redRobe

Chapter Three The Rules of Migration

‘Yo! Rulacho. Shit for brains.’

Sanchez froze in the seat of his parked car.

‘Yeah, you.’

The cholo with the light-swallowing black jacket tugged one python-skin lapel and turned slowly, his already thin mouth pulled into a tighter line, hooded eyes narrowing as he glared round for the person he was going to have to kill.

There was no one. No one that is, except for ten lanes of locked-solid, Friday-night traffic and five hookers on tiptoe, leaning in through car windows with their G-stringed arses stuck up in the air as their heads bobbed up and down. 20,000 people in a traffic jam. 19,995 hot, fucked-off and miserable and five of them happy.

The hookers belonged to Sanchez. He paid $75 a month for them, indentured labour from an orphanage out at Zampango. They were clones mostly, ghost girls. Uneducated, unwanted, running .22 calibre intellects in a .45 Magnum world: but the ones he employed had tits that bounced like baby kangaroos and that was what the punters paid for.

‘Hey,’ the voice said loudly, ‘You blind or something-or do you always dress like that? And what’s with that beard?’

Before he could stop himself, Sanchez put one hand to his chin, touching the fine, neatly-razored streak of dark hair that dropped from beneath his bottom lip to the centre of his pointed chin. An equally fine line edged his upper lip, pimp style.

Sanchez tried to made it look as if he was thinking, like he’d always been planning to stroke his moustache and adjust the collar of his black shirt.

The shirt was silk, the kind with filigree-silver points to the collar. Expensive, but not as expensive as Sanchez told everybody it was. Not that people usually argued. People didn’t where Sanchez was concerned. The pimp smiled, showing a row of gleaming teeth inlaid with diamonds and fine gold circuitry.

‘Jesus fuck!’ The voice was back, rougher than ever. ‘Get out of that fucking rust bucket.’

Sanchez looked round again, lazily. As if checking out his working girls, but a small tic was pulling at the side of his jaw and his lips had thinned to nothing. A bad sign, as any one of his girls could have told the Colt, not that the gun would have cared.

‘God, finally. Down here. Okay?’

The pimp stopped eyeballing the nearest drivers, all of whom were nervously looking everywhere but at Sanchez, and at last did what he was told. Bloodshot eyes skimmed along the edge of the paseo, where the blacktop met a builder’s chainlink fence. The voice was coming from down there, amid the buckled wheel trims, dead Marlboro butts and a riot of crumpled wetwipes that covered the dirt like fallen blossoms.

Sanchez finally spotted the gun, flipped over at the bottom of the fence and already half-buried under dust. One side of it was grit-encrusted where Axl had kicked it across five lanes of road, tiny diodes now opaque and frosted.

‘Sweet fucking Nazarene…’ Sanchez was talking to himself, which wasn’t something he did often. This was a man who existed on the absolute surface of life and liked it there. He had his own reasons for not going deeper, rooted in childhood and poverty but then most people in Day Effé did.

‘…a gun that talks back.’ Sanchez knew about weapons like that. Every two-bit detective in the novelas had one, that and an Italian suit and a big American car. But this was life and that was tri-D.

‘Yeah,’ said the Colt, as the pimp finally opened the door of his ancient white Merc and sauntered casually towards the bank. ‘Clever boy.’

For a split second Sanchez was tempted to kick the Colt through the fence and into a storm drain beyond. Let the piece of shit see how well it managed to insult him when it was drowning in five scummy inches of untreated sewage.

But greed won out, as the gun knew it would. Common sense, Sanchez called it. He didn’t have a problem with greed. He didn’t have a problem with it at all. And Sanchez knew just what he was looking at.

Guns came in three grades, requiring three different types of licence, if you were the kind of person who bothered about what was once called paperwork. There were Nightclub specials, die-stamped out of steel or laser cut from cheap ceramic. These had no chips inside at all, not even for basic voice activation. Next were chipped weapons. They could switch between loads, eject empty clips on demand, adjust their own sights under orders. Neat stuff and the most anyone could hope for, until Colt-MSG/T teamed up with Linux, Gates y Turing and guns went AI.

Smart guns listened, gave advice. In fact they gave so much advice that Colt were forced to get purchasers to sign exclusion clauses stating they understood their gun wasn’t always right, that it could make mistakes and the manufacturers weren’t financially liable for the results of those it did make.

Which hadn’t stopped the guns talking or the owners from listening ...

‘Hey,’ the Colt waited until Sanchez was leant right over it, ‘you and me, we could be really good together, right?’

Five lanes away, on the other edge of the southbound, two policemen were laying into a man with riot sticks. That man was on the ground, curled up in a ball out of Sanchez’s line of sight. But even across the lines of idling traffic Sanchez could hoar the rhythmic thud that accompanied the rise and fall of riot sticks as cops beat whoever it was to pulp.

It was Axl, obviously. And they were hammering the last memories of music out of his head. Kicking the final echoes of soundtrack into red silence. Up above, in a CySat/C3N copter, a woman leaned out of its perspex bubble as she explained what was going on below, talking rapidly into a throat mike. And standing by the central crash barrier was a Japanese tourist vidcaming the violence: alternating between grabbing shots of the falling riotsticks and bowing respectfully to the backs of the two policemen, who were completely oblivious to being filmed.

By the time an Ishie roared up on a dirt bike, bowed to no one and began uploading live to the Web, feeding the datastream from the Zeisscam set in his right eye, Sanchez was back in his Merc with the engine humming. Seconds later he was reversing his vehicle along the hard shoulder towards a turn-off 200 yards behind him.

‘Hey, Sanchez!’

The pimp saw one of his girls jerk upright to stare in surprise. He ignored her. Later on he’d come back for them, and maybe they’d still be there and maybe not. Either way, he could always get some more. Street kids were two a dollar in Mexico City, literally. Guns like the Colt couldn’t be bought for money alone. And whatever Sanchez liked to tell others he didn’t have those kind of contacts.

Not yet.

Ignoring the hostile stares of other drivers, Sanchez ran his white Merc with fins back to the turnoff, cruising past the frozen traffic like a prowling shark in reverse. If he cut up Via Sullivan and then doubled back along Antonio Caso he could be at his bar in the Alameda inside forty minutes, maybe less.