Black Glass (27 page)

Danny visibly cringed at that. Candle knew it was a dirty trick, bringing Dad into it this way; he knew Danny had an aversion to thinking about Dad ... Dad, putting drugs and partying before his kids. Candle went on relentlessly, “—Dad started out partying with other people, ended up doing drugs in a toilet stall. And that’s how he died. Alone, hode. I mean—fuck that. There’s stuff to do in this life you haven’t seen. You did one world tour. You could get a comeback going, do another. There’s a lot of places you haven’t been to.”

Danny snorted, shook his head. “You want to depress me, take me on a trip. The world’s all ... used up. Doesn’t seem worth it. Same stores everywhere, same restaurants, all over the world. Wilderness is dying. Why bother going anywhere?”

“It’s not all fucked up out there. Some of this planet is holding on. Let’s go see it, man. Give it a chance. I promise—I’ll stick with
you no matter what.” Then he said something he almost never said. “I give you my word.”

Danny sighed. “Uh oh—his word. Serious shit.”

“It is—with me.”

“Yeah. I know it is.” Finally Danny said, “Okay. Like you say. Nothing to lose. Let’s try it.”

Spanx appeared at the door. “Yo yo whoa whoa whoa, there’s some fucking wanxenheimers from Hell asking for the Candle brothers, telling the stage dudes they got to come back, saying the badges are coming ...”

Danny looked at Candle. “What the fuck?”

“That’s Grist’s people. They’re looking for me more than you. But they’ll scoop your ass up too. It’s that whole Maeterling thing. I was gonna try to make a deal with Grist—but I can’t do it on their terms. I got to avoid ’em, Danny. You do, too.”

“So let’s get gone!”

“Yeah ... but their drones will follow us out,” Candle said.

Spanx grinned lopsidedly. “Drones? Hafuckingha,motherh afuckingha! I love to fuck up drone cams! I can do a feedback freaker!”

Candle looked at him. “A what?”

“Yeah a feedback freaker, there’s a frequency, you do heavy feedback with the amp set proper, it’ll fuck up the signal on them flying cams. But I’d have to borrow Danny’s guitar.”

Danny stood, scowled over at Spanx—then nodded. “Do it. But make sure you take care of my guitar, I’m gonna come and get that thing before me and Rick leave town.”

“You’re leaving town? What fo’ you leaving town, hound?”

“Just for awhile. Hey where’s my pay?”

“Here, muh dear.” Spanx handed him a pay card. “It’s all there –already gave Ronnie his. I mean ... hers.”

“Okay take the guitar, Hamster’ll let you do it—maybe Ronnie’ll back you up.”

“Oh yeah he’ll totalfuckingly ...”

“Don’t tell anyone why you’re doing this, Spanx,” Candle warned.

“I ain’t no blogmouther, hodey brudder ...”

A couple minutes later, Spanx was onstage explaining that he
was going to do a feedback concert, as a special treat for you to eat, please don’t bleat, and the audience cheered—some of them groaned—and Ronnie set up a beat and Spanx adjusted the guitar carefully, turned it up loud as it would go and made hideous roaring-squealing noises come out of it—but at a certain frequency that invariably interfered with the transmissions of drone cams. And suddenly the spies monitoring the flying cameras saw nothing at all but snow and they recoiled from the amplified shrieking that might have been a transmission from a microphone set up at the place where a wandering star smashed into another star and created fulminating hell throughout a planetary system. Worlds colliding in some dark corner of the galaxy.

Danny and Rick Candle got to the back door leading to the alley—just as the closet door burst open and the bound-up bouncer stumbled out, roaring with rage.

Candle calmly drew his gun—and buffaloed the man, knocking him out with a sharp blow on the back of the head with his gun barrel. Then before the bouncer had hit the deck they were slipping through the door into the thin rain—and Candle saw Halido at the end of the alley, waiting for them in a cone of light from the single lamp projecting from the wall above him.

Candle sighed. Shortstack and Nodder weren’t here to get him out of this one.

So Candle drew his gun, aimed carefully—and shot the light out at the end of the alley.

Darkness descended over the alley and he hustled Danny to another back door, kicked it in—it took two kicks, painfully jarring his ankle—and he hobbled ahead of Danny, the two of them darting through the back corridors of a Chinese-Mexican-French bakery.

They waved at the startled bakers, Danny snagging a cruller as they passed, and ran out through the front door, and into the gathering downfall. They were lucky and caught an autocab almost immediately ...

And left Halido behind.

But ahead was the cross traffic of possibilities, most of them dark possibilities, in the city of uncertainty.

“I
s the chopper on the roof, Targer?” Terrence Grist sat on his living room sofa. Gazing through a transparent wall at the city lights; a web of lights, like when you see bright dew marking out a spider’s web. He hadn’t seen a wet spider’s web since he was a kid. Did spiders still spin webs? They must, somewhere.

“Yes sir.” Targer’s face appearing in the glossy top of the low smart table, in front of the sofa.

“Okay wait there for me—you’re flying the chopper. My regular pilot’s staying here. You still up to piloting a rig like that?”

“I stay up to date, Mr. Grist. I can do it.” Targer’s expression hinted he wondered why Grist wanted him to pilot. It wasn’t usual. The chopper was self-piloting. But some people didn’t trust robotic pilots—though they never got drunk, never smoked pot, and never got tired.

“We’ve got a job. Serious things to deal with, Targer. You understand me? If you’re not ready to be very, very serious, you stay here.”

“You need me, I’m there, Mr. Grist.”

“Fucking Candle got away from me. Again. I wanted that loose end tied up. Everybody is frustrating me, here. And Targer—before we go, I meant to ask about that Benson asshole ...”

“We’re still looking. Everyone is looking. The LAPD, Blackwater Division, Halliburton Policing, everyone.”

“What about transaction traces?”

“Whatever the thing is ... the program or whatever it is ... it covered its tracks well. We can see where it swiped some cash,
moved some things around, but that was all before it was moved. Since then we can’t find it and if it’s active we can’t trace it. It’s using some really sophisticated camouflage. We’re trying–”

“Spare me the fumbling details. Get as many people on it as you need. Just get it done.”

Grist heard a footstep and looked up to see Lisha come in, wearing a lustrous dark blue silk shift, clutching her purse close against her, walking carefully on her black high heels. Her lips were pinched together. She looked like a scared child. She paused just inside the door—it was a bit darker there—and then came closer. He saw what was worrying her; a red mottling of rash across her face, specked by open lesions.

Her face, his face. His stomach lurched.

Grist looked away. “What happened? You have an allergic reaction to something? You need an allergist?”

“No. I’ve been to the dermatologist and the ginger. Everyone says the same thing ... it’s a rash. It’s a reaction to this face ...”

He glanced up at her. She meant, in a way, his face—since hers had been re-shaped into a feminized version of his. “You mean—the new face–”

“They said ...” She chewed her lip, and turned away, her eyes glassy with tears. “That it’s psychological. That I ... it’s face rejection. It’s because I don’t like ... because I don’t, um, relate to you, or trust you, or something, so I don’t like having your face on my face so my ... my body is rejecting the face ... it’s this thing that happens sometimes and they have a test where they can tell it’s caused by ... by your own ... by ... and I took the test and ...”

“All
right!
I
get
it!” So it was her fault after all. “You know what, I won’t subject you to ... me. Not anymore. Not that way, not
any
way. Just—you can get your pay-off check, get your face restored, and get your stuff and go ...”

“I ... thank you. Terrence.” Her voice was very small. Tiny.

She turned and hurried from the room.

He got up, angrily looked around for his coat, found it, and went up to the chopper, thinking,
I wonder if she’s heard too much, living with me. I wonder if she should be taking one of these chopper trips ...

He went to the roof, and saw that Targer was in the pilot’s seat
of the big Slakon-logoed chopper, its hull gleaming in the bright lights of the rooftop. Halido was hunched nervously outside its open hatch, the wind of its blades whipping his hair. Neighbors in an adjacent high rise had complained of the lights and the noise from his copter pad, but Grist had bought their building and kicked them out.

Grist hurried up to the chopper, ducked unnecessarily under the blades—he could never keep from doing that—and climbed up the little metal stairway. The passenger cabin of the chopper was comfortable, trimmed in brass and dark wood, like a first-class private jet cabin, but with seats facing one another around the side bulkheads, and one cushy seat with its back to the pilot’s cab. Grist sat with his back to Targer, strapped himself in, gestured for Halido to get inside. Saw Halido hesitate. Grist gestured again, angrily. Halido glanced off across the roof at the city lights, the rising full moon, then got in the chopper, to Grist’s right. Targer spoke to the system and it closed the hatch, muffling the engine and rotor noise.

“Where to, Mr. Grist?” Targer asked.

Grist spoke over his shoulder. “Oh hell—just take us up for now. Due west till I tell you different.”

Within seconds, the chopper had lofted into the air. A passing nausea, and then they were comfortably chopping through the haze to the West.

“Where uh—where we headed?” Halido asked.

“Catalina,” Grist said. “Shall we watch some television while we wait?”

Across from him was a sheet of clear glass that seemed to hang in the air in front of the farther bulkhead. It wasn’t floating, but this high-end model’s supports were so exquisitely made it was hard to tell. He activated the TV and the sheet of mediaglass became a semi-3D television image. SNN. Slakon News Network. Formerly CNN.

A black-Asian sports commentator with short-cropped hair and a wide face was interviewing a buffed-out Scandinavian type, in an expensive golf shirt. The buff guy was smiling, showing an intricate platinum grill across his teeth that spelled out MIAMI. Under his image his name and specialty appeared:

BJORN WILLCANSER, Steroid Stylist

“One of those steroid designers for the big teams,” Grist commented, refusing to make eye contact with Halido. “My father would’ve shit a brick, if he knew these guys were standard now. Look at that suit—if he opens his arms wide enough it’ll rip. Why doesn’t he get one to fit? It’s gotta strain at the seams I guess, he likes it that way. He’s a walking advertisement for his product.”

“Sir–” Halido began. “Candle slipped past us only because we didn’t have enough personnel–”

“You’re raising your voice, Halido.”

“No—it’s just the chopper noise, sir–”

“Quiet, I want to hear this.” Grist turned the TV up so he could hear it over the chopper noise. It was the quietest chopper around, once the door was closed, but it was still a big whirring machine, going to make some noise, he reflected. Ought to hire engineers to improve them, make it quieter yet.

“They made the right choice,”
the Steroid Stylist was saying.
“You can’t go with some standard mix of steroids and GH, that kind of thing, and expect to compete. You’ve got to have the cutting edge. You’ve got to think about neurological complications. Does Miami want to have its players gouging out people’s eyes on the forty yard line, like Dorf in the Raiders did?”

“What I’m saying, Mr. Grist,” Halido went on, leaning toward him, “is that I did request more help and people didn’t show up on time–”

“Did I not ask for quiet?” Grist snapped. “I’m curious about this. Maybe ...”

“Does Miami want to pay a big fine,”
the Steroid Stylist went on
, “do they want to have to pay to have some guy’s eyeballs grown in a vat, all that transplant time and expense? They don’t. They want precision. And that’s what I’m about, Tyrell. Precision. I play these bodies like a piano and I get the tune I want–”

“We have a line of beauty steroids, but athletic steroids—I’m not sure we’ve gotten into that,” Grist said, thinking aloud. He repeated the thought into the notes function of the mini-PDA on his wrist.

“Mr. Grist—if you’ll look at the phone records–”

“Oh Christ,” Grist said, shaking his head. “Halido you need
to calm down, I’m going to make us a drink.”

He muted the television, got out of his seat belt, turned to wave a finger in front of a sensor. The bulkhead opened, and a small wet-bar extended gently into reach. He hummed to himself, picking out two highball glasses—careful to pick them at random, because he could feel Halido watching him closely. He took a canister of ice out—only this was the one he’d had prepared earlier and there was only one cube in it. He shook his head,
tsk
ing, and put the cube into a glass; he put the canister under the ice dispenser, got more ice, and used tongs to put the new ice into their glasses, noting carefully which one he’d put the first cube in.

He was enjoying himself.

“Rum and Coke for you, right? I’ll have the same.” He made them each a rum and Coke. Halido was watching closely to see that the drinks came from the same bottles for both of them. “I grow the cola berries for this cola in my own hot houses,” Grist said, straight-faced. Then he grinned. “I always tell people that. You’d be amazed at how many believe it.” He handed Halido his glass. A specific glass.

“Now, let’s drink to new beginnings,” he said, toasting Halido and giving him a weary smile as if to say,
You’ve got one more chance.