"Hey. Anybody here?"
Gurgle of liquid through transparent tubing. A silt-slimed pair of
- -battered yellow waders dangle nearby, but no sign of who hung them there. She moves quickly, her feet remembering, to where corroded aluminum rungs protrude from fist-sized blobs of super-epoxy.
The ball-chain zip pulls on Skinner"s old jacket jingle as she climbs. These rungs are a back way, an emergency exit if needed.
Climbing past the sickly greenish sun of a grow lamp, housed in a corroded industrial fixture, she pulls herself up the last aluminum rung and through a narrow triangular opening.
It is dark here, shaded by walls of rain-swolkin composite.
* Shadowed where she remembers light, and she sees that the bulb,
-above, in this enclosed s.p.a.ce, is missing. This is the lower end of
-Skinner"s "funicular," the little junkyard elevator trolley, built for him by a black man named Fontaine, and it was here that she"d lock her bike in her messengering days, after shouldering it up another, less covert ladder.
She studies the cog-toothed track of the funicular, where the grease shows dull with acc.u.mulated dust. The gondola, a yellow munic.i.p.al
recycling bin, deep enough to stand in and grasp the rim, waits where it should. But if it is here, it likely means that the current resident of the cable tower is not. Unless the car has been sent in expectation of a visitor, which Chevette doubts. It is better to be up there with the car up. She knows that feeling.
Now she climbs wooden rungs, a cruder ladder of two-by-fours,
until her head clears the ply and she wirces in wind and silvery light. Sees a gull hang almost stationary in the air, not twenty feet away, the towers of the city as backdrop.
The wind tugs at her hair, longer now han when she lived here, and a feeling that she can"t name comes hile something she has always known, and she has no interest in climbirg farther, because she knows now that the home she remembers is n longer there. Only its sh.e.l.l, humming in the wind, where once she lay wrapped in blankets, smelling machinist"s grease and coffee and fresh-cat wood.
Where, it comes to her, she was sometimes happy, in the sense of being somehow complete, and ready for what another day might bring.
And knows she is no longer that, md that while she was, she scarcely knew it.
She hunches her shoulders, drawing her neck down into the carapace of Skinner"s jacket, and imagines heiself crying, though she knows she won"t, and climbs back down.
82.
-: 20. BOOMZILLA.
BOOMZILLA sitting on the curb, beside the truck these two b.i.t.c.hes say
- -they pay him to watch. They don"t come back, he"ll get some help and strip it. Wants that robot balloon the blonde b.i.t.c.h had. That"s fine. Fly
- -that s.h.i.t around.
Other b.i.t.c.h kind of biker-looking, big old coat looked like she got it off a dumpster. That one kick your a.s.s, looked like.
Where they gone? Hungry now, wind blowing grit in his face, splashes of rain.
"Have you seen this girl?" Movie-looking white man, face painted dark like they do down the coast.
How they dress when they had time to think about coming here, everything worn out just right. Leather jacket like he"s left his old airplane around the corner. Blue jeans. Black T.
Boomzilla, he"d puke, anybody try to put him in that s.h.i.t. Boomzihla know how he going to dress, time he get his s.h.i.t together.
Boomzilla looking at the printout the man holds out. Sees the biker-looking b.i.t.c.h, but dressed
better.
Boomzilla looks up at the tinted face. See how pale the blue eyes look against it. Something say: cold. Something say: don"t f.u.c.k with me.
Boomzilla thinks: he don"t know it"s they truck.
"She"s lost," the man says.
You a.s.s is, Boomzilla thinks. "Never seen her."
Eyes lean in a little closer. "Missing, understand? Trying to help her. A lost child."
Thinks: child my a.s.s; b.i.t.c.h my momma"s age.
Boomzilla shakes his head. How he does it serious, just a little, side to side. Means: no.
The blue eyes swing away, looking for somebody else to show the picture to; swing right past the truck. No click.
Man moving off, toward a clutch of people by a coffee stand, holding the picture.
Boomzilla watches him go.
A lost child himself, he has every intention of staying that way.
83.
21. PARAGON ASIA.
SAN Francisco and Los Angeles seemed more like different planets than different cities. It wasn"t the NoCal-SoCal thing, but something that went down to the roots. Rydell remembered sitting with a beer somewhere, years ago, watching the part.i.tion ceremonies on CNN, and it hadn"t impressed him much even then. But the difference, that was something.
A stiff gust of wind threw rain into his face, as he was coming down Stockton toward Market.
Office girls held their skirts down and laughed, and Rydell felt like laughing too, though that had pa.s.sed before he"d crossed Market and started down 4th.
This was where he"d met Chevette, where she"d lived.
She and Rydehl had had their adventure up here, had met in the course of it, and the end of it had taken them to LA.
She hadn"t liked LA, he always told himself, but he knew that really wasn"t why it had gone the way it had.
They had moved down there, the two of them, while Rydell pursued the mediation of what they"d just gone through together. Cops in Trouble was interested, and Cops in Trouble had been interested in Rydell once before, back in Knoxville.
Fresh out of the academy, back then, he"d used deadly force on a stimulant abuser who was trying to kill his, the abuser"s, girlfriend"s children. The girlfriend had subsequently been looking to sue the department, the city, and Rydehl, so Cops in Trouble had decided Rydell might warrant a segment. So they"d flown him out to SoCal, where they were based. He"d gotten an agent and everything, but the deal had fallen apart, so he"d taken ajob driving armed response for IntenSecure. When he"d managed to get himself fired from that, he wound up going up to NoCal to do temp work, off the record, for the local IntenSecure operation there. That was what had gotten him into the trouble that introduced him to Chevette Washington.
84.
So when Rydell turned up back in LA with a story to tell, and Chevette on his arm, Cops in Trouble had perked right up. They were moving into a phase where they tried to spin individual segments off into series for niche markets, and the demographics people liked it that Rydell was male, not too young, not too educated, and from the South. They also liked it that he wasn"t racist, and they really liked it that he was with this really cute alt-dot kind of girl, one who looked like she could crush walnuts between her thighs.
Cops in Trouble had installed them in a small stealth hotel below Sunset, and they had been so happy, the first few weeks, that Rydehl could barely stand to remember it.