Virtual Light

“Why’d you say that, about matching tattoos?” Rydell was looking around the room. Clean. Blank walls. Soft light but no shadows.

“Because he’ll leave us alone while we’re trying to pick one, and ’cause it’ll take us so long to make up our minds.”

Rydell put his Samsonite down and sat on the couch. “So we can stay here?”

“Yeah, as long as we keep calling up flash.”

“What’s that?”

She picked up a little remote and turned one of the wallscreens on. Started blipping through menus. Hi-rez close-ups of tattooed skin. The fat man came back with a couple of big rough mugs of steaming tea on a little tray. “Yours is green” he said to Chevette Washington, “and yours is Mormon” he said to Rydell, “because you did ask for coffee…”

“Oh, thanks” Rydell said, taking the mug he was offered.

“Now you two take plenty of time” the fat man said, “and you want anything, just call.” He went out, tray tucked under his arm, and closed the door behind him.

“Mormon?” Rydell sniffed at the tea. It didn’t smell much of anything.

“Aren’t supposed to drink coffee. That kind of tea’s got ephedrine in it.”

“Got drugs in it?”

“It’s made from a plant with something that’ll keep you awake. Like coffee.”

Rydell decided it was too hot to drink now anyway. Put it down on the floor beside the couch. The girl on the wallscreen had a dragon sort of like his uncle’s, but on her left hip. Little tiny silver ring through the top edge of her belly button. Chevette Washington flipped it to a big sweaty biker-arm with President Milibank’s face looking out from it in shades of gray.

Rydell struggled out of his damp jacket, noticing the ripped shoulder, the cheap white stuffing popping out. He dropped it behind the couch. “You got any tattoos?”

“No” she said.

“So how come you know about this?”

“Lowell” she said, flipping through half a dozen more images, “he’s got a Giger.”

“‘Gigger’?” Rydell opened his Samsonite, got out a pair of socks, and started unlacing his SWAT shoes.

“This painter. Like nineteenth-century or something. Real classical. Bio-mech. Lowell’s got this Giger back-piece done off a painting called ‘N.Y.C. XXIV.’” She said it x, x, i, v. “It’s like this city. Shaded black-work. But he wants sleeves to go with it, so we’d come in here to look for more Gigers to match it.”

“Why don’t you sit down” Rydell said, “you’re making my neck hurt.” She was pacing back and forth in front of the screens. He took his wet socks off, put them in the Container City bag, and put the dry ones on. Thought about leaving his shoes off for a while, but what if he had to leave in a hurry? He put them back on. He was lacing them up when she sat down beside him.

She unzipped her jacket and shrugged it off, the loose Beretta cuff rattling. The sleeves of her plain black t-shirt had been scissored off and her upper arms were smooth and pale. She reached over the end of the couch and put the jacket down, sort of propped against the wall, the leather stiff enough that it just stayed there, its arms slumped down, like it was asleep. Like Rydell wished he could be. Now she had the remote in her hand.

“Hey” Rydell said, “that guy in the raincoat back there, the one shot—” He was about to say the big longhair on the bicycle, but she grabbed his wrist, the handcuff rattling.

“Sammy. He shot Sammy, up at Ski

“Wait. Wait a sec. The glasses. Everybody wants the glasses. That guy wants ’em, Warbaby wants ’em…”

“Who’s Warbaby?”

“The big black man shot the back window out of his car I was stealing. That Warbaby.”

“You think I know what they are?”

“You don’t know why people are after them?”

She gave him a look like you might give a dog that had just told you it was a good day to spend all your money on one particular kind of lottery ticket.

“Let’s start over” Rydell suggested. “You tell me where you got the glasses.”

“Why should I?”

He thought about it. “Because you’d be dead by now if I hadn’t done the kind of dirt-stupid shit I just did, back there.”

She thought about that. “Okay” she said.

Maybe there really was something in the fat man’s Mormon tea, or maybe Rydell had just crossed over into that point of tiredness where it all flipped around for a while and you started to feel like you were more awake, some ways, than you usually ever were. But he wound up sipping that tea and listening to her, and when she’d get too deep into her story to remember to keep flipping the tattoo-pictures on the wallscreen, he’d do it for her.

When you worked it around to sequential order, she was this girl from Oregon, didn’t have any family, who’d come down here and moved out on that bridge with this old man, crazy by the sound of it, had a bad hip and needed somebody around to help him. Then she’d gotten her a job riding a bicycle around San Francisco, delivering messages. Rydell knew about messengers from his foot-patrol period in downtown Knoxville, because you had to keep ticketing them for riding on the sidewalk, traffic violation, and they’d give you a hard time about it. But they made pretty good money if they worked at it. This Sammy she’d said was shot, murdered, he was another messenger, a black guy who’d gotten her on at Allied, where she worked.

And her story of how she’d taken the glasses out of the guy’s pocket at this big drunk party she’d wandered into up in the Morrisey, that made as much sense to him as anything. And it wasn’t the kind of story people made up. Not like the glasses crawled into her hand or anything, she just flat-out stole them, impulse, just because the guy was in her face and obnoxious. Nuisance crime, except they’d turned out to be valuable.

But from her description he knew her asshole up in the Morrisey had been the same one got himself the Cuban necktie, your German-born Costa Rican citizen who maybe wasn’t either, star of that X-rated fax of Warbaby’s and the one Svobodov and Orlovsky had been investigating. If they had been.

“Shit” he said, in the middle of something she was trying to tell him.

“What?”

“Nothing. Keep talking…”

The Russians were bent, and he knew that. They were Homicide, they were bent, and he’d bet dollars to donuts they weren’t even investigating the case. They could talk Warbaby’s way onto the crime-scene, tap their department’s computer, but the rest of it had just been window-dressing, for him, for Rydell, the hired help. And what was that that Freddie had said, about DatAmerica and IntenSecure being basically your same company?

But Chevette Washington was on a roll of her own now, like sometimes when people get started talking they just let it all hang out, and she was saying how Lowell, who was the one with the hair and not the skinhead, and who actually had, sort of, been her boyfriend for a while, was a guy who could (you know?) get things done with computers, if you had the money, and that sort of scared her because he was always talking about the cops and how he didn’t have to worry about them.

Rydell nodded, automatically flipping through a couple more pictures of tattoos—lady there with these pink carnations sort of followed her bikini-line—but really he was listening to something going around in his own head. Like Hernandez was IntenSecure, the Morrisey was IntenSecure, Warbaby was IntenSecure, Freddie said DatAmerica and IntenSecure were like the same thing– “—Desire…”

Rydell blinked. Ski

“Republic. Republic of Desire.”

“What is?”

“Why Lowell says the cops won’t ever bother him, but I told him he was full of shit.”

“Hackers” Rydell said.

“You haven’t heard a word I said.”

“No” Rydell said, “no, that’s not true. Desire. Republic of. Run that one by again, okay?”