‘A tomahawk?”
“Sort of narrow-bladed hatchet, with a spike opposite the blade. Extends the reach, imparts terrific force, and with practice can be thrown with considerable accuracy. Blackwell swears by it. The other two fled, although they both seem to have died in the aftermath of the riot. Personally, I’m sure Blackwell or his ‘mates’ killed them, because he was never charged with the murder of the other three. The sole surviving witness was Rez, whom Blackwell escorted to the barricade the guards had erected in the exercise yard.” Her sake arrived. “It took Rez’s lawyers three months to get Blackwell’s sentence reversed on a technicality. They’ve been together ever since.”
“What was Blackwell in for?”
“Murder,” she said. “Do you know what a standover man is?”
“No.”
“It’s a peculiarly Australian concept. I’m tempted to think it could only have grown out of a culture comprised initially of convicts, but my Australian friends don’t buy that. The standover man is a loner, a predator who preys on other, more prosperous criminals, often extremely dangerous ones. He captures them and ‘stands over’ them. To extort money.”
“What’s that mean?”
“He tortures them until they tell him where their money is. And 150 William Gibson these are often fhirly serious operators, with people paid to take care of them, specifically to prevent this sort of thing
“Tortures them?”
“‘Toe-cutter’ is a related term. When they tell him what he needs to know, he kills them.”
And Blackwell was suddenly and noiselessly and simply there, very black, and matte, in an enormous waxed-cotton drover’s coat. Behind him the faded American advertising and the grays and pinks of gum. Flis fretted scalp concealed by the waxed-cotton crown of a broad black hat.
“Arleigh, dear, you wouldn’t take the name in vain, would you?”
But he smiled at her.
“I’m explaining your earlier career to Mr. Laney, Blackwell. I’d only just gotten up to the massage parlor, and now you’ve ruined it.”
“Never mind. Dinner’s been moved up, at the request of his Rozzer. I’m here to take you. Change of venue as well. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Where?” Arleigh asked, as if not yet prepared to move.
“The Western World,” said Blackwell.
“And me in my good shoes,” she said. 22. Gomi Boy
The trains more crowded now, standing room only, everyone pressed in tight, and somehow the eye-contact rules were different here, but she wasn’t sure how. Her hag with the Sandbenders was jammed up against Masahiko’s back. He was looking at the control-face again, holding it up the way a commuter woLild hold a strategically folded newspaper.
On their way back to Mitsuko’s father’s restaurant, and then she didn’t know what. She’d done the thing that Hiromi hadn’t wanted her to do. And gotten nothing for it but a vaguely unpleasant idea of Rez as someone capable of being boring. And where did it leave her? She’d gone ahead and used Kelsey’s cashcard, to pay for the train, and floW another train back. And Zona had said somebody was looking for her; they could track her when she used the cashcard. Maybe there was a way to cash it in, but she doubted it.
None of this had gone the way she’d tried to imagine it, back in
Seattle, hut then you couldn’t be expected to imagine anyone like
Marya[ice, could you? Or Eddie, or even Hiromi.
Masahiko frowned at the control-face. Chia saw the dots and
squiggles changing.
That thing Maryalice had stuck in her bag. Right here under her arm. She should’ve left it at Mitsuko’s. Or thrown it away, but then what would she say if Eddie or Maryalice showed up? What if it was full of drugs?
In Singapore they hung people, right in the mall, for that. Her
153 father didn’t like it and he said that was one of the reasons he never invited her there. They put it on television, too, so that it was really hard to avoid seeing it, and he didn’t want her to see it. Now she wondered how far Singapore was from Tokyo? She wished she could go there and keep her eyes closed until she was in her father’s apartment, and never turn the rv on, just be there with him and smell his shaving smell and put her face against his scratchy wool shirt, except she guessed you didn’t wear those in Singapore because it was hot there. She’d keep her eyes closed anyway, and listen to him talk about his work, about the arbitrage engines shuttling back and forth through the world’s markets like invisible dragons, fast as light, shaving fragments of advantage for traders like her father