Virtual Light

2. Cruising with gunhead

Now here he was in Los Angeles, driving a six-wheeled Hotspur Hussar with twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer. The Hussar was an armored Land Rover that could do a hundred and forty on a straightaway, assuming you could find one open and had the time to accelerate. Hernandez, his shift super, said you couldn’t trust an Englishman to build anything much bigger than a hat, not if you wanted it to work when you needed it; he said IntenSecure should’ve bought Israeli or at least Brazilian, and who needed Ralph Lauren to design a tank anyway?

Rydell didn’t know about that, but that paint job was definitely trying too hard. He thought they probably wanted people to think of those big brown United Parcel trucks, and at the same time they maybe hoped it would look sort of like something you’d see in an Episcopal church. Not too much gilt on the logo. Sort of restrained.

The people who worked in the car wash were mostly Mongolian immigrants, recent ones who had trouble getting better jobs. They did this crazy throat-singing thing while they worked, and he liked to hear that. He couldn’t figure out how they did it; sounded like tree-frogs, but like it was two sounds at once.

Now they were buffing the rows of chromed nubs down the sides. Those had been meant to support electric crowd-control grids and were just chromed for looks. The riot-wagons in Knoxville had been electrified, but with this drip-system that kept them wet, which was a lot nastier.

“Sign here” said the crew boss, this quiet black kid named Anderson. He was a medical student, days, and he always looked like he was about two nights short of sleep.

Rydell took the pad and the light-pen and signed the signature-plate. Anderson handed Rydell the keys.

“You ought to get you some rest” Rydell said. Anderson grinned, wanly. Rydell walked over to Gunhead, deactivating the door alarm.

Somebody had written that inside, “GUNHEAD” in green marker on the panel above the windshield. The name stuck, but mostly because Sublett liked it. Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect. He said his mother had been getting ready to deed his ass to the church, whatever that meant.

Sublett wasn’t too anxious to talk about it, but Rydell had gotten the idea that these people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. “He’s in the de-tails” Sublett had said once. “You gotta watch for Him close.” Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that Sublett had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever met, mostly old movies on channels that never ran anything but. Sublett said Gunhead was the name of a robot tank in a Japanese monster movie. Hernandez thought Sublett had written the name on there himself. Sublett denied it. Hernandez said take it off. Sublett ignored him. It was still there, but Rydell knew Sublett was too law-abiding to commit any vandalism, and anyway the ink in the marker might’ve killed him.

Sublett had had allergies. He went into shock from various kinds of cleaners and solvents, so you couldn’t get him to come into the car wash at all, ever. The allergies made him light sensitive, too, so he had to wear these mirrored contacts. What with the black IntenSecure uniform and his dry blond hair, the contacts made him look like some kind of Klan-assed Nazi robot. Which could get kind of complicated in the wrong store on Sunset, say three in the morning and all you really wanted was some mineral water and a Coke. But Rydell was always glad to have him on shift, because he was as determinedly nonviolent a rentacop as you were likely to find. And he probably wasn’t even crazy. Both of which were definite pluses for Rydell. As Hernandez was fond of pointing out, SoCal had stricter regulations for who could or couldn’t be a hairdresser.

Like Rydell, a lot of IntenSecure’s response people were former police officers of some kind, some were even ex-LAPD, and if the company’s rules about not carrying personal weapons on duty were any indication, his co-workers were expected to turn up packing all manner of hardware. There were metal detectors on the staff-room doors and Hernandez usually had a drawer full of push-daggers, nunchuks, stunguns, knucks, boot-knives, and whatever else the detectors had picked up. Like Friday morning at a South Miami high school. Hernandez gave it all back after the shift, but when they went calling, they were supposed to make do with their Glocks and the chunkers.

The Glocks were standard police issue, at least twenty years old, that IntenSecure bought by the truckload from PDs that could afford to upgrade to caseless ammunition. If you did it by the book, you kept the Glocks in their plastic holsters, and kept the holsters Velcroed to the wagon’s central console. When you answered a call, you pulled a holstered pistol off the console and stuck it on the patch provided on your uniform. That was the only time you were supposed to be out of the wagon with a gun on, when you were actually responding.

The chunkers weren’t even guns, not legally anyway, but a ten-second burst at close range would chew somebody’s face off. They were Israeli riot-control devices, air-powered, that fired one-inch cubes of recycled rubber. They looked like the result of a forced union between a bullpup assault rifle and an industrial staple gun, except they were made out of this bright yellow plastic. When you pulled the trigger, those chunks came out in a solid stream. If you got really good with one, you could shoot around corners; just kind of bounce them off a convenient surface. Up close, they’d eventually cut a sheet of plywood in half, if you kept on shooting, and they left major bruises out to about thirty yards. The theory was, you didn’t always encounter that many armed intruders, and a chunker was a lot less likely to injure the client or the client’s property. If you did encounter an armed intruder, you had the Glock. Although the intruder was probably running caseless through a floating breech—not part of the theory. Nor was it part of the theory that seriously tooled-up intruders tended to be tightened on dancer, and were thereby both inhumanly fast and clinically psychotic.

There had been a lot of dancer in Knoxville, and some of it had gotten Rydell suspended. He’d crawled into an apartment where a machinist named Kenneth Turvey was holding his girlfriend, two little kids, and demanding to speak to the president. Turvey was white, skinny, hadn’t bathed in a month, and had the Last Supper tattooed on his chest. It was a very fresh tattoo; it hadn’t even scabbed over. Through a film of drying blood, Rydell could see that Jesus didn’t have any face. Neither did any of the Apostles.

“Damn it” Turvey said, when he saw Rydell. “I just wanna speak to the president.” He was sitting cross-legged, naked, on his girlfriend’s couch. He had something like a piece of pipe across his lap, all wrapped with tape.

“We’re trying to get her for you” Rydell said. “We’re sorry it’s taking so long, but we have to go through channels.”

“God damn it” Turvey said wearily, “doesn’t nobody understand I’m on a mission from God?” He didn’t sound particularly angry, just tired and put out. Rydell could see the girlfriend through the open door of the apartment’s single bedroom. She was on her back, on the floor, and one of her legs looked broken. He couldn’t see her face. She wasn’t moving at all. Where were the kids?

“What is that thing you got there?” Rydell asked, indicating the object across Turvey’s lap.

“It’s a gun” Turvey said, “and it’s why I gotta talk to the president.”

“Never seen a gun like that” Rydell allowed. “What’s it shoot?”

“Grapefruit cans” Turvey said. “Fulla concrete.”

“No shit?”

“Watch” Turvey said, and brought the thing to his shoulder. It had a sort of breech, very intricately machined, a trigger-thing like part of a pair of vise-grip pliers, and a couple of flexible tubes. These latter ran down, Rydell saw, to a great big canister of gas, the kind you’d need a hand truck to move, which lay on the floor beside the couch.

There on his knees, on the girlfriend’s dusty polyester carpet, he’d watched that muzzle swing past. It was big enough to put your fist down. He watched as Turvey took aim, back through the open bedroom door, at the closet.

“Turvey” he heard himself say, “where’s the goddamn kids?”

Turvey moved the vise-grip handle and punched a hole the size of a fruit-juice can through the closet door. The kids were in there. They must’ve screamed, though Rydell couldn’t remember hearing it. Rydell’s lawyer later argued that he was not only deaf at this point, but in a state of sonically induced catalepsy. Turvey’s invention was only a few decibels short of what you got with a SWAT stun-grenade. But Rydell couldn’t remember. He couldn’t rememher shooting Kenneth Turvey in the head, either, or anything else at all until he woke up in the hospital. There was a woman there from Cops in Trouble, which had been Rydell’s father’s favorite show, but she said she couldn’t actually talk to him until she’d spoken with his agent. Rydell said he didn’t have one. She said she knew that, but one was going to call him.

Rydell lay there thinking about all the times he and his father had watched Cops in Trouble. “What kind of trouble we talking here?” he finally asked.

The woman just smiled. “Whatever, Berry, it’ll probably be adequate.”

He squinted up at her. She was sort of good-looking. “What’s your name?”

“Karen Mendelsohn.” She didn’t look like she was from Knoxville, or even Memphis.

“You from Cops in Trouble?”

“Yes.”

“What you do for ’em?”

“I’m a lawyer” she said. Rydell couldn’t recall ever actually having met one before, but after that he wound up meeting lots more.

Gunhead’s displays were featureless slabs of liquid crystal; they woke when Rydell inserted the key, typed the security code, and ran a basic systems check. The cameras under the rear bumper were his favorites; they made parking really easy; you could see exactly where you were backing up. The downlink from the Death Star wouldn’t work while he was still in the car wash, too much steel in the building, but it was Sublett’s job to keep track of all that with an ear-bead.

There was a notice posted in the staff room at IntenSecure, telling you it was company policy not to call it that, the Death Star, but everybody did anyway. The LAPD called it that themselves. Officially it was the Southern California Dosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite.

Watching the dashboard screens, Rydell backed carefully out of the building. Gunhead’s twin ceramic engines were new enough to still be relatively quiet; Rydell could hear the tires squish over the wet concrete floor.

Sublett was waiting outside, his silver eyes reflecting the red of passing taillights. Behind him, the sun was setting, the sky’s colors bespeaking more than the usual cocktail of additives. He stepped back as Rydell reversed past him, anxious to avoid the least droplet of spray from the tires. Rydell was anxious too; he didn’t want to have to haul the Texan to Cedars again if his allergies kicked up.

Rydell waited as Sublett pulled on a pair of disposable surgical gloves.

“Howdy” Sublett said, climbing into his seat. He closed his door and began to remove the gloves, gingerly peeling them into a Ziploc Baggie.

“Don’t get any on you” Rydell said, watching the care with which Sublett treated the gloves.

“Go ahead, laugh” Sublett said mildly. He took out a pack of hypo-allergenic gum and popped a piece from its bubble. “How’s ol’ Gunhead?”

Rydell scanned the displays, satisfied. “Not too shabby.”

“Hope we don’t have to respond to any damn’ stealth houses tonight” Sublett said, chewing.

Stealth houses, so-called, were on Sublett’s personal list of bad calls. He said the air in them was toxic. Rydell didn’t think it made any sense, but he was tired of arguing about it. Stealth houses were bigger than most regular houses, cost more, and Rydell figured the owners would pay plenty to keep the air clean. Sublett maintained that anybody who built a stealth house was paranoid to begin with, would always keep the place locked up too tight, no air circulation, and you’d get that bad toxic buildup.

If there’d been any stealth houses in Knoxville, Rydell hadn’t known about them. He thought it was an L.A. thing.

Sublett, who’d worked for IntenSecure for almost two years, mostly on day patrol in Venice, had been the first person to even mention them to Rydell. When Rydell finally got to answer a call to one, he couldn’t believe the place; it just went down and down, dug in beneath something that looked almost, but not quite, like a bombed-out drycleaning plant. And it was all peeled logs inside, white plaster, Turkish carpets, big paintings, slate floors, furniture like he’d never seen before. But it was some kind of tricky call; domestic violence, Rydell figured. Like the husband hit the wife, the wife hit the button, now they were making out it was all just a glitch. But it couldn’t really be a glitch, because someone had had to hit the button, and there hadn’t been any response to the password call that came back to them three-point-eight seconds later. She must’ve messed with the phones, Rydell thought, then hit the button. He’d been been riding with ‘Big George’ Kechakmadze that night, and the Georgian (Tbilisi, not Atlanta) hadn’t liked it either. “You see these people, they’re subscribers, man; nobody bleeding, you get your ass out, okay?” Big George had said, after. But Rydell kept remembering a tension around the woman’s eyes, how she held the collar of the big white robe folded against her throat. Her husband in a matching robe but with thick hairy legs and expensive glasses. There’d been something wrong there but he’d never know what. Not any more than he’d ever understand how their lives really worked, lives that looked like what you saw on tv but weren’t.

L.A. was full of mysteries, when you looked at it that way. No bottom to it.

He’d come to like driving through it, though. Not when he had to get anywhere in particular, but just cruising with Gunhead was okay. Now he was turning onto La Cienega and the little green cursor on the clash was doing the same.

“Forbidden Zone” Sublett said. “Herve Villechaize, Susan Rydell, Marie-Pascal Elfman, Viva.”

“Viva?” Rydell asked. “Viva what?”

“Viva. Actress.”

“When’d they make that?”

“1980.”

“I wasn’t born yet.”

“Time on tv’s all the same time, Rydell.”

“Man, I thought you were trying to get over your upbringing and all.” Rydell de-mirrored the door-window to better watch a redheaded girl pass him in a pink Daihatsu Sneaker with the top off. “Anyway, I never saw that one.” It was just that hour of evening when women in cars looked about as good, in Los Angeles, as anything ever did. The surgeon general was trying to outlaw convertibles; said they contributed to the skin-cancer rate.

“End game. Al Cliver, Moira Chen, George Eastman, Gordon Mitchell. 1985.”

“Well, I was two” Rydell said, “but I didn’t see that one either.”

Sublett fell silent. Rydell felt sorry for him; the Texan really didn’t know any other way to start a conversation, and his folks back home in the trailer-camp would’ve seen all those films and more.

“Well” Rydell said, trying to pick up his end, “I was watching this one old movie last night—”

Sublett perked up. “Which one?”

“Dunno” Rydell said. “This guy’s in L.A. and he’s just met this girl. Then he picks up a pay phone, ’cause it’s ringing. Late at night. It’s some guy in a missile silo somewhere who knows they’ve just launched theirs at the Russians. He’s trying to phone his dad, or his brother, or something. Says the world’s gonna end in short order. Then the guy who answered the phone hears these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone, I mean.“

Sublett closed his eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. “Yeah? How’s it end?”

“Dunno” Rydell said. “I went to sleep.”

Sublett opened his eyes. “Who was in it?”

“Got me.”

Sublett’s blank silver eyes widened in disbelief. “Jesus, Berry, you shouldn’t oughta watch tv, not unless you’re gonna pay it attention.”

He wasn’t in the hospital very long, after he shot Kenneth Turvey; barely two days. His lawyer, Aaron Pursley himself, made the case that they should’ve kept him in there longer, the better to assess the extent of his post-traumatic shock. But Rydell hated hospitals and anyway he didn’t feel too bad; he just couldn’t recall exactly what had happened. And he had Karen Mendelsohn to help him out with things, and his new agent, Wellington Ma, to deal with the other people from Cops in Trouble, not one of them as nice as Karen, who had long brown hair. Wellington Ma was Chinese, lived in Los Angeles, and Karen said his father had been in the Big Circle gang—though she advised Rydell not to bring it up.

Wellington Ma’s business card was a rectangular slice of pink synthetic quartz, laser-engraved with his name, “The Ma-Mariano Agency” an address on Beverly Boulevard, and all kinds of numbers and e-mail addresses. It arrived by GlobEx in its own little gray suede envelope while Rydell was still in the hospital.

“Looks like you could cut yourself on it” Rydell said.

“You could, many no doubt have” said Karen Mendelsohn, “and if you put it in your wallet and sit down, it shatters.”

“Then what’s the point of it?”

“You’re supposed to take very good care of it. You won’t get another.”

Rydell never actually did meet Wellington Ma, at least not ’til quite a while later, but Karen would bring in a little briefcase with a pair of eyephones on a wire and Rydell could talk with him in his office in LA. It was the sharpest telepresence rig Rydell had ever used, and it really did look just like he was right there. He could see out the window to where there was this lopsided pyramid the color of a Noxzema jar. He asked Wellington Ma what that was and Ma said it was the old Design Center, but currently it was a discount mall, and Rydell could go there when he came to L.A., which was going to be soon.

Turvey’s girlfriend, Jenni-Rae Cline, was bringing an intricately interlocking set of separate actions against Rydell, the Department, the City of Knoxville, and the company in Singapore that owned her apartment building. About twenty million in total.

Rydell, having become a cop in trouble, was glad to find that Cops in Trouble was right there for him. They’d hired Aaron Pursley, for starters, and of course Rydell knew who he was from the show. He had that gray hair, those blue eyes, that nose you could split kindling with, and wore jeans, Tony Lama boots, and plain white oxford-cloth pima cotton cowboy business shirts with Navajo-silver bob-ties. He was famous and he defended cops like Rydell from people like Turvey’s girlfriend and her lawyer.

Jenni-Rae Cline’s lawyer maintained that Rydell shouldn’t have been in her apartment at all, that he’d endangered her life and her children’s by so doing, and that he’d killed Kenneth Turvey in the process, Mr. Turvey being described as a skilled craftsman, a steady worker, a loving father-figure for little Rambo and Kelly, a born-again Christian, a recovering addict to 4-Thiobuscaline, and the family’s sole means of support.

“Recovering?” Rydell asked Karen Mendelsohn in his room in the airport Executive Suites. She’d just shown him the fax from Jenni-Rae’s lawyer.

“Apparently he’d been to a meeting that very day” Karen said.

“What did he do there?” Rydell asked, remembering the Last Supper in drying blood.

“According to our witnesses, he openly horned a tablespoon of his substance of choice, took the podium by force, and delivered a thirty-minute rant on President Milibank’s pantyhose and the assumed current state of her genitalia. He then exposed himself, masturbated but did not ejaculate, and left the basement of the First Baptist Church.”

“Jesus” Rydell said. “And this was at one of those drug meetings, like A.A.?”

“It was” Karen Mendelsohn said, “though apparently Turvey’s performance has triggered an unfortunate sequence of relapses. We’ll send in a team of counselors, of course, to work with those who were at the meeting.”

“That’s nice” Rydell said.

“Look good in court” she said, “in the unlikely event we ever get there.”

“He wasn’t ‘recovering’” Rydell said. “Hadn’t even recovered from the last bunch he jammed up his nose.”

“Apparently true” she said. “But he was also a member of Adult Survivors of Satanism, and they are starting to take an interest in this case. Therefore, both Mr. Pursley and Mr. Ma feel it best we coast it but soon, Berry. You and me.”

“But what about the court stuff?”

“You’re on suspension from the Department, you haven’t been charged with anything yet, and your lawyer’s name is Aaron-with-two-a’s Pursley. You’re out of here, Berry.”

“To L.A.?”

“None other.”

Rydell looked at her. He thought about Los Angeles on television. “Will I like it?”

“At first” she said. “At first, it’ll probably like you. I know I do.”

Which was how he wound up going to bed with a lawyer– one who smelled like a million dollars, talked dirty, slid all around, and wore underwear from Milan, which was in Italy.

“The Kill-Fix. Cyrinda Burdette, Gudrun Weaver, Dean Mitchell, Shinobu Sakamaki. 1997.”

“Never saw it” Rydebb said, sucking the last of his grande decaf cold capp-with-an-extra-shot from the milky ice at the bottom of his plastic thermos cup.

“Mama saw Cyrinda Burdette. In this mall over by Waco. Got her autograph, too. Kept it up on the set with the prayer-hankies and her hologram of the Reverend Wayne Falbon. She had a prayer-hanky for every damn thing. One for the rent, one to keep the AIDS off, the TB…”

“Yeah? How’d she use ’em?”

“Kept ’em on top of the set” Sublett explained, and finished the inch of quadruple-distilled water left in the skinny translucent bottle. There was only one place along this part of Sunset sold the stuff, but Rydell didn’t mind; it was next to a take-out coffee-bar, and they could park in the lot on the corner. Fellow who ran the lot always seemed kind of glad to see them.

“Prayer-hanky won’t keep any AIDS off” Rydell said. “Get yourself vaccinated, like anybody else. Get your momma vaccinated, too.” Through the de-mirrored window, Rydell could see a street-shrine to J.D. Shapely, up against the concrete wall that was all that was left of the building that had stood there once. You saw a lot of them in West Hollywood. Somebody had sprayed SHAPELY WAS A COCK-SUCKING FAGGOT in bright pink paint, the letters three feet high, and then a big pink heart. Below that, stuck to the wall, were postcards of Shapely and photographs of people who must’ve died. God only knew how many millions had. On the pavement at the base of the wall were dead flowers, stubs of candles, other stuff. Something about the postcards gave Rydell the creeps; they made the guy look like a cross between Elvis and some kind of Catholic saint, skinny and with his eyes too big.

He turned to Sublett. “Man, you still haven’t got your ass vaccinated yet, you got nothin’ but stone white-trash ignorance to thank for it.”

Sublett cringed. “That’s worse than a live vaccine, man; that’s a whole ’nother disease right there!”

“Sure is” Rydell said, “but it doesn’t do anything to you. And there’s still plenty of the old kind walking around here. They oughta make it compulsory, you ask me.”

Sublett shuddered. “Reverend Fallon always said—”

“Screw Reverend Fallon” Rydell said, hitting the ignition. “Son of a bitch just makes money selling prayer-hankies to people like your momma. You knew that was all bullshit anyway, didn’t you, otherwise why’d you come out here?” He put Gunhead into gear and eased over into the Sunset traffic. One thing about driving a Hotspur Hussar, people almost always let you cut in.

Sublett’s head seemed to draw down between his high shoulders, giving him the look of a worried, steel-eyed buzzard. “Ain’t all that simple” he said. “It’s everything I been brought up to be. Can’t all be bullshit, can it?”

Rydell, glancing over at him, took pity. “Naw” he said, “I guess it wouldn’t have to be, necessarily, all of it, but it’s just—”

“What they bring you all up to be, Berry?”

Rydell had to think about it. “Republican” he said, finally.

Karen Mendelsohn had seemed like the best of a whole string of things Rydell felt he could get used to just fine. Like flying business-class or having a SoCal MexAmeriBank card from Cops in Trouble.

That first time with her, in the Executive Suites in Knoxville, not having anything with him, he’d tried to show her his certificates of vaccination (required by the Department, else they couldn’t get you insured). She’d just laughed and said German nanotech would take care of all of that. Then she showed Rydell this thing through the transparent top of a gadget like a little battery-powered pressure-cooker. Rydell had heard about them, but he hadn’t ever seen one; he’d also heard they cost about as much as a small car. He’d read somewhere how they always had to be kept at body temperature.

It looked like it might be moving a little in there. Pale, sort of jellyfish thing. He asked her if it was true they were alive. She told him it wasn’t, exactly, but it was almost, and the rest of it was Bucky balls and subcellular automata. And he wouldn’t even know it was there, but no way was she going to put it in in front of him.

She’d gone into the bathroom to do that. When she came back out in that underwear, he got to learn where Milan was. And while it was true he wouldn’t have known the thing was there, he did know it was there, but pretty soon he forgot about it, almost.

They chartered a tilt-rotor to Memphis the next morning and got on Air Magellan to LAX. Business-class mostly meant better gizmos in the seatback in front of you, and Rydell’s immediate favorite was a telepresence set you could tune to servo-mounted mollies on the outside of the plane. Karen hated to use the little VirtuFax she carried around in her purse, so she’d gotten on to her office in L.A. and had them download her morning’s mail into her seatback display. She got down to that fast, talking on the phone, sending faxes, and leaving Rydell to ooh and ah at the views from the mollies.

The seats were bigger than when he used to fly down to Florida to see his father, the food was better, and the drinks were free. Rydell had three or four of those, fell asleep, and didn’t wake up until somewhere over Arizona.

The air was funny, at LAX, and the light was different. California was a lot more crowded than he’d expected, and louder. There was a man there from Cops in Trouble, holding up a piece of wrinkled white cardboard that said MENDELSOHN in red marker, only the S was backward. Rydell smiled, introduced himself, and shook hands with him. He seemed to like that; said his name was Sergei. When Karen asked him where the fucking car was, he turned bright red and said it would just take him a minute to get it. Karen said no thanks, they’d walk to the lot with him as soon as their bags turned up, no way was she waiting around in a zoo like this. Sergei nodded. He kept trying to fold up the sign and put it into his jacket pocket, but it was too big. Rydell wondered why she’d suddenly gotten bitchy like that. Tired from the trip, maybe. He winked at Sergei, but that just seemed to make the guy more nervous.

After their bags came, Karen’s two black leather ones and the softside blue Samsonite Rydell had bought with his new debit-card, he and Sergei carried them out and across a kind of trafficloop. The air outside was about the same, but hotter. This recording kept saying that the white spaces were for loading and unloading only. There were all kinds of cars jockeying around, babies crying, people leaning on piles of luggage, but Sergei knew where they were going—over to this garage across the way.

Sergei’s car was long, black, German, and looked like somebody had just cleaned it all over with warm spit and Q-Tips. When Rydell offered to ride shotgun, Sergei got rattled again and hustled him into the back seat with Karen. Which made her laugh, so Rydell felt better.

As they were pulling out of the garage, Rydell spotted two cops over by these big stainless-steel letters that said METRO. They wore air-conditioned helmets with clear plastic visors. They were poking at an old man with their sticks, though it didn’t look like they had them turned on. The old man’s jeans were out at the knees and he had big patches of tape on both cheekbones, which almost always means cancer. He was so burned, it was hard to tell if he was white or what. A crowd of people was streaming up the stairs behind the old man and the cops, under the METRO sign, and stepping around them.

“Welcome to Los Angeles” she said. “Be glad you aren’t taking the subway.”

They had dinner that night in what Karen said was Hollywood, with Aaron Pursley himself, in a Tex-Mex restaurant on North Flores Street. It was the best Tex-Mex food Rydell had ever had. About a month later, he tried to take Sublett there for his birthday, maybe cheer him up with a down-home meal, but the man out front just wouldn’t let them in.

“Full up” he said.

Rydell could see plenty of empty tables through the window. It was early and there was hardly anybody in there. “How ’bout those” Rydell said, pointing at all the empty tables.

“Reserved” the man said.

Sublett said spicy foods weren’t really such a good idea for him anyway.

What he’d come to like best, cruising with Gunhead, was getting back up in the hills and canyons, particularly on a night with a good moon.

Sometimes you saw things up there and couldn’t quite be sure you’d seen them or not. One full-moon night Rydell had slung Gunhead around a curve and frozen a naked woman in the headlights, the way a deer’ll stop, trembling, on a country road. Just a second she was there, long enough for Rydell to think he’d seen that she either wore silver horns or some kind of hat with an upturned crescent, and that she might’ve been Japanese, which struck him right then as the weirdest thing about any of it. Then she saw him—he saw her see him—and smiled. Then she was gone.

Sublett had seen her, too, but it only kicked him into some kind of motormouthed ecstasy of religious dread, every horrormovie he’d ever seen tumbling over into Reverend Fallon’s rants about witches, devil-worshippers, and the living power of Satan. He’d gone through his week’s supply of gum, talking nonstop, until Rydell had finally told him to shut the fuck up.

Because now she was gone, he wanted to think about her. How she’d looked, what she might have been doing there, and how it was she’d vanished. With Sublett sulking in the shotgun seat, Rydell had tried to remember just exactly how it was she’d managed to so perfectly and suddenly not be there. And the funny thing was, he sort of remembered it two ways, which was nothing at all like the way he still didn’t really remember shooting Kenneth Turvey, even though he’d heard production assistants and network lawyers go over it so many times he felt like he’d seen it, or at least the Cops in Trouble version (which never aired). One way he remembered it, she’d just sort of gone down the slope beside the road, though whether she was running or floating, he couldn’t say. The other way he remembered, she’d jumped—though that was such a poor word for it—up the slope above the other side of the road, somehow clearing all that dust-silvered moonlit vegetation, and just flat-out impossible gone, forty feet if it was five.

And did Japanese women ever have that kind of long curly hair? And hadn’t it looked like the shadowed darkness of her bush had been shaved into something like an exclamation point?

He’d wound up buying Sublett four packs of the special gum at an all-night Russian pharmacy on Wilshire, amazed at what the stuff cost him.

He’d seen other things, too, up the canyons, particularly when he’d drawn a shift on deep graveyard. Mostly fires, small ones, where fires couldn’t be. And lights in the sky, sometimes, but Sublett was so full of trailer-camp contactee shit that if Rydell saw a light now, driving, he knew better than to mention it.

But sometimes, when he was up there, he’d think about her. He knew he didn’t know what she was, and in some funny way he didn’t even care if she’d been human or not. But he hadn’t ever felt like she was bad, just different.

So now he just drove, shooting the shit with Sublett, on the night that would turn out to be his very last night on patrol with IntenSecure. No moon, but a rare clear sky with a few stars showing. Five minutes to their first house check, then they’d be swinging back toward Beverly Hills.

They were talking about this chain of Japanese gyms called Body Hammer. Body Hammer didn’t offer much in the way of traditional gym culture; in fact they went as far as possible in the opposite direction, catering mostly to kids who liked the idea of being injected with Brazilian fetal tissue and having their skeletons reinforced with what the ads called ‘performance materials.’

Sublett said it was the Devil’s work.

Rydell said it was a Tokyo franchise operation.

Gunhead said: “Multiple homicide, hostage-taking in progress, may involve subscriber’s minor children. Benedict Canyon. You have IntenSecure authorization to employ deadly, repeat, deadly force.”

And the dash lit up like an old-time video arcade.

The way it had worked out, Rydell hadn’t actually had time to get used to Karen Mendelsohn, business-class seats, or any of that stuff.

Karen lived, umpteen floors up, in Century City II, aka the Blob, which looked sort of like a streamlined, semi-transparent green tit and was the third-tallest structure in the L.A. Basin. When the light was right, you could see almost clear through it, and make out the three giant struts that held it up, each one so big around you could stuff an ordinary skyscraper up it with room to spare. There were elevators up through these tripod-things, and they ran at an angle; Rydell hadn’t had time to get used to that either.

The tit had a carefully corroded copper nipple, like one of those Chinese hats, that could’ve covered a couple of football fields. That was where Karen’s apartment was, under there, along with an equally pricey hundred others, a tennis club, bars and restaurants, and a mall you had to pay to join before you could shop there. She was right out on the edge, with big curved windows set into the green wall.

Everything in there was different shades of white, except for her clothes, which were always black, her suitcases, which were black, too, and the big terry robes she liked to wear, which were the color of dry oatmeal.

Karen said it was Aggressive Retro Seventies and she was getting a little tired of it. Rydell saw how she could be, but figured it might not be polite to say so.

The network had gotten him a room in a West Hollywood hotel that looked more like a regular condo-building, but he never did spend much time there. Until the Pooky Bear thing broke in Ohio, he’d mostly been up at Karen’s.

The discovery of the first thirty-five Pooky Bear victims pretty much put paid to Rydell’s career as a cop in trouble. It hadn’t helped that the officers who’d first reached the scene, Sgt. China Valdez and Cpl. Norma Pierce, were easily the two best-looking women on the whole Cincinnati force ( ‘balls-out telegenic,’ one of the production assistants had said, though Rydell thought it sounded weird under the circumstances). Then the count began to rise, ultimately going right off any known or established serial-killing scale. Then it was revealed that all the victims were children. Then Sgt. Valdez went post-traumatic in stone bugfuck fashion, walking into a downtown tavern and clipping both kneecaps off a known pedophile– this amazingly repulsive character, nickname of Jellybeans, who had absolutely no connection with the Pooky Bear murders.

Aaron Pursley was already Learing it back to Cincinnati in a plane that had no metal in it whatsoever, Karen had locked the goggles across her eyes and was talking nonstop to at least six people at once, and Rydell was sitting on the edge of her big white bed, starting to get the idea that something had changed.

When she finally took the goggles off, she just sat there, staring at a white painting on a white wall.

“They got suspects?” Rydell asked.

Karen looked over at him like she’d never seen him before.

“Suspects? They’ve got confessions already…” It struck Rydell how old she looked right then, and he wondered how old she actually was. She got up and walked out of the room.

She came back five minutes later in a fresh black outfit. “Pack. I can’t have you here now.” Then she was gone, no kiss, no goodbye, and that was that.

He got up, put a television on, and saw the Pooky Bear killers for the first time. All three of them. They looked, he thought, pretty much like everybody else, which is how people who do that kind of shit usually do look on television.

He was sitting there in one of her oatmeal robes when a pair of rentacops let themselves in without knocking. Their uniforms were black and they were wearing the same kind of black high-top SWAT-trainers that Rydell had worn on patrol in Knoxville, the ones with the Kevlar insoles in case somebody snuck up and tried to shoot you in the bottom of the foot.

One of them was eating an apple. The other one had a stun-stick in his hand.

“Hey, pal” the first one said, around a mouthful of apple, “we gotta show you out.”

“I had a pair of shoes like that” Rydell said. “Made in Portland, Oregon. Two hundred ninety-nine dollars out at CostCo.”

The one with the stick grinned. “You gonna get packing now?”

So Rydell did, picking up anything that wasn’t black, white, or oatmeal and tossing it into his blue Samsonite.

The rentacop with the stick watched him, while the other one wandered around, finishing his apple.

“Who you guys with?” Rydell asked.

“lntenSecure” said the one with the stick.

“Good outfit?” Rydell was zipping up his bag.

The man shrugged.

“Outa Singapore” the other one said, wrapping the core of his apple in a crumpled Kleenex he’d taken from his pants pocket. “We got all the big buildings, gated communities, like that.” He carefully tucked the apple-core into the breast-pocket of his crisp black uniform shirt, behind the bronze badge.

“You got money for the Metro?” Mr. Stick asked Rydell.

“Sure” Rydell said, thinking of his debit-card.

“Then you’re better off than the majority of assholes we get to escort out of here” the man said.

A day later, the network pulled the plug on his MexAmeriBank card.

Hernandez might be wrong about English SWAT-wagons, Rydell found himself thinking, punching the Hotspur Hussar into six-wheel overdrive and feeling Gunhead suck down on pavement like a twin-engined, three-ton leech. He’d never really stomped on that thing before.

Sublett yelped as the crash-harnesses tightened automatically, yanking him up out of his usual slouch.

Rydell slung Gunhead up onto a verge covered in dusty ice-plant, doing seventy past a museum-grade Bentley, and on the wrong side at that. Eyeblink of a woman passenger’s horrified face, then Sublett must have managed to slap the red plastic plate that activated the strobes and the siren.

Straight stretch now. No cars at all. Rydell straddled the centerline and floored it. Sublett was making a weird keening sound that synched eerily with the rising ceramic whine of the twin Kyoceras, and it came to Rydell that the Texan had snapped completely under the pressure of the thing, and was Singing in Some trailer-camp tongue known only to the benighted followers of the Rev. Fallon.

But, no, when he glanced that way, he saw Sublett, lips moving, frantically scanning the client-data as it seethed on the dash-screens, his eyes bugging like the silver contacts might pop right out. But while he read, Rydell saw, he was actually loading his worn-out, secondhand Glock, his long white fingers moving in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable, as though he were making a sandwich or folding a newspaper.

And that was scary.

“Death Star!” Rydell yelled. It was Sublett’s job to keep the bead in his ear at all times, listening for the satellite-relayed, instantly overriding Word of the Real Cops.

Sublett turned, snapping the magazine into his Glock, his face so pale that it seemed to reflect the colors of the dash-display as readily as did the blank steel rounds of his eyes.

“The help’s all dead” he said, “an’ they got the three kids in the nursery.” He sounded like he was talking about something mildly baffling he was seeing on television, say a badly altered version of some old, favorite film, drastically recast for some obscure ethnic market-niche. “Say they’re gonna kill ’em, Berry.”

“What do the fucking cops say about it?” Rydell shouted, pounding on the padded figure-eight steering wheel in the purest rage of frustration he’d ever felt.

Sublett touched a finger to his right ear. He looked like he was about to scream. “Down” he said.

Gunhead’s right front fender clipped off somebody’s circa-1943 fully-galvanized Sears rural-route mailbox, no doubt acquired at great cost on Melrose Avenue.

“They can’t be fucking down” Rydell said, “they’re the police.”

Sublett tugged the bead from his ear and offered it to Rydell. “Static’s all…

Rydell looked down at his dash-display. Gunhead’s cursor was a green spear of destiny, whipping along a paler-green canyon road toward a chaste white circle the size of a wedding ring. In the window immediately to the right, he could read the vital-signs data on the subscriber’s three kids. Their pulse rates were up. In the window below, there was a ridiculously peaceful-looking infrared frame of the subscriber’s front gate. It looked solid. The read-out said it was locked and armed.

Right then, probably, was when he decided just to go for it.

A week or so later, when it had all been sorted out, Hernandez was basically sympathetic about the whole thing. Not happy, mind you, because it had happened over his shift, but he did say he couldn’t much blame Rydell under the circumstances.

IntenSecure had brought in a whole planeload of people from the head office in Singapore, Rydell had heard, to keep it all out of the media and work out some kind of settlement with the subscribers, the Schonbrunns. He had no idea what that settlement might have finally amounted to, but he was just as happy not to know; there was no such program as RentaCops in Trouble, and the Schonbrunns’ front gate alone had probably been worth a couple of dozen of his paychecks.

IntenSecure could replace that gate, sure, because they’d installed it in the first place. It had been quite a gate, too, some kind of Japanese fiber-reinforced sheeting, thermoset to concrete, and it sure as hell had managed to get most of that Wet Honey Sienna off Gunhead’s front end.

Then there was the damage to the house itself, mostly to the living-room windows (which he’d driven through) and the furniture (which he’d driven over).

But there had to be something for the Schonbrunns on top of that, Hernandez explained. Something for emotional pain, he said, pumping Rydell a cup of old nasty coffee from the big stainless thermos behind his desk. There was a fridge-magnet on the thermos that said I’M NOT OKAY, YOU’RE NOT OKAY—BUT, HEY, THAT’S OKAY.

It was two weeks since the night in question, ten in the morning, and Rydell was wearing a five-day beard, a fine-weave panama Stetson, a pair of baggy, faded orange trunks, a KNOXVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT t-shirt that was starting to disintegrate at the shoulder-seams, the black SWAT-trainers from his IntenSecure uniform, and an inflated transparent cast on his left arm. “Emotional pain” Rydell said.

Hernandez, who was very nearly as wide as his desk, passed Rydell the coffee. “You way lucky, all I can say.”

“I’m out a job, arm in a cast, I’m ‘way lucky’?”

“Seriously, man” Hernandez said, “you coulda killed yourself. LAPD, they coulda greased your ass down dead. Mr. and Mrs. Schonbrunn, they been very nice about this, considering Mrs. Schonbrunn’s embarrassment and everything. Your arm got hassled, hey, I’m sorry…” Hernandez shrugged, enormously. “Anyway, you not fired, man. We just can’t let you drive now. You want us put you on gated residential, no problem.”

“No thanks.”

“Retail properties? You wanna work evenings, Encino Fashion Mall?”

“No.”

Hernandez narrowed his eyes. “You seen the pussy over there?”

“Nope.”

Hernandez sighed. “Man, what happen with all that shit coming down on you in Nashville?”

“Knoxville. Department came down for permanent suspension. Going in without authorization or proper back-up.”

“And that bitch, one’s suing your ass?”

“She and her son got caught sticking up a muffler shop in Johnson City, last I heard…” Now it was Rydell’s turn to shrug, except it made his shoulder hurt.

“See” Hernandez said, beaming, “you lucky.”

In the instant of putting Gunhead through the Schonbrunns locked-and-armed Benedict Canyon gate, Rydell had experienced a fleeting awareness of something very high, very pure and quite clinically empty; the doing of the thing, the not-thinking; that weird adrenal exultation and the losing of every more troublesome aspect of self.

And that—he later recalled remembering, as he’d fought the wheel, slashing through a Japanese garden, across a patio, and through a membrane of armored glass that gave way like something in a dream—had been a lot like what he’d felt as he’d drawn his gun and pulled the trigger, emptying Kenneth Turvey’s brain-pan, and most copiously, across a seemingly infinite expanse of white-primered wallboard that nobody had ever bothered to paint.

Rydell went over to Cedars to see Sublett.

IntenSecure had sprung for a private cubicle, the better to keep Sublett away from any cruising minions of the media. The Texan was sitting up in bed, chewing gum, and watching a little liquid-crystal disk-player propped on his chest.

“Warlords of the 21st Century” he said, when Rydell edged in, “James Wainwright, Annie McEnroe, Michael Beck.”

Rydell grinned. “When’d they make it?”

“1982..” Sublett muted the audio and looked up. “But I’ve seen it a couple times already.”

“I been over at the shop seem’ Hernandez, man. He says you don’t have to worry any about your job.”

Sublett looked at Rydell with his blank silver eyes. “How ’bout yours, Berry?”

Rydell’s arm started to itch, inside the inflated cast. He bent over and fished a plastic drinking-straw from the little white wastebasket beside the bed. He poked the straw down inside the cast and wiggled it around. It helped some. “I’m history, over there. They won’t let me drive anymore.”

Sublett was looking at the straw. “You shouldn’t ought to touch used stuff, not in a hospital.”

“You don’t have nothin’ contagious, Sublett. You’re one of the cleanest motherfuckers ever lived.”

“But what you gonna do, Berry? You gotta make a living, man.”

Rydell dropped the straw back into the basket. “Well, I don’t know. But I know I don’t wanna do gated residential and I know I don’t wanna do any malls.”

“What about those hackers, Berry? You figure they’ll get the ones set us up?”

“Nope. Too many of ’em. Republic of Desire’s been around a while. The Feds have a list of maybe three hundred ‘affiliates,’ but there’s no way to haul ’em all in and figure out who actually did it. Not unless one of ’em rats on somebody, which they do tend to do on a pretty regular basis.”

“But how come they’d want to do that to us anyway?”

“Hell, Sublett, how should I know?”

“Just mean” Sublett said.

“Well, that, for sure, and Hernandez says the LAPD told him they figured somebody wanted Mrs. Schonbrunn caught more or less with her pants down.” Neither Sublett nor Rydell had actually seen Mrs. Schonbrunn, because she was, as it turned out, in the nursery. Although her kids weren’t, having gone up to Washington State with their daddy to fly over the three newest volcanoes.

Nothing that Gunhead had logged that night, since leaving the car wash, had been real. Someone had gotten into the Hotspur Hussar’s on-board computer and plugged a bunch of intricately crafted and utterly spurious data into the communications bundle, cutting Rydell and Sublett off from IntenSecure and the Death Star (which hadn’t, of course, been down). Rydell figured a few of those good ol’ Mongol boys over at the car wash might know a little bit about that.

And maybe, in that instant of weird clarity, with Gunhead’s crumpled front end still trying to climb the shredded remains of a pair of big leather sofas, and with the memory of Kenneth Turvey’s death finally real before him, Rydell had come to the conclusion that that high crazy thing, that rush of Going For It, was maybe something that wasn’t always quite entirely to be trusted.

“But, man” Sublett had said, as if to himself, “they gonna kill those little babies.” And, with that, he’d snapped his harness open and was out of there, Glock in hand, before Rydell could do anything at all. Rydell had had him shut the siren and the strobes off a block away, but surely anybody in the house was now aware that IntenSecure had arrived.

“Responding” Rydell heard himself say, slapping a holstered Glock onto his uniform and grabbing his chunker, which aside from its rate of fire was probably the best thing for a shoot-out in a nursery full of kids. He kicked the door open and jumped out, his trainers going straight through the inch-thick glass top of a coffee-table. (Needed twelve stitches, but it wasn’t deep.) He couldn’t see Sublett. He stumbled forward, cradling the yellow bulk of the chunker, vaguely aware that there was something wrong with his arm.

“Freeze, cocksucker!” said the biggest voice in the world, “LAPD! Drop that shit or we blow your ass away!” Rydell found himself the focus of an abrupt and extraordinarily painful radiance, a light so bright that it fell into his uncomprehending eyes like hot metal. “You hear me, cocksucker?” Wincing, fingers across his eyes, Rydell turned and saw the bulbous armored nacelles of the descending gunship. The downdraft was flattening everything in the Japanese garden that Gunhead hadn’t already taken care of.

Rydell dropped the chunker.

“The pistol, too, asshole!”

Rydell grasped the Glock’s handle between thumb and forefinger. It came away, in its plastic holster, with a tiny but distinct skritch of Velcro, somehow audible through the drumming of the helicopter’s combat-muffled engine.

He dropped the Glock and raised his arms. Or tried to. The left one was broken.

They found Sublett fifteen feet from Gunhead. His face and hands were swelling like bright pink toy balloons and he seemed to be suffocating, Schonbrunn’s Bosnian housekeeper having employed a product that contained xylene and chlorinated hydrocarbons to clean some crayon-marks off a bleached-oak end table.

“What the fuck’s wrong with him?” asked one of the cops.

“He’s got allergies” Rydell said through gritted teeth; they’d cuffed his hands behind his back and it hurt like hell. “You gotta get him to Emergency.”

Sublett opened his eyes, or tried to.

“Berry…”

Rydell remembered the name of the movie he’d seen on television. “Miracle Mile” he said.

Sublett squinted up at him. “Never seen it” Sublett said, and fainted.

Mrs. Schonbrunn had been entertaining her Polish landscape gardener that evening. The cops found her in the nursery. Angered beyond speech, she was cinched quite interestingly up in a couple of thousand dollars worth of English latex, North Beach leather, and a pair of vintage Smith & Wesson handcuffs that someone had paid to have lovingly buffed and redone in black chrome—the gardener evidently having headed for the hills when he heard Rydell parking Gunhead in the living room.