to unravel, de-rez, molecules of paint sucked down into the blue of the Lucky Dragon graffiti-eaters.
And once someone had come with a smart tag, a sort of decal they’d somehow adhered to the wall, although neither RydelI nor Durius had
been able to figure how they’d done it without being seen. Maybe, Dunus said, they’d shot it from a distance. It was the tag of a gang called
the Chupacabras, a fearsome spiky thing, all black and red, insectoid
– -‘ and menacing and, Rydell thought, kind of good-looking, exciting-looking. He’d seen it worn as a tattoo, in the store. The kids who wore it favored those contacts, the kind gave you pupils like a snake’s. When the graffiti-eaters came out after it though, it had moved.
They’d edge up to it, and it would sense them and move away. Almost too slow to see it happening, but it moved. Then the graffiti-eaters would move again. Durius and Rydell watched it, the first night, get all the way around to the back of the store. It was starting to work its way back around toward the front when they went off shift.
Next shift it was still there, and a couple of standard spray-bomb tags as well. The graffiti-eaters were locked on the smart tag and not
taking care of business. Durius showed it to Mr. Park, who didn’t like it that they hadn’t told him before. Rydell showed him where they’d logged
it in the shift record when they clocked off, which had just pissed Mr. Park off more.
About an hour later, two men in white Tyvek coveralls showed up in an unmarked, surgically clean white van and went to work. Rydell would’ve liked to watch them get the smart tag off, but there was a run of shoplifters that night and he didn’t get to see what they did to it. They didn’t use scrapers or solvents, he knew that. They used a notebook and a couple of adhesive probes. Basically, he guessed, they reprogrammed it, messed with its code, and after they left, the graffiti-eaters were back out there, slurping down the latest Chupacabra iconography.
This Lucky Dragon by the bridge was smooth and white as a new china plate, Rydell observed, as he came up to it. It looked like a piece 87 of some different dream, fallen here. The entrance to the bridge had a werd unplanned drama to it, and Rydell wondered if there’d been a lot of Ileetings, back in Singapore, about whether or not to put this unit here. Lucky Dragon had some units on prime tourist real estate, and Rydell knew that from watching the Global Interactive Video Column back in LA; there was one in the mall under Red Square, that fancy KDatn branch in Berlin, the big-ass one in Piccadilly, London, but putting one here struck him as a strange, or strangely deliberate, move.
The bridge was a dodgy place, safe enough but not “tourist safe.” There was a walk-on tourist contingent, sure, and a big one, particularly on this end of the bridge, but no tours, no guides. If you went, you went on your own. Chevette had told him how they repelled evangelicals, and the Salvation Army and any other organized entity, in no untertain terms. Rydell figured that in fact that was part of the draw of the place, that it was unregulated.
Autonomous zone, Durius called that. He’d told Rydell that Sunset Strip had started out as one of those, a place between police jurisdictions, and somehow that had set the DNA of the street, which was why, sas you still got hookers in elf hats there, come Christmas.
But maybe Lucky Dragon knew something people didn’t, he thought. Things could change. His father, for instance, used to swear that Times Square had been a really dangerous place.
Rydell made his way through the crowd flowing on and off the bridge and past the Global Interactive Video Column, daydreaming as he did that he’d look up and see the Sunset branch there, with Praisegod beaming sunnily at him from out in front.
What he got was some skater kid in Seoul shaking his nuts at the camera.