Whenever they went to bed, it had seemed more like making history than love. The suite was like a little apartment, with its own kitchen and a gas fire, and they"d roll around at night on a
blanket on the floor, in front of the fire, with the windows open and the lights out, blue flame flickering low and LAPD gunships drumming overhead, and every time he"d crawl into her arms, or she"d put her face down next to his, he"d known it was good history, the best, and that everything was going to be just fine.
But it hadn"t been.
Rydell had never thought about his looks much. He looked, he"d thought, okay. Women had seemed to like him well enough, and it had been pointed out to him that he resembled the younger Tommy Lee Jones, Tommy Lee Jones being a twentieth-century movie star. And because they"d told him that, he"d watched a few of the guy"s movies and liked them, though the resemblance people saw puzzled him.
He guessed he"d started to worry though, when Cops in Trouble had a.s.signed a skinny blonde intern named Tara-May Ahlenby to follow him around, grabbing footage with a shoulder-mounted steadicam.
Tara-May had chewed gum and fiddled with filters and had generally put Rydell"s teeth on edge.
He"d known she was feeding live to Cops in Trouble, and he"d started to get the idea they weren"t too happy with what was coming through. Tara-May hadn"t helped, explaining to Rydehl that the camera added an apparent twenty pounds to anybody"s looks,
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but that, hey, s1re liked him just the way h~ was, ~lI beefy and solid. But she"d kept sugesting he try working out more. Why not go with that girlfriend of yurs, she"d say, she"s so buff, it hurs.
But Che~tte had never seen the in;ide of a gym in her life; she owed her buf~ess to her genes and a few years she"d spent pounding up and down ~an Francisco hills on a conpet.i.tiom-grade mountain bike, its frame rollel from epoxy and j.a.panese constriction paper.
So now Hydell sighed, coming up on the co-ner of 4th and Bryant, and on Bryanl turning toward the bridge The bag on his shoulder was starting to demonstrate its weight, its cohIusi(n with gravity.
Rydeli stopped, sightd again, readjusted the bag. Put t~oughts of the past out of his mind.
Just walk
NO trouble at all finding that branch of Lucky Uragon.
Couldn"t miss it, smack in what hal been the middle of Bryant, dead center as you approached the entrance to the bridge. He hadn"t been able to s~e it, coming along Bryant, ~ecaus~ it was behind the jumble of old coirrete tank traps they"d dropped th.o.r.e after the quake, but once you got past those, there it was.
He coulc see, walking up to it, that it was m newer model than the one he"d worled in on Sunset.
It had fev~er corrers, so there was less to chip off or med repair. He supposed that designing a Lucky Dragon module was ~bout designing something that would hold up under millions of uncaing and even hostile hanth. Ultirrately, he thought, you"d wind up witFsomething hike a seash.e.l.l, hard and smooth.
The storton Sunset had had a finish that a:e graffiti. The gang kids would come and tag it; twenty minute~ later these flat, dark, vaguely crab-like pat:hes of dark blue would come gliding around the corner. Rydell had mver understood how they "vorke4 and Durius said they"d been deve1o~ed in Singapore. They seemed to be embedded, a few millimeters dowi into the surface, which seas a scrt of non-glossy gel-coat affair, but abe to move around under there. Smart material, he"d heard that called. And they"d glide up to the tag, ~vi-iatever artfully abstract scrawl had been sprayed there to declare fealty or mark territory or swear
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revenge (Durius had been able to read these things and construct a narrative out of them) and start eating it. You couldn"t actually see the crablegs move. They just sort of nuzzled in and gradually the tag started
to unravel, de-rez, molecules of paint sucked down into the blue of the Lucky Dragon graffiti- eaters.
And once someone had come with a smart tag, a sort of decal they"d somehow adhered to the wall, although neither RydelI nor Durius had
been able to figure how they"d done it without being seen. Maybe, Dunus said, they"d shot it from a distance. It was the tag of a gang called
the Chupacabras, a fearsome spiky thing, all black and red, insectoid
- -" and menacing and, Rydell thought, kind of good-looking, exciting-looking. He"d seen it worn as a tattoo, in the store. The kids who wore it favored those contacts, the kind gave you pupils like a snake"s. When the graffiti-eaters came out after it though, it had moved.
They"d edge up to it, and it would sense them and move away. Almost too slow to see it happening, but it moved. Then the graffiti-eaters would move again. Durius and Rydell watched it, the first night, get all the way around to the back of the store. It was starting to work its way back around toward the front when they went off shift.
Next shift it was still there, and a couple of standard spray-bomb tags as well. The graffiti- eaters were locked on the smart tag and not
taking care of business. Durius showed it to Mr. Park, who didn"t like it that they hadn"t told him before. Rydell showed him where they"d logged
it in the shift record when they clocked off, which had just p.i.s.sed Mr. Park off more.
About an hour later, two men in white Tyvek coveralls showed up in an unmarked, surgically clean white van and went to work. Rydell would"ve liked to watch them get the smart tag off, but there was a run of shoplifters that night and he didn"t get to see what they did to it. They didn"t use sc.r.a.pers or solvents, he knew that. They used a notebook and a couple of adhesive probes.
Basically, he guessed, they reprogrammed it, messed with its code, and after they left, the graffiti-eaters were back out there, slurping down the latest Chupacabra iconography.
This Lucky Dragon by the bridge was smooth and white as a new china plate, Rydell observed, as he came up to it. It looked like a piece
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of some different dream, fallen here. The entrance to the bridge had a werd unplanned drama to it, and Rydell wondered if there"d been a lot of Ileetings, back in Singapore, about whether or not to put this unit here. Lucky Dragon had some units on prime tourist real estate, and Rydell knew that from watching the Global Interactive Video Column back in LA; there was one in the mall under Red Square, that fancy KDatn branch in Berlin, the big-a.s.s one in Piccadilly, London, but putting one here struck him as a strange, or strangely deliberate, move.
The bridge was a dodgy place, safe enough but not "tourist safe." There was a walk-on tourist contingent, sure, and a big one, particularly on this end of the bridge, but no tours, no guides.
If you went, you went on your own. Chevette had told him how they repelled evangelicals, and the Salvation Army and any other organized ent.i.ty, in no untertain terms. Rydell figured that in fact that was part of the draw of the place, that it was unregulated.
Autonomous zone, Durius called that. He"d told Rydell that Sunset Strip had started out as one of those, a place between police jurisdictions, and somehow that had set the DNA of the street, which was why, sas you still got hookers in elf hats there, come Christmas.
But maybe Lucky Dragon knew something people didn"t, he thought. Things could change. His father, for instance, used to swear that Times Square had been a really dangerous place.
Rydell made his way through the crowd flowing on and off the bridge and past the Global Interactive Video Column, daydreaming as he did that he"d look up and see the Sunset branch there, with PraiseG.o.d beaming sunnily at him from out in front.
What he got was some skater kid in Seoul shaking his nuts at the camera.
He went in, to be immediately stopped by a very large man with a very broad forehead and pale,
almost invisible eyebrows. "Your bag," said the security man, who was wearing a pink Lucky Dragon f.a.n.n.y pack exactly like the one Rydell had worn in LA. As a matter of fact, Rydell"s was in the very duffel the guy was demanding.
"Please," Rydell said, handing the bag over. Lucky Dragon security
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were supposed to say that: please. It was on Mr. Park"s notebook, and anyway when you asked somebody for their bag, you were admitting you
thought they might shoplift, so you might as well be polite about it.
The security man narrowed his eyes. He put the bag in a numbered cubicle behind his station and handed Rydehl a Lucky Dragon logo tag that looked like an oversized drink coaster with the number five on the back. It was the size it was, Rydell knew, because it had been determined that this size made the tags just that much too big to fit into most ~ pockets, thereby preventing people from pocketing, forgetting, and $~ wandering away with them. Kept costs down. Everything about Lucky
Dragon was worked out that way. You sort of had to admire them.
"You re welcome Rydell said He headed for the ATM in the back Lucky Dragon International Bank He knew it was watching him as he
walked up to it pulling his wallet from his back pocket
-- -"I"m here to get a chip issued," he said.