But what really bothered him now was that he was just doing what they’d probably expect him to: heading back to wherever he was going to spend the night (assuming they didn’t already know where that was). And once he got there, what then? He’d be trapped, up in his room, no exit but that ladder, and they’d have him. He guessed he could just keep walking, but he didn’t see what that would get him either.
What he needed, he thought, was something he could do that they weren’t expecting. Something that put the shoe on the other foot, or anyway he should lose them, whoever they were. Then maybe he could raise Laney and get Laney’s take on who they might be.
He’d had an instructor in Knoxville who’d liked to talk about lateral thinking. Which in a way wasn’t that far off what Durius meant when 186 he talked about serious users getting lateral, out on the sidewalk outside Lucky Dragon. Just losing it. What it took, sometimes, was just your basic jack move, something nobody, maybe even you, was expecting.
To his right now, he saw he was passing a stretch of wall that was actually canvas, like a sail or an old tent, stretched tight over lumber and maybe half an inch thick with however many coats of paint it had had since it was put up here. Some kind of mural, but he wasn’t noticing that. The switchblade sounded so loud, opening it, that he was sure they’d have heard it, so he just moved, sweeping the ceramic blade down, then sideways, to cut himself a backward “L.” Through which he ducked and stepped, as if in a dream, the paint on the canvas crackling as he did so. Into warmth and a different light and these completely unexpected people seated around a table, cards in their hands, mother-of-pearl chips piled on the table in front of them. And one of them, a woman, the nipples of her bare breasts transfixed with surgical steel, the stub of a small cigar wedged into the corner of her mouth, met Rydell’s eye and said: “I’ll see you one and raise you one.” “Never mind me,” Rydell heard himself say, as he saw a man with a tattooed scalp, still holding his hand of cards, raise his other hand, with a gun in it, from beneath the table. And simultaneously he realjzed that he still had the black knife, open, in his hand. He felt a weird wash of cold down his spine as his feet just kept moving, past the table and the man and the deep and somehow limitlessly large black hole in the winking ring of stainless steel that was the pistol’s muzzle.
Through a thick brown velour curtain that smelled of ancient movie houses and he was still moving, apparently intact. Feeling his hand thumb the button, closing and cocking the blade against his hip as he went, something he wouldn’t have thought of doing otherwise. Pocketing the knife. In front of him a ladder rough-sawn from two-by-fours. Straight to it and just climbing, as fast as he could. Took him up through a square hole in a splintered timber deck, narrow walkway between walls cut from peeling billboards, a woman’s huge stained paper eye faded there as if staring into infinite distance.
Stop. Breathe. Heart pounding. Listen.
Laughter. The card players?
187 He started along the walkway, feeling a rising sense of triumph: he’d done it. Lost ’em. Wherever he was, up here, he’d be able to find his way back out, and down, and then he’d see how it went. But he had the projector and he’d lost them and he hadn’t gotten his ass shot for interrupting somebody’s poker game. “Lateral thinking,” he said, congratulating himself, as he reached the end of the walkway and rounded a corner.
He felt the rib crack as the weight lifter hit him and knew that the black glove, like the ones he’d trained with in Nashville, was weighted with lead.
It sent him back against the opposite wall, his head slamming against that, and his whole left side refused to move when he tried.