Cops in Trouble had installed them in a small stealth hotel below Sunset, and they had been so happy, the first few weeks, that Rydehl could barely stand to remember it.
Whenever they went to bed, it had seemed more like making history than love. The suite was like a little apartment, with its own kitchen and a gas fire, and they’d roll around at night on a blanket on the floor, in front of the fire, with the windows open and the lights out, blue flame flickering low and LAPD gunships drumming overhead, and every time he’d crawl into her arms, or she’d put her face down next to his, he’d known it was good history, the best, and that everything was going to be just fine.
But it hadn’t been.
Rydell had never thought about his looks much. He looked, he’d thought, okay. Women had seemed to like him well enough, and it had been pointed out to him that he resembled the younger Tommy Lee Jones, Tommy Lee Jones being a twentieth-century movie star. And because they’d told him that, he’d watched a few of the guy’s movies and liked them, though the resemblance people saw puzzled him.
He guessed he’d started to worry though, when Cops in Trouble had assigned a skinny blonde intern named Tara-May Ahlenby to follow him around, grabbing footage with a shoulder-mounted steadicam.
Tara-May had chewed gum and fiddled with filters and had generally put Rydell’s teeth on edge. He’d known she was feeding live to Cops in Trouble, and he’d started to get the idea they weren’t too happy with what was coming through. Tara-May hadn’t helped, explaining to Rydehl that the camera added an apparent twenty pounds to anybody’s looks, 85 but that, hey, s1re liked him just the way h~ was, ~lI beefy and solid. But she’d kept sugesting he try working out more. Why not go with that girlfriend of yurs, she’d say, she’s so buff, it hurs.
But Che~tte had never seen the in;ide of a gym in her life; she owed her buf~ess to her genes and a few years she’d spent pounding up and down ~an Francisco hills on a conpetitiom-grade mountain bike, its frame rollel from epoxy and Japanese constriction paper.
So now Hydell sighed, coming up on the co-ner of 4th and Bryant, and on Bryanl turning toward the bridge The bag on his shoulder was starting to demonstrate its weight, its cohIusi(n with gravity. Rydeli stopped, sightd again, readjusted the bag. Put t~oughts of the past out of his mind.
Just walk
NO trouble at all finding that branch of Lucky Uragon.
Couldn’t miss it, smack in what hal been the middle of Bryant, dead center as you approached the entrance to the bridge. He hadn’t been able to s~e it, coming along Bryant, ~ecaus~ it was behind the jumble of old coirrete tank traps they’d dropped thore after the quake, but once you got past those, there it was.
He coulc see, walking up to it, that it was m newer model than the one he’d worled in on Sunset. It had fev~er corrers, so there was less to chip off or med repair. He supposed that designing a Lucky Dragon module was ~bout designing something that would hold up under millions of uncaing and even hostile hanth. Ultirrately, he thought, you’d wind up witFsomething hike a seashell, hard and smooth.
The storton Sunset had had a finish that a:e graffiti. The gang kids would come and tag it; twenty minute~ later these flat, dark, vaguely crab-like pat:hes of dark blue would come gliding around the corner. Rydell had mver understood how they ‘vorke4 and Durius said they’d been deve1o~ed in Singapore. They seemed to be embedded, a few millimeters dowi into the surface, which seas a scrt of non-glossy gel-coat affair, but abe to move around under there. Smart material, he’d heard that called. And they’d glide up to the tag, ~vi-iatever artfully abstract scrawl had been sprayed there to declare fealty or mark territory or swear 86 revenge (Durius had been able to read these things and construct a narrative out of them) and start eating it. You couldn’t actually see the crablegs move. They just sort of nuzzled in and gradually the tag started