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“What about those hackers, Berry? You figure they’ll get the ones set us up?”
“Nope. Too many of ’em. Republic of Desire’s been around a while. The Feds have a list of maybe three hundred ‘affiliates,’ but there’s no way to haul ’em all in and figure out who actually did it. Not unless one of ’em rats on somebody, which they do tend to do on a pretty regular basis.”
“But how come they’d want to do that to us anyway?”
“Hell, Sublett, how should I know?”
“Just mean” Sublett said.
“Well, that, for sure, and Hernandez says the LAPD told him they figured somebody wanted Mrs. Schonbru
Nothing that Gunhead had logged that night, since leaving the car wash, had been real. Someone had gotten into the Hotspur Hussar’s on-board computer and plugged a bunch of intricately crafted and utterly spurious data into the communications bundle, cutting Rydell and Sublett off from IntenSecure and the Death Star (which hadn’t, of course, been down). Rydell figured a few of those good ol’ Mongol boys over at the car wash might know a little bit about that.
And maybe, in that instant of weird clarity, with Gunhead’s crumpled front end still trying to climb the shredded remains of a pair of big leather sofas, and with the memory of Ke
“But, man” Sublett had said, as if to himself, “they go
“Responding” Rydell heard himself say, slapping a holstered Glock onto his uniform and grabbing his chunker, which aside from its rate of fire was probably the best thing for a shoot-out in a nursery full of kids. He kicked the door open and jumped out, his trainers going straight through the inch-thick glass top of a coffee-table. (Needed twelve stitches, but it wasn’t deep.) He couldn’t see Sublett. He stumbled forward, cradling the yellow bulk of the chunker, vaguely aware that there was something wrong with his arm.
“Freeze, cocksucker!” said the biggest voice in the world, “LAPD! Drop that shit or we blow your ass away!” Rydell found himself the focus of an abrupt and extraordinarily painful radiance, a light so bright that it fell into his uncomprehending eyes like hot metal. “You hear me, cocksucker?” Wincing, fingers across his eyes, Rydell turned and saw the bulbous armored nacelles of the descending gunship. The downdraft was flattening everything in the Japanese garden that Gunhead hadn’t already taken care of.
Rydell dropped the chunker.
“The pistol, too, asshole!”
Rydell grasped the Glock’s handle between thumb and forefinger. It came away, in its plastic holster, with a tiny but distinct skritch of Velcro, somehow audible through the drumming of the helicopter’s combat-muffled engine.
He dropped the Glock and raised his arms. Or tried to. The left one was broken.
They found Sublett fifteen feet from Gunhead. His face and hands were swelling like bright pink toy balloons and he seemed to be suffocating, Schonbru
“What the fuck’s wrong with him?” asked one of the cops.
“He’s got allergies” Rydell said through gritted teeth; they’d cuffed his hands behind his back and it hurt like hell. “You gotta get him to Emergency.”
Sublett opened his eyes, or tried to.
“Berry…”
Rydell remembered the name of the movie he’d seen on television. “Miracle Mile” he said.
Sublett squinted up at him. “Never seen it” Sublett said, and fainted.
Mrs. Schonbru
3. Not a nice party
Chevette never stole things, or anyway not from other people, and definitely not when she was pulling tags. Except this one bad Monday when she took this total asshole’s sunglasses, but that was because she just didn’t like him.
How it was, she was standing up there by this ninth-floor window, just looking out at the bridge, past the gray shells of the big stores, when he’d come up behind her. She’d almost managed to make out Ski
She wore that jacket everywhere, like some kind of armor. She knew that nanopore was the only thing to wear, riding this time of year, but she wore Ski
Bloodshot eyes. A face that looked as though it were about to melt. He had a short little greenish cigar in his mouth but it wasn’t lit. He took it out, swirled its wet end in a small glass of clear liquor, then took a long suck on it. Gri
But it had been the last tag of the day, a package for a lawyer, with Tenderloin’s trash-fires burning so close by, and around them, huddled, all those so terminally luckless, utterly and chemically lost. Faces aglow in the fairy illumination of the tiny glass pipes. Eyes canceled in that terrible and fleeting satisfaction. Shivers, that gave her, always.
Locking and arming her bike in the hollow sound of the Morrisey’s underground lot, she’d taken a service elevator to the lobby, where the security grunts tried to brace her for the package, but there was no way. She wouldn’t deliver to anyone at all except this one very specific Mr. Garreau in 808, as stated right here on the tag. They ran a sca
So up she’d gone, to eight, to a corridor quiet as the floor of some forest in a dream. She found Mr. Garreau there, his shirt-sleeves white and his tie the color of freshly poured lead. He signed the tab without making eye-contact; package in hand, he’d closed the door’s three brass digits in her face. She’d checked her hair in the mirror-polished italic zero. Her tail was sticking up okay, in back, but she wasn’t sure they’d got the front right. The spikes were still too long. Wispy, sort of. She headed back down the hall, the hardware jingling on Ski
But when the elevator doors opened, this Japanese girl fell out. Or near enough, Chevette grabbing her beneath both arms and propping her against the edge of the door.