Virtual Light

23. Gone and done it

Man, he was going to have him a shower. Hot shower. He was going to stay in there until he couldn’t stand it anymore, or until the hot ran out. Then he was going to get out and towel off and put on all brand-new, totally dry clothes, in whatever hotel room Warbaby had got for him. He was going to send down for a couple of club sandwiches and an ice-bucket with about four-five of those long-neck Mexican beers like they drank in L.A. And he’d sit there with a remote and watch some television. Maybe see Cops in Trouble. Maybe he’d even call up Sublett, shoot the shit, tell him about this wild-ass time up in Northern California. Sublett always worked deep graveyard because he was light-sensitive, so if it happened to be his night off, he’d be up watching his movies.

“Watch where you’re walking—” Yanking his cuffed hand so hard he nearly fell over. He’d been about to go one side of an upright as she was about to go the other. “Hey. Sorry” he said.

She wouldn’t look at him. But she just didn’t look to Rydell like she’d sit down on some guy’s chest with a razor and haul his tongue out the hard way. Well, she did have that ceramic knife, when Svobodov shook her down, plus a pocket phone and the damn glasses everybody was after. Those looked just like Warbaby’s, and had this case. The Russians were real happy about that, and now they were tucked away safe in the inside pocket of Svobodov’s flak vest.

She wasn’t the right kind of scared, either, something kept telling him. She wasn’t giving off that vibe of perp fear that you got to know by about your third day on the job. It was like victim fear, what it was, even though she’d already flatout admitted to Orlovsky that she’d stolen those glasses. Said she’d done that up at a party in that hotel, the night before.

But neither of the Russians had said shit about any homicide beef, or any Blix or whatever the victim’s name had been. Or even larceny. And she’d said that about somebody killing Sammy, whoever Sammy was. Maybe Sammy was the German. But the Russians had just dropped it, and shut Rydell up, and now she’d clammed up except to bitch at him if he started to fall asleep on his feet.

The place was coming back to life, sort of, now that the storm had quit, but it was God knows when in the morning and there weren’t exactly a lot of people swarming out yet to check the damage. Lights kept coming back on, here and there, and there were a few people sweeping water off decks and things, and a few drunks, and this guy who looked like he was on dancer, talking to himself a mile a minute, who kept following them until Svobodov pulled out his H & K and spun around and said he’d grease him to fucking catfood if he didn’t get his dancer ass to Oakland like yesterday, fuckhead, and the guy did, naturally, his eyes about to bug right out of his head, and Orlovsky laughing at him.

They came out into some more lights, about where Rydell had first laid his eyes on Chevette Washington. Looking down to keep track of his footing, Rydell saw she was wearing black SWAT trainers just like his. Lexan insoles.

“Hey” he said, “major footwear.”

And she just looked up at him like he was crazy, and he saw tears running down her face.

And Svobodov jammed the muzzle of that H & K, hard, into the joint of Rydell’s jaw, just in front of his right ear, and said: “Fuckhead. You don’t talk to her.”

Rydell looked at Svobodov, edgewise, down the top of the barrel. Waited until he thought it was safe to say okay.

After that, he didn’t try to say anything to her, or even look at her. When he thought he could get away with it, he looked at Svobodov. When they took that cuff off, he just might deck that son of a bitch.

But just after the Russian had pulled the gun out of his ear, Rydell had registered something behind him. Not registered big-time, but it clicked for him later: this big bear of a longhair, blinking out at them, where they stood in the light, from this little doorway looked like it wasn’t more than a foot wide.

Rydell didn’t have anything special going about black people or immigrants or anything, not like a lot of people did. In fact, that had been one of the things that had gotten him into the Academy when he hadn’t exactly had great grades from high school. They’d run all these tests on him and decided he wasn’t racist. He wasn’t, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldn’t see the point. It just made for a lot of hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was going to go back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldn’t be any Mongolian barbecue and maybe we’d all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black.

He had to admit, though, as he and Chevette Washington walked out between those tank-trap slabs, their cuffed wrists swinging in that stupid prom-night unison that you get with handcuffs, that currently he was feeling a little put upon by a few very specific blacks and immigrants. Warbaby’s tvpreacher melancholy had worn thin on him; he thought Freddie was, as his father would have put it, a jive-ass motherfucker; Svobodov and Orlovsky, they must be what his uncle, the one who went in the army, had meant by stone pigs.

And here he could see Freddie with his butt propped against the front fender of the Patriot, bobbing his head to something on earphones, the lyrics or whatever sliding around the edges of his sneakers, animated in red LEDs. Must’ve sat out the rain in the car, because his pistol-print shirt and his big shorts weren’t even wet.

And Warbaby there in his long quilted coat, his hat jammed down level with those VL glasses. Looked like a refrigerator, if a refrigerator could lean on a cane.

And the Russians’ gray tanker of an unmarked, pulled up nose to nose with the Patriot, armored tires and that graphite mesh rhino-chaser screaming Cop Car at anybody who was interested. As indeed some were, Rydell saw, a thin crowd of bridge-people watching from various perches on the concrete slabs and battened food-wagons. Little kids, a couple of Mexican-looking women with hairnets like they worked in food-preparation, some rough-looking boys in muddy workclothes and leaning on shovels and push-brooms there. Just looking, their faces carefully neutral, the way people’s faces got when they saw cops working and were curious.

And somebody in the Russians’ car, hunched down knees-up in the shotgun seat.

The Russians closing in tight on either side of Rydell and the girl, walking them out. Rydell could feel them responding to the presence of the crowd. Shouldn’t’ve left the car out there like that.

Svobodov, this close, sort of creaked when he walked, and that was the armor under his shirt that Rydell had noticed before, back in that greasy spoon. Svobodov was smoking one of his Marlboro cigarettes, hissing out clouds of blue smoke. Had the gun out of sight now.

And right up to Warbaby, Freddie shining the whole scene on with a grin that made Rydell want to kick him, but Warbaby looking sad as ever.

“Get this fucking cuff off” Rydell said to Warbaby, raising his wrist, Chevette Washington’s coming up with it. The crowd saw the cuffs then; there was a ripple of reaction, voices.

Warbaby looked at Svobodov. “You get it?”

“Here.” Svobodov touched the front of his London Fog.

Warbaby nodded, looked at Chevette Washington, then at Rydell. “Good then.” To Orlovsky: “Take the cuffs off.”

Orlovsky took Rydell’s wrist, slid a mag-strip into the slot in the cuff.

“Get in the car” Warbaby said to Rydell.

“They haven’t read her any Miranda” Rydell said.

“Get in the car. You’re driving, remember?”

“She under arrest, Mr. Warbaby?”

Freddie giggled.

Chevette Washington was holding her wrist up for Orlovsky, but he was putting the mag-strip away.

“Rydell” Warbaby said, “get in the car now. We’ve done our part here.”

The passenger-side door of the gray car opened. A man got out. Black cowboy boots and a long black waterproof. Sandy hair, no particular length. He had those deep smile-creases down his cheeks, like somebody had carved them there. Light-colored eyes. Then he did smile, and it was about two-thirds gum and a third teeth, with gold at the corners.

“That’s him” Chevette Washington said, in this hoarse voice, “he killed Sammy.”

And that was when the big longhair, the one in the dirty shirt, the one Rydell had noticed back on the bridge, plowed this bicycle square into Svobodov’s back. Not any regular bicycle, either, but this big old rusty coaster-brake number with a heavy steel basket welded in front of the bars. The bike and the basket probably weighed a hundred pounds between them, and there must’ve been another hundred pounds of scrap metal piled up in the basket when Svobodov got nailed. Put him face-down across the hood of the Patriot, Freddie jumping like a scalded cat.

The longhair landed on top of Svobodov and all that junk like a bear with rabies, grabbed him by the ears, and starting slamming his face into the hood. Orlovsky was pulling out his H & K and Rydell saw Chevette Washington bend down, tug something out of the top of one SWAT shoe, jab it into Orlovsky’s back. Looked like a screwdriver. Hit whatever armor he was wearing, but it put him off-balance as he pulled the trigger.

Nothing in the world ever sounded like caseless ammunition, at full-auto, out of a floating breech. It wasn’t the sound of a machine gun, but a kind of ear-shattering, extended whoop.

The first burst didn’t seem to hit anything, but with Chevette Washington clawing at his gun arm, Orlovsky tried to turn it on her. Second burst went in the general direction of the crowd. People screaming, grabbing up kids.

Warbaby’s mouth was just open, like he couldn’t believe it.

Rydell was behind Orlovsky when he tried to bring the gun up again, and, well, it was just one of those times.

He side-kicked the Russian about three inches below the back of his knee, that third burst whooping almost straight up as Orlovsky went down.

Freddie tried to grab Chevette Washington, seemed to see the screwdriver for the first time, and just managed to bring his laptop up with both hands. That screwdriver went right through it. Freddie yelped and dropped it.

Rydell grabbed the loose cuff, the one that had been around his wrist, and just pulled.

Opened the passenger-side door of the Patriot and hauled her right in after him. Getting into the driver’s seat, he had a grandstand view of the longhair pounding Svobodov’s bloody face into the hood, all these pieces of rusty junk jumping each time he did it.

Key. Ignition.

Rydell saw Chevette Washington’s phone and the case with the VL glasses fall out of Svobodov’s flak vest. Powered down the window and reached around. Somebody shot the longhair off Svobodov, pop, pop, pop, and Rydell, stomping it in reverse, saw the man from the cop car swinging a little gun around, two-handed. just like they taught you in FATSS. The back of the Patriot slammed into something and Svobodov flew off the hood in a cloud of rusty chain and odd lengths of pipe. Chevette Washington was trying to get out the passenger door, so he had to hang on to the cuff and spin the wheel one-handed, let go of her long enough to shove it into forward and tromp on it, then grab her again.

The passenger door slammed shut as he took it straight for the man with the big smile, who maybe got off one more before he had to get out of the way, fast,

The Patriot was fishtailing in about an inch of water, and he barely missed clipping the back of a big orange waste-hauler pulled up beside a building there.

He caught this one crazy glimpse in the dash-mirror, out the back window: the bridge towering up like something wrapped in seaweed, sky graying now behind it, and Warbaby taking one stiff-legged step, another, raising the cane straight out from his shoulder, pointing it at the Patriot like it was a magic wand or something.

Then whatever came out of the end of Warbaby’s cane took out the Patriot’s back window, and Rydell hung a right so tight it almost tipped them over.

“Jesus” said Chevette Washington, like somebody talking in their sleep, “what are you doing?”

He didn’t know, but hadn’t he just gone and done it?

When the lights went out, Yamazaki fumbled in the dark for his bag. Finding it, he felt through it for his flashlight.

In the white beam, Skinner slept slack-jawed beneath the blankets and a ragged sleeping-bag.

Yamazaki searched the several shelves above the table-ledge: small glass jars of spices, identical jars containing steel screws, an ancient Bakelite telephone reminding him of the origin of the verb ‘to dial,’ rolls of many different kinds and colors of adhesive tape, twists of heavy copper wire, pieces of what he took to be salt-water tackle, and, finally, a bundle of dusty candle-stubs secured with a rotting rubber band. Selecting the longest of these, he found a lighter beside the green campstove. Standing the candle upright on a white saucer, he lit it. The flame fluttered and went out.

Flashlight in hand, he moved to the window and tugged it more tightly into its deep circular frame.

Now the candle stayed lit, though the flame pulsed and swelled in drafts he could never hope to locate. Returning to the window, he looked out. The darkened bridge was invisible. Rain was driving almost horizontally against the window, tiny droplets reaching his face through cracks in the glass and corroded segments of the supporting lead.

It occurred to him that Skinner’s room might be made to function as a camera obscura. If the church window’s tiny central hull’s-eye pane were removed, and the other panes covered, an inverted image would be cast on the opposite wall.