her, he used one hand to hold the collar of the coat closed; he kept the other hand in his pocket, around the textured plastic grip of his Futukoro. Three extra clips clicked against each other in his pocket.
Across from a storage yard full of PVC piping, Groucho and Skid were in animated conversation with an albino. Jonny followed Ice through the flooded street, over to where the men were talking. The albino was seated sideways in the cab of an armored Mercedes van, a squat double-axled monstrosity with thick wire mesh bolted over the windows and grubby scales of titanium alloy welded to the body.
Jonny thought the vehicle looked something like the chimeric offspring of a half-track and a rhinoceros. He was admiring its extraordinary and single-minded ugliness when Groucho called him over.
'Jonny, I want you to meet our driver, Man Ray. He runs with the Funky Gurus,' said the anarchist.
Man Ray, the albino, gave Jonny a slight nod and Jonny responded in kind. Then added a quick upward movement with two fingers of his right hand, drawing the fingers across his lips horizontally, running through a rapid series of similar gestures- a terse street distillation of Amerslan and gang recognition codes.
Obviously surprised, Man Ray gave him the answering gesture. Jonny knew the Gurus well. They were all insane, he had decided years before, but pleasantly so. They called themselves combat artists, insisted on fighting with weapons of their own devising. Their greatest pleasure came in staging absurd and bloody raids on rival gangs. There was always a theme; sometimes it was eating utensils, sometimes patterns of light and color. For the Gurus, style always counted more than the damage done, but the damage was usually considerable.
Man Ray wore what appeared to be home-made polypyrrole body armor, cut kendo-style, and red high-top sneakers. A gold obi around his waist was studded with throwing darts, shurikens and other small glittering things Jonny did not recognize. Like many of the Gurus, Man Ray was not a true albino; his features were negroid, but his face was burned the palest of pinks, shading to yellow behind his ears. Traditionally, the Gurus were recruited from workers at the Daimyo Corporation's hellish zero G foundries orbiting the moon.
Constant exposure to low-level radiation often burned out the melanin-producing cells in the worker's skin.
'Thanks for the wheels,' Jonny said. 'I owe you.'
Man Ray smiled. He had no teeth, just stained porcelain implants running along his upper and lower jaws, like twins walls.
'You don't owe me nothin'. Blood's my muse. Flesh is my canvas,' Man Ray said. 'I wouldn't miss a run.' He looked at Jonny, grinning slyly. 'Groucho here's been telling me how you're a great appreciator of art, a true fan of beauty. Here-,' he said, plucking something from his sash. 'This is new.'
Jonny accepted the object, turning it over in his hands. It was a perfect silver rose, about half the size of a natural one, its edges rimmed with hot gold from the sodium street lights. Man Ray pointed to the storage yard. 'Over the top,' he said.
Jonny looked at him once, glanced at Ice. He shrugged and threw the rose over the collapsing hurricane fence that surrounded the pipes.
There was silence, then a rush of air; the street was lit by an explosion of white flame that leapt ten meters into the air. In seconds, the blaze became a shaft of churning light, burning down to a sizzling white mass of flame and molten piping. Jonny turned to Man Ray who said, 'Le fleurs du mal.'
'Fuck that,' said Jonny. 'That was a phosphorous grenade.'
'Everybody's a critic,' Man Ray told Groucho. The Croaker stepped into the passenger side of the van, Skid behind him. Jonny got into the back, hunkering down next to Ice. Man Ray gunned the van's big methanol engine and turned north onto La Cienega toward Hollywood.
The Funky Guru thumbed on a short wave scanner, tuned to the Committee's frequencies, and plugged in a sound chip. The metallic voice of Committee dispatchers was overlaid with music-Taking Tiger Mountain doing an up-tempo version of Saint James Infirmary, Saint Peter taking the lead vocals.
As I passed Saint James Infirmary
I saw my sweetheart there,
All stretched out on a table,
So pale, so cold, so fair
As I passed Saint James Infirmary As the van rumbled crossed Beverly Boulevard, Jonny was suddenly aware of being very cold. He shivered against the jellied glycerin padding the walls of the van, clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering. His right shoulder was almost numb; before leaving the clinic, Ice had placed a xylocaine transdermal patch under the induction cast. 'The Committee's last wave of raids had left endorphins in short supply,' she had explained. Now she was staring out one of the van's armored windows, frowning to herself.
'Your optimism's contagious,' Jonny told her.
Ice gave him a weak smile and asked, 'What're you going to do when we get Sumi?'
'I thought you understood that,' he said. 'Gonna get the hell of here. Groucho said he'd check his contacts in the south. Maybe head down to Mexico. Why?'
Ice wiped away a small island of fog her breath had left on the window. They passed a truck unloading a cargo of black market meat. Boneless pig heads hung limply from the back, like masks from some awful theater. 'What if Sumi doesn't want to leave?' she asked.
'That's her decision,' Jonny said. 'She can do what she wants.'
His voice was harder than he had intended. The possibility that Sumi might choose to stay behind had not occurred to him. He did not want to battle with Ice for Sumi's loyalty. He had, after all, stayed with her when Ice took off. But Ice and Sumi had been lovers on and off before Jonny had known either of them. No comfort there.
'You won't stay?' Ice asked.
'I can't.'
'Why not?'
'Because the Colonel wants to use my balls for an ashtray,' Jonny replied. 'Because Easy Money knows I'm looking for him and that means he's looking for me. And because I don't believe any of this anarquista wetdream bullshit. Nothing changes- it never does. One bunch loses power, another comes in. So what? There's new faces to hate, new guns to run from. But nothing real ever changes.'
'Maybe we can help that,' she said.
'We're talking about the Committee here,' Jonny said. 'They'll eat your faces off. When we get Sumi, I'm gone.'
'I wish you wouldn't.'
'What do you want from me?'
Ice fixed Jonny with a look that he could not quite read. Anger, frustration, fear, they were all there. 'What?' he said.
'You never make it easy, do you?' she asked. 'Maybe I just want us all to be together again. The three of us.'
Why does she have to bring this up now, Jonny wondered. He had been thinking along similar lines all along, the three of them together again. But with Zamora and Easy Money gunning for him, it seemed impossible. Ice, he knew, would not see it that way. Her love came in broader strokes, great passions, grand gestures. That's why she's a good Croaker, he thought. That's why she ran away. 'I want the same thing you do,' he whispered. 'But not here.'
'I can't leave,' said Ice.
'I can't stay.' They were on Sunset now, rolling past crowds hanging around the bars and theaters. A restaurant shaped like Kukulcan's pyramid at Chichen Itza, outlined in bright neon. Jonny's face grew hot. 'Don't ask me to prove myself, okay? I'm not the one who took the big walk,' he said.
Almost without sound, Ice moved to the front of the van. She sat on the floor behind Groucho. Jonny tried to look out the window, but found himself watching Ice's reflection as she rocked with the gentle motion of the van. He felt alone, hardly human- he could have been an insect observing the Croakers and the lone Guru from the ceiling. Jonny was about to speak when Ice pointed at something and said, 'Pull over there.'
Man Ray turned up a side street near the World Link substation, shielding the van from Sunset behind a stand of towering date palms. The Guru killed the engine, reached up and flicked on an overhead light.
Groucho turned to Jonny, his face soft and ghostly in the dim light. 'Let's make this fast,' he said.
Jonny nodded. 'We're going in the back way,' he said.
