‘You know who that is?’
‘No.’ Reaching the platform, putting the bike down to wheel it.
‘That’s some serious money. Advertising. Harwood Levine, but that was his father.’
‘Well, I said it was rich.’ Not paying him much attention.
‘His father’s company did Millbank’s PR, both elections.’
But she was activating the recognition-loop now, not bothering with the screamers from Radio Shack. Sammy’s Fluoro-Rimz pulsed as he set his bike down beside hers. ‘I’ll loop it to mine. Be okay here anyway.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Sammy said, ‘last two I lost.’ He watched her pull the loop out, twist it around his bike’s frame, careful of the pink-and-black enamel, and seal it with her thumbprint.
She headed for the yellow lift, glad to see it there, where she’d left it, and not at the top of the track. ‘Let’s do this thing, okay?’ Remembering she’d meant to buy Skinner some soup from Thai Johnny’s wagon, that sweet-sour lemon one he liked.
When she’d told Sammy she wanted to mess, wanted her own bike, he’d gotten her this little Mexican headset taught you every street in San Francisco. Three days and she had it down, pretty much, even though he said that wasn’t like the map in a messenger’s head. You needed to know buildings, how to get into them, how to act, how to keep your wheels from getting stolen. But when he’d taken her in to meet Bunny, that was magic.
Three weeks and she’d earned enough to buy her first serious bike. That was magic, too.
Somewhere around then she started hanging out after work with a couple of the other Allied girls, Tami Two and Alice Maybe, and that was how she’d wound up at Cognitive Dissidents, that night she’d met Lowell.
‘Nobody locks their door here,’ Sammy said, on the ladder below her, as she lifted the hatch.
Chevette closed her eyes, saw a bunch of cops (whatever that would look like) standing around Skinner’s room. Opened her eyes and stuck her head up, eyes level with the floor.
Skinner was on his bed, his little television propped on his chest, big old yellow toenails sticking out of holes in his lumpy gray socks. He looked at her over the television.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘I brought Sammy. From work.’ She climbed up, making room for Sammy Sal’s head and shoulders.
‘Howdy,’ Sammy Sal said.
Skinner just stared at him, colors from the little screen flicking across his face.
‘How you doin’?’ Sammy Sal asked, climbing up.
‘Bring anything to eat?’ Skinner asked her.
‘Thai Johnny’ll have soup ready in a while,’ she said, moving toward the shelves, the magazines. Dumb-ass thing to say and she knew it, because Johnny’s soup was always ready; he’d started it years ago and just kept adding to the pot.
‘How you doin’, Mr. Skinner?’ Sammy Sal stood slightly hunched, feet apart, holding his helmet with both hands, like a boy saying hello to his girlfriend’s father. He winked at Chevette.
‘What you winkin’ at, boy?’ Skinner shut the set off and snapped its screen shut. Chevette had bought it for him off a container-ship in the Trap. He said he couldn’t tell the difference anymore between the ‘programs’ and the ‘commercials,’ whatever that meant.
‘Somethin’ in my eye, Mr. Skinner,’ Sammy Sal said, his big feet shifting, even more like a nervous boyfriend. Made Chevette want to laugh. She got behind Sammy’s back and reached in behind the magazines. It was there. Into her pocket.
‘You ever seen the view from up top here, Sammy?’ She knew she had this big crazy grin on, and Skinner was staring at it, trying to figure what was happening, but she didn’t care. She swung up the ladder to the roof-hatch.
‘Gosh, no, Chevette, honey. Must be just breathtaking.’
‘Hey,’ Skinner said, as she opened the hatch, ‘what’s got into you?’
Then she was up and out and into one of the weird pockets of stillness you got up there sometimes. Usually the wind made you want to lie down and hang on, but then there were these patches when nothing moved, dead calm. She heard Sammy Sal coming up the ladder behind her. She had the case out, was moving toward the edge.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘lemme see.’
She raised the thing, winding up to throw.
He plucked it from her fingers.
‘Hey!’
‘Shush.’ Opening it, pulling them out. ‘Huh. Nice ones…’
‘Sammy!’ Reaching for them. He gave her the case instead.
‘See how you do this now?’ Opening them, one side-piece in either hand. ‘Left is aus, right’s ein. Just move ’em a little.’ She saw how he was doing it, in the light that spilled up through the hatch from Skinner’s room. ‘Here. Check it out.’ He put them on her.
She was facing the city when he did it. Financial district, the Pyramid with its brace on from the Little Grande, the hills behind that. ‘Fuck a duck,’ she said, these towers blooming there, buildings bigger than anything, a stone regular grid of them, marching in from the hills. Each one maybe four blocks at the base, rising straight and featureless to spreading screens like the colander she used to steam vegetables. Then Chinese writing filled the sky. ‘Sammy…’
She felt him grab her as she lost her balance.
The Chinese writing twisted into English.
SUNFLOWER CORPORATION
‘Sammy…’
‘Huh?’
‘What the fuck is this?’ Anything she focused on, another label lit the sky, dense patches of technical words she didn’t understand.
‘How should I know,’ he said. ‘Let me see.’ Reaching for the glasses.
‘Hey,’ she heard Skinner say, his voice carrying up through the hatch, ‘it’s Scooter. What you doin’ back here?’
Sammy Sal pulled the glasses off and she was kneeling, looking down through the hatch at that Japanese nerd who came around to see Skinner, the college boy or social worker or whatever he was. But he looked even more lost than usual. He looked scared. And there was somebody with him.
‘Hey, Scooter,’ Skinner said, ‘how you doing?’
‘This Mr. Loveless,’ Yamazaki said. ‘He ask to meet you.’
Gold flashed up at Chevette from the stranger’s grin. ‘Hi there,’ he said, taking his hand out of the side pocket of his long black raincoat. The gun wasn’t very big, but there was something too easy in the way he held it, like a carpenter with a hammer. He was wearing surgical gloves. ‘Why don’t you come on down here?’
17 The trap
‘How this works,’ Freddie said, handing Rydell a debit-card, ‘you pay five hundred to get in, then you’re credited for five hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise.’
Rydell looked at the card. Some Dutch bank. If this was how they were going to pay him, up here, maybe it was time he asked them what he’d actually be getting. But maybe he should wait until Freddie was in a better mood.
Freddie said this Container City place was a good quick bet for clothes. Regular clothes, Rydell hoped. They’d left Warbaby drinking herbal tea in some kind of weird coffee joint because he said he needed to think. Rydell had gone out to the Patriot while Warbaby and Freddie held a quick huddle, there.
‘What if he wants us, wants the car?’
‘He’ll beep us,’ Freddie said. He showed Rydell how to put the debit-card into a machine that gave him a five-hundred-dollar Container City magstrip and validated the parking on the Patriot. ‘This way.’ Freddie pointed at a row of turnstiles.
‘Aren’t you gonna buy one?’ Rydell asked.
‘Shit, no,’ Freddie said. ‘I don’t get my clothes off boats.’ He took a card out of his wallet and showed Rydell the IntenSecure logo.
‘I thought you guys were strictly freelance.’
‘Strictly but frequently,’ Freddie said, feeding the card to a turnstile. It clicked him through. Rydell fed it the magstrip and followed him.
‘Costs people five hundred bucks just to get in here?’
‘Why
people call it the Trap. But that’s just how they make sure the overhead’s covered. You don’t come in here unless you know you’re gonna drop that much. Gives ’em a guaranteed per-cap.’
Container City turned out to be the biggest semi-roofed mall Rydell had ever seen, if you could call something a mall that had ships parked in it, big ones. And the five-hundred-dollar guaranteed purchase didn’t seem to have put anybody off; there were more people in here than out on the street, it looked like. ‘Hong Kong money,’ Freddie said. ‘Bought ’em a hunk of the Embarcadero.’
‘Hey,’ Rydell said, pointing at a dim, irregular outline that rose beyond gantries and towers of floodlights, ‘that’s that bridge, the one people live on.’
‘Yeah,’ Freddie said, giving him a funny look, ‘crazy-ass people.’ Steering Rydell onto an escalator that ran up the white-painted flank of a container ship.
Rydell looked around at Container City as they rose. ‘Crazier than anything in L.A.,’ he said, admiringly.
‘No way,’ Freddie said, ‘I’m from L.A. This just a mall, man.’
Rydell bought a burgundy nylon bomber, two pairs of black jeans, socks, underwear, and three black t-shirts. That came out to just over five hundred. He used the debit-card to make up the difference.
‘Hey,’ he told Freddie, his purchases in a big yellow Container City bag, ‘that’s a pretty good deal. Thanks.’
Freddie shrugged. ‘Where they say those jeans made?’
Rydell checked the tag. ‘African Union.’
‘Slave labor,’ Freddie said, ‘you shouldn’t buy that shit.’
‘I didn’t think about it. They got any food in here?’
‘Food Fair, yeah…’
‘You ever try this Korean pickled shit? It’s hot, man…’
‘I got an ulcer.’ Freddie was methodically spooning plain white frozen yogurt into his mouth with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
‘Stress. That’s stress-related, Freddie.’
Freddie looked at Rydell over the rim of the pink plastic yogurt cup. ‘You trying to be funny?’
‘No,’ Rydell said. ‘I just know about ulcers because they thought my daddy had them.’
‘Well, didn’t he? Your “daddy”? Did he have ’em or not?’
‘No,’ Rydell said. ‘He had stomach cancer.’
Freddie winced, put his yogurt down, rattled the ice in his paper cup of Evian and drank some. ‘Hernandez,’ he said, ‘he told us you were trainin’ to be a cop, some redneck place…’
‘Knoxville,’ Rydell said. ‘I was a cop. Just not for very long.’
‘I hear you, I hear you,’ Freddie said, like he wanted Rydell to relax, maybe even to like him. ‘You got trained and all? Cop stuff?’
‘Well, they try to give you a little bit of everything,’ Rydell said. ‘Crime scene investigation… Like up in that room today. I could tell they hadn’t done the Super Glue thing.’
‘No?’
‘No. There’s this chemical in Super Glue sticks to the water in a print, see, and about ninety-eight percent of a print is water. So you’ve got this little heater, for the glue? Screws into a regular light socket? So you tape up the doors and windows with garbage bags and stuff and you leave that little heater turned on. Leave it twenty-four hours, then you come back and purge the room.’
‘How you do that?’
‘Open up the doors, windows. Then you dust. But they hadn’t done that, over at the hotel. It leaves this film all over. And a smell…’
Freddie raised his eyebrows. ‘Shit. You almost kinda technical, aren’t you, Rydell?’
‘Mostly it’s just common sense,’ he said. ‘Like not going to the bathroom.’
‘Not going?’
‘At a crime scene. Don’t ever use the toilet. Don’t flush it. You drop something in a toilet, the way the water goes… You ever notice how it goes up, underneath there?’
Freddie nodded.
‘Well, maybe your perp flushed it after he dropped something in there. But it doesn’t always work like it’s meant to, and it might be just floating back there… You come in and flush it again, then it’s gone for sure.’
‘Damn,’ Freddie said, ‘I never knew that.’
‘Common sense,’ Rydell said, wiping his lips with a paper napkin.
‘I think Mr. Warbaby’s right about you, Rydell.’
‘How’s that?’
‘He says we’re wasting you, just letting you drive that four-by-four. Bein’ straight with you, man, I wasn’t sure, myself.’ Freddie waited, like he figured Rydell might take offense.
‘Well?’
‘You know that brace on Mr. Warbaby’s leg?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know that bridge, the one you noticed when we were coming up here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And Warbaby, he showed you that picture of that tough-ass messenger kid?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well,’ Freddy said, ‘She’s the one Mr. Warbaby figures took that man’s property. And she lives out on that bridge, Rydell. And that bridge, man, that’s one evil motherfucking place. Those people anarchists, antichrists, cannibal motherfuckers out there, man…’
‘I heard it was just a bunch of homeless people,’ Rydell said, vaguely recollecting some documentary he’d seen in Knoxville, ‘just sort of making do.’
‘No, man,’ Freddie said, ‘homeless fuckers, they’re on the street. Those bridge motherfuckers, they’re like king-hell satanists and shit. You think you can just move on out there yourself? No fucking way. They’ll just let their own kind, see? Like a cult. With ’nitiations and shit.’
“Nitiations?”
‘Black ’nitiates,’ Freddie said, leaving Rydell to decide that he probably didn’t mean it racially.
‘Okay,’ Rydell said, ‘but what’s it got to do with that brace on Warbaby’s knee?’
‘That’s where he got that knee hassled,’ Freddie said. ‘He went out there, knowing he was takin’ his life in his hands, to try and recover this little baby. Baby girl,’ Freddie added, like he liked the ring of that. ‘’Cause these bridge motherfuckers, they’ll do that.’
‘Do what?’ Rydell asked, flashing back to the Pooky Bear killings.
‘They steal children,’ Freddie said. ‘And Mr. Warbaby and me, we can’t either of us go out there anymore, Rydell, because those motherfuckers are on to us, you followin’ me?’
‘So you want me to?’ Rydell asked, stuffing his folded napkin into the oily white paper box that had held his two Kim Chee WaWa’s.
‘I’ll let Mr. Warbaby explain it to you,’ Freddie said.
They found Warbaby where they’d left him, in this dark, high-ceilinged coffee place in what Freddie said was North Beach. He was wearing those glasses again and Rydell wondered what he might be seeing.
Rydell had brought his blue Samsonite in from the Patriot, his bag from Container City. He went into the bathroom to change his clothes. There was just the one, unisex, and it really was a bathroom because it had a bathtub in it. Not like anybody used it, because there was this mermaid painted full-size on the inside, with a brown cigarette butted out on her stomach, just above where the scales started.
Rydell discovered that Kevin’s khakis were split up the ass. He wondered how long he’d been walking around like that. But he hadn’t noticed it back at Container City, so he hoped it had happened in the car. He took the IntenSecure shirt off, stuffed it into the wastebasket, put on one of the black t-shirts. Then he unlaced his trainers and tried to figure out a way to change pants, socks, and underwear without having to put his feet on the floor, which was wet. He thought about doing it in the tub, but that looked sort of scummy, too. Decided you could manage it, sort of, by standing with your feet on the top of your sneakers, and then sort of half-sitting on the toilet. He put everything he took off into the basket. Wondering how much the debit-card Freddie had given him was still good for, he transferred his wallet to the right back pocket of his new jeans. Pu
t on his new jacket. Washed his hands and face in a gritty trickle of water. Combed his hair. Packed the rest of his new clothes into the Samsonite, saving the Container City bag to keep dirty laundry in.
He wanted a shower, but he didn’t know when he’d get one. Clean clothes were the next best thing.
Warbaby looked up when Rydell got back to his table. ‘Freddie’s told you a little about the bridge, has he, Rydell?’
‘Says it’s all baby-eatin’ satanists.’
Warbaby glowered at Freddie. ‘Too colorfully put, perhaps, but all too painfully close to the truth, Mr. Rydell. Not at all a wholesome place. And effectively outside the reach of the law. You won’t find our friends Svobodov or Orlovsky out there, for instance. Not in any official capacity.’
Rydell caught Freddie start to grin at that, but saw how it was pinched off by Warbaby’s glare.
‘Freddie gave me the idea you want me to go out there, Mr. Warbaby. Go out there and find that girl.’
‘Yes,’ Warbaby said, gravely, ‘we do. I wish that I could tell you it won’t be dangerous, but that is not the case.’
‘Well… How dangerous is it, Mr. Warbaby?’
‘Very,’ Warbaby said.
‘And that girl, she’s dangerous, too?’
‘Extremely,’ Warbaby said, ‘and all the more because she doesn’t always look it. You saw what was done to that man’s throat, after all…’
‘Jesus,’ Rydell said, ‘you think that little girl did that?’
Warbaby nodded, sadly. ‘Terrible,’ he said, ‘these people will do terrible things…’
When they got out to the car, he saw that he’d parked it right in front of this mural of J. D. Shapely wearing a black leather biker jacket and no shirt, being carried up to heaven by half a dozen extremely fruity-looking angels with long blond rocker hair. There were these blue, glowing coils of DNA or something spiraling out of Shapely’s stomach and attacking what Rydell assumed was supposed to be an AIDS virus, except it looked more like some kind of rusty armored space station with mean robot arms.
It made him think what a weird-ass thing it must’ve been to be that guy. About as weird as it had ever been to be anybody, ever, he figured. But it would be even weirder to be Shapely, and dead like that, and then have to look at that mural.