"This wasn"t done with a sword," Hiro says. He is beyond astonishment as he stands and stares at Lagos"s corpse. All the emotions will probably come piling in on him later, when he goes home and tries to sleep. For now, the thinking part of his brain seems cut loose from his body, as if he has just ingested a great deal of drugs, and he"s just as cool as Squeaky.
"Oh, yeah? How can you tell?" Squeaky says.
"Swords make quick cuts, all the way through. Like, you cut off a head or an arm. A person who"s been killed with a sword doesn"t look like this."
"Really? Have you killed a lot of people with swords, Mr. Protagonist?"
"Yes. In the Metaverse."
They stand for a while longer, looking at it.
"This doesn"t look like a speed move. This looks like a strength move," Squeaky says.
"Raven looks strong enough."
"That he does."
"But I don"t think he was carrying a weapon. The Crips frisked him earlier, and he was clean."
"Well, then he must have borrowed one," Squeaky says. "This bug was all over the place, you know. We were keeping an eye on him, because we were afraid he was going to p.i.s.s Raven off. He kept going around looking for a vantage point."
"He"s loaded with surveillance gear," Hiro says. "The higher he gets, the better it works."
"So he ended up here on this embankment. And apparently the perpetrator knew where he was."
"The dust," Hiro says. "Watch the lasers."
Down below, Sushi K pirouettes spastically as a beer bottle caroms off his forehead. A bundle of lasers sweeps across the embankment, clearly visible in the fine dust being drawn out of it by the wind.
"This guy-this bug-was using lasers. As soon as he came up here-"
"They betrayed his position," Squeaky says.
"And then Raven came after him."
"Well, we"re not saying it"s him," Squeaky says. "But! need to know if this character"-he nods at the corpse-"might have done anything that would have made Raven feel threatened."
"What is this, group therapy? Who cares if Raven felt threatened?"
"I do," Squeaky says with great finality.
"Lagos was just a gargoyle. A big hoover for intel. I don"t think he did wet operations-and if he did, he wouldn"t do it in that get-up."
"So why do you think Raven was feeling so jumpy?"
"I guess he doesn"t like being under surveillance," Hiro says.
"Yeah." Squeaky says. "You should remember that."
Then Squeaky puts one hand over his ear, the better to hear voices on his headset radio.
"Did Y.T. see this happen?" Hiro says.
"No," Squeaky mumbles, a few seconds later. "But she saw him leaving the scene. She"s following him."
"Why would she want to do that!?"
"I guess you told her to, or something."
"I didn"t think she"d take off after him."
"Well, she doesn"t know that he killed the guy," Squeaky says. "She just phoned in a sighting-he"s riding his Harley into Chinatown." And he begins running up the embankment. A couple of Enforcers" cars are parked on the shoulder of the highway up there, waiting.
Hiro tags along. His legs are in incredible shape from sword fighting, and he manages to catch up to Squeaky by the time he reaches his car. When the driver undoes the electric door locks, Hiro scoots into the back seat as Squeaky is going into the front Squeaky turns around and gives him a tired look.
"I"ll behave," Hiro says.
"Just one thing-"
"I know. Don"t f.u.c.k around with Raven."
"That"s right."
Squeaky holds his glare for another second and then turns around, motions the driver to drive. He impatiently rips ten feet of hard copy out of the dashboard printer and begins sifting through it.
On this long strip of paper, Hiro glimpses multiple renditions of the important Crip, the guy with the goatee whom Raven was dealing with earlier. On the printout, he is labeled as "T-Bone Murphy."
There"s also a picture of Raven. It"s an action shot, not a mug shot. It is terrible output. It has been caught through some kind of light-amplifying optics that wash out the color and make everything incredibly grainy and low contrast. It looks like some image processing has been done to make it sharper; this also makes it grainier. The license plate is just an oblate blur, overwhelmed by the glow of the taillight. It is heeled over sharply, the sidecar wheel several inches off the ground. But the rider doesn"t have any visible neck; his head, or rather the dark splotch that is there, just keeps getting wider until it merges into his shoulders. Definitely Raven.
"How come you have pictures of T-Bone Murphy in there?" Hiro says.
"He"s chasing him," Squeaky says.
"Who"s chasing whom?"
"Well, your friend Y.T. ain"t no Edward R. Murrow. But as far as we can tell from her reports, they"ve been sighted in the same area, trying to kill each other," Squeaky says. He"s speaking with the slow, distant tones of someone who is getting live updates over his headphones.
"They were doing some kind of a deal earlier," Hiro says.
"Then I ain"t hardly surprised they"re trying to kill each other now."
Once they get to a certain part of town, following the T-Bone and Raven show becomes a matter of connect-the-ambulances. Every couple of blocks there is a cl.u.s.ter of cops and medica, lights sparkling, radios coughing. All they have to do is go from one to the next.
At the first one, there is a dead Crip lying on the pavement. A six-foot-wide blood slick runs from his body, diagonally down the street to a storm drain. The ambulance people are standing around, smoking and drinking coffee from go cups, waiting for The Enforcers to get finished measuring and photographing so that they can haul the corpse to the morgue. There are no IV lines set up, no bits of medical trash strewn around the area, no open doc boxes; they didn"t even try.
They proceed around a couple of corners to the next constellation of flashing lights. Here, the ambulance drivers are inflating a cast around the leg of a MetaCop.
"Run over by the motorcycle," Squeaky says, shaking his head with the traditional Enforcer"s disdain for their pathetic junior relations, the MetaCops.
Finally, he patches the radio feed into the dashboard so they can all hear it. The motorcyclist"s trail is now cold, and it sounds like most of the local cops are dealing with aftermath problems. But a citizen has just called in to complain that a man on a motorcycle, and several other persons, are trashing a field of hops on her block.
"Three blocks from here," Squeaky says to the driver.
"Hops?" Hiro says.
"I know the place. Local microbrewery," Squeaky says. "They grow their own hops. Contract it out to some urban gardeners. Chinese peasants who do the grunt work for "em."
When they arrive, the first authority figures on the scene, it is obvious why Raven decided to let himself get chased into a hop field: It is great cover. The hops are heavy, flowering vines that grow on trellises lashed together out of long something. Poppies. The trellises are eight feet high; you can"t see a thing.
They all get out of the car.
"T-Bone?" Squeaky hollers.
They hear someone yelling in English from the middle of the field. "Over here!" But he isn"t responding to Squeaky.
They walk into the hop field. Carefully. There is an enveloping smell, a resiny odor not unlike marijuana, the sharp smell that comes off an expensive beer. Squeaky motions for Hiro to stay behind him.
In other circ.u.mstances, Hiro would do so. He is half j.a.panese, and under certain circ.u.mstances, totally respectful of authority.
This is not one of those circ.u.mstances. If Raven comes anywhere near Hiro, Hiro is going to be talking to him with his katana. And if it comes to that, Hiro doesn"t want Squeaky anywhere near him, because he could lose a limb on the backswing.
"Yo, T-Bone!" Squeaky yells. "It"s The Enforcers, and we"re p.i.s.sed! Get the f.u.c.k out of there, man. Let"s go home!"
T-Bone, or Hiro a.s.sumes it is T-Bone, responds only by firing a short burst from a machine pistol. The muzzle flash lights up the hop vines like a strobe light. Hiro aims one shoulder at the ground, buries himself in soft earth and foliage for a few seconds.
"f.u.c.k!" T-Bone says. It is a disappointed f.u.c.k, but a f.u.c.k with a heavy undertone of overwhelming frustration and not a little fear.
Hiro gets up into a conservative squat, looks around. Squeaky and the other Enforcer are nowhere to be seen.
Hiro forces his way through one of the trellises and into a row that is closer to the action.
The other Enforcer-the driver-is in the same row, about ten meters away, his back turned to Hiro. He glances over his shoulder in Hiro"s direction, then looks in the other direction and sees someone else-Hiro can"t quite see who, because The Enforcer is in the way.
"What the f.u.c.k," The Enforcer says.
Then he jumps a little, as though startled, and something happens to the back of his jacket.
"Who is it?" Hiro says.
The Enforcer doesn"t say anything. He is trying to turn back around, but something prevents it. Something is shaking the vines around him.
The Enforcer shudders, careens sideways from foot to foot. "Got to get loose," he says, speaking loudly to no one in particular. He breaks into a trot, running away from Hiro. The other person who was in the row is gone now. The Enforcer is running in a strange stiff upright gait with his arms down to his sides. His bright green windbreaker isn"t hanging correctly.
Hiro runs after him. The Enforcer is trotting toward the end of the row, where the lights of the street are visible.
The Enforcer exits the field a couple of seconds ahead of him, and, when Hiro gets to the curb, is in the middle of the road, illuminated mostly by flashing blue light from a giant overhead video screen. He is turning around and around with strange little stomping footsteps, not keeping his balance very well. He is saying, "Aaah, aaah" in a low, calm voice that gurgles as though he badly needs to clear his throat.
As The Enforcer revolves, Hiro perceives that he has been impaled on an eight-foot-long bamboo spear. Half sticks out the front, half out the back. The back half is dark with blood and black fecal clumps, the front half is greenish-yellow and clean. The Enforcer can only see the front half and his hands are playing up and down it, trying to verify what his eyes are seeing. Then the back half whacks into a parked car, spraying a narrow fan of head cheese across the waxed and polished trunk lid. The car"s alarm goes off. The Enforcer hears the sound and turns around to see what it is.
When Hiro last sees him, he is running down the center of the pulsating neon street toward the center of Chinatown, wailing a terrible, random song that clashes with the bleating of the car alarm. Hiro feels even at this moment that something has been torn open in the world and that he is dangling above the gap, staring into a place where he does not want to be. Lost in the bioma.s.s.
Hiro draws his katana.
"Squeaky!" Hiro hollers. "He"s throwing spears! He"s pretty good at it! Your driver is. .h.i.t!"
"Got it!" Squeaky hollers.
Hiro goes back into the closest row. He hears a sound off to the right and uses the katana to cut his way through into that row. This is not a nice place to be at the moment, but it is safer than standing in the street under the plutonic light of the video screen.
Down the row is a man. Hiro recognizes him by the strange shape of his head, which just gets wider until it reaches his shoulders. He is holding a freshly cut bamboo pole in one hand, torn from the trellis.
Raven strokes one end of it with his other hand, and a chunk falls off. Something flickers in that hand, the blade of a knife apparently. He has just cut off the end of the pole at an acute angle to make it into a spear. He throws it fluidly. The motion is calm and beautiful. The spear disappears because it is coming straight at Hiro.
Hiro does not have time to adopt the proper stance, but this is fine since he has already adopted it. Whenever he has a katana in his hands he adopts it automatically, otherwise he fears that he may lose his balance and carelessly lop off one of his extremities. Feet parallel and pointed straight ahead, right foot in front of the left foot, katana held down at groin level like an extension of the phallus. Hiro raises the tip and slaps at the spear with the side of the blade, diverting it just enough; it goes into a slow sideways spin, the point missing Hiro just barely and entangling itself in a vine on Hiro"s right. The b.u.t.t end swings around and gets hung up on the left, tearing out a number of vines as it comes to a stop. It is heavy, and traveling very fast. Raven is gone.
Mental note: Whether or not Raven intended to take on a bunch of Crips and Enforcers singlehandedly tonight, he didn"t even bother to pack a gun.
Another burst of gunfire sounds from several rows over.
Hiro has been standing here for rather a long time, thinking about what just happened. He cuts through the next row of vines and heads in the direction of the muzzle flash, running his mouth: "Don"t shoot this way, T-Bone, I"m on your side, man."
"Motherf.u.c.ker threw a stick into my chest, man!" T-Bone complains.
When you"re wearing armor, getting hit by a spear just isn"t such a big deal anymore.
"Maybe you should just forget it," Hiro says. He is having to cut his way through a lot of rows to reach T-Bone, but as long as T-Bone keeps talking, Hiro can find him.
"I"m a Crip. We don"t forget nothing," T-Bone says. "Is that you?"
"No," Hiro says. "I"m not there yet."
A very brief burst of gunfire, rapidly cut off. Suddenly, no one is talking. Hiro cuts his way into the next row and almost steps on T-Bone"s hand, which has been amputated at the wrist. Its finger is still tangled in the trigger guard of a MAC-10.
The remainder of T-Bone is two rows away. Hiro stops and watches through the vines.
Raven is one of the largest men Hiro has seen outside of a professional sporting event. T-Bone is backing away from him down the row. Raven, moving with long confident strides, catches up with T-Bone and swings one hand up into T-Bone"s body; Hiro doesn"t have to see the knife to know it is there.
It looks as though T-Bone is going to get out of this with nothing worse than a sewn-on hand and some rehab work, because you can"t stab a person to death that way, not if he is wearing armor.
T-Bone screams.
He is bouncing up and down on Raven"s hand. The knife has gone all the way through the bulletproof fabric and now Raven is trying to gut T-Bone the same way he did Lagos. But his knife-whatever the h.e.l.l it is-won"t cut through the fabric that way. It is sharp enough to penetrate-which should be impossible-but not sharp enough to slash.
Raven pulls it out, drops to one knee, and swings his knife hand around in a long ellipse between T-Bone"s thighs. Then he jumps over T-Bone"s collapsing body and runs.