Virtual Light

18. Capacitor

Chevette’s mother had had this boyfriend once named Oakley, who drank part-time and drove logging trucks the rest, or anyway he said he did. He was a long-legged man with his blue eyes set a little too far apart, in a face with those deep seams down each cheek. Which made him look, Chevette’s mother said, like a real cowboy. Chevette just thought it made him look kind of dangerous. Which he wasn’t, usually, unless he got himself around a bottle or two of whiskey and forgot where he was or who he was with; like particularly if he mistook Chevette for her mother, which he’d done a couple of times, but she’d always gotten away from him and he’d always been sorry about it afterward, bought her Ring-Dings and stuff from the Seven-Eleven. But what Oakley did that she remembered now, looking down through the hatch at this guy with his gun, was take her out in the woods one time and let her shoot a pistol.

And this one had a face kind of like Oakley’s, too, those eyes and those grooves in his cheeks. Like you got from smiling a lot, the way he was now. But it sure wasn’t a smile that would ever make anybody feel good. Gold at the corners of it.

“Now come on down here” he said, stressing each word just the same.

“Who the fuck are you?” Skinner, sounding more interested than pissed-off.

The gun went off. Not very loud, but sharp, with this blue flash. She saw the Japanese guy sit down on the foor, like his legs had gone out from under him, and she thought the guy had shot him.

“Shut up.” Then up at Chevette, “I told you to get down here.”

Then Sammy Sal touched her on the back of her neck, his fingertips urging her toward the hatch before they withdrew.

The guy might not even know Sammy Sal was up here at all. Sammy Sal had the glasses. And one thing Chevette was sure of now, this guy was no cop.

“Sorry” the Japanese guy said, “sorry I…”

“I’m going to shoot you in the right eye with a subsonic titanium bullet.” Still smiling, the way he might say I’m going to buy you a sandwich.

“I’m coming” Chevette said. And he didn’t shot, not her, not the Japanese guy.

She thought she heard Sammy Sal step back acoss the roof, away from her, but she didn’t look back. She wasn’t sure whether she should try to close the hatch behind her or not. She decided not to because the guy had only told her to come down. She’d have to reach past the edge of the hole to get hold of the hatch and it might look to him like he was going for a gun or something. Like in a show.

She dropped down from the bottom rung, trying to keep her hands where he could see them.

“What were you doing up there?” Still smiling. His gun wasn’t anything like Oakley’s big old Brazilian revolver; it was a little stubby square thing made out of dull metal, the color of Skinner’s old tools. A thin ring of lighter metal around the narrow hole in the end. Like the pupil of an eye.

“Looking at the city” she said, not feeling scared, particularly. Not really feeling anything, except her legs were trembling.

He glanced up, the gun staying right when it was. She didn’t want him to ask her if was she alone up here, because the answer might hang in the air and tell him it was a lie. “You know what I’m here for.”

Skinner was sitting up on his bed, back against the wall, looking as wide awake as she’d ever seen him. The Japanese guy, who didn’t look like he’d been shot after all, was sitting on the floor, his skinny legs spread out in front of him in a V.

“Well” Skinner said, “I’d guess money or drugs, but it happens you’re shit out of luck. Give you fifty-six dollars and a stale joint of Humbolt, you want it.”

“Shut up.” When the automatic smile went away, it was like he didn’t have any lips. “I’m talking to her.”

Skinner looked like he was about to say something, or maybe laugh, but he didn’t.

“The glasses.” Now the smile was back. He raised the gun, so that she was looking right into the little hole. If he shoots me, she thought, he’ll still have to hunt for them.

“Hepburn” Skinner said, with a crazy little grin, and just then Chevette noticed that the poster of Roy Orbison had a hole in the middle of its gray forehead. “Down there” she said, pointing to the hatch in the floor.

“Where?”

“My bike” hoping Sammy Sal didn’t bump into that old rusty wagon in the dark up there, make a noise.

He looked up at the roof-hatch, like he could hear what she was thinking.

“Lean up against the wall there, palms flat.” He moved in closer. “Get your feet apart…” The gun touched her neck. His other hand slid under Skinner’s jacket, feeling for a weapon. “Stay that way.” He’d missed Skinner’s knife, the one with the fractal blade. She turned her head a little and saw him wrapping something red and rubbery around one of the Japanese guy’s wrists, doing it one-handed. She thought of those gummy-worm candies you bought out of a big plastic jar. He yanked the Japanese guy by the red thing, dragging him across the floor to the shelf-table where she’d eaten breakfast. He stuck one end of the red thing behind the angle-brace that held the table up, then twisted it around the guy’s other wrist. He took another one out of his pocket and shook it out, like a toy snake. Reached behind Skinner with it and did something with his hand. “You stay on that bed, old man” touching the gun to Skinner’s temple. Skinner just looking at him.

He came back to Chevette. “You’re climbing down a ladder. Need yours in front.”

The thing was cool and slick and fused into itself as soon as he had it around her wrists. Flowed together. Moved by itself. Plastic ruby bracelets, like a kid’s toy. One of those tricks with molecules.

“I’m going to watch you” he said, with another glance up at the open roof-hatch, “so you just go down nice and slow. And if you jump, or run when you get to the bottom, I’ll kill you.”

And she didn’t doubt he would, if he could, but she was remembering something Oakley had told her that day in the woods, how it was hard to hit something if you had to shoot almost straight down at it, even harder straight up. So maybe the thing to do was just proj when she hit the bottom. she’d only have to clear about six feet from the ladder to be where he couldn’t see her. But she looked at the gun’s black and silver eye and it just didn’t seem like a good idea.

So she went to the hole in the floor and got down on her knees. It wasn’t easy, with her hands tied that way. He had to steady her, grabbing a handful of Skinner’s jacket, but she got her feet down on the third rung and her fingers around the top one, and worked her way down that way. She had to get her feet on a rung, let go of the one she was holding, snatch the next one down before she lost her balance, do it again.

But she got to think while she was doing it, and that helped her decide to go ahead and try to do what she had in mind. It was weird to be thinking that way, how quiet she felt, but it wasn’t the first time. She’d felt that way in Beaverton, the night she’d gone over the wire, and that without any more planning. And one time these truckers had tried to drag her into the sleeper in the back; she’d made like she didn’t mind, then threw a thermos of hot coffee in one’s face, kicked the other in the head, and gotten out of there. They’d looked for her for an hour, with flashlights, while she squatted down in river-mud and let mosquitos eat her alive. Lights searching for her through that brush.

She got to the bottom and backed off a step, holding her bound wrists out where he could see them if he wanted to. He came down fast, no wasted movement, not a sound. His long coat was made of something black, some cloth that didn’t throw back the light, and she saw he was wearing black cowboy boots. She knew he could run just fine in those, if he had to; people didn’t always think so, but you could.

“Where is it?” Gold flashing at the corners of his smile. His hair, brushed straight back, was somewhere between brown and blond. He moved his hand, keeping her aware of the gun. She saw his hand was starting to sweat, spots of wetness darkening there, inside the white rubber glove.

“We gotta take the—” She stopped. The yellow lift was where she and Sammy Sal had left it, so how had he gotten up?

Extra bits of gold. “We took the stairs.”

They’d come up the painter’s ladder, bare steel rungs, some of them rusted through. So she wouldn’t hear the lift. No wonder the Japanese guy had looked scared. “Well” she said, “you coming?”

He followed her over to the lift. She kept her eyes on the deck, so she wouldn’t forget and look up to try and find Sammy, who had to be there, somewhere. He wouldn’t have had time to get down, or else they would have heard him.

He held her shoulder again while she swung her leg over and climbed in, then got in after her, watching her the whole time.

“This one’s down” she said, pointing at one of the levers.

“Do it.”

She moved it a notch, another, and the engine whined beneath their feet, gearing them down the incline. There was a patch of light at the bottom, under a bulb caged in corroded aluminum, and she wondered what he’d do if somebody happened to step into it just then, say Fontaine or one of the other people who came to check the electrical stuff. Anybody. He’d shoot them, she decided. Just pop them and roll them over into the dark. You could see it in his face. It was right there.

He got out first, helped her over. A wind was rising and you could feel the harmonics coming up through your soles, the bridge starting to hum like a muffled harp. She could hear people laughing, somewhere.

“Where?” he said.

She pointed to where her bike stood, cabled to Sammy Sal’s. “The pink and black one.”

He gestured with the gun.

“Back off” her bike said when she was five feet from it.

“What’s that?” The gun in her back.

“This other bike. Clunker with a voice-alarm. Keeps people off mine.” She bent to thumb the tab that released Sammy Sal’s bike, but she didn’t touch the recognition-loop behind the seat of her own.

“I fucking mean it, shithead” her bike said.

“Shut it off” he said.

“Okay.”

She knew she had to do it in one go, flip it sideways and over, just her thumb and forefinger on the nonconductive rubber of the tire.

But it was really just an accident that the frame hit his gun. She saw an inch of lightning arc between her bike and the pistol, hot purple and thick as your finger, the particle-brake capacitors in the up-tube emptying their stored charge into the anti-theft system worked into the fake rust and the carefully frayed silver duct-tape. He went down on his knees, eyes unfocused, a single silver bubble of spit forming and bursting between his half-open lips. She thought she saw steam curl from the gun in his hand.

Proj. she thought, crouching to run, but then the black thing hit him and knocked him flat, flapping down out of the dark above them with a sound like broken wings. A roll of tarpaper. She made out Sammy Sal then, standing up there on a dark carbon cross-brace, his arm around an upright. She thought she saw his white smile.

“Forgot this” he said, and tossed something down. The glasses in their case. Hands tied, she caught them anyway, like they knew where they wanted to go. She’d never know why he did that.

Because the little pistol made a chewing sound then, blue pops like a dozen backfires run together, and Sammy Sal went over backward off the brace, just gone.

And then she was running.

Yamazaki heard gunfire, where he knelt on the floor, his wrists joined by glistening plastic behind the rough metal brace that supported Skinner’s wall-table. Or was it only the sound of some hydraulic tool?

There was a smell in the room, high and acrid. He thought it must be the smell of his own fear.

His eyes were level with a chipped white plate, a smear of pulped avocado blackening on its edge.

“Told him what I had” Skinner said, struggling to his feet, his arms fastened behind him. “Didn’t want it. Want what they want, don’t they?” The little television slid off the edge of the bed and hit the floor, its screen popping out on a rainbow ribbon of flat cable. “Shit.” He swayed, wincing as his bad hip took his weight, and Yamazaki thought he would fall. Skinner took one step, another, leaning forward to maintain his balance.

Yamazaki strained at the plastic bonds. Yelped as he felt them tighten. Like something alive.

“You tug, twist ’em” Skinner said, behind him, “bastards’ll clinch up on you. Cops used to carry those. Got made unconstitutional.” There was a crash that shook the room and made the light flicker. Yamazaki looked over his shoulder and saw Skinner sitting on the floor, his knees drawn half up, leaning forward. “There’s a pair of twenty-inch bolt-cutters in here” the old man said, indicating a dented, rust-scarred green toolkit with his left foot. “That’ll do it, if I can get ’em out.” Yamazaki watched as he began to work his toes through the holes in his ragged gray socks. “Not sure I can do shit with ’em, once I do…” He stopped. Looked at Yamazaki. “Better idea, but you won’t like it.”