Had this been a real mugger, Michaels would have been looking at a crushed skull–unless Toni’s silat instruction would have let him dance the crowbar and poke the guy with the stun-gun electrodes. And he wasn’t good enough at that to trust it yet.
He shook his head in disgust. He picked up a spare cartridge from the supply on the table and put it into his belt holder.
He re clipped the taser to his belt.
“Reset,” he told the computer.
“Two to thirty seconds random start.” He pointedly did not look at Howard and Fernandez. He knew they’d be smiling.
Saturday, December 18th, 8:15 a.m.
Washington, D.c.
Toni sat on the lounger her oldest brother.
Junior, had given [her for Christmas three years ago. He owned a furniture store in a nicer section of Queens–which wasn’t saying much– bar and had gotten stuck with several chairs he couldn’t sell and [couldn’t ship back, since the manufacturing company had bar gone out of business between the time he ordered the shipment and when it arrived.
It was a comfortable chair, but kind of a putrid, mottled green color that apparently hadn’t overwhelmed any of his customers. Somebody might as well get some use from it, he’d told her.
She smiled into the phone, a vox-only connection with her mother. Mama had never cottoned to the idea of picture phones. What if the phone rang before she put her face on? her hair was messed up? If she was in the shower?
“Mama, if you’re so worried about how much these calls are cos ting me, why don’t you get an ISDN or a DL and let Aldo hook Papa’s computer to it? For ten dollars a month, we could talk over the net as much as we want.” “I don’t wanna be foolin” with no computer business,” Mama said.
“It’s too complicated.” “It’s not any more complicated than using the telephone.
All you have to do is turn it on and tell it my number if you want to call. If I call you, you just have to touch a button when it beeps, and you get audio and video.” “It’s too complicated.” Toni grinned again. Mama would never change.
There was a bare-bones computer in the ground-floor brownstone apartments where Toni had grown up, a birthday gift from Toni and the boys a couple of years ago. Most American homes these days had some kind of house computer, but Mama didn’t want anything to do with it. While she didn’t cross herself when she walked past it, Toni had long believed that Mama looked at the thing as if it were the spawn of Satan, just waiting to ensnare her in its tendrils and drag her off to electronic Hades. Sophia Banks Fiorella was sixty-five, and had six children, five of them boys, all of them college-educated. Aldo, at thirty-one, the youngest child save for Toni, was a high level programmer for the State of New York’s judicial system, and if he couldn’t convince Mama to use the computer after all the Sunday dinners trying, Toni was wasting her time.
“So, whenna you comin’ home?” “Thursday night late,” Toni said.
“They’re giving us the 24th off, but I have to work on the 23rd.” “You need Papa to pick you up at the airport?” “Papa is not supposed to be drivin’. Mama, he can’t see that good. I thought Larry was gonna talk to him about that.” Toni noticed that her Bronx accent had thickened considerably as she talked to Mama. It always did.
“That” sounded an awful lot like “dat,” and the “coming” endings to words lost the g completely.
“You know your father. He don’t hear what he don’t wanna hear.” “We’re gonna get one of those steering-wheel lock bars for the car if he doesn’t stop it.” “Tony Junior already tried that. It took Papa about two minutes to figure out how to take it off. He’s not stupid.” “I didn’t say he was stupid. But he is half blind and if he keeps driving, he is gonna kill somebody’ “Okay, so Larry or Jimmy will pick you up.” “I’m not flying. Mama, I’m taking the train and I’ll catch a cab from Penn Station.” “Late at night my daughter should be inna cab?
That’s dangerous, a young girl by herself.” Toni laughed. She was pushing thirty and adept at self defense, more so than any man she knew.
She carried a laser with which she was qualified Expert, and had been a federal agent for years, but Mama didn’t want her ri ding in a taxi from the train station.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got my key, I’ll go to the guest unit.” “Mike is coming from Baltimore with his wife and children, they’ll be in the big bedroom and the kid’s room.” “I’ll stay in the little bedroom. Don’t worry. Mama, I’ll see you Christmas Eve morning okay?” “Okay. Look, you need to go, this call is probably cos ting you a fortune. I’ll see you Friday. What time do you want to get up? You want to sleep late?” Toni grinned again. It didn’t matter what time she said, Mama would be at her door at six-thirty sharp, and breakfast would be ready.
“About six-thirty,” Toni said.
“Okay, I’ll get up early. I love you, baby. You be careful.” “I will be. Mama I love you too.” Toni put the phone down and shook her head.
One of the joys of her big Catholic family was the annual holiday gathering.
What with her brothers, their wives, and the nieces and nephews, there would be twenty-some people at Mama’s, not even counting the uncles, aunts, and odd cousin or two who might show up for dinner. It wasn’t so crowded since Papa had bought the units on either side of the old one and knocked out walls to make one large apartment, but even so, it would be bustling.
Toni was very much looking forward to it. Too bad she couldn’t bring Alex with her. Mama would be so thrilled that Toni had a potential husband–and any man she looked at more than twice was, as far as Mama was concerned, a potential husband–that she wouldn’t be able to sit down, she’d be so busy doing things for him.
Maybe someday.
hapter 4 Saturday, December 18th, 11:45 a.m.
Arisona Territory Jay Gridley rode the net.
On a horse.
Until recently, he had favored a Dodge Viper in virtual reality, playing scenarios that involved superhighways and high speed. Hell of a car, the Viper, a rocket with wheels, and he liked putting the pedal to the metal and feeling the wind in his hair. But he’d gotten into a Western frame of mind a couple of weeks ago, and after doing a fair amount of research had built himself a cowboy scenario. You could use just about anything you wanted for virtual reality–VR–NET travel, and it didn’t have to be historically accurate; you could have cowboys and spacemen in the same scenario. But when you were a programmer at Jay’s level, you had certain standards. At the very least, it had to be consistent, and above all, it had to look good.
In this scenario. Jay wore button-fly Levi’s, real cowhide pointed-toe cowboy boots, and a plaid wool shirt, along with a red bandanna, a cream-colored Stetson hat measured in gallons, and a Colt.45 Peacemaker six-gun strapped around his waist in a period leather holster. No drugstore cowpoke clothes for him, no pearl-button shirts with fringe, or chaps or anything like that. He sat upon a hand-tooled saddle, and his horse was a pinto stallion named Buck. Well, formerly a stallion-the VR horse had been gelded, to keep him from tearing off after passing female horses.
Jay had thought about a white horse or even a palomino, but figured those were maybe a bit over the top. Most of the off-the-shelf software would never have gotten into this kind of detail, but they weren’t held to his standards.
Buck picked his way along a narrow switch backed trail that wound through the foothills of a VR mountain range in the Old West. Jay kept a lookout for rattlesnakes–sidewinders, they called them out here–Indians, or desperados who might want to stick him up. There was a net nexus coming up, represented by a little town called Black Rock ahead a couple of miles, but the sun was almost straight up and it was oven-hot and bone-dry here, and he needed to stop for a drink. The rocky trail was mostly bare, with only a few lizards and some scraggly bushes that might grow to be tumbleweeds someday–if they were lucky, and if they didn’t spontaneously burst into flame first.
He grinned.
Damn, but he was good. A very tight little scenario, if he did say so himself.
He reined up next to a dried and dusty stream bed, dismounted, and took a swig from his water bottle, a canvas bag with a wooden plug. The canvas bag held about a gallon, and was woven loosely enough so it allowed a little liquid to seep through it, the idea being that the evaporation would cool the water, but it was still pretty warm. He took his hat off, poured a pint or so into it, and offered it to Buck. The horse noisily lapped the water from the hat.