1 The luminous flesh of giants

The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city's middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.

Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb; seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed. But here the mirrored ziggurats down Lñzaro Cñrdenas flow with the luminous flesh of giants, shunting out the night's barrage of dreams to the waiting avenidas-business as usual, world without end.

The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of night.

Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the background hiss of climate-control. He imagines himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of the old Imperial. He sees himself in the streets of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red paper lanterns line a narrow lane.

He opens his eyes.

Mexico City is still there.

The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned with the edge of the coffee table: a Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more irritating than its lingering aftertaste.

On the screen above the console, the ptichka await him, all in a creamy frieze. When he takes up the remote, their high sharp cheekbones twist in the space behind his eyes. Their young men, invariably entering from behind, wear black leather gloves.

Slavic faces, calling up unwanted fragments of a childhood: the reek of a black canal, steel racketing steel beneath a swaying train, the high old ceilings of an apartment overlooking a frozen park.

Twenty-eight peripheral images frame the Russians in their earnest coupling; he glimpses figures carried from the smoke-blackened car-deck of an Asian ferry.

He opens another of the little bottles.

Now the ptichka, their heads bobbing like well-oiled machines, swallow their arrogant, self-absorbed boyfriends. The camera angles recall the ardor of Soviet industrial cinema.

His gaze strays to NHK Weather. A low-pressure front is crossing Kansas. Next to it, an eerily calm Islamic downlink ceaselessly reiterates the name of God in a fractal-based calligraphy.

He drinks the vodka.

He watches television.

After midnight, at the intersection of Liverpool and Florencia, he stares out at the Zona Rosa from the back of a white Lada, a nanopore Swiss respirator chafing his freshly shaven chin.

And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws of grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they take, their manufacturers all make the same dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids.

He's thought to escape the sameness, perhaps discover something of beauty or passing interest, but here there are only masked faces, his fear, the lights.

An ancient American car comes creeping through the turn, out of Avenida Chapultepec, gouts of carbon puising from beneath a dangling bumper. A dusty rind of cola-colored resin and shattered mirror seals its every surface; only the windshield is exposed, and this is black and glossy, opaque as a blob of ink, reminding him of the gunship's lethal pod. He feels the fear begin to accrete, seamlessly, senselessly, with absolute conviction, around this carnival ghost, the Cadillac, this oil-burning relic in its spectral robe of smudged mosaic silver. Why is it allowed to add its filth to the already impossible air? Who sits inside, behind the black windshield?

Trembling, he watches the thing pass.

'That car ...' He finds himself leaning forward, compulsively addressing the broad brown neck of the driver, whose massive ear lobes somehow recall reproduction pottery offered on the hotel's shopping channel.

'El coche,' says the driver, who wears no mask, and turning, now seems to notice the courier for the first time. The courier sees the mirrored Cadillac flare, once, and briefly, with the reflected ruby of a nightclub's laser, then gone.

The driver is staring at him.

He tells the driver to return to the hotel.

He comes awake from a dream of metal voices, down the vaulted concourses of some European airport, distant figures glimpsed in mute rituals of departure.

Darkness. The hiss of climate-control.

The touch of cotton sheets. His telephone beneath the pillow. Sounds of traffic, muted by the gas-filled windows. All tension, his panic, are gone. He remembers the atrium bar. Music. Faces.

He becomes aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium. It is all he knows of peace.

And, yes, the glasses are here, tucked beside his telephone. He draws them out, opening the ear pieces with a guilty pleasure that has somehow endured since Prague.

Very nearly a decade he has loved her, though he doesn't think of it in those terms. But he has never bought another piece of software and the black plastic frames have started to lose their sheen. The label on the cassette is unreadable now, sueded white with his touch in the night. So many rooms like this one.

He has long since come to prefer her in silence. He no longer inserts the yellowing audio beads. He has learned to provide his own, whispering to her as he fast-forwards through the clumsy titles and up the moonlit ragged hiliscape of a place that is neither Hollywood nor Rio, but some soft-focus digital approximation of both.

She is waiting for him, always, in the white house up the canyon road. The candles. The wine. The jet-beaded dress against the matte perfection of her skin, such whiteness, the black beads drawn smooth and cool as a snake's belly up her tensed thigh.

Far away, beneath cotton sheets, his hands move.

Later, drifting toward sleep of a different texture, the phone beneath his pillow chimes softly and only once.

'Yes?'

'Confirming your reservation to San Francisco,' someone says, either a woman or a machine. He touches a key, recording the flight number, says goodnight, and closes his eyes on the tenuous light sifting from the dark borders of the drapes.

Her white arms enfold him. Her blondness eternal.

He sleeps.

IntenSecure had their wagons detailed every three shifts. They used this big specialty car wash off Colby; twenty coats of hand-rubbed Wet Honey Sienna and you didn't let it get too shabby.

That one November evening the Republic of Desire put an end to his career in armed response, Berry Rydell had arrived there a little early.

He liked the way it smelled inside. They had this pink stuff they put through the power-washers to get the road film off, and the smell reminded him of a summer job he'd had in Knoxville, his last year in school. They'd been putting condos into the shell of this big old Safeway out on Jefferson Davis. The architects wanted the cinder block walls stripped just this one certain way, mostly gray showing through but some old pink Safeway paint left in the little dips and crannies. They were from

Memphis and they wore black suits and white cotton shirts. The shirts had obviously cost more than the suits, or at least as much, and they never wore ties or undid the top button. Rydell had figured that that was a way for architects to dress; now he lived in L.A., he knew it was true. He'd overheard one of them explaining to the foreman that what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the material's passage through time. He thought that was probably bullshit, but he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on television.

But what it really amounted to was getting most of this

2 Cruising with gunhead

shitty old paint off thousands and thousands of square feet of equally shitty cinder block, and you did it with an oscillating spray-head on the end of a long stainless handle. If you thought the foreman wasn't looking, you could aim it at another kid, twist out a thirty-foot rooster tail of stinging rainbow, and wash all his sunbiock off. Rydell and his friends all wore this Australian stuff that came in serious colors, so you could see where you had and hadn't put it. Had to get your right distance on it, though, 'cause up close those heads could take the chrome off a bumper. Rydell and Buddy Crigger both got fired for doing that, finally, and then they walked across Jeff Davis to a beer joint and Rydell wound up spending the night with this girl from Key West, the first time he'd ever slept beside a woman.

Now here he was in Los Angeles, driving a six-wheeled Hotspur Hussar with twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer. The Hussar was an armored Land Rover that could do a hundred and forty on a straightaway, assuming you could find one open and had the time to accelerate. Hernandez, his shift super, said you couldn't trust an Englishman to build anything much bigger than a hat, not if you wanted it to work when you needed it; he said IntenSecure should've bought Israeli or at least Brazilian, and who needed Ralph Lauren to design a tank anyway?

Rydell didn't know about that, but that paint job was definitely trying too hard. He thought they probably wanted people to think of those big brown United Parcel trucks, and at the same time they maybe hoped it would look sort of like something you'd see in an Episcopal church. Not too much gilt on the logo. Sort of restrained.

The people who worked in the car wash were mostly Mongolian immigrants, recent ones who had trouble getting better jobs. They did this crazy throat-singing thing while they worked, and he liked to hear that. He couldn't figure out how they did it; sounded like tree-frogs, but like it was two sounds at once.

Now they were buffing the rows of chromed nubs down the sides. Those had been meant to support electric crowd-control grids and were just chromed for looks. The riot-wagons in Knoxville had been electrified, but with this drip-system that kept them wet, which was a lot nastier.

'Sign here,' said the crew boss, this quiet black kid named Anderson. He was a medical student, days, and he always looked like he was about two nights short of sleep.

Rydell took the pad and the light-pen and signed the signature-plate. Anderson handed Rydell the keys.

'You ought to get you some rest,' Rydell said. Anderson grinned, wanly. Rydell walked over to Gunhead, deactivating the door alarm.

Somebody had written that inside, 'GUNHEAD,' in green marker on the panel above the windshield. The name stuck, but mostly because Sublett liked it. Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect. He said his mother had been getting ready to deed his ass to the church, whatever that meant.

Sublett wasn't too anxious to talk about it, but Rydell had gotten the idea that these people figured video was the Lord's preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. 'He's in the de-tails,' Sublett had said once. 'You gotta watch for Him close.' Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that Sublett had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever met, mostly old movies on channels that never ran anything but. Sublett said

Gunhead was the name of a robot tank in a Japanese monster movie. Hernandez thought Sublett had written the name on there himself. Sublett denied it. Hernandez said take it off. Sublett ignored him. It was still there, but Rydell knew Sublett was too law-abiding to commit any vandalism, and anyway the ink in the marker might've killed him.

Sublett had had allergies. He went into shock from various kinds of cleaners and solvents, so you couldn't get him to come into the car wash at all, ever. The allergies made him light sensitive, too, so he had to wear these mirrored contacts. What with the black IntenSecure uniform and his dry blond hair, the contacts made him look like some kind of Kian-assed Nazi robot. Which could get kind of complicated in the wrong store on Sunset, say three in the morning and all you really wanted was some mineral water and a Coke. But Rydell was always glad to have him on shift, because he was as determinedly nonviolent a rentacop as you were likely to find. And he probably wasn't even crazy. Both of which were definite pluses for Rydell. As Hernandez was fond of pointing out, SoCal had stricter regulations for who could or couldn't be a hairdresser.

Like Rydell, a lot of IntenSecure's response people were former police officers of some kind, some were even ex-LAPD, and if the company's rules about not carrying personal weapons on duty were any indication, his co-workers were expected to turn up packing all manner of hardware. There were metal detectors on the staff-room doors and Hernandez usually had a drawer full of push-daggers, nunchuks, stunguns, knucks, boot-knives, and whatever else the detectors had picked up. Like Friday morning at a South Miami high school. Hernandez gave it all back after the shift, but when they went calling, they were supposed to make do with their Glocks and the chunkers.

The Glocks were standard police issue, at least twenty years old, that IntenSecure bought by the truckload from PDs that could afford to upgrade to caseless ammunition. If you did it by the book, you kept the Glocks in their plastic holsters, and kept the holsters Velcroed to the wagon's central console. When you answered a call, you pulled a holstered pistol off the console and stuck it on the patch provided on your uniform. That was the only time you were supposed to be out of the wagon with a gun on, when you were actually responding.

The chunkers weren't even guns, not legally anyway, but a ten-second burst at close range would chew somebody's face off. They were Israeli riot-control devices, air-powered, that fired one-inch cubes of recycled rubber. They looked like the result of a forced union between a bulipup assault rifle and an industrial staple gun, except they were made out of this bright yellow plastic. When you pulled the trigger, those chunks came out in a solid stream. If you got really good with one, you could shoot around corners; just kind of bounce them off a convenient surface. Up close, they'd eventually cut a sheet of plywood in half, if you kept on shooting, and they left major bruises out to about thirty yards. The theory was, you didn't always encounter that many armed intruders, and a chunker was a lot less likely to injure the client or the client's property. If you did encounter an armed intruder, you had the Glock. Although the intruder was probably running caseless through a floating breech-not part of the theory. Nor was it part of the theory that seriously tooled-up intruders tended to be tightened on dancer, and were thereby both inhumanly fast and clinically psychotic.

There had been a lot of dancer in Knoxville, and some of it had gotten Rydell suspended. He'd crawled into an apartment where a machinist named Kenneth Turvey was holding his girlfriend, two little kids, and demanding to speak to the president.

Turvey was white, skinny, hadn't bathed in a month, and had the Last Supper tattooed on his chest. It was a very fresh tattoo; it hadn't even scabbed over. Through a film of drying blood, Rydell could see that Jesus didn't have any face. Neither did any of the Apostles.

'Damn it,' Turvey said, when he saw Rydell. 'I just wanna speak to the president.' He was sitting cross-legged, naked, on his girlfriend's couch. He had something like a piece of pipe across his lap, all wrapped with tape.

'We're trying to get her for you,' Rydell said. 'We're sorry it's taking so long, hut we have to go through channels.'

'God damn it,' Turvey said wearily, 'doesn't nobody understand I'm on a mission from God?' He didn't sound particularly angry, just tired and put out. Rydell could see the girlfriend through the open door of the apartment's single bedroom. She was on her back, on the floor, and one of her legs looked broken. He couldn't see her face. She wasn't moving at all. Where were the kids?

'What is that thing you got there?' Rydell asked, indicating the object across Turvey's lap.

'It's a gun,' Turvey said, 'and it's why I gotta talk to the president.'

'Never seen a gun like that,' Rydell allowed. 'What's it shoot?'

'Grapefruit cans,' Turvey said. 'Fulla concrete.'

'No shit?'

'Watch,' Turvey said, and brought the thing to his shoulder. It had a sort of breech, very intricately machined, a trigger-thing like part of a pair of vise-grip pliers, and a couple of flexible tubes. These latter ran down, Rydell saw, to a great big canister of gas, the kind you'd need a hand truck to move, which lay on the floor beside the couch.

There on his knees, on the girlfriend's dusty polyester carpet, he'd watched that muzzle swing past. It was big enough to put your fist down. He watched as Turvey took aim, back through the open bedroom door, at the closet.

'Turvey,' he heard himself say, 'where's the goddamn kids?'

Turvey moved the vise-grip handle and punched a hole the size of a fruit-juice can through the closet door. The kids were in there. They must've screamed, though Rydell couldn't remember hearing it. Rydell's lawyer later argued that he was not only deaf at this point, hut in a state of sonically induced catalepsy. Turvey's invention was only a few decihels short of what you got with a SWAT stun-grenade. But Rydell couldn't remember. He couldn't rememher shooting Kenneth Turvey in the head, either, or anything else at all until he woke up in the hospital. There was a woman there from Cops in Trouble, which had been Rydell's father's favorite show, but she said she couldn't actually talk to him until she'd spoken with his agent. Rydell said he didn't have one. She said she knew that, but one was going to call him.

Rydell lay there thinking about all the times he and his father had watched Cops in Trouble. 'What kind of trouble we talking here?' he finally asked.

The woman just smiled. 'Whatever, Berry, it'll probably be adequate.'

He squinted up at her. She was sort of good-looking. 'What's your name?'

'Karen Mendelsohn.' She didn't look like she was from Knoxville, or even Memphis.

'You from Cops in Trouble?'

'Yes.'

'What you do for 'em?'

'I'm a lawyer,' she said. Rydell couldn't recall ever actually having met one before, but after that he wound up meeting lots more.

Gunhead's displays were featureless slabs of liquid crystal; they woke when Rydell inserted the key, typed the security code, and ran a basic systems check. The cameras under the rear bumper were his favorites; they made parking really easy; you could see exactly where you were backing up. The downlink from the Death Star wouldn't work while he was still in the car wash, too much steel in the building, but it was Sublett's job to keep track of all that with an ear-bead.

There was a notice posted in the staff room at IntenSecure, telling you it was company policy not to call it that, the Death Star, but everybody did anyway. The LAPD called it that themselves. Officially it was the Southern California (icosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite.

Watching the dashboard screens, Rydell backed carefully out of the building. Gunhead's twin ceramic engines were new enough to still be relatively quiet; Rydell could hear the tires squish over the wet concrete floor.

Sublett was waiting outside, his silver eyes reflecting the red of passing taillights. Behind him, the sun was setting, the sky's colors bespeaking more than the usual cocktail of additives. He stepped back as Rydell reversed past him, anxious to avoid the least droplet of spray from the tires. Rydell was anxious too; he didn't want to have to haul the Texan to Cedars again if his allergies kicked up.

Rydell waited as Sublett pulled on a pair of disposable surgical gloves.

'Howdy,' Sublett said, climbing into his seat. He closed his door and began to remove the gloves, gingerly peeling them into a Ziploc Baggie.

'Don't get any on you,' Rydell said, watching the care with which Sublett treated the gloves.

'Go ahead, laugh,' Sublett said mildly. He took out a pack of hypo-allergenic gum and popped a piece from its bubble. 'How's ol' Gunhead?'

Rydell scanned the displays, satisfied. 'Not too shabby.'

'Hope we don't have to respond to any damn' stealth houses tonight,' Sublett said, chewing.

Stealth houses, so-called, were on Sublett's personal list of bad calls. He said the air in them was toxic. Rydell didn't think it made any sense, but he was tired of arguing about it. Stealth houses were bigger than most regular houses, cost more, and Rydell figured the owners would pay plenty to keep the air clean. Sublett maintained that anybody who built a stealth house was paranoid to begin with, would always keep the place locked up too tight, no air circulation, and you'd get that had toxic buildup.

If there'd been any stealth houses in Knoxville, Rydell hadn't known about them. He thought it was an L.A. thing.

Sublett, who'd worked for IntenSecure for almost two years, mostly on day patrol in Venice, had been the first person to even mention them to Rydell. When Rydell finally got to answer a call to one, he couldn't believe the place; it just went down and down, dug in beneath something that looked almost, but not quite, like a bombed-out drycleaning plant. And it was all peeled logs inside, white plaster, Turkish carpets, big paintings, slate floors, furniture like he'd never seen before. But it was some kind of tricky call; domestic violence, Rydell figured. Like the husband hit the wife, the wife hit the button, now they were making out it was all just a glitch. But it couldn't really be a glitch, because someone had had to hit the button, and there hadn't been any response to the password call that came back to them three-point-eight seconds later. She must've messed with the phones, Rydell thought, then hit the button. He'd been been riding with 'Big George' Kechakmadze that night, and the Georgian (Tbilisi, not Atlanta) hadn't liked it either. 'You see these people, they're subscribers, man; nobody bleeding, you get your ass out, okay?' Big George had said, after. But Rydell kept remembering a tension around the woman's eyes, how she held the collar of the big white robe folded against her throat. Her husband in a matching robe but with thick hairy legs and expensive glasses. There'd been something wrong there but he'd never know what. Not any more than he'd ever understand how their lives really worked, lives that looked like what you saw on tv but weren't.

L.A. was full of mysteries, when you looked at it that way. No bottom to it.

He'd come to like driving through it, though. Not when he had to get anywhere in particular, but just cruising with Gunhead was okay. Now he was turning onto La Cienega and the little green cursor on the clash was doing the same.

'Forbidden Zone,' Suhlett said. 'Herve Villechaize, Susan I yrell, Marie-Pascal Elfman, Viva.'

'Viva?' Rydell asked. 'Viva what?' 'Viva. Actress.'

'When'd they make that?'

'1980.'

'I wasn't born yet.'

'Time on tv's all the same time, Rydell.'

'Man, I thought you were trying to get over your upbringing and all.' Rydell de-mirrored the door-window to better watch a redheaded girl pass him in a pink Daihatsu Sneaker with the top off. 'Anyway, I never saw that one.' It was just that hour of evening when women in cars looked about as good, in Los Angeles, as anything ever did. The surgeon general was trying to outlaw convertibles; said they contributed to the skin-cancer rate.

'End game. Al Cliver, Moira Chen, George Eastman, Gordon Mitchell. 1985.'

'Well, I was two,' Rydell said, 'but I didn't see that one either.'

Sublett fell silent. Rydell felt sorry for him; the Texan really didn't know any other way to start a conversation, and his folks back home in the trailer-camp would've seen all those films and more.

'Well,' Rydell said, trying to pick up his end, 'I was watching this one old movie last night-'

Sublett perked up. 'Which one?'

'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'This guy's in L.A. and he's just met this girl. Then he picks up a pay phone, 'cause it's ringing. Late at night. It's some guy in a missile silo somewhere who knows they've just launched theirs at the Russians. He's trying to phone his dad, or his brother, or something. Says the world's gonna end in short order. Then the guy who answered the phone hears these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone, I mean.'

Suhlett closed his eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. 'Yeah? How's it end?'

'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'I went to sleep.'

Sublett opened his eyes. 'Who was in it?'

'Got me.'

Sublett's blank silver eyes widened in disbelief. 'Jesus, Berry, you shouldn't oughta watch tv, not unless you're gonna pay it attention.'

He wasn't in the hospital very long, after he shot Kenneth Turvey; barely two days. His lawyer, Aaron Pursley himself, made the case that they should've kept him in there longer, the better to assess the extent of his post-traumatic shock. But Rydell hated hospitals and anyway he didn't feel too bad; he just couldn't recall exactly what had happened. And he had Karen Mendelsohn to help him out with things, and his new agent, Wellington Ma, to deal with the other people from Cops in Trouble, not one of them as nice as Karen, who had long brown hair. Wellington Ma was Chinese, lived in Los Angeles, and Karen said his father had been in the Big Circle gang-though she advised Rydell not to bring it up.

Wellington Ma's business card was a rectangular slice of pink synthetic quartz, laser-engraved with his name, 'The Ma-Mariano Agency,' an address on Beverly Boulevard, and all kinds of numbers and e-mail addresses. It arrived by GlobEx in its own little gray suede envelope while Rydell was still in the hospital.

'Looks like you could cut yourself on it,' Rydell said.

'You could, many no doubt have,' said Karen Mendelsohn, 'and if you put it in your wallet and sit down, it shatters.'

'Then what's the point of it?'

'You're supposed to take very good care of it. You won't get another.'

Rydell never actually did meet Wellington Ma, at least not 'til quite a while later, but Karen would bring in a little briefcase with a pair of eyephones on a wire and Rydell could talk with him iii his office in LA. It was the sharpest tele presence rig Rydell had ever used, and it really did look just like he was right there. He could see out the window to where there was this lopsided pyramid the color of a Noxzema jar. He asked Wellington Ma what that was and Ma said it was the old Design Center, but currently it was a discount mall, and Rydell could go there when he came to L.A., which was going to be soon.

Turvey's girlfriend, Jenni-Rae Cline, was bringing an intricately interlocking set of separate actions against Rydell, the Department, the City of Knoxville, and the company in Singapore that owned her apartment building. About twenty million in total.

Rydell, having become a cop in trouble, was glad to find that Cops in Trouble was right there for him. They'd hired Aaron Pursley, for starters, and of course Rydell knew who he was from the show. He had that gray hair, those blue eyes, that nose you could split kindling with, and wore jeans, Tony Lama boots, and plain white oxford-cloth pima cotton cowboy business shirts with Navajo-silver bob-ties. He was famous and he defended cops like Rydell from people like Turvey's girlfriend and her lawyer.

Jenni-Rae Cline's lawyer maintained that Rydell shouldn't have been in her apartment at all, that he'd endangered her life and her children's by so doing, and that he'd killed Kenneth Turvey in the process, Mr. Turvey being described as a skilled craftsman, a steady worker, a loving father-figure for little Rambo and Kelly, a born-again Christian, a recovering addict to 4-Thiobuscaline, and the family's sole means of support.

'Recovering?' Rydell asked Karen Mendelsohn in his room in the airport Executive Suites. She'd just shown him the fax from Jenni-Rae's lawyer.

'Apparently he'd been to a meeting that very day,' Karen said.

'What did he do there?' Rydell asked, remembering the Last Supper in drying blood.

'According to our witnesses, he openly horned a tablespoon of his substance of choice, took the podium by force, and delivered a thirty-minute rant on President Milibank's pantyhose and the assumed current state of her genitalia. He then exposed himself, masturbated but did not ejaculate, and left the basement of the First Baptist Church.'

'Jesus,' Rydell said. 'And this was at one of those drug meetings, like A.A.?'

'It was,' Karen Mendelsohn said, 'though apparently Turvey's performance has triggered an unfortunate sequence of relapses. We'll send in a team of counselors, of course, to work with those who were at the meeting.'

'That's nice,' Rydell said.

'Look good in court,' she said, 'in the unlikely event we ever get there.'

'He wasn't "recovering",' Rydell said. 'Hadn't even recovered from the last bunch he jammed up his nose.'

'Apparently true,' she said. 'But he was also a member of Adult Survivors of Satanism, and they are starting to take an interest in this case. Therefore, both Mr. Pursley and Mr. Ma feel it best we coast it but soon, Berry. You and me.'

'But what about the court stuff?'

'You're on suspension from the Department, you haven't been charged with anything yet, and your lawyer's name is Aaron-with-two-a's Pursley. You're out of here, Berry.'

'To L.A.?'

'None other.'

Rydell looked at her. He thought about Los Angeles on television. 'Will I like it?'

'At first,' she said. 'At first, it'll probably like you. I know Ido.'

Which was how he wound up going to bed with a lawyer- one who smelled like a million dollars, talked dirty, slid all around, and wore underwear from Milan, which was in Italy.

'The Kill-Fix. Cyrinda Burdette, Gudrun Weaver, Dean Mitchell, Shinobu Sakamaki. 1997.'

'Never saw it,' Rydebb said, sucking the last of his grande decaf cold capp-with-an-extra-shot from the milky ice at the bottom of his plastic thermos cup.

'Mama saw Cyrinda Burdette. In this mall over by Waco. Got her autograph, too. Kept it up on the set with the prayer-hankies and her hologram of the Reverend Wayne Falbon. She had a prayer-hanky for every damn thing. One for the rent, one to keep the AIDS off, the TB...'

'Yeah? How'd she use 'em?'

'Kept 'em on top of the set,' Sublett explained, and finished the inch of quadruple-distilled water left in the skinny translucent bottle. There was only one place along this part of Sunset sold the stuff, but Rydell didn't mind; it was next to a take-out coffee-bar, and they could park in the lot on the corner. Fellow who ran the lot always seemed kind of glad to see them.

'Prayer-hanky won't keep any AIDS off,' Rydell said. 'Get yourself vaccinated, like anybody else. Get your momma vaccinated, too.' Through the de-mirrored window, Rydell could see a street-shrine to J. D. Shapely, up against the concrete wall that was all that was left of the building that had stood there once. You saw a lot of them in West Hollywood. Somebody had sprayed SHAPELY WAS A COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT in bright pink paint, the letters three feet high, and then a big pink heart. Below that, stuck to the wall, were postcards of Shapely and photographs of people who must've died. God only knew how many millions had. On the pavement at the base of the wall were dead flowers, stubs of candles, other stuff. Something about the postcards gave

Rydell the creeps; they made the guy look like a cross between Elvis and some kind of Catholic saint, skinny and with his eyes too big.

He turned to Suhlett. 'Man, you still haven't got your ass vaccinated yet, you got nothin' but stone white-trash ignorance to thank for it.'

Sublett cringed. 'That's worse than a live vaccine, man; that's a whole 'nother disease right there!'

'Sure is,' Rydell said, 'but it doesn't do anything to you. And there's still plenty of the old kind walking around here. They oughta make it compulsory, you ask me.'

Sublett shuddered. 'Reverend Fallon always said-'

'Screw Reverend Fallon,' Rydell said, hitting the ignition. 'Son of a bitch just makes money selling prayer-hankies to people like your momma. You knew that was all bulishit anyway, didn't you, otherwise why'd you come out here?' He put Gunhead into gear and eased over into the Sunset traffic. One thing about driving a Hotspur Hussar, people almost always let you cut in.

Sublett's head seemed to draw down between his high shoulders, giving him the look of a worried, steel-eyed buzzard. 'Ain't all that simple,' he said. 'It's everything I been brought up to be. Can't all be bullshit, can it?'

Rydell, glancing over at him, took pity. 'Naw,' he said, 'I guess it wouldn't have to be, necessarily, all of it, but it's just-'

'What they bring you all up to be, Berry?'

Rydell had to think about it. 'Republican,' he said, finally.

Karen Mendelsohn had seemed like the best of a whole string of things Rydell felt he could get used to just fine. Like flying business-class or having a SoCal MexAmeriBank card from Cops in Trouble.

That first time with her, in the Executive Suites in Knoxville, not having anything with him, he'd tried to show her his certificates of vaccination (required by the Department, else they couldn't get you insured). She'd just laughed and said German nanotech would take care of all of that. Then she showed Rydell this thing through the transparent top of a gadget like a little battery-powered pressure-cooker. Rydell had heard about them, but he hadn't ever seen one; he'd also heard they cost about as much as a small car. He'd read somewhere how they always had to be kept at body temperature.

It looked like it might be moving a little in there. Pale, sort of jellyfish thing. He asked her if it was true they were alive. She told him it wasn't, exactly, but it was almost, and the rest of it was Bucky balls and subcellular automata. And he wouldn't even know it was there, but no way was she going to put it in in front of him.

She'd gone into the bathroom to do that. When she came back out in that underwear, he got to learn where Milan was. And while it was true he wouldn't have known the thing was there, he did know it was there, but pretty soon he forgot about it, almost.

They chartered a tilt-rotor to Memphis the next morning and got on Air Magellan to LAX. Business-class mostly meant better gizmos in the seatback in front of you, and Rydell's immediate favorite was a telepresence set you could tune to servo-mounted mollies on the outside of the plane. Karen hated to use the little VirtuFax she carried around in her purse, so she'd gotten on to her office in L.A. and had them download her morning's mail into her seatback display. She got down to that fast, talking on the phone, sending faxes, and leaving Rydell to ooh and ah at the views from the mollies.

The seats were bigger than when he used to fly down to Florida to see his father, the food was better, and the drinks were free. Rydell had three or four of those, fell asleep, and didn't wake up until somewhere over Arizona.

The air was funny, at LAX, and the light was different. California was a lot more crowded than he'd expected, and louder. There was a man there from Cops in Trouble, holding up a piece of wrinkled white cardboard that said MENDELSOHN in red marker, only the S was backward. Rydell smiled, introduced himself, and shook hands with him. He seemed to like that; said his name was Sergei. When Karen asked him where the fucking car was, he turned bright red and said it would just take him a minute to get it. Karen said no thanks, they'd walk to the lot with him as soon as their bags turned up, no way was she waiting around in a zoo like this. Sergei nodded. He kept trying to fold up the sign and put it into his jacket pocket, but it was too big. Rydell wondered why she'd suddenly gotten bitchy like that. Tired from the trip, maybe. He winked at Sergei, but that just seemed to make the guy more nervous.

After their bags came, Karen's two black leather ones and the softside blue Samsonite Rydell had bought with his new debit-card, he and Sergei carried them out and across a kind of trafficioop. The air outside was about the same, but hotter. This recording kept saying that the white spaces were for loading and unloading only. There were all kinds of cars jockeying around, babies crying, people leaning on piles of luggage, but Sergei knew where they were going-over to this garage across the way.

Sergei's car was long, black, German, and looked like somebody had just cleaned it all over with warm spit and QTips. When Rydell offered to ride shotgun, Sergei got rattled again and hustled him into the back seat with Karen. Which made her laugh, so Rydell felt better.

As they were pulling out of the garage, Rydell spotted two cops over by these big stainless-steel letters that said METRO. They wore air-conditioned helmets with clear plastic visors. They were poking at an old man with their sticks, though it didn't look like they had them turned on. The old man's jeans were out at the knees and he had big patches of tape on both cheekbones, which almost always means cancer. He was SO burned, it was hard to tell if he was white or what. A crowd of people was streaming up the stairs behind the old man and the cops, under the METRO sign, and stepping around them.

'Welcome to Los Angeles,' she said. 'Be glad you aren't taking the subway.'

They had dinner that night in what Karen said was Hollywood, with Aaron Pursley himself, in a Tex-Mex restaurant on North Flores Street. It was the best Tex-Mex food Rydell had ever had. About a month later, he tried to take Sublett there for his birthday, maybe cheer him up with a down-home meal, but the man out front just wouldn't let them in.

'Full up,' he said.

Rydell could see plenty of empty tables through the window. It was early and there was hardly anybody in there. 'How 'bout those,' Rydell said, pointing at all the empty tables.

'Reserved,' the man said.

Sublett said spicy foods weren't really such a good idea for him anyway.

What he'd come to like best, cruising with Gunhead, was getting back up in the hills and canyons, particularly on a night with a good moon.

Sometimes you saw things up there and couldn't quite be sure you'd seen them or not. One full-moon night Rydell had slung Gunhead around a curve and frozen a naked woman in the headlights, the way a deer'll stop, trembling, on a country road. Just a second she was there, long enough for Rydelb to think he'd seen that she either wore silver horns or some kind of hat with an upturned crescent, and that she might've been Japanese, which struck him right then as the weirdest thing about any of it.

Then she saw him-he saw her see him-and smiled. Then she was gone.

Sublett had seen her, too, but it only kicked him into some kind of motormouthed ecstasy of religious dread, every horrormovie he'd ever seen tumbling over into Reverend Fallon's rants about witches, devil-worshippers, and the living power of Satan.

He'd gone through his week's supply of gum, talk ing nonstop, until Rydell had finally told him to shut the fuck up.

Because now she was gone, he wanted to think about her. How she'd looked, what she might have been doing there, and how it was she'd vanished. With Sublett sulking in the shotgun seat, Rydell had tried to remember just exactly how it was she'd managed to so perfectly and suddenly not be there. And the funny thing was, he sort of remembered it two ways, which was nothing at all like the way he still didn't really remember shooting Kenneth Turvey, even though he'd heard production assistants and network lawyers go over it so many times he felt like he'd seen it, or at least the Cops in Trouble version (which never aired). One way he remembered it, she'd just sort of gone down the slope beside the road, though whether she was running or floating, he couldn't say. The other way he remembered, she'd jumped-though that was such a poor word for it-up the slope above the other side of the road, somehow clearing all that dust-silvered moonlit vegetation, and just flat-out impossible gone, forty feet if it was five.

And did Japanese women ever have that kind of long curly hair? And hadn't it looked like the shadowed darkness of her bush had been shaved into something like an exclamation point?

He'd wound up buying Sublett four packs of the special gum at an all-night Russian pharmacy on Wilshire, amazed at what the stuff cost him.

He'd seen other things, too, up the canyons, particularly when he'd drawn a shift on deep graveyard. Mostly fires, small ones, where fires couldn't be. And lights in the sky, sometimes, but Sublett was so full of trailer-camp contactee shit that if

Rydell saw a light now, driving, he knew better than to mention it.

But sometimes, when he was up there, he'd think about her. He knew he didn't know what she was, and in some funny way he didn't even care if she'd been human or not. But he hadn't ever felt like she was bad, just different.

So now he just drove, shooting the shit with Sublett, on the night that would turn out to be his very last night on patrol with IntenSecure. No moon, but a rare clear sky with a few stars showing. Five minutes to their first house check, then they'd be swinging back toward Beverly Hills.

They were talking about this chain of Japanese gyms called Body Hammer. Body Hammer didn't offer much in the way of traditional gym culture; in fact they went as far as possible in the opposite direction, catering mostly to kids who liked the idea of being injected with Brazilian fetal tissue and having their skeletons reinforced with what the ads called 'performance materials.'

Sublett said it was the Devil's work.

Rydell said it was a Tokyo franchise operation.

Gunhead said: 'Multiple homicide, hostage-taking in progress, may involve subscriber's minor children. Benedict Canyon. You have IntenSecure authorization to employ deadly, repeat, deadly force.'

And the dash lit up like an old-time video arcade.

The way it had worked out, Rydell hadn't actually had time to get used to Karen Mendelsohn, business-class seats, or any of that stuff.

Karen lived, umpteen floors up, in Century City II, aka the Blob, which looked sort of like a streamlined, semi-transparent green tit and was the third-tallest structure in the L.A. Basin. When the light was right, you could see almost clear through it, and make out the three giant struts that held it up, each one so big around you could stuff an ordinary skyscraper up it with room to spare. There were elevators up through these tripod-things, and they ran at an angle; Rydell hadn't had time to get used to that either.

The tit had a carefully corroded copper nipple, like one of those Chinese hats, that could've covered a couple of football fields. That was where Karen's apartment was, under there, along with an equally pricey hundred others, a tennis club, bars and restaurants, and a mall you had to pay to join before you could shop there. She was right out on the edge, with big curved windows set into the green wall.

Everything in there was different shades of white, except for her clothes, which were always black, her suitcases, which were black, too, and the big terry robes she liked to wear, which were the color of dry oatmeal.

Karen said it was Aggressive Retro Seventies and she was getting a little tired of it. Rydell saw how she could be, but figured it might not be polite to say so.

The network had gotten him a room in a West Hollywood hotel that looked more like a regular condo-building, but he never did spend much time there. Until the Pooky Bear thing broke in Ohio, he'd mostly been up at Karen's.

The discovery of the first thirty-five Pooky Bear victims pretty much put paid to Rydell's career as a cop in trouble. It hadn't helped that the officers who'd first reached the scene, Sgt. China Valdez and Cpl. Norma Pierce, were easily the two best-looking women on the whole Cincinnati force ('balls-out telegenic,' one of the production assistants had said, though Rydell thought it sounded weird under the circumstances). Then the count began to rise, ultimately going right off any known or established serial-killing scale. Then it was revealed that all the victims were children. Then Sgt. Valdez went post-traumatic in stone bugfuck fashion, walking into a downtown tavern and clipping both kneecaps off a known pedophile- this amazingly repulsive character, nickname of Jellybeans, who had absolutely no connection with the Pooky Bear murders.

Aaron Pursley was already Learing it back to Cincinnati in a plane that had no metal in it whatsoever, Karen had locked the goggles across her eyes and was talking nonstop to at least six people at once, and Rydell was sitting on the edge of her big white bed, starting to get the idea that something had changed.

When she finally took the goggles off, she just sat there, staring at a white painting on a white wall.

'They got suspects?' Rydell asked.

Karen looked over at him like she'd never seen him before.

'Suspects? They've got confessions already . . .' It struck Rydell how old she looked right then, and he wondered how old she actually was. She got up and walked out of the room.

She came back five minutes later in a fresh black outfit. 'Pack. I can't have you here now.' Then she was gone, no kiss, no goodbye, and that was that.

He got up, put a television on, and saw the Pooky Bear killers for the first time. All three of them. They looked, he thought, pretty much like everybody else, which is how people who do that kind of shit usually do look on television.

He was sitting there in one of her oatmeal robes when a pair of rentacops let themselves in without knocking. Their uniforms were black and they were wearing the same kind of black high-top SWAT-trainers that Rydell had worn on patrol in Knoxville, the ones with the Kevlar insoles in case somebody snuck up and tried to shoot you in the bottom of the foot.

One of them was eating an apple. The other one had a stun-stick in his hand.

'Hey, pal,' the first one said, around a mouthful of apple, 'we gotta show you out.'

'I had a pair of shoes like that,' Rydell said. 'Made in Portland, Oregon. Two hundred ninety-nine dollars out at CostCo.'

The one with the stick grinned. 'You gonna get packing now?'

So Rydell did, picking up anything that wasn't black, white, or oatmeal and tossing it into his blue Samsonite.

The rentacop with the stick watched him, while the other one wandered around, finishing his apple.

'Who you guys with?' Rydell asked.

'lntenSecure,' said the one with the stick.

'Good outfit?' Rydell was zipping up his bag.

The man shrugged.

'Outa Singapore,' the other one said, wrapping the core of his apple in a crumpled Kleenex he'd taken from his pants pocket. 'We got all the big buildings, gated communities, like that.' He carefully tucked the apple-core into the breast-pocket of his crisp black uniform shirt, behind the bronze badge.

'You got money for the Metro?' Mr. Stick asked Rydell.

'Sure,' Rydell said, thinking of his debit-card.

'Then you're better off than the majority of assholes we get to escort out of here,' the man said.

A day later, the network pulled the plug on his MexAmeriBank card.

Hernandez might be wrong about English SWAT-wagons, Rydell found himself thinking, punching the Hotspur Hussar into six-wheel overdrive and feeling Gunhead suck down on pavement like a twin-engined, three-ton leech. He'd never really stomped on that thing before.

Sublett yelped as the crash-harnesses tightened automatically, yanking him up out of his usual slouch.

Rydell slung Gunhead up onto a verge covered in dusty ice-plant, doing seventy past a museum-grade Bentley, and on the wrong side at that. Eyeblink of a woman passenger's horrified face, then Sublett must have managed to slap the red plastic plate that activated the strobes and the siren.

Straight stretch now. No cars at all. Rydell straddled the centerline and floored it. Sublett was making a weird keening sound that synched eerily with the rising ceramic whine of the twin Kyoceras, and it came to Rydell that the Texan had snapped completely under the pressure of the thing, and was Singing in Some trailer-camp tongue known only to the benighted followers of the Rev. Fallon.

But, no, when he glanced that way, he saw Suhlctt, lips moving, frantically scanning the client-data as it seethed on the dash-screens, his eyes bugging like the silver contacts might pop right out. But while he read, Rydell saw, he was actually loading his worn-out, secondhand Gbock, his long white fingers moving in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable, as though he were making a sandwich or folding a newspaper.

And that was scary.

'Death Star!' Rydell yelled. It was Sublett's job to keep the bead in his ear at all times, listening for the satellite-relayed, instantly overriding Word of the Real Cops.

Sublett turned, snapping the magazine into his Gbock, his face so pale that it seemed to reflect the colors of the dash-display as readily as did the blank steel rounds of his eyes.

'The help's all dead,' he said, 'an' they got the three kids in the nursery.' He sounded like he was talking about something mildly baffling he was seeing on television, say a badly altered version of some old, favorite film, drastically recast for some obscure ethnic market-niche. 'Say they're gonna kill 'em, Berry.'

'What do the fucking cops say about it?' Rydell shouted, pounding on the padded figure-eight steering wheel in the purest rage of frustration he'd ever felt.

Sublett touched a finger to his right ear. He looked like he was about to scream. 'Down,' he said.

Gunhead's right front fender clipped off somebody's circa-1943 fully-galvanized Sears rural-route mailbox, no doubt acquired at great cost on Melrose Avenue.

'They can't be fucking down,' Rydell said, 'they're the police.'

Sublett tugged the bead from his ear and offered it to Rydell. 'Static's all . .

Rydell looked down at his dash-display. Gunhead's cursor was a green spear of destiny, whipping along a paler-green canyon road toward a chaste white circle the size of a seddingring. In the window immediately to the right, he could read the vital-signs data on the subscriber's three kids. Their pulse rates were up. In the window below, there was a ~idicubousty peaceful-looking infrared frame of the subscriber's front gate. It looked solid. The read-out said it was locked and armed.

Right then, probably, was when he decided just to go for it.

A week or so later, when it had all been sorted out, Hernandez was basically sympathetic about the whole thing. Not happy, mind you, because it had happened over his shift, but he did say he couldn't much blame Rydell under the circumstances.

IntenSecure had brought in a whole planeload of people from the head office in Singapore, Rydell had heard, to keep it all out of the media and work out some kind of settlement with the subscribers, the Schonbrunns. He had no idea what that settlement might have finally amounted to, but he was just as happy not to know; there was no such program as KentaCops in Trouble, and the Schonbrunns' front gate alone had probably been worth a couple of dozen of his paychecks.

IntenSecure could replace that gate, sure, because they'd installed it in the first place. It had been quite a gate, too, some kind of Japanese fiber-reinforced sheeting, thermoset to concrete, and it sure as hell had managed to get most of that Wet

Honey Sienna off Gunhead's front end.

Then there was the damage to the house itself, mostly to the living-room windows (which he'd driven through) and the furniture (which he'd driven over).

But there had to be something for the Schonbrunns on top of that, Hernandez explained. Something for emotional pain, he said, pumping Rydell a cup of old nasty coffee from the big stainless thermos behind his desk. There was a fridge-magnet on the thermos that said I'M NOT OKAY, YOU'RE NOT

OKAY-BUT, hEY, THAT'S OKAY.

It was two weeks since the night in question, tell in the morning, and Rydell was wearing a five-day beard, a fine-weave panama Stetson, a pair of baggy, faded orange trunks, a KNOXVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT t-shirt that was starting to disintegrate at the shoulder-seams, the black SWAT-trainers from his

IntenSecure uniform, and an inflated transparent cast on his left arm. 'Emotional pain,' Rydell said.

Hernandez, who was very nearly as wide as his desk, passed Rydell the coffee. 'You way lucky, all I can say.'

'I'm out a job, arm in a cast, I'm "way lucky"?'

'Seriously, man,' Hernandez said, 'you coulda killed yourself. LAPD, they coulda greased your ass down dead. Mr. and Mrs. Schonbrunn, they been very nice about this, considering Mrs. Schonbrunn's embarrassment and everything. Your arm got hassled, hey, I'm sorry . . .' Hernandez shrugged, enormously. 'Anyway, you not fired, man. We just can't let you drive now. You want us put you on gated residential, no problem.'

'No thanks.'

'Retail properties? You wanna work evenings, Encino Fashion Mall?'

'No.'

Hernandez narrowed his eyes. 'You seen the pussy over there?'

'Nope.'

Hernandez sighed. 'Man, what happen with all that shit coming down on you in Nashville?'

'Knoxville. Department came down for permanent suspension. Going in without authorization or proper back-up.'

'And that bitch, one's suing your ass?'

'She and her son got caught sticking up a muffler shop in Johnson City, last I heard . . .' Now it was Rydell's turn to shrug, except it made his shoulder hurt.

'See,' Hernandez said, beaming, 'you lucky.'

In the instant of putting Gunhead through the Schonbrunns locked-and-armed Benedict Canyon gate, Rydell had experienced a fleeting awareness of something very high, very puree and quite clinically empty; the doing of the thing, the not-thinking; that weird adrenal exultation and the losing of every more troublesome aspect of self.

And that-he later recalled remembering, as he'd fought the wheel, slashing through a Japanese garden, across a patio, and through a membrane of armored glass that gave way like something in a dream-had been a lot like what he'd felt as he'd drawn his gun and pulled the trigger, emptying Kenneth Turvey's brain-pan, and most copiously, across a seemingly infinite expanse of white-primered wallboard that nobody had ever bothered to paint.

Rydell went over to Cedars to see Sublett.

IntenSecure had sprung for a private cubicle, the better to keep Sublett away from any cruising minions of the media. The Texan was sitting up in bed, chewing gum, and watching a little liquid-crystal disk-player propped on his chest.

'Warlords of the 21st Century,' he said, when Rydell edged in, 'James Wainwright, Annie McEnroe, Michael Beck.'

Rydell grinned. 'When'd they make it?'

'1982..' Sublett muted the audio and looked up. 'But I've seen it a couple times already.'

'I been over at the shop seem' Hernandez, man. He says you don't have to worry any about your job.'

Sublett looked at Rydell with his blank silver eyes. 'How 'bout yours, Berry?'

Rydell's arm started to itch, inside the inflated cast. He bent over and fished a plastic drinking-straw from the little white wastebasket beside the bed. He poked the straw down inside the cast and wiggled it around. It helped some. 'I'm history, over there. They won't let me drive anymore.'

Sublett was looking at the straw. 'You shouldn't ought to touch used stuff, not in a hospital.'

'You don't have nothin' contagious, Sublett. You're one of the cleanest motherfuckers ever lived.'

'But what you gonna do, Berry? You gotta make a living, man.'

Rydell dropped the straw back into the basket. 'Well, I don't know. But I know I don't wanna do gated residential and I know I don't wanna do any malls.'

'What about those hackers, Berry? You figure they'll get the ones set us up?'

'Nope. Too many of 'em. Republic of Desire's been around a while. The Feds have a list of maybe three hundred "affiliates," but there's no way to haul 'em all in and figure out who actually did it. Not unless one of 'em rats on somebody, which they do tend to do on a pretty regular basis.'

'But how come they'd want to do that to us anyway?'

'Hell, Sublett, how should I know?'

'Just mean,' Sublett said.

'Well, that, for sure, and Hernandez says the LAPD told him they figured somebody wanted Mrs. Schonbrunn caught more or less with her pants down.' Neither Sublett nor Rydell had actually seen Mrs. Schonbrunn, because she was, as it turned out, in the nursery. Although her kids weren't, having gone up to Washington State with their daddy to fly over the three newest volcanoes.

Nothing that Gunhead had logged that night, since leaving the car wash, had been real. Someone had gotten into the Hotspur Hussar's on-board computer and plugged a bunch of intricately crafted and utterly spurious data into the communications bundle, cutting Rydell and Sublett off from IntenSecure and the Death Star (which hadn't, of course, been down). Rydell figured a few of those good ol' Mongol boys over at the car wash might know a little bit about that.

And maybe, in that instant of weird clarity, with Gunhead's crumpled front end still trying to climb the shredded remains of a pair of big leather sofas, and with the memory of Kenneth Turvey's death finally real before him, Rydell had come to the conclusion that that high crazy thing, that rush of Going For It, was maybe something that wasn't always quite entirely to be trusted.

'But, man,' Sublett had said, as if to himself, 'they gonna kill those little babies.' And, with that, he'd snapped his harness open and was out of there, Glock in hand, before Rydell could do anything at all. Rydell had had him shut the siren and the strobes off a block away, but surely anybody in the house was now aware that IntenSecure had arrived.

'Responding,' Rydell heard himself say, slapping a holstered Glock onto his uniform and grabbing his chunker, which aside from its rate of fire was probably the best thing for a shoot-out in a nursery full of kids. He kicked the door open and jumped out, his trainers going straight through the inch-thick glass top of a coffee-table. (Needed twelve stitches, but it wasn't deep.) He couldn't see Sublett. He stumbled forward, cradling the yellow bulk of the chunker, vaguely aware that there was something wrong with his arm.

'Freeze, cocksucker!' said the biggest voice in the world, 'LAPD! Drop that shit or we blow your ass away!' Rydell found himself the focus of an abrupt and extraordinarily painful radiance, a light so bright that it fell into his uncomprehending eyes like hot metal. 'You hear me, cocksucker?' Wincing, fingers across his eyes, Rydell turned and saw the bulbous armored nacelles of the descending gunship. The downdraft was flattening everything in the Japanese garden that Gunhead hadn't already taken care of.

Rydell dropped the chunker.

'The pistol, too, asshole!'

Rydell grasped the Clock's handle between thumb and forefinger, It came away, in its plastic holster, with a tiny hut distinct skritch of Velcro, somehow audible through the drumming of the helicopter's combat-muffled engine.

He dropped the Glock and raised his arms. Or tried to. The left one was broken.

They found Sublett fifteen feet from Gunhead. His face and hands were swelling like bright pink toy balloons and he seemed to be suffocating, Schonbrunn's Bosnian housekeeper having employed a product that contained xylene and chlorinated hydrocarbons to clean some crayon-marks off a bleached-oak end table.

'What the fuck's wrong with him?' asked one of the cops.

'He's got allergies,' Rydell said through gritted teeth; they'd cuffed his hands behind his back and it hurt like hell. 'You gotta get him to Emergency.'

Sublett opened his eyes, or tried to.

'Berry. . .'

Rydell remembered the name of the movie he'd seen on television. 'Miracle Mile,' he said.

Sublett squinted up at him. 'Never seen it,' Sublett said, and fainted.

Mrs. Schonbrunn had been entertaining her Polish landscape gardener that evening. The cops found her in the nursery. Angered beyond speech, she was cinched quite interestingly up in a couple of thousand dollars worth of English latex, North Beach leather, and a pair of vintage Smith & Wesson handcuffs that someone had paid to have lovingly buffed and redone in black chrome-the gardener evidently having headed for the hills when he heard Rydell parking Gunhead in the living room.

3 Not a nice party

Chevette never stole things, or anyway not from other people, and definitely not when she was pulling tags. Except this one bad Monday when she took this total asshole's sunglasses, but that was because she just didn't like him.

How it was, she was standing up there by this ninth-floor window, just looking out at the bridge, past the gray shells of the big stores, when he'd come up behind her. She'd almost managed to make out Skinner's room, there, high up in the old cables, when the tip of a finger found her bare back. Under Skinner's jacket, under her t-shirt, touching her.

She wore that jacket everywhere, like some kind of armor. She knew that nanopore was the only thing to wear, riding this time of year, but she wore Skinner's old horsehide anyway, with her bar-coded Allied badges on the lapels. The little ball-chains on the zippers swinging as she spun to knock that finger aside.

Bloodshot eyes. A face that looked as though it were about to melt. He had a short little greenish cigar in his mouth but it wasn't lit. He took it out, swirled its wet end in a small glass of clear liquor, then took a long suck on it. Grinning at her around it. Like he knew she didn't belong here, not at a party like this and not in any old hut seriously expensive hotel up Over Geary.

But it had been the last tag of the day, a package for a lawyer, with ~Ienderloin's trash-fires burning so close by, and around them, huddled, all those SO terminally luckless, utterly and chemically lost. Faces aglow in the fairy illumination of the tiny glass pipes. Eyes canceled in that terrible and fleeting satisfaction. Shivers, that gave her, always.

Locking and arming her bike in the hollow sound of the Morrisey's underground lot, she'd taken a service elevator to the lobby, where the security grunts tried to brace her for the package, but there was no way. She wouldn't deliver to anyone at all except this one very specific Mr. Garreau in 8o8, as stated right here on the tag. They ran a scanner across the bar-code on her Allied badge, x-rayed the package, put her through a metal-detector, and waved her into an elevator lined with pink mirrors and trimmed in bank-vault bronze.

So up she'd gone, to eight, to a corridor quiet as the floor of some forest in a dream. She found Mr. Garreau there, his shirt-sleeves white and his tie the color of freshly poured lead. He signed the tab without making eye-contact; package in hand, he'd closed the door's three brass digits in her face. She'd checked her hair in the mirror-polished italic zero. Her tail was sticking up okay, in back, but she wasn't sure they'd got the front right. The spikes were still too long. Wispy, sort of.

She headed back down the hail, the hardware jingling on Skinner's jacket, her new SWAT-trainers sinking into freshly vacuumed pile the color of rain-wet terracotta.

But when the elevator doors opened, this Japanese girl fell out. Or near enough, Chevette grabbing her beneath both arms and propping her against the edge of the door.

'Where party?'

'What folks gonna ask you,' Chevette said.

'Floor nine! Big party!'

The girl's eyes were all pupil, her bangs glossy as plastic.

So Chevette, with a real glass wine-glass full of real French wine in one hand, and the smallest sandwich she'd ever seen in the other, came to find herself wondering how long she still had before the hotel's computer noticed she hadn't yet left the premises. Not that they were likely to come looking for her here, because someone had obviously put down good money to have this kind of party.

Some really private kind, because she could see these people in a darkened bathroom, smoking ice through a blown-glass dolphin, its smooth curves illuminated by the fluttering bluish tongue of an industrial-strength lighter.

Not just one room, either, but lots of them, all connected up. And lots of people, too, the men mostly gotten up in those suits with the four-button jackets, stiff shirts with those choker collars, and no tie but a little jeweled stud. The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough.

She'd managed to get the Japanese girl horizontal on a long green couch, where she was snoring now, and safe enough unless somebody sat on her.

Looking around, Chevette had seen that she wasn't the only underdressed local to have somehow scammed entry. The guy in the bathroom working the big yellow Bic, for starters, but he was an extreme case. Then there were a couple of pretty obvious

Tenderloin working-girls, too, but maybe that was no more than the accepted amount of local color for whatever this was supposed to be.

But then this asshole's right in her face, grinning his mean-ass drunken grin, and she's got her hand on a little folding-knife, something else she's borrowed from Skinner. It has a hole in the blade that you can press the tip of your thumb into and snap it open, one-handed. That blade's under three inches, broad as a soupspoon, wickedly serrated, and ceramic. Skinner says it's a fractal knife, its actual edge more than twice as long as the blade itself.

'You're not enjoying yourself, I think,' he says. European, but she's not sure which flavor. Not French or German. His jacket's leather, too, hut nothing like Skinner's. Some thin-skinned animal whose hide drapes like heavy silk, the color of tobacco. She thinks of the smell of the yellow-spined magazines up in Skinner's room, some so old the pictures are only shades of gray, the way the city looks, sometimes, from the bridge.

'Doing fine 'til you showed up,' Chevette says, thinking it's probably time to go, this guy's bad news.

'Tell me,' he says, looking appraisingly at the jacket and the t-shirt and the bike-pants, 'what services you offer.'

'The fuck's that supposed to mean?'

'Clearly,' he says, pointing at the Tenderloin girls across the room, 'you offer something more interesting,' and he rolls his tongue wetly around the word, 'than these two.'

'Fuck that,' Chevette says, 'I'm a messenger.'

And a funny pause crosses his face, like something's gotten past his drunk, nudged him. Then he throws back his head and laughs like it's the biggest joke in the world. She gets a look at a lot of very white, very expensive-looking teeth. Rich people never have any metal in their teeth, Skinner's told her.

'I say something funny?'

The asshole wipes his eyes.

'But we have something in common, you and I.'

'I doubt it.'

'I am a messenger,' he says, though he looks to Chevette like a moderate hill would put him in line for a pig-valve.

'A courier,' he says, like he's reminding himself.

'So proj on,' she says, and steps around him, but just then the lights go out, the music starts, and it's the intro to Chrome Koran's 'She God's Girlfriend.' Chevette, who has kind of a major thing for Chrome Koran, and cranks them on her bike whenever she needs a boost to proj on, just moves with it now, everybody dancing, even the icers from the bathroom.

With the asshole gone, or anyway forgotten she notices how much better these people look dancing. She finds herself opposite this girl in a leather skirt, little black boots with jingling silver spurs. Chevette grins; the girl grins back.

'You're from the city?' the girl asks, as 'She God's Girlfriend' el~, and for a second Chevette thinks she's being asked if she's a municipal messenger. The girl-woman-is older than she'd thought; late twenties maybe, but definitely older than Chevette. Good-looking without looking like it came out of a kit; dark eyes, dark hair cut short. 'San Francisco?'

Chevette nods.

The next tune's older than she is; that black guy who turned white, and then his face fell in, she guesses. She looks down for her drink but they all look alike. Her Japanese doll dances past, bangs swinging, no recognition in her eyes as she sees Chevette.

'Cody can usually find all he needs, in San Francisco,' the woman says, a tiredness behind her voice but at the same time you can tell she thinks it's all pretty funny. German, Chevette thinks by her accent.

'Who?' The woman raises her eyebrows. 'Our host.' But she's still got her wide easy grin.

'Just sort of walked in . .

'Could I only say the same!' The woman laughs.

'Why?'

'Then I could walk out again.'

'You don't like it?' Up close, she smells expensive. Chevette's suddenly worried about how she must smell herself, after a day on the bike and no shower. But the woman takes her elbow and leads her aside.

'You don't know Cody?'

'No.' Chevette sees the drunk, the asshole, through the doorway into the next room, where the lights are still on. He's looking right at her. 'And I think maybe I should leave now, okay?'

'I't, I ,i . ' ou uon t nave to. Please. I only envy you the option.

'You German?'

'Padanjan'

Chevette knows that's part of what used to be Italy. The northern part, she thinks. 'Who's this Cody?'

'Cody likes a party. Cody likes this party. This party's been going on for several years now. When it isn't here, it's in London, Prague, Macau ...' A boy is moving through the crowd with a tray of drinks. He doesn't look to Chevette like he works for the hotel. His stiff white shirt's not so stiff anymore; it's open all the way, wrinkled tails hanging loose, and she sees he has one of those things like a little steel barbell through one nipple. His stiff collar's popped off at the front and sticks up behind his neck like a slipped halo. The woman takes a glass of white wine when he offers the tray. Chevette shakes her head. There's a white saucer on the tray, with pills and what look like twists of dancer.

The boy winks at Chevette and moves on.

'You find this strange?' The woman drinks her wine off and tosses the empty glass over her shoulder. Chevette hears it break.

'Huh?'

'Cody's party.'

'Yeah. I guess. I mean, I just walked in...'

'Where do you live?'

'The bridge.' Watching for the reaction.

The grin widens. 'Really? It looks so ... mysterious. I'd like to go there, but there are no tours, and they say it's dangerous...'

'It's not,' Chevette says, then hesitates. 'Just don't dress up so much, right? But it's not dangerous, not even as much as the neighborhood around here.' Thinking of the ones around the trash-fires. 'Just don't go out on Treasure Island. Don't try to go all the way to Oakland. Stay over on the suspension side.'

'You like it, living there?'

'Shit, yes. 1 wouldn't live anywhere else.'

The woman smiles. 'You're very lucky then, I think.'

'Well,' Chevette says, feeling clumsy, 'I gotta go.'

'My name is Maria...'

'Chevette,' offering her hand. Almost like her own other name. Chevette-Marie.

They shake.

'Goodbye, Chevette.'

'You have a nice party, okay?'

'This is not a nice party.'

Settling the wide shoulders of Skinner's jacket, Chevette nods to the woman Maria and begins to work her way through the crowd. Which is tighter now by several degrees, like maybe this Cody's friends are still arriving. More Japanese here now, she notices, all of them serious suits; their wives or secretaries or whatever are all wearing pearls. But evidently this doesn't prevent them getting into the spirit of the thing. It's gotten noisier, too, as people have gotten more whacked. There's that loud constant burr of party-noise you get when the drinks kick in, and now she wants to be out of there all that much faster.

She finds herself stuck near the door to the bathroom where she'd seen the icers, but it's closed now. A bunch of French people are talking French and laughing and waving their hands around, but Chevette can hear somebody vomiting in there. 'Coming through,' she says to a man with a bowtie and a gray crewcut, and just pushes past him, spilling part of his drink. He says something after her in French.

She feels really claustro now, like she does up in offices sometimes when a receptionist makes her wait to pick something up, and she sees the office people walking back and forth, and wonders whether it all means anything or if they're just walking back and forth. Or maybe the wine's gotten to her, a little, because drinking isn't something she does much, and now she doesn't like the taste of it in the back of her throat.

And suddenly there's her drunk, her Euro with his unlit cigar, sweaty brow too close to the dull-eyed, vaguely worried face of one of the Tenderloin girls. He's got her backed into a corner. And everyone's jammed so tight, this close to the door and the corridor and freedom, that Chevette finds herself pressed up against his back for a second, not that that interrupts whatever infinitely dreary shit he's laying down for the girl, no, though he does jam his elbow, hard, back into Chevette's ribs to get himself more space.

And Chevette, glancing down, sees something sticking out of a pocket in the tobacco-colored leather.

Then it's in her hand, down the front of her bike-pants, she's out the door, and the asshole hasn't even noticed.

In the sudden quiet of the corridor, party sounds receding as she heads for the elevator, she wants to run. She wants to laugh, too, but now she's starting to feel scared.

Walk.

Past the party's build-up of trays, dirty glasses, plates.

Remembering the security grunts in the lobby.

The thing stuck down her pants.

Down a corridor that opens off this one, she sees the doors of a service elevator spread wide now and welcoming. A Central Asian kid with a paint-splattered steel cart stacked up with flat rectangles that are television screens. He gives her a careful look as she edges in beside him. His face is all cheekbones, bright hooded eyes, his hair shaved up high in one of those near-vertical dos all these guys favor. He has a security badge clipped to the front of his clean gray workshirt and a

VirtuFax slung around his neck on a red nylon cord.

'Basement,' Chevette says.

His fax buzzes. He raises it, pushes the button, peers into the eyepiece. The thing in her bike-pants starts to feel huge. Then he drops the fax back to his chest, blinks at her, and pushes a button marked B-6. The doors rumble shut and Chevette closes her eyes.

She leans hack against the big quilted pads hung on the walls and wishes she were up in Skinner's room, listening to the cables creak. The floor there's a layer of two-by-fours laid on edge; the very top of the hump of the cable, riding its steel saddle, sticks up through the middle, and Skinner says there are 17,464 strands of wire in that cable. Each one is about as thick as a pencil. You can press your ear against it and hear the whole bridge sing, when the wind's just right.

The elevator stops at four for no reason at all. Nobody there when the door opens. Chevette wants to press B-6 again but she makes herself wait for the kid with the fax to do it. He does.

And B-6 is not the garage she so thoroughly wants now, but this maze of hundred-year-old concrete tunnels, floored in cracked asphalt tile, with big old pipes slung in iron brackets along the ceiling. She slips out while he's fiddling with one of the wheels on his cart.

A century's-worth of padlocked walk-in freezers, fifty vacuum cleaners charging themselves at a row of numbered stations, rolls of broadloom stacked like logs. More people in work clothes, some in kitchen whites, but she's trying for tag-pulling attitude and looks, she hopes, like she's making a delivery.

She finds a narrow stairway and climbs. ,The air is hot and dead. Motion-sensors click the lights for her at the start of each flight. She feels the whole weight of this old building pressing down on her.

But her bike is there, on B-i, behind a column of nicked concrete.

'Back off,' it says when she's five feet away. Not loud, like a car, but it sounds like it means it.

Under its coat of spray-on imitation rust and an artful bandaging of silver duct-tape, the geometry of the paper-cored, carbonwrapped frame makes Chevette's thighs tremble. She slips her left hand through the recognition-loop behind the seat. There's a little double zik as the particle-brakes let go, then she's up and Ofl it.

It's never felt better, as she pumps up the oil-stained ramp and out of there.

4 Career opportunities

Rydell's roommate, Kevin Tarkovsky, wore a bone through his nose and worked in a wind-surfing boutique called Just Blow Me.

Monday morning, when Rydell told him he'd quit his job with IntenSecure, Kevin offered to try to find him something in sales, in the beach-culture line.

'You got an okay build, basically,' Kevin said, looking at Rydell's bare chest and shoulders. Rydell was still wearing the orange trunks he'd worn when he'd gone to see Hernandez. He'd borrowed them from Kevin. He'd just taken his cast off, deflating it and crumpling it into the five-gallon plastic paint bucket that served as a wastebasket. The bucket had a big self-adhesive daisy on the side. 'You could work out a little more regularly. Arid maybe get some tats. Tribal black-work.'

'Kevin, I don't know how to surf, wind-surf, anything. Hardly been in the ocean in my life. Couple of times down Tampa Bay.' It was about ten in the morning. Kevin had the day off work.

'Sales is about providing an experience, Berry. The customer needs information, you provide it. But you give 'em an experience, too,' Kevin tapped his two-inch spindle of smooth white beef-bone by way of illustration. 'Then you sell them a new outfit.'

'But I don't have a tan.'

Kevin was the a)proxlmate color and sheen of a pair of mid-brown Cole-Haan loafers that Rydell's aunt had given him for his fifteenth birthday. This had nothing to do with either genetics or exposure to unfiltered sunlight, but was the result of regular injections and a complicated regimen of pills and lotions.

'Well,' Kevin admitted, 'you would need a tan.'

Rydell knew that Kevin didn't wind-surf, and never had, but that he did bring home disks from the shop and play them on a goggle-set, going over the various moves involved, and Rydell had no doubt that Kevin could provide every bit of information a prospective buyer might desire. And that all-important experience; with his cordovan tan, gym-tuned physique, and that bone through his nose, he got a lot of attention. Mainly from women, though it didn't actually seem to do that much for him.

What Kevin sold, primarily, was clothing. Expensive kind that supposedly kept the UV and the pollutants in the water off you. He had two whole cartons full of the stuff, stacked in their room's one closet. Rydell, who currently didn't have much in the way of a wardrobe, was welcome to paw through there and borrow whatever took his fancy. Which wasn't a lot, as it turned out, because wind-surfing gear tended to be Day-Gb, black nanopore, or mirrorflex. A few of the jazzier items had UV-sensitive JUST BLOW ME logos that appeared on days when the ozone was in particularly shabby shape, as Rydell had discovered the last time he'd gone to the farmers market.

He and Kevin were sharing one of two bedrooms in a sixties house in Mar Vista, which meant Sea View but there wasn't any. Someone had rigged up a couple of sheets of drywall down the middle of the room. On Rydell's side, the drywall was covered with those same big self-adhesive daisies and a collection of souvenir bumper-stickers from places like Magic Mountain, Nissan County, I)isneyland, and Skywalker Park. 1'here were two other people sharing the house, three if you counted the Chinese girl out in the garage (but she had her own bathroom in there).

Rydell had bought a futon with most of his first month's pay from IntenSecure. He'd bought it at this stall in the market; they were cheaper there, and the stall was called Futon Mouth, which Rydell thought was pretty funny. The Futon Mouth girl had explained how you could slip the Metro guy on the platform a twenty, then he'd let you get on the train with the rolled-up futon, which came in a big green plastic sack that reminded Rydebl of a bodybag.

Lately, waiting to take the cast off, he'd spent a lot of time on that futon, staring up at those bumper-stickers. He wondered if whoever had put them there had actually bothered to go to all those places. Hernandez had once offered him work at Nissan County. IntenSecure had the rentacop franchise there. His parents had honeymooned at Disneyland. Skywalker Park was up in San Francisco; it had been called Golden Gate, before, and he remembered a couple of fairly low-key riots on television when they'd privatized it.

'You on line to any of the job-search nets, Berry?'

Rydell shook his head.

'This one's on me,' Kevin said, passing Rydell the helmet. It wasn't anything like Karen's slick little goggles; just a white plastic rig like kids used for games. 'Put it on. I'll dial for you.'

'Well,' Rydell said, 'this is nice, Kevin, but you don't have to go to all this trouble.'

Kevin touched the bone in his nose. 'Well, there's the rent.'

There was that. Rydell put the helmet on.

'Now,' Sonya said, just as perky as could be, 'we're showing that you did graduate from this post-secondary training program-'

'Academy,' Rydell corrected. 'Police.'

'Yes, Berry, but we're showing that you were then employed for a total of eighteen days, before being placed on suspension.' Sonya looked like a cartoon of a pretty girl. No pores. No texture anywhere. Her teeth were very white and looked like a single unit, something that could be snapped out intact for closer inspection. But not for cleaning, because there was no need; cartoons didn't eat. She had wonderful tits, though; she had the tits Rydell would have drawn for her if he'd been a talented cartoonist.

'Well,' Rydell said, thinking of Turvey, 'I got into some trouble after they assigned me to Patrol.'

Sonya nodded brightly. 'I see, Berry.' Rydell wondered what she did see. Or what the expert system that used her as a hand-puppet could see. Or how it saw. What did someone like Rydell look bike to an employment agency's computer system? Not like much, he decided.

'Then you moved to Los Angeles, Berry, and we show ten weeks of employment with the IntenSecure Corporation's residential armed-response branch. Driver with experience of weapons.'

Rydell thought of the rocket-pods slung under the LAPD chopper. Probably they'd had one of those CHAIN guns in there, too. 'Yep,' he agreed.

'And you've resigned your position with IntenSecure.'

'Guess so.'

Sonya beamed at Rydell as though he'd just admitted, shyly, to a congressional appointment or a post-doctoral degree. 'Well, Berry,' she said, 'let me put my thinking cap on for just a second!' She winked, then closed her big cartoon eyes.

Jesus, Rydebl thought. He tried to glance sideways, but Kevin's helmet didn't have any peripherals, so there was nothing there. Just Sonya, the empty rectangle of her desk, sketchy details suggesting an office, and the employment agency's logo behind her on the wall. The logo made her look bike the anchorwoman on a channel that only reported very good news.

Sonya opened her eyes. Her smile became incandescent. 'You're from the South,' she said.

'Uh-huh.'

'Plantations, Berry. Magnolias. Tradition. But a certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality. Faulkner.' Fawk? 'Huh?'

'Nightmare Folk Art, Berry. Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks.'

Kevin watched as Rydell removed the helmet and wrote an address and telephone number on the back of last week's People. The magazine belonged to Monica, the Chinese girl in the garage; she always got hers printed out so there was never any mention of scandal or disaster, but with a triple helping of celebrity romance, particularly anything to do with the British royal family.

'Something for you, Berry?' Kevin looked hopeful.

'Maybe,' Rydell said. 'This place in Sherman Oaks. I'll call 'em up, check it out.'

Kevin fiddled with his nose-bone. 'I can give you a lift,' he said.

There was a big painting of the Rapture in the window of Nightmare Folk Art. Rydell knew paintings like that from the sides of Christian vans parked beside shopping centers. Lots of bloody car-wrecks and disasters, with all the Saved souls flying up to meet Jesus, whose eyes were a little too bright for comfort. This one was a lot more detailed than the ones he remembered. Each one of those Saved souls had its own individual face, like it actually represented somebody, and a few of them reminded him of famous people. But it still looked like it had been painted by either a fifteen-year-old or an old lady.

Kevin had let him off at the corner of Sepulveda and he'd walked back two blocks, looking for the place, past a crew in wide-brim hardhats who were pouring the foundations for a palm tree. Rydell wondered if Ventura had had real ones before the virus; the replacements were so popular now, people wanted them put in everywhere.

Ventura was one of those Los Angeles streets that just went on forever. He knew he must've driven Gunhead past Nightmare Folk Art more times than he could count, but these streets looked completely different when you walked them. For one thing, you were pretty much alone; for another, you could see how cracked and dusty a lot of the buildings were. Empty spaces behind dirty glass, with a yellowing pile of junk-mail on the floor inside and maybe a puddle of what couldn't be rainwater, so you sort of wondered what it was. You'd pass a couple of those, then a place selling sunglasses for six times the rent Rydell paid for his half of the room in Mar Vista. The sunglasses place would have some kind of rentacop inside, to buzz you in.

Nightmare Folk Art was like that, sandwiched between a dead hair-extension franchise and some kind of failing real estate place that sold insurance on the side. NIGHTMARE FOLK ART-SOUTHERN GOTHIC, the letters hand-painted all lumpy and hairy, like mosquito legs in a cartoon, white on black. But with a couple of expensive cars parked out front: a silver-gray Range Rover, looking like Gunhead dressed up for the prom, and one of those little antique Porsche two-seaters that always looked to

Rydell like the wind-up key had fallen off. He gave the Porsche a wide berth; cars like that tended to have hypersensitive anti-theft systems, not to mention hyper-aggressive.

There was a rentacop looking at him through the armored glass of the door; not IntenSecure, but some off brand. Rydell had borrowed a pair of pressed chinos from Kevin. They were a little tight in the waist, hut they beat hell out of the orange trunks. He had on a black IntenSecure uniform-shirt with the patches ripped off, his Stetson, and his SWAT shoes. He wasn't sure black really made it with khaki. He pushed the button. The rentacop buzzed him in.

'Got an appointment with Justine Cooper,' he said, taking his sunglasses off.

'With a client,' the rentacop said. He looked about thirty, and like he should've been out on a farm in Kansas or somewhere. Rydell looked over and saw a skinny woman with black hair. She was talking to a fat man who had no hair at all. Trying to sell him something, it looked like.

'I'll wait,' Rydell said.

The farmer didn't answer. State law said he couldn't have a gun, just the industrial-strength stunner he wore in a beat-up plastic holster, but he probably did anyway. One of those little Russian hold-outs that chambered some godawful overheated caliber originally intended for killing the engine blocks of tanks. The Russians, never too safety-minded, had the market in Saturday-night specials.

Rydell looked around. That ol' Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum. Sublett and his folks down in their trailer-camp in Texas, watching old movies for Reverend Fallon-at least that had some kind of spin on it.

He tried to sneak a look, see what the lady was trying to sell to the fat man, but she caught his eye and that wasn't good. So he worked his way deeper into the shop, pretending to check out the merchandise. There was a whole section of these nasty-looking spidery wreath-things, behind glass in faded gilt frames. The wreaths looked to Rydell like they were made of frizzy old hair. There were tiny little baby coffins, all corroded, and one of them had been planted with ivy. There were coffee tables made out of what Rydell supposed were tombstones, old ones, the lettering worn down so faint you couldn't read it. He paused beside a bedstead welded together from a bunch of those pickaninny jockey-boys it had been against the law to have on your lawn in Knoxville. The jockey-boys had all been freshly-painted with big, red-lipped, watermelon-eating grins. The bed was spread with a hand-stitched quilt patterned like a Confederate flag. When he looked for a price tag, all he found was a yellow SOLD sticker.

'Mr. Rydell? May I call you Berry?' Justine Cooper's jaw was so narrow that it looked like she wouldn't have room for the ordinary complement of teeth in there. Her hair was cut short, a polished brown helmet. She wore a couple of dark, flowing things that Rydell supposed were meant to conceal the fact that she was built more or less like a stick-insect. She didn't sound like she was from anywhere south of anywhere, much, and there was a visible tension strung through her, like wires.

Rydell saw the fat man walk out, pausing on the sidewalk to deactivate the Range Rover's defenses.

'Sure.'

'You're from Knoxville?' He noticed she was breathing deliberately, like she was trying not to hyperventilate.

'That's right.'

'You don't have much of an accent.'

'Well, I wish everybody felt that way.' He smiled, but she didn't smile back.

'Is your family from Knoxville, Mr. Rydell?'

Shit, he thought, go ahead, call me Berry. 'My father was, I guess. My mother's people are from up around Bristol, mostly.'

Justine Cooper's dark eyes, not showing much white, were looking right at him, hut they didn't seem to be registering anything. He guessed she was somewhere in her forties.

'Ms. Cooper?'

She gave a violent start, as though he'd goosed her.

'Ms. Cooper, what are those wreath-sort-of-things in those old frames there?' Pointing at them.

'Memorial wreaths. Southwestern Virginia, late nineteenth, early twentieth century.'

Good, Rydell thought, get her talking about the stock. He walked over to the framed wreaths for a closer look. 'Looks like hair,' he said.

'It is,' she said. 'What else would it be?'

'Human hair?'

'Of course.'

'You mean like dead people's hair?' He saw now the minute braiding, the hair twisted up into tiny flowerlike knots. It was lusterless and no particular color.

'Mr. Rydell, I'm afraid that I may have wasted your time.' She moved tentatively in his direction. 'When I spoke with you on the phone, I was under the impression that you might be, well, much more of the South...'

'How do you mean, Ms. Cooper?'

'What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell