Virtual Light

25. Without a paddle

Where we going?” she asked him.

“Fuck if I know” he said, gunning the engine a little. “You the one said ‘left’…”

“Who are you?”

He glanced over at her. “Rydell. Berry Rydell.”

“Barry?”

“Berry. Like straw. Like dingle. Hey, this a big fucking Street, lights and everything—”

“Right.”

“So where should I—”

“Right!”

“Okay” he said, and hung it. “Why?”

“The Haight. Lots of people up late, cops don’t like to go there…”

“Ditch this car there?”

“Turn your back on it two seconds, it’s history.”

“They got ATM’s there?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, here’s one…” Up over a curb, hunks of crazed safety-glass falling out of the frame where the back window had been. She hadn’t even noticed that.

He dug a soggy-looking wallet out of his back pocket and started pulling cards out of it. Three of them. “I have to try to get some cash” he said. He looked at her. “You wanna jump out of this car and run” he shrugged, “then you just go for it.” Then he reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out the glasses and Codes’s phone that she’d scooped when the lights went out in Dissidents. Because she knew from Lowell that people in trouble need a phone, most times worse than anything. He dropped them in her lap, the asshole’s glasses and the phone. “Yours.”

Then he got out, walked over to the ATM, and started feeding it cards. She sat there, watching it emerge from its armor, the way they do, shy and cautious, its cameras coming out, too, to monitor the transaction. He stood there, drumming his fingers on the side, his mouth like he was whistling but he wasn’t making any noise. She looked down at the case and the phone and wondered why she didn’t just jump out and run, like he said.

Finally he came back, thumb-counting a fold of bills, stuck it down in his front jeans pocket, and got in He sailed the first of his cards out the open window at the ATM, which was pulling back into its shell like a crab. “Don’t know how they cancelled that one so quick, after you put that thing through Freddie’s laptop.” Flicked another. Then the last one. They lay in front of the ATM as its lexan shield came trundling down, their little holograms winding up in the machine’s halogen floods.

“Somebody’ll get those” she said.

“Hope so” he said, “hope they get ’em and go to Mars.” Then he did something in reverse with all four wheels and the Ford sort of jumped up and backward, into the street, some other car swerving past them all brakes and horn and the driver’s mouth a black O, and the part of her that was still a messenger sort of liked it. All the times they’d cut her off. “Shit” he said, jamming the gear-thing around until he got what he needed and they took off.

The handcuff was rubbing on the rash where the red worm had been. “You a cop?”

“No.”

“Security? Like from the hotel?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well” she said, “what are you?”

Streetlight sliding across his face. Seemed like he was thinking about it. “Up shit creek. Without a paddle.”

The first thing Rydell saw when he got out of the Patriot, in the alley off Haight Street, was a one-armed, one-legged man on a skateboard. This man lay on his stomach, on the board, and propelled himself along with a curious hitching motion that reminded Rydell of the limbs of a gigged frog. He had his right arm and his left leg, which at least allowed for some kind of symmetry, but there was no foot on the leg. His face, as if by some weird osmosis, was the color of dirty concrete, and Rydell couldn’t have said what race he was. His hair, if he had any, was covered by a black knit cap, and the rest of him was sheathed in a black, one-piece garment apparently stitched from sections of heavy-duty rubber inner-tube. He looked up, as he hitched past Rydell, through puddles left by the storm, headed for the mouth of the alley, and said, or Rydell thought he said: “You wanna talk to me? You wanna talk to me, you better shut your fuckin’ mouth…”

Rydell stood there, Samsonite dangling, and watched him go.

Then something rattled beside him. The hardware on Chevette Washington’s leather jacket. “Come on” she said, “don’t wanna hang around back in here.”

“You see that?” Rydell asked, gesturing with his suitcase.

“You hang around back in here, you’ll see worse than that” she said.

Rydell looked back at the Patriot. He’d locked it and left the key under the driver’s seat, because he hadn’t wanted to make it look too easy, but he’d forgotten about that back window. He’d never been in the position before of actively wanting a car to be stolen.