He grabbed Chevette under the arm and hustled her across the floor, adrenaline flooding the pain in his side. The stream of projected light, behind him, was just enough to show him the wall to the right of the door. He hoped it was plywood, and none too thick, as he pulled the switchblade from his pocket, popped it, and drove the blade in overhand, just at eye level. It punched through, up to the handle, and he yanked it sideways and down, hearing an odd little sizzle of parting wood fiber. He made it down to waist height, twisted it, back to the left, and three-quarters of the way up the other side before he heard the glasslike tink of the ceramic snapping.
“Kick. Here,” he said, striking the center of his cutout with the stub of the blade. “Brace up against me. Kick!”
And she did. She could kick like a mule, Chevette. The section gave way with her second try, and he was boosting her up and through, try- 218 ing not to scream at the pain. He was never sure how he made it through himself, hut he did, expecting any second one of those subsonics would find him.
There were people unconscious, outside the door, and other people kneeling, trying to help them.
“This way,” he said, starting to limp in the direction of the ramp and the Lucky Dragon. But she wasn’t with him. He swung around, saw her headed in the opposite direction. “Chevette!”
He went after her but she didn’t slow down. “Chevette!”
She turned. Her right eye swelling, bruised, swimming with tears; the left wide and gray and crazy now. As if she saw him but didn’t register who it was she saw. “Rydell?”
And all this time he’d thought about her, remembered her, having her there in front of him was something completely different: her long straight nose, the line of her jaw, the way he knew her lips looked in profile.
“It’s okay,” he said, which was absolutely all he could think of to say.
“It’s not a dream?”
“No,” he said.
“They shot Carson. Somebody shot him. I saw somebody shoot him.”
“Who was he? Why’d he hit you?”
“He was-” She broke off, her front teeth pressing into her lower lip. “Somebody I lived with. In LA.”
“Huh,” Rydell said, all he could manage around the idea that the scarf had just shot Chevette’s new boyfriend.
“I mean I wasn’t with him. Not now. He was following me, but, Jesus, Rydell, why’d that guy. . . Just walked up and shot him!”
Because he was going after me, Rydell thought. Because he wanted to wail on me and I’m supposed to be theirs. But Rydell didn’t say that. “The guy with the gun,” he said, instead, “he’ll be looking for me. He’s not alone. That means you don’t want to be with me when he finds me.”
“Why’s he looking for you?”
“Because I’ve got something-” But he didn’t; he’d left the projector in the bar. 219 “You were looking for me, back there?” I’ve been looking for you since you walked out. I’ve been working up and down the face of the waking world, every last day, with a tiny little comb, looking for you. And each day shook out empty, never never you. And he heard in memory the sound those rocks made, punching into the polymer behind the Lucky Dragon on Sunset. Pointless, pointless. “No. I’m working. Private investigation for a man named Laney.”
She didn’t believe him. “Carson followed me up here. I didn’t want to be with him. Now you. What is this?”
Laney says it’s the end of the world. “I’m just here, Chevette. You’re just here. I gotta go now-”
“Where?”
“Back in the bar. I left something. It’s important.”
“Don’t go back there!”
“I have to.”
“Rydell,” she began, starting to shake, “you’re … you’re-” And looked down at her open hands, the palms dark with something. And he saw that it was blood, and knew that it would be the boyfriend’s, that she’d crawled through that. She started to sob, and wiped her palms down her black jeans, trying to get it off.