Synners

19

"Hell, no," said Gator. "After checking out on me like that, I don't think he'd have the nerve to show his dead ass here again." She finished cleaning the needle and put it on the tray. "Especially after the talking-to I gave him. Not to mention the tattoo."

"I don't think he ever noticed it," Rosa said glumly.

"Well, it's harmless anyway," said Gator. "Nowhere near as valuable as what he took out of your mailbox, I'm sure." She gave Rosa a skeptical look. "You really never thought to pop the old email out and take a scan?"

"Lot on my mind lately," Rosa said. "Besides, I had it automated. Anything that came in would go right into off-line storage. I didn't figure he'd bother about that."

Sam straightened up from Gator's laptop. "Well, he hasn't checked in anywhere, with or without the data."

"He wouldn't. He's not a hacker," Gator said. She went over and put an ivy design on the screen. "I marked him with this. I can send a copy to everyone in the Tattoo-of-the-Month Club, which happens to be the entire congregation of St. Diz, but I think you want to find him before anyone else does. He's not a hacker, but he knows payday when he sees it, and he knows he can get good bucks for the stuff he ripped from you."

"If he isn't on the Mimosa, I don't know where to look for him," Sam said, exasperated.

Gator frowned. "Oh, I didn't say he wasn't on the Mimosa. I said he hasn't been here, with me in the tent. He could be hiding out anywhere along the strip, you might have passed him without knowing it."

"Great," said Rosa. "Any more good ideas?"

"Sure," Gator said genially. "Find out when the next hit-and-run is leaving, and where it's going. I can just about guarantee Jones'll be right in the middle of it, trying to peddle his prize to one of the hackers running the fooler loops."

"What makes you so sure about that?" Sam asked her.

"The hit-and-run used to be Jones's home away from home, before he hooked up with Keely. He was always hanging on, trying to get canned with somebody famous so he could get his picture on the dataline. Or escape with somebody famous so he could go home with them and get toxed on the good stuff."

"That's kind of risky for us," Sam said doubtfully. "Since we made the top ten. If we get pulled in at a hit-and-run, we'll probably disappear like Keely."

"Leave early," said Gator.

"You're a major help," Rosa said irritated.

Gator smiled and bent over the laptop. "I can give you a couple of IDs that'll stand up to a hit-and-run arrest, squirt you through court like watermelon seeds. Best I can do under the circumstances. Diz asked me to wait here for Fez."

"St. Dismas?" Sam said.

"Sometimes known as my personal physician," Gator replied.

"You've talked to him?"

Two strips of paper came out of the printer, one after another. Gator handed them over. "He leaves me tattoo designs."

Sam wanted to ask her more about that, but Rosa was pulling her out of the tent. "Come on, we've got a hit-and-run to track down. If we're lucky, maybe we can catch Jones before he leaves for it."

"I wouldn't go out there with them," Gator said. "Just find out where they're going and be there."

"Wait a minute." Sam stopped at the flap. "What about you? You're on the top ten, too."

Gator grinned brightly. "Oh, they've already found me. In the Santa Monica morgue. My physician pronounced me dead and wrote up the death certificate a couple of hours ago. Hell, it works for Jones."

The creature was eight feet tall, part samurai-correction, someone's video idea of a samurai-part voodoo apparition, part machine-fantasy, and all high resolution. It moved within a small radius in the center of the room, going through a stylized, complex choreography that reminded Gabe of semaphore. He gaped at it openly from where he sat cross-legged on the floor with his back against a couch, holding a drink he couldn't identify on one knee. He was in somebody's living room, somebody's enormous, endless living room, currently filled with a glittery array of people eating, drinking, wandering in and out, watching the multiple screens on the walls, giving the thing in the center of the room a wide, courteous berth.

Some time ago Gina had brought him here, sometime after the debacle on the terrace, after she'd asked him to take a little walk with her. No, told him he could take a little walk with her. Gina didn't ask.

He took another sip of the drink, which he seemed to have been working on for days. It was vaguely herbal, vaguely spicy, definitely intoxicating. Gina had given it to him. Probably told him he could drink it instead of asking him if he wanted anything. He couldn't remember now, any more than he could remember exactly how he'd come to be in this enormous, endless living room.

The guy with the crazy cape passed through his field of vision. In his present state he felt immensely appreciative of the continuous running patterns in the material. If he could have moved, he would have gotten up and gone after the man to thank him for wearing something so marvelously interesting.

He was contemplating that for a while when something moved at the corner of his vision. He turned to look; nothing. Funny; he could have sworn that funny flaw was back, the strange dark spot that had dogged him through various Head-hunters settings.

The thought was slow in coining, but eventually it pushed its way through the warm ooze of his mind. No, the glitch wouldn't be here, because he wasn't in simulation right now. Even though it sure felt as if he were. He could summon up Marly's and Caritha's voices in his head just as clearly as if he were hearing them on his headmount speaker. He couldn't really follow what they were saying, but that wasn't so important. The program would move him along, and Marly and Caritha would take care of him. Caritha had the cam, after all; she could tell him whether he was looking at something real, or at a holo.

"Holo, yah," said a voice nearby. "What Valjean spends on holo would finance a new video channel on the dataline. Well, for part of the day, anyway."

The creature in the middle of the room elongated suddenly and changed into a pillar of fire.

"Down!" Gabe yelled, and flung his arms up over his head, waiting for the blast and the heat. When it didn't come, he lowered his arms a little and looked around. Several people were staring at him curiously. The pillar of fire was still burning away.

Someone tapped him on the head. "I think this is yours." He twisted around; a woman thrust an empty glass at him. Something wet had splashed across the silky top of her dress. She looked half-amused and half-annoyed, the way Marly looked at him on occasion. "You know, if you can't handle the lotus, you probably shouldn't touch it."

"Got it," someone else said. Gabe turned back to see a short woman in coveralls holding a handcam. Not Caritha. Right, she wouldn't be here now, he thought, confused. "It's going to make a great effect," the woman was saying. "We'll take the splash and fan it out, it'll look like he's throwing diamonds on you. The party animals'll go bugfuck for it." She looked down at Gabe. "I don't remember getting a video release from you. Sign one before you leave, or I'll have to slip in a sub for you."

"Then this is a video?" Gabe said, even more confused.

"That's what they pay me for." The woman said something else, but he ignored her as he struggled to stand up, looking around the room. If this was a video, Marly and Caritha would be here somewhere. He would find them, and they could go track down more headhunters.

He swam through the room, looking around. Faces came at him and bobbed away again like painted balloons. "… keep sending my agent clips of these things," a voice nearby was saying, "and he keeps telling me to stay out of insty-party video. I don't understand that. I say if the cam loves you, the cam loves you. It loves me, and I deserve to work."

Gabe couldn't hear the reply, if there was one. He found himself facing an array of screens set into a wall, all of them displaying a different sequence of images. His eyes shifted back and forth in a frenzy as he tried to make sense of each one, and for several moments dizziness threatened to knock him over.

There was a sudden firm grip on his arm. "That one's pretty interesting, if you're a connoisseur of tech-fantasy porn." A warm hand turned his face slightly to the left and down. He was looking at a strange gold machine with two gleaming cones rising out of the framework on goosenecks. The point of one cone was running back and forth along glowing symbols painted on an endless stretch of transparent material feeding from an unseen source; the point of the other cone was buried in the head of a woman sitting motionless in a chair next to the machine.

"Headhunters," Gabe whispered.

"Good guess, but the real title is Need to Know," said the same voice close to his ear. "It's an indictment of our present system of information dispersal. You're allowed to know only those things the information czars decide that you need to know. They call it 'market research' and 'efficient use of resources' and 'no-waste,' but it's the same old shit they've been doing to us for more than a hundred years-keep 'em confused and in the dark. You gotta be a stone-home super-Renaissance person to find out what's really going on. Don't you agree?"

Gabe couldn't look away from the image on the screen. It was almost as bad as what he'd seen in the ward.

"What ward?"

Talking without realizing it; he seemed to be doing that a lot tonight. "Where they punch holes in people's heads and steal their neurotransmitter."

There was a pause. "You must watch a lot of tech-fantasy porn. I knew it. I could tell just by looking at you."

He turned to look at the person who was speaking to him. The face wouldn't come clear of the ornate drifting patterns falling past it like veils, but he was sure it was neither Caritha nor Marly. "Excuse me," he said, "I have to find some people."

The house was on fire. No, he was on fire. No, he was standing in the pillar of fire. He'd forgotten all about it. Embarrassed, he tried to step out of it, and it moved with him in a way that was oddly possessive, as if it had decided to claim him. Adopted by a pillar of fire; the program certainly was frisky today. He peered through the flames. A small knot of people gathered near another machine were applauding him. He turned away, wandering around in a small circle as he tried to get his bearings. There was the wall of screens, he must have come from there-no, there was another wall of screens, maybe he'd come from there. The people were still applauding. Abruptly the flames parted, and he was standing outside of the pillar. A woman in an open military-style coat with fringe on the shoulders did something to the machine and then shook her head at him.

"Homeboy, if you're not going to do anything more interesting than stagger around, I can't use you."

"Excuse me," he said. "I have to find some people."

They slid out of his field of vision, and his pov floated around a corner and down a long hallway-long? No, just a special-effects distortion. A robot bird-head popped out of a doorway and inspected him curiously for several seconds before a man's face came out from behind it and waved him on. Cam, he realized, another cam. It was like one of those Big Night Out video releases they did in Entertainment, he thought; simulated parties and private clubs and bars. Like an insty-vacation. He became aware of music, a driving, frenzied beat urging him to relax, relax, relax.

At the top of a spiral staircase, he had a sudden clear glimpse of a mass of hair the color of dark honey before it moved away. "Marly?" he asked. He pushed through the warm bodies posed against the twisting, turning railing. Words bounced off him like hail, and he emerged on the next floor feeling slightly worked over.

He made his way down another hall, stopping at every doorway. Some of the rooms were crowded, and some were mostly empty, but Marly wasn't in any of them. The door to the last room was half-open, and he hesitated, almost knocked, and then gave it a push with his foot.

Music rushed over him, big music with lots of different sounds in it. He hung onto the frame, overwhelmed and blinded. Sometime later his vision cleared, and he saw the bed tipped up on its side against the far wall. To make room for the music, he thought. And for the man he now saw kneeling in the center of the floor before a small fire, urging the flames upward with graceful fingers.

A little ways away Caritha was stretched out with her back to him, resting on one elbow, watching. Gabe floated down onto the floor next to her with a rush of relief.

"I knew I'd find you," he said, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes.

"Shit, what happened to you?" Her voice sounded strange and rough under the music.

"When?" he asked. He wanted to look at her, put an arm around her, but his head was suddenly too heavy to move, his eyes too much trouble to open. He would open them in a minute; there was no point to running a video if you were going to keep your eyes closed.

"Whenever. What'ud you do, get a few refills? How much did you have?"

He managed to get his eyes open to slits. Caritha's voice sounded very strange, as if someone had been messing with the program. The hacker. The hacker who had claimed to be on his side had done something to his program. He struggled to raise his head. The man in the center of the room was burning a musical instrument, he realized, an old electric guitar from the last century, squirting fluid on it and setting a match to it deliberately. Someone was asking him if he was experienced.

"That's not the question," he said. "The question is who's really on your side. Anyone can say they are, but it-it-" He floundered; the thought was suddenly draining away like water down an open pipe.

" 'It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing,' right? That what you're trying to tell me?"

He reached out blindly and found her wrist. "I'm trying to tell you we've been found out. We've got to get away. Where's Marly?"

" 'Found out'? Somebody found something out about you?" A sudden raucous laugh, un-Caritha-like and yet not so out of character. Something was tugging at his mind, trying to get through the jumble of ideas and images and noise; he thought it might be his calendar alarm beeping almost unheard, but no reminder display appeared before him.

"It was Manny," he said faintly. "He found out. Not entirely legally, but I don't know what he's going to do."

"Manny? You mean Rivera?" Another laugh. "Nothing about that character's entirely legal. I could tell you stories."

"You could?" Gabe asked, confused.

"Who knows but that I fucking will."

The man was still burning his guitar. Or burning it again. Static boiled through the figure, and Gabe realized he was looking at a holo of a very old piece of footage.

"There's no time for stories anymore," he said after a bit. "I covered up as much as I could. All he'll find is commercials now, but it'll be a long time before we're all together again." He paused, twining his fingers with hers. So real; he could actually feel the sweat on her palm, the texture of her fingers, the warmth. He tried to remember if new hotsuits with upgraded sensors had been issued. Because the sensations weren't ever this vivid, only good enough, what with the video portion providing power of suggestion, so that your mind would fill in any missing details. Usually, if you surrendered to the illusion. Which you really had to do to make really good video, even commercials…

After a while he realized he'd been talking without knowing it again, and at some length. He blinked at the flames licking up from the guitar.

"I put two LotusLands in you, what you call your mildly hallucinogenic beverages, just to get that fucking pinched look off your face. I don't know how many more they put in you downstairs, but I'd say you're more toxed than you've ever been in your life."

Frowning, he turned to look at her and jumped. It wasn't Caritha.

"You remember anything that happened since you walked in here?" Gina asked him. She waited a moment. "Didn't think so."

Attention, Marly's voice said in his mind. This is not a simulation.

"It's a little late to tell me that," he muttered.

"A little late?" Gina gave a short, humorless laugh. "It's a whole fucking stone-home lot late." Her eyes were dark holes; she was even more toxed than he was, he realized. "We made it easier to be in the sounds and the pictures, and hardly fucking none of it's real anymore. It's a faster, better way to get a real unreal experience. You don't know what I'm talkin' about, do you?"

"I don't know what I'm talking about," he said honestly.

"Good, just as long as we're high enough up in the stupid-sphere for you." A cam poked into the room, took a careful look around, and backed out again. "There now," Gina said. "Valjean's got this running deal-not with me-that he releases all his parties as videos. You can't come here and take a fucking shit but for a fucking audience. He's on the rich-and-famous chips. The folks in Kansas buy them, pop them in their flatscreen consoles or their headmounts, if they even have that shit in Kansas, and go to parties they don't have a chance in hell of ever really going to. And you know what that's from? You know where the fuck they got that idea?"

Gabe shook his head. Whatever was in his system was fading down, a trough between one high and the next. There was a small burning point in the pit of his stomach.

"They used to have these TV shows of kids dancing to music, these flatscreen things in the pre-Jurassic when it was all in black-and-white, and there were maybe two-three networks and two-three channels you could get them on in any city. Kids dancing, just kids dancing to music, and maybe a solo or a group'd come on and lip-synch a hot release. Something like a hundred kids dancing around, and out there in TV land, there'd be maybe a million kids dancing along, pretending they were there."

"Uh-huh," Gabe said politely. He was trying to picture it without really having much idea of what she was talking about.

"It was later that music started to stand for something," she went on suddenly, in a quieter voice. "There were all these ideas, the ideas were in the music, the music was in the ideas. These performers would cut these releases, and they'd say shit like, 'Well, my album's fighting against this' and 'My album's fighting against that.' This was before anyone got the bright idea to do the monster benefits to feed the hungry. You probably don't know what those are. Nobody does that anymore. Now they go get the hungry with cams and they call it, I don't know, 'poverty porn' or 'slum porn,' or I don't know what they call it.

"So they had these albums that were fighting this and fighting that and fighting for some other thing, but what they all really fought in the end was each other, for a place on the old hit parade. Number ten with a bullet, number four with a bullet. They were all so far away from it, see, they were all so fucking far away. They'd say something like 'world peace' and they didn't have the first fucking idea of what the world was like. They saved the goddamn whales, and they didn't even fucking live in the fucking world."

She wiped the dreadlocks back from her smooth forehead, digging her fingers into them so hard, Gabe was afraid she was going to tear them away. "Some of that wasn't their fault. There was lots of crazy shit, even before the arena massacre at the Behemoth concert. You old enough to remember that one?"

Gabe tried to think. She waved a hand at him.

"Never mind, they got such killer video on it, you don't have to be old enough, just tune in disaster porn. Watch the Jesus-boy in the army fatigues take out a thousand kids in one sweep, you are there. But there was crazy shit before that, nutsoids with knives, nutsoids with guns, nutsoids with crazy fucking shit for brains, like the guy that took out Lennon."

"Lenin?" he said, puzzled.

"For all it really meant to him, he coulda shot his fucking TV set. And you know, everyone was sorry. I remember my grandmother telling me that, how really fucking awful it was, and fifteen years later they were still squeezing videos out of the guy, like they forgot somebody wiped him out, and it had gone from, like, because they loved him to it not mattering what had happened because they could still get the fucking videos. They cooked up a simulation, a fucking simulation of the man and got it to do interviews and give simulated answers to simulated questions before the estate pulled the plug on that." She focused on him suddenly with a searching expression. "Do you understand a fucking word I'm saying?"

He thought hard. "Well, I know they have to be dead for a hundred and fifty years without a conservatorship before they're in the public domain. But with a conservatorship the time limit's different, and you have to license-"

"I want it to matter," she said. "I want the fucking music and the people to matter. I don't want fucking rock'n'roll porn to go with the med porn and the war porn and the weapons porn and the food porn-shit, it's all porn, goddamn fucking video porn." She gestured at the holo; the guitar was burning again. "They fixed it so he'd live forever. They don't know he woulda lived forever anyway, because when it came outa him, it came outa something real, so it was real. I want it to come out of something real, not some fucking box, I want it to come out of human-fucking-beings, I want it to be something that makes you know you're alive, and not another part of a bunch of fucking pels in a high-res video!"

She rested her forearms on her knees. Gabe touched her shoulder, wanting to offer her something and not having the slightest idea what that could possibly be.

"That's why I'm gonna do it," she said after a moment.

"Do what?" he asked.

"Change for the machines."

He rubbed the side of his face where she had hit him about a hundred years before.

She slapped his leg suddenly, startling him. "And that's where you came in, isn't it." She got up and offered him a hand. "Come on. Take a little walk with me."

He looked at her hand suspiciously.

"I ain't gonna hit you again. That was a fucking accident, I don't know how many more times I have to tell you that."

"It isn't that," he said slowly, gazing at her hand. "It's- well-is it a long walk?"

"Longest walk you ever took." She grabbed him and hauled him up.

The sign came swimming out of the colorful darkness, plain white board with red glow-print, no holos or other tricks: Kutt-Upps (2 Drink Minim.). Gabe stopped where he was and stared up at it. It didn't mean anything to him, and he couldn't figure out why it would pop out of the roiling confusion of his vision.

Gina took hold of his arm. "Don't tell me you got a secret life with med porn, too."

"Oh, if you've seen one tracheotomy, you've seen them all," he said in a blase tone as she urged him forward. The stuff in his system had reasserted itself-either that, or he'd had some more, he didn't really know-and he seemed to be walking through an orchard of stylized, possibly artificial trees with branches like lattices and lightning bolts. Except wasn't there some place down south that did something funny with trees, got them to bear leaves that looked like lace or something? Big tourist attraction.

At the same time the street looked like a long, dark tunnel, and he couldn't really see the ground, so for all he knew, the next step could be right into some yawning pit, or the step after that, or the step after that. Gina seemed pretty confident that it was solid ground all the way.

Then he realized he was in a long, dark tunnel sloping upward, and he kept ducking his head, thinking the ceiling was very low. But Gina kept pulling him along, and he was thinking that she had been right, it was the longest walk he'd ever taken, when he stepped into an explosion of light and sound.

She had both arms around him from behind, steering him through the chaos. A transparent blimp the size of a watermelon was sailing toward him, diverting up over his head at the last moment. He stopped to watch it; tiny dots of light danced over the side, spelling out MORE DRUGS. He laughed a little and leaned back against Gina, putting his hands over hers. "I don't think so," he murmured. Gina said something, but not to him. It didn't matter; he was enjoying the feel of her arms around him. He had forgotten exactly how good it felt, for real, not in a hotsuit.

Your whole body's a hotsuit, said Caritha's voice in his mind.

That would make his brain the headmount, he thought dreamily, and looked around. In another part of the room, on a raised platform, a woman was holding a strange piece of machinery that looked like the bastard offspring of a shovel and a keyboard and screaming something at the top of her lungs. Periodically she slammed the wide part of the machine down on the stage. After the third time he started seeing sparks flying up from the point of impact.

Yah, his body was the hotsuit, and his brain was the head-mount, but the program seemed to have gone a little crazy.

MORE DRUGS.

He understood percussionist right away, but it took him a while to grab the idea that her last name was Something. The gold tone of her skin had a stronger yellow in it than Catherine's, but on her it looked good. On her it was Something. She wasn't impressed with his Something jokes, but she didn't hit him with the sticks, either. She tortured the table with them.

Maybe he needed some sticks, he thought. He could have used them in Manny's office. Bing, bang, bap, flip-flip, tap. She wouldn't let him handle them, so he used his fingers, trying to find a way through her rhythm. A little later she told him he'd made a game try, and if he wanted to get into music, she could show him the way. But right then Gina lifted him out of the chair by the back of his neck, and he could only watch the table recede in the distance. The sticks tapped good-bye before a sudden glittering population fell into the space between him and them, blotting them out. He must be leaving.

– -

He had gone away for a little while, but there was a dim recording in his mind of a blimp, a far more vivid memory of a yellow gold woman with dancing sticks, and somewhere in there a brick wall with snakes crawling on it-or was that a brick floor? A brick ceiling?-and now here he was in the open night air and someone was saying, "AR is a big, big concept. Wraps around a lotta stuff. A whole lotta stuff."

His vision cleared again, and he was looking at a monitor screen running in split-mode, with what might have been identical sets of figures scrolling up either side at different rates.

"On the right here," the voice went on, "are the readings for the area under normal conditions, when there'd be nobody here. On the left are the real readings that we're intercepting on the way to the security-system sensors-"

Marly's voice spoke casually in his head. Try to say that five times real fast. No, not her voice, just his own, he decided. Suddenly he no longer wanted to disown his thoughts and stick false names on them. He didn't have to do that right now, he didn't have to cut pieces of himself off and dress them up in masks and costumes to keep himself company-

"-tents and purposes a facade simulation at the point of input to the security system, where we alter the readings, change the figures going in to be those you'd get if there was nobody here. See, there's air pressure, wind velocity-now the sound and vision's trickier because we have to get between what the cams see and hear and what they tell the system they see and hear. So we run a real facade simulation there in a loop. That's the fooler loop. You just have to sit on top of it and make sure nothing gets jiggled out of place-"

He drifted away again, unsure if he was moving physically. It felt as though he might be. The lights and colors were shot through with large pockets of darkness, and he couldn't seem to get oriented.

"Yah, well, we're all corks on this ocean." A kid raised up from the synthesizer he had been bending over. "I've got a real feel for the sound of guitars, myself. All kinds. I don't need anybody else. Hear me, and you'd swear you were hearing four-five people-"

Someone interrupted him. He shoved a hand at Gabe, and Gabe took it. "Remember me," he said, pumping Gabe's hand up and down. "My name's Dexter, and I'm a whole fucking group in one body, I swear I am. Tell her that. Please? Tell her."

Gabe nodded, dazed, and wandered off. A whole fucking group in one body. He could sympathize. That wasn't really so hard. Just pull them out and make them into individuals, the group, make good guys and bad guys and stick them in a simulation, and you'd never have to be alone-

Deadline ‹ month.

The memory was a fist in the face. He knew just how a fist in the face felt, too; if he ever had to program a hotsuit with facial coverage for a fast shot to the head, he was ready. What he ought to do now, he thought, was take a blow to the stomach and then program that into one of his commercials and persuade Manny to test-drive it 'suited up. Wouldn't that give old Manny a surprise, would that just give him something to think over? It wouldn't actually hurt him, it would just be unpleasant. After all, it wasn't like the hotsuit was anything but skin-deep.

But he needed the experience, so he'd know he'd gotten the hotsuit settings right. Faking it was out of the question.

Manny hated faked material; he could tell immediately when the sensation wasn't authentic.

He put his arms over his stomach. The feel of Gina's arms was long gone, and he wanted them back. Absurdly tall pink feathers growing up from what seemed to be a flamingo face sailed through his field of vision, leaving a hot pink trail behind. He became aware of the music, then, lots of guitar sounds, sounds like lots of guitars.

He felt himself walking, but it was distant, as if he were wearing a good hotsuit with the tactile damped down. The colors parted around him, and he found himself looking at hundreds of strange humps. They grew up out of the ground (or whatever this surface was-he smelled grass and dirt, so he was calling it ground) in sharply regular rows. Information, he thought. Regimentation. On the whole he preferred the idea of the Byzantine orchard. That was long gone, too, but if he could have Gina put her arms around him again, who knew but that it would come back? And if he had to get her to punch him in the stomach to do that, then he would do that.

"Gina?" he asked timidly.

Scattered voices came through the darkness over the humps.

"… fucking furious with you, asshole."

"Fury is what made rock'n'roll great."

"When was I ever not there for you?"

"Well," Gabe murmured, maneuvering between two of the humps, "where was 'there,' and what was I doing at the time?"

"… twenty years on your case, what does it fucking take?" That was Gina's voice, he'd know it forever. The first time he'd ever heard it, he'd known he would remember it forever, and not just because she'd punched his lights out. It was a voice with texture, a voice that you could touch as much as hear. It had been in his ears all night, and he hadn't realized how much he wanted to keep it there until it had gone away and come back just now.

"Gina," he said, moving forward. Something banged into his hip. He reached out to touch it and was startled by the feel of cold stone. One of those humps.

"It's complicated," said the other voice. Not as textured, a voice from someone who seemed to be receding in the distance, not faint but fading out all the same. "I wanted to tell you. It's a rope out of a hole."

Gabe stumbled into another hump and worked his way around it.

"Picturesque, but not accurate. Now you work in a rucking hole."

"I'm fading fucking out, I'm going so fast sometimes you can see right through me."

"I can see right through you, all right."

The darkness was no longer as deep as it had been. Gabe could make out trees now, plain old trees, and somewhere far off, light flung over the grass in great white circles. He moved sideways now, using the cold stone humps as a guide, stepping from one to another in a straight line. If he could put the voices between himself and the distant white light, he would see where Gina was and who she was talking to.

"… guess we should have taken better care of each other."

"I took great care of you, fucker."

"But when it came down to some things, we did something else. Usually video."

"Twenty years I've heard you bullshit and shoot shit, this is the first time this shit has ever come up. I don't want a postmortem of the last twenty years trying to decide if we did right by each other. What we got right now is what we got. Maybe it's damned fucking little, but it made a difference to me. I didn't keep my life from you."

Now Gabe could see people moving around in the distant pools of light, and something in their motions made him think they were hunting each other. Hunting to music.

"Look, you got a video head, I got a video head, what the fuck were we gonna do, keep the day-care in business? I'll be there tomorrow, for chrissakes, I'll be there. When was I ever not there for you?"

Two dark shapes blocked his view of the people in the light. He recognized Gina's silhouette immediately. There was something familiar about the other one, but he couldn't place it.

"Gina," he said, just as she moved toward the other person. "What?" she snapped.

"Gina," he said again happily, going forward. "Punch me in the-" Something caught him right at his belt line, hard enough to flip his feet up as his head went down. Cold stone bashed into the right side of his face, and there was a technicolor explosion in his head. He was barely aware of his own flailing before something slammed against his back, knocking the wind out of him. Colors poured down in an avalanche.

White light seared his eyes and drilled into his brain. He squeezed his eyes shut again quickly. The buzzing roar now waxing and waning in his ears resolved itself into voices over music. Something was pressing firmly against the side of his face. The patches, he thought; if he could move his arm, he would reach into his pocket and stick on two, or three, or four-

Someone was holding his arm. Laboriously he made his head turn, feeling the pressure against his face yield slightly, and opened his eyes again.

Sam's face swam into focus, started to melt away, and came back again. The hollows below her cheekbones had deepened a bit, and her wide, serious eyes made her look both frighteningly old and frightened and young. The unruly black hair was a little longer, a little softer. She was hanging onto his arm as if she meant to pull him up out of deep water. We're all corks on this ocean.

"So," he said, taking a cautious breath. Pain flared in his back, then receded to a constant dull ache. "And when did you get back into town?"

Sam glanced away for a moment. "I guess you'll be all right if you recognize me."

A young woman appeared behind Sam and put her hand on Sam's shoulder. "Ain't sure we can say the same, doll."

"I know, Rosa. Another minute and we'll go. Where's Jones? Don't lose him again." She looked up, and Gabe followed her gaze to a young guy with nervous-breakdown hair framing a bony, sullen face. "Just make sure you stay there, you," Sam said to the guy, and turned back to him. "Gabe, I can't stick around, and I don't know what you're doing here or what you did to yourself-"

"Told you, he tripped over a fucking tombstone," came Gina's voice from nearby. She was pressing something to the side of his face, he realized, and his head was pillowed on her knees. He reached up, found her hand and the wad of cloth in it. She wiggled out of his grasp and closed his hand around the wad. He had a glimpse of something red.

"… going away," Sam was saying. "For a real long time. Please, don't try to find me."

"You're always going away," he said resignedly. "It would be news if you were staying."

Sam shrugged. "I was going to try to get a message to you later, when things calmed down-" The woman behind Sam gave her a poke, and Sam glanced back at her. "Christ, Rosa, he works there. I gotta tell you, Gabe, I never expected to see you at a hit-and-run in Forest Lawn." She reached over and tucked something into his pants pocket. "If something-oh, I don't know, if something comes up, and you want to tell me something, if there's some kind of trouble, you can try getting a message to me through the name on the paper."

He gave a weak, disbelieving laugh. "Aren't we doing this backwards?"

"I know where you are." She let go of his arm and stood up, her gaze going briefly to Gina. "Some life, Dad." She moved off with the other woman and the guy. He tried to sit up, thinking to call after her, but the pain in his face and the pain in his back blossomed anew, pinning him where he was.

Gina slipped his head onto the uneven pillow of her jacket and then knelt beside him, crossing her arms expectantly.

"That was my daughter," he said, still marveling. Sam had called him Dad.

"That's what she told me."

"But I didn't get a chance to let her know," he added sadly.

"Let her know what? That you've been 'found out'?"

"Her mother's leaving me. She'd have wanted to know that." He took the wad of cloth from his face and looked at it, not understanding right away that the red was his own blood. Gina pushed it back against his cheek.

"You never mentioned that to me, either," she said quietly. "Talked about plenty else. That why you wanted a punch in the stomach, because her mother's leaving you?"

His free hand found hers. "No. When your wife leaves you first thing in the morning, how much worse can the day get? I wanted it because-" Because he thought he was about to lose his job, and he wanted to leave Manny something to remember him by? Oh, that sounded real fierce. Leaving Manny a simulated punch in the stomach for the loss of his simulated girlfriends and his simulated secret life, for the loss of his simulated job. If he was losing it all, he might as well leave Manny with a real punch in the stomach.

The idea gave him a rush of pleasure that temporarily overrode the pain. Take it out of porn, make it something real. Do one real thing. Hell, he might never do another.

Gina's gaze turned to her right. The crazy guy, Visual Mark, was bending over him with the same space-case expression he'd been wearing the day Gabe had first met him.

"Go home and pack," Gina said to him. "I'll be there. Just like fucking always."

Visual Mark straightened up and walked off with his hands in his pockets. Gabe had the sudden wild thought that he'd never see the man again. And Gina?

"Are you going somewhere, too?" he asked her. "You and him?"

"That's a long fucker of a story." She yawned. "You feel sober?"

"I feel pain."

"Yah, that's sober as I remember it."

He took a firmer hold on her hand. "Where are you going?"

"Christ, you don't know anything, do you? Your daughter knows. Old Sam, she's got a line on a lot of stuff."

"What?" He felt a flutter of a strange new fear and tried to tell himself that it was the combination of the drugs and the shock of the injury.

"It's a long fucker of a story," she said again. "Your daughter's gonna be okay, but you need some work. Maybe a staple on that gash. You opened yourself up there pretty good."

"Yes," he said. "I did."

She paused, looking at him speculatively. "Shit, maybe I oughta tell you. While you're still too toxed to get frantic."

She had gotten to the part about Mexico when the police arrived.