Guy going by in the direction of Oakland and Rydell’s room.
Young guy with dark military-buzzed hair, black coat, black scarf up 184 around his face. Seemed not to see Rydell, just kept walking, hands in
his pockets. Rydell fell in behind him, about fifteen feet.
He tried to imagine this place the way it had been before, when it was a regular bridge. Millions of cars had gone through here, this same space where he walked now. It had all been open then, just girders and railing and deck; now it was this tunnel, everything patched together out of junk, used lumber, plastic, whatever people could find, all of it lashed up however anybody could get it to stay, it looked like, and some~- how it did stay, in spite of the winds he knew must come through here.
He’d been back in a bayou once, in Louisiana, and something about the way it looked in here reminded him of that: there was stuff hanging
k everywhere, tubing and cables and things whose function he couldn’t identify, and it was like Spanish moss in a way, everything softened at
~ the outline. And the light now was dim and sort of underwater-looking,
~ just these banks of scavenged fluorescents slung every twenty feet or so, some of them dead and others flickering. He walked around a puddle where a vendor had dumped about ten ~ pounds of dirty shaved ice.
Up ahead, he saw the guy with the black scarf turn into a cafй, one ~ ~of these tiny little places you got in here, maybe two small tab1e~ and a counter that sat four or five Big blonde boy looked like a weight lifter was coming out as the scarf went in, and the weight lifter made just that little bit of eye contact with Rydell that told him.
They were doing him: the trade-off. He was being tailed, and by at ~Ieast three people.
~: Weight lifter started in the direction of Rydell’s bed-and-breakfast, ‘:~Treasure Island, Oakland. Back of his neck as wide as Rydell’s thigh. As ~Rydell passed the cafй, he looked in and saw the scarf ordering a cof~: fee. Just as normal as pie. So he didn’t look behind him, because he
knew that if he did that, they’d know. They would. Just like he’d known, when the weight lifter blew it by looking him in the eye. The belt he’d slung the duffel from was cutting into his shoulder, through his nylon jacket, and he thought about Laney and Klaus and
~ the Rooster, about how they all obviously thought the projector was
185 I really important, or valuable. Was that what he was being followed for, or was it about this mystery man of Laney’s, his man who wasn’t there? Otherwise, he didn’t think he had any serious long-term enemies up here, though it was hard to be sure, and he didn’t think these guys were ordinary jackers, because it looked to him like they really knew what they were doing. He reached into the jacket pocket and felt the knife. It was there, and he was glad he had it, though the thought of actually cutting somebody with it bothered him. The thing about knives was that the people who thought they wanted to use them on other people usually had no idea how much mess it made. It wasn’t like in the movies; cut people bled like stuck pigs. He’d had to deal with a few cut people around the Sunset Lucky Dragon. And it could get tricky because who knew who was seropositive? He and Durius had these goggles they were supposed to put on, to keep people’s blood from getting in their eyes, but usually it just happened all at once and they didn’t remember the goggles until it was likely too late anyway.
But the main thing about knives, even ones that cut steel-belt radials like ripe banana, was that they weren’t much good in a gunfight.
Someone had slung up an old anti-shoplifting mirror above a closed stall, and as he approached this he tried to see who might be following him, but there was enough foot traffic in here that he only got a generalized sense of people moving.