Idoru

39. Trans

Yamazaki lost his balance as the van shot up the narrow ramp, out of the hotel. Laney, holding Arleigh’s phone to the dashboard map, toning the number of the Hotel Di, heard him crash down on the shredded bubble-pack. The display bleeped as Laney completed the number; grid-segments clicked across the screen. “You okay, Yamazaki?”

“Thank you,” Yamazaki said. “Yes.” Getting to his knees again, he craned around the headrest of Laney’s seat. “You have located the hotel?”

“Expressway,” Arleigh said, glancing at the display, as they swung right, up an entrance ramp. “Hit speed-dial three. Thanks. Gimme.” She took the phone. “McCrae. Yeah. Priority? Fuckyou, Alex. Ring me through to him.” She listened. “Di? Like D, I? Shit. Thanks.” She clicked off.

“What is it?” Laney asked, as they swung onto the expressway, the giant bland brow of an enormous articulated freight-hauler pulling up behind and then past them, quilted stainless steel flashing in Laney’s peripheral vision. The van rocked with the big truck’s passage.

“I tried to get Rez. Alex says he left the hotel, with Blackwell. Headed the same place we are.”

“When?”

“Just about the time you were having your screaming fit, when you had the ’phones on,’ ” Arleigh said. She looked grim. “Sorry,” she said.

Laney had had to argue with her for fifteen minutes, back there, before she’d agreed to this. She’d kept saying she wanted him to see a doctor. She’d said that she was a technician, not a researcher, not security, and that her first responsibility was to stay with the data, the modules, because anyone who got those got almost the entire Lo/Rez Partnership business plan, plus the books, plus whatever Kuwayama had entrusted them with in the gray module. She’d only given in after Yamazaki had sworn to take full responsibility for everything, and after Shannon and the man with the ponytail had promised not to leave the modules. Not even, Arleigh said, to piss. “Go against the wall, God damn it,” she’d said, “and get half a dozen of Blackwell’s boys down here to keep you company.”

“He knows,” Laney said. “She told him it’s there.”

“What is there, Laney-san?” asked Yamazaki, around the headrest.

“I don’t know. Whatever it is, they think it’ll facilitate their marriage.”

“Do youthink so?” Arleigh asked, passing a string of bright little cars.

“I guess it must be capable of it,” Laney said, as something under her seat began to clang, loudly and insistently. “But I don’t think that means it’ll necessarily happen. What the hell is that?”

“I’m exceeding the speed limit,” she said. “Every vehicle in Japan is legally required to be equipped with one of these devices. You speed, it dings.”

Laney turned to Yamazaki. “Is that true?”

“Of course,” Yamazaki said, over the steady clanging.

“And people don’t just disconnect them?”

“No,” Yamazaki said, looking puzzled. “Why would they?”

Arleigh’s phone rang. “McCrae. Willy?” Silence as she listened.

Then Laney felt the van sway slightly. It slowed until the clanging suddenly stopped. She lowered the phone.

“What is it?” Laney asked.

“Willy Jude,” she said. “He… He was just watching one of the clubbing channels. They said Rez is dead. They said he was dead. In a love hotel.”