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11. Pulling tags
Tuesday, she just wasn’t on. Couldn’t proj. No focus. Bu
“Chev, don’t take this the wrong way, but you got like the monthlies or something?”
“Fuck off, Bu
“Hey, I just mean you’re not your usual ball of fire today. All I mean.”
“Gimme a tag.”
“655 Mo, fifteenth, reception.”
Picked up, made it to 555 Cali, fifty-first floor. Pulled her tag and back down. The day gone gray after morning’s promise.
“456 Montgomery, thirty-third, reception, go freight.”
Pausing, her hand in the bike’s recognition-loop. “How come?”
“Says messengers carvin’ graffiti in the passenger elevators. Go freight or they’ll toss you, be denied access, at which point Allied terminates your employment.”
She remembered seeing Ringer’s emblem carved into the inspection plate in one of 456’s passenger elevators. Fucking Ringer. He’d defaced more elevators than anyone in history. Carried around a regular toolkit to do it with.
456 sent her to EC with a carton wider than she was supposed to accept, but that was what racks and bungles were for, and why give the cage-drivers the trade? Bu
She couldn’t get a run today. There was no routing in effect at Allied, but sometimes you’d get a run by accident; pick up here, drop off there, then something here. But it was rare. When you worked for Allied you rode harder. Her record was sixteen tags in a day; like doing forty at a different company.
She took the purse to Fulton at Masonic, got two flyers after the owner checked to see everything was there.
“Restaurant’s supposed to take it to the cops” Chevette said. “We don’t like to be responsible.” Blank look from the purse-lady, some kind of secretary. Chevette pocketed the fives.
“298 Alabama” Bu
Bust her ass out there to get there, then she’d pick up and do it. But she couldn’t get on top of it, today.
The asshole’s sunglasses…
“For tactical reasons” the blonde said, “we do not currently advocate the use of violence or sorcery against private individuals.”
Chevette had just pumped back from Alabama Street, day’s last tag. The woman on the little CNN flatscreen over the door to Bu
The overlit fluorescent corridor into Allied Messengers smelled of hot styrene, laser printers, abandoned ru
“Happy about something, Sammy Sal?”
Allied’s best-looking thing on two wheels, no contest whatever, DuPree was six-two of ebon electricity poured over a frame of such elegance and strength that Chevette imagined his bones as polished metal, triple-chromed, a quicksilver armature. Like those old movies with that big guy, the one who went into politics, after he’d got the meat ripped off him. Thinking about Sammy Sal’s bones made most girls want him to jump theirs, but not Chevette. He was gay, they were friends, and Chevette wasn’t too sure how she felt about all that anyway, lately.
“Fact is” Sammy Sal said, smearing dirt from his cheek with the back of one long hand, “I’ve decided to kill Ringer. And the truth, y’know, it makes you free…”
“Ho” Chevette said, “you musta pulled a tag over 456 today.”
“I did, dear, do that thing. All the way up, in a dirty freight elevator. A slow dirty freight elevator. And why?”
“Cause Ringer’s ’graved his tag in their brass, Sal, and their rosewood, too?”
“Eggs-ackly, Chevette, honey.” Sammy Sal undid the blue and white banda
“and must begin, now, to systematically sabotage the workplace” Fiona X said, “or be branded an enemy of the human race.”
The door to the dispatch-pit, so thickly stapled with scheds, sub-charts, tattered Muni regs, and faxed complaints that Chevette had no idea what the surface underneath might look like, popped open. Bu
“Wait for me, Sammy Sal” she said.
Bu
Chevette followed him in. He closed the door behind her. The goggles he used for dispatching dangled around his neck, one padded eyepiece patched with cellophane tape. There were no windows in the room and Bu
Bu
“Oughta let Sammy Sal crack it for you” she suggested. “He’s real good.”
“It’s cracked already, sweetheart. What’s wrong with it in the first place. Now tell me what were you doin’ over the Morrisey last night. And it better be good.”
“Pulling a tag” Chevette said, going on automatic, the way she had to if she were going to lie and get away with it. She’d been halfway expecting something like this, but not so soon.
She watched as Bu