Virtual Light

11. Pulling tags

Tuesday, she just wasn’t on. Couldn’t proj. No focus. Bunny Malatesta, the dispatcher, could feel it, his voice a buzz in her ear.

“Chev, don’t take this the wrong way, but you got like the monthlies or something?”

“Fuck off, Bunny.”

“Hey, I just mean you’re not your usual ball of fire today. All I mean.”

“Gimme a tag.”

“655 Mo, fifteenth, reception.”

Picked up, made it to 555 Cali, fifty-first floor. Pulled her tag and back down. The day gone gray after morning’s promise.

“456 Montgomery, thirty-third, reception, go freight.”

Pausing, her hand in the bike’s recognition-loop. “How come?”

“Says messengers carvin’ graffiti in the passenger elevators. Go freight or they’ll toss you, be denied access, at which point Allied terminates your employment.”

She remembered seeing Ringer’s emblem carved into the inspection plate in one of 456’s passenger elevators. Fucking Ringer. He’d defaced more elevators than anyone in history. Carried around a regular toolkit to do it with.

456 sent her to EC with a carton wider than she was supposed to accept, but that was what racks and bungles were for, and why give the cage-drivers the trade? Bunny buzzed her on her way out and gave her to Beale, the cafeteria on the second floor. She guessed that would be a woman’s purse, done up in a plastic bag from the kitchen, and she was right. Brown, sort of lizardskin, with a couple of green sprouts stuck in the corners of the bag. Women left their purses, remembered, called up, got the manager to send for a messenger. Good for a tip, usually. Ringer and some of the others would open them up, go through the contents, find drugs sometimes. She wouldn’t do that. She thought about the sunglasses.

She couldn’t get a run today. There was no routing in effect at Allied, but sometimes you’d get a run by accident; pick up here, drop off there, then something here. But it was rare. When you worked for Allied you rode harder. Her record was sixteen tags in a day; like doing forty at a different company.

She took the purse to Fulton at Masonic, got two flyers after the owner checked to see everything was there.

“Restaurant’s supposed to take it to the cops” Chevette said. “We don’t like to be responsible.” Blank look from the purse-lady, some kind of secretary. Chevette pocketed the fives.

“298 Alabama” Bunny said, as if offering her some pearl of great price. “Tone those thighs…”

Bust her ass out there to get there, then she’d pick up and do it. But she couldn’t get on top of it, today.

The asshole’s sunglasses…

“For tactical reasons” the blonde said, “we do not currently advocate the use of violence or sorcery against private individuals.”

Chevette had just pumped back from Alabama Street, day’s last tag. The woman on the little CNN flatscreen over the door to Bunny’s pit wore something black and stretchy pulled over her face, three triangular holes cut in it. Blue letters at the bottom of the screen read FIONA X-SPOKESPERSON– SOUTH ISLAND LIBERATION FRONT.

The overlit fluorescent corridor into Allied Messengers smelled of hot styrene, laser printers, abandoned running-shoes, and stale bag lunches, this last tugging Chevette toward memories of some unheated day-care basement in Oregon, winter’s colorless light slanting in through high dim windows. But now the street door banged open behind her, a pair of muddy size-eleven neon sneakers came pounding down the stairs, and Samuel Saladin DuPree, his cheeks speckled with crusty gray commas of road-dirt, stood grinning at her, hugely.

“Happy about something, Sammy Sal?”

Allied’s best-looking thing on two wheels, no contest whatever, DuPree was six-two of ebon electricity poured over a frame of such elegance and strength that Chevette imagined his bones as polished metal, triple-chromed, a quicksilver armature. Like those old movies with that big guy, the one who went into politics, after he’d got the meat ripped off him. Thinking about Sammy Sal’s bones made most girls want him to jump theirs, but not Chevette. He was gay, they were friends, and Chevette wasn’t too sure how she felt about all that anyway, lately.

“Fact is” Sammy Sal said, smearing dirt from his cheek with the back of one long hand, “I’ve decided to kill Ringer. And the truth, y’know, it makes you free…”

“Ho” Chevette said, “you musta pulled a tag over 456 today.”

“I did, dear, do that thing. All the way up, in a dirty freight elevator. A slow dirty freight elevator. And why?”

“Cause Ringer’s ’graved his tag in their brass, Sal, and their rosewood, too?”

“Eggs-ackly, Chevette, honey.” Sammy Sal undid the blue and white bandanna around his neck and wiped his face with it. “Therefore, his ass dies screaming.”

“and must begin, now, to systematically sabotage the workplace” Fiona X said, “or be branded an enemy of the human race.”

The door to the dispatch-pit, so thickly stapled with scheds, sub-charts, tattered Muni regs, and faxed complaints that Chevette had no idea what the surface underneath might look like, popped open. Bunny extruded his scarred and unevenly shaven head, turtle-like, blinking in the light of the corridor, and glanced up automatically, his gaze attracted by the tone of Fiona X’s sound-bite. His expression blanked at the sight of her mask, the mental channel-zap executed in less time than it had taken him to look her way. “You” he said, eyes back on Chevette, “Chevy. In here.”

“Wait for me, Sammy Sal” she said.

Bunny Malatesta had been a San Francisco bike messenger for thirty years. Would be still, if his knees and back hadn’t given out on him. He was simultaneously the best and the worst thing about messing for Allied. The best because he had a bike-map of the city hung behind his eyes, better than anything a computer could generate. He knew every building, every door, what the security was like. He had the mess game down, Bunny did, and, better still, he knew the lore, all the history, the stories that made you know you were part of something, however crazy it got, that was worth doing. He was a legend himself, Bunny, having Krypto’d the windshields of some seven police cars in the course of his riding career, a record that still stood. But he was the worst for those same reasons and more, because there wasn’t any bulishitting him at all. Any other dispatcher, you could cut yourself a little extra slack. But not Bunny. He just knew.

Chevette followed him in. He closed the door behind her. The goggles he used for dispatching dangled around his neck, one padded eyepiece patched with cellophane tape. There were no windows in the room and Bunny kept the lights off when he was working. Half a dozen color monitors were arranged in a semicircle in front of a black swivel armchair with Bunny’s pink rubber Sacro-saver backrest strapped to it like some kind of giant bulging larva.

Bunny rubbed his lower back with the heels of his hands. “Disk’s killing me” he said, not particularly to Chevette.

“Oughta let Sammy Sal crack it for you” she suggested. “He’s real good.”

“It’s cracked already, sweetheart. What’s wrong with it in the first place. Now tell me what were you doin’ over the Morrisey last night. And it better be good.”

“Pulling a tag” Chevette said, going on automatic, the way she had to if she were going to lie and get away with it. She’d been halfway expecting something like this, but not so soon.

She watched as Bunny took the goggles off, disconnected them, and put them on top of one of the monitors. “So how come you never checked back out? They call us on it, say you went in to make a delivery, they scanned your badges, you never come back out. Look, I tell ’em, I know she’s not there now, guys, ’cause I got her out Alabama Street on a call, okay?” He was watchiag her.

“Hey, Bunny” Chevette said, “it was my last tag, my ride was down in the basement, I saw a freight el on its way down, jumped in. I know I’m supposed to clock out at security, but I thought they’d have somebody on the parking exit, you know? I get up the ramp and there’s nobody, a car’s going out, so I deak under the barrier and I’m in the street. I shoulda gone back around and done the lobby thing?”

“You know it. It’s regs.”

“It was late, you know?”

Bunny sat down, wincing, in the chair with the Sacro-saver. He cupped each knee in a big-knuckled hand and stared at her. Very un-Bunny. Like something was really bothering him. Not just security grunts pissing because a mess blew the check-out off. “How late?”

“Huh?”

“They wanna know when you left.”

“Maybe ten minutes after I went in. Fifteen tops. Basement in there’s a rat-maze.”

“You went in 6:32:18” he said. “They got that when they scanned you. The tag, this lawyer, they talked to him, so they know you delivered.” He still had that look.

“Bunny, what’s the deal? Tell ’em I screwed up, is all.”

“You didn’t go anywhere else? In the hotel?”

“Uh-uh” she said, and felt this funny ripple move through her, like she’d crossed some line and couldn’t go back. “I gave the guy his package, Bunny.”

“I don’t think they’re worrying about the guy’s package” Bunny said.

“So?”

“Lookit, Chev” he said, “security guy calls, that’s one thing. Sorry, boss, won’t let it happen again. But this was somebody up in the company, IntenSecure it’s called, and he called up Wilson direct.” Allied’s owner. “So I gotta make nice with Wilson and Mr. Security, I gotta have Grasso cover for me on the board and naturally he screws everything up…”

“Bunny” she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Hey. You’re sorry, I’m sorry, but there’s some big shit rentacop sitting behind a desk and he’s putting fucking Wilson through about what precisely did you do after you gave that lawyer his package. About what kind of employee are you exactly, how long you mess for Allied, any criminal record, any drug use, where you live.”

Chevette saw the asshole’s black glasses, right where she’d left them. In their case, behind Skinner’s Geographics. She tried to lift them out of there with mind-power. Right up to the tar-smelling roof and off the edge. Put those bastards in the Bay like she should’ve done this morning. But no, they were there.

“That ain’t normal” Bunny said. “Know what I mean?”

“You tell ’em where I live, Bunny?”

“Out on the bridge” he said, then cracked her a little sliver of grin. “Not like you got much of an address, is it?” Now he spun himself around in the chair and began to shut the monitors down.

“Bunny” she said, “what’ll they do now?”

“Come and find you.” His back to her. “Here. ”Cause they won’t know where else to go. You didn’t do anything, did you, Chevy?“ The back of his skull showing gray stubble.

Automatic. “No. No… Thanks, Bunny.”

He grunted in reply, neutral, ending it, and Chevette was back in the corridor, her heart pounding under Skinner’s jacket. Up the stairs, out the door, plotting the quickest way home, running red lights in her head, gotta get rid of the glasses, gotta– Sammy Sal had Ringer braced up against a blue recyc bin.

Worry was starting to penetrate Ringer’s rudimentary view of things. “Didn’t do nuthin to you, man.”

“Been carvin’ your name in elevators again, Ringer.”

“But I din’t do nuthin to you!”

“Cause and effect, mofo. We know it’s a tough concept for you, but try: you do shit, other shit follows. You go scratching your tag in the clients’ fancy elevators, we hassle you, man.” Sammy Sal spread the long brown fingers of his left hand across Ringer’s beat-to-shit helmet, palming it like a basketball, and twisted, lifting, the helmet’s strap digging into Ringer’s chin. “Din’t do nuthin!” Ringer gurgled.

Chevette ducked past them, heading for the bike-rack beneath the mural portrait of Shapely. Someone had shot him in his soulful martyr’s eye with a condomful of powder blue paint, blue running all down his hallowed cheek.

“Hey” Sammy Sal said, “come here and help me torment this shit-heel.”

She stuck her hand through the recognition-loop and tried to pull her handlebars out of the rack’s tangle of molybdenum steel, graphite, and aramid overwrap. The other bikes’ alarms all went off at once, a frantic chorus of ear-splitting bleats, basso digital sirennioans, and OUC extended high-volume burst of snake-hiss Spanish profanity, cunningly mixed with yelps of animal torment. She swung her bike around, got her toe in the clip, and kicked for the street, almost going over as she mounted. She saw Sammy Sal, out the corner of her eye, drop Ringer.

She saw Sammy Sal straddle his own bike, a pink and black-fleck fat-tube with Fluoro-Rimz that ran off a hubgenerator.

Sammy Sal was coming after her. She’d never wanted company less.

She took off.

Proj. Just proj.

Like her morning dream, but scarier.