All Tomorrow's Parties Page 19

  Not many people out now, and none of them tourists. The rain could do that, she remembered. Once again she got that feeling that she loved this place but wasn't really a part of it anymore. Kind of twisted in, like a hook, not a big feeling but sharp and deep. She sighed, remembering foggy mornings when she'd come down from the cable tower with her bike over her shoulder and pumped it over to Allied, wondering if Bunny'd have a scratch for her right off, a good ticket to pull, or if he'd give her a deadhead, what they called a pickup outside the city core. She'd liked a deadhead sometimes, because she got to see parts of town she might not have ridden before. And sometimes she'd wind up clean, what they called it when you didn't have any deliveries, and that could be great too, just go over to the Alcoholocaust or one of the other messenger bars and drink espresso until Bunny paged her. It had been pretty good, riding for Allied. She'd never even eaten it, wiped out bad, and the cops weren't as book-happy if you were a girl; you could get away with doing sidewalks and stuff. Not that she could imagine going back to it now, riding, and that brought her mood back, because she didn't know what else she could do. Whatever, she wasn't going to star in any new versions of Tessa's docu.

  She remembered this skinny tech named Tara-May, somebody Cops in Trouble had sent over to grab footage of poor Rydell, who'd only ever wanted to feature in a segment of that thing. No, she corrected herself, that wasn't fair, because she knew that what Rydell had really wanted was to be a cop, which was what he'd started out to be in Tennessee. But it hadn't worked out, and then his episode hadn't worked out, let alone the mini-series they'd talked about spinning off. Mainly, she supposed, because what Tara-May had shot had convinced the Cops in Trouble people that Rydell looked a little on the heavy side on TV. Not that there was any fat on him, he was all muscle and long legs, but when they shot him he didn't look like that. And that had driven him sort of crazy, that and Tara-May always going on about how Chevette should take speech and acting classes, learn all these martial arts, and give up drugs. When Chevette had made it clear she didn't do drugs, Tara-May had said that that would make networking a little harder, not having anything to quit, but that there were groups for everything and that was probably the best way to meet people who could help you with your career.

  But Chevette hadn't wanted a career, or not the way Tara-May meant it, and Tara-May just hadn't been able to get that. Actually there were a lot of people like Tara-May in Hollywood, maybe even most people were; everybody had something they “really” did. Drivers wrote, bartenders acted; she'd had massages from a girl who was really a stunt double for some actress Chevette had never heard of yet, except she hadn't really ever been called, but they had her number. Somebody had everybody's number, but it looked to Chevette like the game had all their numbers, every one, and nobody really was winning, but nobody wanted to hear that, or talk to you much if you didn't buy into what they “really” did.

  Now she thought about it, that was part of what had gotten between her and Rydell, because he'd always buy into that, whatever anybody told him they really were. And then he'd tell them how he really wanted to do an episode of Cops in Trouble, and how it looked like he actually would, because Cops in Trouble was paying his rent now. Which nobody wanted to hear really, because it was a little too real, but Rydell never got that. And then they'd hit on him for phone numbers, names, intros, and start slipping him disks and lists of credits, hoping he was dumb enough to go back and try to show them to producers. Which he was, or anyway good-hearted enough, and that hadn't helped him any with the people at Cops in Trouble either.

  And that, somehow, was how she'd wound up with Carson. Rydell sitting on the couch in that apartment with the lights off, watching one old Cops in Trouble after another, looking lost, and she just hadn't been able to handle it. It had been fine when they'd had things to do together, but when it came to just being together, that hadn't seemed to work, and Rydell going into that sad thing when it had started to look like it wasn't going to work out with the show…

  But here was the bar, a small crowd around the door now and the sound of music she'd been hearing but not really listening to, which died as she got up close to the crowd.

  Place was packed. She slid in sideways between a couple of Mexicans looked like truck drivers, had those steel chisel-toe things tacked to the front of their black cowboy boots. Inside, over the heads of the people packed on the floor, she could see Creedmore with a microphone in his hand, grinning out over the crowd. It was a dancer grin, ten thousand watts of bad electricity, and she saw he had the start of that thing that dancer did to your gums.

  People were clapping and whistling for more, and Creedmore, his face running with sweat, looked like he was intending to give it to them.

  “Thank you, thank you kindly,” she heard Creedmore's amplified voice say. “Now this next number's one I wrote myself, and it's going out soon as our first single, Buell Creedmore and his Lower Companions, and it's called ‘Just When You Think You've Got It Dicked…’”

  Or anyway that was what she thought she heard him say, but then the band kicked in, loud, with the guitarist choking steely serpentine chords out of a big, shiny, old red electric, and she couldn't make out any of the words. Although she had to admit it sounded like Creedmore could sing.

  They were jammed in here so tight, it made it hard to keep a lookout for Carson, but on the other hand it wasn't too likely he'd be able to see her either.

  She kept moving, as best she could, trying to find Tessa.

  45. JACK MOVE

  RYDELL had taken a surveillance course, back at the academy, and his favorite part had been going out and following people. It wasn't something you did alone, but with at least one partner, and the more partners the better. You learned how to trade off, somebody taking your place, and how to deak up ahead of the subject so you'd be ready when the next guy needed to trade off. That way the subject never had the same person behind him for too long. There was a definite art to it, and when you got it down it was sort of like a dance.

  He hadn't really gotten the chance to put it into practice, in his very brief career as a police officer, or later when he'd worked for IntenSecure, but he felt like he'd been pretty good at it, and it had given him an idea of what it would feel like if you were being followed, and particularly if you were being followed by some people who knew how to do it right.

  And that was what he found himself thinking about now, as he shouldered the duffel with Rei. Toei's projector in it and prepared to depart this pathetic excuse for a crime scene. If Laney had wanted him to attract someone's attention by standing here, well, he'd stood here. But maybe now, he thought, he was getting that watched feeling because Laney had told him he'd be sure to be noticed if he came here.

  Could be nerves. Maybe, but actually he didn't feel nervous, just tired. He'd driven all night up the coast with Creedmore, and all the downtime he'd had today had been when he'd fallen asleep listening to Rei Toei. What he felt like now was going back to his room, checking out the projector to see if she'd come back, then hitting the bed.

  But there it was, that prickling at the back of his neck. He turned and looked back, but there was nobody, just the place where the Kil‘Z had been sprayed over dried blood.

  Guy going by in the direction of Oakland and Rydell's room.

  Young guy with dark military-buzzed hair, black coat, black scarf up around his face. Seemed not to see Rydell, just kept walking, hands in his pockets. Rydell fell in behind him, about fifteen feet.

  He tried to imagine this place the way it had been before, when it was a regular bridge. Millions of cars had gone through here, this same space where he walked now. It had all been open then, just girders and railing and deck; now it was this tunnel, everything patched together out of junk, used lumber, plastic, whatever people could find, all of it lashed up however anybody could get it to stay, it looked like, and somehow it did stay, in spite of the winds he knew must come through here. He'd been back in a bayou once, in Louisia
na, and something about the way it looked in here reminded him of that: there was stuff hanging everywhere, tubing and cables and things whose function he couldn't identify, and it was like Spanish moss in a way, everything softened at the outline. And the light now was dim and sort of underwater-looking, just these banks of scavenged fluorescents slung every twenty feet or so, some of them dead and others flickering.

  He walked around a puddle where a vendor had dumped about ten pounds of dirty shaved ice.

  Up ahead, he saw the guy with the black scarf turn into a café, one of these tiny little places you got in here, maybe two small tables and a counter that sat four or five. Big blonde boy looked like a weight lifter was coming out as the scarf went in, and the weight lifter made just that little bit of eye contact with Rydell that told him.

  They were doing him: the trade-off. He was being tailed, and by at least three people.

  Weight lifter started in the direction of Rydell's bed-and-breakfast, Treasure Island, Oakland. Back of his neck as wide as Rydell's thigh. As Rydell passed the café, he looked in and saw the scarf ordering a coffee. Just as normal as pie. So he didn't look behind him, because he knew that if he did that, they'd know. They would. Just like he'd known, when the weight lifter blew it by looking him in the eye.

  The belt he'd slung the duffel from was cutting into his shoulder, through his nylon jacket, and he thought about Laney and Klaus and the Rooster, about how they all obviously thought the projector was really important, or valuable. Was that what he was being followed for, or was it about this mystery man of Laney's, his man who wasn't there? Otherwise, he didn't think he had any serious long-term enemies up here, though it was hard to be sure, and he didn't think these guys were ordinary jackers, because it looked to him like they really knew what they were doing.

  He reached into the jacket pocket and felt the knife. It was there, and he was glad he had it, though the thought of actually cutting somebody with it bothered him. The thing about knives was that the people who thought they wanted to use them on other people usually had no idea how much mess it made. It wasn't like in the movies; cut people bled like stuck pigs. He'd had to deal with a few cut people around the Sunset Lucky Dragon. And it could get tricky because who knew who was seropositive? He and Durius had these goggles they were supposed to put on, to keep people's blood from getting in their eyes, but usually it just happened all at once and they didn't remember the goggles until it was likely too late anyway.

  But the main thing about knives, even ones that cut steel-belt radials like ripe banana, was that they weren't much good in a gunfight.

  Someone had slung up an old anti-shoplifting mirror above a closed stall, and as he approached this he tried to see who might be following him, but there was enough foot traffic in here that he only got a generalized sense of people moving.

  But what really bothered him now was that he was just doing what they'd probably expect him to: heading back to wherever he was going to spend the night (assuming they didn't already know where that was). And once he got there, what then? He'd be trapped, up in his room, no exit but that ladder, and they'd have him. He guessed he could just keep walking, but he didn't see what that would get him either.

  What he needed, he thought, was something he could do that they weren't expecting. Something that put the shoe on the other foot, or any-way he should lose them, whoever they were. Then maybe he could raise Laney and get Laney's take on who they might be.

  He'd had an instructor in Knoxville who'd liked to talk about lateral thinking. Which in a way wasn't that far off what Durius meant when he talked about serious users getting lateral, out on the sidewalk outside Lucky Dragon. Just losing it. What it took, sometimes, was just your basic jack move, something nobody, maybe even you, was expecting.

  To his right now, he saw he was passing a stretch of wall that was actually canvas, like a sail or an old tent, stretched tight over lumber and maybe half an inch thick with however many coats of paint it had had since it was put up here. Some kind of mural, but he wasn't noticing that.

  The switchblade sounded so loud, opening it, that he was sure they'd have heard it, so he just moved, sweeping the ceramic blade down, then sideways, to cut himself a backward “L.” Through which he ducked and stepped, as if in a dream, the paint on the canvas crackling as he did so. Into warmth and a different light and these completely unexpected people seated around a table, cards in their hands, mother-of-pearl chips piled on the table in front of them. And one of them, a woman, the nipples of her bare breasts transfixed with surgical steel, the stub of a small cigar wedged into the corner of her mouth, met Rydell's eye and said: “I'll see you one and raise you one.”

  “Never mind me,” Rydell heard himself say, as he saw a man with a tattooed scalp, still holding his hand of cards, raise his other hand, with a gun in it, from beneath the table. And simultaneously he realized that he still had the black knife, open, in his hand. He felt a weird wash of cold down his spine as his feet just kept moving, past the table and the man and the deep and somehow limitlessly large black hole in the winking ring of stainless steel that was the pistol's muzzle.

  Through a thick brown velour curtain that smelled of ancient movie houses and he was still moving, apparently intact. Feeling his hand thumb the button, closing and cocking the blade against his hip as he went, something he wouldn't have thought of doing otherwise. Pocketing the knife. In front of him a ladder rough-sawn from two-by-fours. Straight to it and just climbing, as fast as he could.

  Took him up through a square hole in a splintered timber deck, narrow walkway between walls cut from peeling billboards, a woman's huge stained paper eye faded there as if staring into infinite distance.

  Stop. Breathe. Heart pounding. Listen.

  Laughter. The card players?

  He started along the walkway, feeling a rising sense of triumph: he'd done it. Lost 'em. Wherever he was, up here, he'd be able to find his way back out, and down, and then he'd see how it went. But he had the projector and he'd lost them and he hadn't gotten his ass shot for interrupting somebody's poker game. “Lateral thinking,” he said, congratulating himself, as he reached the end of the walkway and rounded a corner.

  He felt the rib crack as the weight lifter hit him and knew that the black glove, like the ones he'd trained with in Nashville, was weighted with lead.

  It sent him back against the opposite wall, his head slamming against that, and his whole left side refused to move when he tried.

  The weight lifter pulled the black glove back for a roundhouse into Rydell's face. And smiled.

  Rydell tried to shake his head.

  Faintest look of surprise, maybe confusion, in the other's eyes, his face. Then nothing. The smile gone slack.

  The weight lifter went suddenly and very heavily to his knees, swayed, and crashed sideways to the gray timber deck. Revealing behind him this slender, gray-haired man in a long smooth coat the color of old moss, who was replacing something there, the lapel held open with his other hand. Eyes regarding Rydell through gold-rimmed glasses. A deep crease up each cheek, like he smiled a lot. The man adjusted his beautiful coat and lowered his hands.

  “Are you injured?”

  Rydell drew a ragged breath, wincing as the rib seemed to grate. “Rib,” he managed.

  “Are you armed?”

  Rydell looked into the clear, bright, unmoving eyes. “Knife in my right pocket,” he said.

  “Please keep it there,” the man said. “Are you able to walk?”

  “Sure,” Rydell said, taking a step and almost falling on the weight lifter.

  “Come with me, please,” the man said and turned, and Rydell followed.

  46. PINE BOX

  CREEDMORE was into the climax of his number before Chevette spotted God's Little Toy cruising past overhead. The bar, like a lot of the spaces here on the original deck, didn't have a ceiling of its own, just the bottoms of whatever floor areas had been erected above it, with the result that what passed for a c
eiling was uneven and irregular. The management had at some point sprayed all that black, and Chevette might not have noticed the floating camera platform if its Mylar balloon hadn't caught and reflected the stage lights. It was definitely under human control and looked like it might be jockeying to get a close-up of Creedmore. Then Chevette spotted two more of the silver balloons, these parked up in a sort of hollow created by a discontinuity in the floors above.

  That meant, she thought, that Tessa had gotten someone to drive her back to the foot of Folsom. Then either she'd driven back or gotten a lift. (She was pretty sure Tessa wouldn't have walked it, not with the balloons anyway.) Chevette hoped the latter, because she didn't want to have to try to find a space to park the van a second time. Whatever Tessa was up to here, they were going to need a place to sleep later.

  Creedmore's song ended with a sort of yodeling cry of brainless defiance, which was echoed back, amplified into a terrifying roar, by the meshback crowd. Chevette was amazed by the enthusiasm, not so much that it was for Creedmore as it was for this kind of music. Music was strange that way though; there were people into any damned thing, it seemed like, and if you got enough of them together in one bar, she guessed, you could have a pretty good time.

  She was still working her way through the crowd, warding off the odd grope, looking for Tessa, and keeping an eye out for Carson, when Creedmore's friend Maryalice found her. Maryalice had undone a couple of extra increments of bustier, it looked like, and was presenting as very ample indeed. She looked really happy, or anyway as happy as you can look when you're really drunk, which she definitely and obviously was.