“Now that’s a nail,” Blackwell said, “galvanized, one-and-a-half-inch, roofing, I’ve nailed men’s hands to bars like this, with nails like that. And some of them were right bastards.” There was nothing at all of threat in Blackwell’s voice. “And some of those, you nail their one hand, their other comes up with a razor, or a pair of needle-nose pliers.” Blackwell’s forefinger absently found an angry-looking scar beneath his right eye, as though something had entered there and been deflected along the cheekbone. “To have a go, right?”
“Pliers?”
“Bastards,” Blackwell said. “You have to kill ’em, then, Now that’s one kind of ‘brave,’ Laney. What I mean is, how’s that so different from what you tried to do to Slitscan?”
“I just didn’t want them to let it drop. To let her … settle to the 3 bottom. Be fotgotten. I didn’t really care how badly Slitscan got
B 71 hurt, or even if they were damaged or not. I wasn’t thinking of revenge, as much as of a way of. . . keeping her alive?”
“There’s other men, you nail their hand to a table, they’ll sit there and look at you. That’s your true hard man, Laney. Do you think you’re one of those?”
Laney looked from Blackwell to the empty bourbon glass, back to Blackwell; the bartender moved, as if to refill it, but Laney covered it with his hand. “If you nail my hand to the bar, Blackwell,” and here he spread his other hand, flat, palm down, on the dark wood, the drink-ringed varnish, “I’ll scream, okay? I don’t know what any of this is about. You might be crazy. But what I most definitely am not is anybody’s idea of a hero. I’m not now, and I wasn’t back there in
L.A.”
Blackwell and Yamazaki exchanged glances. Blackwell pursed his lips, gave a tiny nod. “Good on you then,” he said. “1 think you just might be right for the job.”
“No job,” Laney said, but let the bartender pour him a second bourbon. “I don’t want to hear about any job at all, not until I know who’s hiring me.”
“I’m chief of security for Lo/Rez,” Blackwell said, “and I owe that silly bastard my life. The last five of which I’d’ve passed in the punitive bowels of the State of fucking Victoria. If it hadn’t been for him. Though I’d’ve topped myself first, no fear.”
“The band? You’re security for them?”
“Rydell spoke well of you, Mr. Laney.” Yamazaki’s neck bobbed in the collar of his plaid shirt,
“I don’t know Rydell,” Laney said. “He was just the night watchman at a hotel I couldn’t afford.”
“Rydell has a good sense of people, I think,” Yamazaki said.
To Blackwell: “LoJRez? They’re in trouble?”
“Rez,” Blackwell said. “He says he’s going to marry this Jap twist doesn’t fucking exist! And he knows she doesn’t, and says we’ve nofucking imagination! Now hear me,” and Blackwell produced, from some unspecific region of his clothing, a mirror-polished rectangle 72 William Gibson with a round hole through its uppermost, leading corner. Something not much larger than a cashcard, to see it in his big hand. “Someone’s got to our boy, hear? Got to him. Don’t know how, don’t know who. Though personally myself I’d bet on the fucking Kombinat. Those Russ bastards, But you, my friend, you’re going to do your nodal thing for us, on our Rez, and you are going to find flicking out. Who.” And the rectangle came down with a concise little thunk, to be left standing, crosswise to the counter’s grain, and Laney saw that it was a very small meat cleaver, with round steel rivets through its tidy rosewood handle.
“And when you do,” Blackwell said, “we shall sort them well and fucking out.” 3
0
73 10. Whiskey Clone Eddie’s club was way up in something like an offke building. Chia didn’t think there were music clubs on the upper floors of buildings like that in Seattle, but she wasn’t sure. She’d fallen asleep in the Graceland, and only woke up as Eddie was driving into a garage entrance, and then up into something vaguely like a Ferris wheel, or the cylinder of an old-fashioned revolver, except the bullets were cars. She watched out the windows as it swung them up and over, to stop at the top, where Eddie drove forward into a parking garage that might’ve been anywhere, except the cars were all big and black, though none as big as the Graceland.