“You’re bigger.” 8 “Size ain’t everything.”
“Sure,” Rydell had said.
ALL that summer Rydell and Durius had been night security at the Lucky Dragon, a purpose-built module that had been coptered into this former car-rental lot on the Strip. Before that, Rydell had been night security at the Chateau, just up the Street, and before that he’d driven a wagon for IntenSecure. Still farther back, briefly and he tried not to think about it too often, he’d been a police officer in Knoxville, Tennessee. Somewhere in there, twice, he’d almost made the cut for Coiis in Trouble, a show he’d grown up on but now managed never to watch.
Working nights at the Lucky Dragon was more interesting than Rydell would have imagined. Durius said that was because it was the only place around, for a mile or so, that sold anything that anyone actually needed, on a regular basis or otherwise. Microwave noodles, diagnostic kits for most STDs, toothpaste, disposable anything, Net access, gum, bottled water. . . There were Lucky Dragons all over America, all over the world for that matter, and to prove it you had your trademark Lucky Dragon Global Interactive Video Column outside. You had to pass it entering and leaving the store, so you’d see whichever dozen Lucky Dragons the Sunset franchise happened to be linked with at that particular moment: Paris or Houston or Brazzaville, wherever. These were shuffled, every three minutes, for the practical reason that it had been determined that if the maximum viewing time was any more, kids in the world’s duller suburbs would try to win bets by having sex on camera. As it was, you got a certain amount of mooning and flashing. Or, still more common, like this shit-faced guy in downtown Prague, as Rydell made his exit to do the curb check, displaying the universal finger.
“Same here,” Rydell said to this unknown Czech, hitching up the neon-pink Lucky Dragon fanny pack he was contractually obligated to wear on duty. He didn’t mind that though, even if it did look like shit: it was bulletproof, with a pull-up Kevlar baby bib to fasten around your neck if the going got rough. A severely lateral customer with a ceramic
9 switchblade had tried to stab Rydell through the Lucky Dragon logo his second week on the job, and Rydell had sort of bonded with the thing after that.
He had that switchblade up in his room over Mrs. Siekevitz’s garage. They’d found it below the peanut butter, after the LAPD had taken the lateral one away. It had a black blade that looked like sandblasted glass. Rydell didn’t like it; the ceramic blade gave it a weird balance, and it was so sharp that he’d already cut himself with it twice. He wasn’t sure what he should do with it.
Tonight’s curb check looked dead simple. There was a Japanese girl standing out there with a seriously amazing amount of legs running down from an even more amazingly small amount of shorts. Well, sort of Japanese. Rydell found it hard to make distinctions like that in LA. Durius said hybrid vigor was the order of the day, and Rydell guessed he was right. This girl with all the legs, she was nearly as tall as Rydell, and he didn’t think Japanese people usually were. But then maybe she’d grown up here, and her family before her, and the local food had made them taller. He’d heard about that happening. But, no, he decided, getting closer, the thing was, she wasn’t actually a girl. Funny how you got that. Usually it wasn’t anything too obvious. It was like he really wanted to buy into everything she was doing to be a girl, but some subliminal message he got from her bone structure just wouldn’t let him.
“Hey,” he said.
“You want me to move?”
“Well,” Rydell said, “I’m supposed to.”
“I’m supposed to stand out here convincing a jaded clientele to buy blow jobs. What’s the difference?”
Rydell thought about it. “You’re freelance,” he decided, “I’m on salary. You go on down the street for twenty minutes, nobody’s going to fire you.” He could smell her perfume through the complicated pollution and that ghostly hint of oranges you got out here sometimes. There were orange trees around, had to be, but he’d never found one.