And maybe, in that instant of weird clarity, with Gunhead’s crumpled front end still trying to climb the shredded remains 32. 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 glass top of a coffee-table. (Needed twelve stitches, 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, cocksucker!’ said the biggest voice in the world, ‘LAPD! Drop that shit or we blow your ass 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, cocksucker?’ Wincing, fingers across his eyes, Rydell turned and saw the bulbous armored nacelles of the descending gunship. The downdraft was flattening everything in the Japanese garden that Gunhead hadn’t already taken care of. Rydell dropped the chunker. ‘The pistol, too, asshole!’ 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-muffled engine. 33
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 fuck’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 hell. ‘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 asshole’s sunglasses, 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 shells 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 glass 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 glass 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 brass 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. Wispy, sort of. She headed back down the hail, the hardware jingling on Skinner’s jacket, her new SWAT-trainers sinking into freshly vacuumed pile the color of rain-wet terracotta. But when the elevator doors opened, this Japanese girl fell out. Or near enough, Chevette grabbing her beneath both arms and propping her against the edge of the door. ‘Where party?’ ‘What folks gonna ask you,’ Chevette said. ‘Floor nine! Big party!’ The girl’s eyes were all pupil, her bangs glossy as plastic. So Chevette, with a real glass wine-glass full of real French wine in one hand, and the smallest sandwich she’d ever seen in the other, came to find herself wondering how long she still had before the hotel’s computer noticed she hadn’t yet left the premises. Not that they were likely to come looking for her 36 here, because someone had obviously put down good money to have this kind of party. Some really private kind, because she could see these people in a darkened bathroom, smoking ice through a blown-glass dolphin, its smooth curves illuminated by the fluttering bluish tongue of an industrial-strength lighter. Not just one room, either, but lots of them, all connected up. And lots of people, too, the men mostly gotten up in those suits with the four-button jackets, stiff shirts with those choker collars, and no tie but a little jeweled stud. The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough. She’d managed to get the Japanese girl horizontal on a long green couch, where she was snoring now, and safe enough unless somebody sat on her. Looking around, Chevette had seen that she wasn’t the only underdressed local to have somehow scammed entry. The guy in the bathroom working the big yellow Bic, for starters, but he was an extreme case. Then there were a couple of pretty obvious Tenderloin working-girls, too, but maybe that was no more than the accepted amount of local color for whatever this was supposed to be. But then this asshole’s right in her face, grinning his mean-ass drunken grin, and she’s got her hand on a little folding-knife, something else she’s borrowed from Skinner. It has a hole in the blade that you can press the tip of your thumb into and snap it open, one-handed. That blade’s under three inches, broad as a soupspoon, wickedly serrated, and ceramic. Skinner says it’s a fractal knife, its actual edge more than twice as long as the blade itself. ‘You’re not enjoying yourself, I think,’ he says. European, but she’s not sure which flavor. Not French or German. His jacket’s leather, too, hut nothing like Skinner’s. Some thin-skinned animal whose hide drapes like heavy silk, the color of 37 tobacco. She thinks of the smell of the yellow-spined magazines up in Skinner’s room, some so old the pictures are only shades of gray, the way the city looks, sometimes, from the bridge. ‘Doing fine ’til you showed up,’ Chevette says, thinking it’s probably time to go, this guy’s bad news. ‘Tell me,’ he says, looking appraisingly at the jacket and the t-shirt and the bike-pants, ‘what services you offer.’ ‘The fuck’s that supposed to mean?’ ‘Clearly,’ he says, pointing at the Tenderloin girls across the room, ‘you offer something more interesting,’ and he rolls his tongue wetly around the word, ‘than these two.’ ‘Fuck that,’ Chevette says, ‘I’m a messenger.’ And a funny pause crosses his face, like something’s gotten past his drunk, nudged him. Then he throws back his head and laughs like it’s the biggest joke in the world. She gets a look at a lot of very white, very expensive-looking teeth. Rich people never have any metal in their teeth, Skinner’s told her. ‘I say something funny?’ The asshole wipes his eyes. ‘But we have something in common, you and I. ~.’ ‘I doubt it.’ ‘I am a messenger,’ he says, though he looks to Chevette like a moderate hill would put him in line for a pig-valve. ‘A courier,’ he says, like he’s reminding himself. ‘So proj on,’ she says, and steps around him, but just then the lights go out, the music starts, and it’s the intro to Chrome Koran’s ‘She God’s Girlfriend.’ Chevette, who has kind of a major thing for Chrome Koran, and cranks them on her bike whenever she needs a boost to proj on, just moves with it now, everybody dancing, even the icers from the bathroom. With the asshole gone, or anyway forgotten she notices how much better these people look dancing. She finds herself opposite this girl in a leather skirt, little black boots with jingling silver spurs. Chevette grins; the girl grins back. ‘You’re from the city?’ the girl asks, as ‘She God’s Girl- 38 friend’ e1~, and for a second Chevette thinks she’s being asked if she’s a municipal messenger. The girl-woman-is older than she’d thought; late twenties maybe, but definitely older than Chevette. Good-looking without looking like it came out of a kit; dark eyes, dark hair cut short. ‘San Francisco?’ Chevette nods. The next tune’s older than she is; that black guy who turned white, and then his face fell in, she guesses. She looks down for her drink but they all look alike. Her Japanese doll dances past, bangs swinging, no recognition in her eyes as she sees Chevette. ‘Cody can usually find all he needs, in San Francisco,’ the woman says, a tiredness behind her voice but at the same time you can tell she thinks it’s all pretty funny. German, Chevette thinks by her accent. ‘Who?’ The woman raises her eyebrows. ‘Our host.’ But she’s still got her wide easy grin. ‘Just sort of walked in . . ‘Could I only say the same!’ The woman laughs. ‘Why?’ ‘Then I could walk out again.’ ‘You don’t like it?’ Up close, she smells expensive. Chevette’s suddenly worried about how she must smell herself, after a day on the bike and no shower. But the woman takes her elbow and leads her aside. ‘You don’t know Cody?’ ‘No.’ Chevette sees the drunk, the asshole, through the doorway into the next room, where the lights are still on. He’s looking right at her. ‘And I think maybe I should leave now, okay?’ ”t, _1 ,i . ‘