“Use them yet?”
“Just the power,” Rydell said. “The other one, I don’t know what it jacks with.”
“Neither do I,” said Laney. “Is she there?”
“She was,” Rydell said, looking around in the dark for his fairy star, then remembering he was wearing sunglasses.
His hand found a switch that dangled from a wire near his head. He clicked it. A bare fifty-watt bulb came on. He slid the glasses down his nose and peered over them, finding the projector still there and still plugged in. “The thermos-thing’s still here.”
“Don’t let that out of your sight,” Laney said. “Or the cables. I don’t know what we need her to do there, but it’s all around her.”
“What’s all around her?” “The change.” – “Laney, she said you told her the world was going to end.” “Is going to end,” Laney corrected. “Why’d you tell her that?”
Laney sighed, the deep end of his sigh becoming a cough, which he seemed to choke off. “As we know it, okay?” he managed. “As we know it. And that’s all I or anyone else can tell you about that. It’s not what I want you thinking about. You’re working for me, remember?”
And you’re crazy, Rydell thought, but I’ve got your credit chip in my pocket. “Okay,” he said, “what’s next?”
“You have to go to the site of a double homicide, one that took place last night, on the bridge.”
“What do you want me to try to find out?”
“Nothing,” Laney said. “Just look like you’re trying to find something
Out. Pretend. Like you’re investigating. Call me when you’re ready to go, I’ll give you the GPS fix for the spot.” 169 “Hey,” Rydell said, “what if I do find something out?”
“Then call me.”
“Don’t hang up,” Rydell said. “How come you haven’t been in touch with her, Laney? She said you two were separated.”
“The people who, well, ‘own’ her, that’s not quite the term, really, but they’d like to talk to me, because she’s missing. And the Lo/Rez people too. So I need to be incommunicado at the moment, as far as they’re concerned. But she hasn’t tried to reach me, Rydel!. She’ll be able to, when she needs to.” He hung up.
Took the glasses off, left them folded on the pillow, and crawled to the end of the bed. “Hey,” he said to the thermos-thing, “you there?” Nothing.
He started getting himself together. He unpacked his duffel, used the switchblade to cut a couple of slits in it, took off his nylon belt and threaded it through the slits, using it as a strap, so he could sling the bag over his shoulder.
“Hey,” he said again to the thermos-thing, “you there? I’m gonna unplug you now.” He hesitated, did. He put it in the duffel, along with the power cable, the other cable, and his Lucky Dragon fanny pack, this last because the thing had already saved his ass once, and it might be lucky. He put his nylon jacket on, put the sunglasses in his pocket, and, as an afterthought, gingerly put the switchblade in his right front trouser pocket. Then he imagined it opening there, thought about its lack of a safety catch, and, even more gingerly, fished it out and put it in the side pocket of his jacket.
AND found the place without too much trouble, though Laney’s mode of C PS-by-phone was pretty basic. Laney had a fix on the spot (Rydell had no idea how) but no map of the bridge, so he triangulated Rydell’s sunglasses somehow and told him to walk back toward San Francisco, lower level, keep walking, keep walking, getting warmer. Okay, turn right.
Which had left Rydell facing a blank plywood partition plastered with rain-stained handbills, in a European language he didn’t recognize, for a concert by someone named Ottoman Badchair. He described this to Laney. 170 “That isn’t it,” Laney said, “hut you’re really close.”
There was a shop next door, closed, and he couldn’t figure out what it sold when it was open, and then a gap. Rolls of plastic back in there. Lumber. Someone was building another shop, he thought. If this was it, the crime scene, there ought to be a yellow plastic ribbon with SFPD stapled up, but then he remembered that the police didn’t come out here all that much, and he wondered what they did when they had a body to dispose of. Flipping them over the side wouldn’t make the city too happy, although of course there was no way the city could prove a particular corpse had come off the bridge. Still, it bothered Rydell that there wasn’t any yellow ribbon. He guessed he thought of it as a mark of respect.