the thing, and was Singing in Some trailer-camp tongue known only to the benighted followers of the Rev. Fallon. But, no, when he glanced that way, he saw Suhlctt, lips 2.7 moving, frantically scanning the client-data as it seethed on the dash-screens, his eyes bugging like the silver contacts might pop right out. But while he read, Rydell saw, he was actually loading his worn-out, secondhand Gbock, his long white fingers moving in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable, as though he were making a sandwich or folding a newspaper. And that was scary. ‘Death Star!’ Rydell yelled. It was Sublett’s job to keep the bead in his ear at all times, listening for the satellite-relayed, instantly overriding Word of the Real Cops. Sublett turned, snapping the magazine into his Gbock, his face so pale that it seemed to reflect the colors of the dash-display as readily as did the blank steel rounds of his eyes. ‘The help’s all dead,’ he said, ‘an’ they got the three kids in the nursery.’ He sounded like he was talking about something mildly baffling he was seeing on television, say a badly altered version of some old, favorite film, drastically recast for some obscure ethnic market-niche. ‘Say they’re gonna kill ’em, Berry.’ ‘What do the fucking cops say about it?’ Rydell shouted, pounding on the padded figure-eight steering wheel in the purest rage of frustration he’d ever felt. Sublett touched a finger to his right ear. He looked like he was about to scream. ‘Down,’ he said. Gunhead’s right front fender clipped off somebody’s circa-1943 fully-galvanized Sears rural-route mailbox, no doubt acquired at great cost on Melrose Avenue. ‘They can’t be fucking down,’ Rydell said, ‘they’re the police.’ Sublett tugged the bead from his ear and offered it to Rydell. ‘Static’s all . . Rydell looked down at his dash-display. Gunhead’s cursor was a green spear of destiny, whipping along a paler-green canyon road toward a chaste white circle the size of a ~eddingring. In the window immediately to the right, he could read the vital-signs data on the subscriber’s three kids. Their pulse rates were up. In the window below, there was a ~idicubousty peaceful-looking infrared frame of the subscriber’s front gate. It looked solid. The read-out said it was locked and armed. Right then, probably, was when he decided just to go for it.
A week or so later, when it had all been sorted out, Hernandez was basically sympathetic about the whole thing. Not happy, mind you, because it had happened over his shift, but he did say he couldn’t much blame Rydell under the circumstances. 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 Japanese fiber-reinforced sheeting, thermoset to concrete, and it sure as hell 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.