All Tomorrow's Parties Page 22

  Carson had coordinated on a Real One sequence about the history of stimulants, so Chevette knew that dancer was somewhere out there past crack cocaine in terms of sheer gotcha. The addiction schedule was a little less merciless, in terms of frequency, but she figured she'd still just barely missed it, chipping with Lowell. Lowell who'd explain in detail and at great length how the schedule he'd worked out for using it was going to optimize his functionality in the world, but never result in one of those ugly habit deals. You just had to know how to do it, and when to do it, and most important of all, why to do it. Powerful substance like this, Lowell would explain, it wasn't there just for any casual jack-off recreational urge. It was there to allow you to do things. To empower you, he said, so that you could do things and, best of all, finish them.

  Except that what Lowell had mainly wanted to do, dizzed, was have sex, and the diz made it impossible for him to finish. Which had been okay by Chevette, because otherwise he tended to finish a little on the quick side. The Real One sequence had said that dancer made it possible for men to experience something much more like the female orgasm, a sort of ongoing climax, less localized and, well, messy.

  Dancer was pretty deadly stuff, in terms of getting people into bed in the first place. Strangers doing dancer together, if there was any basis for attraction at all, were inclined to decide that that was basically a fine idea, and one to be acted on right away, but only provided the other party seemed agreeable to doing it until both were pretty well dead.

  And people did wind up dead around the stuff; hearts stopped, lungs forgot to breathe, crucial tiny territories of brain blew out. People murdered one another when they were crazy on the stuff, and then in cold blood just to get some more.

  It was one ugly substance and no doubt about it.

  “You got any more of that?” she asked Saint Vitus, who was dabbing at the spit-slick corners of his mouth with a wadded-up tissue, dots of blood dried brown on it.

  Saint Vitus fixed her with his slitty glasses. “You've got to be kidding,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Chevette, pushing off the stool, “I am.” Must've been the time of night. How could she even have thought that? She could smell his metallic breath in the sound box.

  “Got it,” said Tessa, pulling off the glasses. “Crowd's thinning. Chevette, I'll need you to help me get the camera platforms together.”

  Saint Vitus smirked. At the thought, Chevette guessed, of somebody else having to do something like work.

  “You haven't seen Carson, have you?” Chevette asked, stepping to the window. The dwindling crowd, seen from above, was moving in one of those ways that there was probably a logarithm for: milling and dispersing.

  “Carson?”

  She spotted Buell Creedmore, just in front of the stage, talking with a big guy in a black jacket, his back to the sound booth. Then the big guitar player, the one with the squashed cowboy hat, jumped down from the stage and seemed to be giving Creedmore a hard time. Creedmore tried to say something, got shut up, then managed to say something short, and by the look on his face, not too sweet, and the guitar player turned and walked away. Chevette saw Creedmore say something to the other guy, gesturing back in her direction, and this one turned and headed that way, his face concealed, from just this angle, by a dusty swoop of black-painted cable.

  “He was here before,” Chevette said. “That's why I Frenched the meshback and ran out the door. Didn't you wonder?”

  Tessa looked at her. “I did, actually. But I thought maybe I was just getting to know you better.” She laughed. “Are you sure it was him?”

  “It was him, Tessa.”

  “How would he know we're up here?”

  “Somebody told him at the house? You talked enough, before, about your docu.”

  “Maybe,” Tessa said, interest waning. “Help me get the platforms tethered, okay?” She handed Chevette four black nylon tethers, each one tipped with a mini-bungee and a metal clip.

  “Listen,” Chevette said, “I'm not up for a night at Cognitive Dissidents, okay? I don't think you are either. I just watched your friend here gum enough dancer to wire a mule.”

  “Chevette,” Tessa said, “we're up here to document, remember? We're going interstitial.”

  Saint Vitus sniggered.

  “I think where we're going is to sleep, Tessa. Where's the truck?”

  “Where we parked it.”

  “How'd you get the balloons back here?”

  “Elmore,” Tessa said. “Has one of those caps, and an ATV to go with it.”

  “See if you can find him again,” Chevette said, starting down the ladder. “We could use a lift back.”

  Chevette wasn't sure what it would actually take to get Tessa to give up on Cognitive Dissidents. Worst case, she might actually have to go there, if only to make sure Tessa was okay. Cog Diss was a rough enough place even if you didn't have your head buried in a pair of video glasses.

  She went down the ladder and headed out onto the floor, where God's Little Toy was already descending, under Tessa's control. She reached up, got it tethered, and turned to signal Tessa, in the sound booth, to start bringing the others down.

  And found herself looking, for however many dreamlike seconds, before he hit her, into Carson's eyes.

  Hard and in the face, just like he'd done before, and she saw those same colors, like a flashback; saw herself falling back, across the big beige couch in his loft-space, blood splashing from her nose, and still not believing it, that he'd done that.

  Except that here she went over into a couple of Creedmore's remaining audience, who caught her, laughing, saying “Hey. Whoa,” and then Carson was on her again, grabbing a handful of Skinner's jacket—

  “Hey, buddy,” said one of the men who'd caught her, holding up his spread hand as if to block the second punch that Carson, his face as calm and serious as she'd seen it in the editing booth at Real One, was aiming at her. And looking into Carson's eyes she saw nothing there like hatred or anger, only some abstract and somehow almost technical need.

  Carson tried for her, past that stranger's upraised hand, and her protector yelped as one of his fingers got bent back. It deflected the blow, though, and gave Chevette time to twist out of that grip.

  She backed off two steps and shook her head, trying to clear it. Something was wrong with her eyes.

  Carson came after her, that same look on his face, and in that instant she knew that she knew neither who he was nor what it was that was wrong with him.

  “You just didn't get it, did you?” he said, or that was what she thought she heard him say, feeling a tear run down from her swelling eye, her head still ringing.

  She took a step back. He came on.

  “You just didn't get it.”

  And then a hand came down on his shoulder and he spun around. And went down, the man behind him having done something that Chevette hadn't seen.

  And she saw that it was Rydell.

  It wasn't.

  It was.

  Rydell in a rent-a-cop's black nylon jacket, looking at her with an expression of utter and baffled amazement.

  And Chevette got it, right then and absolutely, that she was dreaming, and felt the most enormous sense of relief, because now she would wake up, surely, into a world that would make sense.

  On the floor, Carson, rolling over, got to his knees, stood up, shook himself, brushed a squashed cigarette-filter from the sleeve of his jacket, and suckerpunched Rydell, who saw it coming and tried to move aside, so that Carson's fist slammed into his ribs, rather than his stomach, as intended.

  And Rydell screamed, in shrill animal pain, doubled over—

  And that was when the guy with the black leather car-coat, the fresh-looking black buzzcut, black scarf knotted up high around his neck, this guy Chevette had never seen before, stepped up to Carson. “Mistake,” she thought she heard him say. He took something from the pocket of his black coat. Then: “You're not on the menu.”

  And he shot C
arson, right up close, without looking down at the gun in his hand.

  And it was not a loud sound, not loud at all, more like the sound of a large pneumatic nail-gun, but it was final and definitive and accompanied by a yellow-blue flash, and Chevette could never remember, exactly, seeing this, though she knew she had: Carson blown back by however many thousand foot-pounds of energy trying to find their way to kinetic rest at just that one instant in his body.

  But it didn't take, in memory; it did not stick, and she would be grateful.

  And grateful too, though for other reasons, that this was when Tessa, in the sound booth overhead, killed the lights.

  53. (YOU KNOW I CAN'T LET YOU) SLIDE THROUGH MY HANDS

  RYDELL knew that sound: a subsonic projectile through a silencer that slowed it even more, draining off the expanding gases of the ignited charge, and still the muzzle velocity would be right up there, and the impact, where it was localized…

  He knew this through the pain in his side, which felt like a white-hot ax blade between his ribs; he knew it through his shock (he was literally in shock in a number of ways) at discovering Chevette (this version of Chevette, with really different hair, more the way he'd always wished she'd wear it). He knew it in the dark that followed the report, the dark that followed the death (he was pretty sure) of whoever the man was who'd gone after Chevette, the man he'd decked, the man who'd gotten up and, it felt like, driven Rydell's broken rib halfway through his diaphragm. He knew it, and he held on to it, for the very specific reason that it meant the scarf was a trained professional, and not just some espontaneo in a bar.

  Rydell knew, in those first instants of darkness, that he had a chance: as long as the scarf was a pro, he had a chance. A drunk, a crazy, any ordinary perp, in a pitch-dark bar, that was a crapshoot. A pro would move to minimize the random factor.

  Which was considerable, by the sound of it, the remaining crowd, and maybe Chevette as well, screaming and heaving and struggling to get out the door. That was bad, Rydell knew, and easily fatal; he'd been a squarebadge at concerts, and had seen bodies peeled off crowd barriers.

  He stood his ground, nursing the pain in his side as best he could, and waited for the scarf to make a move.

  Where was Rei Toei? She should've shown up in the dark like a movie marquee, but no.

  And zooming past Rydell's shoulder, toward where he'd last seen the scarf, there she was, more comet than pixie, and casting serious light. She circled the scarf's head twice, fast, and Rydell saw him bat at her with the gun. Just a ball of silver light, moving fast enough to leave trails on Rydell's retina. The scarf ducked, as she shot straight in at his eyes; he spun and ran to the left. Rydell watched as the light expanded slightly, to whiz like cold, pale ball lightning around the perimeter of the dark bar, people moaning and gasping, screaming as she shot past. Past the struggling knot at the door, where several lay unconscious on the floor, and still no sign of Chevette.

  But then the Rei-sphere swung in and down, and Rydell spotted Chevette on her hands and knees, crawling in the direction of the door. He ran over to her as best he could, his side feeling like it was about to split; bent, grabbed her, pulled her up. She started to struggle.

  “It's me,” he said, feeling the complete unreality of seeing her again, here, this way, “Rydell.”

  “What the fuck are you doing here, Rydell?”

  “Getting out.”

  The blue flash and the nail-gun fwut were simultaneous, but it seemed to Rydell that the flick of the slug, past his head, preceded it. In immediate reply, one tight white ball of light after another was hurled past him from behind. From the projector, he realized, and likely straight into the scarf's eyes.

  He grabbed Chevette under the arm and hustled her across the floor, adrenaline flooding the pain in his side. The stream of projected light, behind him, was just enough to show him the wall to the right of the door. He hoped it was plywood, and none too thick, as he pulled the switchblade from his pocket, popped it, and drove the blade in overhand, just at eye level. It punched through, up to the handle, and he yanked it sideways and down, hearing an odd little sizzle of parting wood fiber. He made it down to waist height, twisted it, back to the left, and three-quarters of the way up the other side before he heard the glasslike tink of the ceramic snapping.

  “Kick. Here,” he said, striking the center of his cutout with the stub of the blade. “Brace up against me. Kick!”

  And she did. She could kick like a mule, Chevette. The section gave way with her second try, and he was boosting her up and through, trying not to scream at the pain. He was never sure how he made it through himself, but he did, expecting any second one of those subsonics would find him.

  There were people unconscious, outside the door, and other people kneeling, trying to help them.

  “This way,” he said, starting to limp in the direction of the ramp and the Lucky Dragon. But she wasn't with him. He swung around, saw her headed in the opposite direction. “Chevette!”

  He went after her but she didn't slow down. “Chevette!”

  She turned. Her right eye swelling, bruised, swimming with tears; the left wide and gray and crazy now. As if she saw him but didn't register who it was she saw. “Rydell?”

  And all this time he'd thought about her, remembered her, having her there in front of him was something completely different: her long straight nose, the line of her jaw, the way he knew her lips looked in profile.

  “It's okay,” he said, which was absolutely all he could think of to say.

  “It's not a dream?”

  “No,” he said.

  “They shot Carson. Somebody shot him. I saw somebody shoot him.”

  “Who was he? Why'd he hit you?”

  “He was—” She broke off, her front teeth pressing into her lower lip. “Somebody I lived with. In LA.”

  “Huh,” Rydell said, all he could manage around the idea that the scarf had just shot Chevette's new boyfriend.

  “I mean I wasn't with him. Not now. He was following me, but, Jesus, Rydell, why'd that guy… Just walked up and shot him!”

  Because he was going after me, Rydell thought. Because he wanted to wail on me and I'm supposed to be theirs. But Rydell didn't say that. “The guy with the gun,” he said, instead, “he'll be looking for me. He's not alone. That means you don't want to be with me when he finds me.”

  “Why's he looking for you?”

  “Because I've got something—” But he didn't; he'd left the projector in the bar.

  “You were looking for me, back there?”

  I've been looking for you since you walked out. I've been working up and down the face of the waking world, every last day, with a tiny little comb, looking for you. And each day shook out empty, never never you. And he heard in memory the sound those rocks made, punching into the polymer behind the Lucky Dragon on Sunset. Pointless, pointless. “No. I'm working. Private investigation for a man named Laney.”

  She didn't believe him. “Carson followed me up here. I didn't want to be with him. Now you. What is this?”

  Laney says it's the end of the world. “I'm just here, Chevette. You're just here. I gotta go now—”

  “Where?”

  “Back in the bar. I left something. It's important.”

  “Don't go back there!”

  “I have to.”

  “Rydell,” she began, starting to shake, “you're… you're—” And looked down at her open hands, the palms dark with something. And he saw that it was blood, and knew that it would be the boyfriend's, that she'd crawled through that. She started to sob, and wiped her palms down her black jeans, trying to get it off.

  “Mr. Rydell?”

  The man with the tanto, carrying Rydell's duffel in the crook of his arm as though it were a baby.

  “Mr. Rydell, I don't think it would be advisable for you to attempt to leave the bridge. A watch has almost certainly been posted, and they will shoot you rather than permit the possibility of your escape.” The
pallid glare of the fluorescents chained overhead winked in the round lenses; this lean and concise man with perfectly blank, perfectly circular absences where eyes should be. “Are you with this young woman?”

  “Yes,” Rydell said.

  “We must start toward Oakland,” the man said, handing Rydell the duffel, the solid weight of the projector. Rydell hoped he'd gotten the power cable as well. “Otherwise, they will slip past and cut us off.”

  Rydell turned to Chevette. “Maybe they didn't see us together. You should just go.”

  “I wouldn't advise that,” the man said. “I saw you together. They likely did as well.”

  Chevette looked up at Rydell. “Every time you come into my life, Rydell, I wind up in…” She made a face.

  “Shit,” Rydell finished for her.

  54. SOME THINGS NEVER HAPPEN

  THE Gunsmith Cats alarm watch taped to the wall of Laney's box brings him home from the Walled City. It buzzes to announce the Suit's impending arrival. The Suit has no watch of his own but is relentlessly punctual, his rounds timed to the clocks of the subway, which are set in turn by radio, from an atomic clock in Nagoya.

  Laney tastes blood. It is a long time since he has brushed his teeth, and they feel artificial and ill-fitting, as though in his absence they have been replaced with a stranger's. He spits into a bottle kept for this purpose and considers attempting the journey to the restroom. Importance of grooming. He feels the stubble on his cheeks, calculating the effort required to remove it. He could request that the Suit obtain an electric disposable, but really he prefers a blade. He is one of those men who has never grown a beard, not even briefly. (And now, some small voice, one always best ignored, suggests: he never will.)